“Tomorrow belongs to me”. So argues Kevin Drum. Writing in Mother Jones he argues that despite the electoral apocalypse facing the liberals in November, minorities and the Millenial Vote are going to give the Democrats — in the long run — the permanent majority.
Even if the Republican Party eventually softens its views on social issues, it won’t make much difference once the Millennials have reached age 30 and their party identification has hardened. If Teixeira is right, by the time this process is over an entire cohort of voters will be heavily pro-Democratic for the rest of their lives.
As it happens, 2010, like 2002, might not be such a great year to make this prediction: a brutal recession and the usual midterm blues are likely to produce big Republican gains this November. In the long term, though, the longer the Republican Party continues to rely on its intolerant, ultraconservative base for support, the more likely they are to write their own obituary for 2020 and beyond.
Ranged against Drum are Peggy Noon and one-time Clinton pollster Dick Morris. Noonan’s argumemt is summarized by the variation on another song: “The More I See You, The Less I Want You”. The former Reagan speechwriter argues that failure and disaster bring their own karma. The Tea Party, she argues, was not the creation of the GOP but a surprise to the Washington elites of both parties. In the Noonan view reality gets to vote. Any party which put the nation on the course to joblessness, economic decline and punitive taxation would find its support dwindling, minorities and Millenials notwithstanding. According to that line of thinking there are no Permanent Majorities where there are Permanent Screw-ups. The anti-Washington mood is a datapoint not to be ignored.
It was a largely self-generated uprising, and it was marked, wherever it happened, in San Diego or St. Louis, by certain common elements. The visiting senator or representative, gone home to visit the voters, always seemed shocked at the size of the audience and the depth of his constituents’ anger. There was usually a voter making a videotape in the back of the hall. There were almost always spirited speeches from voters. There was never, or not once that I saw, a strong and informed response from the congressman. In one way it was like the Iranian revolution: Most people got the earliest and fullest reports of what was happening on the Internet, through YouTube. Voters would take shaky videos on their cellphones and post them when they got home. Suddenly, over a matter of weeks, you could type in “town hall” and you’d get hundreds, and finally thousands, of choices.
The politicians, every one of them, seemed taken aback—shaken and unprepared. They tried various strategies—mollify the crowd, or try to explain to them how complex governing is. Sen. Arlen Specter tried that in early August 2009, in an appearance with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Faced with fierce criticism of the health-care bill as it then stood, Mr. Specter explained that see here, it’s a thousand-page bill and sometimes Congress must make judgements “very fast.” The crowd exploded in jeers. …
It was a real pushback, and it was fueled by indignation. The attitude was: “We have terrible worries—unemployment, the cost of government, its demands, our ability to compete and win in the world. You are focused on your thing, but we are focused on these things.”
Dick Morris runs a variation on the Noonan theme. He argues from Bill Clinton’s experience that any administration which hooks its wagon to the minority or moonbeam wagon should remember that it is ultimately political suicide to rule at odds with the nation that pays the bills, worries about mortgages and wants an ordinary life. The “vanguard” begins to outrun its lines of supply. They may subsist on dreams but the ordinary working stiff needs macaroni and cheese. And when they stray too far from the herd the leash gets jerked back.
When a president moves leftward, a vicious cycle begins to set in. Driven to raise the intensity of his rhetoric and to take positions further to the extreme, he alienates more and more centrists and moderates, forcing himself to rely more and more on left wing voters. This reliance, in turn, fuels an ever more pronounced leftward drift until he ends up with a vastly diminished political base.
In Obama’s case, his reliance on minority voters adds to the difficulty as he drives racially fair whites to see him as governing primarily in the interests of minority voters.
Obama’s decision to have his Justice Department sue Arizona over its immigration law — despite the fact that American voters back the statute by 2:1 — is the latest illustration of that leftward drift. So is Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute the Black Panthers who posted themselves at a mixed-race polling place in military uniform with clubs to deter white voters.
Whether Drum — or Noonan and Morris — are right will be settled empirically. My money is on Noonan. Youth is not eternal. Sooner or later it gets arthritis and the Millenials have to pay the bills. In Mario Lanza’s immortal words:
Post jucundam juventutem
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.
Which roughly translates to, “After a pleasant youth, after a troubling old age, the earth will have us.” But before the earth gets you Dr. Rationing will gets his hooks on you. Before the Millenials die they will have to meet the bare bodkin of the Grand Rationer. Today that refers to Dr. Donald Berwick, who “Obama opted to make a recess appointment of Berwick to head CMS, an agency that oversees a third of all health care spending in the U.S. and that will play a major role under ObamaCare in deciding what care is available and who gets it.”
It is understandable why the administration would want to keep Berwick’s views under the radar. He has praised the U.K’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he says has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.”
Last year, the Orwellian-named NICE unveiled plans to cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain to 3,000 from 60,000. “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospital’s Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph.
“It will mean,” said Dr. Richardson, “more people on opiates, which are addictive and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky and has a 50% failure rate.”
And here we thought the first rule of medicine was to do no harm.
If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46%.
History doesn’t stop. And there are no permanent regimes.
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What these “deep thinkers” don’t seem to grasp is the fact that free stuff isn’t free and that at some point productive people will no longer see any benefit in being productive and just stop. If you have a million dollars and AIDS, so what, unless some productive person cures AIDS and in compensated to his work. Hint! Hint! If you want or need something don’t expect some one else to gove it to you. Earn the money and pay for it.
Yeah, Yeah, Drum and the permanent millenial whatever; like White’s “Red Star Rising…” maoism and the NYT inevitable socialist stalinism of the 30′s, 40′s, 50′s et al. Not happening, not then, not now, not ever.
Should we hold Noonan’s support for Obama during the election against her in this regard? Clearly her ability to read people or predict the future is Gump-grade retarded.
Today still belongs you
Tomorrow belongs me
We own this country now
From sea to shining sea
You owe me for the work
My grampa did for you
You owe me for the life
Of pain you put me through
My vote will put in place
Good people who will care
For people just like me
Who only want their share
We do not ask for much
We only want what’s due
Tomorrow belongs me
Today still belongs you
Kevin Drum’s title for his article is “Demography is Destiny”.
Destiny is fickle. The “youth vote” oscillates every ten years or so; the pendulum will probably swing back among younger people.
Neither Kevin Drum nor Ruy Texeira should count his chickens before they’re hatched.
There won’t be enough of the USA to scrape up with a spoon after five or ten more years of Obambus-style government.
Who the heck is Kevin Drum? Either I’ve known the guy (the age and geography work), or maybe saw his columns in LA Weekly? Never read his blog. He seems to be rather clueless. Hey KD, here it is in short strokes, first the Republicans aren’t at all what you say, second the Democrats aren’t worth spit, third your hot demographic are all unemployed and pissed and watching Obambus clown himself about Arizona and BP and Iran and Israel and health care and the stimulus, and not a thing is changing for them, not for the better.
What is true is that they’ve been raised to be oppressed and nonjudgemental, and their first accomplishment has been Obambus the Glorious. If they stick to their ways and we get more of the same – see my opening line above. But I’m more optimistic about the American system than that, so stay tuned.
If the Democrats are destined to rule this country in perpetuity, then why are they in such a hurry to fatten the party rolls with amnesty? Why are they pushing, by hook and by crook, an extremely unpopular agenda (national health care, cap and trade, etc.)? Why won’t they pass (pass? how about propose) a budget and let the chips fall where they may? If the future belongs to them, why are they so damn afraid of the TEA party, or Limbaugh/Beck/Hanity, or Sarah Palin?
Or, is Kevin Drum acting more like Tariq Aziz declaring that American tanks are nowhere near Bagdad?
what you’re all ignoring is the most salient feature: the corruption of the culture via the Marxist takeover of the educational systems.
30 years ago, the idea that homosexuality would be the norm was ludicrous. today, homosexual marriage is a virtual fait accompli.
there HAS been a huge societal shift, on this and a whole host of other issues. and the Marxists are driving it.
Interesting that Wretchard quotes Gaudeamus igitur, a student song that goes back to the 1700s in its present form (Mario Lanza sang it beautifully; his was the singing voice dubbed for Edmund Purdom in The Student Prince, but the song is much older than a 1950s movie)–
What I remember with sadness, given the present state of the university, is the third stanza:
Vivat academia!
Vivant professores!
(repeat first two lines)
Vivat membrum quodlibet
Vivant membra quaelibet
Semper sint in flore.
Roughly translated–
Long live the academy,
Long live (our) professors,
Long live each member (of the school),
Long live all members (of the school),
May they always be in their prime.
I think the Roe effect is being ignored/denied. How can those that murder their future still count on that future?
Is there something I’m missing here?
Liberals murder their unborn children. Conservatives don’t. Even my limited math skills see the problem with counting on people tomorrow that you are killing today…
See why I call them 4th worlders? Only on some other planet can you count as a voter someone you murdered in the womb last month.
Curious phrase ….”tomorrow belongs to me”
It’s been used before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNMVMNmrqJE
Yes, Bob. The corruption of the educational system by liberalism was accomplished long ago. Fortunately, part of that corruption was to teach students to “question authority”, so we don’t have to worry about the students soaking up the propaganda. They don’t take much of anything seriously.
And I think the Roe effect is important when you add to it that many liberals like to have sex with people who make reproduction impossible, and a lot of liberal women are simply forgetting to have children.
But the big problem is that the West has been infected big time, for about two centuries now, with this anti-truth, anti-meaning thing that will inevitably lead to anarchy unless the big arbiter in the sky lowers the boom and short-circuits the cycle.
Couldn’t Mr. Drum’s article have been written about the young people of the early 70s? So, why haven’t they as they grew up retained that leftward cant, and what makes him think that his generation will be different?
I’m down here in North Carolina’s glorious Outer Banks, and the mood here politically is as grim as I can recall in 20 years of annual sojourns to this magic place. The locals are usually hostile toward toward the feds, which is historically a recent development. During the Civil War, OBX’ers were sympathetic toward the Union. Before that, during the Revolutionary War, they were a divided lot who had great sympathy for the English Crown.
But the other day I saw a vacationing woman reveal herself to be a federal employee only to have the surf-shop salesclerk exclaim at her, “TRAITOR!” Surf shop dudes, to the extent they get political, typically tend toward a faux-anarchism a la Rage Against The Machine or Henry Rollins (i.e., comfortably and safely liberal but with an attitude), or they zone-out into Dave Matthews’ milquetoast (also comfortably and safely liberal). These days, they’re sounding more like the salty old fishermen. In both the surf and tackle shops, and also gas stations, I found an array of anti-government and anti-environmentalist bumper-stickers on proud display. I bought one that challenged the Audubon Society to identify a bird — one made with the human hand. At the township line into Buxton or Frisco (I forget) there are a row of mock tombstones set up, each purporting to be the grave of a broken federal promise.
It was explained to me why the locals were so unhappy that they moved the famous Cape Hatteras Lighthouse about 10 years ago. The sea had eroded the grounds right up to the base of the lighthouse and the enormous structure was set to topple into the foam. It seemed like a no-brainer: move it or lose it. Why did so many locals oppose the move? I couldn’t figure it out, maybe they couldn’t either, until now when one said to me, “That lighthouse is US. They’ll move us around, too, herd us around, tame our way of life to their pleasing.”
Right now on Ocacroke Island there are maybe 17,000 people either asleep or partying. Only 800 of them are locals. The rest are mostly from the enlightened set, meaning they’ll reliably tell me they can see both sides of the issue and sympathize with the locals before them and with the feds, who both make good arguments. But, just as reliably, they’ll almost to man scuttle off back home and vote in more federal control.
You can sit there in Ocacroke watching the beautiful sunset over Silver Bay, and realize that the prime piece of property, making up an entire compound on the point of the scenic bay, is vast governmental facility set up with federal funds. It dwarfs every other complex in town, and there it sits on the prime spot, even though nobody ever seems to be there at all, ever. You’d be hard pressed to find evidence outside of a few cars in the lot that anything goes on there. It is, believe it or not, a “Teaching Research Center.”
That’s what the feds, with their largesse, have in mind for the locals? That’s an “investment” they have to be thankful for? No wonder they are nervous.
Couple of things.
I have long thought that 85% (arbitrary) of the population ignored politics. This regime may have changed that. How much, I dont know. If a lot, great, because there is a Basis in the people that understands the American Idea. Free Enterprise, Least Government, self determination, private property, etc.
Drum’s an idiot. He has no more idea of the American culture than an islam or a hottentot. America doesnt live in New York or Wash. DC or LA or their environs. Its in Greensboros and Marions and Thomasvilles and Plainsvilles and Jeffersons and Madisons and a host of other towns and cities where Americans spend Sundays in Church and Wednesday nights in Prayer Meetings and Tuesdays in County Commission Meetings. Any other vision of America is simply bullshit. The people that go to these fnctions understand the Bill of Rights (ALL of it) and how it supports their lives. Pity the fool who mistakes their quietude for ignorance and passivity.
Got edit rights.
The Boomers were supposed to all be liberals.
Explain Ronald Reagan.
5. Alexis
Kevin Drum’s title for his article is “Demography is Destiny”.
This phrase was one of the major themes of Mark Steyn’s book “America Alone” a short while back. Steyn, of course, analysed and extrapolated it more fully from the perspective of demographic birth rates. I highly recommend the book. In fact I highly recommend anything written by Steyn. He’s one of the very few writers of whom I can say that. Thomas Sowell is another.
Steyn’s response to Wretchard’s theme of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”, as taken from the book, would be that only those who are born get to inherit the future. Tomorrow will only belong to those demographics with high birth rates.
It’s not just that Kevin Drum is wrong, but he’s got it completely backwards.
Within ten years and probably sooner, we are going to see the Millenials whipsaw way to the right in generational war against the Boomers.
The Millenials will notice see their paychecks and their options for the good life are being sucked dry to run the welfare/pension state. The Millenials are not going to like it.
14. Cowboy
There’s a bit more to the story about the Outer Banks unrest. It’s not just the lighthouse, it’s a whole spectrum of regulatory issues where the locals feel the state and the feds are overreaching for example by arbitrarily ruling beach areas off-limits because of some spotted plover or such might crawl across it. Or, some of the nit-picky new fishing regulations. There’s no one single “big thing” – it’s the being nibbled to death by ducks approach of the regulators.
What exactly does Kevin say the Democrats have done for my generation? Seriously? Extended our unemployment benefits? Ok so the Repubs are falling into the typical trap of being the Scrooge Party on that one, but there’s probably a helluvalot of porkulus attached to that bill too. I just wouldn’t make ‘deficit reduction’ the reason for opposing the UE extension since probably a half million will end up on food stamps.
Societies and civilizations before us have committed suicide — some by a thousand cuts and some by quicker methods. Entropy pushes is in that direction whether we like it or not, kind of like Freud’s concept of the “Death Instinct.”
It takes a lot of energy to keep things going. For a civilization this means self-confidence blended with humility and realism, a loyal and educated citizenry, and an economic system that can sustain survival, cushion and lift up the fallen, and encourage, admire, and reward the excellent.
Unfortunately there has been a two hundred year erosion of the civilization world wide and an eighty to ninety year slow and steady erosion here in America. Kevin Drum aside, the decline is still reversible — for a while longer. We shall see.
Drum is wrong. Badly wrong. What the left forgets is that the reality of human nature is not on their side, and that no matter how much power they bring to bear to destroy it, it always springs back. Example No. 1: the Soviet Union.
People work for themselves and their families. You can tap a little bit off from the top for government and charity, but there is definitely a limit to that and it’s fairly high–above 50%. Try to go past that and you get societal rot followed by societal collapse. That’s reality.
Another reality is that you can’t tap as much from a multicultural society as you can from an ethnically homogeneous one. You can’t push that one as far, either. It doesn’t matter what the PC crowd pumps out, productive Americans KNOW that the face of violent crime in America is black. They KNOW the places in the big cities where it would be suicide to be caught after dark. They also KNOW that the “projects” are full of people living off the government teat doing drugs, killing each other in driveby shootings, and pumping out kids they can’t afford to pay for themselves. Good luck getting productive Americans to enjoy paying more for that waste of cash. I’ll make a comment here about one thing that was a game changer, too: what happened to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Despite the national press attempt to hide that atrocity, lots of non-blacks heard about it and for lots of people it permanently confirmed what they could expect from black criminals if they got the opportunity. Under Obama, they’ve seen that the Feds won’t even press cases against black criminals who are guilty beyond the slightest, most remote shadow of a doubt.
Obama’s got a lot of problems, but one of his biggest ones is the fact that he has been exactly what his opponents said he would be: a divisive anti-white racist who never stops thinking about “payback.” In a multicultural system Putnam’s research is dead on: all parties distrust each other, suspect each other of using government to help their group at the expense of all others, and have lessened sympathy for even their own ethnic group, much less for any others. If you doubt this, ask yourself whether you think white guilt over any perceived black injuries survives past Obama.
No, Drum and Texeira are whistling past the graveyard. There’s not going to be a permanent left majority; instead, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of anger toward the left–and the groups that supported them–for being a bunch of thieving bastards whose policies made the country uncompetitive and brought it close to ruin. America will probably survive, but the left will take a serious beating if for no other reason than the old adage, “charity begins at home.”
Responding to Skip-this-post @ 10 – Here’s some information that puts abortion and lynching in some perspective (excerpt from somethin I posted earlier on Hot Air)
A majority of our elected reps have built their careers on confiscating money from the majority (who happen to be white) and giving goodies and money to blacks. The welfare laws have created four or five generations of inner-city blacks who have never known any way of life except the handouts from THE MAN. Meanwhile, the “progressivist” activism pushing abortion has KILLED TENS OF MILLIONS OF BLACK BABIES, far out of proportion to the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population.
BY COMPARISON The Tuskegee University study of Lynching in the United States from 1882 to 1951 (evidently when the greatest number occurred) found a total of 4,730 people lynched in the US — 3,437 black, 1,293 white. That’s less than one percent of the number of black babies killed by abortion in just over half the time.
If that doesn’t count as a form of genocide, I don’t know what does.
The left was saying the same thing in ’68. “The baby boomer generation is going to overthrow the establishment. Conservatism is finished.” They had it all figured out. They even got the voting age reduced to 18 to speed the inevitable. And yet… Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in ’72 against McGovern. If Nixon hadn’t destroyed himself, I don’t think that Carter ever would have been elected. After the Carter disaster, Americans (including the boomers elected conservatives for twelve straight years. Then a centrist Democrat. Then eight more years of conservatives. Drum’s wishful thinking won’t change anything.
Excellent point #8 I can’t believe what is accepted today as normative behavior.If the muslims ever won their world jihad I hope Mr. Drum is around to receive his just reward.
Drum is right. Dead right. But not for the reasons he articulates.
It is because, like it or not…we are being ruled by a Message. And currently, the Message Messiah.
Because there is a stranglehold on our pop culture news media, who are devoted disciples of the Message.
The Message is a new religion, with cult-like qualities. The United Nations is a devotee and congregant. The Message is all leftist, all the time. It seeks to destroy ANY divergent thought. It tolerates no dissent. It relentlessly crushes truth and buries facts. It hides and disguises any “inconvenient truth”.
It sets up prizes, awards, accolades and kudos for strict adherence to “the Message” in entertainment, world peace, books, articles, and academia.
Those “off Message” need not apply. In fact, it earns one extra credit if one villifies the “off message” crowd. You are more likely to win an Oscar, Emmy, Pulitzer, Nobel…the more harshly you condemn, the more roughly you attack the “off Message” crowd.
As “the Message” is beaten relentlessly into our subliminal national conscience, it beats us senseless. So, listen as they bang the Drum slowly. The inexorable march of the enemy within. They are so entrenched, we are nearly helpless to stop them.
Victories against them are temporary and fleeting. That is because we continue to fight the symptoms, not the disease. It’s not Democrats. It’s not even liberals.
It’s leftists. And, it is the fact that they own…lock, stock and barrel…the entirety of our mass communications vehicles. All of academia. And all of our entertainment. The whole of our pop culture. ONE “message” is being delivered day after day after day. To our citizens. To our youth. To the world.
If we have no national will to identify and confront rampant, unchecked leftism…call it for what it is, stop feeding it, and stop mislabeling it…we stand no chance to defeat it. And, we will be fooled by temporary and fleeting gains.
No…Drum is right. Dead right. The coming election results won’t change a thing. It won’t be enough. It will never be enough.
cfbleachers/27! Snap out of it!
They have big cities; flyover country is ours, as well as its demographics. They would try to manufacture a big crisis, not that far in time from now. However, being them, they would overplay their hand, because their ideology would force them to misjudge the reality. Unintended consequences blowback would be as severe as the crisis they’d manufacture, but in the opposite direction. They may think they have an upper hand, but it’s a delusion.
Millennials would soon figure what the game is. They would form their counter culture, and guess what it would be counter to?
I am not that worried about leftists. Even if they were sucessful, they’d live on a borrowed time and in 10 to 20 years, being called a “lefty” would be considered an ultimate insult. More so than a “hippie”, which is now a derogatory term (my 24 yo daughter uses it in that sense, and she is not atypical).
I am more worried about people that may utilize them as useful tools to bring about their “better world”, which the lefties may not even enter, their usefulness reaching their expiry date.
2×4/28, I concur.
I would only add that IMO, manufactured or not, I’m afraid we are facing a crisis of staggering proportions. The Oil Disaster in the Gulf. And if the August relief wells are a flop, multiply the cataclysm by 15 or 20.
After the Carter disaster, Americans (including the boomers elected conservatives for twelve straight years.
Ah, well I remember. I was graduating from university at the time and loved Carter. The thrill of a fresh start, a clean slate after the bad old Nixon years. Jimmy promised and I believed. I worked to get him elected and a thrill went up my leg when he and Rosalind got out of the limo and walked up Pennsylvania Avenus. Then I went off to Africa for a stint in the Peace Corps. The next four years turned me into a conservative. Youthful idealism, meet painful reality.
Drum is whistling past the graveyard. The powerful USS Liberty is tacking to the right and the self-centered Millenials will mutiny at their diminished lifestyles; their going to support “Change” like nobody’s business. We have some damage and rough seas ahead from an oncoming economic sh*ticane, but the enemy’s sneak assault has been halted. Around November, their burning hulks will dot the ocean. Then we unleash American enterprise and innovation on the economy — and Hell on their homeland.
This time around we do the Carthage thing on them. Cut funding for multicultural and women’s centers on campus. Defund ethnic and gender studies. Stand up to teachers’ unions. Support Hollywood conservatives and movies. And repeat over and over and over who it was that betrayed us and brought us so much misery. Put billboards up with a photo of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, with two words — “Epic Fail.” Etc, etc. There is great opportunity here. It can be used effectively if we all pitch in.
#17
Ronald Reagan (not a boomer) was a Liberal who became a liberal. It happens to the best of us.
Batman/22 and Cowboy/14 are both talking about ‘real’ sources of wealth –and even survival. The Outer Banks story reminds –only slightly so far –of the actual story of Fort Sumter (not the one-sentence history book ref, see at link the inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday, writing).
Real estate as food production is certainly in the air, from Soros & the like buying huge gouts of farmland, to Obama’s several answers to questions about America where he smiles and says she has a lot of nice real estate, to China now importing corn from the world’s largest corn exporter USA, heck a bunch of clues that financial paper and electronic glyph assets can’t by themselves produce any necessities of life, and can furthermore be electrically-shorted out of existence a whole lot easier than growing and grazing land can.
Of course it has to be defended –the latest Nyquist is on that sovereignty topic, and begins:
Toward the end of John Derbyshire’s book, We Are Doomed, the author refers to his 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which lists 152 countries. Derbyshire then asks the following question: “How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact … without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation?” According to Derbyshire the correct answer is six: “Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.”
Of these six, all are minor powers except for the United States. All have the advantage of geographical isolation. In essence, all six countries are islands; that is to say, they are not easily invaded. Sweden is geographically like an island, tenuously connected to Europe above the Arctic circle. Switzerland is an island in the sense of being surrounded by mountains. Australia and New Zealand are entirely surrounded by water. The United States and Canada form a continental island that is protected on both sides by oceans.
We should not be surprised to discover that these particular countries have thrived during the last 100 years.
..and it goes on from there, concluding in the familiar jeremiad way, ‘it will unravel’ –meaning of course unless…we don’t allow it to.
But there’s weirdness in the air. As magical to cowboy and someone in the USG as the Outer Banks are, so to are the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where among the sharks snapping up spill-kill are not just the enviro outfits whose business models depend on the Carole Browners of the world, but buyers of failing gulf coast r/e lenders –such as Toronto-Dominion Bank, whose big chief Frank McKenna is Bilderberger-buddies with Lord John Browne, the ‘heart’ of BP (until he got caught in bed with –well, i wouldn’t want to say–please use your ‘search’).
Then there’s weirdness such as just now, when i went searching for the swiss bank ‘timeline shockwave 2012′ chart mentioned by twobyfour on the prev thread #182 –near the top was something from ‘Wake Up!’ that went to ‘liveleaks’ which featured on the sidebar a link to ‘Russian troops burn American flag’. Of course, it’s just an anecdote, but clearly there’s a theme coming down to small unit level –or at least not being discouraged at same.
Ok, that was all very depressing, but then when Fox news just now included another NATO convoy being hit in the Khost area of Pakistan, and i recall how dependent NATO will soon be on the Russia route –well, i thought –why not stick it all on Belmont and let those folks be depressed too.
I guess my point is, USA has a lot of REALLY excellent real estate, and as we self-destruct for the sake of proving that stoopid is equal to smart, we become less able to hold onto that r/e, and history says, we will NOT hold onto it.
That whole long post and when i summarize, i realize, again, i yam become Captain Obvious. Apologies and please just bill my rant account.
An example of how afraid the Dems are of this coming election was attached to my doorknob when I got home yesterday. A flyer from Dem State Senator Mickey Switalski, who is challenging US Congressman Levin (who has been misrepresenting MIchigan for about three decades now), it extolls at length about how fiscally conservative Switalski is, how “small government” his attitude is, how willing he is to make the hard decisions and cut the bloat of the Federal government.
This is in Metro Detroit. The Leftist la-la land that dragged Michigan into the pit of despair that it has lanquished in for the last four decades. And the Dem cahllenger is going on like he is Ronald Reagan re-incarnated.
I don’t trust him, and will be voting for a Republican or a Libertarian, but I do find it interesting that he uses this approach to sell himself while challenging a sitting Dem.
Perhaps there is cause for hope (note that is lower case hope, not Hope as in Hopey-Changey).
Some friends of mine have a daughter who just graduated from college with a degree in Global Policy Studies. As the choice of major might suggest, the girl is a big-picture thinker, an idealist, and very, very bright. She’s about to head off to Africa for a month of missionary work.
Her parents are libertarians. She got the standard complement of lefty indoctrination at college. It’s interesting (and, at the same time, scary) to watch her wrestle both intellectually and emotionally with the conflicts of worldview between how her parents brought her up and the great statist maw into which her generation is being flung.
Some days she tacks cynical: “Hey, I could join AmeriCorps or Teach for America, get a federal job, have my college loan debt reduced, job security, have it made for the next 20-30 years.” And some days she tacks back to where her heart is: “I can make more of a difference in this world teaching just a few kids to read than I could ever do by becoming part of ‘the machine.’” (“The machine” being her description not of corporate America but of Washington politics, her assessment after spending a semester there. Give her props for recognizing that D.C. is the problem, not the solution.)
She’s still primarily in process mode at this point. So I can’t say which way she will ultimately go. I don’t claim she’s representative of her age group — in fact, I would say she’s pretty exceptional, sharp as a tack & a leader by nature, and that in and of itself makes it important which path she chooses.
Anyhoo, I gave her parents a copy of Michael Yon’s article on biogas systems for developing countries, which they are passing along to her. They also gave her a copy of an article on KIPP schools that I sent their way. (An article which I had run across before I knew of our own L3′s role with KIPP and the charter school movement.)
Ya does what ya can.
Kevin Drum: “the longer the Republican Party continues to rely on its intolerant, ultraconservative base for support, the more likely they are to write their own obituary for 2020 and beyond.”
Intolerance of Socialist collectivism is good because Socialism creates the same self-serving government oligarchy it was supposed to replace when Monarchies were overthrown. Socialism is Animal Farm, and Socialists like Kevin Drum are the Pigs of Animal Farm; collecting the people’s labored-for property under their exclusive control. The Socialist Pigs control communal property and thereby control the commune; they are the commune-ists. The Socialist Pigs then expect all the “little animals” to come forward, wagging their tails while receiving their allotment of corn; and you must lick the hand that feeds you.
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you…” Samuel Adams
Socialist collectivism is un-Declarational because it is built upon excessive taxation of the laboring middle class, coercively infringing on their God-given right to private property created by the sweat of their brows; Socialist governmental theft of the fruit of their labor; Socialist governmental destruction of their pursuit of happiness. Socialist collectivism is un-Constitutional because the Federal Government is not empowered therein to collectivize the people’s property, feather their own nests, and then toss out leftovers in return for votes. The social engineering of Animal Farm Collectivist Socialism is un-American; we should be intolerant of it.
Conservation of the individual’s God-given equal rights to life, liberty and creative pursuit of happiness is what Kevin Drum refers to as “ultraconservative.” Marxist rhetoric. Conservation of our sacred human rights is true social justice, and it is self-evident common sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7M-7LkvcVw
boogie #34 –
A few months ago I rented a mobile home to a beautiful little Progressive in her senior year of college. Born with looks like the St. Pauli girl, this young woman has uglied herself up by putting her blonde hair in darkened corn rows, and acquiring a weird-looking tatoo, and dirty nose ring. Her car bumper is covered with “Obama” and “Green” slogans. Her major is Environmental Science.
She thought it would be really cool to live out here in the countryside in a mobile home. Cool. When the heat wave started a few weeks ago, she at first tried to tough it out without airconditioning. Then she started complaining how hot it was in that tin box. A few days ago she gave in and we hear her AC on full blast day and night (we don’t have it in our own home and our windows are opened).
When little girl Green’s electric bill shocks her at the end of the month, maybe she’ll complain about it. And maybe I’ll say that’s what we all have to suffer to live in a coal-less, Green world. I can’t wait ’til one of the black snakes shows up in the kitchen.
I give her five years before she shifts into Aryan Princess mode.
The Leftists are breeding themselves out of the future, think hard and try to think of a person of the Commie persuasion that has kids, any kids. I and an Old-School Catholic and conservative and I’ve got five (26-16 years off age), my brothers and sisters all have several as well. We have all raised our kids as religious conservatives. I have friends that tend leftward and they are well below replacement level reproduction (perhaps that is why leftists are so involved in the education system, with no children of their own they have to corrupt ours).
Mine are phasing into adulthood now and are, if anything, more conservative than I am. They fully understand that they will be called upon to pay ever increasing burdens unless the maddness has taken over our government is corrected. They deeply resent the idea that they expected to shoulder the burden currently being created in D.C. They have no desire to see THEIR children slaving away to pay for the Boomers follies.
I have gone to great lengths to teach my kids that only through action can things be changed. They are all involved in political life, donations (to specific candidates usually – the better to ensure that the right ones get elected), phone banks, knocking on doors, challenging assumptions in day-to-day life. To them there is no greater slur than “hippie” and no; gay is not a lifestyle choice, it is either a birth-defect or a depravity.
They know that after the Bible the two most important documents in the world are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
BW/34–”Global Policy Studies”?? Oh, goodness. I applaud her idealism but she’s going to take some lumps along the way.
36. Salt Lick,
Do you really think it will take that long? The reality check after college is hard and swift (heck, the electric bill might just start it right there). My kids’ friends seem to wear that whole Green/Red thing like a coat while at college, but it slips off pretty quick when they venture outside the ivy-covered walls of the Academy.
June and July in New Mexico
June
Susana Martinez Had a Pretty Darn Good June
The bad news for Susana Martinez, the Republican candidate for governor of New Mexico, is that she’s way behind her Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, in campaign cash — about $300,0000 to $2.2 million as of June 25.
The good news for her is that the trend is her friend:
Martinez accelerated her fundraising after becoming the nominee and collected three times more money than Denish during the monthlong financial reporting period, which covers May 26 through June 25. Martinez received $611,247 in contributions, with all but about $15,000 of that received after the June 1 primary. Denish raised $187,629.
—
July
New Mexico voter regisgtration is 3/4 Democrat!
Hispanics represent 45% of the population.
Gov Bill Richardson increased state govt. 50% in the last 7 years!
Susana Martinez, conservative Republican leads Democrat Denish by 3 percent:
New Mexico Governor – Martinez vs. Denish
Martinez’s first generation American parents from Mexico despise the lawlessness and corruption around the “immigration issue.”
Some darned folks just don’t realize how uncool it is to assimilate and become Americans.
#39 anton — I wouldn’t bet against you on that. Especially since right after college for many of them will be “move in with mom and dad” because there ain’t no jobs. Given the Obamanites tin ear, they’ll make it worse by sending “Obamacore” literature to everyone on the unemployed list.
Me, in my hobbies and such, I interact with a lot of home-schooled kids. Maybe that’s why I tend to be optimistic about America.
(perhaps that is why leftists are so involved in the education system, with no children of their own they have to corrupt ours).
That is EXACTLY it, anton. For two generations now, they have not been replenishing their ranks the normal way, but by mind-stealing other people’s children.
Remember the creepy Child Catcher in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”? He steals children on behalf of a pair of childless, self-indulgent, perpetually juvenile despots in a kingdom called Vulgaria.
Life imitates art imitating life. Might as well call the kingdom Boomertania.
Obambus’ weekly address is about improving the VA and widening eligibility for PTS treatment. Has Obambus finally realized that soldiers qualify as the selfless volunteers he seems to like so much? Or just that the VA is a low-resistance channel for pouring money into government health-care? I wonder if this could become his signature issue, I mean, on the positive side.
Democrats become a “permanent majority”? Let’s ask the Romans about permanence, or the Ming Dynasty, or the British Empire on Which the Sun Never Set.
Drum could usefully read Ridley’s “Rational Optimist”. The long-term trend for the human race has been onwards & upwards — but the standard bearer for progress has changed frequently.
The US may yet shuck off excessive government and intrusive regulation, which would involve a rejection of everything that elitist “Democrats” stand for today. But if the US fails to do so, the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, or Russians will pick up the banner of progress and continue the forward march.
In the big scheme of things, today’s elitist “Democrats” are of less global importance than cockroaches — and they are definitely less permanent than cockroaches.
bw @ 34: along the lines of college students, I was having a late sandwich at a place yesterday, and the twenty-something waitress chirps that I’ve brought along a good book. Er, yeah? “Cartesian Linguistics” by Noam Chomsky. Doubt if there are twelve people on the planet who could knowingly glance at the cover of that book and make that recommendation. I presume she saw the author’s name. “Oh, I’m majoring in political science”, she confirms. “But this is ‘the linguistics’ Chomsky,” I point out. “Oh, but I like words, too!” she explains.
“I want to be a speech writer!” she says. Well, this being Los Angeles, I suppose that’s an alternative to being a screen writer. “I’ve been reading Nietzsche, you really have to go way back sometimes,” she says, running off. “Uh, but -”, I want to hear a bit more of that. Nietzsche, for a modern political speechwriter, say what? Finally she’s back with the iced tea pitcher. “So, Nietzche,” I begin, “would you also look at stuff by, say, Ayn Rand?” She plops down on the seat for a moment, it’s late lunch, place is mostly empty anyway. “Oh, well, my mom is a hippy and my dad really conservative, back there in Ohio,” she says. Er, OK. “Um, one more thing, I just wanted to clarify, you said ‘way back’ about Nietzsche, but he’s a modern,” I said. “Oh, but kids today,” she said. “They don’t know that, um, uh, …” she said, casting for an example, that I don’t recall she ever quite found.
The sandwich was disappointing, a meatball sub traditionally excellent there, for Los Angeles, but they must have had a fill-in cook who didn’t get it at all.
The only thing that matters is clean voting.
A signature and ID were required where I vote just 3 years ago–now everybody must use a (much easier to cheat with) mail in ballot.
They’re talking about doing away with the Electoral College. Registering everyone. And paper ballots are so last decade.
If our franchise is slowly taken away, this discussion is useless.
Drum is wrong. What he offers is fine if it is free. It isn’t. Starting next January the middle class is going to start paying serious taxes. The next congress isn’t going to be giving away any goodies to anyone, so those out of work now are going to have to do something, start a business or something similar.
The US will have a situation similar to Canada. High taxation rates, highly intrusive government that doesn’t do anything for you. Mediocre policing, long waiting lists for health care, a non existent safety net for working class (a friend who worked 1/2 the year had his unemployment benefits partially taxed back).
Derek
No Mel, it’s not. Remember the little wooden boat.
We just have to change the rules. Trees and ropes, for a better America. Would that make a good bumper sticker?
Drum is more right than he is capable of understanding, and everybody, at some level, knows it. As Garet Garrett saw in 1939, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them.
When the problem is in the people, there is nothing to win back in an election.
M/46; Here’s a great essay on that. And John Fund weighs in, too.
Here’s a photo of how it started, the first act Bill Clinton signed into law. The gray suited guy and the woman standing behind him are professers Cloward and Piven. No joke. Really.
let me slip a quick oil bidness report, for those interested. These three links wiil bring you up to date:
Reason magazine with an overview
The first big rig gives up and sails away
And a quickie fox vid on what it means for you
To the Progressive mind there is a different reality. One which will happen once humans are released from the bondage of the individualism.
Guys, we can’t make the mistake of underestimating a determined enemy.
Leftism has a stranglehold on the truth. It makes facts on the ground completely disappear. We are left to merely point at them, when we can. It doesn’t stop, it never ends.
If we are not vigilant, if we rest even a moment…another plot will succeed. We were within a hair’s breadth of giving away trillions of dollars in a “global warming” worldwide scam.
EVERY Republican runs steeply uphill against the mass media army arrayed against them.
Our ability to get reason and even self-protection into the debate is so badly curtailed, that we can’t get voices of reason into the race, much less across the finish line.
Impressionable kids are being groomed to swallow propaganda daily.
It does us irreparable damage, if we merely shield our eyes and avert our gaze from the tactical and strategic advantages they hold. I don’t wish to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we are severely handicapped at this moment in time.
If we don’t recognize that, we can’t overcome the severe disadvantage. We can’t defeat their ends…if we refuse to identify and acknowledge their means.
“How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact … without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation?” According to Derbyshire the correct answer is six: “Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.”
Now that is seriously irritating. Someone appears to have forgotten the UK – whose political system has been essentially unchanged for a heck of a lot longer than that. Unless you count the Channel Islands in WWII.
“The N.I.C.E.” may have “an Orwellian ring” to it, but whenI first encountered the acronym in current-day Great Britain, it reminded me of C. S. Lewis’s “National Institute For Co-ordinated Experiments,” in his 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength.” Lewis’ imaginary “NICE” was more “not-nice” in its operations than the current one.
FC/54; That’s a quote from your countryman, John Derbyshire –found at home base, the National Review. My guess would be that he left you off the list due to post WWII de-colonialization.
Tomorrow belongs to them.
And the USSR got better and better until it fell apart.
So they think they will “win?” This will be the equivalent of winning a 5 course meal in the grand ballroom of the Titanic 15 min before it hits the iceberg.
It appears to me that most of the Left identifies with itself mainly because they see it as “their team.” It has all of the logic of preferring the Browns over the Rams when you live in Montana. Ironically, having discarded the concept of patriotism the Left has embraced self-patriotism. They support it because it’s “them.” They don’t want to lose even if it means they don’t hit the iceburg.
The mother of one of my neighbors lived in England and came down with breast cancer. This progressed to lymphoma and she eventually passed away. They described the care as “very good” after she became ill. Her husband came down with cataracts in that same time period, and the wait list was over a year. He went blind waiting. Here where I live, on an island just off the coast, people with cataracts don’t even have to cross the water to get them fixed, and it is done on a couple of weeks’s notice.
mac – “Americans KNOW that the face of violent crime in America is black. ” It may be in your perspective. In California (save Oakland maybe) the face of crime is an illegal alien gang member, 20 thousand documented (undocumenteds)alone in Los Angeles. That is the equivalent of a couple of divisions with permanent command and control from our prisons where they are aided and abbetted by liberal lawyers. And the government likes it that way. They jump for joy whenever they allow Americans to be murdered because it is power and money in the bank for them. I was at the police dock Sunday and overheard a “Homeland Security” agent, a kid really, bragging what a great job he had to his boss who sat in some beautiful custom car. And he was right, he got to drive around the bay in a big expensive go-fast boat terrorizing American citizens and he would never have to put himself in harms way because he did not have a common enemy in the narco-terrorist. His enemy is the American taxpayer and the enemy of his enemy is his friend. They didn’t manage to kill any eight years this weekend so it was uneventful, save the green group that threatened to sue the fireworks people for damaging the environment. For now, bread and circuses, later, curfews.
@ Mr. X, #22
The Republicans are fine with extending unemployment benefits, they just don’t want to borrow new money to do it–and the Democrats are insisting on that.
Drum correctly asserts that the GOP has been playing defense at best, poor version of “laissez faire” politics at most. Promoting the evils of government holds little weight when contrasted with the likes of BP and most of Wall Street. The people who stand to gain the most from a return to more classical liberalism in government have not a clue what the GOP Stands for, much less why. The conservative movement has taken great pains to explain the philosophy behind the movement to fellow conservatives, but cannot translate that into common sense solutions for American society today.
Even where an audience thirsts for knowledge and is open to a counter view, the Conservative movement can point to so few examples of successful conservative minority entrepreneurs, people who did not take government handouts to gain an advantage, yet made it despite that perceived disadvantage…, well it is tragic. Most of those known to kids as successes used illegal activity to get ahead. A quick score to provide seed money for a business is a common myth, risen to the level of mystique among most youth in our culture. Hard work and dedication to the point of tunnel vision are not traits held to be admirable in schools that seek to train up a well rounded person, while failing to provide basic skills. What is the message conservatives and republicans have for young people? for Emigres or even for those neighbors who while living on the same island, have no claim nor expectation to inherit the benefits of American republican society.
It cannot be that hard, but it is too easy to point out the failings of the left, it is so handy to explain the inevitable and unavoidable bad ending of the socialist, progressively communist narrative that no thought is put into writing and rewriting the classical liberal take on the place of the individual in politics today, much less in Corporate affairs or Mega Church Rites or even the orgiastic affairs of the NGO and government employee unions.
There remains a disconnect between the political parties’ aims and the desires and direction of the common citizen. So long as the conservative movement does not or will not address those issues the tea party movement with remain an impotent outlet of citizen outrage. I do not expect the dems to be capable of addressing it with any but false and mischievous tones. I have little hope left that the republican leadership is capable of grasping so simple a concept. It isn’t on message, won’t generate any campaign contributions, and doesn’t give them yokels the fuzzy feeling of being an insider. Something I suppose, financiers and PolySci types have a hard time grasping. (hint for Mr. Steele: being an insider to big G is antithetical to the classical small government liberal, which is where the heart and soul of Reagan’s revolutionary’s remain).
After the monumental FAIL that is the Carter/Obama version of American government, the demographics should not matter if the opposition’s message is right. Obviously the GOP is not sending the right message. I do not understand Why?
There’s something comforting about Drum’s Whiggish sense of history–that the earnest cooings of yesterday’s bien pensants will necessarily be the shibboleths of the Next Generation–but I think we all underestimate the sheer volatility of a post-Christian nation. Obama managed to catch a little lightning in a bottle this go-round, but that eschatological longing remains, an immense pool of gasoline waiting for the next spark.
Or to put it another way, we, too, confidently await the Millenials’ collision with reality in expectation those rather sweet, tattooed vegans will become like “us”–but I’m afraid history gives us other examples of what such people cut off from kith and kind may become.
Fletcher @ 54:
Ever hear of something called the Republic of Ireland/Eire? Easter week of 1916? Partition in 1921, Irish Free State in 1922?
Believe me, Mr. Derbyshire as a Brit, knew about it. Counts as loss of territory.
Cheers. /
Count me among the doomsayers. I’ve been thinking since we dodged a bullet in 2000 that the U.S. is dangerously close to a permanent leftist majority. Combining demographic trends with the left’s iron grip on the educational system and the media, the situation looks dire.
The majority of young people I encounter are so ignorant of history and America’s founding principles that they don’t even know what they don’t know. Oh, they know that the Founding Fathers were all racist, sexist slaveowners, and therefore evil. That they’re sure of. And they have plenty of self-esteem.
While the Old Media seem to be slowly dying, they still reach many more people than talk radio and blogs. Even in the blogosphere, far more people read Huffington Post and Daily Kos than Belmont Club. Old Media works hard to influence elections. They publicized G. W. Bush’s ancient DUI conviction the weekend before the 2000 election, and came within a razor’s edge of changing that election’s outcome. In 2004 CBS News promulgated the TANG memos, which were immediately exposed as fraudulent by the blogs. It seemed to me and many others that that was a watershed moment, and that Old Media’s influence was on the wane.
But by 2008 they had learned their lesson, and closed ranks behind Obama. They overwhelmed the blogosphere by sheer volume and repetition, as well as ridiculing or ignoring any negative information about Obama. They are still at it today as they spread the “extremist teabagger” meme, while ignoring the New Black Panthers.
One of the hallmarks of the American electoral system, and that of any stable society, is that, while imperfect, elections are generally seen as honest and the loser accepts his loss. In fragile and dysfunctional societies, the loser almost always denies the legitimacy of the election. This mindset made its first appearance on the national scene in America in the aftermath of the 2000 election. The left has been shrieking “We wuz robbed” ever since, while at the same time attempting to rig any election they can going forward. This is incredibly corrosive to society, and I fear that it has become a permanent feature of American politics.
With the calculated and systematic destruction of the private economy, millions of people are forced to become dependent on government handouts. What happens to individual initiative and self-reliance when many people have lost hope of finding a job they can live on? Again, more corrosion of traditional American principles. Americans have always been noted for optimism and a “can-do” spirit. The current regime is making more and more of us fearful, angry, and embittered.
“…the corruption of the culture via the Marxist takeover of the educational systems.”
The University system is buckling, and I’m now reading about an article per day discussing horrendous student loans and how young people should beware racking them up, as they will be unpayable.
Increasingly unions are demonized, both SEIU as being citizen-beating thugs and teachers’ unions, not to mention all the DC employees and other federal and local government workers who belong to unions. I have to believe that in the next 5 to 10 years the unions will be run out of town, probably on some kind of RICO-like charges. Already in California, Arnold is demanding that governmetn workers (i.e., union members) have their wages cut back to minimum wage.
If / when that happens, I really don’t anticipate that ANYone will stand up for either teachers nor the beleaguered and failing school districts across the country. Can the progresives successfully fend off school-vouchers for ever?
Education in America is becoming the victim of its own success. Liberals *have* taken over the systems from kindergarten through PhD programs focusing on women’s studies and global warming. But those programs have all devolved into taxpayer-funded sinecures for over-educated incompetents, and in a Darwinian sort of way, their very success will ensure their death by starvation as more and more voters refuse to continue to fund them.
There will continue to be a demand for training for mining engineers, rocket scientists and clothes designers. Not so much for French majors, black history, or Greek mythology. I’d be inclined to lump the study of law in there with black and women’s history as having future potential for bank account enhancement. The one question I haven’t figured out yet is whether or not MBA programs are also analagous to teaching tea-leaf reading and witchcraft and can therefore be thrown overboard, or if there is actually some real-world value to studying business administration.
Drum is either being disingenuous, or has a blind spot. As much as I habitually assume every utterance from a leftist to be a deliberate lie, I suspect the latter. Drum, like most leftists, doesn’t see that the underlying struggle is liberty vs. statism. It’s not likely to end so long as humanity survives. When the statists win, so far it’s always been temporary and eventually human liberty breaks free.
So far no totalitarian state has managed to permanently extinguish the spark of freedom. Some humans will always attempt to dominate others, and the others shall always resist.
Mr. Drum can not enslave me. He can’t make me a serf or chattel or slave without my consent, which I shall never, ever grant. So all he can do is kill me. And he and his pallid ilk haven’t the stones.
The National Socialist Democrats won’t be able to do a thing when there isn’t any money.
Money makes the world go around
The world go around
The world go around
Money makes the world go around
It makes the world go ’round.
A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
A buck or a pound
A buck or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around,
That clinking clanking sound
Can make the world go ’round.
Money money money money money money
Are we living in Weimar America?
geoffb / 52: “To the Progressive mind there is a different reality. One which will happen once humans are released from the bondage of the individualism.”
“Progressive” is Orwellian Newspeak for regressive; regression to ancient collective despotism; regression to a Marxist Animal Farm Dictatorship or an in-your-face Fascist Dictatorship. Notice the similarity between Adolph Hitler, other Fascists and Karl Marx in regard to the value and so-called “rights” of the individual as compared to the “State” – as compared to a small group of people at the top – the Pigs of Animal Farm.
“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois (middle class) individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community…” Adolph Hitler
“For Liberalism the individual is the end and society the means… For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.” Alfredo Rocco
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/chapter1.htm
George Orwell understood that collectivism destroys the individual and his/her sacred unalienable rights.
“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” (Communist Manifesto) meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it (The Socialist Party of Oceania) was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
I used to sing Gaudeamus Igitur every year during my university’s Freshman Inauguration Ceremony (FIC) as part of the choir. I know both the tenor and bass parts, always great fun to sing since it’s a song with little subtlety – just belt it out with natural two bar phrasing and control the breath.
On this topic, I’m afraid I have to side with Kevin Drum here. Given the poor state of the education system in the US, what are the chances that the non-white population would shed their tribal instincts for pan-American nationalism? Would the blacks, for example, even in 2012, vote any less than 90% for Barack Obama? That, I think, is your ultimate litmus test. If more than 50% of them still vote for the big Zero, then it is almost certain Drum’s prediction will hold true. Tribe and self-identification politics trumps all, even suffering at the hands of the government when it’s controled by their own people. Hey, according to their ‘leaders’, the likes of Jesse Jackson, Obama, Reverend Wright, it’s always the fault of ‘INSERT BLANK’.
Yes, idiotic public policies at play will make the ‘minorities’ angry, but WHO will they be angry at, and for WHAT reasons? Generally, they’re either too smart (Jews, East Asians, elite Indians), or too stupid (blacks, hispanics). The smart ones see it as an opportunity, will game the system as much as they can and position themselves on top of the heap. The stupid ones will find themselves easily directed by the smart ones towards convenient targets, some other subclass or ethnicity. It could be the middle class, white or non-white. It could even be another small but important minority, depending on how each smart minority plays it against other ethnic smart minorities. And by virtue of stupid people usually outnumbering smart people, you can probably tell how the voting would go… Then the US ends up like Mexico. But hey, there are worse fates. I think.
The Carter years of horror gave way to the Reagan years of revival because the minority/tribal-immigrant/education-rot factors were not that substantial thirty years back. Now, they cannot be discounted, and in fact are key issues that led to the current state. Can you turn back the clock? I hope so, but my brain says no.
As I’ve said, who is correct can be seen earliest 2012 during the elections, Watch the black, Jewish, and hispanic vote very carefully and how they vote for the Dems and Obama. I know it may be quite disheartening for me to split you guys down into such racially divisive groups, but that’s also the way these groups view themselves.
The Left’s permanent majority will never happen if charts like this :
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/10/charts-of-the-day-employment/
get out and are understood.
The chart is actually two charts:
• One shows Canada’s economic recovery during our current depression ; it’s a classic”V” with almost all lost jobs recovered because Canada had no bailouts.
• The other is of America. No “V” there, no recovered jobs, just the dreaded “L” shaped recovery and that hides the even uglier truth because the true horrendous nature of all the lost jobs has been manipulated and spun by Obama et al.
True, but when the Titanic sank many good people drowned alongside the rats.
A law degree is often an entrée to a career in politics (sorry, “public service”) where one can spend the rest of one’s life living large on the taxpayer’s dime.
You’re right: Drum and his ilk, the ivory tower intellectuals and the armchair pundits, would never soil their hands in that fashion. But totalitarian governments never seem to have any trouble finding bloody-minded thugs to do their dirty work. And then you’re dead.
True, but that’s when they’ll begin to target the “hoarders”. You know, individuals who have worked, saved, stockpiled, and prepared. It’s just not fair that they are better off than those who didn’t.
—
While it’s true that the totalitarians will lose in the long run, in the short run they are quite capable of destroying millions, perhaps billions, of lives.
This is really the crux of the issue. After Carter proved such a disaster, Democrats were left with basically four tools to get elected: gerrymandering, porkbarrelling, vote fraud, and fear-mongering about Republicans. The first two don’t work on a national level, and vote fraud is harder to pull off on the larger stage. Fear-mongering cuts both ways, and trying to sell the perpetually cheerful Reagan as a dangerous nut didn’t work so well when he was running against a Carter/Mondale duo easily portraied as frighteningly incompetent. But in local elections, Dems were able to keep control of Congress despite Reagan’s landslide.
As to the why? I think it’s pretty clear. The people in charge of the message are part of the machine. GOP insiders – whether senior elected officials, appointed leadership like Steele, or the hordes of paid campaign staffers needed these days – are all in the business of government. Shrinking government, reducing it’s size and importance, is bad for their careers. D.C. is their world and when it comes right down to it, they can’t throw the Ring Of Power into the volcano.
I suppose, to continue the analogy, we ought to make it clear to them that we – the voters and the ultimate authority – will throw them into the volcano with the ring if they won’t throw it in first.
That’s the thing that impressed me the most about Sarah Palin. Back in mid-September 2008 I wrote on another blog, “PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome) has already gotten worse in two weeks than BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) did in eight years.”
And yet, through the whole campaign and beyond, she remained resolutely and relentlessly cheerful. Which drove the leftists even crazier.
I don’t know whether she is capable of winning a national election, but I know of no other Republican who comes close to her in the cheerfulness department.
If you look at the political trends going back nearly 40 years, two things jump out at me. One, the electorate has been asking for a change of course from the Federal Government. Going back to Carter/Ford in ’76, every presidential election except one (Bush/Dukakis in ’88) has been won by the guy with fewer years in D.C. on his resume. 8 out of 9. We’ve been sending outsiders to the White House hoping that they will clean up the corruption and stagnation, and reorient the Federal Government away from catering to D.C. insiders.
The second thing I notice is that voters are getting less patient. When Carter proved incompetent, voters threw him out in favor of Reagan, but left Congress in the hands of Democrats. Reagan was moderatly successful, he at least got the country moving in the right direction again, but when G.H.W Bush didn’t follow through, voters chucked him out in favor of Clinton and unified Democrat control in D.C. The result scared people and at the first opportunity, Dems were thrown out and Gingrich and the GOP got control of congress, largely on the basis of reforms promised in the Contract with America.
Liberals like to portray the Contract as some sort of arch-conservative culture war thing (probably because that sells for them) but the bulk of it was about reforming corruption in D.C. Unfortunatetly, the GOP didn’t follow through, and twelve years later, amid Bridge To Nowhere type scandals Dems retook Congress, then two years later the White House.
But about three years after Pelosi became Speaker, voters are fed up again, more than ever this time it seems.
Voters have tried changing parties, chaning back, splitting government, unifying government, and every change has brought more corruption, more spending, less competence… Now people are out of patience and nearly out of resources. There’s no more time to fool around with the same crap that hasn’t worked.
Drum is an idiot for thinking he can draw a trend line with one and only one datapoint – the 2008 election. His “trend” is nothing more than his own wishfull thinking.
But I’m only partially comforted by knowing he’s wrong, because I don’t know what comes next (other than lots of turmoil). We have an ugly time coming. The people and institutions who “stepped up” to manage our society have utterly failed to do their jobs and two generations of tinkering with the system failed to fix it. A big hammer is coming out and it’s going to smash things up so we can get it working again.
But I don’t know how much is going to get smashed. Will we just bust up the political parties and their tax-and-regulation supported funding? That’d be great. Or will we bust up the underlying structure of our government itself? We are entering a Strauss-and-Howe Crisis period, and the changes we see will be on a par with the last three turning – The Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal. The New Deal (or maybe I should say the dismantling of it) is the minimum amount of change we should expect. Another civil war or full-fledged revolution, with shooting and horrors and everything, isn’t out of the question. Whatever happens, whether we’re better or worse off in 2020, the political landscape will be totally remade over the next few years, and nobody can predict how allegiances will tract through those changes.
One link and gotta run.
Do you want to support changing the image of America and Americans that is coming from Hollywood?
Go here: http://tinyurl.com/2beq4ap
Same link here: http://www.declarationentertainment.com/
I’m not rich by any measure and I’m in. My grand kids deserve movies that are not anti-American and/or that make all American men out to be monsters, killers, enviro-nuts or pussies.
Have a great weekend
Papa Ray
JMH @ 73: “nobody can predict how allegiances will tract through those changes.”
Agreed. But we can predict Peak Government, when the money runs out. No more lenders, and the tax stone has been squeezed dry of blood. It is so close now that it hardly counts as a prediction.
Obama and his elitist “Democrats” are already isolated on the world stage — the lone cowboys riding against the global herd on the need to cut borrowing and cut spending. Even other “Democrats” are starting to notice that Obama is doing the opposite of his European betters. Unsk’s link @ 69 is interesting too — at what point do “Democrat” voters start to realize that their elitist leaders are denying them jobs & income?
Eventually, rolling back excessive regulation and embracing re-industrialization will get onto the agenda — because bankrupt governments will have nothing else left to try.
“Democrats” have gone in the last 50 years from being the Party of Jim Crow and racial discrimination to the Party that claims the absolute loyalty of Americans of African heritage. Maybe in 50 years time, “Democrats” will be the party of industry & commerce, blaming the hapless Republicans for having forced economy-destroying environmental extremism upon the US population. (After all, evil Republican Nixon launched the EPA, which “Democrats” would later have to shut down. Or so they may argue).
And if “Democrats” become the Party that repeals the Endangered Species Act, installs tort reform, and launches the 21st Century Nuclear Power Plant Building Extravaganza, they will get my vote too.
”…he argues that despite the electoral apocalypse facing the liberals in November, minorities and the Millennial Vote are going to give the Democrats — in the long run — the permanent majority.
Even if the Republican Party eventually softens its views on social issues, it won’t make much difference once the Millennials have reached age 30 and their party identification has hardened.”
Once again, wretchard has provoked me into doing some homework, and after a furious half hour of background study and analysis (25 minutes on google, followed by 3 ½ minutes of exhaustive indepth analysis, separated by a coffee break of 1 ½ minutes), I’m ready to report my findings.
First, I had to look up who the heck Drum is talking about. It turns out that every author seems to consider it his or her own right to define them (and to name ‘em – they are also called Gen Y, Gen Next, Net Generation, Echo Boomers, etc.) Basically, they are the generation cohort that is between the ages of 10 and 28. It’s a big group of folks, some say half again as large in numbers as Gen X and almost as large as the boomers. For perspective, one and a half times as many people are American millennials as live in France. So, Drum’s prediction, should there be any truth in it, should be taken seriously.
Second, there is a LOT of stuff out there about the millennials apparently because they, as a group, are different from the rest of us in ways that impress those who deal with them in the work place, in the military, and in universities. One large oil company, for example, chartered a study after its managers and older employees kept remarking to each other and to management about the differences. Shock among the senior officers in the USAF on learning that junior officers were organizing their squadrons on Facebook was listed as one of the reasons why the DOD banned access to youtube, myspace, and similar sites in May 2007. Retention of young officers has been a growing problem as the military encounters the millennials. Academia has been heavily impacted and is, of course, the source of many, often conflicting, studies. Apparently the millennials are a challenge to teach, in part because of their style of learning (multitasking seems to be one of the core attributes of millennials, and one study noted that excellence in multitasking is probably achieved most easily by those with severe Attention Deficit Disorder) and because they tend to come to the university environment with “helicopter” parents attached. Basically, the millennials are the internet generation with all that implies. Some bash ‘em, some see hope in ‘em.
Third, there is no ‘average’ millennial. The concept has been banished entirely. They are all, every one, ‘above average’ by definition. One has to resort to terms like ‘arithmetic median’ to convey the concept of the banned word. This is the generation which has come to expect a trophy for showing up. They have been told all their lives that they can surely expect, beyond doubt, that they will be wealthier than their parents, but won’t have to work nearly as hard. That is because they are all smarter and very much above average. Every single one of ‘em.
Fourth, Drum has data to support his thesis. Starting a decade ago, when the oldest of the millennials was 18, the voting pattern of the 18-29 year olds has increasing moved to the democrat column. In 2008, 66% voted Dem, only 32% GOP. If the 2008 election had been decided by the 18-29 vote alone, McCain would have carried only 8 states – OK, LA, and GA in the south, UT, ID, and WY in the west, plus WV in the east, and Alaska. The rest – including most of flyover country – would have gone to Obama. Key statistic here – 44% of the millennials are minorities, 20% are hispanic. So, in a sense, Drum’s claim is a restatement, from a slightly different perspective, of the well documented democrat strategy to gain permanent control as the traditional ‘anglos’ slip into minority status.
Fifth, Drum’s mistake is his assumption that a persons lifetime politics is set in stone at age 30. That may have been the case for the beats, for the boomers and for the gen X. But the picture that comes through for the millennials is that they are kids – overly protected kids who remain dependent on others for support and comfort. One study at a med school found significant differences between gen x and millennials on 10 of 16 factors, perhaps the most significant being that millennials scored very low on ‘self reliance.’
They have not yet lived as adults, and the events which will determine the characteristics of their generation have not yet happened.
What Drum sees in the data is the reflection of values of the parents and of the liberal schools. This generation has been protected from cradle (remember the ‘ baby on board’ bumper stickers) through college and beyond. They have accepted what they were taught – the ideals of their parents and teachers.
Those ideals will be challenged by the consequences of the huge debts incurred by their parents in the service of said ideals.
Sheltered and protected as they have been all their lives, the millennials are vulnerable as no generation of Americans has been since the “lost generation’ nearly a century ago. But, among their characteristics as a group are a high dedication to civic and family matters, and a remarkable willingness to learn. If they can retain these characteristics as they watch the ideals of their parents/teachers dissolve in the period of wealth debasement ahead, then not only will Drum be proven wrong, but conservatives will find a rich field for recruitment.
JMH / 73: “If you look at the political trends going back nearly 40 years, two things jump out at me. One, the electorate has been asking for a change of course from the Federal Government.”
There are two classes of American voters who are engaged in Marxist class struggle, with Marxist type government managing the struggle – suppressing the middle class and favoring the proletariat class – one class with inferior rights to property and pursuit of happiness – one class with superior rights – and a third elite class looming above them all – the not-to-be-equalized equalizers – the Marxist Pigs of Animal Farm.
1. The laboring, tax-paying middle class American voter. These voters want change. They want less taxation because it is now becoming destructive of their God-given right to the pursuit of happiness – a sacred right to keep the fruit of their own labor.
2. The labor-challenged, tax-eating proletariat class American voter. These voters want change. They want more taxation of the laboring middle class because it provides them with a living not labored-for – a State-given right to acquire the fruit of someone else’s labor.
“The proletariat (non-disabled poor) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital (property) from the bourgeoisie (middle class), to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state (Marxist Government)… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic (unequal) inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” Abraham Lincoln
“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.” Abraham Lincoln
http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln78.html
Salt LIck @30 & 2×4 @28 & cfbleachers @27
I was a “baby killer” veteran and conservative from 1970, but from Carter’s inauguration, I’ve sworn eternal hostility, and have no truck with them, even at utility board level.
Is Drum right? I don’t know; my crystal ball’s in the repair shop being upgraded to “Gypsy 3.1″. But it doesn’t really matter or change anything I will, or will not do. I’ve studied the Russian and Central European dissidents and take my guidance from their example, as I see us as now under enemy occupation.
I will ask for nothing. I will believe nothing. I will fear nothing. I will not cooperate.
And yes LIck, I enthusiastically second you notion of “the Carthage thing”. But I also want “the Nuremberg thing”.
32. buddy larsen
With some of our best military folks trapped in Afghanistan – and no way out – wouldn’t it be a great time for “Red Dawn” to prove prescient.
Especially with a compliant U.S. government…
“Dude…check out the real estate!”
Too obvious? Sorry, I’m really a poor dot connector, but I do remember Osamma’s warning: “…the next will make you forget 911.” That would work for me.
Might be a good time to move to Wyoming.
The fate of the Red Dawn remake of course, will now not be released, since the movie hurt the feelings of the guys that think they already own America:
http://shanghaiist.com/2010/06/03/red_dawn_remake_hurting_the_feeling.php
Art imitating reality is just so un-PC.
UNSK #69:
During the great Depression of the 1930′s there were many bank failures in the USA and essentially none in Canada.
The reason was that the USA had laws limiting banks, whateer their size in terms of assets and numbers of customers, to ONE branch. This law was because small banks in little towns did not want any competition from the big city. But when certain industies or types of crops ran into trouble due to reduced demand and the Smoot Hawley tradewar tarrifs, those same little banks had too narrow a base to weather the circumstances.
And Canada in the 1990′s did not have a Community Reinvestment Act and an Attorney General threatening to prosecute those institutions that did not make enough PC loans. History repeats itself.
And by the way, the new “financial reform” bill has still more CRA-style provisions in it. Sen Chris Dodd responded to crticisms of such provisions in the bill by saying “They said the same things about the CRA.”
@ 76 – the anti-Millenial propaganda just ticks me off (and it annoys Josh as well) – in part because I’ve seen so many Millenials in Russia in positions of responsibility, even (gasp) buying their own apartments and making babies at an age when their peers in the States are drifting into their early thirties, or getting divorced from their starter marriages, or living in overcrowded houses with four or five roommates to be the in the ‘cool’ neighborhoods, or being mocked by their elders for still living with their parents in cities where housing has been grossly inflated for years and Boomers are still deluding themselves into thinking that whoever buys their overpriced condo is going to fund their retirement. A whole under-unemployed nation almost the size of France screwed by the Boomers and Xers who’ve got theirs.
It’s also no way to win young converts to the Conservative cause, as at least the author of @ 76 acknowledges.
Went to sleep in the midst of a post, awoke in fear of something unseemly being included in my premature expectoration, but did not find it here.
‘
Decided to use Google Desktop to see if I could retrieve it.
Failed, but came up with this gem.
We’ll have to hold Walt’s feet to the fire again this Halloween for a repeat of that magnificent feat.
…and no, Walt, we will not hold you upside down.
—
Best commenter results
Here is the final poll for the Best Commenter on the Belmont Club. I’ve tabulated the data from the nominations in a table shown below the Read More. Some of the nominations were ambiguously stated, but I did my best to decipher them.
Oct 31, 2009 – 12:36 pm
8. Walt:
Congratulations to all and especially to L3 for a much deserved win. Olde Fogey, in comment #109 on the Best Comments Nomination thread, remarked that he was curious about the lives of the major contributors to the Belmont Club.
I too wish I knew a little bit about the people I daily read with pleasure, and in that spirit will lift the veil of anonymity a bit and admit that today, October 31st, Hallowe’en, is my 80th birthday, born two days after the stock market crash of 1929. I have seen the Great Depression, WWII, jet travel, spaceflight, the taming of the atom, the conquering of major diseases, computers, the Internet, two Phillies World Series Championships, Fox News and other wonders too numerous to mention. I entered this unforgiving world not expecting much, and received more than I hoped for or deserved. My time on this planet has been put to good use, raising a family and a trio of handsome, smart and beautiful grandchildren. The love of my life is still by my side.
Life, as they say, is good.
We think of goblins, ghosts and such
On October day the last
But I don’t think of them so much
‘Cause years go by so fast
You see ‘twas on the 31st
That I came on the scene
With naught to eat and raging thirst
Not knowing where I’d been
I did recall a soft warm place
Quite dark but comfy too
I seemed to feel upon my face
A wetness but who knew
And then a spasm pushed me down
Headfirst I slid the way
Emerging then I think downtown
In middle of the day
Rough hands then held me by the heels
And smacked me on the butt
I gasped for air, how good it feels
To know I’d made the cut
And then they put me next to mom
She hugged and kissed me then
As I relaxed and grew quite calm
I realized some men
With stethoscopes were eyeing me
As I groped for a teat
I didn’t like their prying, see
So I refused to eat
So that was my first Hallowe’en
In all it went quite well
Succeeding days were not so keen
Sometimes were bloody hell
But I survived as most folks do
And grew up in my time
And found that I was of the few
Who found that life’s a rhyme
—
More my speed when inspiration (infrequently) strikes:
15. exhelodrvr:
“Apparently all that money I donated to Acorn was wasted.“
Mr X/81; may i offer you a virtual kleenex for those crocodile tears?
The Fed’s Heroic Rescue
aka, Bailouts for the Rich and Powerfull
Amazing what Free Money can do:
Wall St. Hiring in Anticipation of an Economic Recovery
The shift underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008.
—
Some respected economist has joined me in asserting how much better off we’d be if those trillions had been “given” to citizens in the form of gargantuan tax holidays.
—
RWE:
The “reforms” also include hiring quotas which include age, sex, race, and more!
Big Surprise.
Right after the ’08 elections all the left was in full joy mode and many of them were convinced the Republican party was dead to fade away. Being the age I am I was taken aback as I have seen the ebb and flow of party success throughout the years and figured a lot of these people were just wet beyond the ears type, but not all of them are.
Obama could go down as the Hoover of this current economic turmoil. I don’t see him coming off as a Roosevelt especially if the economy double dips. Next year the Bush tax cuts expire and people will notice.
Buddy, Mr.X has a point, and you know how I am watching him like a hawk.
K know some Russians in 20-30 yo group and agree that a great majority is in an anti-socialist, self-reliance camp.
The 90′s were time of Great Mugging over there. Something that is yet to happen over here to turn our spoiled brats into adults.
d/84; remember late 08 and early 09, a one-year payroll tax holiday was perzactly what the pub response/alternative to the stim bill was. Instant money in exactly the right hands in exactly the right form, to stop the freee-fall before any real endemic damage to confidence and trust. And the same number of dollars in either case. A classic supply-side vs demand-side confrontation.
–as far as the quotas in FinReg –maybe that’s why we’re hearing so much from Shabazz the Panther, Holder the DOJ, and Wright the Preacher, lately. Somebody’s got to save the race-bait industry, in the face of all these quotas!
***
twoby –i know, he does have a point –tho it may be atmospheric –stats would be in order –but the atmospheric point would stand anyway, probably –the different feelings of ascendancy vs descendancy –
Boomers are for certain gonna have to take a hit, or else we will have a generational rift to go with our race rift. Rifts everywhere –not good for the brand –
75. Kinuachdrach — “Democrats” have gone in the last 50 years from being the Party of Jim Crow and racial discrimination to the Party that claims the absolute loyalty of Americans of African heritage. Maybe in 50 years time, “Democrats” will be the party of industry & commerce, blaming the hapless Republicans for having forced economy-destroying environmental extremism upon the US population. (After all, evil Republican Nixon launched the EPA, which “Democrats” would later have to shut down. Or so they may argue).
Exactly. I wish more pessimistic BCers would factor this in to their calculations. 50 years. (And, BTW, when are “whites” predicted to become a “minority” in America? — in 40 years.) The fortunes of leaders turn on a dime these days — ask Obie, Pelosi, and Reid to compare November 2008 to July 2010.
Change is coming, folks, and it’s the good kind. The spontaneous eruption of unconnected Tea Parties alone ought to tell you “something’s different this time.” Start reading Red State and subscribe to Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative’s Fund and Sarah Palin’s Facebook page if you don’t believe me. The old GOP is dying. Something new is moving in.
And as for what our brains sometimes tell us when we calculate the odds of turning back what 40 years of Progressivism has wrought, well, you can’t know for sure that you are going to triumph in the battle for Liberty, but you never let yourself consider that you won’t.
This afternoon I bought 500 rounds of 7.62X39, 500 of 9mm, contributed $100 to my Congresscritter’s challenger, gave DeMint $150, and would donate to wretchard if I could figure out how to do that. And I’m only making $25000/yr these days.
Mr. Drum is wrong. (Incidentally I suspect “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” was Wretchard’s choice, not Drum’s, apt tho it is.) But he is profoundly wrong because he refuses to see that BOTH major parties have been totally discredited in the Millennial’s eyes. If there are still parties and elections in the future, a new third party will wipe away nearly all traces of the Dems and Repubs. Perhaps it will be something like Jim Kunstler’s tea party suggestion…
…of course, the ‘true’ brand would not have included such a half-marx albatross as soc sec in the first place –nor medicare –both of them succubi on free-enterprise, and the far far better solutions it would have –and still might –offer.
Buddy,
What odds are you giving for a double dip, or worse when the tax hikes and some of the regs start to bite next year?
Looks more likely than anything I’ve previously seen.
Lotsa profits being taken this year instead of next to avoid the scalping.
The only thing of any value i could say, doug, is that the conventional wisdom has that automatic self-destruct of coming into being as a result of people already having acted on it.
me, i’m still “in” –they gonna have to run me off with a stick –
And ultimately, what I hope for is that we can strike a deal, agreeing to skip “the Nuremberg thing” in exchange for cooperation on “the Carthage thing.” Because if we have to dismantle the neo-feudal Welfare State by force against determined opposition from dead-enders, there will be a lot of misery to go around, for the deserving and the innocnet alike.
In my blacker dogs though, I wonder if that misery isn’t necessary. I wonder if the reason things have gotten so out of control is that we haven’t been harsh enough on the false and failed Big Government prophets and their kleptocratic minions. What does a Barney Frank, George Soros or Nancy Pelosi have to fear when they embark on their crusades to remake all of our lives? What do the people who vote for them have to fear? They certainly have less to fear from their failure than we have to fear from their success, and so they try and try and try again. Heads I win, tails we flip again.
On sunnier days I think that no, we’re Americans and we can find a way. We’re supposed to find a way. We created a system of government capable of bloodless and orderly revolutions. But if they’re bloodless, what, exactly, are we watering the Tree of Liberty with these days? We need to find a substitute, or we’re back to the blood of patriots and tyrants.
JMH / 93
The peaceful substitute is a Constitutional amendment, because we are a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. The amendment will have to change the 16th where Federal taxation cannot exceed 10% – preferably a Federal sales tax. A 10% Federal tax limit will have the effect of resurrecting the 10th amendment; States would find themselves positioned to take over all social programs such as retirement, healthcare and education; programs which are not ennumerated in our Constitution as Federal powers. The State Constitutions themselves would need amending so that States and local government (in combination – in total) would also have a 10% limit. All property taxes would need to be abolished; we have too many retired people who are unable to own their homes because of the property tax.
The amendment will have to require Federal government not to spend more than it receives in income – which must be limited to that derived from the 16th amendment plus foreign tariffs. The amendment should rescind the 17th amendment and provide for Congressional (shorter) and Supreme Court (longer) term limits. The amendment should provide Congress with 2/3 supermajority override over Supreme Court decisions, just as Congress has 2/3 supermajority override over Presidential vetoes.
In this way “We the People,” through our elected representatives, will finally become masters of both Congress and the Courts; masters of our own destiny.
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
An optimistic report follows:
Spent the week in northern Arizona in a church conference. Out of 2000 attendees, 2/3s minimum were under the age of thirty. They are hard working, productive, self sufficient,serving not Uncle Sugar but humanity. Tagging generations in monolithic ways like Comrade Drum results in flawed projections. Marxism blows and it’s days are numbered. There are hundreds of thousands of quality young men and some women being forged for leadership in the Middle East. We’ll get through this yet.
Josh @43,
Nothing good of evil comes. I see this as an “opportunity” to corrupt the veterans into more dependent clients. Then you subject them to thought purification and maybe turn them into obedient obots, dependent on their master for their next check. What citizen could oppose anything with the “veteran label”? I’m not sure the majority of vets will take the bait. But there are always a few opportunists, and these days vast numbers of fakes and wannabes. How will they screen to exclude the fakes?
I’ve been on all sides of swamp. Vietnam Vet, Seven years as a VA managerial employee, and more recently an active debunker of wannabe fakes.
RWE @ 80. Good point. “Bailouts” was just shorthand for the totality of the assault by the Left, the Banks, Soros et al. I kinda sorta think of the CRA, Fannie and Freddie, the Oil runup, the Basel II accords and the relaxation of banking reserves. the Stimulus, the Bailouts, and the Fed’s manipulation of the markets, etc. as one continuum in the attack on our way of life. Also for comparisons sake of those charts, America is the big fish for the Left to take down, and Canada is relatively a minnow. I think if you could ever do a comprehensive analysis of what really happened, other similar points such as yours would probably appear.
The larger point is that there is a growing sense by many not generally politically oriented that those now in charge are way out of control. The ideas conveyed by those graphs are just one illustration for people to grasp how totally screwed up things really are.
“Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”
I find it reassuring that our host is not fearful of being charged with having violated Godwin’s Law. “Once that observation was made, it became a tradition that whoever brings Nazis into the argument automatically loses.”
Many years ago, I’d heard Hugh Hewitt use that as an excuse to cut off more than one caller. On one occasion, I thought he said “you lose” as he cut the call. I got the impression he rather enjoyed invoking it. And it didn’t seem to matter how substantial was the caller’s argument, it was simply a matter that Hewitt, maybe fearfully, did not wish to see his show accused of a Godwin violation.
Or maybe, on that day he gleefully said “you lose,” he simply did not want to entertain that direction of thought, and he used Godwin as the excuse.
Whatever.
And now, after all those little Left-wing and Statist encroachments on our liberties having built up so heartily while our guardians of access to Right-talk radio prevented the sane and rational comparative argument, we have come to And Tomorrow Belongs to Me.
Rurik @ 96: Nothing good of evil comes.
Yet evil defeats itself.
Anyway, I (still!) don’t take Obambus as evil, just – it’s hard to sum up such a purblind fool. Just something the cat coughed up and people voted for.
buddy larsen@ #50. Thanks for the tip to the essay. Universal Voting Registration if passed is a greater threat to the republic than Soc. Medicine (bad enough).
Evil defeats its self only in a metaphoric and secondary sense. Evil eventually leads good people to defend their God-given equal rights to life, liberty and creative pursuit of happiness. In terms of real people, real lives, real suffering, real murder and real mass-murder; then only the forceful will of good men and women, kneeling upon the altar of God, can defeat evil.
“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson
My generation never seemed to merit a title. I’m too young to be counted as a Boomer, too old to have been counted in Gen X. I used to feel gypped by all this, but now I’m thinking it’s to my advantage when the millenials find out they’ve inherited a world for which they’re ill-prepared and a mountain of debt that limits their room to manuever. I figure they’re going to be real pissed.
On their politics, one thing gives me hope for them, which is that they’ve seen one Republican administration that they do judge to have been a failure. They are now in the process of seeing a Democratic one do the best Jimmy Carter impersonation one can imagine. We’re even starting to have Iran Hostage echoes, as, what is this now, Day 81? All that’s missing is a cartigan sweater. Don’t worry, “The Energy Crisis is Real!” speech is coming, Obama’s blindly making sure of that. The last time this happened, the Nixon->Carter progression brought us Reagan who remade the political landscape and busted the New Deal Coalition. Are we in a similiar pattern now? Will the Bush->Obama progression bring about another as yet unforeseen force such as a Ronald Reagan? One can hope.
“K know some Russians in 20-30 yo group and agree that a great majority is in an anti-socialist, self-reliance camp. The 90’s were time of Great Mugging over there. Something that is yet to happen over here to turn our spoiled brats into adults.”
As even Buddy admits, some of the same people (Soros) were involved in both the Russian and American muggings.
The Great American Mugging is about to happen or has already started. Read this New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generation.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp
to see the generation gap between the optimistic Boomer parent who wants his son to take a (pretty good by today’s crap standards) 40k entry level job and the grandfather who tells him to get the hell out of a collapsing economy and take a job abroad – even if it’s teaching English, grandpa thinks grandson can hook up with the local elites and get his career going somewhere.
http://angryfutureexpat.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/listen-to-your-elders-go-west-east-south-or-north-young-man-and-grow-up-with-the-world/
Future Angry Expat Says Listen to Your Greatest Generation Elders, Go Overseas Young Man – Or At Least to Canada
The point is, twobyfour understands the parallel between what’s happening to Gen Y now and what happened to the Russians who came of age in the early 90s, only to find that there was nothing there and there weren’t enough toilet cleaning jobs to go around to compete with the flood of migrants from the CIS countries (like illegals from Mexico here, cough cough).
One of the reasons there are so many opportunities for 20 and 30somethings with drive in Moscow now is that so many now 40somethings emigrated – to the UK, U.S., or Canada. At many Russian TV networks the average age is something like 28 (I’m thinking of Pervey Kanal). Try finding that in the U.S., where the median is probably closer to 40 at Fox, MSNBC, and 50 at the former Big Three – CBS, ABC, NBC. It’s not just the viewers of network television who need Levitra and Cialis.
“Someone appears to have forgotten the UK – whose political system has been essentially unchanged for a heck of a lot longer than that.”-Fletcher Christian (54)
The UK was most certainly not forgotten by Mr. Derbyshire. Review his criteria: “How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact … without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation?”
“FC/54; That’s a quote from your countryman, John Derbyshire –found at home base, the National Review. My guess would be that he left you off the list due to post WWII de-colonialization.”-Buddy Larsen (56)
You’re thinking about the “major dismemberment,” I suppose. Right direction but wrong example. As Mr. Derbyshire explains in his latest book, “Not even Britain qualifies, because of the secession, accompanied with revolutionary violence and a brief but nasty civil war, of the Republic of Ireland, nearly 30 percent of the area of the 1911 United Kingdom.”(We Are Doomed p. 213)
I respectfully disagree, though I wish you were right. But unfortunately an Constitutional amendment, for that matter the Constitution itself, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if we keep electing the likes of Barak Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Robert Byrd, etc.
It’s plainly obvious that Campaign Finance laws are blatent violations of the 1st Amendment, yet we have them. It’s clear that the sort of Eminent Domain abuse in the Kelo case is a violation of the Takings clause, yet it goes on with official approval. The Commerce Clause has been so outrageously abused as to be absurd.
Words on a scrap of paper do not give us magical powers to hold the kleptocrats at bay. If mere words had that power, then surely the US Constitution would have protected us from the obscene Federal Government we endure today. No finer words on government structure have ever been committed to paper and enshrined as the Law of any Land.
And yet here we are.
We’ve not been failed by the Constitution. The fault is not with it. The fault is with us for allowing the contemptible scoundrels in government to root in D.C. for so many years. The fault is with us for allowing our fellow citizens to vote themselves largess when they could with no penalties when power slipped momentarily from their hands.
The Treason of the Intellectuals: Update.
The Party Line: Diversity = University.
The University: Public Broadcasting System (PBS).
The Lesson: “Exclusive: Newly Published Mark Twain Essay, ‘Concerning the Interview’”.
The Lesson Plan:
“Teachers, here is a lesson plan about this newly published essay.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/07/exclusive-unpublished-mark-twain-essay-concerning-the-interview.html
Unsk/97; i could not agree with you more. Just start with the Enron and Citibank boards and trace out the names & events. the financial and the political pincers closed apace –see the photo i linked in #50 above –there’s your iconic start point.
Dallas is the psychic gulf oil spill –the two great poisons America has swallowed flowed from there –the JFK assassination, and then the Ross Perot who put that “person” in the chair in the photo.
Now, while we are distracted by DOJ, Arizona, the oil spill, and Dr Mengele bypassing a senate perfectly willing in both aisles to have a hearing and now in control of 4% of the GDP (greater than the DOD), FinReg will slide thru and we will all be obliged to learn to our chagrin and probable ruin that “TooBigToFail” is our benign, sorta aw shucks name for Mussolini fascism.
..that is, 4% slated to rise rapidly to 6%.
Speaking of which, Chris Wallace –who has on Fox become about the best interviewer on TV, has Axelrod on today, and Netanyahu, too, tho i think in separate segments. Wallace is promoting the list of topics he has for Axelrod –Berwick is one of ‘em, as are the other hots topix.
–be interesting to see Axelrod explain the recess appointment, which in the conditions is an extreme outlier.
An interview not to miss with “a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer”.
…-
“Empowering People, Not Elites
Interview with Saul Alinsky
(24,403 words)
Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.
Response to our earlier article dealing with Alinsky has been so great that we worked to obtain this extensive interview with him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, by far, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that we know of. The interview will be appearing in weekly installments here at The Progress Report.
Part One
For the past 35 years, the American establishment has come under relentless attack from a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore.”
http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=1075
The slogan from the time of the founding was: That government is best that governs less.
By 2008 we had a new slogan: That ruling class is cool that treats the “folks” like fools.
Most people do not think of themselves as fools — self identified fools constitute a small minority. But many do believe the intellectual qualities of the majority are of such a nature that most must be “fooled” by the Cool into doing the right thing.
So we have a ruling class that produces fake candidates with fake programs based on fake science bolstered by fake research that is used in fake reporting to create fake scandals and a series of fake crises that are fake threats bigger than real threats. All the while it is accepted by most people that most people have to be fooled into voting the right way. So you are yourself cool when you see the need to treat the population like fools. You believe the unexamined leader with the under analyzed program is the only one worth supporting.
If you are young and think you are cool and have a good chance of joining the cool ruling class, then all this political foolery has an attraction since you are in on the joke. Even if you will be but a tool of the cool, hey, that’s OK because it’ll pay well and some of the cool wears off on you.
As long as the young can count themselves as among the “cool” — at least potentially — then they will be down with the slogan: That Ruling Class is Cool, that treats the people like fools.
The election happens and Cool triumphs over fool and a few years pass. You constantly find yourself grouped among the fools and see that being a tool of the cool ain’t all that cool — even if you could get the hotly contested position of tool. You realize that you are not in on the joke but are the butt of the joke. At that point you might reevaluate the above slogans, and see the wisdom in the words: That government is best that governs less!
Say it loud. Say it proud. That government is best that governs less.
mz2/109; Along those same lines, that is pieces of history that need dredging up, don’t forget the NEP Program.
Briefly, by 1921, once Lenin’s application of Marxism had stripped the target people of private property and the famines had naturally begun, Lenin began instituting a market economy again –as that alone would stop the famines that marxism had in a few short years brought on. So, NEP was to return to ‘normal’ economic principles, only with the old owners replaced by new owners.
Point being that people who think the Obama brain trust is simply stupid, assume that the Obama brain trust hasn’t heard of NEP.
(of course, NEP changed with Lenin’s death & Stalin’s diverging to the full monty murder-the-extra-mouths dictator)
Unsk/97; here, have a big ole steaming hot bowlful of corroboration:
RODDY BOYD: What killed AIG was much more likely the financial and managerial collapse within AIG Global Investment Corporation’s securities lending program.
Posted at 8:07 am by Glenn Reynolds
***
JMH / 105
A Constitutional amendment can be forced on the Federal Government by the States; that’s how it will happen. Once the State Legislatures begin the amendment process public knowledge of the amendment will increase, and that means increased public knowledge of the current violations of our Constitution as you described. The only reason the Pigs of Animal Farm have to this point gotten away with their violations of the Constitution, is because most Americans haven’t read it and don’t realize it; they are ignorant of the situation. Once Americans understand that our Constitution has been violated, and that an amendment is necessary; they will support the amendment and the Constitution it’s self. Public knowledge of and support for the Constitution (and its amendment) will bring down the Pigs.
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlev
BTW, Article I, Section 8 will need to be changed to this:
“To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and to regulate disputes of commerce among the several states…”
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8
Tomorrow Belongs to “We the People”
re: “Demographics is Destiny”
What we’ve been experiencing the last few decades is a middle class which feels itself too economically burdened to afford to have many children (particularly with the overhead of having to provide for a good education through college).
Meanwhile, we have an underclass whose reproduction is economically subsidized.
What happens to demographics when that economic subsidy can no longer be maintained? When a potential single mom faces the fate of providing for her child from a minimum wage job, with no subsidy? There is a limit to how many unproductive people can be supported by our system before it collapses.
19. huxley said, “It’s not just that Kevin Drum is wrong, but he’s got it completely backwards.
Within ten years and probably sooner, we are going to see the Millenials whipsaw way to the right in generational war against the Boomers.”
My 21 year old daughter is astounded at how much money is being taken out of her summer-job paycheck. I told her to get used to it because there is more coming, and that she will be paying for all the borrowed money spent in the past two years as well as for the upcoming “free” health care.
jWarrior/116
She did not vote for Barry Hopey Obumbler, did she?
117/twobyfour
She was not 21 in November 2008, but she said that many of her classmates were gaga over BHO. I have told her and her sister from the time they were quite young that everything in life costs money, that there is a limited supply of money, and that you have to choose what you want to spend your money on. She is quite thrifty with her own money, and is beginning to see that those in government are spending money they don’t have.
Having said that, I make a point of not asking people how they voted. I don’t even know who my wife voted for.
TO #98 Pascal and Wretchard:
Thank you for your innovative skirt-around of Godwin’s law, and of Wretchard’s sly allusion.
I will use that phrase cleverly in future commentary.
“Tomorrow Belongs To Me” is a code word for Fascism of the Nationalist Socialists, who would always deny being Nazis, but are the right hand of the same socialist corpse (or corps if you speak 0bamanese).
111. buddy larsen
“NEP”?
Here is the Canuck version, aka NEP, aka National Energy Program.
Trudeau’s Liberal (socialist) Party is now under the benighted leadership of Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard buddy of Obama/Summers, etc.
“Pierre Trudeau – Free net encyclopedia ***
The introduction of the National Energy Program (NEP) created afirestorm of protest in the Western provinces The northern magus:Pierre Trudeau and Canadians.”
http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Pierre_Trudeau
…-
More Iggy here:
“It’s Murder On The Ignatieff Express”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014403.html#comments
27. cfbleachers : It is the will of Landrue…you are not of the body.
I’ve heard this attributed to Churchill: the young man who is not a liberal has no heart, the old man who is not a conservative has no common sense.
Take it from a guy who voted for Jesse Jackson, and proudly wore his Jesse Jackson ’88 t-shirt, and who now wishes Sarah Palin would run, Churchill had it right.
#51 Buddy Larson
Thanks for the link to Diamond Drilling.
My brother just completed a project in the straits of Malaysia refurbishing rigs for Diamond Engineering, and and was sent back to Houston to manage projects there.
The Southern Republican-voting states are getting kicked in the teeth with the cancelation of the fighter jet, NASA, and now this.
This is in-your-face agitation, with no subtlety at all, by Mr. “I Won.”
My ancestors at Lexington Green grabbed their muskets for far less.
110. hdgreene
“The slogan from the time of the founding was: That government is best that governs less.”
Which is complete nonsense. Taken to its logical extreme, this means that the ideal form of government is anarchy. And anarchy is the least stable form of government.
Government has some essential functions and some that some people may think essential. Defense of the country is the primary function, with maintenance of a stable currency a very close second. Note that “defense of the country” means defense from enemies within and without; it includes specifically punishing wrongdoers. Such as those who commit murder, physical assault, fraud, criminal damage and theft – and not by some narrow legalistic definition, either.
In modern societies, another function of government is the prevention of the sale of substandard and/or defective goods. For example, it is far from immediately obvious when a loaf of bread has been adulterated with sawdust, or when someone sells an electrical appliance that is dangerous to use. It may well be that anyone reasonably competent can tell whether an axe is of decent quality, but can you say this about an electric drill? Or a packet of aspirin?
The whole argument about government is about how far government regulation should extend. It’s probably true that in most Western countries it has gone too far, but no regulation at all is also an evil.
Cowboy #102
“My generation never seemed to merit a title. I’m too young to be counted as a Boomer, too old to have been counted in Gen X.”
FYI, Cowboy, the term demographers apply to this generation (I’m a member as well) is “tweener”.
FC #124
“It’s probably true that in most Western countries it has gone too far, but no regulation at all is also an evil.”
Fletch, the most instructive and convincing stuff on this subject was written by Hayek and Rothbard. Both argued that once you reached a point or government control (which was not tremendously more organized than anarchy), a society would ALWAYS slouch towards autocracy.
Not sure when that point was crossed in the UK but I think most here would say it was the “progressive” era just prior to and during WWI here in the states.
happy/123; yep –the idea appears to be to stop the feets, brains, capital, business activity drain from union-wrecked blue to open-shop red states –not by raising the blue but by ruining the red.
mz2/120; a fiendish coincidence, that “NEP”, eh?
happy/123; PS –
This article i found after listing to a mr Scott West (retired EPA investigator) being interviewed on Fox over the wknd. This is pretty dark stuff. Makes one think of long-term projects such as IPCC and the Fan&Fred crash. Yes, it would mean Bush’s DOJ was covering for BP, but as people who peer into the agency abyss know, Bush was never but a surface sheen on the Clinton deeply-politicized agency mess still with us.
As far as BP, there are some individuals –i’d guess a very few –that are making the actual decisions that are causing these disasters –and in every case, the investigations are being stopped just short of identifying the names. Settlements, pleas, decrees, enter, that appear to involve major fines but in the BP scope of things, amount to nothing. your bro, in oilfield service co mngmnt, ought to close-read the article –and then search a bit more on the crusade of Scott West. If the picture looks too big to be so dark, just remember the IPCC scam started in freaking 1988 –these people have long-term plans.
***
http://www.adn.com/2010/06/25/1341692/bps-latest-blunder-fuels-critics.html
news flash: the obama administration to issue new offshore drilling moratorium today. Over-riding the courts. we are in a state of tyranny; proximate objective, 4 or 5 dollar gasoline ASAP.
The hope for a gentle transition to the admin’s backers’ ‘green energy’, down that big drainhole in the gulf –put there by a set of nigh-unrepeatable rig-floor actions.
The Mississippi Canyon horizon and the other deep water projects underway were going to be America’s energy saving grace –reasonably priced fuel to grow our economy on far into the future. Now in process of ruination by the hand of the administration, as far as all the signs point. And behind the scenes, watch for the Chinese government to buy out BP’s Alaska holdings, in order that BP can pay of its damage claims. Crocodile tears from BP. Foreign sale subject to congressional approval, of course –so it won’t be long before the dragon raises its head.
It’s wartime –the USN has attacked Pearl Harbor, Dolittle’s Raiders have ditched on purpose short of the target, and the Midway fleet at Point Luck is scuttling itself.
…as if we’d elected Yamamoto president in the 1940 elections.
“It’s probably true that in most Western countries it has gone too far, but no regulation at all is also an evil.”
In most industries, there is a minimum reasonable level of regulation designed to prevent wholesale fraud and abuse and grossly harmful practices, that those intimately involved in that industry can generally agree upon. The problem it seems is that we have traveled so very far from that kind of regulatory agreement that reasonably protects.
As one who deals with a lot of government regulation, there once was a time, before the counterculture left took over our bureaucracies, when most, though not all, regulation had a clear logical purpose of reducing reasonably harm to the public. Back then, there were strong elements in the Democrat party that actually sought to protect the middle class from absurd government abuse that increased the cost of living. That time has long since past, obviously. Where once the goal of legislation was to protect the public, the goal now seems to be to punish and even destroy certain elements of society thought to be political incorrect, such as heavy manufacturing, small business, the religious, conservatives and gun owners, etc.
While at the same time as the counterculture left has launched this omnipresent onslaught on business, Republicans, led by their RINO faction, have largely run away from protecting business with the exception of the most egregious cases. Under George W, the growth of regulation and government continued much as it had under Clinton. But to make matters far worse, in those agencies when there was big money and huge opportunities for corruption, like the SEC and MMS, the core generally accepted regulations that actually protected the public from physical harm, fraud and abuse, were allowed to be ignored.
One would have thought that following 911 that Bush Administration would have demanded a huge expansion of offshore drilling, but done in such a way that would never jeopardize the whole off shore drilling concept. Instead, we got a meek, ill organized, attempt to expand drilling and a regulatory enforcement effort that allowed the repeat offenders like BP to go hog wild which now has led to a poisoning of the well for more aggressive oil drilling.
A similar thing happened in the Financial World. One would have expected the Bush Administration to protect free markets. But instead we got a series of corrupt RINO and Democrat insiders that were allowed to scheme and pilfer and undermine time tested sound banking principles that has now led to this great debilitating ruinous Depression we now face.
In most industries, there is a minimu
Buddy, I want to make a post out of 128/9. Do you have anything else to add?
“As if Yamamoto were elected president in 1940″ seems like a good title. I wish I had Wretchard’s eye for creating them.
Buddy/129
Thanks for the link; I will pass it on;-)
i’m flattered, pascal, if in a dour, numb, way. changes, you could make:
…put there by a set of nigh-unrepeatable April 20 rig-floor actions inexplicable and akin to nothing so much as drinking a glass of gasoline and dropping a lit match in your mouth.
***
happygrl, you’re mighty welcome. I bet your bro would echo that word ‘inexplicable’ in re what BP had the crew do on the floor that day.
***
unsk/130; it’s all inexplicable -i mean, Bush’s ‘drops’ to which you refer.
Done.
What you said needs to be repeated. From humble acorns*….
*(not to be confused with any Obama-turfed acronym)
Done.
What you said needs to be repeated. From humble acorns*….
*(not to be confused with any Obama-turfed acronym)
my daughter is 21, and she and all of her friends qualify as “millenials”. Yes, they lean left, especially on social issues – but they also *all* know that they are going to get screwed out of everything they put into social security. I haven’t met a person of that age group yet who believes in SS, which would probably surprise Drum. They know it’s a scam. They also know that their employment situation is horrible, even for those who *do* have degrees, and it isn’t getting any better. What use does a millenial have for any union, for example, since there are no new jobs and they’ll never be allowed to join??? AND they know that they are going to be asked to give up most of what they do earn for the rest of their lives so that the Boomer generation can go tottering around the countryside in their supposedly glorious retirement years. And they’re pissed about it.
If Drum truly believes that the millenials are going to keep funding a gigantic wealth transfer scheme from the young to the old, he’s an even greater fool than I thought.
And when that scheme falls apart, the rest of the Liberal Orthodoxy falls apart with it.
Millenials should organize a nationwide strike –make it an “or else” situation. this is just absurd –and the worst thing of all is how long it’s been obviously coming at us. It’s just beyond belief that pols have sat on this thing for 20 –30 years –and deliberately giving the impression that they had it under control –
As a former Democrat who was brought up on leftist/statist/atheistic cant, I don’t buy Drum’s linear-progression view of the dynamics of demography.
My ideological journery is not a rarity, but very, very common. The most common form of liberal is what I call the “Liberal But,” as in, “. . . I’m a liberal, BUUUHHT. . . .,” a whine usually voiced when confronted by anything from Section 8 housing, rising crime rates, getting mugged or harassed or having one’s fence urinated on, or finding out we didn’t get post-racialism after all, you name it.
Some other things Drum at al are forgetting: The minorities’ birth rates are not as high as advertised. The swelling in their numbers has been almost entirely illegal Hispanic adults, not a surge of Hispanic babies. African-American population growth is stagnant, and African-American women are disproportionate users of abortion.
Still more: minorities and young people are not monolithic. African-Americans, for instance, have proportionately more socially conservative views than any other ethnic/racial grouping. Gay marriage in particular is viewed dimly by at least a plurality of African-Americans. This doesn’t make the black community “conservative,” since the great majority will vote for what are usually ultraliberal black candidates or liberal non-black politicians. Still, there are wedge issues in the black world that could be used to pry them away from self-appointed corrupt “leaders” over time.
FC / 124: “The slogan from the time of the founding was: That government is best that governs less.” Which is complete nonsense.
“Most bad government has grown out of too much government.” Thomas Jefferson
“Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” Thomas Jefferson
“Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.” Thomas Jefferson
“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” Thomas Jefferson
FC / 124: “The slogan from the time of the founding was: That government is best that governs less.” Which is complete nonsense. Taken to its logical extreme, this means that the ideal form of government is anarchy. And anarchy is the least stable form of government.
Limited government, as expressed in our Declaration, Bill of Rights and Constitution, does not tend toward a “logical extreme” of anarchy. Our recent history shows the opposite – we’re tending toward the Marxist &/or Fascist Left – the opposite of anarchy. The Declaration of Independence, if it were enforced as law, would limit Federal Government from taxing the laboring American Middle Class past the point where it becomes destructive of our God-given right to the pursuit of happiness – our sacred right to the property for which we labor – the fruit of our own labor. The Constitution, if it were enforced as law, would limit Federal Government from spending money on social programs (retirement, healthcare, education, etc.) which are not therein enumerated; and it would limit Federal Government from destroying our God-given rights to free speech, press, religion (religion not destructive of our equal rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness), assembly and self-defense. These limits on Federal Government are not anarchy. The following video explains Fascist and Marxist Oligarchy (Left) vs. Anarchy (Right) vs. a Constitutional Republic (Middle).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7M-7LkvcVw