Michael Barone writes that the bloom is off the rose. Based on the bellweather of his experience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he notes “that enthusiasm for Barack Obama and his administration seems to be conspicuously missing.” Here are some particulars:
I attended a session last night on foreign policy where almost all of the panelists painted a gloomy picture of the state of world affairs (James Fallows was a little upbeat about China’s apparent concessions on Iran sanctions and its own currency) and had little good to say about Obama administration policy. There were even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush: Charlayne Hunter-Gault noted that Africans appreciated his anti-AIDS program and Elisabeth Bumiller said that her editors at The New York Times could not believe that people in India were big Bush fans. The most stinging attacks came from Mort Zuckerman, who said the Obama policies were dangerously weak, and Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, hardly an Obama basher in the past.
Does this mean that liberals are rethinking their core ideas or are they looking for another wagon on which to hitch their star? Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast says that James Brolin and Barbara Streisand actually applauded a Niall Ferguson peroration praising the budgetary reforms of Paul Ryan. That’s not completely surprising: no one is immune from fear once they’ve been shown the danger. The administration’s problem is that it is palpably failing and unless the trends reverse themselves sooner or later a majority will catch on.
The interesting question is what happens if enough people lose faith in the administration and find that even after they’ve affixed the blame the downward momentum still continues. Will the country have a ‘Thresher moment’ and lack the time and energy to set things right? In 1963 the USS Thresher which was the newest, fastest SSN in the US Navy was on a test dive off Cape Cod. It probably sprang a leak at test depth. There at the edge of its envelope, the leak triggered the worst possible response: an automatic reactor shutdown. Without the power to drive itself to the surface the Thresher continued to sink. They blew ballast. But something unexpected happened: in those conditions the high pressure air cooled and froze the pipes. She had plugged herself and sank ever deeper until the depths claimed her.
That terrible loss of reserve energy just when the system needed it most is the biggest threat that the Obama bleed-off of resources poses. The presumption is that once enough political erosion has occurred then someone will blow the ballast and the sub will surface. What must be factored in is time. Nations don’t turn on a dime. The gigantic programs initiated by the administration will bear a momentum not easily reversed. Europe, well on its way to crush depth, is finding that lightening ship isn’t so easy. Too many people, too many systems were predicated on a future that just won’t be there. Nowhere is that more evident than in pensions. A BBC report suggests that the “elite” finally realize that the cradle-to-grave system can only be sustained on the basis of work-till-you-drop.
Europe’s low birth rates and ageing population make it imperative for EU member states to overhaul their pension systems, the European Commission says. … France, Greece, Spain and the UK have plans to raise the retirement age. But the changes, brought in as governments seek to slash chronic budget deficits, have angered many workers. Thousands have protested in the streets.
One can understand the disappointment. The welfare state is beginning to look like one giant bait-and-switch. The refusal to accept they’ve been had — hence the street mobs and general strikes — are a dying system’s equivalent of compressed air freezing the pipes. They only guarantee the ship sinks faster. And there is the question of whether raising the retirement age will improve things at all. The demographic engine of Europe was shut down a long time ago and now the props won’t force her to the surface. Firms forced to hang on to septuagenarians doddering to the office will have less room for younger workers. Maybe they’ll just have to squeeze into the last watertight compartment as they hear the crumbling bulkheads come closer and closer. And when the retirees finally stagger home from their last working day the pension they receive will be nothing like they were promised. The Daily Mail describes how members of some pensions funds are now finding their guaranteed pensions aren’t guaranteed at all. Those who got early payouts did well. Those who have yet to receive their payouts will be glad to get whatever they can.
Anyone who thinks that bad habits will end overnight should look at Illinois. The Chicago Tribune notes that the state is bankrupt. But you wouldn’t know to look at it. The giant spending machine continues to churn long after financial death, like some fiscal zombie stalking the earth.
“Illinois stops paying its bills, but can’t stop digging hole.” … Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes says the state owes billions to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, state universities and he told The New York Times, “it’s getting worse every single day.” He calls the state’s inability to pay for essential services “obscene.” The real obscenity — in Illinois, California, New York and especially Washington, D.C. — is an inability to live within the means taxpayers provide. Despite record high taxes in these states and more coming at the federal level, government never has enough of our money. But it isn’t all government’s fault. Too many Americans have come to rely on government to take care of them, and government has passed the point where it can do so any longer.
The real problem is that individuals may soon have no choice but to rely on government to take care of them. Wayne Allyn Root argued that President Obama was “The Great Jobs Killer” a conclusion which the speakers at Aspen — with more finesse — more or less agreed.
“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.” …
Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.”
Ferguson added: “The critical point is if your policy says you’re going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you’re riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” A dashing Brit, Ferguson added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It’s just not a lot of fun actually—decline.”
The destruction of private enterprise and its substitution by government spending creates the danger that too many people will find there’s nothing left but to stay on the needle. Only when it the needle absolutely positively bone dry; bent, corroded and blood encrusted will the alternative be considered. In the meantime there is the terrible momentum of promises, the fatal attraction of hope and change. Will there be enough reserve buoyancy to surface? Or will the Ship of State, like some gigantic version of Illinois, keep racing for the depths?
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The bloom is more than off the Rose. You can call a turd a rose but it still smalls like a turd. Over 50% of the people that voted bought a Fairy Tale and it is turning into a Nightmare. The 2010 elections will be a turning point in America and I hope it turns away from this current path.
I have always thought that no more then 2 dozen Congress critters were worth saving. The other 520 or so needing a “tree and rope” moment to focus their concentration. I’m now thing I over estimated the number of honest ones. I’ll need more rope, one can always double up on trees.
BTW, Not sure if it’s true but in my youth I did one TDY on a nuke boat as a mission specialist. I was told that when the hull ruptures, the pressure is so great that the air undergoes spontaneous combustion. So I could look forward to getting flash grilled for a few milliseconds before I drowned. Not sure if my leg was getting pulled or not. No WWW. back then, so no way I could look it up.
The gravity of truth is weak in our political atmosphere and our institutions are poor judges of proportion. The pendulum swings undamped to the whims of untested theories. If a little of something is good, then ten thousands times that amount must be as much better.
A little government good, all government better. A little taxes good, confiscatory rates better. A little immigration good, open borders better. Anti-discrimination good, anti-white better.
Catchup-Ketchup
Bottle-bottle
First a little
Then a lot’l
Now…what a delicate matter this has become. How does one extricate themselves ever so carefully from this mess without offending 13% of the population? One does best not to impugn your neighbor’s heroes. A little slight of hand will do. The Dems need a small state to invade, like Granada. Hey, what are the Iranians up to now? Maybe small war good, world war better!
How very fitting that this story should come out of Aspen, where the elegant people meet to discuss their role in making the world better. And all of a sudden their plans to do so, and the unicorn they thought they could ride into this bright and glorious future turns out to be a common ass. I can’t see them turning away, though, rather doing what they do best: doubling down. I wonder if this might just turn out to be the moment Hillary was waiting for. F
Brolin/Streisand? Ideas? Waaaah!!
At least it looks like Zuckerman has learned a little since he got rid of Gloria Steinem.
The film clip pertains to USS Scorpion –the ‘other’ great mystery sub loss. Maybe before the Thresher we’ll be the Scorpion?
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/item_EXWMNqy0wi169CXldmZctN
I’m part of the problem. It stems from my very first paycheck. I remember looking down at is saying, at a very young age, “Who is the FICA bastard and who said he could have so much of my money!?!”
So, after oath-of-office time, I contact my reps and explain that I will FIRE the son of a bitch that touches my benefits. That 100 HP shop vac has been sucking money out of my wallet my entire life, and I WANT MY FRICKING BENEFITS.
i’m not. They can keep it all. i don’t want to live forever, and i don’t want what they owe me on socsec. i just want them to QUIT WRECKING THE COUNTRY.
No Free Lunches:
Schools adjust budgets for state’s shortcomings
GALESBURG — Knox County schools are still owed more $3 million in state aid, painting a dismal picture for next year’s funding as the fiscal year winds down.
Districts are waiting on state payments in free lunch and breakfast programs, driver education, reading improvement grants and transportation.
Reality bites. There is no pain-free way out of the unsustainable financial situation the Political Class has created; but the lowest-pain route would be a booming economy providing lots of jobs for young & old and lots of tax revenue.
Many sacred cows would have to die for the economy to grow. A booming economy would use lots of fossil fuels building nuclear power plants — and to hell with the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam.
Will a chastened Political Class be prepared to roll back excessive regulation and promote the growth of evil industry? That’s the only practical way to “blow the tanks”, but it may be too much of an admission of defeat for our failed rulers.
4. Annoy Mouse, remember FDR’s plan for ending the 1st “Great Depression”? It was called WW2.
While I don’t agree with the theory that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in time to do anything about it, I do think he created the situation that made Pearl Harbor or something like that inevitable. FDR’s embargo of OIL and metal to Japan gave the Japanese a choice of surrender or fight. Any understanding of the Japanese national character would lead one to know that they would choose war over surrender. FDR was told that by ALL the experts on Japan that he asked. He went ahead anyway, so the only logical conclusion is that he wanted war. It worked, FDR got his war.
I just wonder if The Usurper is making the same mistake, only instead of Japs, he has conservatives.
Does the fool really think that Americans won’t fight for their rights?
It will be interesting to see what happens if Arizona just ignores any unfavorable court rulings and applies their law in the manner they want. It will be even more interesting if some Arizona Sheriff deputizes a few thousand citizens (militia) and they show up at the border with hunting rifles in hand.
The Usurper will then send in troops, the Militia can go home and presto! The border now has enough troops to secure it.
Boomers ought to start cutting deals–say, a certain target number sign out of entitlements in return for top ten questions of a survey being asked of top ten names on same survey while being waterboarded on TV. Cable would be ok.
My first pick, timmy geithner –my first question, “why didn’t you STOP –as head of the NY Fed and wall street sheriff –what you KNEW was going at AIG?
“…and, timmy, do you understand that the 5 trillion in actual and liable spending, timmy, and the 5 trillion this has burned off private people’s net worth, is actually a total of TEN trillion?”
With the Big Zero’s huge Tax and spend policies the USA is sure to sink like the doomed sub the Scorpion. We are in too deep and the big Zero is taking us to the bottom.
The only way out is to jettison the dead weight and compartmentalize the damage. That dead weight and leaky hole would be the big Zero and his cronies – including Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. The faster they are out of the control room and jettisoned the better. The big Zero should be impeached or resign.
I want to call attention to Barone’s fly-by observation:
There were even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush: Charlayne Hunter-Gault noted that Africans appreciated his anti-AIDS program and Elisabeth Bumiller said that her editors at The New York Times could not believe that people in India were big Bush fans.
Both of these items are common knowledge to anyone who casually reads the international press.
Maybe the real reason those Russians were over here snooping around and acting Americanski is that they were looking for a new gravy train after theirs chugged to a stop?
I see Yerps on TV chanting about “No more ministers flying around in their private jets” and can only think how little those ministers and their junkets contribute to the cashflow problem, in contrast to people such as the Greek radio announcers who get an early retirement due to their hazardous jobs.
Bill and Buddy: I have assumed for quite some time now that by the time I get eligable for Social Security that means testing will be the rule and I won’t get any, especially considering my military retirement pay. But if they do that they damn sure better cut off all those “disabled” people, some in their 20′s, who are either physcially capable of working or are disabled due to voluntary conditions.
Teacher & Administrator Salary Database
Bouman, Timothy $632,000
Ancelet, Barbara $609,300
Ballough, Tiffany $379,600
Gmitro, Henry $368,589
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2009 Teacher Details
Name: Bouman, Timothy
Salary: $632,000
Position: High School Teacher
Full/Part Time: Fulltime
Percent Time Employed: 100%
Assignment: English (Grades 9-12 Only)
Years Teaching: 12
Degree: Master’s
School Name: Noble Street Charter High School
District Name: City of Chicago SD 299
—
I was searching for something I heard on Talk Radio:
A superintendent of schools making 700 k, retiring on 500 k.
…instead, I found a teacher making 632 k !
Chicago, Chicago!
It’s my kind of town.
Sometimes, in order to solve a problem, all you have to do is wait.
Huh. When I was a highschool English teacher at a Catholic school in NY in the mid 1980s, I was making $26K after six years. I guess I went to the wrong place.
You know, if you search that database for Top 200 salaries, even number 200 is in at $199K a year. Nice work if you can get it.
D/17; …and if you’re hangin around town broke and jobless, and wondering who did it to you, don’t think politicals parties, naw, think the Giant Blue Evil Eye.
Oh, come now, we all live in Obama’s submarine?
Bread and circuses.
Politicians lie and spend.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don’t think the overall situation is surprising in the least to anyone who had a decent high-school civics or history class (of course that may not be a whole lot of people anymore…). The horror, shock, and surprise is that Obambus the Glorious turns out to be a complete loser. I mean, he’s so slim, and holds his chin so high! And how can a (half) black man have so many conventional, known faults? And, isn’t the left as far from these traditional faults as one can get?
Well, that last is the big laffer.
We might better ask why the Republican party fielded such a horribly weak field in 2008, and why a confused old warhorse was the nominee in a twitter world. Better yet is why Mitt Romney could simply not catch on with the national crowd.
Even George W. Bush, a man with many virtues, had rather more faults than one would like as well – too much faith and trust being the principle ones.
Obambus is more a symptom than a problem. Would Hillary have been any better? (not really) Would McCain have been any better? (yes, but not by a lot). The financial meltdown, Iran’s pursuit of nukes, globalization of business, rising of health care costs, are each huge and very nearly insolvable problems.
The future will not look like the past. Please, Republicans, do NOT trot out Bob Dole’s “Bridge to the past”. I’d like to be sixteen again too, but that’s not a political platform.
19. peterike
Gotta cultivate those connections.
All you have to do is sell your soul.
—
Buddy:
Looks like a prosthetic eye to match my unit.
Buddy:
That eyeball is racist!! It excludes all non-caucasians. Has to be a nice non racial brown.
Pension Calculator
Public educator pensions gobble up taxpayer dollars at an unsustainable rate. They are far more generous than those of most taxpayers, and are a primary cause of Illinois’ disastrous budget situation. Use this tool to calculate an educator’s pension and it cumulative cost to taxpayers
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From the TRS website:
“Cost of Living Increases: You will receive an automatic 3 percent cost-of-living increase on the January 1st following your 61st birthday or your first full year in retirement, whichever is later. When your first increase is calculated, it includes increases for the entire time you have been in retirement. ”
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Good point, Herb:
America constitutes only 2 percent of the World population, yet we produce 25% of the bleu eyes.
Remediation entails pigmentation cap and trade.
Blue eyes freak people out. that’s why i keep two of mine closed and just get along on the middle one. Even that doesn’t help near as much as you’d think.
Richard “The interesting question is what happens if enough people lose faith in the administration and find that even after they’ve affixed the blame the downward momentum still continues.”
As I have said many times before concerning Obama and the democrats. The democrats depend on blocks of votes. The black block, the mexican block and the far left liberals. They like to think that the middle, the independents will side with them if they can fool them. This is the only group that Obama and the crats might loose.
Will it be enough? Maybe but don’t put money on it because fear in that middle group may prevent them from jumping ship. Look at what has transpired and how it has prepared the American population. How it has boxed most in and limited their options. Fear is a great de-motivator as well as a motivator.
The black block is still going to vote (multiple times) for Obama and the crats. The Mexicans will vote (multiple times) for the crats and Obama because they know that the Republicans just want to jail or deport them, destroying their families (even if that is not exactly true). They will vote democrat even if the democrats keep breaking promises.
The “minorities” will also be more inclined to vote when they get their street money to do so along with free rides, a bottle and lunch. The Unions have already received and will get even more millions of dollars to get out the democrat vote. The far left will continue to believe that Obama can and will deliver, even after he has shown them that they don’t really matter to him. They ARE that afraid, stupid, and starstruck.
So..all of that has much less to do with faith than it does with fear, greed and stupidity. I am also not forgetting the millions of white folk that now are depending on the government food stamps and other programs. They will be less likely to rock the ONLY boat that they are in just because they dislike the crats or Obama. If you have no job and no real chance of getting one, you will hang on to whatever rope you have hold of. Even if/when someone might throw you another.
Their kids need to eat, and waiting (or believing) someone else is going to save them is not an option most will depend on.
The shadow government’s plan is working well, even if it is a little behind schedule. But come the next crisis, they will catch up.
Papa Ray
Everyone knows that’s the evil one, Buddy:
Patch that one and get brown contacts.
—
Shabazz in the Whitehouse:
The guy that hates whitey, and encourages folks to kill crackers and their babies.
Also the AG Holder non-voter intimidator who carried a club to his local precinct.
Video: The nice young man Eric Holder let off the hook
So, all those Aspen Institute illumi-not-ies are jumping ship on Obama even before the midterms? Yes.
These are the same people who were SO convinced that Bush was ‘the worst president in history’ that they went totally ballistic trying to ruin his presidency? Yes.
So, what conclusion is there but that they want to play at revolution, but when it starts coming toward them, they panic and run?
“So, what conclusion is there but that they want to play at revolution, but when it starts coming toward them, they panic and run?”
—
A whole bunch of sixties walking wounded made that calculation and acted on it.
The rest ran for public office:
Our Rulers and Masters.
What the bird-brains in Aspen apparently fail to realize is the Big O is doing this on purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy (i don’t know how to embed links, sorry) in order to impose a system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
designed by a lazy guy who wanted everybody else to pay his bills for him, that always results in the imprisonment and murder of citizens (subjects) because it is so against human nature that it has to force people to comply rather than reward them, as in capitalism. And what do these diaries say about Canada and the U.S?
http://tinyurl.com/ylsmolv
This will not end well. Some, perhaps many, will die. The question: Will the armed forces side with a borderline communist administration or a heavily armed populace of their families and friends?
I would like to see a commercial in the fall that has a black civil servant talking dead seriously about how taxes need to be raised so that he can have his vacation. why is this important? the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the constitution. he has a civil right to pursue happiness. Therefor, since vacations make him happy it is his civil right to have a vacation. People saying differently are racists.
Prime Minister Thatcher said, “…and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess.
They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”
Rush is just on a role these days … marriage must agree with him.
regarding this “aspen ideas summit” or whatever, Rush says, “When Barbra Streisand is making more sense about things than the Republican party, you know we’re in trouble.”
F at # 5 is clear eyed. Those who voted for Mr. Obama won’t admit to picking a nag, they will pivot to Hillary and the media will help them. Obama is the perfect foil for her, and her many burned followers will be eager to show they were correct all along.
Welcome to the country of the blind.
Annoy Mouse@4,
The Dems need a small state to invade…
Arizona is closer than Granada. And won’t require much airlift and no naval assets.
Charles, your commercial is a work of art! Talk about stirring the soup.
O/T, but where is LOTM?
to be blogged under: Dug a hole and pulled it in after him?
Is Obama driving the ship of state straight to the bottom? Read the following advance text of Obama’s speech to the nation next week and judge for yourself.
OBAMA’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION IN THIS TIME OF CRISIS
My American friends, I come to you
From Oval Office with a view
Of beautiful and unspoiled yet DC
The buildings here are simply grand
And walking slowly on the Strand
Is something that is comforting to me
But there are snakes in every room
And righty whiteys crying doom
They claim that I am trying hard to break
The country down onto its knees
For all my lefty friends to please
But I assure you everything is Jake
Of course there’s some things on the ropes
Extinguishing our changey hopes
And all the fault of madman Georgie Bush
My plan’s in place, I’ll do my best
To see this clear, I shall not rest
My vision for us needs just one more push
My staff is Marxist to the core
And so we have much more in store
With Acorn and the unions we’ll prevail
With gulf oil crisis we’ve been blessed
We’ve seen the population stressed
Our plan of course is letting BP fail
Our power needs will soon be met
By solar mirrors on the net
Providing all the energy we need
For sunshine puts a happy face
On jobless workers we replace
With foreigners who’ll soon be up to speed
And lastly friends, this you should know
That space and science we forego
And NASA’s job is now to reassure
Our Muslim friends that just because
They’re backward and with murd’rous laws
That that condition’s only just du jour
In closing friends I’ll only say
That starting now, this very day
The White House as it was will not be back
For I intend to stay a while
For many terms and so my style
Demands that I must paint the damn thing black
@12. Skip_this_post
FDR got energetic in provoking the Japanese to attack us after Hitler broke the Hitler/Stalin pact and attacked the USSR on June 22 1941, with the oil/steel embargo against Japan being announced on July 26. Prior to the USSR being threatened, American Communists (well represented in FDR’s administration) were against US involvement in any war against Hitler. This may have been a major feature of the Hitler/Stalin pact, from Hitler’s point of view, namely that the USSR could influence American action via their agents in the US.
36. geoffgo
But it is far better armed and has a darn sight more places to hide in than Grenada.
Seriously; does anyone want to speculate as to how Teh One would try to enforce a ruling against AZ? Most of the military is populated with Southern Boys, they might not cotton to shooting at loyal Americans that are trying to defend their country from a foreign invader.
If he doesn’t send in the Army he ends up with the old Ghostbusters refrain, “Who ‘ya gonna call?”.
AZ is probably a net contributor to the Federal Budget so a tit-for-tat revenue witholding snit would be meaningless. How long would the people of the US put up with deploying troops against Americans when we are understaffed fighting the Talis?
As Wretchard has asked before; how many time is Obama willing to double-down?
“Crush depth” and related metaphors in your post, W, add to its essential awesomeness. The analogy between economies and machines that have kinetic energy/momentum and the means to regain it, is true. And scary. We’re near the design limits. And because, in a society or an economy there is no formal clear limit, no alarm bell, we don’t know how near we are; or whether we’re already past it.
Ban Walt, Wretchard! BAN HIM! How DARE that racist bastard rag on our Obamassiah! You can’t let him get away with his racist jibes! “paint it black” indeed! Who does he think he is! One of the Rolling Stones!? I’M a’ COMPLAININ’! OFFICIALLY, FORMALLY. My feelings are hurt!!!!
So, if our welfare states collapse, the elders, the handicapeds will have to commit suicide, or to live by their children and or families, like it was the use before the sixties. I remember that my paternal grand mother stayed a while by us, then by my aunt, then by my uncle. It must have been humiliating for her to depend on her daughters in law good will to be well considered. Though, as grand children we found her presence agreable, she was like one of us, with whom we could play. I can’t think to have to live by my daughter in law in the future, There are some concrete individual liberties we won within the welfare system, in the meanwhile we depended more on the state. So, dunno yet which situation is the best, me thinks that lot of people will get miserable.
I honestly do not see a democratic loss at the polls nor do I see only a four year term for POTUS Obama (PBUH) I fully expect by hook or crook for the current administration staying in power regardless of the vote or the peoples wishes.
The folks currently in power will not give it up on the mere fact that all the votes are against them.
I hope I’m wrong and wish for a change (Hope and Change) but I feel Obama’s POTUS (PBUH) will serve another term perhaps another after that. These folks won’t give up power that easy.
Our primary here goes at July 20th I’ll be there voting but I don’t expect my vote to count for much.
43. Marie Claude “….me thinks that lot of people will get miserable.”
Well put indeed.
The deeper we sink the more miserable they will be.
Les Miserables will be more than a Broadway play once again.
MC: I can’t think to have to live by my daughter in law in the future
LOL (I think that’s the first time I’ve used that acronym.)
But the larger point is very true.
Both sides of the political debate focus on the caricature of the extremes (I know – that’s why it’s called debate).
The Left sees blood dripping from the mouth of the greedy capitalist dragon monster.
The Right sees lazy, fat, worthless, punked out Hollywood junvenalia masquerading as The Great Unwashed and Professionally Unemployed.
Newly elected NJ Gov Chris Christie was interviewed on CNBC a week or so ago discussing his budget veto based on demand for deficit cuts. Christie was rather basking in glory as his interviewers almost literally gaped in astonishment at the remarkable and presumably trendsetting concept of a balanced budget. Then the Wet Blanket chimed in (can’t recall his name) and reminded the happy party that service cuts regressively impact the poor.
Anyway, I am wandering around the subject, so here is my point. (It is an echo of something buddy larsen wrote quite some time ago and I am sure he will speak up if I take it places he never intended.)
The Republican Party, to the extent that a political party represents in any way, shape or form, the intellectual base of a school of thought (and it strikes me that both parties, at least at the Washington level, have devolved into a single political entity fully isolated from intellectual moorings either port-side or starboard) … the Republican Party is lacking a concept for dealing with the handicapped, the sick, and the poor. Claiming they are all “lazy, fat, etc etc” is not a concept. Putting the burden of care on families and church groups is not a concept. I submit that the reason for this exclusion from the intellectual platform presented by the Republicans is that they have yet to acknowledge the existence of the subgroups requiring public assistance. The omission stands as a defect in the Conservative platform. (Which has or is becoming remarkably tone-deaf, given the Republican refusal, on the heels of TARP, to extend unemployment benefits because the unemployed need no further encouragement to continue their dissipate life style of minimum wage luxury courtesy of the public feeding trough.)
As a closing caveat, the political machine encroached and severely compromised Democratic efforts in the area of social services, which in hindsight was only to be expected I suppose. California complicates the public awareness because, not only is it as high-profile state, home to a high profile media industry – but it represents multiple elements of radical extremes, courtesy, in part, of a Democratically dominated state government for the last 50 years.
Over at EB, commenter Quirk asks the old chicken-egg question of who corrupts whom – does the political system take down the pristine ambitions of newly elected Mr Smith’s or does Mr Smith bring his carefully concealed dark side onto the Capitol steps?
Beats me. What is obvious is which way the pendulum is swinging – for reasons that relate directly to the miserable little soap opera that started to unwind in 2008.
And that’s all. The sheer magnitude of All.of.it leaves me just stunned. Crush depth is about right.
HEP-T @44: I fully expect by hook or crook for the current administration staying in power regardless of the vote or the peoples wishes.
In other news: Robert Mugabe has pledged his vote counting verification process to this effort (in repayment to a debt owed to another one-term Dem Prez who requested anonymity).
Talnik @ #31 This will not end well. Some, perhaps many, will die. The question: Will the armed forces side with a borderline communist administration or a heavily armed populace of their families and friends?
I have often wondered this. Have friends in the military who just have too much inner conflict to go against Tea Party types. For one, there are just too many family members and friends in those crowds.
“Streisand actually applauded a Niall Ferguson peroration praising the budgetary reforms of Paul Ryan.”
It’s not as though I distrust Ferguson so much as I’m wary of his analyses. I think that’s based, in part, on my attempt to read and then, when the read didn’t kick in, peruse his ‘The War of the World.’ In the space of two pages I found roughly four things that I considered (empahsize ‘that I considered’) to be in error and that doubly struck me as glib. I am also not a fan of the idea that America is an empire, and he is a proponent of that idea, which requires a rather wholesale change in the meaning of empire and accomodates a worldview that I find distasteful, and wrong.
Ferguson has an engaging personality and seems quite with it, but I am wary of his analyses, regardless of who he pleases.
We have entered the Age of Demons.
Prepare.
What’s up with the U.S. sending three count em’ Ohio-class boomers now equipped with 154 Tomahawks each to the Pacific? Keep buying those U.S. Treasuries or else China? How does this square with the Hopey Changey new tone and reset?
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. After all the Deputy SecTreas was in Moscow a year before and Paulson too had his hand out to the Russian Central Bank, telling them that their Fannie/Freddie paper was safe, right before McCain BFF Misha the Tie Eater launched his ill-fated war. But traditionally when all the Keynesian pumps have failed, there’s still war.
What would Whiskey say?
I say this is another outrageous act by the lawless, socialist America-hating democrats. Outrageous because it is antithetical to freedom but also pays off and makes a further claim on the loyalty of the gender and minority interest groups to whom the dems owe their offices.
The Dodd-Frank bill, Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major power grab, the new law inserts race and gender quotas into America’s financial industry.
In addition to this bill’s well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.
The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.
Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency’s workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.
What would be the mission of this new corps of Federal monitors? The Dodd-Frank bill sets it forth succinctly and simply – all too simply. The mission, it says, is to assure “to the maximum extent possible the fair inclusion” of women and minorities, individually and through businesses they own, in the activities of the agencies, including contracting.
Nice Work if You Can Get It
…The default option pressed on a vast, ever-growing segment of the American population, however, is to “round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle,” commencing four or five “enervating” decades as so-called “knowledge workers.” The result, writes Crawford, is, “Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day?”
By contrast, he says, “people who do work that is straightforwardly useful” satisfy a “basic human need.” De Botton agrees, contending that “the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.” Thus, “the adults who feature in children’s books” are “shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers—people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.” No such book leads children to dream of becoming regional sales managers or “brand supervision coordinators.”
* * *
Both authors make acute observations about the knowledge worker trapped in his cubicle. Crawford earned a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago before quitting a job at a Washington think tank to open his own motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. (“For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.”) He notes that, in political terms, the vast modern organization has come to be governed in an inscrutable, baffling manner:
Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us. So authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism.
This problem didn’t beset the “man in the gray flannel suit” 50 years ago, when deep thinkers worried about a crisis of conformity. Over 16 million Americans served in uniform during World War II. The experience of life in the military, modern nations’ least democratic institution, was democratized. An entire generation of American males returned to the civilian world accustomed to giving and taking orders.
Today’s manager, shaped by the anti-establishment 1960s rather than the command-and-control 1940s, would be mortified if anyone compared him to a drill sergeant. As a consequence, writes Crawford, “He is not so much a boss as a life coach.” Rather than communicate clear, objective goals by which a subordinate’s job performance will be evaluated, the manager extols and transmits the “corporate culture,” urging and constantly helping “team members” identify with and “buy in” to the organization’s “mission.” “This higher purpose typically remains on a meta-level, vaguely specified,” notes Crawford. “But the absence of specific content to this higher purpose is its main feature. All the moral urgency surrounding it seems to boil down to an imperative to develop a disposition of teaminess.” Clear directives to do X but not Y would actually hinder the team member’s crucial progress in personal discovery and transformation.
They would, moreover, require the boss to take risks it is crucial for him to avoid. In Crawford’s words,
A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
The infuriating absurdity of workplaces shaped by such imperatives was captured by the 1999 movie, Office Space…
But traditionally when all the Keynesian pumps have failed, there’s still war.
Sorry, here are the links to that story:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2002378,00.html
And some Whiskey bait here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/08/financial-regulation-bill-dictates-ethnic-gender-quotas/
Obama and his cohorts are no more capable of changing direction than was the Titanic. At least the Titanic was an accident, due to hubris not doubt, but an accident nonetheless.
Obama and the cohorts are grabbing everything they can off the table and stuffing it into their pockets. No matter what happens to the economy these folks will be living high. 20% unemployment and negative GDP still generates hundreds of billions in revenue that has to go somewhere.
William Voegeli
William Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, and a contributing editor for the Claremont Review of Books.
He is the author of
Never Enough:
America’s Limitless Welfare State
Articles on this Site
The Meaning of the Tea Party
Voegeli, Taxed in California
Nice Work if You Can Get It
Failed State
Look Out for the Union Label
The Wilderness Years Begin
The Roots of Liberal Condescension…
etc
Doug @ 56. Re: William Voegeli author of “Never Enough.”
Yeah, I heard him interviewed this morning by Dennis Prager. Dennis of all people should have made the connection I’m about to make. But he didn’t.
This is the old story of losing our paradise because of “evil forces” playing on human weaknesses. We were misled down this path, weren’t we? We Americans who are so trusting that those in government and on the Left are decent honest human beings incapable of treachery and worse.
From that radio interview is was clear that “Never Enough” parallels my exegesis of the Eden story.
We had everything we could want materially. But we could not withstand God’s simple test of our control of our ego.
When Eve fell or was pushed against the forbidden tree and saw that touching it didn’t kill her (as she mistakenly thought was the bar), she then listened to the voice that said that “God’s selfishness for His knowledge and power was why He barred her from eating of it” (targeting her sense of trust and undermining her obeisance and gratitude). Furthermore, she succumbed to coveting all that was His: it could be hers if she ate of it.
Ambition is good, but unbridled ambition is costly (what do you say now welfare staters?)
And then, once she ate of it, she couldn’t be alone in her sin, she felt the need to have company in sin. And so it goes.
When God later confronted Adam, he complained it was “the woman whom YOU gavest to me” was the fault — like he didn’t see it in the salad she provided. “It’s not my responsibility!”
Back to the current dilemma: It’s not YOUR responsibility conservative Americans?
Back to Eden: When quizzed, can’t you just imagine Adam explaining to God how he was totally misled by the woman? Right Adam, nothing willful in your being misled was there? It never occurred to you that you could give into temptation and blame someone else for the consequences, did it? Right? “No — not Me. Never. I swear.” God’s omniscience is a pisser ain’t it?
Back to Now: Like we were misled by the “Progressives” into believing we could borrow until the cows came home and not worry?
You want us to believe that there was no willful misleading or being willfully misled by anyone who today calls himself a conservative, doncha Mr. Prager?
I swear Doug, I can hardly stand listening to Dennis Prager because of all the “ultimate” issues he knows so well to skirt. He’s worse than any hypocrite. He’s an enabler of the Statist advance. He’s a Rodney King who wants us to believe we can all just get along so he doesn’t have to confront his complicity in the disaster unfolding around him.
“The welfare state is beginning to look like one giant bait-and-switch.”
Based on Old Reliable:
The Ponzi Scheme.
—
Medved believes it is important for Pubs to focus on spending, rather than deficits.
I agree with him:
Addressing deficits opens the door for Dems to advocate higher taxes.
(ivariably followed by greater spending)
So what, exactly, happens if the U.S. Thresher/Economy bottoms out? Are we predicting the same sort of economic collapse as the ex-USSR went through?
As I understand what America is based upon, we have an essentially rich country where we *can* feed ourselves, we *can* provide electricity, we *do* have a road and rail system to get around, we *do* have coal and wood and other resources to build stuff — we have a pretty fail-safe infrastructure that although neglected will get us through well past any Obama expiration date. Didn’t the USSR collapse because it was *all* based upon a crumbling rusty system that had no natural resources?
So if the worst that happens is a continued failure of banks and/or Wall Street, then who’s going to be hurt more: America or the rest of the world dependent upon America? (Can you say, “Europe”?)
And, if there is some across-the-board system failure, who is strong enough to invade us and take over? Canada? I just don’t see any other country swimming across either ocean to land on our shores, and other than the damned dumb Muslims trying to blow us up, why would either China or Russia bother, given that they have their own internal problems. And the dumb damned Muslims don’t have the resources except to take out one or two coastal cities, and not the whole country.
Surely I’m overlooking something in this doomsday scenario, and I wish one of you really really smart people would explain to me what a worst-case America-fails plot would look like.
P.S. wouldn’t a back-to-nature jobs program be a good thing for the country if it put to work all the unemployable people looking for a job now? Building dams, repairing the roads, etc — the stuff that FDR did back then? Of course, the *best* work program would be to declare a big juicy war on someone. I nominate Iran.
Doug @ 58: “focus on spending, rather than deficits…” Agree. Spending is a verb. It defines an action. One can deal with it by changing the action: like, spending less. Also, verbs deal with the future, with what is possible to create or change. More hopeful. Deficit? A noun. One deals with nouns by first having to work backward from an imagined world (where that noun has been abolished or managed) to a plan to get there. Which would then open up, as you say, the choice of two actions: spending less or borrowing/taxing more. Onto the latter of which the Dems would latch with their customary tick-like affinity.
So bottom line, “Stop spending my money now” works a lot better to drive desired action than the alternative. Which might be scripted as: “Deficit: big! Too big! Depressingly big! So big it’s a gigantic abstraction…do we still have anyone’s attention? OK, what to do? Uh, spend less! Much less! [Other voices interrupt loudly: "But think of the children you're killing by cutting off the limos and caviar and one-on-one self-esteem services! We can't afford to abandon them! Taxes! More taxes! Tax more!"] Shut up, you, I’m talking! [Sounds of scuffle, confused shouting, police whistles. New voice: Obama's]. Thank you for your attention. We had a little trouble up here with some folks who wanted to obstruct our program of social justice and transformation, but it’s all over now. What I am unveiling tonight is a new and important solution to our current troubles: a system of taxation that will make the fat cats pay their fair share and give the working people the food stamps they deserve…”
Pascal,
Medved is a genius, but sometimes the village idiot in his persistence in avoiding the obvious.
Prager shares similar but not identical traits.
The whole time he was prattling on about liberals not having an evil bone (“proof” being that he loves them) in their bodies, I was reliving my behaviors and the feelings I carried in my guts after college gave me multiple rationales to take out my unresolved issues and hostilities on others in pursuit of utopia.
Wishing for a World Devoid of Evil does not make it so.
Doug: The whole time he [Prager] was prattling on about liberals not having an evil bone (“proof” being that he loves them)
I wanted to make that clear. You were recalling Prager’s prattle.
Doug: Wishing for a World Devoid of Evil does not make it so.
Really. That used to be Prager’s most important role: reminding us of that.
Medved is another can of worms entirely. Yes he is a brilliant former Leftist who turned to conservatism. I’m convinced he did so in order to undermine the Right from within (I’m not suggesting Savage could have dedicated one of his books to Medved, but it is possible he was part inspiration for “The Enemy Within”). He spends 3 hours a day having us listen to Leftist drivel so he can appear superior — and us by extension — while ridiculing and hammering and demonizing anyone really on the right who calls for principles.
IMHO, Medved is a mole who uses trolls to establish creds on the right. The older Prager has fallen under his influence and has gone off the rails ever since.
#49 Martin McPhillips:
I am also not a fan of the idea that America is an empire, and he is a proponent of that idea, which requires a rather wholesale change in the meaning of empire and accomodates a worldview that I find distasteful, and wrong.
Certain of the Founders thought of our new country as an emerging empire. Washington and Jefferson in particular used that exact word. Follow-on generations in the earlier days of our republic felt the same way with “Manifest Destiny” and the annexation of both the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and the American Southwest with the Mexican war. McKinley and (Teddy) Roosevelt acted on imperial impulses.
To be accurate, the term “Empire” had broader connotations back then, and also, we Americans are not comfortable with, or particularly good at as an aggregate, being imperialists, despite that accusation being thrown at us. Ironically though, Americans assigned to the task of imperial-type duties have functioned as competently as British, Dutch, or French colonialists. Or as IN-competently on occasion; no better, but no worse. Wretchard can probably expound on that aspect of American “imperial behavior” from having grown up in the Phillipines better than I can.
mx @ 51: Should China care about 500 conventional warheads off their coast, when they are also targeted by ICBM nukes?
Just inviting the Chinese navy to accidentally sink one, I think.
Nahncee,
Welcome back!
Was wondering if you were gone forever.
I think Japan is a much better model than the USSR for the fate that awaits us if we don’t change course pronto.
…but it might be worse for us, as we differ from them wrt to debt held outside the country.
(and I wonder if their education system could possibly be as wretched as ours… the decline of human capital)
At any rate, Japan’s problems stemmed from the same things we are doing now:
Bogus accounting and bailouts to avoid declaring real losses and real liquidation of wealth.
We’re on the brink of a deflationary spiral:
Despite (and because of) the government’s ridiculous spending, liquidation of wealth has reduced the total money supply.
Although banks now have a Trillion Dollars in “excess” reserves thanks to government largess, they are not lending, and who can blame them in this environment, esp when they can make money on the taxpayer’s money bestowed by the all-knowing in DC.
Deflation is tougher to stop than inflation due to consumer psychology/expectations:
Why buy something today when it will be cheaper next week?
…positive feedback in a negative direction.
—
The Dems upcoming tax hikes just might be enough to push us over the edge.
#59 – NahnCee – well put!
An errant thought – one of the goals of terrorism is to undermine confidence in the government. What if, for Obama, it doesn’t matter whether he succeeds with his programs or not? If they succeed, he sinks the ship; if the programs do not succeed, by their very proposal and actions, Americans are losing faith in their government?
Frankenstein real estate market –
$3.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt and $10.3 trillion in residential real estate debt.
Will we reach a 50 percent underwater market where 25 million Americans sit in homes worth less than their mortgage?
—
The real estate market has morphed into a beast that is largely sinking the overall economy into the ground. If we combine the commercial real estate market ($3.5 trillion in debt) with residential outstanding mortgages ($10.3 trillion) we arrive at a figure that nears the annual GDP of our country. What makes the figure even more troubling is the amount of leverage found in the real estate market. Many of these loans will default yet banks are maintaining the notion that at some point par value will be reached; for many the par value scenario is the worst case they have mapped out, and this is highly optimistic. We have created a real estate Frankenstein that now has a mind of its own and will do everything it can to stay afloat going forward, even at the expense of the real economy. In fact, the real estate monster thinks it is the economy.
51. Mr. X
I don’t think those Ohio Class submarines are such a big deal.
They’ve taken the nukes off them that used to be aimed at the soviet union. they’re now armed with tamahawks with 1000 mile range. They have the capability to land 40 or so people anywhere. I don’t why the Chinese thinks this is provocative. But they do.
The more interesting thing are the big multinational war games around the singapore straights and out in the pacific around hawaii that involve most pacific nations except China.
Historically, there is some question as to whether the PLA is like the Japanese militarists that beat Tzarist Russia in the Russia Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century.
I think the idea of collective security is to avoid any one nation being picked off by the PLA.
And more generally if I were to give a theory to it I’d say the object is to ensure that the PLA doesn’t get to bring home the bacon. ie enjoy minor successes that enable them to lord if over the CPC and then to maintain that lordship– subsequently charge into major mistakes.
anyhow that’s how I read it.
the downside of this is that if the pacific alliance states are too successful the chinese will turn their ambitions north as they did after the Korean war.
@ 63 Don Rodrigo:
The Founding and then continental Manifest Destiny look very much like something that started on a narrow coastal strip and proceeded across wilderness and frontier. The one army we faced, the Mexicans, had a legitimate but light claim on the Southwest. But that’s not the empire that the U.S. is now said to have in any case.
Aside from a few colonies, the U.S. never showed great imperial ambitions (with all due respect to our esteemed host from the Philippines).
Russia (and the Soviet Union) had an empire. The British had an empire. The Japanese had one, briefly.
If America has an empire, where is it? Surely Mexico and Canada are not a part of it. Nor South America. Not Europe. India? China? Japan? How about Africa?
Has Iraq been annexed? Or did we just spend several years helping it get to the point where it can determine its own fate?
Generally (and I don’t know that this is true in Ferguson’s case), reference to an American empire is a slander, a fiction, and an attempt to cause a mirage to appear and then have political discourse over it.
The U.S. is the status quo (super)power and guarantor of strategic peace. That does not imply empire.
#69. Martin McPhillips
You are correct about what America is now, which is more relevant than my historicl treatise at #63. I didn’t make the time to put my comments in context; perhaps I should have.
GL #46
“Putting the burden of care on families and church groups is not a concept. I submit that the reason for this exclusion from the intellectual platform presented by the Republicans is that they have yet to acknowledge the existence of the subgroups requiring public assistance. The omission stands as a defect in the Conservative platform. “
Respectfully, miss, this entire passage is just plain wrong – irretrievable, incontrovertibly wrong, not to mention selfish, myopic, ignorant, immature, and immoral. Not factually true in any way, and devoid of any historical background or context, unless you declare a year zero sometime in the late 1920′s – something which would only be done by leftist enemies of Western civilization.
Until the 1930′s humanity was well-served by private sector charity and strong family units – things which any intelligent, mature individual with even a smattering of knowledge about history would have to say worked far better than a charity industry run essentially entirely by the state. Not only has a state takeover of the charity industry failed to provide charity in as useful a manner as what came before, it also, because it has no strings attached and does not or cannot place conditions of behavior requirements to receive said charity, provide any incentive whatsoever for people to change destructive behaviors that more often than not were what led to the poverty and need in the first place. Further, the collateral damage caused by creating a welfare state and the public sector work force and their attitudes and voting propensities (and the confiscatory taxation policies to pay for this infrastructure) have wreaked havoc on our civilization and nation.
Putting the “burden”? The fact that you used that term tells me everything I need to know about your worldview and “values”. No, let’s accurately describe the situation – the word is RESPONSIBILITY, not “burden”.
I’m glad I’m not your aging parent, or a child of yours with a birth defect.
The idea of families caring for their loved ones isn’t just a concept, it’s THE concept. It’s infinitely superior to whatever your damned concept is, I know that much. To think otherwise is to give in to the leftist, culturally marxist notion that the definition of family is no longer, man, woman, and children, but rather state, woman, and child. The notion of the state caring for less affluent people in need should be severely limited, restricted, and with many tripwires and behavioral requirements in place, and be a very last resort if there is a REAL need. This scenario worked well before, and there’s no good reason it cannot work now.
If conservatives have failed, if they have a “defect”, to use your word, it isn’t because they haven’t signed on to your (failed, by the way) statist concept of taking care of their fellow man. It’s because they have failed to articulate a historically and morally (and even functionally) correct truth – that with vanishingly rare exceptions, private charity and family responsibility is better for many, many reasons than public sector attempts at the same. Further, conservatives have not used whatever bully pulpits they have remaining to put for the historical and current facts that make that assertion bulletproof.
We’d all be better off if they did so.
Geeze Louise indeed.
“Didn’t the USSR collapse because it was *all* based upon a crumbling rusty system that had no natural resources?” Actually Nancee the USSR had quite a robust physical infrastructure and an abundance of natural resources (perhaps more than we do here). It was the moral infrastructure that rotted under the Soviet system. Quite similar to the USSA.
#53 Doug: I am currently reading Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, and he provides a number of interesting thoughts. I agree with his premise that pushing all high schoolers toward college is not a great thing and in many ways counter-productive in society. If you are going to end up fixing A/C’s eventually, why take on college debt first? For my money, the military provides all the opportunity without the liabilities. You learn a skill and earn money for college. That is how many of our fathers started out. (and today, many more mothers) It also produces better citizens.
department of res ipsa loquitur:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/obama-israelis-suspicious-of-me-because-my-middle-name-is-hussein-1.300793
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awww … mark levin was just playing the audio clip and talking about this …
Skip_this_post @ 2 said
“Not sure if it’s true but in my youth I did one TDY on a nuke boat as a mission specialist. I was told that when the hull ruptures, the pressure is so great that the air undergoes spontaneous combustion. So I could look forward to getting flash grilled for a few milliseconds before I drowned. Not sure if my leg was getting pulled or not. No WWW. back then, so no way I could look it up.”
I could not resist the challenge so I did the calculations. The USS Thresher was believed to have experienced hull collapse at a depth between 1300-2000 ft. I’ll split the difference and assume a crush depth of 1650 ft or 502.9 meters. This corresponds to a water pressure of 48.68 atm. If I assume standard pressure and temperature (STP) inside the Thresher before hull collapse and isentropic compression of a perfect gas after collapse then the temperature of the air after compression would be 889.6 deg.K or 1077 deg.F (a candle flame temperature is about 1426 deg.F). Assuming only isentropic compression, the air is extremely hot but not “burning”. Now assume the situation where the air in one compartment is isentropically compressed to 48.68 atm while the air in an adjacent compartment remains at STP. Then assume that a watertight hatch suddently bursts thus allowing a normal shockwave to propagate through the compartment. Under that situation, the shockwave would have a Mach number of 6.47 and heat the air immediately behind the shockwave to 8078 deg.K. At that temperature, the molecular nitrogen and oxygen would dissociate into their atomic species and become incandescent (the air would be “burning”). If I assume the speed of sound to be 340.29 m/sec then the time required for a Mach 6.47 shockwave to propagate down a 10 meter compartment would be 4.5 milliseconds.
Under the scenario of a watertight hatch bursting due to air compressed in an adjacent compartment, the story told to Skip_this_post is correct.
Along the lines of gas physics and sunken submarines, the story of the USS Tang (SS-306) is very interesting. The Tang was one of the few examples were crewmen actually survived after the submarine sank (there were multiple examples of this with German U-boats). The submarine sank in 180 feet of water so escape was physically possible. However the experience of the crewmen was horrific. The crewmen escaped through an escape trunk where they could equalize the pressure of an air pocket to the pressure of the surrounding water. Survivors described how the pressure caused agonizing pain in their sinuses and the air was so hot that it was excruciating to breath. Some crewmen passed out and drowned shortly after leaving the submarine while others died after reaching the surface due to damage to their lungs. An aspect that particularly disturbed me was the number of crewmen who simply gave up rather than try to save themselves. The crewmen of the Tang were all volunteers for extremely hazardous duty and none of them were cowards. However their situation was so utterly hopeless that a majority of the initial survivors chose to go to their bunks, lie down and die rather than make the near impossible attempt at saving themselves. It’s horrible to think about what people went through while dying in submarines.
Doug @ 67 said:
“$3.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt and $10.3 trillion in residential real estate debt… The real estate market has morphed into a beast that is largely sinking the overall economy into the ground. … If we combine the commercial real estate market ($3.5 trillion in debt) with residential outstanding mortgages ($10.3 trillion) we arrive at a figure that nears the annual GDP of our country. … We have created a real estate Frankenstein that now has a mind of its own and will do everything it can to stay afloat going forward, even at the expense of the real economy.”
Since yesterday the DJIA has gone up almost 400 points. Since March 2009, the DJIA has gone up almost 3000 points. I believe this is an almost entirely bogus rally due to government manipulation (PPT) in a misguided attempt to prop up the national economy. The correct approach would have been to liquidate the insolvent banks, default on the bad debts and allow price discovery to take place. The longer the nation remains in La-La land with this bogus dead cat bounce, the harder we will fall after we bang into mathematical reality. The fools think they can make our problems go away by closing their eyes, clapping their hands and chanting “We do believe in fairies!”.
#49 Martin: my impression was that Ferguson thought the US should be an empire, but isn’t. His last few books are still in the unread pile under my desk, though.
Mr. X – forgive me if I balk at your suggestion that Russia was rich or ocmpetent. We have been feeding not only ourselves but most of the rest of the world for decades now. The only thing Russia *ever* exported was how to cheat at ice skating and how to throw a really bloody revolution. Oh, and they managed to put a chimp in space ahead of us a couple of times *and* to demonstrate what happens when a nuclear power reactor goes postal. As far as I can see, that is still the sum total of their accomplishments.
Still waiting for some smart person to tell me what happens whan America crashes to the bottom. Will it be better or worse than being nuked?
nmu@71:
I trust you’ve had time to descend from your high dudgeon and are breathing deeply and regularly. Your rant was simply silly.
But not unexpected.
One rebuttal point and that’s it. The effectiveness of private charity experienced a near-immediate erosion of effectiveness via the human element of “depravity.” Think administration fees and expenses that asymptotically approached 100% of the general fund. There will be blood – and guess whose? How long ago was United Way dragged through the front pages of the WSJ because CEO Aramony evidenced behavior suggesting “misconduct” related to use of funds? How many private charities can provide meaningful services outside the context of legal constraints that impose unsustainable insurance costs to provide liability coverage?
Do not even think of lecturing me about caring for a child with birth defects and do not ever refer to me as “miss,” young man (which I know you are not, but I trust the point obtains.) To you I am the anonymous blogger known as Geeze Louise. Respect your own boundaries.
NahnCee @ 77 said:
“forgive me if I balk at your suggestion that Russia was rich or competent. … The only thing Russia *ever* exported was how to cheat at ice skating and how to throw a really bloody revolution. Oh, and they managed to put a chimp in space ahead of us a couple of times …”
Actually the Russian Space Program was genuinely impressive. Russia has (or had) excellent mathematicians, scientists and engineers. Their Venus landers in particular were first class and their Energia launcher was comparable to the Saturn-V. Right now, NASA is trying to reproduce some of the technology that the Russians successfully used on Venus over thirty years ago.
Nahncee, I too am happy to see your posts again. Our peril is not invasion from beyond our borders. It is that control of our government has been taken over by agents who are successfully destroying the capitalism that is the source of the prosperity that will protect us from the fate that worries Marie Claude.
“Better yet is why Mitt Romney could simply not catch on with the national crowd.”
First, he is a RINO. The man is about as conservative as Chomsky, he just hides it better.
Second he is a Mormon. That doesn’t matter to me, since I’m a Pantheist ( paleo, not neo) but the Christians consider him to be a devil worshiper, if not the Devil hisself…. So there will be no support from the Christians. Mitt would cause most Southern Baptists to vote against him, even if Stalin was running as a Democrat.
AS far as the Boomers, youse guys are looking at it from inside the box. Jump out and look again.
What is an Aircraft carrier? It is a big box full of airplanes. Once loaded with fuel and bombs, those airplanes can fly about 1,000 miles to drop those bombs on something. Each flight by an airplane is called a ‘sortie’. A big Carrier like the Nimitz class nukes the USN uses can fly about 1,000 sorties before they run out of fuel for the aircraft.
CV’s ( Aircraft carriers) are big targets. They are tuff targets ( at bikini one survived a nuclear bomb explosion), but any ship can be sunk. So they tend to keep company (a fleet) with other ships that specialize in protecting the CV. The whole thing is called a CVBG ( Aircraft carrier battle group) and is quite expensive both in money and personal.
An Ohio clss boomer, on the other hand, cost less then the CV, although not by much but doesn’t need a dozen other ships to protect it. It delievers the same 1,000 sorties at a fraction of the cost both in money and personal.
The Chinese are very well aware of this. From their POV, the USN just ‘surged’ 3 more CVBG’s toward their costs. Actual range on the cruise missles loaded on the Ohio boats is classified, but rumor has it at 1,400 miles or over 2,000 KM. That means any of those boats can put a cruise missle thru the bathroom window of the PM’s palace whenever they want to. Fook-all the Chi-coms can do about it.
I think the Chi-Coms are acting to protect the Iranians. The boats are normally assigned to the Pacific command. It is easy to hide crossing the Pacific then the Atlantic. Shorter distance to Iran also.
So the Mullahs are looking at 3,000 cruise missiles heading their way. Cruise missiles that never miss, that don’t flinch in the face of anti-aircraft fire. That hit their target EVERY time.
So, yes the Mad Dog Mullahs are worried. Remember also that the Mullahs turned off their nuke program in ’03 when Baghdad fell. They realized that If Bush wanted to he could have ordered the 3rd ID to turn right and they would have been in Tehran in less then a week. Fook-all the Iranians could have done to stop them.
So the questions are;
One, is this a complex political ploy to bluff the Mullahs into folding and allowing unfettered inspection as the NPT allows? Are the Chinese part of it and complaining loudly so the Mullahs know we are coming. Left to their own devices neither the Iranians or the Chi-Coms have any way of detecting an Ohio class boomer.
Two, was a deal worked out between Bibi and the Usurper? The USA blows away the infrastructure supporting the nukes program and tells the mullahs, “You want to drag out negotiations? Fine. we have lots of time and even more cruise missiles.” The real problem with this plan is that there aren’t 3,000 targets in Iran. Oh well. Cruise missiles are to expensive to use for bouncing rubble.
I’m thinking One. I doubt that the Usurper has the ‘nads to actually bomb somebody. That would so piss off Hollywood. It would bump Lindsey’s fingernails right off the front pages.
75. Eggplant
I recently read a fascinating history of submarine disasters: Disasters of the Deep by Edwyn Gray. It covers only accidents, not combat losses. It covers all of the well-known disasters as well as obscure ones I’d never heard of. It also happens to make for a good history of submarine development.
#78GL
No high dudgeon. Not sure how any intelligent grownup could construe that. Nope, just good and decent humanity and an accurate recollection of history. Learn to recognize them.
Your rebuttal is an anecdote and a weak failure. Centuries and millenia of highly successful private sector charity are not gainsaid by one tiny poorly articulated example, or even a few. Remove the constraints you (rightfully) decry and let the system work as it should.
Or do you assert that the public sector is inherently better at it than the private, after all the sorry history of the 20th century? And you call me silly?
Lastly, you will never have the intelligence or moral authority to order me about in terms of my language. Believing that you do is the very definition of conceitedness and is the beginning of tyranny. I have respected your boundaries well enough. You respect my freedoms.
NahnCee
So if the worst that happens is a continued failure of banks and/or Wall Street, then who’s going to be hurt more: America or the rest of the world dependent upon America? (Can you say, “Europe”?)
hmm, our banks are interconnected, if the markets attacked us now, they felt the weaker link, as they did for you in 2008, it doesn’t mean that you are still out of the danger, they are just waiting for opportunities
now check how is it really the deal fer ya
http://www.europac.net/media/video_blog
or read “Zerohedge”, you’re not in your bubble anymore
Geeze Louise, if I haven’t the vocabulary to express, I always had the feeling that I understand you
Whether the elderly, disabled and dysfunctional are helped via public or private means is a detail. What is essential in either case is a surplus to support the transfer payment. The problem with the welfare state model is that it has eaten the seed corn. For a variety of reasons the demography of Europe (and to some extent the US has collapsed). There are fewer rowers to propel the ship of state and keeping wheezing 70 year olds manacled to the oars will help, but not by much. Also the desire to have things ‘just so’ has created a regulatory environment in which starting a business becomes hard.
Once not being able to start a business was a nuisance. Today it’s an existential problem.
The basic psychological monkey on our backs was that the post war boom went on for so long that it became regarded as a natural condition. People thought it would go on forever. With “want” banished social emphasis shifted to self-fulfillment. Thirty hour weeks, clean environment, psychic goodies like apologies and reparations for everyone. Sex in the City, but no children. Finding Yourself, because there would always be the space to do it in. In that world, we could always buy the world a Coke. We were blinded by our good fortune. But fortune turns eventually. It always does. Now suddenly people are waking up to situation in which the future is not guaranteed except by present effort; where peace and security is no longer a given, except by current vigilance.
Maybe we call out in the night for our elders, the Great Generation, to come back and rescue us. But they have gone to their rest. We are alone now. It’s all up to us. We look at the darkness we’ve never ventured into and hesitate. But to stay rooted to one spot is to perish.
Like someone who’s blown his wad and forgotten how to work the danger is we’ll go on living with the old mentality, adjusting here and there. Throwing the last scraps of paper on the dying campfire. Eventually the Michelin 5 star feast becomes the Dollar Meal, but we keep eating out, not looking to make something. In that world, we just become cheaper copies of our old selves, like a washed up rock star opening supermarkets. When do we wander out of the flickering circle of campfire into the unknown?
I think it was Sonny Bono who once said that the best thing that ever happened to him was to wake up one day and realize his old life was over. Only then did he start on his new life. The story goes that he went into government office to get a permit to start some business. After being given the officious runaround, a light bulb went on in his head. He told the bureaucrat that there were two things he decided to do just then. The first was run for mayor and the second was, when he was mayor, to fire the bureaucrat. But he had to make the mental shift first.
The liberal elite has had a long, good run. Fairly considered, they haven’t been as bad as other elites through history. They were decent in their own way; generous according to their lights; and if they were insufferably self-righteous sometimes it was also occasionally out of a sense of genuine noblesse oblige. Unfortunately their day is done as a class. They have been done in by themselves. It happens to companies, cultures, civilizations. But it isn’t the end.
Those who can make the mental shift can reinvent themselves, because like it or not the world will keep turning on its axis and the society which can best adapt to the changing weathers will not only reverse its decline but positively prosper. We can’t reach the stars with the current narrow mindset. But we will reach the stars once we’ve shucked off the weight of 1940s Communism/Marxism. Time it died. Rest in pieces. If you like, put a laurel wreath on it and give its due.
But it’s not the conservatives that bringing the old order down. It’s time. We are all in the care of time.
Its just, well, staggering, the thinking that went into to the modern european state. One would think that a rising population would not only be the secret, but the base necessity for all the dole they required for the population that now expects it, no matter what. But no, population was the big monster that was set to consume everything in its path, according to the mad scientists, the social scientist of the post war euro world.
No, “The Population Bomb” was the only catastrophe to be dreaded, and population could be so easily managed, what with birth control and abortion, at the state level.
And if population could be so easily managed, and, if new people could be added to the population, europe could be supplemented with particular populations, hoards if you will, from former colonies.
And it’s a two-fer, you see? Because it would be a gesture of reconciliation and absolution, for all the crimes of colonisation.
(and of course, lure the suckers into the plantation system that returns the superior western ‘social engineers’ to the place of prominence, queen be, if you will, and swell the bureaucracy they built to ‘manage’ (i.e. ‘control’) it.
But why, one asks, did the social scientists dote as they did on muslim immigration to their euro nations? Apparently, to follow the narrative, India suffered so greatly under colonial rule that that’s what the pretext on which the kind of ‘post modern’ independence movement there was based on.
And yet, no one complains of hoards of Hindi, nor is there much friction between non-hindu and hindu, to site but one ethnic example. About the worst form of ‘civilisational clash’ between the two, centers around, say, the amount of curry used in Indian cuisine and the fact that the smell permeates the hallways of apartment blocks where they share housing. No one begrudges them their polytheism (except, you-know-who).
But, riots don’t break out over it. Hindi don’t seem predisposed to retaliation over it. They don’t see it (and a laundry list of interminable ‘other’ things) as one more slight, whereby honor is at stake, and therefore one will win in the ‘dispute’ and the other one will die.
Why were the polytheists passed over for emigration to europe in favor of pitting one monotheistic culture against another monotheistic culture, unless they got the protocol directly from Adolph himself? (i.e. to obliterate christianity itself? As Adolph, Marx, Stalin, Lenin and so on made a top priority?)
Even the Labour party liberals in Australia are, as Melanie Phillips points out, now raising a fuss
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/politicians-finally-hear-the-people-say-enough/story-e6frg6zo-1225887310346
And are not only questioning the policy, but criticizing it, and calling for an end, a termination to at least one of the interminable liberal policies, amongst the plethora of interminable interminable plethora of eur-o-pean liberal interminable liberal policies?
The insanity of the leftist paradigm is the sheer conceit, that places them at the top of the ‘food chain’ of compassion, and that simply by virtue of their abstruse magical thinking, that they can help people and cultures otherwise worthy of extinction, get a leg up and a place at the table of their precious, all inclusive freak show zoo-bu-lie that is their “diversity” Tommy’s Holiday “Diversity” Camp.
“There were even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush: Charlayne Hunter-Gault noted that Africans appreciated his anti-AIDS program and Elisabeth Bumiller said that her editors at The New York Times could not believe that people in India were big Bush fans.”
heh heh, shadenfruede of the first order… The folks from India (to cite that but one example again) don’t even play the leftist game by expressing resentment over a real or even some perceived “historical” “slight” on the part of Post-Modern Post-Historical Western social engineering.
They don’t bite the generous hand of “western” largesse that supposedly “feeds” them- they reject the hand entirely for the fraud that it is, because they are used to doing it for themselves.
democrat party, Labour party, National Socialist German Workers Party is pure racism, and nothing but, so help me g-d.
I dunno wretchard the ancien regime doesn’t just evaporate when a bell rings.
nmu@83:
I would never presume to use respect in the same sentence with the current Republican Party.
And “silly” was much too kind. Simple is better.
#85 wretchard-
I would quibble about it being a mere detail. I think it of vital importance. One way is humanity itself. The other is a symptom of a diseased memeset.
Beyond that, though, I thank you, sir, for putting into words easily and beautifully what I did not.
#88 gl
“I would never presume to use respect in the same sentence with the current Republican Party.”
Well, it seems there is at least one thing we can both agree on wholeheartedly!
If only they would be authentic conservatives…..respect would be justified.
I am an Evangelical Christian. I voted for Romney in my state’s primary. I know lots of others who did (he won my state). Just sayin’…
Alas, as our hull cracks and we sink deeper into the gloom, we only have ourselves to blame. We have not required any accountability in our public officials. Who but we have placed folks such as Nancy “jobs, jobs, jobs Pelosi, Maxine Waters (and just so nobody confuses me with the spirit of whiskey) Barney Frank, into their current positions of power?
Broke Illinois continues to dole out raises, folks like us grumble and post a few lines on a current events blog. It is going to be a long hot 4 for 10 spy swapping, Oakland rioting, oil spewing summer. Who cares enough about “the care of time” to hold anyone accountable?
w: But it’s not the conservatives that bringing the old order down. It’s time.
The macro-dialectic completely passed by the conservatives.This period of history is a failure for one side – not a victory for the other. It’s the priorities.
Yeah, Romney just struck too many people as dull and greasy, how he won office as a Republican in Massachusetts is just one of those things. He’d probably be a very good president, he’s just not a very good candidate. Kind of the un-Obama.
81 skip_this_post
A few comments in no particular order.
Carrier battle groups are called “strike groups” because that’s what we’ve been using them to do.
The strike aircraft (F/A-18′s) on the aircraft carrier carry precision weapons – that is, dumb bombs outfitted with a computer in the nose that is used to steer the bomb to a predetermined GPS location. We don’t use dumb bombs anymore.
“Sorties per target” putting it loosely, have been superceded by “precison guided munitions per sortie”. That is, a strike aircraft carrying six precison-guided weapons can hit six separate targets. Note I said “hit”. In the bad old days, we used “sorties per target” because the dumb bombs frequently missed their targets and it took a lot of dumb bombs to get close to a mission kill on a target (think B-17′s over Berlin). Not so anymore.
So those F/A-18 squadrons, refueled in the air enroute and returning from a strike, can do a lot more damage than just “one bomb per airplane”.
Now, the escorting ships – cruisers and guided missile destroyers – carry the same long-range land-attack missiles that the Ohio-class SSGN’s carry.
Such ships are more than capable of conducting offensive anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare at the same time they are wielding their land-attack missiles, tasks the Ohio’s are not built to do as a primary mission.
I can assure you that the U.S. Navy has no illusions about the dangers presented to a Carrier Strike Group (or an SSGN) by modern diesel submarines, modern surface ships armed with missiles, mines (an arguable point, I’m sure) or modern combat aircraft backed up by modern surveillance and command and control systems.
The Ohio’s are valuable for just the reason we sawe this past week. It’s very difficult to find them before they launch, and they can wield a lot of long-range firepower.
No system, no matter how well-built and operated, is immune to danger; ‘the enemy always get a vote’ as the saying goes.
But we don’t need to be anywhere close to our aimpoints anymore to threaten an entity, and we can make it extremely difficult for an enemy to come out to look for us.
And they know this.
Rickl @ 82 said:
“I recently read a fascinating history of submarine disasters: Disasters of the Deep by Edwyn Gray.”
Thanks for the tip. Based upon your suggestion, I just bought a used copy from Amazon for $4.28 .
A very interesting on-line resource concerning German U-boats is:
http://www.uboatarchive.net
In particular read the British Admiralty records concerning the different U-boats that the British destroyed. The British Admiralty produced a classified report concerning every U-boat that they could identify. The British wisely wanted to learn as much as possible about the U-boat menace and made it a topic of systematic study. Those reports have since been declassified and provide a detailed look at what life was like on a U-boat. Also the reports go into detail about the amazing experiences the different German sailors went through in escaping from their sinking boats. Some of the sailors claimed to have escaped from depths that were simply unbelievable (the sailors probably exaggerated). It’s remarkable how much detailed information the British were able to extract from these captured German sailors without violating the Geneva Convention (the British were very proper in their treatment of captured German U-boat crewmen).
Rickl: Thanks for the link to the sub book. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage is good too. It focuses on the exploits of the USN in the Cold War. Some of the accounts are truly harrowing. Brass cojones, indeed.
I agree with JWarrior that “Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage” is an excellent book. It’s also available as a book tape.
Wretchard @ 85: “They have been done in by themselves. It happens to companies, cultures, civilizations. But it isn’t the end.”
I never cease to be amazed at your economy with words, W! In the days of the telegraph, you would have been King.
On the march of time — it was not the end for China when their leaders abandoned technology in the 1400s. But life for ordinary Chinese became fairly miserable for the next half-millenium.
It won’t be the end of the world when unsustainable Western liberal government spending finally grinds to a halt, but life for ordinary people in the West may get fairly miserable for a few generations.
The big question may be — How do we save the seeds of knowledge, so that future generations don’t have to fall into the same pot-hole?
Geez, I am a thinkin you have been listening to the left too long.
A. no mo uro’s post was right on. It was not silly at all.
B. It is extremely doubtful that the Rethugians if allowed, would ever consider completely wiping out the Welfare State, and discontinue the care for the extremely disabled or handicapped completely.
C. Wretchard’s point is also pertinent as usual. The ability to support our welfare state with it’s present largesse is quickly coming to an end. We may be approaching financial “crush depth” and the skipper at the rudder seems to be willing to take us all down to the bottom. In our present state, preserving the Welfare State simply is not and should not be on our list of priorities.
D. But what really galls me is that you have completely bought, hook, line and sinker, the Lefty line that Republicans are uncaring meanies, just waiting to throw the poor, the homeless and the dispossessed out on to the streets. What about the damage to millions of people trapped by the Demcrat Welfare State dependency game? The Left has created atrocious conditions and incentives in our inner cities designed purposely to produce millions of poor who can’t take care of themselves, and you want to blame that on Republicans? Do you really think the Left cares about the poor? Or just maybe is it the power and money generated for the Democrats and their Cronies by the Welfare State?
Republicans by astounding margins are far more likely to donate to charities that help the poor. To assign them the uncaring card is just plain wrong. Furthermore, the Conservative Republican program to designed to lift the poor out of their circumstances has never been tried in my lifetime and I’m old. Dependency destroys.
D.
“Soylent gringo
Its just, well, staggering, the thinking that went into to the modern european state.”
A good place/start to trace the rise of the EU is with Herzen.
This is a keeper: “where the provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad.” Quid nunc?
Next: “Berlin in Lights – The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1868 – 1937)”.
…-
“The Revolutionist
The worldly idealist at the heart of Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia.”
“The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven hundred miles away. Luckily, the Romans were equal to the event. As Herzen watched, they gathered at the embassy of the oppressive Austrians, pulled down the enormous imperial coat of arms, stomped on it, then hitched it to a donkey and dragged it through the streets. “An amazing time,” Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. “My hand shakes when I pick up a paper, every day there is something unexpected, some peal of thunder.” He raced to Paris, where the provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad. Herzen’s old friend the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had already started east to foment revolution against the Tsar; another friend, the German Romantic poet Georg Herwegh, was raising a battalion of émigré workers and intellectuals to march on Baden-Baden. Herzen stayed in Paris to see what would happen next.
Nothing good, as it turned out. The liberal provisional government, challenged by the radical Paris workers, called in the National Guard and unleashed a slaughter.”
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/30/061030crat_atlarge
“I am an Evangelical Christian. I voted for Romney in my state’s primary. I know lots of others who did (he won my state). Just sayin’…”
That’s nice. I’m happy for you. What you are not is a born again Southern Baptist. How many states in the bible belt did Mitt win?
Mitt just wants to be POTUS. He won’t be. EVER. What he can do is take money out of a conservative candidate’s coffers. All he can be is a spoiler, helping whichever Democrat is running.
John Kerry without the rich wife.
I regard the interference of the New Black Panther Party in the 2008 presidential election, and especially the Justice Department’s refusal to enforce the law, to be an ominous precedent. Imagine if the KKK had stationed men in white sheets at polling stations and then a friendly president got charges against Klansmen dropped!
Congress needs to investigate what is happening at the Department of Justice. If malfeasance is found from political appointees to the Department of Justice, the House of Representatives must not be afraid to recommend articles of impeachment against offending parties.
It will be important to know how far up the chain of command this went. What did the Attorney General know and when did he know it? Likewise, what did Mr. Holder’s boss know and when did he know it?
Will men and women in Congress have the moral courage to investigate the Justice Department? Will they have the moral courage to put guilty parties in this obstruction of justice on trial in the Senate?
If interference with the election process by vigilante groups is to be tolerated, the moral legitimacy of our elections gets called into question. If election tampering is getting presidential sanction, this sets an ominous precedent that strikes at the heart of our political system. The United States of America needs free and fair elections.
Don’t look now, but state supreme courts have made (in Boston), and are set to rule (in California) for “same sex marriage”.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/07/judge_declares_3.html
The ruling in Boston, is against the DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act), in U.S. congress, 1996. It cite’s that it is a states rights issue (Tenth Amendment) for the state of Massachusetts to make the law according to its own choosing.
But the ruling in California, expected to be handed down tomorrow, says the opposite, it forbids the state (via the referendum that passed there in California, as well as 36 other states) from deciding the issue according to the choice made of its electorate, and has the temerity and conceit to cite the Tenth Amendment (itself, again) in order to do so. That is, forbid the state from its right to choose, regarding an issue, what is legal and what is not.
Forget for the moment, not only, how inconsistent, but how opposed to each other these rulings are ( and hence, how supreme (pardon the pun) the miscalculation involved herein is).
Instead, take the ruling by the unelected panel of philosopher kings in California at face value, or rather, look behind the smokescreen. By ostensibly ruling in favor of a “right” to “same sex” marriage, they have, by their efforts, ruled in favor of a “right” to polygamy, the issue all along whereby marriage, discussed as a supposed “right” was concerned. Falsely premised and therefore falsified in the discussion for the sake of “public consumption” by agenda-ed parties.
They say that the “right” to marriage has been discriminated against.
Forget as well, that the Boston ruling is all about benefits for “same sex” partners to receive benefits (follow the money- it, “same sex” marriage, as with abortion, are to make compulsory, for the taxpayer the subsidizing of these two practices.
Now, the muslim agenda, has been yet again, advanced by these philosopher kings of the unelected panels of lower state court rulings… It is only a matter of time before the practice of polygamy will be cited as a “right” again as well, by one of only two groups- muslims, and hold-out polygamists mormons. And who do think it will be who wants to “come safely out of the closet’ on this one this time? Hmm? (Hint, the issue of mormon polygamy was already decided there for the state of Utah once before, when their statehood was in question, but they don’t matter. But the precious muslims, that’s a warhorse of a diff’rent stroke!)
The leftist agenda will not wither away and die as long as it sits on courts in violation of the oath taken by judges, and continues to make confusion and chaos of the law and the constitution, that has resulted time and time again from the courts usurpation of power in Marbury vs. Madison”. The constitution they have sworn publicly to defend, against all enemies foreign and domestic, and which privately they have sworn only to use and to abuse for their ultimate goal of destroying it. Trojan horse indeed.
Vote in NOvember, as it is the only form which will affirm the only revolution that has ever mattered, or been a positive force for humanity, the revolution of 1776.
If the United States of America isn’t an empire, it is certainly as big as an empire – and is bigger than many empires historically have been. I rather like the idea of an “empire of liberty”, but I don’t think the USA is temperamentally suited to being an old-fashioned empire.
I think we need to realize that imperialism still exists and is often aimed at us. We should consider Russian imperialism, Brussels imperialism, Venezuelan imperialism, Iranian imperialism, Arab imperialism, Chinese imperialism, South African imperialism, Argentinian imperialism, Mexican imperialism, Brazilian imperialism, and Turkish imperialism, just to name a few of the imperialisms we need to contend with. Those from the Left who take a myopic view that American imperialism is the only imperialism on the planet (or that American imperialism is the only imperialism worth worrying about) are utterly deceiving themselves.
Empire is a fact of life, whether we want to recognize it or not.
104. Soylent gringo
By ostensibly ruling in favor of a “right” to “same sex” marriage, they have, by their efforts, ruled in favor of a “right” to polygamy, the issue all along whereby marriage, discussed as a supposed “right” was concerned. Falsely premised and therefore falsified in the discussion for the sake of “public consumption” by agenda-ed parties.
……………
another whiskey theme coming out of california
Kinuachdrach, #99: It won’t be the end of the world when unsustainable Western liberal government spending finally grinds to a halt, but life for ordinary people in the West may get fairly miserable for a few generations.
It’s entirely possible – I would say quite likely, in fact – that the US will then face a demographic implosion of its own. It’s been argued, on BC and elsewhere, that we’ve already reached a tipping point where American parents will no longer be able to make their kids better off, or even no worse off, than they themselves were in terms of standards of living. In light of this, how many young people coming into adulthood under these conditions, let alone in the aftermath of the liberal collapse Kinuachdrach alludes to, will simply elect not to procreate at all, rather than subject their children and grandchildren to lifetimes of (by the would-(not-)be-parents’ standards) soul-sucking immiseration?
To GeezeL,
I would ask whether the reason the quality of mercy is stretched so thin these days is precisely because of the various levels of Federal, State, County, and Municipal governments excavating all the spare coins from the purses and exchequers of the citizens? For the last CENTURY!?!?!?!?!?
In my extended family and in the only slightly larger circle of people with whom I work, there are at least a dozen instances of families providing a home and care for a substantially disabled, infirm, or chronically ill child, sibling, or parent. That’s out of a total of fewer than 70 adults.
While some token aid comes from state agencies, the vast bulk of the expenses are being born by these working families or individuals, who also pay the taxes that go to support many other families the government deems deserving, but which I’ve seen using food stamps in grocery stores purchasing luxury items that I couldn’t afford for myself, and still pay my bills.
On a few occasions I have availed myself of unemployment benefits, but I have paid far more in unemployment insurance payments than I ever drew while I was looking for work.
I also know a boatload of folks (for instance, in various community orchestras in cities where I’ve lived) who have given thousands and thousands of hours of their time, playing music at convalescent homes, hospitals, retirement communities, and free concerts for schools, etc.
And from every ship my dad served on when I was a kid, I saw enlisted sailors and officers who coached baseball and scouts when they were home from deployments. I ‘spicion those folks did a lot more volunteering than I noted as a six-or-seven-year old. For instance, as I reflect a bit more, Navy wives who did volunteer work in base clinics and emergency rooms for the Red Cross (my mom was a “Gray Lady…”)
In Cincinnati, I knew of church congregations that regularly went out into the community to do home repairs and house painting for folks that weren’t even connected to their church community.
How much more would people like that give of themselves if they weren’t being bled white by the Government, which calls them vicious selfish RACISTS for objecting to having their pockets picked by the criminal conspiracy of craven vote-buying Congresscritters?
About your 104, SoylentG,
Does a State Court – even a State Supreme Court – have legal standing to pass on the constitutionality of a federal law? I thought it was the other way around…
On the other hand, if they can do so, while confirming the principle of STATES’ RIGHTS as specified in the United States Constitution under the terms of ANY article or amendment, that can ONLY be to the good.
The doctrine of enumerated powers and limits needs to be revisited. I pray that rope burns are not the only available option to effect a return to proven principles of good government.
#77 NahnCee
Still waiting for some smart person to tell me what happens whan America crashes to the bottom. Will it be better or worse than being nuked?
I’m not going to rise to the bait of “smart person”, nor can anyone tell you exactly what happens when America crashes to the bottom. Only scenario analysis is possible–preferably done in multiple versions adjusting key assumptions, and even that is not going to be accurate.
But hey, we can take a stab at it.
First, the operable phrase of art is “refuge line of drift”. Other extremely knowledgeable posters have explained this before.
Basically, once the fine-tuned economic logistics of the USA breaks down under disaster (man-made or otherwise), the cities really are “three meals away from a revolution”, as Lenin said. Supermarkets only carry small back-stocks of goods and are easily emptied. Once cash runs out (because credit is dependent on telecommunications infrastructure continuing to function) the real rioting starts at the food stores, and spreads to anything else not sufficiently nailed down.
Enter refuge lines of drift. Civilians will attempt to escape the cities as rapidly as possible, jamming roadways and traveling more or less aimlessly after fuel supplies run out locally and generally acting like locusts. Most of the US population is urban, so no–the armed rural core does not have the numbers or munitions to effectively withstand the scale of ex-urban refuges, now acclimated to lawlessness and driven by hunger. In fact, only communities that have natural barriers or distance stand a chance of surviving intact, and they will be extremely wary of “outsiders”.
Ultimately disease, starvation and violence reduce the population to the point where some forms of regional equilibrium are restored, likely resembling much greater homogeneity in terms of belief or ethnicity (tribe).
All of this represents a fantastic breakdown of national unity, however at this point after 60 years of hammering multi-cultural nails there isn’t much unity left in the great cities, and they are functionally bombs chained to the rest of the county. Keep in mind that this scenario is the “bottom”–if the food keeps flowing there’s a lot of ruin the US could tolerate. Without the food, all bets are off.
The real question then is what the rest of the world would do while the (former) largest economy, with 300 million+ people, implodes. The first thing would be to rearrange the world financial situation to exclude the dollar. Following that, whether or not there is enough productivity and spare manpower to merit attempts to salvage the US becomes an issue. Salvage in terms of restoring food distribution and security order. Most likely there would be an expedition by the UN or other parties to “save the US people”–if only because the USA sits still on enormous resources that have to be managed by someone.
Keep in mind that to some, the ideal goal is the breakdown of ALL national sovereignty and the subjection of the nations to a world government with real enforcement power. That can’t happen so long as the world’s largest economy and military superpower holds to its sovereign constitution, so either it needs to stop holding, or it has to be completely broken and reconstituted. If you can break the USA, you can break anyone and bring them under the power of the single world state.
The US could, in fact, survive the simple scenario above, but it would come out so wounded that it would be unrecognizable from today. It might be closer to after the Civil War, with 40% of the southern male population dead, or it might be much worse. Regardless, effective US influence would be someplace around mid-1800s level, and not a major impediment to any of the other “great powers” on the international scene.
Going back to our host’s analogy, what bobs to the surface after the submarine of the USA hits crush depth will more closely resemble a dingy than an Ohio.
–JC
Crush depth? For some, maybe. I call it Freedom Depth. That’s where the crushing pressure becomes so painful that even the dumbest idiots can see that the public sector unions and their pensions/benefits are an extravagance we can no longer afford. Then we cut ‘em loose.
Never forget – the public sector needs the private sector to survive, but the reverse is not true.
JC in KZ @ 110,
That whole scenario is ridiculous. Why would a government default on its pension obligations cause farmers to stop selling food to the cities? What makes you think the government (Federal or State) would allow it to come to that? At the very worst this nation has deep reserves of basic provisions – wheat, corn, beans, etc. sitting in dry storage all over the country.
Just look at Argentina or even post-Soviet Russia. Did those societies implode in a manner even remotely similar to what you describe? No, they did not. And post-Soviet Russia was in much worse shape than we are now, by many miles.
The only thing that happens is that all those public sector retirees go from being wealthy to being lower-middle-class as their pensions are cut down to size. This might cause a dry-up in Cadillac sales, but it will hardly cause society to implode. That’s just idiotic.
Your description of worst case scenario is very credible, JCinKZ, except that you limit your frame to the USofA.
Sorry, Brock. Obama and the towering intellectuals he has chosen to punish the U.S. are busy right now – in case you’ve been in a coma for the last three months – doing their damnedest to destroy the United States petroleum industry. That’s the fuel that runs the tractors that plow, the harvesters that reap, the trucks and trains that carry the grain, the electrical generating plants that power the grain mills and bakeries, the digging machinery that extracts the ores to be made into cans and cooking pots, and the fuel that cooks the food in everyone’s kitchen.
In other places in Wretchard’s blog, lists have been presented reminding us of the tens of thousands of needful products which are made from petroleum as a starting place.
You think the U.S. could NOT collapse, with these determined efforts to bring it down?
Did you ever read about the two World Wars? The Great Depression? Rwanda? Nogorno-Karabakh? Chechnya? China’s Great Leap Forward? Stalin and the Kulaks of Ukraine? Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?
It’s almost impossible to imagine any scenario in which the USA is plunged into chaos that does not involve the simultaneous and/or linked collapse of neighboring cultures as well as distant allies and even enemies.
What will happen to China when there is no country like the USA to purchase its ephemeral consumer goods? We together (USA & China) have become as interdependently specialized as the orchid with petals that allow a single species of moth to enter, and the single species of moth that can eat nothing but the nectar of that single species of orchid.
This does not give me any pleasure. What it means to me is that there is a lot to lose. The doctrinaire anti-industrial eco-fanatics are doing their level best to bring the industrial world to its knees. The Flaming Marxist bastards who have gained control of the current government are poisoning, bludgeoning, starving, raping, robbing, and mutilating the one country that has proven it is capable of feeding a major portion of the world. More importantly, it is the one country that has shown it has a system in which individual initiative is more robust that the cynical open running sore of corruption that characterizes the stinking United Nations, and the majority of the murdering tyrannies that make up its roster these days.
Kill the U.S., and I guarantee, no world government based on the festering pus-bag perverts of the United Nations will last more than a decade. They will be far too busy diddling each other’s children, negotiating bribes and building palaces for themselves to rule effectively. These preening bureaucrats have NO EXPERIENCE whatsoever in executing any sort of productive labor. They have no experience in managing the productive labor of even their own slaves. The United Nations has been living on the monies paid into their coffers by the United States (more than 50 percent overall throughout its history) and a few other of the Western Industrialized countries. The crowd of dictatorships, totalitarian juntas, and Arab Muslim states, have been allowed to persist because of the EXPENSIVE artificialities of international law which they have been gnawing and eroding since the 1950′s. The ONLY thing they know how to do with any efficiency or expertise is to STEAL wealth from those who know how to produce it.
When the Golden Goose is dead, there will be no more Gold for them to steal, and they will fall on each other with their knives and eat each other like the animals they are.
There are Strong Men who will be able to maintain their own patches, but survivors of the collapse will see the forests reclaim the suburbs and farms; the universities and hospitals and factories will rust, crumble, and disappear into the soil. The grain silos that have provided flour and bread for a billion people around the world will stand empty for a time until they, too, topple.
The world will descend into an extended period of isolated communities, separated by wildlands. Dialects will drift and diverge so that people living in towns separated by three days’ walk may still be able to communicate, but they will regard each other as outlandish foreigners.
Superstition, even more than now, will substitute for science. You think the fraud of AGW is acute? There are already admirers of the Sanctified One who would happily buy little balls of his poop wrapped in gold foil, and consume them, firmly convinced of their healing powers.
The power to resist is in us, if we have the will and the courage.
It will not be easy, or pretty. But that choice is being forced onto us more and more emphatically by the wreckers and destroyers who have lied and cheated their way into their supremacy.
Follow the wisdom of Papa Ray, and Subotai, Habu, and others. Don’t let the opportunity to prepare pass you by.
twobyfour a while back thought my comment about Misha the Tie Eater gratuitous. Well, check this link out:
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2010/07/russia-respects-victims-west-spits-on.html
Russia to build memorial to 200,000 fallen Georgian soldiers in WWII in Moscow
This Stanislav Mishin knows which buttons to push with American paleoconservatives – and how to get on Glenn Beck for fifteen minutes.
“Just look at Argentina or even post-Soviet Russia. Did those societies implode in a manner even remotely similar to what you describe? No, they did not. And post-Soviet Russia was in much worse shape than we are now, by many miles.”
Brock’s comment is on the ball, except that there are some social differences that made it easier for Russia to absorb the shock of collapse in the 1990s than America at present. Dmitry Orlov details them in his book, Reinventing Collapse, which Buddy Larsen thinks is a piece of Russkiy propaganda agitprop designed to lull us into accepting our own USSR-style decline.
One thing I mentioned previously in this thread is that Russia had somewhat decent infrastructure leftover from the USSR – nice broad streets in Moscow that once amazingly were almost empty on the weekends back in the 70s and now are choked with private cars (compare the wide Moscow streets to American megalopis New York City), robust gas and electric lines in the ground (instead of electric lines always being blown down or over by storms), the Moscow and various Soviet cities’ Metro/streetcar systems, etc. Even the crummy Kruscheva and Brezhneva apartment blocks have exceeded their expected service life though many are being condemned and their residents pushed out to apartments in the Moscow region to make way for new condos. The best apartments by far in Moscow are usually renovated (sometimes with a wall knocked out to double the size) buildings constructed in the late 40s through the early 60s (and no, they were not all built by German POWs).
Anyway, the basic point Orlov made is that even when people went without wages for months or even years in Russia, they still kept their apartments and no one (thanks to Russia’s then non-market system for gas, long before they started having to get the Ukrainians/Belarusians off the gasdole) shut off the heat in the winter.
One cannot say the same for American housing, particularly the cheap stuff thrown up in the last twenty years, where squatter zones and condemnations could become common.
75. Eggplant…
One artificial prop for the market is the price earnings ratio. (what did obumble say, profit earnings or something meaningless)
Laffer writes that everyone is declaring all the profit they can move into this year to avoid BHO’s tax hikes next year.
Thus profits are artificially high now, and will suffer next year as a result.
Scythianeedle, don’t be a doofus. US oil production is up 0.67% in 2010 just from 2009. It’s higher now than it has ever been. If the “Peak Oil” folks are right that steady rise will taper out one day and then slowly decline, but a complete crash just isn’t in the cards. If Obama ever did anything to reduce oil production by as much as 5% he’d probably be impeached by Senators literally afraid for their own lives. Meanwhile the oil that was still produced would be funneled to the truly necessary goods (like food) and away from luxury items like plastic cups (when glass or ceramic mugs are plentiful).
Mr. X/114
The “tie eater” apropos’ are always gratuitous. If you want to write about this favored subject of yours, write about it, but don’t tuck it on every post in all sorts of contrived connections. It then looks like you wrote an entire post just to slip the ref in. Quit doing it and I’ll have no issue with you.
As for the memorial to 200k Georgian soldiers… I don’t want to be cynical, but there is a substantial group o’ people that are so compassionate about Jews as long as they are dead (in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor). Then right off the bat they turn on a dime and call Israelis Nazis.
I am not saying that “we love dead Georgians” is the case with 200k Georgians memorial. But a memorial and territorial (perceived) entitlements are different things. There are elements in Russia that want the SU expanse back (and if Georgian svolotch is in the way, then too bad), though they would pass as the ideology goes.
Doug, be informed that 81% of mortages in Las Vegas are underwater/upside down. Plus there are somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 vacant houses that are not listed. Operative theory seems to be that inventory must be witheld from market
lest prices decline even farther.
Me? I say to dump them all as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible.
Fighting wage/price declines during deflation is the same as jerking back on the stick when an airplane stalls. All you can get is that uncontrollable spiral.
Brock @ 116: Be careful what you call “luxury items”. Many petroleum-based items that might well be ass u me’d to be unecessary are actually by- products of a by- products by- product. (I have in particular mind those plastic flimsies in the checkout lines.)
And I will once again comment that “peak oil” can easily lead you astray. Think
“petroleum overhead” instead. If it takes 50 gallons of diesel to pump one barrel (42 gallons) of crude, then the oil bidness will be kaput. We ain’t nowhere close to that state of affairs. Barack Obama and some others want us to be, but I daresay we can foil the bastards after all.
Joshua #107 — In light of this, how many young people coming into adulthood under these conditions, let alone in the aftermath of the liberal collapse Kinuachdrach alludes to, will simply elect not to procreate at all, rather than subject their children and grandchildren to lifetimes of (by the would-(not-)be-parents’ standards) soul-sucking immiseration?
But doesn’t an apocalyptic collapse assume less access to birth control technology? And nights where the electricity is down and people go to bed early out of boredom?
Unsk & Mad Fiddler:
The issue is private vs public institutions and the proper role for each. Tomes have been written. I cannot do the subject any form of adequate justice. But I do note the shriek was startling.
As wretchard noted upstream, the liberal welfare construct is crumbling. The welfare state itself will never disappear, but it can, will, and is being trimmed to more manageable proportions. My initial point was that the intellectual base supporting conservative policy is not currently adequate to address social services in a meaningful way. I understand that many on this board disagree with that position. So be it.
For Unsk: reading skills. I never said that Repubs are meanies etc. I cited the caricature as an example of radical extremes masquerading as generalities in public debate (one of Whiskey’s alleged sins), which is true. I intentionally avoided the subject of being a centrist because I also understand this site is contemptuous of the ‘muddlin middle’ and I didn’t want to push too many buttons at one time. I now wish I had made that more clear because the distance between left and center is still substantive (although I do see the extremes being gradually removed from the political sphere – a little too gradually for my taste but still, movement in the right direction.)
For Fiddler: your controlled restraint is noted. I’m sure your musical friends have brought hours of enjoyment to the community and they are to be commended. I won’t get into the details of the challenges of dealing with handicapped people and I absolutely refuse any implied challenge to play the my family is more compassionate than your family game. Suffice it to say for now that recent studies have exposed private assisted care facilities for the elderly as poorly managed, subject to misappropriation of funds, and understaffed. Fact. In this great country.
Those who cheer the unraveling of the welfare state are reminded that we are now moving into new territory where, as mentioned by Marie Claude, the young, elderly, and handicapped will be impacted first. (The poor should be treated as a separate subject requiring different approaches.)
So that’s enough for now. nmu’s post was not right on and his tone and content were both silly and simplistic.
Note to Marie Claude: I have no problem with your English, which is alternately maddening and fascinating, but I was chuckling at the thought that your son married a woman too much like mom?
Here’s where we may be going – from the movie, The Book of Eli:
Solara: “What was the world like – before[nuclear war]?”
Eli: “People had more than they needed, people didn’t know what was precious and what wasn’t, people threw away things they kill each other for now.”
A paraphrase from Genesis 3:17-19 which describes Adam’s (and concomitantly, our) punishment, is used when Eli is accosted by about 12 evil punks who refuse to let him pass and intend to kill him. Just before engagement, he warns (and laments):
Eli: “Cursed be the ground for our sake. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for us. For out of the ground we were taken, for the dust we are… and to the dust we shall return.”
It bespeaks of our future – perhaps sooner now, than we once thought.
Fasten your seat belts, it’s inbound. And “shazam” will be one of its agents. It has all been played out before. For some, the play will be fast and furious; for others, it will have happened “somewhere else.”
“So that’s enough for now. nmu’s post was not right on and his tone and content were both silly and simplistic.”
Translation:
“So there, I was SO right, and I’m never wrong about anything. Nyah, nyah, nyah. And you’re a dumbhead.”
Strong stuff, anonymous blog poster. Strong stuff.
Anyhow, my thanks to Unsk and Mad Fiddler for your comments in support. Your knowledge of history and your own personal experiences, but more importantly your understanding of certain immutables of human nature, inform your writings. “Year zero” thinking always results in disaster, whether it is the French Revolution, Russian or Chinese Bolshevism, the soft tyranny of current western Euro socialism, the New Deal or the Great Society, or 1960′s hippy radicals – or those who currently believe that they are so damned smart and have magical analytical skills to the extent that they “get” some ill-defined “macro” dialectic which negates all that came before and represents a fundamental change in human nature and existence.
Conservatism (of the small-l libertarian flavor), for all its faults, has the advantage of one thing over all its detractors – it buys into the concept of original sin, and it understands that while you can tweak at the edges, there are unchanging aspects of human nature which are not perfectible by means of the apparatus of state. The beauty of Magna Carta, the Declaration and Constitution, and of the Founding Father era, was that they did not fall into the year zero trap of believing that they could radically change how humans are built. Instead, they took human nature as fact, and tried to design a government that dealt imnperfectly (but as well as possible) with humanity, both in its greatness and its foibles. As such, they understood that government takeover of charity was a mistake. Sadly, in the 1930′s, our nation forgot that wisdom.
Anyhow, thanks again for your posts.
#85 Wretchard
I think I owe it to you to flesh out my quibble with your point regarding the difference between public and private charity.
You are correct in stating that the main thing a society needs in order to have any charity industry public or private is that we are having enough children and generating enough wealth to even have the opportunity to take care of the needy in the first place.
I would posit that the philosophical underpinnings of a society that opts for the state charity route vs the private one are the same underpinnings that lead to demographic collapse. In other words, turning over the respnsibilities of the family to the state creates a disincentive to have your own family.
Your thoughts?
59. Nahncee. The Soviet Union was very rich in natural resources, just enslaved to a bureaucracy that was, by turns ideological and kleptocratic. Where the US finds itself now?
Anyway, my latest favorite idea for reducing the federal and local deficits is to privatize all the government power authorities. All the reasons for them being in existence (rural electrification chief among them) have been accomplished. Sell them off to the highest bidder(s). This will result in cash infusions and higher tax revenues into the future.
There are many other assets now in the hands of governmental bodies which will be better managed privately. (The fact that they are in gov’t hands in the 1st place is a tragedy of the commons, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. . .)
The American future does not have to look like the Thresher, just the future of Socialism in America.
BTW, there’sa a very good chance that the 10 spies were hustled out of the country so fast in order to keep people from searching the CV of the high level contact that the spies admitted to, one Leon Fuerth.
Also on the CFR and iirc the Trilateral commish: Richard Fuld (along with many others, of course). Fuld led LEH into the “surprise” bankruptcy that almost to an analyst is pinpointed as the unneccesary and set-up shock that set off the global panic –which led to TARP under Bush’s waning days. So Obama nevber had to ‘do it first’ on the TBTF bailouts –which i believe, of course, were meant to destroy the free market (and may yet).
Note that CNBC, a GE unit (GE is heavily invested in cap and trade passing and making a market thru regulations for GE’s green machine inventory) and part of the media syndicate operating to pass Obama’s agenda, felt the need to produce and air one of the singularly dullest hours of TV ever, “The Last Days of Lehman Brothers” (or somesuch), a few weeks ago.
The show (i watched it) seemed to break some basic drama rules by keeping the actor playing Fuld in close-up about half the film, showing him sweating and grieving and looking desperate, showing how ‘surprised’ and ‘shocked’ he was that he wasn’t going to get the bailout that the previous several big houses had. It looked to me, for all the world, like somebody had told CNBC to produce the show, and that it was important that Fuld be presented as ‘extra extra’ upset and surprised that LEH was going belly up, and as a result of Hank Paulsen’s sober protection of the American taxpayer, and that this presentation of Fuld needed to be dramatized for the CNBC audience. take a look at it, if it’s available and you’re interested in this comedy of murderous genius clowns.
and, sweet memories –especially John M Deutch and Marc Rich, also close to Fuerth at least insofar as Gore’s staff and Clinton’s knew what each other were doing.
yes it is very odd the speed at which the russian spies were hustled out of the country. one would assume that Putin was embarrassed by the episode since this sort of thing would likely be his pet project but what would be the American motive for hustling these spies out of the country even before they have been tried?
One of Russian spies/agents of influence– was Mikhail Semenko. He recently had a book entitled , The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?. — on NY Times best seller list.
One Steve Clemens wrote about him here.
Here is description of another spy/agent of influence named Donald Heathfield who penned a work of management theory
……..
perhaps if you went through and looked at the drift of of the ten spies published work you could get an idea of the general drift of their critique.
Still this does not add up to a motive for quickly hustling them out of the country. Especially when the first stated motive for rounding them was according to Eric Holder:
“One of the members, the husband of one of the couples was in the process of going to France and then on his way to Russia,” Holder replied. “The concern was if we let him go we would not be able to get him back. If we did not act at that point the possibility existed that would not be able to break up the ring in the totality that we have now.”
“The basic psychological monkey on our backs was that the post war boom went on for so long that it became regarded as a natural condition.”
Note that the “boom” was not just material in nature but philosophical as well. People were free to experiment with various ideas, knowing that there would always be an England or at least a New York Port Authority. But the material enabled the philosophical. One does not sit around and dream up massive class action lawsuits against companies that make lawn mowers on the basis that they “Overstated the horse power of the unit” unless the civilization is rich enough to afford lots and lots of lawn mowers, lawyers, and class action lawsuits.
Similarly, a civilization does not devise rules that prevent the police from asking as to the nationality of suspects unless a significant percentage of that civilization does not feel endangered by any crimminal.
Doug Kass who called the market downturn in 2008 now writes that the stock market has made a short term bottom. However, that comes in the context of huge uncertainty for 2010-2012. He makes some interesting comparisons between stock market trading and poker.
GLouise,
I’m of the Spartan school of thought. I appreciate that you are not and have no problem with that. My problem is you wanting me to help pay for your personal opinion.
My money is for MY children, grandchildren and immediate family. It is not yours to spread around in what ever manner soothes your guilt.
Handicapped babies should be put down. Right then and there. Those contacting fatal diseases should be either put down or allowed to die. Once one is to old to deal with life, take the red pill.
The ONLY medical services necessary are those of the emergency room.
You will consider these measures hard, cruel, and uncivilized. I consider your method to be robbery. In a spirit of middle of the road-ness and a concession to that most hateful of things, that losers lament, the cowards way, compromise, I suggest that you take in the crippled, the halt and the lame and leave me out of it.
If you want to help those that cannot help themselves, fine, do so. Just leave me out of it.
#116 Brock, “Meanwhile the oil that was still produced would be funneled to the truly necessary goods (like food) and away from luxury items like plastic cups (when glass or ceramic mugs are plentiful).”
I fail to see how one can re-direct the fabrication of plastic cups (plastic being a by-product of petroleum), into the production of food. I take it you mean that petroleum in its pre-byproduct form of energy can diverted to the needs of fueling the tractors and whatnot, that are used to harvest and plant what, more corn?
There has already been plenty of re-direction of energy resources to the production of corn by the Iowa corn lobby, and thanks to it’s friends in congress, particularly Tom Harken in the senate, to produce plenty of corn, and corn syrup, and so on. High fructose corn syrup is a problem, it’s in EVERYTHING now, but now it has to be re-re-regulated out of the morass that regulation favoring its production already produced via Tom Harken’s original “regulation” has saddled us with in the first place. Why do you think Harken keeps getting re-elected there? Will he get the blame? For his corporate favoritism (corporate fascism) and tampering? I doubt it.
As to high priced salaried and pensioned teachers, and the bureaucracies and Unions that perpetuate them, for turning out illiterates year after year in their gulag barrios, and come haranguing us every few weeks for “more money”, I say fire the stinking lot of them, smash the, (sorry…) their unions (their thug
“enforcement” wing) and put them out on the streets, starving, and with a “health care” lobotomy to boot, so they can drool on street corners with a cup- tin, plastic, wood or otherwise- mumbling “mo money…mo money…”, and then let’s see who, in their “communities”, want to riot on their behalf.
I am really tired of pandering to this subsidized “community” operating a thinly veiled protection racket whose bluff (with some actual force behind it) needs to be called. If they want to live off of taxpayer supported income and “budgeting”, and not produce a single thing that can be measured in any way, shape, or “human capital” standard as profitable, least of all, beneficial to this country, i.e. results, positive results, except to foster a perpetually illiterate “constituency” to help perpetuate them, then they must all forego their right to vote in order to do so. And then we’ll see how long they last. One or the other, but not both. This is the one choice, I, the taxpayer, and on whose dime their livelihood depends, extend to them. These (this, in fact) are (is) my terms. My money, my terms. Non-negotiable. I am not obligated, in any way, to any “noblesse oblige”, by virtue of anything in the constitution, nor am I obligated, through taxation, and 26,000 pages of illegal tax code, to such protection rackets simply because this was once a prosperous country, and will be again. No. Non-negotiable.
So, Louise, do you want to wax some more about what my burdens are? I’d like to burden you with the truth, but it would be a waste of time.
I’m sure medved sincerely wants you to call and share this with him, to hear about how compassionate we of the conservative stripe need to be (falsely premised, as usual- we are already compassionate, a hundred times more so than our covetous rivals to the left will ever be) to get bums interested in (not) voting for us (that’s not voting for us, yet again) in elections, just so we can say we tried and have failed, (to get our “compassionate” message” out) again. Silly Party indeed.
I fail to see the enlightened wisdom of NOT facing reality and articulating it, and then acting on it, and putting the criminal class in D.C. out of business, however harsh it will be criticized, based on the notion that eschewing reality is the sure fire way to become unpopular with subsidized block communities of “potential” voters living on the gummint plantation, in squalor, and supplied and newly subsidized by newly procured gum-minted cash, still wet with ink, from tax cheats at the treasury.
Who go back, again and again, and vote for more government against my, and even their own, best interest.
Go ahead, share with us your rebuttal, or more precisely, try and shame us again with your lively, sanctimonious, and rebarbative rebuttal.
I am sure glad judges in po-dunk courts have made same sez marriage and polygamy an election issue again, as they did in 2003, against the will of the electorate (and against their voice) in California, and 36 other states, in such a colossal usurping, and miscalculation.
thanks, unelected philosopher kings.
AM @3 & 4,
A family proverb from Rurik’s Mother “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing – but only for a little while, before switching to a new mania”.
Why should you worry to avoid offending 13% of the population, particularly if they were the core of the group who caused the problem in the first place? Instead, shouldn’t they be held accountable?
Your invocation of a “small good war” reminds me of a precedent. Nicholas II was urged by his Interior Minister that a small victorious war would be good for Russia; this led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
“yes it is very odd the speed at which the russian spies were hustled out of the country.”
Well at least Mr. X. is still here! (oh thass a joke Mr. X!)
Regading the Doug Kass article – very good view into a dedicated trader’s mind. Note that the really good traders make no notice of macro events at all – economic policy, demographic trends, political events – and therefore when something big happens, they will be temporarily blindsided just like everyone else. Doesn’t matter to them, because what they count on is that when something big DOES happen, they know they will be able to react faster than anyone else will in realtime, and that is all they concentrate on.
Of course, that means that the markets are hyper-reactive to short term events, down 500 Dow points one week, up 500 the next. We’re in a traders market right now, and the most important conclusion to draw from that is that as long as this continues, the markets predict nothing – they only react.
There’s also another valid conclusion to draw from Kass’ poker comparison, and although he doesn’t say this explicitly, he doesn’t have to: in this kind of market, there is no difference
between “investing” in stocks and gambling. The only people who are going to do really well are the professional gamblers, and if you’re not comfortable with professional gambling then you should be completely out of this market.
130 – skip_this_post. Nice, real nice. We can tell you’re not a compassionate conservative, nor a conservative nor Christian at all. And you’re probably not very old, either. But thanks much for exposing us to your thinking.
It’s not a zero-sum game. Who gets to decide “hanicapped”, for example?
————————-
Handicapped babies should be put down. Right then and there. Those contacting fatal diseases should be either put down or allowed to die. Once one is to old to deal with life, take the red pill.
The ONLY medical services necessary are those of the emergency room.
Salt Lick @ 120: “But doesn’t an apocalyptic collapse assume less access to birth control technology?”
Exactly! Think of the incredible level of technology behind the contraceptive pill, the sterile abortion mill, or even the humble unreliable condom. Take away technology (or even just reliable electric power and transportation energy) and we are back to a world where intercourse leads to pregnancy.
There is an argument that much of “old fashioned” morality was simply the tribe’s way of dealing with the inevitability of pregnancy. Before our industrial-based wealth made teenage pregnancy a welfare-subsidized career choice for young women, illegitimate births put ordinary caring people into a dreadful bind — they could not afford to support the unmarried woman’s children as well as their own, but they could not bear to see the bastards suffer grinding poverty. Everyone in society had a great interest in making sure that procreators looked after their own offspring.
If this argument has any validity, then Obama is creating the conditions for a general return to the old-fashioned morality he despises. The Law of Unintended Consequences!
Josh @21
“We might better ask why the Republican party fielded such a horribly weak field in 2008…”
How many people who voted for Mac in the primaries, voted for The Obamandias in the actual election? The answer is open primaries which allowed any and everyone to vote to select the weakest GOP candidate. Back in the summer of 2008 I participated in the McCain Mutiny,(Strawberries anyone? ) befor returning home to vote for Sarah P in November.
Geez- “the young, elderly, and handicapped will be impacted first.”
How do you come to this conclusion? The young, the elderly and the handicapped all have strong lobbying constituencies. Deprivations of the young, the elderly and the handicapped are the easiest for the leftist nightly news to highlight in a heart tugging way. While it’s true that spending cuts to the Welfare State by our betters are often applied to those that make the best media stories first just to make a point, the likelihood of significant and meaningful assistance cuts to those groups any time soon is close to nil. Social Security and Medicare are not called the third rail of American politics for nothing.
My state, California, a relatively wealthy state, presently has 32.5% of all welfare cases in America. Are you telling us that there is not room there for spending cuts? T
I believe you initial point was that the implications of most Republican thought is heartless, uncaring and without a strategy to reasonably care for the sick, and handicapped. The fact is that most welfare spending goes to Democrat dominated urban areas that have completely corrupted the social services delivery system. The big city democrats have devised multiple ways to frustrate any change in the present system. Welfare reform which measurably improved the situation in many areas was a Republican idea. My state, California, a relatively wealthy state, presently has 32.5% of all welfare cases in America, as a result of two things: California has never implemented Welfare Reform and much of the money ends up going to illegals which is against the law. There have been many thoughtful Republican proposals to improve our welfare system, but few has been reported in the media, because it is not in the interests of the Leftist Media to report such things. Your perception of a lack of caring Republican strategy seems to be a reflection of how our news is shaped to reinforce Leftist memes.
But the larger issue is that any reform of the welfare system must be integrated into a larger reform of our economic regulatory system. The Left’s policies have so driven up the cost of living in urban areas that many formerly workable solutions to our problems of poverty no longer work. It is very difficult for someone with a non unionized menial job to pay the bills anymore. I’ve had homeless shelters as clients and one of their biggest problems was not getting jobs for the homeless, it was getting jobs for the homeless that paid enough so they could live on their own.
130. Skip_this_post:
Are you sure you’re on the right forum?
I mean, I guess we should expect to get utilitarian trolls every once in a while. Perhaps you’re one of those neo-Randian “utilitarians,” with your Peter Singer-like talk of killing “defective” babies. Lifting Obama’s “red pill” quote is an interesting, and bizarre touch as well.
But then, hey, one thing I have found is that many people in this world who express opinions are wildly inconsistent in their collection of opinions that constitute their world view. That is the prerogative of the individual, including yourself.
GL@121: nmu’s post was not right on and his tone and content were both silly and simplistic.
nmu@123: Translation…“So there, I was SO right, and I’m never wrong about anything. Nyah, nyah, nyah. And you’re a dumbhead.”…Strong stuff, anonymous blog poster. Strong stuff.
nmu: You are too excitable. If I could undo this thread, I would, in a heartbeat. I started with a serious and ad hominem-free post that criticized conservative thought in support of my contention that the collapse of the liberal state will leave a void that conservatives are not equipped to fill. You fell off the rhetorical deep end. All by yourself. Nobody pushed you. And now whatever debate might have ensued is permanently compromised by nasty and thoroughly juvenile “you started it miss/mister” rhetoric.
As a final statement for the formal record, I never asserted that the public sector is inherently better at it than the private[.]
The either-or public-private dichotomy is a false premise, IMO. My ultimate suggestion was something more creative, which I will save for another time.
Where is old virgil x. when you need him?
Charles @ 129: Kass just sort of mentions in passing a “short-term” bottom, which means it may be over by the time you read it.
This is NOT the chart for a short-term bottom or rally:
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$INDU&p=D&yr=1&mn=0&dy=0&id=p37066077539
it is actually the chart that earlier this week people were declaring as the same head-and-shoulders that looked like the Depression.
The short-term trend – and I mean for a few more days – is back up to the 200ma, and that may – MAY – be a sufficient attractor to hold the market price for the summer, but any move above that is going to be more PPT, in my humble opinion.
And it really does look like a bottomless pit below.
For the sake of clarity, I will say again. I am not obligated, by virtue of anything articulated in the United States federal constitution, to any “noblesse oblige”, nor to finance any subsidy by “custom”, and neither am I obligated by what any “constituency” has become “accustomed to” by virtue of any nationalizing of the formerly federal government in the Washington capital by politicians in D.C. Period.
#46 Geeze Louise- “I submit that the reason for this exclusion from the intellectual platform presented by the Republicans is that they have yet to acknowledge the existence of the subgroups requiring public assistance.”
It is an out and out lie to presume that all, least of all any member(s) of “subgroups” ““require” “public assistance”.
It presumes, (falsely premised again, as usual) that subgroups, in their entirety, are to be based, and individuals classified “accordingly”, as always, on any or some sort of “racial” or “ethnic” classification (by the government). (read the census form lately?) And presumes as well, that american citizens are not citizens at all, but “subjects” of a pseudo monarchical structure which has deigned to favour one “subgroup” or financially bracketed “subgroup”, “ethnicity” or “race” at the expense of another. The national government in D.C. does this every day, and has so for many years, and I don’t see the “supreme” courts in D.C. stepping in and disqualifying ANYTHING which is based on this blatant form of racism, or even defining it as such.
To reiterate. I define racism as any system that favours one group, financial or corporate, racial or ethnic, or any “subgroup” at the expense of another. Period. And yet regimes in D.C. have been doing this every day for years.
It also follows that it is a lie to think that EVERY member of a racially “classified” ethnicity thinks that he or she is owed, or even approves of this “redistribution of wealth”, based on the false premise of any racial or ethnic identity group politics or “policy” bandied by its presumed “leadership”. (for example, race hustlers and shake down artists). Period. No “meme-bership” in any these racially classified “subgroups” do so exclusively. Period. It is a lie to presume that ALL blacks, or all “African Americans” think that all “white people” owe them something. All do not. It is a lie to presume that all “Hispanic” classified people (classified that way, by more government “custom”) think the government, (the taxpayer) should pay for their health care. All do not. It is likewise not true to presume that all people classified as “members” of Asian, or Chinese, or Filipino, or Japanese by (government) classified “ethnicities” or racial “subgroups” (and so on), believe the government, through taxation, should be subsidizing them in any way, nor that they approve of D.C. subsidies and the funding of other variously government-defined members of racially classified “subgroups” on their dime. They do not. (please, continue to insert hyphenated “ethnicities” and “subgroups” here, z.b. Austrian/Americans, Dutch/Americans, Solomon Island/Americans, etc.)
Yet, these very “presumptions” are accepted as truth and as fact, by the government in D.C. (and elsewhere), and form the basis of nationalist D.C policy based on this racism, and is concocted there (and elsewhere) every day. The City government where I live has appropriated 60 million more dollars to fund the medical school training and education of foreign “students”, while disqualifying students (with better scholastic records, who will pay for their education themselves) who would otherwise be rightly classified as (and, of course, be disqualified, because they are…) United States Citizens. This is racism as government policy and the supreme court has done nothing to stop these policies of racism. It has, in fact, done everything to usurp and empower local, state and national givernments (in D.C.) based on this “new” racialist, un-constitutionally articulated, “custom”, for precisely that racialist “custom”- i.e. “precedent”.
In an effort to establish “precedent” as is how what is considered to be “law” is established in Britain.
Up to and including promoting Eugene Sotomayer to supreme court justice, based on her “wise latina” genetic racialist superiority credentials, and of course, because “…we all know this (the courts) is where policy is made…”, as she herself has said…
She is not a justice, nor is she, in her position, any recourse to it. She is a Broker.
Pure racism. And such racialist policies should not be rewarded, but they are.
Oh, Goody Goody, shades of “Soylent Green:”
Belgium’s plan to wash its dead down the drain: Bodies would be dissolved in caustic solution… and flushed into the sewer
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1292778/Belgium-considers-proposals-dissolve-bodies-flush-sewage-systems.html?ITO=1490
What is it with the Flemish and their Dutch cousins these days when it comes to having a highly-developed creepiness factor?
The critical question coming from the Aspen event is whether the liberal elites in this country are blaming Obama and his administration for the damage being done by their actions OR do they see that the underlying ideology that they share with Obama is the REAL cause of our difficulties? Is the execution by Obama of “stimulus” faulty or is the concept of “stimulus” a false one?
I suspect, given the patterns of liberal “thought”, that the liberals are seeking a scapegoat and Obama is the obvious target. They have NOT abandoned their belief in liberal ideology.
My long-standing remedy is the wholesale replacement of the current American governing elite. This is a historically proven remedy but usually effectuated by cutting off heads, pushing out of windows, or lining up before firing squads. We’ve largely been able to change elites through non-violent methods but if the ballot box is rigged……
#125 WeSwinger
Your suggestion of selling off government utilities makes a lot of sense – on the surface. However, the government has already encumbered many of these government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) with very high debt levels. Since the debt is backed by the Treasury, converting this debt to private debt will raise interest costs. Look at the balance sheet for the Tennessee Valley Authority for example.
Of course, some enties might make financial sense to privatize EXCEPT almost all government activities have “stakeholders” that obtain advantages from the activity that couldn’t continue from a private owner. For example, Hoover Dam sells a lot of power and water to Los Angeles at rates substantially below market rates. Environmentalists insist on water release regimes that help downstream fish but cost lost revenues.
Back to TVA, one of the surprises about Al Gore’s huge electricity bill a few years back was the low price per kilowatt-hour he was paying – less tha HALF what I pay in California. A privatized system would need to raise his rates. The list goes on.
Still, some conservative think tank could do a survey and find SOME winners.
One last note – I claim foresight and will depend less on pensions and social security checks and more on my five, healthy, productive children for my old age care. Thankfully, they’ve all came out right, more by luck than my great parenting skills. Plus I expect to work into my 70′s, thankfully at a desk job that I enjoy greatly. When I do retire is when I buy a motorcycle and take up sky diving.
Unsk@137: I believe you initial point was that the implications of most Republican thought is heartless, uncaring and without a strategy to reasonably care for the sick, and handicapped.
I was inferring the latter, not the former, although the media posits causality. The subject remains visceral and defensive because the strategy is poorly defined. Not long ago I tweaked the concept of compassionate Conservatism to a chorus of similar rebukes that sound suspiciously like “protesting too much.”
If one extrapolates from a fully private sector solution for providing social services (again, separating the able-bodied poor from the young, elderly, sick, and handicapped), then, at a minimum, the government must impose regulatory control to limit the kind of uncensored private sector abuses that are well documented. (United Way scandal was far from a tiny exception.) The idea that simply because the service provider is a private sector institution does not imply superior quality of care nor does efficient allocation of resources imply quality of service. Certainly not by definition and apparently not by empirical research. Assisted care facilities seem particularly vulnerable, where they exist, which is not to even engage the subject of inadequate number of facilities.
At any rate, that’s where I was going. Moot point really since financial stress will continue for five to ten years at which point I will be retired. I think.
I agree with the last paragraph about integrating welfare reform with economic regulatory reform, yet I think California has limited points of confluence with other states – some to be sure, but in many ways, CA is it’s own deal.
And I really do think I will let the subject rest there.
I wouldn’t keep arguing the point, GL –you were clearly misunderstood –and everybody’s irritable these days and ready to rant –i should know –har!
Some want to do ”soft landing” on entitlements and go for the peaceful solution; others see the system so rotten that there’s nothing for it but a clean sweep.
Me, it depends on the time of day, and the daily news. This administration is like a long slow heart attack. People that agree need to worry about the big picture and not sweat the small stuff, imho.
The same debate was heavy here before the 2006 elections –some were so pissed off at Bush that they advocated staying home on election day and to go for the crisis and the clean sweep. Others wanted the half-a-loaf so the same crisis could be kicked down the road and would hopefully shrink under the pressure of time and common sense. The former prevailed, and that’s where we are now. I could say we got no loaf and the crisis anyway, but that would depend on the timeline envisioned, and may not be true.
Good reminder buddy. I’m going to pull a habu and go run four miles, maybe five. See how I feel.
Good idea, GL. It’s been raining here for a week –the damn fence is down somewhere and i’ve got cows in the house yard –something i never put up with rain or no in years past. Now i just think, ‘ah, so what, everythings so f**ked anyway’.
but i know that’s a bad ‘tude –that’s what the sonzabitches are trying to do –demoralize the people who don’t want their yards all stomped & muddied up.
guess i’ll go patch fence.
Whitehall @ 143: The critical question coming from the Aspen event is whether the liberal elites in this country are blaming Obama and his administration for the damage being done by their actions OR do they see that the underlying ideology that they share with Obama is the REAL cause of our difficulties? Is the execution by Obama of “stimulus” faulty or is the concept of “stimulus” a false one?
Or is it Boosh’s fault? Obama says it’s Boosh’s fault. And since he never lies and he’s always right, there you are! So wake up America (slap!) and vote for your only choice, George Leroi Obama.
You can’t blame Obama without blaming Dubya.
That said, we are headed straight to the bottom.
I don’t think my pension will be there in 20 months.
“130. Skip_this_post:
Are you sure you’re on the right forum?”
Been here for most of this century. I just change nome de’ web about 3 times a year. That is so the conversation involves ideas, not identity. The rise of the “cult of personality” is something the forefathers didn’t allow for. I guess it was to be expected in a society without Lords and a King.
I am and always will be upset by do gooders wanting to steal money from me and mine to pay for their feel good schemes (AKA: taxes). ALL entitlement programs are feel good efforts that those with low self esteem use to feel like their poor miserable lives are accomplishing something.
That is why I would like to see the US go to bonds to finance government programs. That way do gooders could pay for their own stuff and let me buy bonds to pay for the things I deem important. Like F-22′s and Nuclear power and OIL shale conversion plants.
But Wait, there’s more. Keeping a mongoloid baby with one arm and one leg alive is cruel. The do-gooders are condemning that child to a life of misery. WHY? We all die. Nobody gets out of life alive. Why make that poor child suffer for years before it dies? Because that do gooder is afraid of death? Why doesn’t that do gooder seek professional help instead of stealing my money in a fruitless attempt to sooth their psychosis about death?
I almost went with Whiskey II ( a type of Soviet Submarine) this time but decided that would be a little to much “In your face”. Not that I see anything wrong with getting up in someones face, It’s just shouldn’t be done is a casual manner. Or when seriously outnumbered.
When faced with the tyranny of the majority, one must walk the gray zone between surrender and arousing the ire of the mob.
“He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.”
-James Graham
I left this comment on the previous thead but wanted to leave it here also. It is that important.
Again:
This is a great thread (as most here are).
Such insight, distinction, analysis and opinion should be force feed down our elected government employees throats by some means like the “Chair” in Startrek Universe.
But without the foundation of conservative upbringing and the innate understanding of our Founder’s intentions and beliefs…
It most likely would either kill most of them or drive them insane. Not that they are not insane to degrees now, but I’m talking – Completely over the edge into the abyss.
I would wish to respond to all of you. but have much to do today. Dropped the kids at a close friend and have a list as long as my arm of people to call upon today to make sure that they can vote and will have transportation and that they are properly registered.
The recent rains have made some of the rural roads a bitch and even some closer to town. But I have found that face to face gets better results than using the phone. Plus the fact that addresses and such need to be verified so that we can assist those who actually want to vote but sometimes won’t answer the phones or are too wary of phone conversations (older folk are like that).
If I get no response at the door, I leave a handwritten note on doors or in mailboxes so that they know that I want to assist them or at least they know that their votes are their right and their responsibility. One lady said to me that “She had not voted in years but since I was nice enough to come by and I said I would drive her, that she definately vote now”. I had to assist her to get her registered and she is one more, on my list of those to get to the booth.
That is what I’m looking for. Votes that conservatives have never given. Those millions of the “silent, hard working, but politically ignorant” Americans.
They need to vote and be counted now. Without them we have no chance.
A repeat of a warning. The democrats intend to do everything legal and illegal to win the upcoming elections, and they have billions of dollars to make sure they do. We must work harder than they do and try and then prevent their falsification and thieving of votes.
Now is the time to get out of your little bubble that you have built for your safety and sanity. Now is the time for you to get out and have straight and honest talk with not only your neighbors (who you most likly don’t even know) but with strangers all over your town or city.
You will have a hard time of it because people now are not used to having strangers talking to them about politics and they now are more afraid than almost any time in their past.
Most Americans despise politics but you have to convince them that it is in their and their families best interest, no..their survival…to voice their displeasure and their despair through their vote.
I’m pleading with each of you. Don’t believe others will do this for you. YOU must stand up, get on the line and advance for the preservation of our Republic.
If you don’t, I can damn sure guarantee that you will not like what happens to you and your family if we fail.
God Bless all of you and our Republic.
Papa Ray
Josh at #148
That is a corollary question – do the liberal elites themselves believe that “it’s all Bush’s fault”? If they do, then they are delusional. Of courese, they are willing to feed that line to the hoi polloi as a distraction but I doubt they seriously believe it themselves.
Except maybe Barbara….
Geeze Louise
“but I was chuckling at the thought that your son married a woman too much like mom?”
kinda like, same size, same temper !
I have another son who has chosen “exotism”, a blond slavic Ukrainian fiancee, that I still don’t know, so I’m not making bets on her aptitude to care for her “future” foreign parents in law (?).
Well I’m not yet on the dilemn line, still have revenues, and my hubb’s retirments wages, which aren’t all from the state. Anyway, if the state fails, that means that the banks had defaulted first, so I don’t expect that private rents will still be paid too. This was a “nightmare” prevision. Though, in the actual configuration, which allowed us some “independance”, I wouldn’t like to have to beg anything to my children, that is.
Keeping a mongoloid baby with one arm and one leg alive is cruel. The do-gooders are condemning that child to a life of misery.
So, you would circumvent the rights of parents who may want to keep the baby alive (they usually do) by imposing the community and government will for the “greater good?”
How does that jibe with your claimed hostility towards government-imposed policies?
Skip_this_post/150
Bonds… were thinking along that line. Or if there is no way to avoid taxes (the serfs paid about 20% – 10% church/10% lord/labor during harvest, why we are paying nearly 50% all tabulated???), 15% tax max, 5% allocated for gummint operation (more than enough!) and the rest assigned to causes one considers worthy, whether saving babies and/or and/or roads, infrastructure and/or military and/or space, etc.
As babies are concerned, Don Rodrigo already noted the apparent contradiction in your screed.
apropos of nothing but mildly entertaining:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/code-cracked-cyber-command-logos-mystery-solved/
152. Whitehall,
I am not sure what they think, I am pretty sure they are stumped. Like all followers of a revealed religion they have followed the “right” steps that lead to salvation.
Marxism has a specific set of prescriptions that will inevitably lead to Nirvana (oops, not Nirvana, commies are atheists, let’s say a “state of double-plus-goodness). Like good little Marxists they have followed the steps; detroy the capitalists, ruin the banks, tax the wealthy etc. etc. but Double-Plus-Goodness has failed to happen. Heck even Plus-Goodness is nowhere in sight.
They scratch their pointy little heads and ponder how this could be. They have followed The Prophets Rules of Revolution to a letter but everyone is unhappy; unhappy with them no less! Can’t the proles see that the Annoited Ones are doing this for their own good, you know, for the CHILDREN! Of course the real problem is that they will decide that they just didn’t try hard enough and will (in the words of our esteemed host) double-down to ensure eventual success.
140. Josh
I buy the arguement that higher taxes next year are pushing profits into this year. So next year will be marginally worse than this year.
But by traditional measures this market is cheap at 10 times earnings. Further the market is where it was 10 years ago.
So the market is already priced for nothing going on but the rent.
Sure all the borrowing of the last 10 years has just come to nothing.
But the assumption now is that the borrowing will continue indefinitely. And that government workers will never take a paycut or see any shrinkage in their pensions. That only people in the private sector are subject to such things.
I don’t think that’s what going to happen. Rather the pubbies will come in come november and after january chop out a lot of spending.
To Geeze Louise,
Thanks for maintaining good humor and civility. You have grasped my central point, but in order to differentiate my sweat-beaded rant from others, here’s a distilled version:
The problems with the GOVERNMENT give-away’s (“gives-away?”) are (1) the forcible confiscation of funds from those who produce and re-distribution to those who do not, (2) the cynical vote-buying basis for the whole scheme, and (3) the intentionally divisive race-baiting by the politicians who refuse to acknowledge or address the infuriating and conspicuous abuses of welfare, quotas, set-asides, and food stamp programs.
It is an utter lie – either deliberate or delusional – for Liberals to think they’re proving how much they care about the “less-fortunate” by giving them other people’s money.
Your example of the United Way scandal, it should be noted, was primarily a problem of a bad person (well, several actually) slipping into the leadership position and managing to plunder the system individually. You are correct that the private sector is vulnerable to this.
My point is that federal, state and municipal welfare programs are RIDDLED through and through with graft, corruption, padding, bribes, and abuse by recipients, store owners, ad infinitum. The criminality is casual and systemic, starting from the promises made to the voting blocs by politicians, built into the earliest drafts of the bills, and expanded hyperbolically in implementation and execution.
The parasites’ drain on the host body is approaching criticality.
#143. Whitehall writes:
I suspect, given the patterns of liberal “thought”, that the liberals are seeking a scapegoat and Obama is the obvious target. They have NOT abandoned their belief in liberal ideology.
Of course you are right. The common refrain from the Left is that their wonderful little Utopias never work out because the “wrong people” were in charge. All you need to do is to get the “right people” calling the shots.
The problem with this notion is that despite the vast number of times Leftist Utopias have been tried, apparently each and every one of them somehow managed to be run by the “wrong people.” Obviously the “right people” are very rare and hard to find, as are unicorns, Yeti, and the Loch Ness monster.
And suppose you did actually find the “right people” and created a socialist paradise on earth? What happens when the “right people” die? It seems like getting the “right people” is much like winning the big lottery. You might hit it big once but the odds of a repeat performance is next to zero. With the current state of history no one has ever managed to pick the winning numbers from that game. But that does not stop them from trying, or fools from trying to build perpetual motion machines.
Dave @ 118 said:
“Fighting wage/price declines during deflation is the same as jerking back on the stick when an airplane stalls. All you can get is that uncontrollable spiral.”
I like this analogy! We’re in a deep stall. Bernanke has the stick pulled all the way back into his lap and is wondering: “Why are we still falling?”
We need to push forward on the stick, increase our rate of descent until flow around the wing is reattached and then gently pull back until we’re at level flight at a lower altitude.
Skip_this_post @ 130 said:
“I’m of the Spartan school of thought. … Handicapped babies should be put down. Right then and there. Those contacting fatal diseases should be either put down or allowed to die. Once one is to old to deal with life, take the red pill.”
I admire the Spartan’s for their bravery and sense of honor. Also King Leonidas was one of my heros decades before the general public ever heard of the comic and movie “300″. However the Spartan attitude towards their own children was perhaps their least admirable quality. One can judge a society by how it treats its weakest members. If infant euthanasia is the price one must pay to become a Spartan then I’d rather be an Athenian.
“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”
And Zuckerman and his audience has been there all along to either cheer or whine. Let the reckoning commence; spare no one.
For the one or two people who aren’t already aware – the Drudgereport.com page has links to other news outlets, so the only “editorial” slant he imposes is in the selection and order of headlined items, maybe occasionally in the word choice of a hyperlinked headline.
As a reader, you can click on the links and find yourself reading the articles published in Reuters, AP, Agence France Press, The Manchester Guardian, NYTimes, DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC WIRE, ITAR-TASS, Pravda, XINHUA, Daily Kos, San Francisco Chronicle, maybe fifty other international news sources representing a pretty wide spread of views. He also links to about fifty columnists and opinion writers of all stripes.
I don’t see a link to Al-Jazeera…
Anyhoo, since a verdict has been reached in the shooting trial of the BART police officer (Johaness Mehserle) who used his service pistol accidentally when he evidently intended to TAZE a guy he and several other officers were subduing, the city of Oakland (where the shooting occurred) is now experiencing rioting and looting by residents. Presumably these residents are expressing their outraged sense of solidarity with the victim of the shooting, by liberating high-tech electronics, Celebrity-endorsed footwear and cosmetics, and “bling.”
And our POS Attorney General Eric Holder has announced he will personally review the case to see if there is any basis for prosecuting Officer Mehserle under federal civil rights laws.
Do you suppose Holder will give even a quarter-of-a-second’s worth of thought to reviewing the shooting of non-black Chicago police officer Thor Soderberg by a black man who attacked him evidently without provocation?
Welcome back Carter!
Still Waiting for O’Godot.
O’left-liberalism: “feelings”, all about “feelings”.
O’s sole legacy*: “her feelings of betrayal by the Obama administration.”
“This is his [Obama's] sole legacy*: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
>>> “The loudest applause of the morning when she talked about her feelings of betrayal by the Obama administration.”
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“Teacher union chief raps Obama at national convention
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told her members meeting in Seattle on Thursday that the past two years have been “tougher than I’ve ever seen,” with shrinking school budgets combined with increasing initiatives to punish teachers whose students don’t succeed.
She urged her audience to fight against what she called the “blame the teacher crowd” by embracing new strategies to reform public education.
She called it “Fighting Smart”: “searching for solutions we believe will work, even if those solutions force us to think outside the box or initially make us feel uncomfortable.”
She spoke to more than 2,700 delegates gathered at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center. The loudest applause of the morning when she talked about her feelings of betrayal by the Obama administration.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2549660/posts
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O’s sole legacy*:
“The “small people”, the “rank and file”, the “loyal soldiers” of the narcissist – his flock, his nation, his employees – they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated – is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“Barack Obama – Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?”
http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014386.html
It is apparent that too many people think that plastics come from petroleum.
The monomers that produce the vast bulk of consumer plastics come from NATURAL GAS.
These are normally termed Natural Gas Liquids: ethylene, propane, propylene, butane…
Some wells produce as much as ten percent NGL. ( And some produce amazing amounts of Helium. )
The value of plastics is such that the monomers could be derived from coal or oil or tar sands.
———-
The real reason America can’t follow the Russian path is because it’s filled with Americans. Culture counts.
So does the world’s best internal transport system and a national free-trade zone equal to twenty-five percent of global GDP.
Our cost of energy is going down with the prolific discoveries of natural gas and higher efficiency everything else.
VFDs are being incorporated into high end consumer products and will eventually replace universal motors in power tools. (VFD, variable frequency drives, use solid state switching electronics to create 6 to 400 Hz 3-phase power from even house current. The efficiency bump vs universal motors is amazing.)
AND, lastly, America is a massive food exporter — and her number one source of fertilizer is natural gas based ammonia and phosphates from Florida.
If things really get bad Canada, America and Australia at least can feed themselves. That does wonders for social cohesion.
——-
As for Mr. X-SVR… keep sending us those hot Moscow babes.
And as for Putin playing with nukes: FDR gave Stalin the bomb — how did that turn out?
( Harry Hopkins, traitor, managed to get a nuclear reactor starter kit sent to Moscow as part of lend-lease. It included sample graphite bricks for the Hanford converter design and neutron shim. It also included the critical exotic alloy tubes used in the heart of the pile. )
( When Hoover confronted FDR with evidence WRT Hopkins and other Reds in his mal-administration the President told him to shut-up and take a hike. )
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LOTM: Lindbergh DID serve in the military — in the Southwest Pacific Air Campaign he flew a double length tour — out of uniform — as technical advisor. He was credited with DOUBLING the effective range of the Corsair, Lightning and other planes by using his Spirit of St. Louis tricks.
There is good evidence that FDR used him as an agent against the Nazis. His irritating speeches went over well in Germany. So much so that Goring gave him the deluxe tour, personally.
Lucky Lindy subsequently ducked into the White House and gave FDR the down low. This connection was kept top secret, of course.
Lindbergh’s intel completely convinced FDR to shunt the bulk of our military spending on airpower.
Lindbergh’s ‘pro-NAZI’ speechifying didn’t stop him from being embraced as a national hero all the way through the war and thereafter. Near as I can guess, FDR seems to have written Lindy’s speeches for him.
War requires deceit, and when FDR was fooling everyone else he still managed to get played by Uncle Joe and Harry Hopkins.
Blert, thanks for the clarification and correction.
I plead guilty to conflating the various fossil fuel sources of high-molecular weight polymer products.
Call me a fossil fuel facile fool.
Seriously, I salute you for adding to our awareness. I’m pretty darn certain that windmills, hydro-electric, or any other alternative energy system don’t provide any raw materials to be engineered into so many useful products.
You want to guarantee the extinction of the whale, the rhinoceros, the elephant, the redwood, the Sequoia, the rain forests, and the millions of critters that depend on those forests for their existence?
Stop extracting and distributing and using petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
Then watch while desperate folks around the world do whatever they have to for fuel, clothing, and shelter-building materials.
Haiti, Madagascar and certain other large island societies demonstrate dramatically how an impoverished populace with few options can strip the land of every living thing before they just lie down and die in despair.
Deforestation is of course a devilishly complex issue born of many factors. It’s worth reading about, and you can find some great links on the net by just doing a search with the single keyword “deforestation.”
81. Skip_this_post
“Mitt would cause most Southern Baptists to vote against him, even if Stalin was running as a Democrat.”
Poppycock…and news to this Southern Baptist Evangelical; I was more holding my nose over McCain who neither was a Christian – Romney was my first choice.
Charles @ 158: Well, the Japanese market fell 70% from the peak and stayed there for a decade. That would put us at about Dow 5000 until 2018, and make buying anything now a very bad idea. And the cause would be much the same, working off a real-estate bubble. Ours has a slightly different shape than theirs. And we have gotten by so far by the fed printing and/or borrowing three trillion dollars in a year – some of which they may yet recover, but I don’t think anyone outside the fed (is supposed to) actually know their position. There is a HUGE “secret” overhang in properties right now that are carefully not being foreclosed, although they are delinquent six months and more. I have no idea of the real numbers, a SWAG might be another three trillion, and that’s not even counting all of the underwater mortgages. Our fearless leaders were counting on igniting inflation to monetize it all away, whether it is a blessing or a curse that this has not occured as attempted, is a mystery to one and all.
Have to give Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke this much props – they have held off the apocalypse by something over two years now. There is just no telling what happens next. So I suppose the market remains mostly paralyzed – and mostly managed secretly and illegally, as it has been I think pretty much since 2001 and maybe longer.
#77 Nahncee: You might try the voice of experience:
http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/12/21/surviving-collapse-1/
Josh @ 169 said:
“Well, the Japanese market fell 70% from the peak and stayed there for a decade. That would put us at about Dow 5000 until 2018, and make buying anything now a very bad idea.”
Many people on the Internet are saying that the Dow will bottom somewhere between 5000 and 7000 after the PPT is done playing games.
Josh also said:
“Have to give Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke this much props – they have held off the apocalypse by something over two years now. There is just no telling what happens next. So I suppose the market remains mostly paralyzed – and mostly managed secretly and illegally, as it has been I think pretty much since 2001 and maybe longer.”
I agree that serious trouble with the economy began after the Dot-Com imploded (the collapse in autumn 2008 was an aftershock from the Dot-Com). However I’m of the opinion that the illegal equity market manipulation didn’t really begin until March 2009.
Eggplant @ 171: However I’m of the opinion that the illegal equity market manipulation didn’t really begin until March 2009.
I’ll just say it’s been so incredibly blatant since then that I took off my aluminum foil helmet for a few seconds to scratch my head, and suddenly decided after the fact that the rumors to the effect previously must have been true after all.
How it has remained secret this long – and just who it is secret from – remains a mystery. I just haven’t been working close enough to the markets in recent years to have any good sources, that is, any good way to filter out all the crazy rumors one can pick up. Heck, maybe it’s a good thing, I dunno … but I doubt it.
Keeping a mongoloid baby with one arm and one leg alive is cruel. The do-gooders are condemning that child to a life of misery. WHY? We all die. Nobody gets out of life alive. Why make that poor child suffer for years before it dies? Because that do gooder is afraid of death? Why doesn’t that do gooder seek professional help instead of stealing my money in a fruitless attempt to sooth their psychosis about death?
Skip this post:
Please watch the first 5 minutes of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/dollarbankchannel#p/u/3/E0lSMD11JL4
The woman featured in the opening segment is so severely disabled that she cannot move her arms or legs, nor can she communicate by speaking the usual way. She uses a machine to do her communicating. Turns out there is nothing wrong with her mind. Is this “a life of misery”? Guess what? It’s not your call. She’s the only one qualified to say how much she does or does not enjoy life.
There is in fact an exit mechanism for people who consider their lives to be not worth living. It’s called suicide. Plenty of non-disabled people take this route. While plenty of disabled people, such as the ones featured in this video, are as full of mental vigor, humor, curiosity, and personal drive as just about any able-bodied person.
For someone to advocate a policy of preemptively killing disabled infants so they will be “spared” “a life of misery” is, to be blunt, monstrous. You are even out-Singering Peter Singer on this one. He “only” advocates killing non-sentient disabled people, like those in PVSs. You OTOH want to cull a half-limbed Down syndrome baby before that baby has a chance to grow & develop his or her own outlook on life and defend their own right to live.
BTW, 9 out of 10 pre-born babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are already aborted. So it looks like someone beat you to the punch.
I also don’t understand the part about your money being “stolen.” Seriously, what are you talking about? If a Down syndrome child incurs medical expenses in the context of a private insurance system, your money is not “stolen” in order to care for that child. Private insurance is voluntary. It pools risk. You join, or you don’t. If you do join, you do so aware that sick people will be using “your” money. This is not theft. If you are talking about a Down syndrome child being given medical care that is paid via Medicaid or some variation of SCHIP, then your beef is with government interference in the health care system that confiscates taxpayer dollars, not with that Down syndrome baby. Please direct your frustration at the appropriate target. How odd that a beef with socialism and socialist bureaucrats gets translated to “kill Mongoloid infants.” I guess it’s because babies, unlike the government, are helpless, and have no power to harass, fine, impoverish, imprison or execute you.
Better yet is why Mitt Romney could simply not catch on with the national crowd.
Because he is a liberal. Or did you fail to notice how well his healthcare system is working in Mass?
Josh @ 169: See here or here for truly frightening numbers. The Fed is allowing banks to keep loans on their books at their full value even if the loand are seriously delinquent. There are “homeowners” who have not made a payment in two years who are still living in “their” house.
Many of the large banks would be insolvent if they were required to value their loans at anything near the loan’s real market value. Meanwhile the Feds are doing their HAMP program, better know as “extend and pretend”, even though many of the modified loans go south later on, because, you know, the people who got them couldn’t really afford them in the first place.
But all the smart guys, from the realtor to the mortgage broker to Fannie Mae which bought this crap because Barney Frank said be nice to minorities or else or the Wall Street guy who bundled it into tranches which were then stamped AAA by Moodys and sold worldwide, all of them got their fee for passing this junk along and now it is the taxpayers problem.
Everybody’s got their fingers crossed hoping that the economy will come back and demand will go up and all will be well Real Soon Now. It ain’t gonna happen.
Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, a standup guy, was reputed to have said, “If you know you’re gonna have to eat s**t, you don’t wanna take small bites”. We are taking small bites.
Guys,
Talkin’ about the bloom comin’ off the rose…well, I’d like to talk about avoiding the thorns on this rose for a sec.
I ran into another one of the Democrat’s/SEIU’s recruitment schemes last month right here in Arizona. It aims to fund networks of satrapies, undercut the regular competitive markets, and then unionize all players left standing. As a fringe benefit, it preserves Affirmative Action intact against its sure “sunset” as it blurs the US’s national borders. And I thought BC’ers’d find it interesting.
The scheme appears to target the disabled’s, Feminists’ and Anyone-Who’s-Ever-Been-Disadvantaged “identity-groups” by way of using the Federal grants awards process to leverage “disadvantaged” vendors against the regular meritocratic bidders in competitive bidding markets. It’s working, too. The Left is generating a shadow economy of Federally-funded indigent-corps as well as a dependable (and financially dependent) cadre of vocal “small-business” owner-advocates for ever-increasing Federal grants. And, ultimately (and in a fashion parallel to the SEIU’s deliberate harrassing/courting of America’s home-health care workers) the gambit fabricates another collective hive susceptible to Wade Radthke’s SEIU serenade, out of whole human cloth.
Indirectly, and worst of all, the project is turning an inordinate chunk of our economy into caliphates of diverse “progressive” global foundations and, finally, the UN. Small mountain towns like Flagstaff, AZ, and once bustling corridors like Silicon Valley are shot through with these zombie institutions. Pretty much any place where academics or media companies dominate the locality’s economy and politics, such as with Flagstaff or Santa Cruz or Boston or Boulder or Chicago, has recently seen a deliberate increase of grants-funded, politically active, “creative” NGO’s like these.
As the example went: “No experience. No merit. No history. No equipment. No problem! Just be a “disadvantaged” contractor, and we’ll ‘carve-out’ a chunk of every bid-request just for your disability. And if you claim in addition to your base disadvantage(s) that your business hales from one of the Progressives’ established victims’ groups like, “women-owned” businesses, “minority-owned” businesses, or “disabled-owned” businesses do, then you’ve got two shiny lapel-pins and you’re even more likely to get the contract.” The example I discovered was busily maximizing the company’s “disability profile” to include every favorable license and registration possible. The company traded no skills, produced on commodity, and owned insufficient equipment for the bids it was generating…but it was only clicks away from enjoying a shiny new “no-bid” 8(a)-status with Federal hiring agents like Haliburton, Kiewit and others.
In contrast, a non-disadvantaged enterprise competing for the same bid must sell its bids on capability, that is, on the company’s hardware, human capital, local operating knowledge, job-references, etc. But with the Left’s disability carve-outs paving their way, Obama’s new “indigence-corps” contractors sell their bids on incapacity. And Hell, if they’ve got an 8(a) des.’ then they don’t even have to formally bid. (Any contractor’ll tell you LOTS of time goes into bidding. And if you don’t get the job, you have to write off the time spent bidding. Well, 8(a)’s needn’t worry ’bout nun-a dat. ‘Cuz dey’z disadvantaged, u c! )
This is not some passive, ‘organic’ growth either. People are being deliberately recruited in web-networked seminars to apply for business licenses, and then, immediately they’re registered as a “disadvantaged” business. Like a dishonest borrower signing a subprime loan, once the inductee is “sold” on the concept of a free lunch, all he needs is an approved grievance and the literacy to draft his “the man held me down” sob-story (or the $’s to pay someone to draft it), and his tax-ID jumps magically to the head of the line for Obama’s Federal grants. Pick any field: road construction, environmental consultancy, higher education, even private laboratories, Zombie Indi-Gencies, floating on promises of tax-payer largess, can glide in and undercut the meritocratic market at will.
…All entirely by design, and all with terrible consequences for America’s innovative markets and her competitive stance in the world. And, all goin’ on right under our noses.
Someone (I think Josh) said the Democrats are playing the web-working game better than the GOP is. I agree, and the GOP had better get a clue quick!
176. Lazareth. Absolutely right. A white straight male is dead last in government hiring and contracting.
Plus the bid of a minority contractor can be 10% higher than all the non-minority bidders and he can still “win” the contract.
Truly disgraceful. And the Dodd financial “reform” bill working its way through Congress will make it even worse.
m. simon @ 174:
:Better yet is why Mitt Romney could simply not catch on
:with the national crowd.
Because he is a liberal. Or did you fail to notice how well his healthcare system is working in Mass?
well yeah but no more liberal than say McCain, and younger, and with some business experience, even (state) executive branch experience, looks good on paper.
Wait a minute, Citoyen Aubergine…
You’re saying that the financial collapse of 2008 is an AFTERSHOCK of the collapse of the DOT-COM bubble that happened almost TEN YEARS EARLIER?????
I can certainly believe that the “irrational exuberance” of that bizarre moment in time is profoundly linked to the vast rapacious sweep of people eager to make their fortune “flipping” houses in the frenzied climate of mortgage speculation that’s been going on, but I thought the PROXIMATE CAUSE of the 2008 collapse was:
(1) the 4-decade accumulation of worthless mortgages created by Federal command to banks to abandon traditional rules of qualification for loan applicants, through the Community Reinvestment Act;
(2) the rampant purchase of those worthless mortgages by Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae under the criminal supervision of Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, et al, who awarded themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for achieving Purchase Goals they set for themselves, paying for the worthless paper with Taxpayer funds, AND paying themselves the bonuses with more Taxpayer funds*;
and (3) the countless Credit Default Swap contracts meant to cover Trillions of dollars of worthless mortgages, then hidden by “bundling” with good contracts BY THE INSIDER FRIENDS AND BIG CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION, and sold to credulous banks around the world.
The CDS is a legitimate kind of financial instrument in use since the early 1990′s. The term covers a lot of custom-made contracts similar in purpose to credit insurance but different in many important respects. They are not subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as credit insurance, and this allowed the clever bastards to find ways around the nominal safeguards. Still, a lot of the problem is the normal human tendency to gloss over the tricky bits if they think they can make a fast buck.
Several folks have asked how much more of this lying, robbing, embezzling and demolition of our country are we going to tolerate?
* Raines’ & Gorelick’s criminal activity promoted and encouraged even more insane lending by banks, cause they saw they would NOT get stuck holding the lousy loans…
Intrigue and Ambiguity in Cases of 4 Russians Sent to West in Spy Swap
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/07/if_it_looks_like_a_duck.html
The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund makes an alarming observation in his article: “The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy:”
There have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don’t want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.
Before even considering what these muscled-through bills could be, the idea that anyone in Congress would want to force “sweeping legislation” with the knowledge that the vast majority of voters rejected it is beyond tragic.
Fund notes these possibilities for lame duck passage: “card-check,” New Start nuclear treaty, universal voter registration, “a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending,” massive climate change legislation, and more pork.
One has to wonder if the Democrats will even bother with the process that even lame duck measures will require, instead opting for the “deem’n pass,” used before their recess to pass an imaginary $1.12 trillion 2011 budget.
What is more frightening to imagine than this Democrat-majority Congress as a lame duck, deeming and passing, is this President, as he begins to realize his walking papers will arrive soon, making more appointments and Executive Orders.
Republican candidates should include as part of their platform the appointments of a Repeal Czar and a Constitution Czar.
How about down with the Czarist regime! No Mo Czars!
A reminder: The Swiss bank’s “timewave zero” (a.k.a. TSWHTF) projections for spring 2011 to spring 2012, happening on republican majority watch (democrats’ tactical withdrawal in Nov 2010). When I saw the chart, my first impression was that I don’t see projections but a calendar, perhaps a reminder for those in “know” from “Davos party”. Is there a connection between the AT article and the Swiss bank’s “projections”? Let’s just say there may be a “coincidence”. A key (though almost innocent looking) piece of legislation my be slipped in after November to assure that the foundation for TSWHTF is in place.
Want to be a part of a movement to change the way Hollywood portrays America?
Well, here is your chance and it’s cheap at twice the price.
I’m sure not rich but this little investment in our children and grand children’s future of movie watching is going to be worth every dollar.
I also had a great day today helping Conservative Americans get ready and fired up for November’s elections. I feel really good about doing that.
Try it.
Papa Ray
P.S. A link to VDH’s “The Ministries of Truth Weigh In”
MF/179; re your part (3):
This is how it was done
and
This is who did it
Planned? Well, the conditions certainly were –and very carefully and adroitly. Further proof likely awaits some book some years hence, as the scheme had to go to ‘let’s take a walk around the block’ conversations once the loopholes were aligned. But an obscure tool like the CDS doesn’t go, in secret and without a murmer from the NY Fed (pres, Geithner), from a few hundred million’s worth in yr 2000 to sixty trillion dollars worth in 2007 (ina parabolic curve), when the meltdown began with a failed auction or two of 40 to 1 LEH bundles.
WRT welfare, while I realize that the plural of anecdote is not statistic, I ride the bus to work every day with 4 people (whom I have gotten to know.) Two of them are deaf and mildly retarded. They are there rain or shine, 5 or 6 days a week, whatever their bosses ask. One of those has numerous “company awards” little badges he wears on his shirt and is very proud of. One of them, grossly overweight, and from conversations, what my Mama would have called “simple” is there 3 days a week and would be there more often with more hours available to her. One of them, also grossly overweight and also what Mama would call “simple” is there if the weather’s nice and not if it’s rainy. She says when someone said “we missed you yesterday” “it was raining.” At Christmas she was all upset because her boss asked her to work more hours. “I don’t have to, everything is fine.” I mentioned that she would have a short career in my line of work, and she said (get this QUOTE) “they can’t fire me, I’m disabled.” Someone nervier than I asked what her disability was. She said, “You should be able to tell by looking at me…I have ADHD and a weight problem.” (OT, I have a weight problem, but I tend to think that’s MY problem.) The last one is a young black man who told everyone that he tried to join the military so he would have a regular paycheck, but he flunked “some tests” and had a felony record, so they wouldn’t take him because he is black. So he lives with his baby mama, because “she get help fo’ her rent and lights and Lone Star (Texas food stamps)”
Most of us don’t politic on the bus for obvious reasons, but guess which ones of these wore their Obama button and Tshirt after the election regularly? And guess who’s surprized at no good changes since “we got a black boy in dere” “he be lettin us down.” Don’t mean to sound like Whiskey’s ghost, but these are real observances, all black, two guys, two girls, half handicapped, and good and bad. Sort of like the real world.
jWarrior,
If I told you the company I am using as my example is run by a white, middle-aged, US citizen, and that he has NO disabilities and he resides in a posh neighborhood of Sedona, what would you say?
We used to call these people “conmen.” And they were usually thrown in jail. But, we live in a whacko-Jacko world now, don ‘t we?
All this proves to me is, “race” is just a word-tool for these people. Just like “green,” “disadvantaged,” and “oppressed” are. I hope we wake up in time.
Doug: I incorporated your comments at 61 here.
Should you would like to edit it or make additions, please let me know.