News that an environmental activist has taken over the Discovery Channel headquarters to demand an end to “filthy human babies” reminds us that religion can take a number of guises. Men have always worshipped some strange things. That they are called “causes” and not religion is only a matter of words. James Lee’s demands tell us about what happens when the tenets of common “causes” are magnified by an endless media feedback loop. Amplified without limit they reach a kind of reductio ad absurdum. A site believed to be affiliated with the suspect, Save the Planet, sets forth the his creed as the “sayings of Lee”. Some of his demands are:
- All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infant.
- All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease.
- Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed.
- Immigration … Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US.
- Find solutions for Global Warming
- Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy.
- You’re also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing.
Lee says ‘The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupify the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans.” TV. That replacement for the ancient temple; the magic mirror against which the laser-like craziness of Lee bounced back and forth until, focused into a single beam of insanity, it flashed back upon the Discovery building.
The most interesting thing about Lee’s ideas is that they are simply monstrously enlarged versions of mainstream Leftwing notions. Promoting birth control in Third World countries, abolishing all advanced combat systems, ridding the world of the Judaeo-Christian heritage, Climate Change, building down the US economy, handing out subsidized housing — what could go wrong? Nothing out of the ordinary in that, is there? But one way to detect logical fallacies is to see what happens when you scale them up. Those harmless ideas when projected onto a horizon ten miles high and fifty miles wide are so awe-inspiringly crazy that either you say “what the f**k?” or “why not?” James Lee said “why not”. When the cops finally take down James Lee and people go back to carrying out the same program in small but unnoticeable ways, who will dare to say, “a prophet, now there was a prophet!”
Al Gore said, “A profit, now there is a profit!”
A prophet, not an extremist. Seems about right – er – appropriate. [sorry for that]
Funny that he’d call for the end of war when war basically wipes out large swaths of humans… And isn’t it strange the way the fanatical Leftist monsters such as Gore and Lee always aim their venom at the USA as a polluter? Our air is cleaner than it has ever been in my lifetime — the water and byways too. But if you’ve ever travelled anywhere near the southeast Asian region — there is a gargantuan pall of smog and the smell of burning trash hanging over the entire region for thousands of miles in every direction. The smog reaches all the way from India through China, and even hovers over the oceanic regions of Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. The coastal regions are all deteriorating, while we in America have done more, perhaps, than any other nation to clean and clear everything up. While not perfect, we produce more with each watt of energy, and produce less waste and negative byproduct for all we manufacture, than just about anyone else in the world. There is far more we can do to increase efficiency, but nobody has done more, and yet we are the recipients of more hatred, criticism, and venom than anyone else on the planet. When was the last time you heard a hard Leftist calling for the massive polluting Chinese slave nation to shutter its factories? When was the last time a earth-firster called for the reformation of the toxic manufacturing centers of Indian or Southeast Asia?
But the insanity of the Left knows no bounds, as we are learning under this beastly Obama administration.
I have to say it, especially after the last thread – note the anti-religious bigotry that pervades his manifesto.
Scratch a leftist, find an anti-religous bigot. Every time.
Well, he’s been smoked by police snipers. A nice, fitting, abrupt end.
And of course, this incident will be used as an argument for Gun Control – when in fact it is the exact opposite, an example of why an Armed Populace is essential.
Al Gore’s book paralleled the Unabomber’s manifesto. Al Gore’s movie inspired this latest nut. And like the Va Tech shooter and any number of other head cases, all were treated as just as good as anyone.
The Left’s reducto ad absurdum of freedom meaning all philosophies being equal means we have all kinds of nuts running loose. The Warren Court decision that protective incarceration was no longer legal led to immense cruelty, not only for the people who should be safely locked up in a state mental hospital but also the rest of us, who have to put up with them every day.
Ever hear of the Insane Liberation Front? It’s real. It argues that it is an oppressive violation of human rights to have whackos take drugs to enable them to fit more comfortably into society.
One of the Left’s answers to this is gun control. If you are gonna not only let the nuts run loose but encourage them to form “causes” then you have to limit the damage they can do.
Guns don’t kill people; Leftists do.
Some would be saviors seem to be at risk from disillusioned believers. These leaders enjoy how their zealots bring fear and hesitation to their opponents. Riding the extremist tiger seems a powerful tool until the tiger concludes the rider is either, too much of a brake, not enough of a goad or too conciliatory. What do true believers do when their anointed messiah disappoints? Whether Savoranola or Robespierre, history is replete with examples. For the benefit of our country and families of any potential victims I pray God that extremists are not encouraged but instead restrained.
dan @ 5 said:
“Well, he’s been smoked by police snipers.”
At least James Lee did his part for reducing world population. However Lee should have done the “right thing” and simply jumped off a bridge.
I’ve actually met radical environmentalists as crazy as Lee. They’re scary and tend to make lots of load shrieking sounds. I wonder if Lee voted for Obama?
My wife (Discovery employee) nearly walked into this situation before the police arrived, as she was coming back from lunch, but before police were on the scene. My two sons (10 months and 3 years old, respectively) were in Discovery daycare and were safely evacuated by the supremely competent staff there.
While it is very frightening to read this man’s writing about “parasitic human infants,” especially that he was armed with ill intent and less than 100 yds away from my kids, I must point out that his manifesto also rails against anchor babies and illegal immigration.
The man was obivously disturbed and latched onto whichever causes caught his fancy. Fringe personalities are attracted to fringe politics. With a little more charisma a guy like this is David Koresh, and with a lot more, he can turn into a Hitler or Lenin.
Regardless of the man’s politics I’m simply thankful that Discovery Kids had a plan for just this scenario–a locked door with a card-reader, reinforced and with bulletproof glass, and a back exit allowing the kids to be evacuated safely.
And yeah, if we need to practice population control, I’m relieved it was limited to him, and no one else.
Most ideologies are plausible within certain ranges. Beyond those bounds they behave in a nonlinear fashion and fail utterly. It’s nice to have a park, but if you managed every forest like a neighborhood park you’d wipe out a lot flora and fauna. It’s nice to bike to work, if you can. But to demand and end to internal combustion would lead to a collapse of the world’s logistical system. It’s nice to live pesticide free — until the bedbugs bite. It’s nice to abolish all advanced combat systems, abolish your nuclear weapons and buy the world a Coke. Until you’re dead with an enemy bayonet through your gut.
But ideologies are also like religions — in fact many are religions — in that they are simplified models of the more complex logical system. When Moses came down from the mountain he realized that he would have to spell it out. Hence the Ten Commandments. Even that low number of basic rules is often forgotten. Religions are checklists to keep us on track when we’re not thinking. And they are useful when the rules are valid. If you go through life without stealing, murdering or raping women just because God says so that’s close enough.
Because religions or ideologies are simplified models weak minds take the abstractions as the things in themselves. The statue or the canon law is substituted for God, which is not quite right. Maybe James Lee went crazy watching all these nature shows, whereas for most of us, these shows are just shows. Yet to a weak mind it’s a hypnotic pool that just draws you in.
There is I think, a concept in epidemiology called “mutation to the mean”. Sometimes you get a some strange virulent version of an organism that is very destructive. But its very destructiveness militates against its propagation. Versions with less virulence are selected for. Eventually the mutant evolves to the mean. Cults are like that, whether based in the monotheisms or ideologies. You get a Pol Pot and he wipes himself out. A Leftism that wants to survive adjusts itself until it works and by then it is no longer Leftism at all. It’s back in the mean.
What changed in the late 20th century is that the Englightened Ones decided to intervene and keep these mutations alive. North Korea, Palestine, the extreme Left — all of these would sooner or later destroy themselves. But we keep them alive because we “can’t use food as a weapon”, we have to subsidize ‘edginess’. That’s another way of saying we won’t let it evolve to the mean. We keep the craziness going for our own moral vanity.
Nature protects the universe against the Left by letting it destroy the host. While the Left did not wholly infect the West, Europe and America could be relied upon to keep the outliers on life support. When you think about it, North Korea required capitalism to survive. Alone it would starve itself to death with its marvelous economic system. No socialist system can survive without either plundering or being subsidized by the things it hates.
Now that the Left is within an ace of dominating the West, the cross subsidy no longer applies. Once the Left truly takes over it will kill the host. Nothing can subsidize the West. But in the end, it will evolve from the ruins to the mean. Common sense comes back in the end, much to the dismay of those who imagined themselves too clever for it. The wisdom of crowds prevails over the fantasies of extremists but at what a cost!
What’s radical is not necessarily the positions, but the presumption, arrogance, and textbook megalomania, with self-destruction sprinkled on top.
Another great post by W.
What is important here is that James Lee’s demands are a very good example of what once well meaning liberal ideas meant decades ago to be used within a reasonable context taken and used by the Hard Left to their reductio ad absurdum conclusion and thus effectively driven from the high ground of charity over the cliff to the hellish pit of insanity light years below.
There is not a continuum of logic thought from liberal to the hard left. There is an abrupt break where compassionate ideas in small doses administered by private entities become monstrously cruel and evil when pervasively demanded by the State.
On a reason trip to the midwest, I had two political discussions. One with a self professed fashionable liberal who voted for Obama and one with an ‘establishment” Republican who voted for McCain, but who refuses to use anything other than the MSM as a news source.
Interestingly enough, it was the fashionable liberal who was able to recognize that Obama, Pelosi et al had pushed their so-called compassionate agenda over the Constitutional cliff to a monstrous Stalinism. She now loathes Obama.
The establishment Republican on the other hand, even though he voted against Obama, still couldn’t believe that Obama really wanted to harm small business, Capitalism, middle America, et al. To him, this administration just had made a series of uninformed ill advised decisions that could be reversed with the proper mediation. He thought Republicans shouldn’t get too confrontational and harshly political about the those issues of that could someday cause our imminent demise like nuclear war or economic depression or collapse. Somebody might get offended ya know.
This type of Republican, as well as many independents like him, are exactly the type of people who need to understand how the Left’s reductio ad absurdum line of logic always descends into insanity. This type of” moderate” always wants to put the best reasonable face on the Hard Left’s dangerously deranged ideas, and effectively gives them respectability in the arena of public discourse by even considering them. Of course, these same people object to the honesty of Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and Levin and want to deny them equal air time.
Jimbromski, #9: While it is very frightening to read this man’s writing about “parasitic human infants,” especially that he was armed with ill intent and less than 100 yds away from my kids, I must point out that his manifesto also rails against anchor babies and illegal immigration.
The man was obivously disturbed and latched onto whichever causes caught his fancy. Fringe personalities are attracted to fringe politics. With a little more charisma a guy like this is David Koresh, and with a lot more, he can turn into a Hitler or Lenin.
First of all, I’m sure I speak for all BC’ers in expressing relief that your family didn’t come any closer to crossing the path of this bastard, and got out of the incident unscathed.
That said, I’m not 100% sure he was merely casting about for whatever fringe politics caught his fancy. One commentator over on Ed Driscoll’s blog is claiming that the MSM is now trying to whitewash Lee’s environmental views and portray him simply as a right-wing anti-immigrant freak. I wonder if Lee wasn’t counting on the MSM to do just that, to provide cover for what would have amounted to a false-flag suicide mission.
I’m expecting more of this. This loon is not alone in believing that humans are a blight to the planet.
The most “dirty disgusting” thing is how many “leaders” NEVER speak out against such misanthropy. Worse is that they (the Conditioners) are inculcating such loons in schools.
What’s fearsome about a Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald or a James Jay Lee is not necessarily their existence but the lake of ideology in which they swim. As Wretchard posted earlier they are only taking to a logical conclusion many of the ideals voiced but not acted on by others. For example, the belief that “A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy” is not just an intellectual conjecture but for some an article of faith. The cynical and opportunists will use these true believers to further their own ends. The true believers will either let themselves be used or act independently to prove their faith is alive.
There will be more until the ideological lake is drained
Jim,
Glad to hear that no one was hurt. I think most of us would have wanted even the perp to walk out this one, albeit in handcuffs. But that wasn’t to be. The men on the spot had to make the choice.
As Nietzsche said, the more we seek to become angels, the more devilish we become.
If it should ever come to pass that we win the culture war and win it rapidly and overwhelmingly, if the left is fully exposed, repudiated and scorned, I suspect that we shall see a lot of this.
The whole power of the Left rests in enveloping weak souls is false consciousness and false narrative and thereby seducing low souls by licensing their lowest natures.
Stripped of external, social and political sanctions but yet without internal restraints, wave of them would break on the rocks of the new reality.
Their masters, of course, will survive the shipwreck and even prosper on the new shores.
Lee stood trial for protesting at the Discovery building in the past. At his trial, he said that he was inspired by former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” And we all remember that Gore’s movie was required viewing in many schools around the country. How many more “Lee”s are fermenting in the cauldrons of ignorance that we call our schools?
Jimbromski,
I’m really glad to hear your family is ok and that this nutball apparently only ended up committing suicide by cop.
But since that’s how it turned out forgive me for finding this incident utterly hilarious. I’ve seen nearly endless angst from the mainstream media about the deadly dangerous Tea Partiers. But when an actual violent extremist pops up not only is he not a Tea Partier- he’s an eco-freak who actually attacks the Discovery channel!
Not only that but I read elsewhere that he is Canadian and of Asian descent- and he hates illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants to the United States, that is.
This is bizarre. It’s like the Huffington post came up with a parody of what they imagine Glen Beck would write as a movie script.
You couldn’t make this up. No one would ever believe it.
What’s fearsome about a Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald or a James Jay Lee is not necessarily their existence but the lake of ideology in which they swim.
A couple of editors in the Economist recently wrote a book arguing that religion was very much ascendant in the 21st century. Not just Islam and Third World Christianity, but even in the West you found people practicing religions under other names. Whether they believed in Xenu or Gaia or the Human Extinction project, or some other mainline beliefs like environmentalism, belief was alive and well. We shouldn’t forget the biggest of mainline Western religions, Marxism, whose religious wars in the 20th century snuffed out about 300 million lives.
Man is a pattern-seeking creature. It is hard to deny him belief. He looks up at the stars or into the garbage can and comes up with a theory. People like Christopher Hitchens can laugh, but they’ve got a theory too. Everybody thinks he understands something and that eventually leads to a “theism” of some kind; even a-theism.
The great virtue of Christianity and Buddhism and probably certain varieties of Islam, was that to the extent they were grounded in natural law they pushed things to the mean. The initial motivation to taking apart Judaeo-Christianity in the West was that it put on a parity with Marxism. The unintended consequence was to destroy the tendency to the mean. Now we have to be tolerant of everything, from Wahabi sects to Human Extinction advocates.
Mongoose, #17: If it should ever come to pass that we win the culture war and win it rapidly and overwhelmingly, if the left is fully exposed, repudiated and scorned, I suspect that we shall see a lot of this.
Alas, then the question becomes how much carnage and destruction the Left can/will wreak upon the West on its way down.* Keep in mind the Left’s longstanding policy of “rule or ruin”. Also keep in mind that they remain convinced that time is on their side, that in a generation or so they will achieve final victory simply by demographic attrition. Expect them to continue to cause trouble, and lots of it, for the rest of us even while out of power.
[* I'm reminded of the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine eleven years ago, in which the Founders of the Dominion, upon facing not only defeat at the hands of the Federation but also a popular uprising on the planet they had subjugated as their home base, as their final act of defiance slaughtered 800 million inhabitants of said planet, and would have wiped out its entire population had Starfleet not finally captured their base sooner.]
Leftism IS an Anti-Religion.
Anti-Religions place man at the extreme top of rationality. There are flavors: man-god,
man-as-god’s-EXCLUSIVE-channel, personality cult & state atheism.
What they all have in common is a loose-leaf rule-book.
It’s a FIAT Book as against a Bible or Torah.
ALL anti-religions sin against the First Commandment of God.
By definition a modern ultra-liberal is anti-religious.
Hubris as cult.
Vainglory elevated to the new normal.
Unsuk: I do not know, sounds like your are describing a pretty clear continuum to me. In fact, there is a continuum on the left and is not very broad. The fact is the the Left is a real and actual historical conspiracy and it is organized and powerful–it has learned over two centuries how to corrupt the human soul and use the structure and institutions of society against itself.
It is more like an onion, and its nature is projected outward from the core. The liberal you spoke was an “useful idiot” (no matter how intelligent she may well be) residing in one of the outer layers. The fact that she can recognize Obama for what he is is due to the fact that on some level she knows what the left is about for she was part of it. Intuitively she knows their language and the inner meanings of their faith, rituals and nostrums. She knows the shibboleths. She may consider herself not “hard left” and “moderate” but in fact it is only because she has been kept at the the outer layers. She is only fooling herself. She is a creature of the hard left–her whole internal world is their creation–she just does not understand how she has been debased or manipulated. She does not have the framework to exist outside of it. It has been kept from her. She no doubt thinks Obama is “too extreme” but she has not reached the point where she understands that “liberalism” must lead to communist tyranny and that, given Americans history, someone or something like Obama and his machine is inevitable if Leftist of any sort is to be the ascendant principle. Continuum? You bet. And it only goes one way.
The hard core have been trained for generations: they are the remnant of old internal socialist communist direct action organization against us. The Left has a real history made up of real people doing real thing over time in a conscious, aware and willful manner. It is not a matter of some smorgasbord of political beliefs that normal people pick and choose from. That is just a useful illusion created by the Left.
Those outer layer have been manipulated and seduced.
The “right”, on the other hand, is really just about everyone else outside the onion It is not an organization. Capitalism is not an ideology; it is a resource management technique. Nor is democracy an ideology; it is a political process.
Your Republican friend does not get all of this. He cannot see the Left because 1) he has been taken in by their gramacian mind games (he cannot even understand when they are speaking clearly what they actually mean and intend) and he has let himself be defined by the left through his acceptance of their false culture and false media. He has been reduced to a sort of secular dhimmi At some level he buys into the overarching state and the false elitism created by the Democrat Nomenklatura. He is the sort that does not understand that the USSR was ruled by people exactly like this bunch and not a cabal of old, drunk men in fur hats.
One also suspects that his notion of freedom is tainted by some sort of determinism or utilitarianism.
It is this false culture that is the real source of their power and the darkest evil that emanates from them. It is this self-surrender that truly breaks society apart and not the gulag.
Having said that, is is amazing that the nation’s soul is so weak: The Soviets required the threat of the gulag to break the will of the Russian peoples. Here it is broken by bad schools and the threat of being talked rudely about on Sun morning TV shows. Both of your friends should be ashamed of themselves.
Wretchard #10
“Sometimes you get a some strange virulent version of an organism that is very destructive. But its very destructiveness militates against its propagation. Versions with less virulence are selected for.”
The best explanation I have seen for the first law of successful parasites. Well done.
Unsk #12
The Repub you describe can be found everywhere. Even here on this blog. They’re uncomfortable with any stridency on their own side oft times because they see stridency in the name of any cause as a fault. Also, seeing threats for what they really are does and should cause anxiety, which this same type of person tends to avoid at all cost. It’s easier and causes less sleep loss to believe that the cave bear can’t eat you.
But he can.
Mongoose #17
“The whole power of the Left rests in enveloping weak souls is false consciousness and false narrative and thereby seducing low souls by licensing their lowest natures.”
Not only by licensing their lowest natures, but by telling them that by signing onto the program and loosing those low attributes both philosophically and physically, they have achieved a lofty state of perfect being.
This is one of the great advantages the left enjoys in terms of recruiting members over the center/right. They give their acolytes and sycophants permission to go through life believing that they are perfect and should feel really good about themselves simply because they call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” or whatever the moniker of the week might be. Ananlysis and understanding aren’t necessary, only nomenclature.
There is no equivalent to this on the center/right, which to one extent or another possesses the concept of original sin or some permutation thereof. We don’t believe in the perfectibility of man, so we can’t offer that as a selling point. For a lot of pathetic, insecure folks, it’s a deal breaker.
So, if I am absolutely certain that vanilla ice cream is superior, I should immediately pick up a rifle and demand that chocolate be banned and strawberry imprisoned, lest they destroy the sidereal universe. Oooowwwiiiieeeeee.
An inconvenient flavor.
Man may seek patterns, but his highest ambition, desire, need and attainment is the pursuit of god.
You have it backwards. he does not find god because he is seek patterns: He find patterns because he is seeking God. It is what he was made for.
Also you have natural law backwards: It is its source from God that defines it. Judeo-Christianity is not “rooted in natural law”, but rather “natural law” is “rooted” in it, at least as a set of principles which mankind and fully understand (as opposed to mere phenomena dimly observed). Paganism nor Islam of any sort (nor the nihilism of Buddhism) is “rooted in natural law:. They are rooted in bizarre fictions and fantasies, and grave spiritual errors.
Natural law is the reflection or espression of the diven in the human experiance on this earth. It, and reaason, order and beauty, may be the only immanent presence of God in the phyical world.
Which is to say that natural law comes not from this world at all.
Joshua #21
“Alas, then the question becomes how much carnage and destruction the Left can/will wreak upon the West on its way down.”
I anticipate that it will be quite a bit. But even that will be instructive to those that remain. Can you find any Communist true believers in Cambodia or neo-Nazis in Germany? Of course you can but they are few and far out on the loser fringe. No one will give them power. Those cultures have learned, albeit at horrendous cost. Americans will too. The American Left will someday be like the fringe in Cambodia and Germany.
Asimov’s Hari Seldon couldn’t stop the collapse of Galactic civilization into a new dark age. What he could do was shorten it from 30,000 years to 1,000. I don’t believe our future is nearly as gloomy or desperate. Nevertheless our goal, like Hari’s, will be to minimize suffering and plant the seeds for recovery.
DonB71inWA, #27: Asimov’s Hari Seldon couldn’t stop the collapse of Galactic civilization into a new dark age. What he could do was shorten it from 30,000 years to 1,000. I don’t believe our future is nearly as gloomy or desperate. Nevertheless our goal, like Hari’s, will be to minimize suffering and plant the seeds for recovery.
If the American public wasn’t so accustomed to lack of real suffering or hardship as the societal norm, I might be as optimistic as you. The trouble is, I seriously doubt we have 1,000 years, or even an order or two of magnitude less, for things to improve after a collapse before a critical mass of people get so desperate for a way out of the ensuing Weimar Republic of America that they start casting about for someone, anyone, who can plausibly promise a speedy (that’s the operative word) return to some semblance of the “good old days”. That didn’t exactly work out too well for the nation of the original Weimar Republic, as you may recall.
Wretchard, do you dare to follow the money trail? What are you afraid of?
“Palin’s tours around the country are supported by a network of organizations that are not always what they claim to be. The Winning America Back conference was organized by a Missouri political-action committee called Preserving American Liberty (PAL-PAC). The group’s Web site states that “Members of Preserving American Liberty are from the Kansas City metropolitan area and are all unpaid volunteers who want to make a positive difference in the community.” Yet when I asked local politicians (including state representatives, a Senate candidate, and a congressional candidate) and local journalists about who had organized the event, I found that they knew nothing about the sponsors—“maybe because they’re Tea Partiers,” one reporter guessed, “and they’re all new to politics.”
PAL-PAC seems to have been created for a single purpose: to pay Sarah Palin to give a speech. PAL-PAC announced the Palin event at the same time that it announced its own formation. After the Palin event was over, most of the information on PAL-PAC’s Web site disappeared. In effect, PAL-PAC was a disposable entertainment company, set up to put on a one-day show that collected the contact information of thousands of people who came to see Palin in the flesh, and to give her their money.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/10/sarah-palin-201010?currentPage=all
So Mr. Lee wanted the Discovery Channel to become more like PBS?
I’ve heard that people who watch too much PBS become sterile.
WHO PAYS: A Leftist worrying about “Secret money” and “secret organizations” on the right?
Too funny, You are just the sort we are talking about.
Hint: that is how leftists work.
And Vanity Fair no less.
Pal (or gal), this article is all just the usual projection, slander , lies and innuendo of yet another Left Wing propaganda organ.
What are you saying, that “secret Right wingers” are funding Palin. It is laughable.
You know, they did the same carp with Goldwater years ago.
But you knew that didn’t you. If you are not some sort of operative, you are a fool
(well, ultimately, you are a fool either way)
Why cannot you rationally argue position instead of this spouting this nonsense?
Oh, you know about that too.
Plain is a fine and decent person, whatever one may think of her politics. This is ultimately why the Left hates her.
WhoPays:
It looks like a perfect “flash crowd” sort of thing. What a hoot. The left should never have pi$$ed off so many people at once.
Mongoose @ 31
Your substance free tactics boil down to “A little song, a little dance, a little selzer down my pants.” It’s cute, but you can’t answer the question. You can’t even face the substance of the question. You are afraid. Go ahead, prove me wrong. I dare you.
All you have to do is answer the question. Who funded PAL-PAC, who refunded Dr. Wayne Graves the $126,000 for Palin’s speech. If it’s not secret, then you should be able to find out. Why so scared? Where’s your claims to rationality now?
Speaking of left wing projection – remember when feminists started voicing their concerns about Obama being assassinated during the campaign when Hillary began to lose?
fnord, #34: Speaking of left wing projection – remember when feminists started voicing their concerns about Obama being assassinated during the campaign when Hillary began to lose?
Considering that Sarah Palin is essentially the American version of the late Pim Fortuyn (who could have been a Palin-like game-changer in Dutch politics had he not been murdered first), that is a scary thought indeed.
Who pays: There is no substance there. (and there is none to you either). It is a wholly contrived bit of electioneering propaganda. It is not serious journalism at all, as if Vnaity Fair was capable of such a thing. and you are evidently not a serious person. You do not even sound like an adult.
What’s next, are you going to start referencing The New York Observer?
There is nothing there. Your accusations have no point to them. There is noting odd going on.
Only some weird, paranoid Leftist tool or an operative would even be concerned with such a thing.
That is the point.
That is why you spout idiotic, adolescent tripe like this:
our substance free tactics boil down to “A little song, a little dance, a little selzer down my pants.” It’s cute, but you can’t answer the question. You can’t even face the substance of the question. You are afraid. Go ahead, prove me wrong. I dare you.
It is just silly. You are the one that is scaredl that is why you are rooting sound to find mystery where the is none. There nothing out of the ordinary here. It is pure innuendo.
What is really comic is you think there is some secret Conservative slush fund to fund someone that the Establishment GOP is trying to suppress.
Either grow up or go back to KOS.
“i dare you” indeed. What an childish imbecile. You are way over your head here.
If you want to do something useful, go follow the Soros money trail. Now that is scary.
I guess it’s understandable that Mr. Lee demands that civilization be exposed for the filth that it is. In San Francisco, there has long been antipathy to young parents, denigrated as “breeders,” and this antipathy has been going mainstream among infected leftists, who apparently never bothered thinking about the wisdom of the Fourth Commandment. Most non-leftist people are going to feel a revulsion at Lee’s demands, since Lee’s own implicit “civilization” is a kind of sickness and sterility.
Jonathan Swift thought long about the despicable human race and their “civilization,” and he writes about that civilization in Book IV of “Gulliver’s Travels.” I think anyone reading Book IV would agree with Lemuel that it might be a better idea to associate with horses than with yahoos such as Mr. Lee and his ilk.
Here’s the Wiki summary of Book IV:
“. . . abandoned in a landing boat, [Lemuel Gulliver] . . . comes first upon a race of (apparently) hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses (in their language “Houyhnhnm” or “the perfection of nature”) are the rulers and the deformed creatures (“Yahoos”) are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse’s household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.”
When you have a person that is a “true believer”, or a nut case there are two choices. Option #1. Give them what they want of kill them. Option #2 I guess Mr. Lee got option #2.
Who Pays Palin can you share with Jimbromski your happiness that his family is safe?
Confess we’re all on James Lee’s side
We want our perfect world, and now
We try the filth and dirt to hide
Behind a careworn furrowed brow
I’d like a world where children laugh
Instead of crying in their sleep
I’d like to write the epitaph
Of tyrants killing men like sheep
I’d like to see whom we elect
Work hard for us and not themselves
Who do the job that we expect
Not scoop the good stuff off the shelves
I’d like to see us reach the stars
And banish poverty for all
Why stop at Luna or at Mars
Cannot you hear the star fields call?
We can do better if we try
We can be more than we have been
There is no step that is too high
Indifference the only sin
My vision for us shows the way
But needs hard work and not just luck
But if they listen men will say
Why Not instead of What The F**k
“Most ideologies are plausible within certain ranges. Beyond those bounds they behave in a nonlinear fashion and fail utterly.”
Chesterton wrote frequently about the health of boundaries and how insanity comes with their removal. Somewhere he wrote that everyone likes windows – letting in sun, air, attractive view – what’s not to like? The problem is that a person can go from that to the urge to make a window larger and larger, until it’s so large it eliminates the wall that contains it. And that, incidentally, eliminates the window too, because without the boundary of a wall to restrict and contain it, the window ceases to exist.
aardvark, #37: In San Francisco, there has long been antipathy to young parents, denigrated as “breeders,” and this antipathy has been going mainstream among infected leftists, who apparently never bothered thinking about the wisdom of the Fourth Commandment. Most non-leftist people are going to feel a revulsion at Lee’s demands, since Lee’s own implicit “civilization” is a kind of sickness and sterility.
Indeed, I strongly suspect that “progressives” will someday look back on this incident as a huge own-goal. “Someday,” most likely, as in Wednesday, November 3, 2010.
“The trouble is, I seriously doubt we have 1,000 years, or even an order or two of magnitude less, for things to improve after a collapse before a critical mass of people get so desperate for a way out of the ensuing Weimar Republic of America that they start casting about for someone, anyone, who can plausibly promise a speedy (that’s the operative word) return to some semblance of the “good old days”. That didn’t exactly work out too well for the nation of the original Weimar Republic, as you may recall.”
Well, Weimar isn’t the only example. Rome got a good 400 years out of it.
On the other hand they did have to put up with family of insanely murderous criminals running everything for the duration. And in the end, they still fell.
12. Unsk
“What is important here is that James Lee’s demands are a very good example of what once well meaning liberal ideas meant decades ago to be used within a reasonable context taken and used by the Hard Left to their reductio ad absurdum conclusion and thus effectively driven from the high ground of charity over the cliff to the hellish pit of insanity light years below.”
I disagree, Lee’s ideas are from the leftist mainstream. Read Jonah Goldberg. Environmentalism is just re-cycled Nazism.
Mongoose @ 36
“It is a wholly contrived bit of electioneering propaganda.”
Really? What is Sarah Palin running for, Mongoose? And if it is contrived, then you could answer the question: who is behind PAL-PAC? Who funded it? You claim a lack of substance at the same time you skitter away from the question, frightened at what you may find. You can’t answer the question because you can’t handle the truth.
If it’s innuendo, them I’m sure you can dispel it with fact, but you proffer nothing because you got nothing. No fact, no substance, no argument. Just whining, tittering, queasy fear at revealing your ignorance.
Mongoose: “What is really comic is you think there is some secret Conservative slush fund to fund someone that the Establishment GOP is trying to suppress.:
Ha, ha! Go back and look very carefully Mongoose, and you’ll see I never said any such thing. You just JUMPED to the conclusion! Why? Did you just come up with that jump all on your loneseom? Are you getting nervous? You can’t tell me who pays Palin, ’cause you con’t know yourself.
Don’t feed the troll.
Mama always told me it wasn’t fair to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Lest anyone forget, Hitler was a new-wave man.
He used meth.
He was a vegetarian. ( His thinking beat PETA by decades. ) His diet gave him horrific gas pains — he farted like a cow. ( I’m not making that up! )
He was deeply into off-beat Indian religious ideas.
He felt himself uniquely above the law.
He initiated the Shoah on religious grounds — His new creed.
He believed that he could and would breed a new super-man.
His Death’s Head Division supplanted Christianity with Hitler-worship. ( Inductees renounced their prior faiths.)
He covered crosses all over Germany — and placed swastikas in their stead.
He put his health in the care of a quack who’s main expertise was Syphilis. It’s hard to say whether his mentality folded-up due to meth, syphilis, or defeat. It’s is of some comfort that he was self-dungeoning.
He’s quite the new-age icon alright.
There was a time not so long ago when the Left wouldn’t talk about the likes of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin because they were too far beneath them to notice. Then a strange thing happened. Twitter accounts started getting more traction that the whole New York Times. Certain personalities started drawing greater audiences then sitting Presidents — without the benefit of the media. And worse, the crowds cleaned up after themselves.
This posed a tremendous logical problem for the left. How could such insignificant people draw these crowds? How could incumbent after incumbent lose their elections? How could Scott Brown win “Ted Kennedy’s seat”? How could their causes in the polls fall so badly? Why is “health care” even more unpopular now than it was when it was passed — and it was unpopular then. How could it be that even Gibbs had given up on keeping the Congress? The obvious answer was that the voters were fed up.
But that did not compute. Because how could the voters be fed up with progressives? Everybody loves them, even when the polls say otherwise. 2008 was proof that everybody loved them. If 2010 shows different, never mind because everybody still loves them. That’s forever.
So the answer to the paradox was to fall back on the Pelosi theorem. Somebody is paying people to oppose the Mosque at Ground Zero. Somebody is “ginning things up”. In their world it’s all astroturf. Therefore the transformation of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin must be because they are being paid. Paid. By someone.
So let’s try this experiment. Let’s get down on our hands and knees and hope that Who Pays Palin Pays Who Pays Palin. Then that person can get up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and speak, because 500,000 people will come to listen. But it is doubtful that even 500 people will show up. Why did they show up for Glenn Beck? Because the 500,000 people must have been paid. Paid. In a little while we’ll have Who Pays the 500,000 showing up.
But what they don’t understand is this. They’ve just insulted everyone even more. Because a lot of people went and they know they weren’t paid. And ordinary people will resent being told that they are motivated by what motivates the progressives. The simplest explanation for GB and SP’s success is this. People are fed up with being talked down to; fed up with being told they are hirelings by hirelings. And this will be the evidence: come November a terrible defeat will descend on Pelosi and her ilk. And as she leaves the Chair her words will echo down the corridor: “This wasn’t supposed to happen … who paid you? Who paid yoooo?”
Another thing that just occurred to me is how this incident has all but completely pushed Obama’s end-of-the-Iraq-war speech out of the headlines. Whatever mileage he may have gotten out of the speech was, in all likelihood, obliterated by the brief, but all-too-clear glimpse of the true nature of “progressivism” given to us by Lee.
Hari Seldon’s plan did come a cropper: the MULE.
The ultimate in manipulative power players, the Mule could charm the masses while taking all of society off in the wrong direction.
It’s a good thing Seldon established a Second Foundation.
I understand the battleground has moved to the Delaware Primary. Another Rino is in real trouble.
Being on the Left Coast, I’d appreciate anyone able to provide ground-truth.
@26 mongoose
Your post reminds me of something in the Brothers Karamazov, wherein Dostoyevsky observes that for all its talk of economics, the real purpose of socialism is the denial of God.
Somewhat off thread, but you might appreciate this
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html
Pelosi is fine with insulting the 500,000 who show up, they weren’t going to vote for her anyway. But she needs to worry about her constituency at home, so needs to find a scapegoat, a paymaster, 500,000 scapegoats, it’s all the same to her.
Re # 10. wretchard
“It’s nice to live pesticide free — until the bedbugs bite.”
Funny you mentioned this. Since they already thrive in almost all Manhattan hotels, I expect that as soon as bedbugs will become a household pet on the Upper East Side the DDT will be brought back without any shame.
Re: wretchard, #48: And as others here have already pointed out, some other “progressive” true-believers are likely to take their defeat as nothing less than a call to arms, figuratively and in some cases literally. Resistance to the bitter, dead end, by any means necessary, up to and including bloodshed, if not to crush the counter-revolution then at least to hinder it long enough for the nation’s demographics to at last shift permanently in the “progressives’” favor, as they believe is inevitable.
Until Lee came along I thought the Left had lost their 1960s/70s penchant for outright terrorism. After all, why bother with random acts of violence when you’re capable of mass brainwashing via the MSM? But one thing I took away from Lee’s manifesto is that he had lost whatever faith he may have had in the MSM as a leftist bully-pulpit. Why should I even have to try to coerce The Discovery Channel into advocating my human-extinction ideology? If the MSM were truly “progressive” wouldn’t TDC and other outlets happily be doing so anyway as a matter of course? If Lee had already written off the MSM, how many of his fellow leftists will do the same as their political losses continue to mount, and how many will be angry and desperate enough to act out as Lee did? All bets are now off.
Joshua #55
Until Lee came along I thought the Left had lost their 1960s/70s penchant for outright terrorism.
There is a lengthy list of ELF terrorist acts from 1997 through 2009 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Earth_Liberation_Front_actions
and ALF actions from 2000 through 2004 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Animal_Liberation_Front_actions,_2000-2004
and from 2005 to the present at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Animal_Liberation_Front_actions,_2005-Present
Quite the busy little beavers they are. While some of the actions, like throwing acid on Hummers, involved mostly property damage, others involved direct attacks on houses under construction, a resort hotel, a local Republican party office, a university research center, and the homes of research scientists that could have ended in harm to the occupants, construction workers, students, employees, and others.
Wretchard #48…
You nailed it, you totally nailed it.
Re: PA Cat, #56
Three words: Symbionese Liberation Army.
Now that was Leftist terrorism. Even Lee is a piker next to those barbarians, let alone ALF/ELF.
wretchard:
No socialist system can survive without either plundering or being subsidized by the things it hates.
What if there were a socialist system that can survive without plundering corporate capitalism? Indeed, what if there were several “socialist” systems that did so?
To answer this, one needs to define what “socialism” is. Is it a credit union? Is it a farmer’s cooperative? Is it an employee owned cooperative? Is it a state owned bank or a state owned factory? Was Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a federally owned arsenal “socialism”? (Thank goodness that the du Pont family rescued the American artillery industry from congressional dithering!)
All of these do exist as systems that thrive while not plundering capitalists to do it. They exist because they have good management that expects these enterprises to make a profit, or at least not lose money. The worst thing that can happen to the cooperative (or even the state owned enterprise) is to use state ownership as a means to bail out ailing businesses or to let federal subsidies turn cooperatives into government puppets.
I think the main impediment to creating a “cooperative network” of democratically owned enterprises is that most “co-op” types (at least in urban areas) are dreamers rather than doers. In many respects, the infusion of university hippies in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s was the worst thing that ever happened to the cooperative because their commitment to the idea was fickle.
Hmm, “Who Pays” is acting out in his own little way, just as Lee decided he had to go after the Discovery Channel. Almost amusing that the extremists on the left are being driven out of their minds by current events. Scary, but amusing.
This obsession with the concept of pay has come up in the climate change wars as well, with the same results. The warmists have been screaming that all of the skepticism has been funded by some huge, all controlling corporate EVIL, without once realizing how much this discredits them in the eyes of everyone who is skeptical and knows that their is no money in it for anyone.
Actually, anyone who is honest realizes this, which is why the warmist’s ranks are dwindling by the day. Literally, considering what happened at the Discovery HQ today.
WPP:
You seem to be suggesting that Sarah Palin is corrupt. I don’t know whether she is or not. I strongly doubt she is getting paid by George Soros! Seriously, it’s a howler to see the New York Times throw a searchlight on the “Koch conspiracy” when it is an integral part of other conspiracies.
It seems to be a sad fact of life that people who believe in conspiracy theories typically do so because they are part of their own conspiracies; conspirators tend to presume their enemies to be just as cloak-and-dagger as they are.
I’d feel better about leftist warnings about the Koch brothers when more leftists turn against George Soros rather than regarding his money as their favorite tit.
#52 Your post reminds me of something in the Brothers Karamazov, wherein Dostoyevsky observes that for all its talk of economics, the real purpose of socialism is the denial of God.
What made the Communist Party different from every other ordinary political organization (ie “The Republican Party”) was that they didn’t seek office; they sought the Throne of God. This is very eloquently brought home in 1984. The Party must become to all intents and purposes, omnipotent. And it can do this not by manipulating reality but by manipulating information. “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” Eternity would be theirs because they got to define it.
But to do this they had to commit a deicide. They had to kill God, or at least kill off rival faiths, to occupy the vacant throne. For historical reasons that meant killing Christianity. That is the source of the deeply embedded antipathy towards Christianity that almost amounts to an obsession.
Unfortunately for the Left, God has unaccountably struck back. Not just in the form of 3rd World Christianity or Islam. Their decoy causes, originally intended to lure useful fools into the outer fringes of the Party whence they could be scooped up, have taken on a life of their own. George Orwell saw it happening even during the 1930s.
The animal liberation crowd, the Human Extinction Crew are runaway bots which have somehow gone off the reservation, even though they return every now and again from some dim instinct to return to their roots. And when they do, it is a family embarrassment.
But worst of all, God has the terrible habit of reasserting himself through reality. The current crisis is the revenge of God the Reality. The financial collapse, the demographic crash, the ruin of the institutions. All are reminders that reality bites. The Party never thought it could come to this. Remember the famous scene in Room 101 when Winston Smith realizes that Party Member O’Brien cannot even prevent his own decay? He didn’t care because in the newspapers he could live forever, if need be.
Yet O’Brien is wrong. External reality is important. The Party, vain though it may be, is not exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. It needs energy to sustain its fantasy, its control over information. It needs energy to run the presses, light the studios. It needs money to pay the salaries and perquisites of its members. It needs all these things. And since it produces nothing of itself, the Party is ultimately dependent on those proles that it despises.
Were I to create a literary Room 102 it would be O’Brien sitting in a chair. Comfortable, without chains. Surrounded by his telephone and memory hole and telescreen. And Winston Smith would be pacing before him asking, “how many telescreens do you have?”
“One,” O’Brien said.
“No,” Winston replied. “You have none.” And the telescreen would disappear.
“You see O’Brien,” Winston continued, “I can make your telescreen vanish in an instant. All I have to do is not pay my taxes. And viola, no telescreen. What is in your memory hole, O’Brien?”
And O’Brien will turn to the familiar device and see IOUs spewing out of it, not vanishing inside its recesses.
“Where did these come from?” he said. “I burned them.”
“Nothing is forgotten, O’Brien. The Present contains a record of the past. And the present remembers that you have no money. It’s the law of thermodynamics. You can’t get something from nothing. Unless you’re God, O’Brien. And you are not.”
And maybe we will have our Room 102 one day, though we may not call it that. God I am afraid, will prove too hard for the Party to kill. Man is a pattern seeking creature. “My heart shall never rest, O Lord, until it rests in Thee.”
Before I finally call it a night, here is the obligatory Wikipedia page for those who didn’t get the reference in Wretchard’s post title.
Until next time…
Who Pays Palin, from your first post all BC’ers knew you were a troll. The question I had is, are you so blinded by partisanship that you are a troll without a heart? When you chose not to respond to my post (any easy thing after all) regarding the safe return of Jimbromski’s family you showed us who you are. You portray yourself as superior, erudite and an exposer of corruption. Is there room in your soul for compassion and empathy irrespective of politics? It appears not. What is life outside the Party?
Who Pays Palin, you are transparent and are unmasked. I suspect your pretense and preening satisfies some internal need and grants you acceptance by the like-minded. Contrary to your assumptions BC’ers are not easily snookered.
At Least Mr. Lee practiced what he was preaching. He reduced the number of Humans by one. Not having a lot of physical courage, he used a Police Sniper to do his reduction.
Kudos to the sniper.
wws @ 60: This obsession with the concept of pay has come up in the climate change wars as well, with the same results.
So true! Here we are, with the Left mouth-foaming over who might or might not have paid Sarah Palin a few bucks to give a speech (ummm… the woman is a celebrity. For better or worse, celebrities in our culture get paid.)
Yet, the fact that some estimates had the climate change industry getting funding to the tune of $79 BILLION over 20 years doesn’t even cause the Left to twitch an eyelash. Because, you see, that was GOVERNMENT funding, which of course can’t possibly have an agenda tied to it (not even, oh I dunno, increasing government power?).
Ok, so maybe somebody DID pay Sarah Palin to give a speech. And maybe they didn’t want to be known so they funneled it through some organization or other.
SO WHAT! Sarah Palin isn’t even a government official. She has ZERO legislative power. What does it matter who paid her? You think Jon Stewart or Bill Maher do their Leftist propaganda shows for free? You think Bill Clinton gives speeches for nothing?
If Sarah Palin is getting paid to talk, then good for her.
Ya see, capitalists don’t have a problem with someone making bank in a free market. Good for them. If someone wants to pay Sarah because they believe in her message, they have every right to do so. It’s their money.
The problem is when the Leftist crony capitalists and socialists manipulate the playing field by WIELDING GOVERNMENT POWER and spending tax payer dollars. I don’t expect a Leftist tool like Who Pays Palin to understand the difference between government funding/coercian and private funding, but the rest of us do.
I think the simplest answer to Who Pays Palin is that paying her wouldn’t make her popular. Someone here already said this in some form, but I’m just trying to state it as simply as possible.
12 Unsk: “He thought Republicans shouldn’t get too confrontational and harshly political about the those issues of that could someday cause our imminent demise like nuclear war or economic depression or collapse. Somebody might get offended ya know.
This type of Republican, as well as many independents like him, are exactly the type of people who need to understand how the Left’s reductio ad absurdum line of logic always descends into insanity. This type of” moderate” always wants to put the best reasonable face on the Hard Left’s dangerously deranged ideas, and effectively gives them respectability in the arena of public discourse by even considering them. Of course, these same people object to the honesty of Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and Levin and want to deny them equal air time.”
People have to crawl before they learn to walk. I read here various things about Obama and the left in general, and no doubt many of them are true, or at least plausible. The people we’re going to need to take back this country aren’t there yet, and probably never will be. I don’t think it matters that much. It didn’t take a majority of people to empower the left, just a committed minority. We won’t need a majority to understand the left to drive them from power.
Let’s take Obama. I’ve seen all sorts of things written that he’s a power hungry Marxist who wants to destroy the Us and all that it stands for. That could be true, and many things he’s said lend credence to that theme.
OTOH, what does anyone know for sure about him? I think I know a couple of things: first, he’s totally clueless and is about as incompetent a person as we’ve ever had in high office in the US. That’s saying a lot. The second thing I know is that he is concerned with one thing, and one thing only – self promotion.
I’ve seen all sorts of speculation that he’s going to rig the 2012 elections, and that he’ll never give up power willingly. I think that is hogwash. It’s much more likely that he wants out as soon as possible. Once he’s an ex-President he can go around giving speeches, basking in adulation, and leaving the messy governing stuff to someone else. Like it or not, he’s got the whole historical
“first black President” thing going for him, and I think if he could preserve that and resign tomorrow he probably would, so he could get on with being Obama sans any responsibility.
I could be totally wrong, but I think his actions are a means to an end, not the end itself. He doesn’t appear to be worried about his re-election chances. That could be because he’s insulated from reality by the leftist cocoon he’s inhabited, but it seems much more likely to me that he doesn’t care, and may actually want to leave it all behind. That way he can “eat his waffle”, buy his
shrimp, play endless rounds of golf, and then give speeches as the historical first black President. Somebody else gets to do the work, and I don’t think that’ll bother him at all as he doesn’t seem to like to work. Talking is a lot more fun. That’s what I think he wants, that status and place in history. He got all that on election day, now he just has to put in his time and then cash in.
If he can promote the theme that he was an enlightened president who was stymied by the GOP and a bunch of redneck, racist clingers, that would work even better for him. I think that’s what he’s going for, and I think some on the left and in the Democratic Party sense that as well. They realize he’s willing to sacrifice all of them for his personal glory. But he understands that once the GOP gains power, they’ll all rally around him, just as they did Clinton. It could be he’s thrilled about the idea of the GOP gaining control of Congress. He then has an automatic excuse for everything, and the grumbling on his side will stop as they focus on the enemy.
You don’t need to convince everyone that Obama is some sort of manchurian candidate, even if it’s true. The incompetence alone (O and the left in general)is undeniable now, and that is what needs to be hammered on constantly. The “leftists are trying to destroy this country” theme just leaves many people with their eyes glazed over.
Who Pays Palin #29:
Couldn’t help noticing your use of the word “dare”.
I can’t remember the author’s name but there was a book written in the early 1970′s by an erstwhile liberal about the SDS movement on campus at Harvard (where he was in attendance) who spent a little time on this concept of issuing “dares” in the realm of political discussion, and the role of sexual repression and insecurity and inadequacy in those who issued the “dares”. You seem to be the poster child for this dynamic.
I’d add that while envy is certainly one of the most evil human attributes, even worse than greed, by far the most evil form of envy is that flavor which pretends to be concern for social/economic justice. Palin gets paid large sums of money and has political power because she deserves it. You do not get paid large sums and your power is limited to trolling on a blog with a group of intellectual superiors who rightfully mock you as a lightweight, because you do not deserve anything better. That’s the fairest thing possible. Stop worrying about how much money and things and power other people have and try to develop a skill or utility that will enable you to make some money and develop a political philosophy that moves beyond perpetual adolescence, if you are able.
At any rate, apparently you didn’t read the following exchange upthread, which applies so well to you.
Read and repeat as necessary until you are cured:
“The whole power of the Left rests in enveloping weak souls in false consciousness and false narrative and thereby seducing low souls by licensing their lowest natures.
Not only by licensing their lowest natures, but by telling them that by signing onto the program and loosing those low attributes both philosophically and physically, they have achieved a lofty state of perfect being.”
This is a beauty. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick when asked about the propriety of the Lincoln Memorial rally responded “It’s a free country…I wish it weren’t.” At Hot Air
Patrick’s spontaneous admission is the perfect description of modern liberalism.
I read the news online about this guy this morning, so I had some frame of reference. However, when I listened to Channel News Asia at lunchtime their line was,
“It is unknown why the gunman took over the station, but the man in question has a history of harassing the Discovery Channel over environmental issues.”
No wonder Singapore has such a distorted view of the US…?
When Who Pays Palin entered the thread, my first response was “Troll, do not feed.” That is still my strongest response but I also enjoy the way W and others have used the mud-throwing episode to make their own points. And some commenters have made the excellent point that Who Pays Palin (hereinafter WPP) has the payment thing exactly backwards. Money is a proxy for value, it isn’t itself valuable. By asking who pays Palin, WPP avoids (or simply fails to see) the question of why 500,000 people were moved to give up their other plans, spend their own money, show up and listen to her and others at the rally. THEY paid Palin. With their attention. The money –paid by them, paid by anybody– is a sideshow. They showed up. That is the true marker of a deeply-felt need. The market is sending a signal that it wants something else than the governing class now in office. The signal is 500,000 people listening. Not who’s writing checks.
That fact apparently is making WPP’s head explode. Interesting to watch.
re: ..PAL-PAC was a disposable entertainment company, set up to put on a one-day show..
Aha. Then don’t look to deeply into other big road shows. Most of Hollywood productions have this flavor. A corporation stands up, organizes a bunch of contractors and small specialty firms, manages the income and outgo, does the accounting, audit and tax reporting, and then disassembles itself. This is becoming the model for more and more (non-Hollywood) “production”-type businesses (especially now that computers and networks have made markets work in this arena – no need for a big company structure that sits fallow for parts of the year).
Now, if we could just get most governance to adopt this structure. More along the lines of voluntary civil society. A group of affected citizens gets together to accomplish some goal (say build a hospital or improve a road or even write a new civil code to propose to the electorate), they raise the funds and complete the task as quickly as possible, then disassemble.
No or little permanent bureaucracy, done as close to the need as possible (with the next level up of voluntary organizations generally reluctant to step in for local control, responsibility, action). Where actions are tightly connected with consequences. Little ability to defer costs or not suffer the impact.
Reminds me of the claims that regulation has been reduced (and we have problems today because of a lack of regulation, because of a “lack of government involvement”). There hasn’t been a year when a business has not had to deal with pages more of “pre-made” purchasing decisions caused by regulation. It’s so bad, that the costs of these regulations has frozen, if not reduced, actual middle class income from wages for 15-20 years. And business is happy to be complicit when the regulation raises barriers to entry or raises/sustains prices. The people who show up at these events are clearly fed up with big-government, big-unions, and big business. (what does BP fear? Not government, but competition. Answer to the spill should have been a requirement that two companies will always be awarded access to public property and are forced to race to produce it).
Early example (of business compromised by regulation) was Freon in refrigeration systems. That regulation sustained the price of refrigeration (that was starting to fall rapidly with the emergence of Asian manufacturing). Guess how many 3rd world children died because they didn’t have an (affordable) refrigerator for medicines? Ditto now florescent light bulbs. How many 3rd world children die or suffer horribly from fires caused by cheaper kerosene lamps? There’s a real cost and impact on the least-of-us. We’ve just seen how “cash-for-clunkers” has extended the recession because a fraction of the less-well-to-do population that needs transportation had a significant portion of their disposable income taken by the rise in the cost of used-cars. And we’re told its the consumption of these people (“the masses”) that is needed to drive recovery.
What a waste. Put our thumb on the scales of the market and we kill people. And since we’re a democracy where everyone is responsible when the government decides to act (irrespective of how we voted), that means we all are responsible, and in this case carry the guilt. One of the wonderful things about a free market is it allows two entities to make decisions in a way that frees me from responsibility, and restores the moral definition of “free-will” – something I, the individual choose (not as a group, and esp. not as coerced by a government, of the majority or not).
WRT the religious aspects of Marxism, I have long felt that Marxism (and it’s depraved little brother, Socialism) is a cult in that it demands that its followers take the word of its founder entirely on faith (lacking any empirical proof to support it’s precepts). The cult requires that they act against their own interests for “the greater good”, in effect to martyr themselves (or preferably others) for the betterement of society.
The most salient feature of the difference between the Leftist/Marxist cult and Judeo-Christian belief is the nature of their rules. The Ten Commandments say that you should not do this (very short) list of things, which any thinking person will allow are a pretty good set of guidelines for the peaceful functioning of a community. Leftist/Marxist ideology demands exact adherence to a voluminous list of precepts (I have a copy of Das Kapital that I use as a doorstop, it weighs about five pounds and has done more useful work over the past few years than it’s author ever managed in his lifetime) and will violently prosecute those who fail in their observance of the rules.
Mayhaps this is why they get along so well with Islamists, the desire to control every aspect of people’s lives runs through both creeds like a blood trail on fresh snow (sand?). Try to imagine a Leftist list of Commandments if you will; it will certainly be too large for an old man to carry down a mountqain if it were written on stone tables!
In effect the Judeo-Christian theology suggests that you should not behave badly to others; Marxist theology says that you will behave exactly so, or else.
To head the inevitable trolls off at the pass; yes there was an Inquisition hosted by the Church but compare the toll, a few thousand over the period of centuries as opposed to hundreds of millions in the course of eighty years or so. Consider as well that the Inquisition is repudiated by the Church, but Marxism is still embraced by the Left.
Winston, via wretchard: “But 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. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings.”
no mo uro: “The whole power of the Left rests in enveloping weak souls in false consciousness and false narrative and thereby seducing low souls by licensing their lowest natures.”
In these formulations, the congruity of socialism-leftism-statism and islamism is just about complete.
Ari Tai; “..if we could just get most governance to adopt this structure” That is brilliant! The cost savings on ifrastructure would be staggering.
Now what do we do with the current host of Bureaucrats? Many have no real work-skills.
75. aardvark ; My point exactly, and much better said as well
62. wretchard:
“But worst of all, God has the terrible habit of reasserting himself through reality. The current crisis is the revenge of God the Reality.”
For Heaven’s sake Mr. Fernandez, are you proposing that existence is primary to consciousness?
Who Pays Palin? Notice a common theme and method put forth by the “opposing viewpoint” in the comments section of some PJM articles?
The weird thing, for me, is that the Discovery Network is extremely pro-Global Warming. Why would the nut single them out? Did they accidently air a special questioning his religion? Couldn’t he find the Fox News Building?
I guess that once you set rationality aside in favor of dogma, anyone less dogmatic is automatically “the enemy”.
As someone who is certified in the psychoanalysis of trolls, I think it’s important to point out that WPP’s projection stems from the underlying materialist theology of contemporary liberalism/leftism. Palin’s evilness must be predicated on money. Kind of like Rush’s evilness must be predicated on his addiction to substances.
Their materialist underpinnings require that all leftist enterprises promote tyranny, because the laws that govern matter are deterministic. Life, on the other hand, implies an interior — at least some tendency to behave for oneself. So the laws that govern life, like the 10 commandments in the case of complex life, are designed to enhance and sustain freedom.
Peter Grynch
Lee was cleansing the temple.
Discovery’s sermons being the closest to his ‘righteous’ views; the Warmist temple just needed his ‘messiah’ intervention to deflect them leftward onto the stoney path.
( Warmists engage in conflict over that which cannot be discerned. They use ‘misty logic.’ “Ah, for the good old daze.”
Some ‘talents’ can pull ‘signal’ out of shaking keys. If that is you, you’re either a nut-case or a dog.
And with that perspective, we perceive the mechanism for Warmist alarmism: it puts food on the plate for its high priests and superiority in the souls for its adherents.)
What made the Communist Party different from every other ordinary political organization (ie “The Republican Party”) was that they didn’t seek office; they sought the Throne of God.
They sought the Throne of No-God. Different.
BC, help me here, what is the argument being used to declare the US economy monsterous?
The only demand he left off was removing the letter “M” from the alphabet.
83. michaelhoskins ;
I think that falls under the heading “Hate America First” one of leftism’s First Principles; either that or it is because we are way more productive than any other economy on the planet and produce far less pollution per unit of production…..it just isn’t fair!!!!
Wretchard @ 48:
“There was a time not so long ago when the Left wouldn’t talk about the likes of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin because they were too far beneath them to notice.”
That’s just silly, written in haste and rage without pausing to reflect on the history of right-wing demagoguery. To believe that, you must have never read any MSM on Rush Limbaugh in the 90s or on Morton Downey, Jr. or Wally George in 80s. To believe that you have to be utterly unfamiliar with the alarms over the right-wing pastor (and pervert) Billy James Hargis or to have never heard of Father Coughlin.
Wretchard, reread this little post of yours and then go back to reread some of your writings in summer of 2008. Why were voters upset with George W. Bush? Why did they give him such low poll ratings as well as so much of the GOP candidates? According to your analysis then, it had to be the malign influence of the MSM. Progress was being made in Afghanistan and Iraq and the economy was just fine. Why couldn’t people see it? The people must rubes, suckers, unable to see the true progress made by a president you supported so often.
When the Tea Party inevitably falls to corruption and the endless “ways of Washington”, as it already is beginning to with Rick Scott and Marc Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul’s jog to the center and your beloved Scott Brown, then who will you blame? Maybe yourself for being so unwilling to follow the $ trail of the Tea Party Express, Americans for Prosperity and Palin’s paid appearances.
Really, it shouldn’t be such a difficult question. And yet the bad conscience, weasel words and uneasy avoidance reveals so much about the Belmont Club. Who pays Palin?
The San Jose Mercury-News carried a piece on this event this morning on page 3. Not a single word on Lee’s political views or his endorsement of radical leftist/environmentalist view or of Al Gore.
I too have meet such watermelons as Lee here in California and they are scary. Worst, they are influential.
I fondly remember when whiskey used to post here. Whiskey had some strong views. Whiskey was not a troll, but sometimes he went overboard in his views to the point that he was often beating a deadhorse and ultimately he was banned from this board. It would be an insult to the memory of Whiskey to allow a genuine unrepentant troll like whopayspalin to keep posting trash here that is far more unpalatable that whiskey ever was.
WPP: Let me fix your projection for you:
That’s just silly, written in haste and rage without pausing to reflect on the history of LEFT-wing demagoguery.
(And here I am speaking about your posts.)
There is very little so called “right-wing” demagoguery. It is almost all from the Left.
Accusations of “right-wing demagoguery” from the Left are general made when anyone outside the Left makes any sort of commonsensical assertion against, or criticism of said left wing demagoguery. All such claim by the Left are just rhetoric, deflections or projections.
BTW, that would does not mean what you think it does.
WPP, again, you are way over your head here. Go back to KOS. Or Mommy’s basement.
You are living in a fantasy world.
Whiskey was never a troll. He is in fact in the linkroll. The problem with Whiskey was twofold. He was enough of a part of the community to “speak for it” in a way that a troll, who is an outsider, does not. The second difficulty was that I think he was offending other long standing members of the community. The Whiskey problem was in the nature of handling an internal conflict to the Belmont Club.
It was unacceptable to ask him to censor himself. So the onus fell to me to choose; and I chose as best as I could. I don’t believe anybody who wrote to me complaining of Whiskey should be blamed. People can complain any time they like and not feel sorry for it. The responsibility for the loss is mine. That doesn’t solve anything, but there it is.
About all I can say is that people are welcome to visit Whiskey’s site and indeed they should. He is probably better served in that forum than here, where for good or ill, the responsibility for content is mine.
Though they are not strictly comparable, the present troll sneeringly refers to the “little posts” that are on this site and yet relies on the audience of these “little posts” to advance his cheesy arguments. So in memory of Whiskey, I’ll ban the troll and he can advance his grant arguments on a site of his own, where I am sure he will attract an audience worthy of his mettle.
Conventional wisdom may judge someone insane for believing in human parasites, when in fact such judgements are the result of ignorance.
Why don’t you tell us, wpp, who it is?
“BC, help me here, what is the argument being used to declare the US economy monsterous?”
The USA not only allows wealth creation, in the near past (pre-Obomination) it encouraged it. That is antipathetic to the 4th world. We are all supposed to have the same amount of money, which is their idea of equality. Since the exact number is unknown and varies from person to person, Socialism, Marxism and Communism end up with zero being the right number.
Of course, the party elite cannot be elite unless they pay themselves more so socialism ends up the same as capitalism, only the serfs don’t have as much of a chance of getting out of the mud.
Remember the communist joke; ‘The state pretends to pay the workers and the workers pretend to work’.
I won’t consider WPP a troll. Trolls hit and run. They pop up from under the bridge, growl and then run back to their cave. If they stick around to defend their words, they are not trolls. Another poster’s disagreement with those words doesn’t make them a troll.
Accusing someone of being a troll is sort of an ad hominem. In the case of WPP it would be better to Fisk him. Some of his logic looks weak, to be charitable. If WPP (I’m assuming it’s a he, since the word choice seems masculine) can defend his logic, then WE need to alter our perceptions.
Now he might be a Paid flack. ITM was infested with them during the early days of Iraq. Soros was writing checks again. I suspect Soros is getting hammered to ride to the rescue.
Soros would really hate to see Congress flip. It might even affect his life style, since there was something funny about the market crash in ’08.
It hasn’t been investigated because the stock market crash put the Obomation in office and the SEC is the tail of the White Hose. They wag as they are told to.
The way to deal with a soros flack is to prove that their talking points are invalid. That shows they are useful fools.
I would Fisk him but I’m hitting a RW busy spell. Campaigning. Doing the door to door stuff. Grunt work, but somebody has to do the dishes and take out the trash. Republicans went 9 for 9 in the local elections and we are going to try and run the table in State. With non-crooks.
I had to re-read WPP’s post numerous times and the best I could come up with is : “So what?” News flash! Celebrity gets paid for speech! Buh-bye WPP. You took up too much oxygen with too little purpose.
What I find most ironic, and humorous, is the far-left created much of Palin’s celebrity by attacking her so vigorously. If she had just run as a Vice Presidential candidate and lost, she would not be nearly as famous. I mean, who even remembers Geraldine Ferraro beyond her candidacy?
Obviously, Sarah Palin is a far more commanding figure on the national political scene than either Joe Trippi, Bob Beckel, or Howard Dean. But like them, she is neither an office holder nor a candidate. And as with Trippi and Beckel, and Dean questions about who pays her, how much, and for what are really nobody’s business.
SpeakEasy,
Geralsine Ferraro? I can remember Bill Miller… before the American Express commercial!
Right y’all are –but unless wpp tells us who it is that so ignites his tailfeathers, we can’t have a good laugh as we wait here for the Glenn Beck show to start, the show where he has promised to start naming names of those who worked so hard to effect the financial crash. Some of us already know these names, of course, and what would be really interesting is to hear from wpp that these are the people who pay Palin. This would be the only man-bites-dog angle –unless of course it’s the mafia, the kremlin, the PLA, the vatican, the masons, the jews, the blacks, the latinos, the KKK, the presbyterians, BP, and/or extra-terrestrials who pays Palin.
Occasional trolls are welcome fauna, freeing one from having to go out and visit the environs they inhabit.
Who Pays names some fairly ancient-history examples of “right-wing demagoguery.” (The guy can spell and hyphenate, I’ll give him that.) Could one, if one looked really hard, find some more recent examples of left-wing demagoguery? Hello Rev. J. Wright? Sharpton? Pelosi? Reid? Just some no-names in the crowd.
In the case of Who Pays, I suspect one sees the shrinking set of memes available to critics of Palin and the Tea Party. Criticizing a person’s book and speaking engagement income? Goodness, there goes Barack’s entire pre-White House income. (At present, of course, Barack has a limitless expense account, which he and Michelle exercise quite often. Ask not who pays for Barack now. We all do. And the income from the books keeps coming in.)
Book contracts are interesting as money laundering ventures, as supporters-backers-sponsors buy bulk orders to steer money to the author. Palin received no bulk orders, as far as I know. People wanted to read her book. So the interesting question might be, to elaborate what Wretchard said, “Who Wasn’t Paying Palin?”
Palin might have influential donors who contribute to her PAC? Golly, that’s what PAC’s are for. One might ask who contributed to Barack’s election fund. We’ll never know, since he didn’t access public funds and will not be audited by the FEC.
Maya Angelou, by the way, gets $30 to $50K for a drive-by presentation at your local campus, paid for by student activity fees.
Will the Tea Party fall to corruption, as Who Pays anticipates? For sure. That anyone would expect politicians to tend to anything other than corruption reveals a kind of utopianism that yields such phenomena as . . . Barack Obama.
That’s why we have elections.
#10 “What changed in the late 20th century is that the Englightened Ones decided to intervene and keep these mutations alive.”
Oh, I think that goes all the way back to the League of Nations. Perhaps the founders believed that by preventing wars from going to their full conclusion they’d be discouraging war.
#83 We haven’t been following the Club of Rome’s road map to neo-primitivism enthusiastically enough. Too many of us non-elites still have nice things.
Just think, wpp, if each of the 500,000 who attended the Beck rally would be willing to pay Palin one dollar a week to continue her high-profile, cheerful, savage and truthful squelching of the grand personages of the ruling class, it would cost that person only $52 for a blissful year of righteous comeuppance –a year that would change the world, if the world could be changed by America getting the crooks and communists the hell out of those government buildings in DC.
Yep, that’d be twenty-four million bucks for Miss Sarah –and worth every penny, a bargain at ten thousand times the price.
You know, being leftist doesn’t protect you from other leftists? Ariel Gore, from Hipmama, was obliged to shut down her chatboard because “non- breeders” were hunting down her most vocal posters, and harming them, and their children in public places. These were leftist women with children in tie- dyes, eating only organic food, or on the dole, or in college, or in college and on the dole and living in tie-dye. Innocent, tiny children hunted down and hurt.
He might be a violent freak, but he had people agreeing with him, and they are still around.
There are people writing of getting spit at when they are out with their children, or people making hurtful comments about too many children.
You know, I think part of this is the brainwashing endured by everyone in the seventies- the “killer child” genre of horror films being an example.
On point article at the Manhattan Institute tracing the lineage of today’s (anti)progressives to the mid-nineteenth century Tory alarmists.
Radical environmentalists’ Tory disdain for democracy and for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished. True to its late-1960s origins, political environmentalism in America gravitates toward both bureaucrats and hippies: toward a global, big-brother government that will keep the middle classes in line and toward a back-to-the-earth, peasantlike localism, imposed on others but presenting no threat to the elites’ comfortable lives.
Somewhere out there there is an adult leftie capable of arguing his position on the merits. Why is that so difficult?
Wretchard @ 90: “So in memory of Whiskey, I’ll ban the troll”
Nicely done, W! And a fitting tribute to one of Belmont’s graduates.
Different opinions are good — when they are based on reason and are well presented. And are subject to change in the light of evidence. WhoPaysPalin demonstrated none of those redeming qualities. And if we want brain-dead liberalism, all we have to do is check out the New York Times.
The people who would kill us for our own sakes draw a hard dichotomy between the World of Men and the World of Nature. It’s a dichotomy constructed entirely in their own minds. In reality, if I can use the term, man is part of nature. He is a product of nature. The first generation of stars had to die and a second generation born to produce the carbon of which we are made.
You can argue that the universe, in deep time, will continue to produce intelligent life, no matter the efforts of “environmentalists” to destroy it in favor of other life forms. Perhaps on a million planets environmentalists have managed to killed the Breeders, to destroy the children. It will not be the first time in human history that such attempts have been made. A statue to the Great God Moloch ought to be erected before the temples of Leftist feminism. The demons have been there, done that. But on the millionth and first planet, or the billionth and first, life will survive. Some intelligence will decide to live. I figure it might as well be us.
And elsewhere:
I’m in Munich today on vacation. I go see the oberamergau passion of christ play tomorrow. Today’s tour included visits old palaces and cathedrals that have been converted into tourist meccas. The cathedrals have lots of pictures across the ceilings and walls. The alters have elaborate colorful statues. The stories of the bible are told in pictures and stone. The cathedrals are much like modern south american cathedrals. The palaces, built from the 17th-19th centuries convey power, majesty and authority on a big scale and a sense of command wherein everyone heard “peasant know thy place.” In these centuries a very few wealthy nobles ruled a very large peasant class. Today these old noble families make their money mostly on tourism. The number of beer gardens here is immense. I don’t know how people can live with so much beer. At a certain age I realized I had to quit or die. The october fest next month draws 6 million people. Lots of bikes in downtown munich and few of them were locked. There are no parking garages. We passed the old Nazi hq. The most interesting thing about it is that the architecture looks just as ugly as communist architecture. The tour guide told us that since reunification 20 years ago government services in Germany have declined– she said the likely reason was because so much money was poured into the old east germany.
I have not figured out how to get google or yahoo to display in English.
Oberamergau’s passion play began in the 1600′s during the 30 years war. A plague hit the small town. After surviving the plague the people decided to put on the play in gratitude for surviving.
Accusing someone of being a troll is sort of an ad hominem.
Prima facie, this is absolute nonsense. It is merely calling a thing by its real name, and the behavior associated with that thing goes far beyond you quite limited definition of a troll. Would that they go away after their rantings. What you are describing is just drive-by, hit and run trolling–it is a subset of the vice. Don’t you ever read some of the other blogs on PJM? These behaviors are those of true trolls, and they never go away.
We manage for the most part to keep them out of here because of the level here. That and the fact that we do not tolerate their nonsense for 10 seconds. When one intrudes he is generally a professional or a neophyte that has wandered over from one of the sillier blogs on PMJ.
Fisk WPP? There is nothing to Fisk. You are not in a rational or reasonable domain with these people.
It is like “fisking” that poor soul who was shooting up The Discovery Channel.
We have no obligations whatsoever to loons like WPP other than to treat them like the dangerous and idiotic louts that they are.
I don’t miss him already, wasn’t making much sense, just, y’know, seething.
WPP just struck me as sophomoric — in the sense of Junior High School.
The Turing Test established a threshold of cognition and response: machine response risen to the point of pseudo-sentience.
WPP didn’t pass my Turing Test, too much rote posting.
C-4 used to post like that: names and connections and all.
He penned a menagerie of malefactors.
Of particular menace was the hidden payola of AIPAC.
He devoutly held that such brazen lobbying was a sinister force.
If only he could expose their Sorosian, sub-rosa, cabal of paid operatives!
–wonder what happened to old C4. Maybe he went to work for the administration. Maybe he’s off in Utah or Idaho running a secret FEMA camp…sauntering through the grounds, growling, slapping a riding crop against the top of his jodhpur kneeboots
***
Charles, since you’re in Germany, and also interested in the ‘peak oil’ topic, you may want to save this German military report on the implications:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6912
“Who pays Palin?”
I pay her. I own her, lock, stock and barrel–she doesn’t even dare LOOK a moose unless I’m in a good mood and give her permission to do so. That answers that question, now doesn’t it. Who pays me? You get to ask that question, but you DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEMAND AN ANSWER.
See, that’s where the Hard Left tries to cow decent citizens, by demanding answers to their often arbitrary and illogical questions. What will they do if you don’t answer? Throw you in prison? Get you fired from your job? Pee in your goldfish tank and leave an illegible, incoherent but very vehement message taped to its side? Probably the latter, given what we’ve seen here.
Realistically, they’ll call you names. Go ahead. When you can call me worse names than any sergeant I’ve served under could I’ll be impressed. Mainly because I cared what they thought–you, not so much. In fact, not at all. Wanna call me a racist? OK.
“I’m a racist/he’s a racist/she’s a racist/we’re all racists/wouldn’t you like to be a racist too?” With apologies to Dr. Pepper.
See how it works? You can make all the damands and challenges you want, but unless we care enough to take you seriously they’re as relevant as a mouse fart. Dismissed….
Who pays Palin?
I do.
I bought her book. I’ve attended her events.
I am Sparticus.
Who’s paying you, “Who Pays Palin?”
“I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.”
Compassionate “conservative:”
Kathleen Parker – My name is Glenn Beck, and I need help
Beck has built a movement framed by two ideas that are unassailable: God and country. Throw in some Mom and apple pie, and you’ve got a picnic of patriotism and worship.
Wait, did somebody say . . . Mom???
Sister Sarah, come on down!
Yes, Mother Superior made an appearance. Sarah Palin, whom Beck sainted a few months ago during an interview in which he declared her one of the few people who can save America, came to the Mall not to praise politics but to honor our troops.
Palin is the mother of a soldier, after all, and God bless her, and him, and all those who have served. Unassailable. As Palin said, whatever else you might say about her, she did raise a combat soldier. “You can’t take that away from me.”
Who you? Oh, that’s right, The Media. Never mind that Beck is one of the richest members of the media. Or that Palin has banked millions primarily because The Media can’t get enough of her. But what’s an exorcism without a demon? And who better to cast into the nether regions than the guys lugging camera lights?
Covering all his bases, Beck invoked the ghost of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who stood in the same spot 47 years ago to deliver his most famous speech. Where King had a dream, Beck has a nightmare: “It seems as darkness begins to grow again, faith is in short supply.”
Really? When did that happen? Because it seems that people talk about God all the time these days. Even during the heyday of Billy Graham, most Americans could get through 16 or so waking hours without feeling compelled to declare where they stood on the deity.
And the darkness? Creeping communism brought to us by President you-know-who. Conspiracy theories and paranoia are not unfamiliar to those who have wrestled the demon alcohol.
—
Let’s hope Glenn gets well soon.
Charles @ 105: I have not figured out how to get google or yahoo to display in English.
For Google, type it in like this:
http://www.google.com/ncr
The “ncr” tells it not to redirect to the local version. I don’t know if this will work in Yahoo.
You could also try http://www.google.us if the above doesn’t work.
As the saying goes, behind every cloud there is a silver lining. Hate me if you want to but actually WhoPaysPalin did bring up an interesting point, although perhaps not in the way it was intended. Far too often corruption can be nailed down by simply following the money.
IMHO the basic problem is that most people want to follow the money up. I think it would be far more productive to follow the money down from the usual suspects, and then to follow it up. For example, who does George Soros pay? I’d like a list of that. And then, as the algorithm goes, go back up the chain for the people he pays and do indeed check out who else pays them. Include them, if they are somebody different, into the list of usual suspects and repeat the cycle again and again. If done properly it might give us a rather authoritative road map of political corruption and the evidence needed to send them all to Hell.
Doug, what Kathleen Parker is saying –rather frankly, frankly –is that she’d prefer Beck to’ve –rather than redeem himself and become a powerful preacher teaching a great swath of citizenry the grace of choosing redemption –to’ve just remained a drunk.
Wonder why anyone would feel that way? Wonder if she ever asks herself that question.
Well September 2nd marks the anniversary of the Japanese surrender. That and Wretchard’s article got me to thinking about the two incidents in the Spring of 1932 that started the end of democracy in Japan, especially the May 15th incident. To simplify, assassination of an elected official was presented in a sympathetic way by young military cadets that led to light sentencing and a military take over of the government.
A side note: I was watching the film of the surrender and noticed the narrator got a couple of digs in for those not at the signing. The rare parchment that the surrender documents was printed on was found in a basement in Manila and that one of the Japanese officials walked with a cane because he was wounded by a Korean patriot before the war started.
buddy: I doubt that she does ask herself this question. Does she have a self? In must be in there somewhere i guess, all wrapped up in a napkin and tucked away in a drawer some place, some place right next to her soul.
She probably is not aware of what she intends. It is dreary to keep saying it, but the Left’s projection of hatred on the the real is really self hatred. They would destroy us all to keep from facing themselves. That is why they are so dangerous. They will fight and fight to stay in denial.
Ironically, this is something that they actually share with alcoholics.
There is nothing wrong with Beck: he does the nation a service. Let us hope more people pick up on what he is doing and emulate him. Beck is out there attempting to build back the consciousness, faith and spine of America to what it once was. He is improvising–trying his practical best. He is not waiting on a grand strategy or the right moment for he knows there is no time and no grand strategy can save us. It is all a bit clumsy and all very American. He is right. Love will find a way. Let us hope that other people, perhaps with more subtle minds and deeper souls, take up his challenge and build back the nation in their own private and public spheres.
When the Left start calling you a drunk, you know you are doing something right.
Buddy, I don’t think Kathleen means that, exactly. She doesn’t mind that Glenn got sober. She just wishes he were more private about it. She’s hearing that, because he recovered from personal addictions, he can guide the United States in our repentence and recovery. Kathleen isn’t so sure she needs to walk that path herself.
#109 Buddy
“Peak Oil” and the German Government: Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis… – http://tinyurl.com/3747e7c
hmmm Germany will need a strong euro to buy oil and mineral that she needs for her export industry, thus tha means throwing the Mediterranean Klub under the bus
Why Market Is Now More Certain Than Ever That Greece Will Default, And A European Funding Update http://bit.ly/9Dtbh4
hmmm and Germany will worship Putin and the ayatollah, that she discretly does for quite a while
But the Mercedes will become out of price for the new sising economies
109. buddy larsen
Yeah the problem the europeans have is that unless they can find large chunks of natural gas like the USA has just done in the last couple years–they’re in a world of hurt because even if the US does convert to natural gas for trucks and busses — the great downdraft in oil prices that will cause will be made up for in an upsurge of natural gas prices.
That will be ok in the USA — at least as far as the balance of trade is concerned but a wash for Europe where lower oil prices will be matched by higher natural gas prices.,,,
hmmm likely oil consumption is far higher in europe than natural gas consuption … a US switch gain to Europe would be a net gain for Europe.
Palin would be the one to see this happen in short order. In any case she has said many times in the past that she would see it as part of her job — as vice president during the last campaign — to bring energy independence to the USA.
I don’t know where she is on that right now.
wb/118 & m/117; i think those two thoughts really form the bookends of what the right-minded people feel (think?) about the GB phenom. Sort of “I’m not sure I myself need him, but I know that others surely do, and that still others, on the grounds that they personally are already trying very hard to do right, might be offended by his assumptions.”
And that’s all to the good. We’re gonna get peeled like that if we get anywhere near the revival tent. All those people in there embarrassing themselves, stumbling and reaching and trying to learn how to turn off the endless self-criticism that whips us into cynical disillusion.
“Hey, self, you ain’t so mucking fuch, what’s the big deal?”
“Who Pays Palin”:
You are the one who pays Palin. You feed her. The Daily Show feeds her. The New York Times feeds her. The Nation magazine feeds her. The more leftists and liberals attack her, the more popular she becomes. The more she is vilified with a passion, the stronger she gets. If you truly want her power to wither, leave her alone.
In many respects, Sarah Palin is more of a creation of the liberal tabloid imagination than anything else. She acts as a cultural mirror image of Barack Obama; those who worship one tend to demonize the other. They are “exotic” in diametrically opposed ways. I think she was picked as a vice presidential candidate because of the obvious contrast.
Sarah Palin ought to be viewed with curious detachment. The more you get sucked into focusing on her, the more you are within her power.
There was a time when I thought the Left stood up against the power of big money, but when leftist organizations fawn over the money of George Soros, I lose respect for them. Hence, I detect a note of hypocrisy over leftist suggestions that she is a paid puppet.
So, who is paying Palin? You are.
119/MC & 120/Charles –yep, reports like that don’t just get leaked, it’s part of a long range prep job. Iran has shown NATO to itself –out of oil ‘favor’ from Russia and the mideast unless the USA finds some of the old magic again. Hard to even look for it dragging the debt wreck. Nyquist thinks the bear is already in the Gulf of Mexico.
Buddy, where the heck have you been? You missed a History Channel “Heavy Metal” presentation on guess what airplane? I woke Charley Pinson up in Flrida and he said it was fair to middling accurate.
He and I will rendevous in San Antone in October and go catch Midland Air Sho then return to SA for reunion. Can we stop by your domicile and say “Howdy”> And don’t ferget trip to Nimitz 15 Oct.
I would seriously suggest that NASA be given the task of developing a jet engine that flys on LNG. Also offer good-sized prize(s) for any private sector development of same. Then we can develop all of those shales without fearing that natural wellhead prices will fall to negative cash flow levels.
Also, “New Scientist” had article on how some medical nanotechnology could locate
oil in dry oils and get them to gush. See if you can find that piece.
How to finance? Revenue bonds directly serviced and redeemed from royalties. Make them Zero Coupons at 40 to 50% original discount. 15 years or so to maturity. Then as royalties come in, randomly select those due for early redemption each year. That will spike interest and insure that original owners will be able to sell at a profit before maturity date.
Oh, and did you catch Hank Jr’s new release about Obama always going back on his word? It is called “The Great Reneger”.
118. Whiggish Boffin-
If that is what she meant, that is what she’d say, without all the sarcasm, sacrilege, and put downs.
But hey, it got her jobs with the WaPo and CNN!
Not the first time she’s turned the knife in the back of “fellow conservatives,” nor will it be the last.
—
“There was a time when I thought the Left stood up against the power of big money, but when leftist organizations fawn over the money of George Soros, I lose respect for them…”
For Bubba and Hillary, Soros is small potatoes.
Bill makes millions in fees speaking to Muslims in the Oil Patch.
The Honorable Secretary of State Hillary gives hundreds of millions to the same folks for building mosques, while handing out free copies of Rauf’s book paid for by our offspring.
James Lee- “we need to rid the planet of filthy human procreators!”
police- “well. ok mr. Lee, so how ’bout we start with you first?”
“Accusing someone of being a troll is sort of an ad hominem.
Prima facie, this is absolute nonsense. It is merely calling a thing by its real name, and the behavior associated with that thing goes far beyond you quite limited definition of a troll.”
http://www.flayme.com/troll/
{snipped}
“What Is A Troll?
The term derives from “trolling”, a style of fishing which involves trailing bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The troll posts a message, often in response to an honest question, that is intended to upset, disrupt or simply insult the group.”
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Internet_troll
{snipped}
“The term derives from the phrase “trolling for newbies” and ultimately from trolling for fish; it first appeared on Usenet. The term is frequently abused to slander opponents in heated debates and is frequently misapplied to those who are ignorant of etiquette. ”
Maybe you don’t know what ‘Ad Hominem’ means;
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html
{snipped}
“An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. ”
The claim was made that WPP was a troll. Then that claim was used as an argument to counter WPP’s post. CLASSIC Ad Hominem.
Now if you want to expand ‘troll’ to mean anyone that disagrees with you then I suppose that is your 1st amendment right. I also have a first amendment right to use a more standard definition of ‘troll’. So I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.
Where I disagree most is when you assume malice on the part of those you deem trolls. I think ignorance is the cause.
“09. buddy larsen
Yeah the problem the europeans have is that unless they can find large chunks of natural gas like the USA has just done in the last couple years–they’re in a world of hurt because even if the US does convert to natural gas for trucks and busses — the great downdraft in oil prices that will cause will be made up for in an upsurge of natural gas prices.”
In my best evil Boris accent: “Buddy, von’t vurry, just vring your Amerikan shale gas drilling and Izraeli enh-enced rekov-ui nano technologiya – and your single engineerz from Texastan looking for beu-ti-ful vives – to Mother Russia. Poof, no problem. Europe vil run out of people before Russia run out of people or gaz.”
Seriously, amid all the breathless predictions from Ed Lucas at the Economist, the Washington Post, and other Russophobe hacks as to how shale gas can set Europe free from evil Gazprom, there has been precious little discussion of the reserves in The Motherland itself. Which is a pity, since they are substantial, and the Urals has the same geologic age as the Appalachians where the Marcellus is booming. Less need to spend gazillions to pick gas out of Greenland, Yamal or Russia’s Arctic shelf.
I suspect the real competition in two or three years will be between Russia and China (Xinjiang) for those American and Canadian PEs. Why make 70k in OKC or Calgary if you can pull down 100k in Tyumen or Yekaterinberg at 13% flat tax? The girls sure are preddier and there’s always jetting off to Antalya Turkey on weekends…
Perhaps Gen Yer Senor Equis can find a new career for himself giving Russian lessons to Chesapeake and Schlumberger employees…
My own view of Glenn Beck is that if he and Palin can’t talk about the defense budget on the stage while discussing the looming bankruptcy of America, then they’re not being fully honest. That’s not to say that there is not plenty else to cut, but the trillion dollar defense/intel/homeland security bloat with bases in 120 countries (what honest Ike once called the military industrial complex) has got to go on a crash diet too. The Iranians are not going to take over the Gulf States if we do that, as the Sunnis and Chinese wouldn’t let them do it.
There’s an argument to be made that everyone who posts on boards like this could be considered a “troll” in the classic sense, because everyone who writes is looking for that response, that spark of emotion in someone else that they may have instigated.
On the other hand, that is better looked at as just normal human interaction, and in practice what we mean by “trolling” tends to be those who use insults, attacks, and negativity against particular members of a group in order to spark a response in the cheapest way possible. I think it’s not all that bad a thing if it leads to a good discussion; on a board like this that prides itself in reflective discussion, however, there’s a great distaste for someone who jumps in and drags the level of conversation into the gutter just because it amuses them. (or whatever) Personally, I know the line where I no longer think this kind of posting should be tolerated by a host (and it’s always the host’s call, of course) is when a poster not only negates the thrust of the original topic but through his repeated and angry posts manages to hijack an entire thread and make it all about HIM. I think you can read through this thread and see that that was happening here.
I think many people fail to understand why Beck’s past alcoholism *increases* not only his appeal, but validates his entire message. The left, which has no idea what Christianity is all about, certainly doesn’t understand it. Funny how the left is always far more judgmental and unforgiving than the Christians who they hate; well, not that surprising since they have never understood the concept of salvation, and how forgiveness, not judgment, is the true core of Christianity.
But Beck has shown himself to be particularly brilliant in this area – is this deliberate or did he stumble into it by fortunate accident? Who can say. Beck has now cast himself as a man who can preach the Apostle Paul’s original message, and it is working now just like it worked back then.
Compare Beck’s confession of his old life to what Paul said to Timothy in this passage: 1:12 “I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, 13 though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.”
Beck has confessed to alcoholism; Paul confessed to helping in the murder of one of God’s messengers, Stephen. In 1 Corinthians 6 Paul gives the famous “roll call of the damned”, the sins for which men forfeit the Kingdom of Heaven, but he closes with the great statement “And Such were some of YOU! But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
That, in it’s most succinct form, is what Christianity is all about.
I put this here not to proselytize but to show that Beck has adopted this message as his own, and he’s done it in a way that is honest and genuine. The message works now just as it has worked for 2000 years because it reaches out and touches the heart and soul of the men and women who hear it. And the secular left is forever bewildered and flustered by this appeal, contemptuous at what they cannot understand and furious that it speaks to a part of the human heart that is forever closed off to them.
Live as a troll, die as a troll, with or without payment. Those of us who have lived long enough to know good from bad, right from wrong, guidance from misguidance, will continue to read, observe and assess. Politicians reveal themselves more fully over time, it is inevitable – provided attention span and memory are functioning. The USA has an important time coming, when it might claw itself back from the precipice; but the active partisanship and obfuscation of the media who “inform” the lumpenproletariat (voters) will remain a problem.
“Though they are not strictly comparable, the present troll sneeringly refers to the “little posts” that are on this site and yet relies on the audience of these “little posts” to advance his cheesy arguments. So in memory of Whiskey, I’ll ban the troll and he can advance his grant arguments on a site of his own, where I am sure he will attract an audience worthy of his mettle.”
Hush!
Listen…
I think I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth out in the wilderness…
Good for you, W. I think in the end that someone who approaches all their commentary in the manner of being a tool (in multiple senses of the word) deserves exile.
And does this not tie in lovingly with your points about the Left feeding off the host organism even as they decry it?
WPSP belittles TBC even as he attempts to co-opt it to get his message out.
I would say “The Gall!” if I thought people like that even had any concept of the shameless nature of their hypocrisy.
It would seem that “The Great Reneger” is the product of a Mike Fischer (who bears some resemblance to Hank, Jr).
“There’s an argument to be made that everyone who posts on boards like this could be considered a “troll” in the classic sense, because everyone who writes is looking for that response, that spark of emotion in someone else that they may have instigated.”
Yes, but then you hit the classic Yin and Yang of it. If everyone is a troll, what meaning does the word have? Do we start accusing posters of being non-trolls?
Liberals are trying/have tried to ban hate. If they do that they will also ban love, since there cannot be love without hate. No down without an up. Left must have a right or there is no direction. Western society has embraced a ‘cult of personality’. We mostly look at the cover before deciding to buy the book. Those of us that still read.
Those that don’t, watch movies, which in turn are sold by posters or ads featuring square jawed manly men and large silicon bosom long legged peroxide blonds. Sort of a 20th century book cover. It would be a great improvement if humans started looking past the advertising and judging the content.
For one thing it would greatly reduce the number of long legged mac daddies in office.
wws welll I don’t buy Beck redemption, as he was a addict and compulsive drinker, he just reverse his compulsivity to another domain, which isn’t a rational behaviour, nor a passionate but a ersatz to fill a void
Marie Claude (you too wws): I usually don’t talk about this but I learned the nature
of acute alcoholism the hard way. I had three years worth of war to include injuries and other unpleasantries. One year of alcoholism. War ain’t shit!
All war can do is eliminate your body somewhat ahead of time and in manners you rather not employ. Alcoholism destroys your soul. Now that is the best I can put it.
Alcoholics are born, not made. Seven people out of every eight have a built-in fuse
in their bodies. This fuse prevents the prolonged over-consumption of alcohol that leads to dependency and/or addiction. For the eighth person, the Good Lord (working in His usual mysterious ways) put a penny back of the fuse. His or her problem is not psychological in orgin, it is physiological. Out of every 800 people who drink, there will be 100 alcoholics and 100 cases of alcoholism. Out of every 800 people who never, ever take a drink, there will be 100 alcoholics but zero cases
of alcoholism.
As far as the psyche goes, those in the throes of alcoholism are in a permanent state of both despair and denial of same. In those who are sucessfully recovering, the despair seems to get replaced by a well-founded sense of realistic optimism.
That is why Glen Beck, as frightened as he is of what seems to be approaching total victory of the “progressives” can rally half a million people to inform those others that they have to go off the abyss by themselves. The rest of us will not go with them. In this regard, he is persuading the public to act like recovering co-alcoholics and refuse to do anything to enable and sponsor others addictions. As Wretchard might put it, he not only is preaching the power of NO!, with Sarah as
sidekick, it is the power of HELL NO!
Glen’s persona is there for all to see. But the success of the rally came from his channeling Mrs Beck.
‘Nuff said.
Thanks to Mr. Samford in #127 for some useful clarification of logic and language.
However, my personal definition of a “troll” hinges on my perception of the troll’s motivations. Does he or she WANT to be civil and a contributor or does the troll intend to sow anger and discontent? Sometimes trolling is for conscious disruption and is performed as a tactic. However most trolls are “acting out” their own internal demons by behaving badly in public but in a protected way. Most would not say the things they do in any face-to-face conversation or where personal reprocussions could be expected. They are seeking personal power (negative in this case) without personal cost or discipline.
That said, a few commenters who behave like trolls just have poor writing and communications skills. They can be forgiven but need not be tolerated either – we should have SOME standards!
Before one offers the counterargument that motivation is difficult to ascribe, let me say that our human ability to determine motivation in others is a social skill critical to our survival.
Dave
Impressive and constructive witness, difficult to imagine how it is being a alcoholic if one hadn’t pass through it. I still can decider if Beck is authentic, or if he plays a partition. He’s been saying so many things, even contradictory. Well I guess I don’t know the character enough
I still can decider –> I still can’t decide
wws, et al, I respectfully disagree with your definition of all commentors as “trolls.” I personally do not post comments intending to spark an emotion or throw out a challenge. I do so for one of two reasons: as a witness with first-hand experience in the topic at hand or to have a civil discussion on a topic and hopefully learn something new. For me, WPP received instant troll status because he interjected a diatribe of nonsense into a totally unrelated topic. When your first reaction is, “WTF?”, you are probably looking at troll droppings. Of course the only opinion that really matters, when judging troll status, is our host’s opinion. Everyone has a right to their own opinion- on their own blog. IMO, Wretchard is more than fair in this regard.
With regard to Glenn Beck, he is the first to identify himself as an entertainer. You seek inspiration or redemption from him at your own risk. Most of his “revelations” are hiding in plain sight; He just has a well located soapbox. He reminds me of Monty Python’s Brian when being pursued by Romans. He “hides” up on the wall among the proselytizers and starts making very general statements about life. When the Romans move away he stops and tries to get away but some of the listeners start asking him to continue and he gains an instant following. Of course that is just my opinion…:)
Thanks for the wonderful sentence, Blert:
“If only he could expose their Sorosian, sub-rosa, cabal of paid operatives!”
I will have to give that name to the villain of my next story: “Sabrosa Sorosian.”
See, Sabrosa in Spanish means “Delicious, or Tasty”… and the Sorosian name embeds one of the most sinister figures of the age in a name redolent of ancient mideastern culture, Armenian tenacity and intrigue.
I get an image of a lithe and sensuous beauty, able to negotiate with powerful and dangerous adversaries, and match their schemes play-by-play, diddling their brains with a blast of feminine pheromones…
Wonderful how much one can mine and exploit the thoughts and writing of your comrades in these precincts!
Buddy, regarding your post 109, we need to recall that it was President I-Can’t-Control-My-Own-Willie Clinton who authorized the DOE to make the Elk Hills Oil Reserves available for public auction during his administration. We further need to recall that it was Occidental Petroleum — a very large share of which is owned by the family of Nobel Laureate Environmental POSEUR Al Gore — that was awarded the $Billion + contract.
Amazin’ coincidence, if you believe in coincidences…
The U.S. Department of Energy official website describes this as “the largest divestiture of federal property in the history of the U.S. government.” [... i.e., at the time of the statement]
That reservation was set aside in the early decades of the 20th century after the U.S. Navy was completing its transition from coal to fuel oil to power its ships. The decision for the federal government to hold these and other oil fields in reserve was a strategic decision to strenuously avoid a situation in which the United States might be unable to defend its citizens, merchants, allies, or military forces because of a shortage of petroleum.
The President who threw that away also personally intervened to allow the sale of top-secret missile guidance technology to the People’s Republic of China, and accepted many millions of dollars of campaign contributions from the PRC, and repeatedly entertained their “lobbyists” in exclusive overnight stays in the White House.
I don’t deny that there are Republican Senators & Congressional Reps who have shown reprehensible, even criminal behavior.
But these are just a few items in an encyclopedic list of examples showing how the Democrat Party Leadership has been involved in a decades-long frenzy of looting and betrayal of this country for money.
Dave/124; sorry –didn’t mean to not answer –a roving tunderstorm rolled past an kilt off my wifi (‘wifi’, an acrotraction of “Works iffy”) –yes i’ve not been writing much –what happened is, some weeks ago i found myself on a journey deep into my mind and soul, grokking the Eastern spiritual literature, withdrawing deep into a meditative state in order to refresh the wellsprings of creativity –and forgot to pay my internet bill. but yes do drop by –i’m about four clicks south of 290 a couple miles uphill off that little twisty ribbon that runs to Blanco from a T about 7 or 8 mile west of DSp –teetering on the Devil’s Backbone (which is why the weather is always a little uptempo from the lowland report –them arroyo venturis and all). So, i miss the P-38 show and Friendly Dave has to make sure i know it, eh? THANKS! LNG jet engines –where’s the Belmont engineer corps? –the stuff needs pressure to stay liquid –it fizz off fast on release –but the zeke bonds sound intriguing. need an underwriter –there’s only two left –mussolini would be so proud, now we can get a whole industrial leadership into a single elevator. ‘kay i gotta reead all these posts while the eve is yet young –
There’s a new Nyquist up, bookends with the the one linked above –this one is –well, pretty bold about that something that has been worrying an awful lot of us about this strange POTUS –very thankful for the depth of the command structure –as i’m sure the command structure is too, lately:
Once upon a time there was a nation, free and proud. It was armed and ready for war. Its warriors were battle-ready and disciplined. But the leaders of this nation were socialists, and they were opposed to their own country’s armed forces. In secret collaboration with a foreign power, they ordered their country’s disarmament. They eliminated military units, they slashed military spending, and promoted commanders who were willing to disband their own armed forces.
Here was a patriotic and warlike nation which had no hope of freedom or independence, because it lacked one simple advantage: It lacked leaders who were ready to defend the country’s sovereignty. The educated strata of society, from which these leaders were drawn, had been indoctrinated to oppose national defense on ideological grounds. Instead of caring for their country, their ideal was to care for the international working class. In other words, they believed in something that has no real existence; and they were willing to betray their country in order to serve this unreal thing.
…is how the piece leads off.
Marie Claude: “He’s been saying so many things, even contradictory.” You don’t get much more cognitive dissonance than Glenn Beck on foreign policy, but that’s simply because he doesn’t trust Washington to get much of anything right domestically but his network wants you to trust the Beltway boys to handle the Middle East, Russia and much else. But 99% of the people that listen to him could care less about foreign policy per se, aside from Iraq and Afghanistan. MC at least from her French perspective gets that the German and Russian elites are now joined at the hip, whether anyone in Washington likes it or not.
I confess at times I have sought to provoke a response from Buddy (still reading his the Commies are coming back author J.R. Nyquist) and most of the time being an older good natured Texan he doesn’t take the bait, except when it comes to Uncle Sam’s favorite cutout in the former USSR for the last twenty five years, Daddy Warbucks Soros. There are others who post here who have, certainly a few who vigorously defended the Georgian attack on South Ossetia and borders drawn by the Georgian-born Josef Vissarionovich if not Misha the Tie Eater. As one blogger wrote, at best Misha is like that annoying little brother who insists you go with him to the bar, talks smack to and hits the biggest guy at the bar in the face, then whines to big brother Uncle Sam when he gets his ass kicked.
I think in my case it is about recognizing that if one has lived and worked in Russia in many circles in America this is not forgiven, regardless of the sinking ship of the U.S. economy and the current plague of joblessness among Gen Yers. Josh seems to be one of the posters here who can empathize. In supposedly awesome low unemployment D.C. and its ‘better living through looting’ environs, I have gone something like 0 for 40 in the last six months without a single interview. Oh sure, it’s bad times so there is always plausible deniability, so many applicants, so few competent HR people left who aren’t frantically searching for another career rather than doing their jobs, bla bla bla. But let’s get real, it’s not a coincidence. Still I think in the end it is for my benefit as who wants to pay $2,000 a month minimum to have their own teeny place without terminal fortysomething bachelor or gay roommates? Since let’s get real, that is the real trade off in D.C. unless one can at the uber young age of 35 become in effect a taxpayer paid lobbyist at 100k a year for one’s own agency or department on the Hill.
Go abroad, young man. If you kick the dog enough in America the dog will go somewhere else.
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/
MrX/145; i usually don’t take the bait because you’ve already taken it, usually so that you can offer it back. Soros is a prime example –clearly he has done incredibly good work for the anti-west, anti-Dollar, anti-pax-America, pro finlandized Europe–and the world! — boys at the Kremlin, yet you castigate unmercifully his few unimportant human-rights NGO forays obviously barely at the edge of Mr. Putin’s eagle-eyed periphery. This is the “please don’t throw me in the briar patch” bait, and Mr X, my friend, when you offer it you are taking it yourself in the very same moment. Granted, what you are trying to do, that is, be hortatory, didactic, and casual and friendly all at the same time, is a very tough order, and you do an excellent, entertaining, and engaging job of it –but, well, it may not be fully doable at all, by anyone.
Further, and again not to be unpleasant, but may i offer, to your recent theme of working conditions being so much better there than here, that the problem that the 13% flat tax and massive natural resources can’t overcome –for now anyway –is the autocracy, the reputation of the courts in disputes with the Party. Not just the known assassins being made member of the Duma and thus legally free to ignore extradition, but the state takeovers of Gazprom and the others with their by-no-means-proven-criminal owners and execs jailed it appears for life.
Western oil companies have been repeatedly shafted, thrown out of deals just when the value starts flowing, by a legal system which appears to be fixed in the Party’s favor at all times when the stakes are rich enough. Granted enough Obama and the USA will have descended to statist parity –but that hasn’t had time to fully happen yet.
That’s just scratching the surface. And i’m no anti-Russian –at all. What i’d love to see is peace on earth and goodwill toward all.
MFiddler/143; amen to all that –there’s so much bad smell coming off BP and Occidental and this administration’s long range subversion of USA thru the energy component of nationhood (i still can’t get over “Macondo”) that one might wonder how something like obvious foreign agent Al Gore ever got into the VP office. For that answer, please search on Senator William J. Fulbright, ties to the KGB (LBJ assigned a permanent organization of secret agents to moniotor his contacts), sponsorship of Bill Clinton. It will all become clear. BTW, Obama attended Occidental College on a Fulbright scholarship, but that’s just a dollop of icing on the crap cake.
Buddy,
Yes perhaps the NGOs are misdirection – or perhaps it’s Soros leftist persona, the velvet glove for the intel connected iron fist? Or maybe Soros, as America’s own version of Russia’s state friendly oligarchs who get insider tips on looming central bank decisions from You Know Who in exchange for services rendered, is capable of hovering above all nationalities and playing both sides off against the middle? Maybe he really was the inspiration for naming the NWOish org in the recent Bond flick Quantum in his hedge fund’s honor. It is the fact that such questions are never asked in mainstream or even ‘conservative’ publications that claim to abhor Soros’ causes that has consistently troubled me. Try getting a piece about Soros funding of the Orange Revolution published in the National Review or Weekly Standard and see what I mean.
I didn’t say working conditions for Russians were better than for most Americans in the U.S. What I have said is is that they have been getting better in Russia for the last several years while rapidly deteriorating in America, so that the ‘convergence’ that some predicted in the 1970s between an increasingly corporatist/socialist Western capitalism and an increasingly capitalistic socialism is indeed happening before our very eyes.
The One and more broadly the coalition and banksters that elected him are seeking to recreate the same conditions in the U.S., with Manhattan/Greater D.C. as the center instead of Moscow. Joel Kotkin at Forbes has hammered on this point in particular – but unlike in Europe or even now Russia, there ain’t no high speed trains or serious new infrastructure, just more 100k a year jobs for well-voting bureaucrats.
Of course, the bosses in Moscow have always pretended to rule Russia from the center while the hinterlands lied to the center. This happened even in Soviet times when the consequences of deceiving Moscow could be severe. Look at the recent stories about the wild fires where the Good Czar had to come give the local chinovniks a swift kick in the ass for stealing or not allocating money that should have maintained a firefighting system in Tver region at least equal to the sand boxes and fire truck summoning bells that existed in poorer Soviet times. The legacy of following the rule of law or at least maintaining appearances means in the U.S. that the Governors won’t lie to the feds, but the feds can lie to the Governors and people. And there is no Good Czar in Washington who can show up to slap around the chinovniks who are stealing from their own state residents (think of the State of Illinois here).
Tell me Buddy, why can a twentysomething Muscovite making $2,000 a month afford a monthlong all-inclusive vacation to Turkey or the Crimea while a fiftysomething American making $4,000 a month cannot afford to take more than a week off in Mexico? Why does the same 3 kilos of potatoes cost three times in the U.S. what it does in ‘world’s 5th most expensive city Moscow’ — despite Russia’s hellacious wildfires forcing potatoes to substitute for the burned gretchki (buckwheat) crop? Why am I considered a weirdo for asking such questions?
I know these questions might upset conservatives here who were accustomed only to Soviet Russian babushkas standing in breadlines and will not even consider that a conservative young man might find more opportunities here than in his homeland. But clearly, despite all this talk of deflation in asset prices – stocks, houses, cars – there has been no deflation in what people eat in the U.S. That is where the lion’s share of all this Fed printed inflation has gone (along with grossly bloated housing costs for Gen Yers – think of all those landlords in Boston, New York or Chicago who refuse to face the reality that no single or double occupant will ever be able to pay their rents at REAL inflation adjusted current levels again, and that their condo or house is actually only worth 30-40% of their mortgage). To eat the same foods I ate in Russia for two people I was spending anywhere from $950 to $1,200 a month – the same food plus eating lunches out cost me $540 a month in Moscow.
There is a reason a third of the American population is on food stamps or some kind of welfare benefits. And I did not take that fact from Pravda. Sooner or later the National Review should accept that the U.S. is turning into an oligarchy or shutter their doors and cease dishonoring the legacy of William F. Buckley by saying TARP was necessary and leave poor Ben Bernanke alone.
It’s true once you get outside Moscow the average salary plunges – but again those Russians may be poor, but they are still not dependent on the State for anything except perhaps their heating and pitifully small pensions. They can feed themselves. You don’t see 40,000 Russians lined up in a crowd for government housing like you did a few weeks ago outside Atlanta.
Foreigners are indeed for the most part treated well here, and can join the Russian middle class in Moscow and St. Pete immediately if they have some education skills plus Russian language (not just speaking English and having a pulse as in the 90s). There is still, as the author of that ‘Go Abroad Young Man’ blog post suggested, a decade-long window for Americans to take their English plus skills abroad…to grow up with emerging economies (though I think China is completely overhyped and their language combined with the Han racial barrier is almost impenetrable). It’s a similar one to the window Brits enjoyed after WWII when their empire had collapsed but the overseas share of business could be gotten good – and I think given that comparison, Wretchard would find this discussion of interest.
Finally, there’s the matter of showing up at the Microsoft campus to interview and not finding a single person who speaks plain English and having the door slammed in one’s face by an uncomprehending thirtysomething Chinese lady, who probably was there on an H-1B. If the elites in the U.S. want to bring in such types along with illegals to supplant their less compliant natives and do it all in the name of ‘diversity’, why shouldn’t I outsource myself in response? Whiskey would agree with me.
Kick the dog enough at home and starve him enough, and he’ll wander off somewhere else.
One last word, Mr X, re the Georgia and the tie-eater and such. Did you notice Fidel Castro made a big old-timey stem-winder the other day? A throwback to his big orations of the late 1950s, when the USA hating, USA-interests-subverting, possible JFK assassin, Kruschev nuclear missile stationing, dissenter executor and imprisoner without trial, secret police governing by, communist dictator first began his half-century of bashing and materially harming USA? Have you noticed how USA has not distributed USA passports to Cubans from the Gitmo enclave? Has not moved a bunch of smugglers and special agents into Gitmo to begin shelling nearby Cuban villages and mining nearby Cuban roadways? Has not provoked Castro to the point that Castro invaded Gitmo to put a stop to it?
Has not responded to that invasion by a full-scale overwhelming combined arms attack on Cuba, stopping just short of Havana, and then cordoning off a third of Cuba and declaring it a free territory, and then making that free territory a colony of the USA via massively militarizing it with military bases and ports?
All the while supported at the UN by no states other than Danny Ortega and Hugo Chavez’s jackboot communist dictatorships, and oh yes a fly speck island in the Pacific which took a cold cash bribe to do it?
And if you’ve noticed all that, then have you reflected on whether, if USA HAD done all that, whether you would have some slight suspicion that USA had wanted the strategic military advance all along, and so had set-up the entire conflict? And would thenceforth work steadily at warping the history so as to blame the victim?
News reports that the faulty BP Macondo blowout preventer is under lift and will break surface today, beginning a rigorous forensic investigation in the custody of a team of crack federal investigators.
Georgia’s government was not the victim Buddy, even if many Georgians and Ossetians were victimized by the war. You give the Russian government far too much credit for having orchestrated the whole thing. I only give them credit for recruiting disgusted members of Saako’s inner circle as sources — either right before or shortly after the war — and bugging his cell phone so they knew Saako was planning to attack and the whole Georgian order of battle. That still didn’t prevent a Russian recon plane from being shot down.
In 2008 Georgia was a U.S. client state led by a Soros protege President plucked out of Columbia U who stumbled onto delusions of martial grandeur. Saako himself has never had to disclose how much he has paid for lobbyists in the U.S. or where Georgia gets the crapload of money to spend on defense per capita when the average salary in the country is something like $250 a month. The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline doesn’t provide THAT much revenue. So where did the rest of the money come from? Where is the transparency for the American taxpayer? And what did we get for our ‘investment’?
The Georgians were soundly trounced on their own turf not by vast hordes of Russian soldiers but with a ratio of one Georgian to one Russian because the Georgian army refused to stand, fight and die for Saakashvili. I confirmed the numbers from my independent sources and there weren’t more than 10,000 Russians in Georgia at any one time. The numbers the Western media reported were vastly exagerrated to make the Georgians look better, as if they actually fought.
The Cuba analogy is lame, simply because the Soviets ceased keeping Castro as a client in 1990. Castro did in fact try to retaliate for the CIA attempts to assassinate him and other provocations by egging Nikita Krushchev on to deploy the nuclear missiles into Cuba — despite the reality that in 1961 the Soviets knew their bomber and missile forces were vastly less than what the U.S. had and not ready for such a confrontation.
When Georgia is finished being a U.S. client under Saako they might end up under Turkish suzerainity again. I wonder how you would like that.
Mr X
the German and Russian elites are now joined at the hip, whether anyone in Washington likes it or not.
That’s right, and it’s not from yesterday, almost since the Berlin wall fall down (Stratfor, even before), German entrepreneurship discreatly searched for a extended market space towards East, then since Merkel, a eastern Germany apparatchik product (in spite of she’s been adopting the western values), accessed to power, Russia and Germany have openly increased their ties and interactions, political and economical.
“Germany and Russia Move Closer”
http://tinyurl.com/28yt9gj
Well, I don’t have a angelic view on Putin, but nonetheless, I don’t see him as a direct threat for western Europe, though the alliance of the two big, Germany and Russia, never produced something good for the rest of Europe, that’s why, may-be, the Brits are looking for closer ties with us as far as defence is concerned
Mr. X
Out my way all I run into is ex-Russian citizens fleeing the excellence of Moscow.
On present trends the entire city is turning into Moscow on Gold River.
Perhaps it’s the weather.
Putin & Co in every way operate like the Soviet Mafia of classic infame.
At least this time around there is no pretense of creating a New Soviet Man.
Putin — I mean Czar Putin — mocks his own office by assuming hyper-athletic poses for his vainglory.
That shtick went out with Alexander the Great.
He would better be imaged as a Sith Lord!
Ever scheming, ever coveting more POWER: he’s addicted.
However, his strategy is WAY off. He’s already been strategically gutted by the Chinese. They will soon be facing him down with ten times his power level. Their lust for resources rises exponentially.
Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan are ALL playing double games — and figuring that they’re all so clever that their gamist tactics are unread.
China claims her issue is Taiwan. Her issue is the World and the Single Power in the Way: America. China knows that trade secrets theft will place her own nation as a hyper-peer competitor to the EC. Their loss of economic rank will cripple their export engine, which is directly responsible for funding Russian energy exports. China’s strategic problem is that picking off Japan and the USA in a single stroke is no simple thing. Obviously Clinton and Obama are critical Chinese assets.
Iran claims her issue is Israel. Her issue is the Sunnis and the Single Power in the Way: America. Iran figures, rightly, that she can dupe Putin and get enough military power to blitzkrieg the Gulf Arabs and then hunker down to extract Jizra. By being the ultimate swing producer, Tehran figures to hold both West and East hostage.
Pakistan claims her issue is India. Her issue is maintaining her protection racket. As it stands Pakistan is an overbooked whore: a state with a most impressive jon list — America, KSA, China. More a criminal enterprise than a government, Islamabad is fighting off the West in Afghanistan so as to maintain her cut of the opium trade. This is leveraged up with American aid to stop exactly what Pakistan started and maintains. KSA is milked for all she’s worth with sub-rosa nuclear protection promises. Of course, KSA is for Pakistan what America is for Mexico: away for the elites to pimp wage slaves. Curiously, the CIA has been mentally captured by Islamabad. Chapman should have been a wake-up call but I rather expect the phone went unanswered.
Russia claims her issue is NATO. Her issue is maintaining her rank despite the exponential power growth of the East. Chronic population shrinkage solves many Russian problems — but entices the East. Even a child understands that NATO is not a threat to Moscow, which makes one wonder about the maturity of the Russian Army Staff.
Not to worry, such concern is a dodge. The Russian Army has an insuperable strategic problem: Exponential growth in muslims and the building threat from the East.
Should Moscow flip to islam — actually, WHEN — the balloon should go up.
Hitler and Stalin were almost clones. They were destined to war.
Any islamist Moscow is going to soon war upon the kafir.
On the numbers, Russia will be the first islamic Great Power. Any attempt to go Stalin on the islamist class will be met with nuclear empowered suicide troops. Putin will then be ranked hell bound for his complicity in giving the atomic genie to Russia’s most mortal enemy. It will be the enemy within that takes out Moscow. That such a force gets a little help from the East — all that technical stuff that was routed via Kim — just means that what goes around comes around.
Cheers.
MC, mrX, also of course, Putin’s KGB career was babysitting the USSR/GDR alliance, hee lived in East germany and speaks perfect German. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved and merged with NATO, hidden inside the apparent western triumph was all those old KGB structures, entering –no doubt suppressing giggles –NATO, and through the front door no less.
re your #151, MrX, four quick points:
1) the Cuba analogy is less lame if you understand that it was merely a comparison of the two giant nations, and the different sets of outcomes for antagonistic midgets on their borders (90 miles of warm sea and the Caucasus mountain range being about equally effective barriers).
2) The size of the Federation army quoted does not include the large numbers of ‘off-book’ irregulars, the fighters that Putin admitted had entered the Georgian uplands alongside the army (“How can you expect me to control thses angry civilians?” to paraphrase him) and who terrorized the local Georgians into evacuating (‘ethnic cleansing’) to Tbilisi. Does anyone anywhere believe these terrorists were not part of the Federation’s game plan?
3)The real action re Turkey is already in play along the other side of the isthmus (see just last week’s huge gas deal between Moscow and Baku) when Putin (who will ‘run’ for Medvedyev’s job next year) in a show of Moscow’s Georgia-invasion-validating ability to manipulate regional security at will in any direction, will pacify the Nagorno-Karabach issue and bring Turk and Armenian to peace and alliance. The Azeris are already resigned to it, so the Tbilisi-Cebu terminals will take what Baku sends, and the Russians will be shaking hands with the Iranians, like they did with the Germans on the Vistula in 1939, again without firing a shot, save for the 2008 Georgia war which they needed to initiate, in order to establish the conditions where we now see Germany openly drift toward the petro supplies that NATO will no longer guarantee from the Persian Gulf.
4) Look into the september Panic of 2008, how LEH was the fuse, the ‘unexpected bankruptcy’ which set off the previously orderly sell-off ‘soft(er) landing. Did you know that LEH only entered the subprime-based risk market in late 2007 –after the several years of great price & profit run-ups had been booked by the other big players? That they then went into it way too hard and fast and uncharacteristically foolishly, beginning about the time Soros began buying into LEH stock publicly and heavily, continuing all the way thru the summer of 08 into Septembner when LEH, presenting the same liquidity crash as the others who were bailed out, presented and was astonishingly denied (suddenly officials were worried about solvency rather than liquidity), and then took, with Dick Fuld perhaps not even acting as he fulminated, that lightning fast weekend bankruptcy that forced Monday to open with the crash?
Do you see what i’m getting at, that the same Soros tactic seems to’ve been employed in Tbilisi, with Soros moneybags buying influence, and goading the Georgians to fight Russia –which, when the war started, he took his probably well-planned losses as he did with LEH stock, making his real gain elsewhere, secretly and with someone else behind the scenes, while publicly excusing himself in the failed enterprise with an embarrassed shrug and a lament about losing sometimes, et cetera.
Qui bono? Putin! In both cases, Putin!