The First Emperor
Kremlinology was the term once used to describe the methods employed to “to understand the inner workings of an opaque central government”, the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to “read between the lines” and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as “First Secretary”, the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper “Pravda” and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.
It has since come to mean the desperate measures one must to resort to get at something called the Truth in opaque regimes, which is difficult because in an opaque regime nothing is as it seems. Two incidents from history, one ancient and one modern illustrate how the official story is not always the real one.
The polity of the Roman Empire had not quite reconciled itself to the new system of despotism when a group of insiders made a confused attempt to play under the new rules. The political factions were torn between the urge to “beat them or join them” — a feeling that the GOP knows today. The Pisonian conspiracy is the name given to an attempt by a group of prominent Romans to unseat the Emperor Nero and replace him with Gaius Calpurnius Piso. “The conspirators were said to have varying motives; some were imperialists and others were pro-republic” and involved elements of the Praetorian Guard.
It failed when the plot was betrayed by a lower ranking member of the conspiratorial circle. Nero’s revenge on the conspirators was savage. But he faced a delicate problem in the person of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, his tutor and adviser. Men of such prominence had to appear to leave the public scene decorously; for it would cause a scandal to drag them off in chains.
Such men were asked to commit suicide. “In 65 [AD], Seneca was caught up in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy, a plot to kill Nero. Although it is unlikely that he conspired, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself.” For the good of the state. Men like Seneca had few alternatives. Their large families would be ruined and killed unless they complied.
Tacitus says that Seneca told his family to remember “their maxims of philosophy” and live them out now that they had come to the sticking point. As for himself, Seneca said that he knew that a day like this would come. “Who knew not Nero’s cruelty? After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor.” These words might have been spoken in the context of the Mafia. Perhaps all elites are some form of Mafiosi.
A more recent and perhaps better known example of political suicide was the ‘suicide’ of Erwin Rommel. Rommel was one of Hitler’s most famous and popular generals. He was also a secret enemy of the Fuhrer. Following the failure of Operation Valykrie Rommel’s name became linked with the anti-Hitler conspirators. Like Seneca his departure had to be handled discreetly.
Erwin Rommel’s son, Manfred, described the scene when the SS came.
At about twelve o’clock a dark-green car with a Berlin number stopped in front of our garden gate. The only men in the house apart from my father, were Captain Aldinger [ Rommel's aide] , a badly wounded war-veteran corporal and myself. Two generals – Burgdorf, a powerful florid man, and Maisel, small and slender – alighted from the car and entered the house. They were respectful and courteous and asked my father’s permission to speak to him alone. Aldinger and I left the room. ‘So they are not going to arrest him,’ I thought with relief, as I went upstairs to find myself a book.
A few minutes later I heard my father come upstairs and go into my mother’s room. Anxious to know what was afoot, I got up and followed him. He was standing in the middle of the room, his face pale. ‘Come outside with me,’ he said in a tight voice. We went into my room. ‘I have just had to tell your mother,’ he began slowly, ‘that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour.’ He was calm as he continued: ‘To die by the hand of one’s own people is hard. But the house is surrounded and Hitler is charging me with high treason. ‘ “In view of my services in Africa,” ‘ he quoted sarcastically, ‘I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It’s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family, that is against you. They will also leave my staff alone.’
‘Do you believe it?’ I interrupted. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I believe it. It is very much in their interest to see that the affair does not come out into the open. By the way, I have been charged to put you under a promise of the strictest silence. If a single word of this comes out, they will no longer feel themselves bound by the agreement.’
The official public story was that Rommel had died of his wounds. They even gave him a state funeral, with a big wreath from the Fuhrer. Even Rommel’s family was cowed into silence. The true facts surrounding Rommel’s death emerged only during the Nuremburg trials, after Wilhelm Keitel testified to what really happened.
How many such deceptions have occurred through the ages? Perhaps through the annals of man the official truth has often been at variance the actual narrative of events. This realization has led some scholars to claim that we live in a “world without truth”; that all history consists of lies. This idea is especially popular in the Left, who are forever debunking Christmas, Thanksgiving, Columbus and the Boy Scouts. Perhaps the reason they feel certain that history consists entirely of lies is because they have made up most of them.
But the moral black hole it creates is genuine. Kelly Monroe Kullberg, in her book Finding God Beyond Harvard spoke of her search for the truth — any truth. For “without a transcendent truth breaking into our world and revealing reality, we’re left to our imaginings, despair and power games. The power brokers thrive in a world without truth, for their invent their own, and few have the moral verve to stop them. A world without truth is a recipe for disaster.”
She had to find out if the truth existed anywhere; for at Harvard the conventional wisdom was that the truth was a mythical beast, like the unicorn, which no one had lately seen.
By and by it dawned on her that the truth was in fact everywhere. It had to be. Otherwise airplanes would not fly, computers would not function nor the planets stay on their courses. “The elegant mathematical forms encoded in nature, the nineteen universal constant that are exactly what they must be” were the stuff that kept the world turning. The truth was omnipresent whenever we looked outside the narrow boundaries of the heart of man.
And why was it absent there? Because men wanted to create their own truth. We don’t live in a ‘world without truth’ we simply abide on an island of lies of our own construction. Kremlins are made by man and maintained at immense cost. Thousands if not millions of people are constantly busy patching up the walls of that fortress with the mortar of falsehood lest reality leak in.
Outside the artificial walls lies don’t work. They create high prices, shortages, unemployment, military disaster. But inside the walls the lies work miracles.
The opaqueness of regimes — the Kremlins of the world — is a self adopted metric of power. The intensity of falsehood measures the degree to which they can exclude the facts from their own kingdoms of darkness. It’s a temperature, like airconditioning. For there is no measure of power as impressive as the ability to lie and get millions to accept it as true. Thus the actual function of official journalism has never been to write “the first draft of history”, but to plaster the ramparts with lies.
Perhaps the root cause of the Fall of Empires — whether the Roman or the Third Reich — is they eventually poison the wellsprings of their own fact. They dissimulate until even their statistics and their ‘facts’ are contaminated and the loop closes. They act upon the falsehoods they themselves have made up and thus go off the cliff. All tyrannies die in the end from madness, and each approaches the end with the vague notion that this could not be happening to them. But by then there is nothing to grasp, even their tools have become shadows.
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W: Your writing is both very profound and true, and the truth of it makes me quite sad in this particular case…
And so this morning, through those “first drafts of history” we are being treated to an absolute deluge of details about espionage ongoing at highest levels of our government. Good thing those devoted FBI agents were on the case.
Generals do not “fall on their swords” lightly, because they know once they are gone, they will be replaced by next in line who is more “flexible”. If possible, better to soldier on and try to accomplish a little good. Sometimes the heat and light generated by a public “suicide” can do some good also.
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand…
Ol’ William Butler Yeats was a fart-head if ever there was one–but still, a great poet who occasionally had insights. Observe the human world much (as done here at BC) and one definitely feels insightful–and this post of Wretchard’s is a brilliant example of that.
BTW, in another life I tried dating an amazing young woman whom I call “Celia the Magnificent”; a smallish woman, she had more personality in one look than 100 other femmes could having in a lifetime of magazine covers.
Anyway, she was an Irish-American army brat who grew up (to some extent) in Germany, and met Manfred Rommel when he was mayor of Stuttgart. She told me he bent over her and said something like, “Ah, what a pretty German-American girl” (Celia was absolutely blonde) but she immediately replied tartly, “I’m Irish” (for she carried a classic Irish surname, indeed). Rommel, the gentleman, immediately said, “Ah, I’m Celtic too!” and explained something about that part of Germany being Celtic at one time.
Cool story. It is even true.
Something bright and sunny to remember in the darkness under the walls of the pass of Cirith Ungol, Mr. Frodo.
(I thought about her story when I was in the museum there in Stuttgart years ago; in the Celtic section they even have bits of tartan cloth taken from the ancient tombs. Another vanished people; as vanished as the elves.)
An Préachán
I wonder who “selected” Petraeus biographe? Valerie Jarret? Leon Panetta? I wonder if it was his “biographer” who sent the incrimination email? Does Chief Justice Roberts have a “biographer”? Did Obama select the title “All In”? Is Huma Hillary’s biographer? How can I get a biographer?
Petraeus removed now, and as a future political force. The meme of the acceptability of the CIA being headed by a converted muslim is introduced to the public. Does Leon Panetta have a “biographer”? Who says the obama administration has no long-term planning capability?
I saw an old friends facebook page. She is very happy about the election. There was a photo of Barak and Michelle hugging.. The collaborator in me was happy for her being happy about the election. The “can’t wait for the inauguration” gave me a chuckle instead of a bitter smile it would have if i were a more logical person.
For some its the fall of Rome and for others its VE day all over again.
Me I wanted to refresh American prosperity and entrepreneurship. Or at least disband the EPA so the people who work there could suffer as much as the citizenry. Alas my wishes did not come true.
Other people seemingly wanted to get even with all the Mexicans babbling in Spanish in the grocery store and holding up the lines. they too did not get what they wanted.
Most likely the Obamians will not get what they want either. If I know what they want, which I am not sure I do. Probably something like people not getting sick or being broke anymore.
We will whip them next time anyhow. I am sure we can petition the Buildeburger commission for redress.
So this is what it was like for the ordinary person living through the 1930s? It was glaringly clear that something very bad was coming, but the individual had no ability to affect events. Self-delusion abounded. Returning from Munich, Chamberlain was greeted by cheering crowds and by warm accolades from all the right people.
But today is worse. At least in the 1930s, the clear & present danger was external. Today, the Enemy is in the control room. Still, Wretchard is right — the Enemy’s inability to face the truth (unemployment statistics, anyone?) dooms him.
As I type this, a storm is coming in from the west, over the mountains. The rising sun has fired up a rainbow in the approaching rain. The old Biblical promise — this too shall pass. After the storm, there will be better days, even if we ourselves do not live to see them.
petraeus is nothing special, just another creature of the media. as far as i can tell, the last truly signifigant american general was mcarthur.
ok, here goes a long one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/magazine/a-message-from-beyond.html?_r=0
This message is now the subject of speculation that it is from Broadwell’s husband about Petraeus. Note also that the Times’ response, like the message itself, is unctuous beyond all recovery.
Seneca? Rommel? wretchard, your writing is insightful, educated, and beautiful, but really, to put Petraeus in that company twists my melon. Of course the similarity is supposed to be in the environment, not necessarily the victims. Petraeus the victim? Was he conspiring against the crown? I may have missed that part. Well then, in being pressured to self-punish and at the cost of secrecy. Hmm, … mebbe. And by a tyranny. Perhaps. But again, your flagships are cases where there was (purportedly) resistance against the tyranny. So then, we should assume that Petraeus is after all being victimized here because, say, he might know and spill some truths about the Obambus regime and Benghazi? Truths where, for example, he was not in some way at fault himself, in fact the principal at fault? That, given what I see as his weak record in Iraq and Afghanistan, is where it finally breaks down for me. He’d have to be both innocent and “holding the bag” for your metaphors to be valid.
Should we care that a senior defense and security official is skirt-chasing married women? I dunno. Maybe. We’re not France, you know. Broadwell for all her “accomplishments” looks to me like an acquired taste, but maybe he either acquired it or is very broad-minded. Heh.
Um, what else, something else, … oh right, the metaphysics.
For “without a transcendent truth breaking into our world and revealing reality, we’re left to our imaginings, despair and power games. The power brokers thrive in a world without truth, for their invent their own, and few have the moral verve to stop them. A world without truth is a recipe for disaster.”
…
Perhaps the root cause of the Fall of Empires — whether the Roman or the Third Reich — is they eventually poison the wellsprings of their own fact. They dissimulate until even their statistics and their ‘facts’ are contaminated and the loop closes. They act upon the falsehoods they themselves have made up and thus go off the cliff. All tyrannies die in the end from madness, and each approaches the end with the vague notion that this could not be happening to them. But by then there is nothing to grasp, even their tools have become shadows.
Yes. Beautifully said. And yet I would quibble (have to go with what I do best). We have our Obambus regime at war with arithmetic, and getting defensive about it (when they claim that they are “obeying” arithmetic, which they are NOT). And at war with their own madness, lying incessantly and coming to believe their own lies. Yet, just maybe this is after all only the way of men, to delude themselves. I suggest it is something slightly else. All men make errors, and some make many. But with Bill Clinton, and I fear now with the empty sack that is Obambus, it is that they value the failure, for if you ALWAYS fail, then one more doesn’t hurt. This is not a matter of hatred or treason, it is a sadly common human and organizational pattern, I can give you names, dates, and references. They know they will fail, and move on. In this case with a fat pension and books to be written and promoted, sycophants and hagiographers in a cometary trail on how failures were in their stars. And why is that, finally? “… that we are underlings”. Hmm. This would seem to suggest rather different analysis, I think, of each of the Roman, Reich, and Obambus regimes. Sometimes I don’t myself know where my quibbles are going. What I thought I was going to say is something about the subtleties of the nature of “truth” Well, perhaps another day, there’s subtlety for ya.
“Make him an offer he cannot refuse” – I think we are beyond the pale of regular thinking. So, a good catholic boy goes down wiith an “affair”. What are the chances that Judge Roberts was “gotten to” before his vote. How about Christe – “so fat boy this is what you are gonna say”. Why do I think this – we are dealing with a dicatorship regime. normal thinking does not apply Take the test – Anytime something happens in their favor – you always ask yourself “WTF – didn’t see that coming”. Think of your reaction to the election, Roberts decision, Christie’s behavior (I was at a Romney Christe event – hard to beleive he flipped so fast) and now Patreus. You don’t think they got stuff on Boehner? Cantor? These guys are KGB like. Think about how health care was passed. When the masses rise up – it won’t be pretty – one cobra will wipe out any resistance. We will be outgunned. Welcome to the Stalin repression.
Christina Romer, Obama’s first Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, made her academic bones examining the effect of tax increases on GDP:
“Our baseline specification suggests that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly three percent.”
Now, I have to say there should be some caveats to that statement. Like all economists she and her husband sort of linearized around our current operating point, so a dramatically different economy will show dramatically different effects. They also make clear that not all particular tax increases have the same effect. For example, increased tax rates on the proceeds of investment have a more deleterious effect on GDP growth.
What’s interesting is that the president and his supporters will swear this is not true. That their desired tax increases will boost economic growth. Ms. Romer is a good Keynesian, holds a chair at a prestigious university, and was considered enough of an insider for a White House job. But her insight didn’t make it into the OODA loop.
The immediate problem with that is that very soon, the total interest-bearing Treasury debt will cross over a threshold. Up till now, it was conceivable that tax and regulation reforms could generate enough economic growth to reduce the deficit to a manageable size. But on the other side of that threshold, interest payments balloon as a percentage of GDP such that it would require average growth rates (including recessions) of something like 10% for decades to begin reducing the deficit. This is the cliff that Greece, Spain, and maybe Italy have gone over. On the other side of that threshold there are no more good choices, just bad ones and worse ones. Poverty, or hyperinflation and then poverty? Your choice.
The worst of it is the gnawing fear that the Administration will not be able to make a rational choice even then, because their comprehension of the problem is so polluted. And that although their own economists contributed to our understanding of the problem, they may very well be utterly unaware that they are even making those choices.
No time for a long response this morning. I hope to reserve the right to write again later.
But the truth is always real. While men are yet living, they can use what power has been given them to make themselves a fact in the world of facts. Either they align themselves with objective truth and become virtuous, or they serve their own selfish ends and become hellish.
Now what about the conspiracy theory? Can you really call it a conspiracy when everybody can see it? That is a subject for another post.
I remember reading about the Mayflower 11, and the sailing of it across the N. Atlantic to Plymouth for the anniversary of the first voyage.
The captain, Alan Villiers, made an interesting discovery while conning the ship through a storm.
As the wind kept increasing the crew took in sail after sail, leaving just enough canvas abroad for the ship to ‘lie to’ and weather the blow. As the sails came off, Villiers said that the high poop deck at the stern acted like a weather vane, keeping the ship bow onto the waves.
“Like a duck tucks her head under her wing, the good ship just turned her bow into the waves and rode out the storm by herself.”
The Truth has to be relentlessly hammered home that the people can fix the economy if we can beat the politicians hands off the controls long enough for it to right itself. Otherwise, they will ‘FIX’ it untill it sinks altogether
Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!
Why didn’t Petraeus take the Dem approach of Kennedy, Clinton et al, and go after the “war on women” vote which carried Obama? He could announce :
I’m not ashamed of my body !!”
I support wymen’s free sexuality, and I love lady parts”
I’m just like JFK and Clinton, my heroes.
Why is the FBI trying to suppress the sexual freedom of my biographer with gestapo tactics and secret surveillance? Thats why all wymen voted for obama, to prevent the war on wymen’s sexual freedom !!
I’m an alpha male !!!! Do you want some kind of beta wuss heading up the CIA? Fire me if you dare, but I’ll still fight for wymen’s sexual freedom !!!
I call on the press to stop this assault on wymens sexuality !!!
I’m running as a democrat !!!
The man isn’t the strategic thinker the press made him out to be.
W – as usual, you have hit the nail on the head. The struggle is reality vs. fantasy. We know what the outcome will be, but not how much damage will be done along the way.
I am trying to multi-task: focused at the moment on getting my life more in tune with reality, while continuing the struggle for Liberty & Prosperity.
Josh @8: “Seneca? Rommel? … to put Petraeus in that company twists my melon.”
I’m with you on that one buddy.
The Petraeus Affair has forced the ethical misconduct of the Obama Administration onto the front pages. The Wall Street Journal reports
The computer-security investigation—which raised questions about a potential compromise to national security—points to one reason Mr. Petraeus and the White House decided he couldn’t remain in the senior intelligence position. An extramarital affair has significant implications for an official in a highly sensitive post, because it can open an official to blackmail. Security officials are sensitive to misuse of personal email accounts—not only official accounts—because there have been multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal emails. [SNIP]
The computer investigation began late this spring, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Mr. Petraeus wasn’t interviewed by the FBI until recently.
While Mr. Petraeus was still a general, he had email exchanges with the woman, but there wasn’t a physical relationship, the person said. The affair began after Mr. Petraeus retired from the Army in August 2011 and ended months ago, the person said. [SNIP]
Intelligence officials scrambled Friday afternoon to alert key members of Congress. Some received a call about an hour before the announcements from Deputy Director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan. Other key congressional officials, including the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), weren’t told in advance.
Once again, as with so many other critical issues, this administration has put the needs of the American people behind its own political imperatives. Knowing of these security lapses, “multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal email accounts”, they failed to inform even fellow Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), of the existence of the problem until after the election.
This behavior is unconscionable. But it is of a pattern of dishonor. Whether engaged in gun running to Mexican drug gangs in Operation Fast & Furious to influence gun control legislation, or demagoguing the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) or sabotaging BP’s effort to “top kill” the blown out Macondo 252 well in late May 2010 to pressure senators to pass Cap & Trade legislation, we have repeatedly seen Obama and his cronies put politics before governance.
There is a clear and easy path out of this morass. All the Democrat delegates recently elected to participate in the Electoral College need do is emulate Barack Obama and vote “Present” in a public display of solidarity with the Republicans and the American People. Failing that, the Republican House of Representatives, under Speaker John Boehner, should begin impeachment proceedings. How does “President Boehner” sound, Mr. Speaker?
3 USC § 19. Vacancy in offices of both President and Vice President; officers eligible to act.
(a) (1) If, by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President,
then the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, upon his resignation as Speaker and as Representative in Congress, act as President. (2) The same rule shall apply in the case of the death, resignation, removal from office, or inability of an individual acting as President under this subsection.
It’s a conspiracy, fer sure. And I know who’s responsible:
“We are the Stealthy Green Toup’es,
Stalking nights and sleeping days.
A bunch of mean and nasty men
who all think Sorhed’s numba ten!
What need we the strength of thirty?
We can win by fighting dirty!
Two
Four
Six
Eight
Tiptoe, sneak and infiltrate Ch-Cha-Cha!”
I witnessed how actual Kremlin imploded, and the account above is the most profound analysis of the reasons of this fall. Bravo!
In Short, Chicago’s Chickens will have come home to roost.
So we of this present generation are also witnessing how the enslavement of millions of black people in this country is now bringing White America to her hour of judgment, to her downfall as a respected nation. And even those Americans who are blinded by childlike patriotism can see that it is only a matter of time before White America too will be utterly destroyed by her own sins, and all traces of her former glory will be removed from this planet forever.
Happy B-day to the Marine Corps, btw. 267 years of proud service. Raise a glass to the lads at Tun Tavern. Semper fi!
Seneca was a devoted hypocrite, but a magnificent one.
“The opaqueness of regimes — the Kremlins of the world — is a self-adopted metric of power.”
Agreed, Wretchard. The first time around Opaque Obama adopted a campaign stance promising a breath-taking new transparency in governance. Legislation would be posted online for examination by citizens before passage. That lie was an enormous black hole into which he ought to have fallen during his time in office, but surely by the second campaign. Yet the ‘gentlemanly’ (read “spineless”) GOP candidate never mentioned it. He averted his eyes from the long list of broken “promises”, too polite to mention them. He betrayed us.
This time, the Prevaricator promised more drilling. The day after he won, O closed down drilling out west – and that’s just for starters.
The closest parallel to understanding this administration is indeed Kremlinology…yet many feel as though we’re going to re-live the Germany of the 1930s.
Can you tell me why that is?
Here’s the administration’s next claim: That the order to “Stand Down” was directed at Petraeus, not the Seals.
Note the title of this book by Broad-hurst: “All In.” Swear I’ve seen that title for a “gang-bang” video.
Husband in Petraeus Affair Wrote to Advice Columnist?
HMunsterNov 10, 2012 9:58 AM CST said…
If you read the entire column, you would see that the husband, his wife and Petraeus would socialize together occasionally. I would invite Petraeus out for drinks along with my wife, then in front of Petraeus I would say nicely, but very matter-of-factly to my wife: “I know that you’re cheating on me with David, but what I would like to know is why and how long it’s been going on.” No yelling, no recriminations, just stating a fact. Even if they tried to deny it, the looks on their faces would betray them. By the way, I believe you were cheated on: “Tell us how you would have handled things after confronting your wife about the suspected “affair”, which she may well deny? Some of us have been down that road. ” Please… [EDIT]: By the way, when I was a licensed P.I. we would never “confront” the cheating spouse, we would chronicle the event on film and/or video. The easiest way to do that is to have the person (being cheated on) tell their spouse that they had to go out of town overnight or for the weekend on some pretext – business or sick friend/relative/whatever. We would have a surveillance set up at the cheating spouses’ house. Sometimes they would go and meet their lover at their own place, sometimes they would have the audacity to have the lover come over. If they were both in a relationship they would meet at a third location, usually a motel or hotel. We would occasionally get video of them kissing – or some other pda – if they were so indiscreet as to do it out in the open. Usually we would just get proof of them stepping behind closed doors together. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they’re not playing checkers in there.
—
A lot of the other comments there are hilarious, and worth the read.
Margaret Thatcher famously said: “the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money.” Well, does this apply to a superpower? What’s to stop the US in, say, 5-10 years, from grabbing oil, gold, and anything else valuable from countries that resist entering into a “peaceful” subordinate status? After all, the Left believes this is what the US has been doing all along, and the Left believes in an international communist dictatorship (the Left projects its own desires on its enemies). What better way to impose it than via the US military?
This would be one way to “solve” the fiscal cliff…
I’m starting to hope that radical greens, New-Agers, and other anti-industry activists will get the upper hand in the US. Alas, I fear they too will be discarded rather brutally once their usefulness to the regime has worn out.
On the other hand, the crummy public school system and pop culture (and the regime’s disdain for reality independent of social constructs) may well undermine any efforts at maintaining such a distopia. And of course, there are other players in the world.
”Men of such prominence had to appear to leave the public scene decorously; for it would cause a scandal to drag them off in chains.”
Thusly is the horror reinforced. Rommel’s family had resigned themselves to the loss of his life when he began his military career; theirs, not so much. Rommel’s suicide, while staving off an immediate retaliation upon his family, has nevertheless consigned his family to a fate of even greater evil.
One of the great tragedies of war occurs when our enemy uses non-combatants as a shield from our fire. We must ‘shoot through’ the innocents to halt the enemy; failure to do so rewards the enemy’s behavior ensuring an even more widespread use of the tactic.
Rommel’s innocents were too close to sacrifice; as a result he made an accommodation with the devil.
P.S. Semper Fi on this 237th Anniversery of the United States Marine Corps
It wasn’t conscience but adversity that turned the elites against both Nero and Hitler. Nero eventually provoked a tax revolt as he bankrupted Rome to pay for his hare-brained schemes. Hitler’s fall from the apex of popularity is too well known to repeat here. In both cases it was not the expected set of checks and balances that stopped either, but emergent forces they themselves engendered.
Seneca and Rommel are universal archetypes of men trapped by social arrangements that had served them well until at last turn of the screw. It was too good to leave until it was too late. The structure of choice at courts works against long term calculation. The returns are irresistible until suddenly they are fatal. That dynamic always traps the weaker of two factions in the party of incumbency as they play for an increasingly juicier plum even after there is no chance left to win it.
Methinks that when we come to the end of this uncertain road before us, we will be greeted by the sight of once-powerful, narcissistic, and arrogant men and women swinging upside-down by their heels from the girders of unfinished gas stations.
I think we have arrived to where the expected set of checks and balances has broken. This is the Post-Constitutional United States. Congress is dsyfunctional to the point of non-functional. The Supreme Court is a vehicle by which government overrides Constitutional limits, it is no longer a bulwark of those limits. And the presidency, well. It no longer needs even a Congressional budget, gets away with setting aside laws it doesn’t like and also enforcing ones it can’t get passed anyway. The president’s off targeting Americans for surpise drone attacks.
The central, most important, vital protection of the Constitution is the notion of equality before the law. That is the notion that should you come before it that your status, means, and identity have no bearing (you try doing what John Cornine did). Forget that, we’ve got an active “benefit” regime dedicated to demographic carve-ups and slice-n-dice. The law picks winners and losers. And in the name of equality, to boot! UAW > (Chrysler bondholders + centuries of corporate jurisprudence), just to touch the tip of an iceberg. The lesson learned? Why, more, more, more! Helps you win Ohio.
So, how do you get it back? With so much broken, it is hard to know where to begin. The first question is, can it be done? Or are we like Cicero and also the Pisonian conspirators, doomed watch a republic slip away?
Again, by 2016, ObamaCare will be a feature among the landscape of a socialist entitlement state. Arguments will have to made on their ground. It’s Blue Model America, a Post-Constitution America, from which we’ll be tinkering from the edges. They have the institutions. Best policy might be ju-jitsu, helping them fall by the weight of their own mistakes. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
SBW/21
Sorry, there will be no glass raising at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern. It has been taken over by the New Black Panthers, who are busy stuffing ballot boxes in preparation for the 2014 mid-terms.
“The power brokers thrive in a world without truth, for their invent their own… A world without truth is a recipe for disaster.” Kelly Monroe Kullberg
“She [Julia] did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truth.” George Orwell – 1984
W: “She [Kullberg] had to find out if the truth existed anywhere.”
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident… I tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else; not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” George Orwell – 1984
W: “By and by it dawned on her [Kullberg] that the truth was in fact everywhere. It had to be. Otherwise airplanes would not fly, computers would not function nor the planets stay on their courses… The truth was omnipresent whenever we looked outside the narrow boundaries of the heart of man.”
Winston Smith: “The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind; surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false… There was truth and there was untruth; and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” George Orwell – 1984
W: “There is no measure of power as impressive as the ability to lie and get millions to accept it as true… Perhaps the root cause of the Fall of Empires — whether the Roman or the Third Reich — is they eventually poison the wellsprings of their own fact… They act upon the falsehoods they themselves have made up and thus go off the cliff. All tyrannies die in the end from madness…”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously [the lie and the truth], and accepting both of them [Insanity]… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” George Orwell – 1984
W: “For there is no measure of power as impressive as the ability to lie and get millions to accept it as true. Thus the actual function of official journalism has never been to write “the first draft of history”, but to plaster the ramparts with lies.”
“Even the names of the four ministries by which we are governed exhibits a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts; the ministry of peace concerns its self with war; the ministry of truth with lies… These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink; for it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.” George Orwell – 1984
The title of this post is The First Emperor, and I have no doubt Wretchard believes Barack Obama will be that first Emperor, or, since last Tuesday, already is the first elected Emperor of the United States. But they don’t call themselves Emperors any longer, they now call themselves Presidents for Life. Three 80 plus year old Supreme Court justices will retire soon and Obama will not nominate and seat three moderates. No, the three new radical Left justices will ramrod a decision that the 22nd Amendment is unconstitutional, being punitive, which it was, being directed at the bones of FDR. We will never again see an honest election. Expect, about 2024, near the end of his fourth term, that Barack Hussein will anoint himself President for Life, to the cheers and huzzahs of the entire plantation.
In the flickering glow of the torchlight parade
Obama, the President for Life
Smiled as he gazed at the nation he’d made
And turned to his young nubile wife
And said the fools cheering below without pause
Have traded their freedom for cheese
He’d made them all paupers and beggars because
As beggars they’re easy to please
He waved to the crowd and then walked through the door
That led to a room of gold thrones
And smiled to his wife and said, cheese and what’s more
They’re pleased that I gave them free phones
Jesus said “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” I would add that the truth will make you sane.
Josh @ 8: “But with Bill Clinton, and I fear now with the empty sack that is Obambus, it is that they value the failure, for if you ALWAYS fail, then one more doesn’t hurt.”
Great writing, Josh. Worthy of our host himself. But I have to disagree with your conclusion.
You & I look at Soetero and see Failure writ large. More unemployed young people; more unpayable debt; less job- & tax- creating production; less international respect. Failure, thy name is Soetero.
But Lil’ Barry looks in the mirror, and he sees Success. Without ever having broken a sweat at a productive job, or even having written a book (himself), he is a multi-millionaire. He has the same kind of personal aircraft at the King of Saudi Arabia — take that, Bill Gates, you loser! He is surrounded by sycophants who praise his every move (or lack of move), and is protected by men who will literally take a bullet for him. From his perspective, this is Success with a capital S.
Rommel was an honorable man serving a dishonorable master — and he paid the price. Stalin was a dishonorable man, an epic failure as a human being. Yet Stalin died from natural causes in his own dacha, the Master of All He Surveyed.
If one does not have to pay the price of failure, then can it even be called failure? No matter how real the impact of that failure may be to lesser creatures, the “Other”.
31. Walt
I was referring to the lads in Tun Tavern on 10 November 1775. So, I guess I should have said, “… in memory of the lads …”
Wretchard, before I read the comments, what an excellent, thought-provoking essay!
We may not have to look backwards to Roman times for answers and parallels. We can look at California! A lot of eloquent, passionate, aware Californians come on here. VDH is one who’s got his own column at PJMedia, and he’s one whose rhetorical ability and persuasiveness rates upwards towards the Ciceronian in my book at least. So why is California, inarguably, stuck on stupid on the whole? Given their fiscal straits, why are they doing things like building a high speed rail at all, much less from LA to Fresno? Fresno! Why are they destroying agriculture over the delta smelt? Driving out business with punitive tax and regulatory schemes? Electing Democrats who promise to do two things: raise costs across the board, and pit citizens one against the other?
Reason would have provoked an electoral change, if reason were ever a factor. It isn’t a factor seemingly. Why is it that dying states continue to vote for the poison? Even Cicero’s eloquence could not save the Roman Republic, and California shows why that may be: reason has nothing to do with it. Cultural sway and institutional heft, that’s what wins the day. Or is this not the case?
Just read on the PowerLine.org review of the new book about Soviet penetration of the US gov. at the time of Roosevelt admin. It was their very long term project than and I think the goal has not changed. It is most likely expanded from mere influence to conversion from within. Particularly given the wildest success in influencing not only the gov but also (which is much more important) media, academia, unions. So what we have now is both parties acting along to make the only global power that was once upon a time capable to stop the “new world order” actively promoting one.
Re # 9. Hutsul
“These guys are KGB like.”
Like? They are ideological agents of “hope und change”. What they are “hope” for and to what goal they want the “change” to lead to?
I fully expect that in the near future we will have an either sneaky of frontal (or a combination of two) assault on the 2-d amendment.
Seneca and Rommel helped make Rome and Germany so great that it eventually destroyed them. The proper life sign of American freedom was not whether a Republican or Democrat was in control, but how big the government was. Under both parties it simply grew until it place the crown upon its own head.
A friend asked me “why do the Republicans always lose?” My retort was, “why did the Mensheviks always lose?” The essential point is not to feel sorry for the Mensheviks, but to realize they were merely the less capable faction of a broader dysfunctionality.
Readers will know that I was never enthusiastic about Romney, but I did remark that he seemed to believe it was essential to campaign on the basis of holding the country together. He did not want the Presidency at the at the cost of bringing the temple down. He wanted to keep the post-war American republic a going concern. But Obama, I remarked, was under no such obligation.
Romney’s loss means there may be nothing left for his faction to inherit. The GOP are now the permanent junior partners of the party of incumbency, which soon may have no need of them at all, except as a fig-leaf for bipartisanship. A lot of people have criticized Christie, but maybe he understood that his chief asset was to appear skeptical so that he could provide the reassuring seal of bipartisanship at the last moment.
That makes sense in a way. If you’re not determined to beat them, as Romney seemed not to have been, then the rational alternative is the join them. By that measure it’s better to do a Christie than be a half-assed opponent.
Returning to the metaphor of Seneca and Rommel, their exertions ironically helped bring about a situation where they themselves would no longer count against Caesar. They unintentionally brought about the destruction of the internal checks and balances. That had the inevitable consequence of moving the focus of checks and balances to the external arena. By destroying the system Nero ensured that the next challenge to him would come from outside it; ditto the Fuhrer.
Over the long term it would not be the institutions of the Old Republic that checked Roman emperors but the barbarians. Similarly, Germany ceded the role of opposition to Hitler to the Allied Armies. Failing to keep freedom doesn’t mean you no longer have to choose. It only means somebody else will choose for you.
If a society is ever to recover, it has to create the conditions for internal checks and balances to regenerate whenever the Empire gets a jolt of negative external feedback. The induced response to external setbacks has to be an impetus internal reform. Had the Second World war (by some miracle) not supervened it is interesting to speculate on whether a longer but shallower series of failures would have worn the Third Reich down. I think the probable answer to that question is “yes” because that is in fact what happened to the Soviet Union over the period now known as the Cold War.
The Obama administration is likely to experience negative feedback pretty soon. But how can this be turned to account? That is the question.
There are some hilarious comments over at Ace’s place (http://minx.cc/?post=334821), including alternate book titles such as Deep Inside David Petraeus.
And Happy Birthday to the few, the proud, the Marines!
Re California. People will stick the status quo until the costs of obeying city hall exceed the costs of fighting it. Since the price you had to pay for resisting the emperor or the Fuhrer was so high, the tendency was to hope for the best and keep following orders. Things had to get ridiculously desperate before the calculus shifted.
This is why the failure of the Republican Party should not be cause for abandoning the field. This amounts to waiting for the barbarians to scale the walls so that you can feel revenged on the Emperor, or in the present instance, to wait for California to fall apart so you can “I told you so”. Talk about Pyrrhic.
Rather the strategy should be to make the Emperor to fight for every inch of additional yardage. To redouble, not necessarily the support for the GOP, but every effort to expand the domain of choice, freedom and information. In that way one is positioned for the counterattack at every moment; for there is much to be said about getting there ahead of the barbarians.
Seneca and Rommel are universal archetypes of men trapped by social arrangements that had served them well until at last turn of the screw. It was too good to leave until it was too late.
Hmm. Interesting of itself, but again I have to wonder at the Petraeus parallel. Let’s move on.
Returning to the metaphor of Seneca and Rommel, their exertions ironically helped bring about a situation where they themselves would no longer count against Caesar. They unintentionally brought about the destruction of the internal checks and balances.
Well, but did Rome or Reich *have* internal checks and balances?
We are supposed to.
Rome and Reich’s “checks” were try to kill the king, succeed and rule, fail and die. So they failed and died. System nominal.
c @ 39: So why is California, inarguably, stuck on stupid on the whole?
Well, entropy, maybe. When you’re fat and rich discipline suffers, though details vary. The thing is this is almost rational, because when you’re fat and rich that’s the time to try some high-cost, low-probability alternatives. Maybe it’s an instinct, or a principle of Psychohistory, or the curse of Adam, or something. When you’re at the top, the only way is down.
IOW, I don’t know.
k @ 36: If one does not have to pay the price of failure, then can it even be called failure?
Someone always pays. Criminal lives high on the hog, but he robbed someone. The books always balance. There is always someone going to try every mistake, commit every crime. Either you deal with it, or you don’t.
The tree of liberty, and all that, maybe we just all need some object lessons, every so often, and that bell seems to be ringing now.
California is on a high-speed crazy train to hell. At least I’ll have a good view. Maybe I’ll run into Romney down in La Jolla, we can share some fish tacos and watch the sun go down.
I don’t understand what you’re saying Wretchard, the more I think about it. The examples, Seneca and Rommel, are given as instances of internal checks within the system. They were eliminated, so that’s cautionary. But then you say the solution is to keep fighting, and on the same field.
Wherever that point winds up, the fact remains that all internal checks have failed. Obama was supposed to have been in check by: 1) Constitutional limits on federal power; 2) Congress’ check and balance; 3) the Supreme Court’s check and balance; and, finally, 4) electoral accountability. He has sailed around each one, and incredibly given his amassed record of abject failure. All the time with a flashing neon reading: “ALERT: This guy wants to ‘fundamentally transform’ the whole country along socialist lines!”
I really don’t know what we are supposed to do about that, or what we can do about that. The problem about these arguments that can be made against tyranny is that they can’t afford to fail once. Once is too much. Then, we’re into generational lesson time, maybe (as in the case Rome) many generations. The country simply chose socialism. Look around you, folks. Those guys did that to you. The Constitution is already a dead letter, and we had to fight a war to get it the first time. They aren’t exactly easy to come by.
“The GOP are now the permanent junior partners of the party of incumbency, which soon may have no need of them at all, except as a fig-leaf for bipartisanship.”
That’s what happened to the GOP in Illinois, where one-party rule by the Democrats obtains. It is a failed state, and the situation is worsening, but in the absence of an opposition party, there are no consequences for the Democrats. They remain in power and continue to rape the mostly conservative GOP-voting electorate in all but three of the state’s counties. Case in point is what happened when the Chicago teachers went on strike. Guess what? They won, wringing unaffordable concessions that will be paid for, directly or indirectly, by put-upon Illinois taxpayers throughout the state. We are serfs of the Illinois Democrat Party and of the unions that provide its muscle and most of all of Michael Madigan, who rules the state.
Last post. The Washington Post says that:
We are entering the age where effects are ascribed to doubtful causes.
anti-Mohammed video —-> rampage in Benghazi.
marital infidelity —–> Petraeus’ resignation
a Rolex watch ———> J cubed’s resignation from his new Congressional seat.
Now maybe that’s just me being cynical. The reality based community knows for a fact that the putative reasons given for the above are the real, actual and true causes for the effects observed. They have to be. It says so in the papers.
The alternative hypothesis is that these are cover stories for the real causes, which will be revealed at the last trump of judgment (who presumably will outlive Donald). Even atheists will probably wish for the existence of God if only so that they can find out for sure whether a) Oswald shot JFK; b) a video caused the unrest in the Middle East; c) why Petraeus resigned; and d) whether a Rolex watch actually costs $40,000.
I suppose you could make a half serious argument for the existence of God on the conjecture that if all these secrets are never to be revealed then the existence of universe would be too pointless.
26. Simone in BC
What better way to impose it than via the US military?
Perhaps. There is no mention of the Constitution in any school or institute of higher learning. All the miitary would have to do is change what they are teaching the troops on entry into boot camp. No Constitution, get rid of honor, integrity and of course, we’d have to go back calling the Muslim Brotherhood RAGHEADS like my generation loved to do.
You’re right, it certainly could be done. One problem though, might be this exchange:
“Well Grandpa, I passed all my Spec Op training, am a designated bad a$$ Seal! And keep this under your hat – I’m not supposed to divulge current ops: We’re going to link up with some Hamas and Hezbollah fighters and go into Israel and kill a bunch of those dirty Jooooos! Proud of me, now?”
“Get the hell out of my house you worthless maggot scum! I wouldn’t give a crap if some female Israeli Patriot blew your commie a$$ into the next generation.”
So as I can see, that that might be a problem. Oops, sorry, I forgot about Obamacare – Grandad will be long gone. The government just tells them in basic that their Gramps was killed by a dirty Joooo doctor. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
To begin to heal the junkie needs to crash. Hard. The train wreck is inevitable for the west. When it comes, keep a lookout amongst the carnage for a survivor to lead us through. The best chance is a quaint notion that a bunch of Churchills, Rommels, Senecas will arise and take us through to broad sunlit meadows. Maybe even Rome will rise again. Maybe.
35. Storm-Rider
Heh. That’s the truth I came to know through my classical liberal education. Back when “liberal” wasn’t an obvious evil word.
Looks like I just squeezed past the indoctrination centers that the public schools now represent. Thank God – even though it will go hard on me in the near future.
They came for Seneca, and they came for Rommel.
I wonder will they come for us? Or will we go another route.
People ask, “Why would anybody vote for the [metaphorical] poison?”
The answer is that they’re already convinced that everything’s going down in flames, and they want to be there to see the people they don’t like be destroyed, instead of it possibly happening without them getting to revel in the schadenfreude.
Or, in a purely economic sense, to take the word “poison” out of play, they know the economy is about to crash, and are trying to vote themselves as much crap as possible into their pockets before it all goes to shit.
Of course, when it all goes to shit, none of it will be any good to them anyway. But they don’t see that.
“Perhaps the root cause of the Fall of Empires — whether the Roman or the Third Reich — is they eventually poison the wellsprings of their own fact.”
The poisoning can’t occur unless the system/Empire suffers from advanced sclerosis. The American political system is sclerotic. It has been stuck on repeat play since the Republican Party was formed in 1850 and apparently many people here at BC claim the American political system can’t renew itself unless it first collapses.
I believe American politics could renew itself without first collapsing. Why assume that collapse is a necessary condition for renewal? I’m way more optimistic than that.
For example (repeat post from a previous thread) in Canada we know how to form new political parties at the Provincial and Federal levels. In Canada new political parties come and go with the changing of long-lived Political seasons. See below how the formation of a new conservative Federal political party eventually led to a majority government under our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.
Largely from Wikipedia:
The Reform Party of Canada was a Canadian federal political party that existed from 1987 to 2000. It was originally founded as a Western Canada-based protest party, but attempted to expand eastward in the 1990s. It viewed itself as a populist party. Soon after its formation it moved to the right and became a populist conservative (largely socially conservative) party. Initially, the Reform Party was motivated by the need for democratic reforms and by profound Western Canadian discontent with the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Led by its founder Preston Manning, the Reform Party rapidly gained momentum in western Canada and sought to expand its base in the east. Manning, son of longtime Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, gained support partly from the same political constituency as his father’s old party, the Social Credit Party of Alberta.
Demand for unity by the right encouraged Manning to promote a new movement, the “United Alternative”, to create a small-”c” conservative alternative to the Liberals. Manning blamed “conservative” vote splitting for keeping the Liberals in power. Manning’s efforts created a strong debate in the Reform party, and he would even write a letter to the effect that he didn’t want to lead Reform anymore, but would only lead the new party. Manning won a leadership review with over 75% support quelling his opposition. In 2000,following the second of the two United Alternative conventions, the party voted to dissolve in favour of a new party: the “Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance”, a declaration of policy and a new constitution. The new party’s platform was a mixture of the Progressive Conservative Party and Reform Party platforms. However, it was largely seen as merely a renamed and enlarged Reform Party. Former Reform members dominated the new party, and the Reform caucus in the Commons essentially became the Alliance caucus (with a few exceptions).
In April 2002, Stephen Harper was elected to leadership of the Canadian Alliance. Once Harper assumed the leadership, most of the rebellious MPs rejoined the Alliance party. Then Harper successfully reunited the right under the banner of the Conservative Party of Canada.
This new Conservative Party of Canada first took power as a minority government in the 2006 federal election as a minority government, a position it maintained after the 2008 election, before winning its first majority government in 2011. The current party leader is Stephen Harper, who has been the Prime Minister of Canada since 2006.
The Birthday wishes to Mother Green and the Machine are noted but its the 237th,not the 267th. Semper fi Marines and many returns.
To continue using Rome as an example, the Praetorian Guard eventually took over the reins of succession.
“Help us, Obi Wan. You’re our only hope.“
Josh @ 8: “Petraeus the victim? Was he conspiring against the crown?”
Hell, the girl even looks like Ellie Holbrook! Jordan Lyman never would have used the letters.
Bet Obama still doesn’t have the coordinates for Site Y.
stevesmith @ 54: in Canada we know how to form new political parties at the Provincial and Federal levels.”
Yeah, but have you unraveled your socialized medicine yet? Here in the US, that will amount to one-sixth of the economy. Once Obamacare goes into effect, the economy will be forever skewed by this massive artificiality. Has Canada managed to dial back any of their federalized programs yet?
Down here, the goal is to limit government, not merely replace those in charge with another gang of hacks.
55. DCH: “The Birthday wishes to Mother Green and the Machine are noted but its the 237th,not the 267th.”
Quite right, apologies: my bad. Darn typo.
W @ 44: “Rather the strategy should be to make the Emperor to fight for every inch of additional yardage.”
That depends on how one wants to fight the Emperor. In a war of attrition, the advantage probably goes to Lil’ Barry’s forces.
Nathan Bedford Forrest won a reputation as one of the most effective Confederate Generals in the (previous) US Civil War, usually fighting against much larger Union forces. To over-simplify, his basic technique was to choose the time & location of attack carefully, and then launch a surprise assault on the flanks of moving columns to divide the numerically larger Union forces and throw them into confusion.
Our would-be Emperor leads a very divided army. His single-mother brood-mares need that free cheese, but his high-income supporters in bureaucracy, media & academe would rather someone else paid for it. DC Democrats mouth support for teachers unions & public education, but they send their own daughters to be privately educated at the Friends’ School at vast expense. Domestic examples of the unsustainability of the Emperor’s coalition run on & on.
Internationally, it is the same story. External actors such as China & Iran outsmart the Ivy League set at every turn, driving wedges into the Emperor’s fissured coalitions.
We need to find ways to make US State governments as effective as the Russians at outmanoeuvering DC’s best & brightest. The best outcome now would probably be to have FedGov collapse (perhaps while trying to prop up diseased polities like California), and be replaced by a new coalition among the stronger surviving States.
58. Abbie Normal
Two examples of Federal programs that were recently abolished in Canada. We did just abolish our stupid Federal Gun Registry and the Feds have also destroyed the Registry database except for the Province of Quebec. The Feds want to destroy the database for Quebec too but not so Quebec itself which has started a lawsuit against the Feds. The Feds also just abolished the Canadian Wheat Board – a socialistic Federal supply management bureaucracy. It’s dead and gone.
Our socialized medicine needs reform, mainly by creating a parallel private system which would be legislatively simple. I don’t think our socialized medicine takes up one sixth of the economy but I don’t know how much of the economy it does suck up.
@61 :
It probably would be a lot easier since, due to only having 10% of the population of the US, the Bureaucracy attached to it likely isn’t nearly as big, either.
Kind of o/t – I need to do a serious calibration of where to move that is more in line with my need for fellowship of like-minded fellows. Anybody know of a truly accurate good map of red blue constituencies? The fallback is always Texas, God Bless Texas! And, they already have the right of succession built in, but I would like options. I’m on my own, but the calls are starting to come in asking the same question. Anybody? All input gratefully received.
to Abbie Normal @ 58
‘ Has Canada managed to dial back any of their federalized programs yet?’
yes..the gun registry and SocialiZed medecine ( as the only option) is on the way out for some provinces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry
SF
I removed my Romney bumper stickers today because I felt a subtle fear that the new majority would do violence to my car. I was reminded of my visit to my grandfather’s village in western Ukraine in 1993 right after the curtain fell. The paesants were very dark in their dress and behavior – they went about there business like late night burglers. I could not understand why this was so – until I went to the local graveyard to find my relatives markers. In one area, where many of my cousins where buried I noticed that the date of death was the same day. I asked why, I was told about Stalin’s purges – the late night knock on the door looking for troublemakers, smart alecs. These were routed out by informants (villagers who got a little more cheese). Hence, the subtle dark dress, low profile amongs the remaining villagers. Reality check tells me we have arrived. Does anybody have a living memory of fear associated with a bumper sticker for Nixon or Carter or Reagan. We have past some marker and it does not bode well for the smart alecs.
We don’t FedGov to collapse, we want them so broke they have to fire almost everyone and renege on their pensions. We want FedGov so broke so fast that the left is gobsmacked with fear. We want FedGov so broke so fast that the House impeaches and Senate convicts out of shear fear. I suggest a two million person march on the Capitol with tar and feathers or nooses might do it also.
8. Josh
L’affaire Petraeus is getting curiouser and curiouser– it looks as if the Fibbies got involved because Broadwell was sending threatening e-mails to another woman she thought was getting too close to General Four-Star, and said woman “went to the FBI for protection.”
From the WaPo:
“The collapse of the impressive career of CIA Director David H. Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with knowledge of the episode.
The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and a Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said.
When Petraeus’s name surfaced, FBI investigators were concerned that the CIA director’s personal e-mail account had been hacked and that national security had been threatened. The officials said further investigation, including FBI interviews with Broadwell and Petraeus, led to the discovery that the two were engaged in an affair.
The identity of the woman who received the e-mails was not disclosed, and the nature of her relationship with Petraeus is unknown. The officials said the woman did not work at the CIA and was not Petraeus’s wife, Holly. The law enforcement officials said the e-mails indicated that Broadwell perceived the other woman as a threat to her relationship with Petraeus. . . . The law enforcement officials did not provide an exact timeline for the investigation, but they said the inquiry started several months ago. They said investigators thought they were dealing with a routine harassment case until some communications were traced to a private e-mail account belonging to Petraeus.
The sexually explicit nature of the communications caused investigators to suspect that someone had broken into Petraeus’s e-mail account, leading to concerns about potential national security breaches, according to the officials. As the investigation proceeded and more evidence emerged, including Broadwell’s role, FBI investigators realized they had uncovered an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, the officials said.
The e-mails from Broadwell indicated that she felt the other woman was becoming involved with Petraeus, according to the officials. They said the e-mails were ‘threatening and harassing’ but not specific enough to warrant criminal charges. One of the officials said that the recipient of the e-mails complained to Petraeus about them and that the FBI later obtained e-mails between Petraeus and Broadwell in which they discussed the harassment.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-probe-of-petraeus-triggered-by-e-mail-threats-from-biographer-officials-say/2012/11/10/d2fc52de-2b68-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_print.html
Sounds like Broadwell is a real drama queen as well as a seductress. Where Benghazi comes into this mess is an ongoing question.
Confucius say: He who tomcat end up in catfight.
The administration is leaking like a sieve. The all out smear of Petraeus is well and truly started.
Richard – absolutely profound stuff, my friend.
You have a good attitude. Never give up, never surrender, never back off. But then again, change tactics, come at the enemy from another angle, be quicker and more agile than the enemy. And the Democrats have clearly become a large, slow, monolith. I’m working on my attitude, but I’m fairly self-interested at the moment.
I’m not a historian, but it occurred to me that most empires die in wars. Perhaps it will be the “barbarians” or maybe civil war, or internal revolutions, perhaps the odd Iranian or Chinese nuc, but empires mostly end after a war.
Someone said that all of this Obama corruption, the California mess – it’s not self-correcting. I beg to differ. EVERYTHING is self correcting. It just means lots of suffering and death, death by starvation, death by violence, death by Obamacare and loss of foodstamps, there’ll be just a lot of bodies. Then, something new will begin. It’s just a matter of time. That’s how empires die.
What the Democrats and their supporters believe about the economics, justice, about how wealth is created or how it should be distributed, about abortion or evolution, matters not. Their beliefs won’t change the level of the oceans, won’t change gravity, won’t change winter or summer or spring, or the second law of thermodynamics. Their beliefs won’t put a chicken in every pot, nor a shared Prius in every communal garage. Their beliefs won’t create them a job nor a business to provide that job.
Their beliefs mean squat. We’re all in the same boat, and if we’re going down by the bow with them leading, I’m damn well going to find the last lifeboat somewhere near the stern. Enjoy the ride, Obama-kiddies, it will be short.
Might be time to check out “Absolved”. Bits of a novel available online that is relevant these days.
http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2008/07/absolved-banner-connector.html
41. grrr
I fully expect that in the near future we will have an either sneaky or frontal (or a combination of two) assault on the 2-d amendment.
Here is some information that I got on the web from ex-military guys I admire and respect. Please disagree if you do not support some of these statements; fight them if you disagree. I will use everyone’s comments to help form my own impressions. Wimpy, huh? Hell, I’m still learning.
Warrantless searches are authorized under the “Terry Frisk” doctrine. Delayed notice search warrants under USA PATRIOT ACT exist. The NDAA 2012, and now the “Enemy Expatriation Act” authorize “judgmental” determination of your status as a potential domestic terrorist. Now I’m beginning to worry about anything I post that can be considered “unsupportive” of the United States of America. Hell, I put in 26 years; I love my country above all else! Today, however, that may constitute a fault? If you have any doubts about the demise of the fourth amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizures, you’re not paying attention. Are you still worried about the Second Amendment? Who cares if your “right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” if body-armor equipped officials can kick in your door in the middle of the night and take your guns without even having proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that you are going to use those guns to commit violent crimes?
“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
While the Supreme Court of the United States recently recognized the individual rights view of this amendment in the last several years (Heller), it was at best, limp. Even Justice Scalia indicated that too much hubris on this issue is unwarranted:
http://www.examiner.com/article/scalia-s-gun-remarks-outrage-conservatives
Scalia stated that the court may issue gun control rulings in the future due to “precedent” indicating that within the context of the 18th century the Framers of the Constitution allowed for local restrictions on guns and bans on certain types of weapons.
Huh? Stand by for heavy rolls.
While you may have an individual right to own firearms, local governments can still subject you to “reasonable” restrictions, regardless of how unreasonable you may feel those restrictions are.
Despite the idea, verbalized by that same Supreme Court in U.S. v. Miller, that the entire point of the second amendment was to protect the right of the citizenry to possess and use military-type weapons suitable for militia duty, today you may not own a current military grade automatic weapon in the United States. If you want an OLD one, you’ll pay a ridiculously exorbitant price due to the artificial, government-imposed lack of supply.
What about the rights of the people to defend themselves from tyranny? Look what happened in New Orleans during Katrina. If a 250 pound, bully can “jump” and stomp a 95 pound, 75-year-old woman, what chance do you think you might have?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Qx0cTze0M
I love the Marines – they are my brothers and sisters. I hope they are getting good instruction on the Constitution they swore to defend “against all enemies, both foreign and DOMESTIC”. That Domestic thingy can cut both ways unfortunately and the decision may be based only on the information you are given in the briefing (if accurate!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tbp1hERZjI&NR=1&feature=fvwp
the following expresses differing points of view on troop intervention. Notice that the “Progressives” didn’t like it when GW was in office…you can be sure they will be moot about it under President Obama:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLb-DerEvGY&NR=1&feature=endscreen
As far as the Second Amendment goes, your right to BEAR arms is “infringed” daily in all but four states: Vermont, Alaska, Arizona, and Wyoming. Everywhere else, if you want to carry your weapon, concealed on your person (you know, where it might actually be useful?), you have to ask your “betters” for a permission slip first. Of course, if you live in Illinois? You want the right to carry a gun? You don’t have ANY right to carry a gun!
Here is the problem. That whole, “we’ve got to elect a GOP candidate to the presidency” because Obama is going to take our gun rights away? That right would have been no more protected by Governor Romney. “Reasonable people” will show up all day long and vote against it.
The truth is that, by the wording in the Constitution, you don’t need government permission or protection to possess any of these rights. The entire idea behind the Bill of Rights was that these are NATURAL, God-given, unalienable human rights, shared by all men by virtue of their birth as human beings. The government may no longer protect those rights, BUT YOU STILL POSSESS THOSE RIGHTS.
AHA! Here the rubber meets the road: Are you going to exercise them?
Last word. Wretchard is the prime example of someone who effected dictatorial government change…without use of weapons.
Smart sometimes beats ruthless.
Pray for smart.
#63. Knight1 re: O/T fallback location
I’m in Kalifornia, so the issue is more urgent for me. Have been waiting for the twenty-something kids to finish school and get out on their own, but now I wait no more. Preparing to dump the house on the market now. I’m going to get hooked on retroactive newly raised taxes (unconstitutional, but that old piece of paper hasn’t mattered for 50 years).
My relocation selection criteria has been pretty simple. I’m going to the best run state, most conservative leaning, and lowest taxed state. Why bother with pulling up roots and leaving home for yet another fiasco state in the making?
Choices are difficult. Wyoming, Alaska, Tennessee, Florida, and one of the Dakota’s come to mind, plus Texas. Wyoming is the clear winner as far as I can tell, but man, it gets COLD there for a long time, and it’s windy most of the time. Texas is a great choice, but it doesn’t have the lowest taxes, much of it is either desert or located in Tornado alley. I was in Alabama a couple of years ago -and the people and culture there are terrific. However, I’m still sorting out the tax problems of 3 months work there, about 15 audit notices or letters from their various taxing agencies want a piece of me or my Corporation. Alabama is no better than Kalifornia, as far as the government culture goes. Why walk into that buzzsaw; checked them off the list. Their capital Montgomery is every bit as bad as Sacramento in Kalifornia.
Tennessee and Florida have been my favorites, for lots of reasons beyond climate. However, reassessing Tennessee the other day during my research and planning, I found out that they are a pretty serious progressive-taxing state. Florida is better than Tennessee in that regards, but Florida went for Obama in an election where the truth about Obama’s frauds was pretty clear. I see Florida becoming Kalifornia in 5-10 years, particularly if Cuban Americans have turned majority Democrat – they were the last hispanic bulwark against hispanic-driven Socialism. So, Florida is pretty much out.
The solution may end up being Texas – maybe Texan Hispanics will value faith and freedom over free Obama-bennies. Certainly if Texas tried to confront the Feds or out-and-out secede, I’d be there the next day with M4 in hand (oops, shouldn’t say that on the Internet; I’ll have the NSA monitoring my computer).
Good luck on your search.
Marcus Aurelius came to power 100 years after Nero, and was able to stabilize Rome for another 20 years. But in the bigger picture, he only slowed the inevitable decline. In an environment where our external threats know much more in real time about our situation that Rome’s enemies did, the OODA loop has been tightened considerably.
Sgian Dubh @ 71:
Concerns about boards being monitored, notes being taken, are quite valid. It is wise not to contemplate things that are illegal nor things that attempt to destroy governments. You focused on 2nd amendment rights, but also realize that 1st amendment rights are conditional. See: that dude in jail right now over the Mohammed video everybody knows was a canard. Don’t be fooled into thinking you have unalienable rights because the Constitution says so. You don’t. The Constitution has become a dead letter. Those here do not celebrate that, but rather mourn that and would have it restored. That oath of office taken by the president, and the one taken by every Marine, enjoy full support here.
The Good Lord, JC Himself, advised followers to go along with Rome. And he was dealing with a lot of worked up folks. (Judas Iscariot was one such, a Zealot, whom many believe betrayed Christ precisely over this issue). Judea wound up not taking his advice and paid a terrible price. All these problems are, in the final sense, temporal.
And this: Texas does not have a right to secede, as they found out when they tried it the first time. Oklahoma is an often overlooked state that has much to recommend it.
I have had the book, “The Murder of Rommel” on my reading list for some years now but have yet to buy it. Maybe I’ll do something quaint and check out the public library.
My interest in the book is based on an interview the author gave back in the mid-90’s when it was first published. The author was part of a US Army unit assigned to occupy the area that included Rommel’s home after WWII. He became friends with Rommel’s family and they told him that Rommel said his staff car was strafed not by RAF fighters, as the history books show, but by USAAF fighters.
This matches what a friend of mine told me, and he got it from a very high level source, that the attack on Rommel’s staff car was an assassination attempt by the USAAF, just like the Yamamoto strike of the previous year. It was done the same way, a carefully planned mission based on decoded enemy messages. I would love to write this story, but if it is true, I wonder why it has been kept covered up all these years.
As for the future of the USA, I am afraid we have reached the point yet again where we need a dictator. Lincoln was effectively a dictator. FDR was effectively a dictator. Back in England, Cromwell was effectively a dictator.
We need dictator who will tell everybody how much in the way oi freebies they will get, and for many that will mean nothing. And he will have to enforce it ruthlessly. In addition, types like Code Pink, the New Black Panthers, and OWS will have to learn to enjoy highly managed lifestyles in desert climes. Certain elected officials will serve one term in office and one in prison. And of course, a 9/11/01 style attack will be met with the use of radioactive very deadly force.
The logical place for such a leader to come from is the US Military. If he is a true US Military man he will retire to raise chickens once the emergency is over.
You of course remember when the Tea Party came to Washington when the health care act was being voted on. What do you think of us, others, trying to catalyze a similar “occupation” of Washington during the fiscal cliff/debt limit discussions during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. These are extraordinary times, they call for sacrifice. The “makers” and others horrified by the path we are on need to start sending riders out to spread the word, and converge on Washington. I think that it can’t be a day or a weekend, but a Tiananmen Square type movement. What say you?
Doug @ 20:
Hey, it is okay to take off your hair shirt. Or maybe you enjoy it. As for me, my Great-Grandparents (all sets) came here during and after to famine that was a creation of the Brits in the auld sod. We replaced that low cost labor pool so just be quiet.
The aggravations of the Obama Regime are only beginning. Remember he is now unencumbered by having to face another election.
Subotai Bahadur said at another place (I paraphrase):
“No. No. You heard them wrong. It isn’t “Hope & Change!”. It is “Rope & Chains!”. Wear them proudly America.
Reagan did eliminate the National Tea Tasting Board.
Totalitarian regimes by definition seek to replace reality with political constructs. The Totalitarian experience suppresses the ability of people to perceive and process information. The system and the people in it become progressively less efficient. The ability to recognize and logically react to adverse information declines and the controlling authority becomes increasingly desperate in demanding information and results from the compromised subordinates. In effect having eliminated the intrusion of reality that would serve to lead people, to pull them along logically in an optimum direction like strings pulled by a weight, they attempt instead to push the string against the force of reality. Reality wins.
Consider the case of China. Mao followed the examples of the Emperors but attempted to impose his authority deeper into the local level and individual psyche. Local officials not only could not deliver desired productivity but were unaware of what the reality was that a manager would need to arrange production even if it was legal to make the choices needed to do so. They responded to the demands of the Center by reporting false prosperity and destroying evidence. Enmeshing the widest possible network in corruption became a survival strategy to prevent being singled out for what everyone was doing.
Totalitarianism proves destructive not simply because political criteria replace market information. The problem is not that money was thrown away on Solyndra. The problem is that delicate apparatus needed to determine how the resources should be used gets deconstructed. Once that happens it can be hard to regenerate.
Today the American economy is chained to that of China. Who can believe the numbers reported by China, or by an Obama Czar?
The Grand Sacrifice of a Seneca or a Rommel might save their families but it does so by removing a remaining possible signal of reality not dissolved by the totalitarian experience. If the Emperor is secure in their control then the elimination of a few threats may ensure their survival. This can happen in a small community such as a cult or in a larger community such as the Third Reich or USSR if information dominance can be established. If repeated intrusions of reality in conflict with the totalitarian system occur then the system may not be able to respond and eliminate the threats fast enough. Collapse can be sudden and violent as with the People’s Temple in Guyana.
wretchard @44
Amen to that. Fight chaos.
Had a fairly productive meeting today with some folk attempting to hash out means of forging ahead with contesting our local election results. Despite our small voting population, thousands of votes remain uncounted and there have been numerous reports of irregularities (pre-filled screens illegally punched through to “help” voters, obfuscation of candidates, software interfaces seemingly designed to invalidate votes placed for certain candidates…etc) and outright illegal procedural ball-dropping by local election officials.
Yup, Screwtape’s buddies have had a busy week in the US Virgin Islands. One of our sitting senators and two of his staff were just arrested Thursday on a host of charges ranging from soliciting bribery (one from a windmill power project), graft, kickbacks, falsifying campaign disclosure reports for fun and profit, soliciting fraud (with his own staff who were given huge unearned bonuses for cash kickbacks to the ‘senator’), to wire fraud (he allegedly used tax-payer funds to task two of his legislative staff to earn a University of Phoenix online degree in his name). Word is there are more arrests of local Senators -and friends- pending…
And lest we forget what we’re up against; in just the last few days a US attorney’s office was burned down and the home of an Assistant Attorney General was gutted by fire (arson – “a total loss to both the structure and its contents”)…Security system was efficiently disabled…And I was awakened by a pretty intense gunfight last night (second in a month) that apparently didn’t rise to the level of news.
Crazy stuff…
74. Cowboy
Thanks for your comments, Cowboy, I deeply respect your wisdom and advice. I am not one of the people who eschew government for all of the crazy things I read on the internet. Like I said before, I love my brothers and sisters in law enforcement and in the military and respect their service. Nonetheless, anyone who violates the limits on their office (like the cop or the national guard roughneck who whacked a 75-year-old woman) are not my friends, nor will I respect them. Certainly, they can kill me and if they do, I’ll be dead.
If they come for my gun I will not “fight to the death” their efforts to disarm me. I will have to swallow hard as I hand them over, because I will not fire on my brothers and sisters. But if they decide that I am not the person who served 26 years and they harm me for no reason, I WILL REMEMBER that violation of laws I would never personally violate in the execution of my constitutional duties. Do they care if “I remember?” Probably not. But today, even I do not know what my “rememberance” will mean in actions on-going.
Of course, I’m an old man, and no one who is a totalitarian or a bully would have any reticence in blocking me against the wall or putting a bullet in my head. But I am a Christian, too, and confident in my destination.
Either way, with God’s acceptance of my future actions…I win.
Thanks again.
That deathless poet-philosopher “Mr. T.” offers his opinion on what lies ahead for the Obama Administration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSPNQ82Sq4E
Another grand slam, stating cogently what have been previously, to me, only scattered notions.
There’s always freedom somewhere.
The only positive side I can see to any of this is that it might finally trigger a widespread demand on the part of many states to secede from the out-of-control federal grabbermint.
Already seems to be happening…
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-louisiana-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/1wrvtngl
#54 SteveSmith
I don’t see what you mean by American politics being “on repeat play since 1850.”
I love Canada as much as the next guy, but when you went to expand on your argument, somehow it devolved into a brief history of Canadian parliamentary politics since 2002. Haven’t you ever heard the old joke that the world’s most boring headline was scientifically calculated to be “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?”
Keep up the good work up there by the way!
RWE @ 75
“As for the future of the USA, I am afraid we have reached the point yet again where we need a dictator. Lincoln was effectively a dictator. FDR was effectively a dictator”
But Lincoln and FDR weren’t from the military. They led the nation through its crisis, 1860, 1940. If our next crisis hits about 2020, that’s when we may need the dictator. How about Christie? He’s got the style for it.
Grant won in 1868, Eisenhower in 1952. If we are looking for a general to win, that may come in 2028 or 2032? I was thinking Petraeus for that, but that’s looking a little shaky now.
I’m gonna go watch “Failsafe.”. It will cheer me up.
#72 – To Old Salt, thank you for your response and analysis. I am from California and know exactly what you are experiencing. I moved when I realized I was seeing gang graffiti everywhere I looked – like dogs marking territory. I came to Washington state because visiting my brother, it took awhile for me to nail down what was missing – very little graffiti. That has changed in 16 years and looking at the election maps, only about 4-6 counties control a total of 39. The 4-6 counties are all on the western side of the state, especially King Co. and surrounded by red counties to no avail. I looked at the voting totals – King Co. turned out just over 50%, the red counties were above 60-85% and it didn’t matter. Breaks my heart. It is beautiful here and it is time to move on. I’d moved from Seattle to Federal Way as halving my commute, but now unemployed, so with this election and its eventual consequences, it is time to move again. This time to a rational state. Your analysis again accords with mine, so tough hard choices and action are required. Thank you, Old Salt.
P.S. – I thought I’d better check on those numbers – King went up to 73.6% with 93,000 votes still left to count – that’s from Thursday to Friday. We are an all mail vote county – no longer any polling stations to my sad regret. It is curious because in the primary election, which did not allow for voting for President or VP – we did that in precincts during caucus – only one-third turn out. Curious to see such an uptick – particularly since I’m a PCO and volunteered on the phone banks – it seemed to all of us an odd change from what we calibrated.
Old Salt @ 72: Alabama. Some of the lowest taxes in the nation (OTOH, that’s reflected in the quality of state-provided services available). My property taxes last year were a tad under $500. No income taxes on municipal, state, or federal retired pay. Republicans recently took over all three branches of the state government (first time since Reconstruction).
Also, the cost of gas is among the lowest in the nation ($3.10 today). C’mon down!
One of the things I like best about this blog is that W can riff on something to do with WWII or the Nazis, there can ensue a long discussion of details and broad philosophical arguments about Nazis, fascism and what have you, and when you’re done reading it doesn’t feel like anybody ran afoul of Godwin’s Law. Remarkable.
Less remarkable but still interesting…I just looked up a word and noticed the most common word lookups at webster.com for the last 24 hours and the last week:
Past 24 Hours
1.socialism
2.touché
3.pragmatic
4.esoteric
5.schadenfreude
6.kid
7.paradigm
8.disposition
9.didactic
10.bigot
Past Seven Days
1.socialism
2.kid
3.touché
4.pragmatic
5.esoteric
6.marriage
7.democracy
8.paradigm
9.bigot
10.culture
Looks like people are trying to learn the new form of government they’ll be living under soon (and in large part already are).
Knight1 @ 89: “Breaks my heart. It is beautiful here and it is time to move on.”
Yeah…I’ve begun thinking that about the US. It may indeed be time to move on soon. Today for the first time…and probably not the last…I broke down and cried on my wife’s shoulder. I just want to leave…and I may. I’m wondering if Switzerland lets in enterprising software developers…and whether I could get citizenship so I can renounce my US citizenship.
I hope I’m wrong, but I think you guys who are gearing up for next time are on a fool’s errand. This election was our chance, and we blew it. Even the Obamazoids will see that within the next 2 years at the outside…and we won’t be able to get the crap back into the dog. There will either be social and economic collapse or virtual dictatorship, or maybe social and economic collapse followed by virtual dictatorship. Whatever way it goes, I don’t think I’m up for staying through it. If I thought there was a chance to save things, I’d be the first to risk my life in the effort. But I don’t. Not enough people care passionately enough about what’s happening to try to stop it. The law is flouted openly by the most powerful and visible man in the country, and nobody says anything.
Well, the tax eaters hopefully won’t be getting much more of my money.
There seem to be groups of people, even certain Tweeters (@ReginaldQuill, @LibertyLynx cough cough) who apparently despise Obama, desperate NOT to believe that elements of their government and policies that they support (i.e. arming Syria’s rebels to overthrow Assad) got Amb. Chris Stevens killed. They will spin themselves in knots to avoid this painful fact. They will denounce every patriot like Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer or Doug Hagmann who comes out with elements of the truth — about Amb. Stevens’ last meeting with the Turkish ambassador, who told him the Russians knew of the Libyan SA7s being shipped to Syria — and claim they’re all ‘Russian agitprop agents’. (Well, yes…do they think the Russians haven’t seen that playbook of arming ‘mujahadeen’ ‘freedom fighters’ before?)
Anything to face the truth that Benghazi has been the subject of so many cover ups including the Petreus affair drama for one primary burning reason: if exposed the operation would prove that at least elements of the Obama Administration willfully shipped weapons to Islamist extremists associated with if not direct card carrying members of Al-Qaeda. And even asked the Al-Qaeda franchise group Ansar Al Shariah to supply ‘local security’ for the CIA compound that was inside the American satellite office in Benghazi. In other words, the whole ‘we’re fighting a war on terror and not playing footsie with our enemies’ charade would be unmasked and then they’d have to admit the people they’ve denounced as tin foil hatters and ‘truthers’ were at least partially right. The War on Terror has not been won, like the War on Drugs, because there’s been so much fraternizing with the other side or ‘allies’ who fund the other side.
I’d say that the fight is still in the ether — not in the barrel.
So, one should eschew all of the caliber talk. It’s actually counter-productive in W’s forum. For, in the worst case, such commentary becomes actionable intelligence that Big Mama can pull warrants on. A DoJ with (bag) Holder at the helm is an entirely subjective beast.
—————-
Instead, clubbers ought to begin their cross-training in emotional combat. For it is across the amygdala that our polity is divided.
http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/?p=354
The above link is MUST reading for those who wish to turn the leviathan around.
It’s hard to concatenate AC’s thesis, but here goes:
Across the human spectrum of DNA there are many ‘genetic sub-spectra’ — quasi-binomial distributions of essential traits. Those that are visually apparent, by definition, stand out.
But, for our politics, certain sequences — which map brain proteins — are defining: they are those which provide our ‘fulcrum of decision’ within the mind — within the amygdala, as it happens.
It’s a brain locus that can be pumped up/ enhanced by experience — or warped by experiences.
————
The Liberal mind actually has a direct mapping within the substructures of the amygdala; a ‘logical organ’ that makes higher order decisions — riding herd on the subconscious, if you will.
============
Further, our reproductive impulse is coded deep within our DNA — where else? In life there is a schism between breeding massive with trivial nurture — and breeding tight with massive nurture.
Our species is obviously one dialed into the EXTREME form of massive nurture and tight (ish) breeding. ( Monogamy being the ultimate in tight breeding. )
Such a scheme is Conservative — and known as ‘K-selection.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
The feral scheme of fatherless ghetto babies is Liberal — and known as r-selection; which goes way beyond bastards to all manner of low-commitment maternity — and nil paternal commitment.
Such preferences are encoded AT BIRTH, yet can be amplified by subsequent events, too.
===============
So, to chop the legs out from Liberalism, one must come to grips with what is gripping the imaginations of Liberals — and what constitutes their hot-buttons of decision.
Romney ALMOST got it right — but only in the third debate. He started to follow my dictum to be inscrutably firm and logical. If done while in the ‘right frame of expression’ — the Liberal can be, literally, driven into a pseudo-stroke — right on down into lock-jaw or gibberish.
For, while logical exposition would scarcely bother a Conservative, even when the argument lands telling blows — the effect on the amygdala of a Liberal is utterly paralytic.
—————–
Some idea of how powerful this can be is only hinted at with the third Romney-0bama ‘debate.’ When Romney is presenting the ‘threating’ realities of the world — Barry is about to lose his eyesight performing the Punahou Death Stare.(tm)
If the ‘moderator’ were to permit Mitt’s exposition to carry on — the President would’ve needed medical attention — as he would’ve entered psychic crisis then paralysis.
When it happened to Chris Wallace he had to be hospitalized. (!) Even the death of his first born son was as nothing compared to such a psychic blow.
In my own experience, I’ve seen truth trigger complete emotional breakdowns — featuring incoherence so severe the individual was left muttering and stuttering around: babbling with shuffled feet to the four walls.
[ Suddenly, Last Summer is on point here. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053318/ ]
—————–
Such tactics will prove immeasurably more powerful and effective than regiments of rifles. For you can deploy them right now — against the leading wedge of folly — Liberal professors and other ilk.
Having challenged professors before, I can absolutely assure you that mental blow-outs are right around the corner when you topple their scaffold of self-deceit/ manipulation of others.
[ Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren are nationally prominent buffoons/ Liberals. You'll note that they can't logically argue their way. Everything is, instead, a matter of 'in-grouping' / identity politics.
One might label it Political Set Theory. ]
Agoraphobic Plumber #90 – well, here’s the bright side – you had a shoulder to cry on – sorry, just began a mini-martini… I don’t think Switzerland will be your answer – from what I’ve been reading laws are being implemented across Europe to avoid any transfers of monies and, I suspect, people wanting out of what is already visible in Europe. At least here, you are certain to find like-minded people so that when the SHTF you’ll know at a glance who is on your side and who is not – the gut is faster than the mind in times of trouble. Stay strong, AP – and thanks because you made me buck up.
86. sally1137
I’m gonna go watch “Failsafe.”. It will cheer me up.
“Vandenburg”, for me. It will gird my loins.
Blert at #92 – I gotta admit much of what you said bypassed my absorption quotient, but towards the end, when you mentioned professors, I flashed on an old political science teacher I had in college – he was tenured, naturally – the class was rigged and he espoused more liberalism and white apology than I have heard before or since – even in these tulmultuous days! I was on my Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged shift and argued with him constantly – he did go apopletic and I actually thought he might have a heart attack. Before the class was finished, he proposed to me in class – weirdest thing – and I’ve seen some truly weird things…. Creepiest might be a better description.
The bitch slap of the recent election left me feeling pretty down – I got my Hayek out the next day and started reading (chapter: “Why the Worst Get On Top”)…..
“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the good of the whole is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done….Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the ‘selfish’ interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realization of the ends the community pursues.”
For those willing to reflect: Barry’s lock-up during Benghazigate, without a doubt, flowed from his amygdala — which went into multi-vibrator mode — leaving him flip-flopping around like beached flounder.
THIS is what the palace guard must hide from the public.
He ‘went to bed’ to rebuild his psychic composure, for it’s a sure bet that ugly thoughts of false-flag counter-intel ops were ruining his harmony.
(Hacking into his amygdala’s buzz.)
So he shuffled off in his PJ’s and took a snoot before hitting the rug for his ‘pau hana’ knee bends.
(After four years, it needs a reweaving, for sure.)
————
As for Putin & Co. — he and every other worldly power has already run a psychiatric work-up on the Wan. No wonder Putin shuns any ‘opportunity’ to meet with the Wan. Candy boy drains Alpha cred by mere proximity.
Protocol demands that heads of state be ranked equally. What a come down for Putin!
The photo ops must be particularly cruel: in this digital era you just can’t destroy all the photos. Poor Putin: standing next to a towering mental midget. The last time I saw such tragedy it was Maxwell Smart standing next to Mr. Big. ( the pilot episode — c.f. youtube )
Expect him to use go-fers/ ambassadors.
I would.
75. RWE “In addition, types like Code Pink, the New Black Panthers, and OWS will have to learn to enjoy highly managed lifestyles in desert climes.”
These are fronts. NGOs, government spies, etc. People don’t have time to be rebels. They are too busy slaving for precious metals that inevitably vanish into our atmosphere.
60. Kinuachdrach “External actors such as China & Iran outsmart the Ivy League set at every turn,”
69. Old Salt “Perhaps it will be the “barbarians” or maybe civil war, or … the odd Iranian or Chinese nuc”
“China and Iran… China and Iran…”
Do you not know what Iran is about? Maybe you don’t know anything about China? If Westerners think they belong in the same category, then all of Asia needs to wake up to this threat.
The fall back location for Americans is CANADA. That’s where one should put your specie. Since it draws no income of any kind, and you’ve already paid income tax on it, it’s your best bet for last-cash-standing.
While some imagine roving bands of thieves in a dystopia, history shows that life goes on. It’s the (fiat) money that dies!
So, visions of ‘The Walking Dead’ are pure fantasies.
Instead, think of commerce without ‘digital money’/ plastic. ( Digital Wall Street would reach its dead end.)
Today’s New York is what the future holds: spotty social function and illiquid commerce.
And, the specie of choice ought to be silver. Gold coins are just too much concentrated wealth. It’s always been that way.
That’s why every single super successful nation started up on a silver standard. ( Britain, America, Rome, China, Spain, France, etc. ) Gold as a money standard was only created in the 19th Century — by Britain — because she’d struck so much gold that such a standard favored Britain and here closed trading empire. Yes, that’s when and where it came from. The gold bugs are entirely wrong. Gold is so prized that it just doesn’t trade commercially. Instead, it’s purchased as ‘blood insurance’ — i.e. to buy ones way out of political Hell. (Think ransom monies in one guise or another.)
(True story: the Lindberg ransom was paid off with ‘gold certificates’ at a time when all such notes had been withdrawn from circulation. If the perps had taken them back to Germany they could’ve redeemed them, still, for gold. Instead, the ransom notes sent one to the electric chair.)
One wonders what is going on. I can think of no other phrase to explain it, but I think we are going through what is essentially a slow coupe. Certain elements are plotting to overthrow the government as set forth in the Constitution but it is all happening in slow motion so we fail to see the dynamic. In many ways its like what is transpiring in the nations blighted by the Arab Spring; one man, one vote, one time.
The traditional mechanisms of the Constitution are used to put the plotters in power but once there they simply ignore them. Supreme Court decisions have essentially gutted the plain and traditional meaning of the Constitution through a net of plain and utter sophistry. The Congress plays with micro-managing the economy and the society while totally abdicating the functions which it was designed to fulfill. The Executive branch, having been delegated the power to make laws (euphemistically known as “regulations”) which is the actual duty of the Congress, has assembled an army of unelected bureaucrats which produces them like maggots on roadkill on a warm summer day.
And the speed of the fall seems to be increasing. The powers that be hardly even bother to cloak their actions with a credible fiction of law anymore. The idea that their powers are limited seems ugly and repulsive to them. But that’s where we are. They are beginning to come out of the closet.
As to the hearings on Benghazi:
(1) Petreus won’t be there
(2) Hillary can’t be there (she’s off to the unstable country of Australia to fend off a potential slaughter of albino lesbians there I believe)
(3) Where is Gen. Ham? He could provide key information here. But he mysteriously retired and I haven’t heard anything about him since. Was he ordered to fall on his own sword?
And Congress can just be told they can’t be bothered to be there? I’ll remember that tactic if the IRS ever wants to audit me. I’m sure that will work for me. Sure.
Too much of what is going on now reeks of Kabuki theater, and a poorly executed one at that.
blert @ 92:
That’s interesting. I had forgotten about your amygdala analyses, so thanks for the referesher. The other day Elizabeth Warren gave what by all accounts was a very bizarre and shaky first press conference. It’s hard to find video of the whole thing, if anybody has it I’d like to see. The Boston Herald released an edited version that’s only 50 secs long. It’s very hard to read the accounts and believe this known charlatan, a proven fraud in a couple ways, has been privileged with a US Senate seat. And in her first interview she essentially froze up and choked. Gov. Patrick was kept on hand to bail her out, and she owes him one now, for sure. I wonder if what happened was that amygdala paralysis.
about Rommel
“But many historians say it is implausible that a field marshal who regularly met top Nazis, including Hitler, did not know of the Holocaust, a point critics say the film brushes over.
“On the one hand he didn’t commit war crimes that we know of and ordered a retreat at El Alamein despite Hitler’s order,” said Neitzel.
“But he took huge German casualties elsewhere and he was a servant of the regime. He was not exactly a shining liberal or Social Democrat. Mostly, he was interested in his career.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/01/entertainment-us-germany-rommel-idUSBRE8A00RM20121101
#23 dymphna
Lady Dymphna,
The difference is one of perspective. Kremlinology was being on the outside, looking in, against the opposition of what tried to be a totally closed society. Americans had/have more insight into German society, and plenty of Americans [my father included] were in Germany to bring about the end of the Nazi era. It is a form of dictatorship we are most familiar with, and we see the signs. In point of fact, the mechanisms and means of a dictatorship of the Left and a dictatorship of the right are interchangeable.
————
Cowboy does have a solid view of things. The First American Republic has fallen. We are seeing the beginning of the maneuverings to impose what follows. I will note to all that there have been 4 sudden reliefs of command from flag rank officers and higher since the disaster in Benghazi. For those with the interest, I would commend research into the fall of Generalfeldmarschall Blomberg, who was Hitler’s first Defense Minister, and was removed because he could be an alternate power center. The means seem analogous. I suspect this is the first stage of a purge of those in command of the military/intelligence community who could be a threat in the future. We are not in a stage where Show Trials are necessary or possible. I will not predict where it may go.
We have a Long Night ahead under the current regime. The regime is going to find that it is not driving all events, but events will be driving them. In the chaos to come, it may be [but not likely] that conditions will allow the rise of a Second American Republic. Or the creation of a separate entity.
Subotai Bahadur
67. PA Cat
then again Hollande difficulties with his both women are nothing comparing to what Petraeus is having with his seduced women
MC
Rommel spent his entire war in the west — never a direct witness to the Shoah.
When he did get actionable intelligence, Stauffenberg was injured in Tunisia and certainly approached him, he was not happy.
Even that far back, Rommel was slated to be the Head of State for the plotters.
Thats what the SD finally figured out. Even though the plotters tried to keep contact with Rommel to an absolute minimum — he was surrounded by SS troops — they still counted upon him to step up right through to action day.
BTW, the creation of the 116th Panzer Division was all part of the plot. Though presented to Hitler on his birthday April, 20, 1944, IIRC, by Heinz Guderian, it’s purpose was to entirely negate the 1SS Panzer Corps. The latter force was deliberately broken up in two so that the 116th Panzer could destroy each one in turn. (1SS and 12SS = 1SS Panzer Corps) To pull that stunt off, it was located nearest the ammo supply and repair facilities — and had two (2) full strength Panther battalions and one (1) full strength Mark IV Panzer battalion and one (1) full strength Panzerjager battalion. All during the Normandy fighting the 116th Panzer never was committed — the SS were. (!) Only, at the end, did OB West finally commit it as their last mobile reserve.
For the plotters, the 116th Panzer Division was to be Rommels life insurance. It was ENTIRELY composed of anti-NAZI officers — by Guderian, of course. Later in the war, the SD wanted to execute its top officers. They deemed it too dangerous to try and there are tales to tell about that.
This, the ‘Greyhound’ division was the fastest, deepest marching division during Battle of the Bulge. Virtually all western histories shunt the tale over to the 2nd Panzer — which actually was smashed and destroyed by 2nd USA Armored Division.
It’s because Rommel was so deeply involved so early into the plot that most historians have given him a ‘bye.’
And, obviously, he paid the price. The plotters tried to shield him — so that another attempt could be mounted. The SD entirely frustrated that hope.
Over 5,000 souls were snuffed out over the assassination attempt. A staggering number were Prussian staff functionaries not even in on it, whatsoever.
Hitler, thusly, deliberately broke the General Staff at this time — entirely imitating Stalin in this regard.
In his final hours he remonstrated that he should’ve done the deed much, much earlier.
84. AW
Re my “repeat play” comment. There’s no deep meaning to it, but it seems to me that Canadian Politics has been more eccentric and less stable than the Democrats versus Republicans theatre that is replayed through every U.S. election cycle. My point regarding the comments in this and recent threads is to assert that a third party to replace the Republicans in the U.S. is not an impossible dream. In fact there are useful examples to learn from just North of the border.
I understand the accepted narratives and jokes about Canada. I have invented a few myself. But our actual history and political history is downright colourful and is full of eccentric characters and political movements. More so it seems to me than other members of the anglosphere.
The Reform Party story that started in 2002 was just a recent example of a new conservative party started with the express purpose of challenging a governing “conservative party”. The point being that it is possible to start a new genuinely conservative party that eventually supplants an existing CINO (conservative in name only) party. Eventually, any new party ages and loses it’s original vision, so the renewal process must start again.
In Canada since Confederation in 1867 over 40 political parties have come into being and won seats in the Federal Parliament. Most of these are now extinct. There are many other examples of new Provincial political parties being created, coming to power and then fading away. Two examples from Alberta are The United Farmer’s Association Party and the Social Credit Party. The United Farmers entered politics in 1919 and formed a majority government in Alberta in 1921. In 1935 the Social Credit Party replaced the United Farmers as the governing political party in Alberta. Neither of these two parties was based on mainstream political ideologies. They had their eccentric lives in the sun and then faded away. Last year in Alberta the new Wild Rose Party challenged the ruling conservatives from their political right and nearly formed a new government on their first attempt.
The point is not that the U.S. should be like Canada – it can’t and doesn’t want to be like Canada. The point is that I believe American Federal politics has become sclerotic, needs a good shake up and that a shake up is perfectly feasible. The Tea Party movement in the U.S. is an obvious nucleus for starting the birth of a new political party. I say go for it.
I’ve gone on long enough about this. Time to shut up.
Now Petraeus is Rommel? This was a well written script but the casting is all wrong with a dwarf cast as a giant.
#103. Subotai Bahadur
I suspect this is the first stage of a purge of those in command of the military/intelligence community who could be a threat in the future.
I have begun to wonder the same thing in my more paranoid moments. The Won makes feeble legal arguments to justify his illegal actions, but at some point he will discard the mask, or rather, it will just crack apart and fall from his face. The way things are going there would be little to stop him except the military who swear an oath to the Constitution rather than the President. If you plan or fantasize on openly declaring that there is no law but you then you need to neutralize the military beforehand. Otherwise your neck might end up on the wrong end of a rope.
Get rid of those in the upper ranks who have any integrity and guts–and as for the lower ranks, maybe the sequestration that’s coming will do something there. Hell, why do we need an army at all? We can just rent soldiers from Cuba or Venezuela and save a bundle. I’m sure Cuba and Venezuela would both be delighted with the idea.
Amygdala, really? I know a Russian woman who will go on about dopamine, is this a related (and Russian) theory? Are you sure you don’t mean uvula?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCLPH3fnsDs
And if y’all are really looking for a place to hide, may I suggest Venus? Living is easy there, it’s a tropical paradise and the fixings of life are there for the picking, with blanket trees, ham bushes, and soap roots. And the tickets to go there are free!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons#The_solution
In the end Rommel was a selfish coward. Whole cities were being wiped out but he didn’t want HIS family to die. What if he had kept his and his family’s honor by shooting Burgdorf and Maisel in the face. Then helped his wife commit suicide and with his aide and teenage son fell killing as many of Hitler’s henchmen as they could?
Sometimes people do the honorable thing and die and the powers that be lie through their teeth and proclaim folly instead. Case in point Captain Fettermen and the “With eighty men I could ride through the whole Sioux nation” lie. He was of course the first dead Indian fighter to get “Custered”. In his case with no family to protect his reputation it was immediate. In Custer’s case we waited until his wife died to truly smear him.
As far this discussion being dangerous Mountainguerrilla has articles titled “Suppressive Fire For the Irregular War-Fighter” and “Notes on Setting Up the Modern Fighting Rifle” and Western Rifle Shooters has “Kill All They Send” so I wouldn’t wet my pants just yet.
We had hard freeze last night and today huge flocks of Widgeons and Mallards were passing through heading south. For the Lakota I believe it is now Waniyetu Wi the Moon when winter begins. How appropriate.
BobSun Nov 11, 12:30:00 AM EST said…
TownHall reports massive voter fraud in St. Lucie County
Posted by The Right Scoop The Right Scoop on November 10th, 2012 in Politics | 415 Comments
According to TownHall almost every precinct in St. Lucie county had over 113% voter turnout:
On Tuesday only one precinct had less than 113% turnout. “The Unofficial vote count is 175,554 registered voters 247,713 vote cards cast (141.10% ). The National SEAL Museum, a St. Lucie county polling place, had 158.85% voter turn out, the highest in the county.”
The Supervisor of Elections, Gertrude Walker, had this to say concerning the 141% voter turnout: “They may have had something like that in Palm Beach County, but we’ve never seen that here.”
Wow. There is no way they can get go without a recount now. This kind of voter fraud must end and it begins with Allen West. Let’s just hope the courts in Florida won’t stop this recount from happening.
townhall-reports-massive-voter-fraud-in-st-lucie-county/
I was only able to get you, Guvnor Ruf, up to about 112% as I recall. No wonder you fired me.
—
BobSun Nov 11, 12:42:00 AM EST said…
Well done in Philly, too:
In 13 Philly wards, Obama received 99% of vote — or more!
voter-turnout-president-obama-gop-voters
But the good news is:
Exclusive: Jackson Jr. Plea Deal Includes Resignation, Pleading Guilty To Misuse Of Funds…
Some Jail Time Inevitable…
Only to be replaced by another crook.
It’s sad to watch the country go down the toilet.
—
Doug Sun Nov 11, 02:28:00 AM EST said…
Jeeze, I’m shocked and surprised that Rufie did not reply to Bob’s evidence that this election was stolen.
Including War Hero and outspoken true conservative Allen West.
How Mia Love lost in Utah, I have no idea:
Racial Prejudice?
Seems a bit late in the game for that, even in Utah.
Mia Love is actually in a blue district in Utah. Yes, even Utah has these. And it was close. Had she not spoken at the convention she might have got by. Her prominence probably channeled more money and effort to take her down. We’re dealing with vicious people. Remember Obama’s closing argument? “Voting is the best revenge!”
To the notion that Rommel was coward, I’m not convinced. An argument can be made that he did the noble thing. No question he was in a tough spot, and there but by the grace of God go I. Rommel was many things, but not a coward. Nor Seneca. Nor Socrates. Nor Jesus Christ, and all these guys ordered to off themselves. Those are shoes you don’t want to walk in. The walk of the proscribed.
Josh @109…
Put the shovel down.
Lurk @110…
Rommel held the Blue Max.
Coward? ‘Tis to laugh.
Being slow on the uptake: he was kept out of the active plot because it would’ve been utterly blown if he was at all seriously engaged.
This, folks, is why military coups traditionally start with Lt Cols. Generals are watched for Bonapartist ambitions. Often they have finks directly attached to their staffs.
(Ask General Ham how that worked out.)
Claus was at the exact classic rank when he began his plot. His nightmare was that he had to be both agent and master — at the same time. It’s what blew the plot up. Almost three hours were lost because of his absence from Berlin.
85. franko
“But Lincoln and FDR weren’t from the military. They led the nation through its crisis, 1860, 1940. If our next crisis hits about 2020, that’s when we may need the dictator.
How about Christie? He’s got the style for it.”
—
Any “man” that weeps because he gets a call from The Boss, talks mostly about himself as a speaker when Ryan and Romney should be in his spotlight, and Heaps praise on BHO just prior to the election gets a thumbs down from me.
I threatened to toss Coulter into the Noonan-Buckley reject pile if she maintained her love for the Fat Man.
Luckily, she acquitted herself quite well on the Dennis Miller Show.
Don’t recall right now exactly what she said, but do remember Dennis commenting on probable mental issues for someone to be so obscenely morbidly obese as he.
…unless he has the DNA of a Pig, he is headed for an early trip to the grave.
And wasn’t he a global warmer, or something?
…if all the billions of humans on the planet were as fat as he, I might become a believer, also.
Doug @114…
Christie lost me when he defended appointing Salafists to positions of authority.
Yuk….
Even notorious bums with horrific records as slumlords. (!)
Blert
I’m not a specialist of Rommel, so I’ll have hard time to find a argument
if you’re interested, der spiegel made a couple of articles lately
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/nico-hofmann-interview-zu-rommel-und-hitler-projekt-a-862890.html
-http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/rommel-ulrich-tukur-als-hitlers-wuestenfuchs-in-der-ard-a-863956.html
Snopes Disputes Voter Fraud Allegation
Jus think… in a few years after homosexual marriage is legal, polyamory will be legal. Petraeus “affair” will be nothing more than a man dating a woman and considering her for his second wife. This “scandal” will be solved by marriage.
118. ErisGuy
in a few years after homosexual marriage is legal, polyamory will be legal. . . . This “scandal” will be solved by marriage.
Nothing then to keep Petraeus and Dr. Broadwell from taking each other as husbands. Might be good to have a doc in the family after Obamacare goes into full effect.
The relevant military term-of-art will be
FORLORN HOPE
Whether it was two Navy SEALs in Benghazi or BP engineer Kurt Mix, there still are Americans who will face seemingly impossible odds for the public good.
And no amount of “doubtcasting” by Obama’s advertisng team can diminish their position of honor in the view of the American Public.
Obama will come out looking like the tiny, cowardly gnat that he really is.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him….”
Marc Antony
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
-Winston Churchill
benghazi must be studied, not because of Obama, but for those two Seals. There are rumors that the guy on the rooftop took out 60 or 70 enemy. That’s medal of honor type stuff. That’s sergeant York squared! I want to know what this guy did so I can honor him. I want to revel in it.
77. R Daneel,
I don’t remember where I got that, and it was ‘sposed to be sarcasm.
Hair Suits don’t fit me well.
Mere life is sometimes tough enough, even w/o open wounds and ashes.
“The writer’s job is to tell the truth,” Ernest Hemingway once said. When he was having difficulty writing he reminded himself of this, as he explained in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. “I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”
105. blert
“When [Rommel] did get actionable intelligence … he was not happy.”
Nonsense. Rommel knew, and was prepared to carry out the Final Solution in his sphere of operations:
“Erwin Rommel was sent to North Africa in the first place to salvage Mussolini’s hold on Libya, but he was not sent into Egypt so that the Giza pyramids could be dismantled and then reerected on the edge of Berlin the way the Germans had earlier done with the Pergamum Altar in the middle of the city. He was to supervise the killing of all Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East under the control and with the participation of the murder commando attached to his headquarters.5 Hitler did not trust the Italians, to whom the area was to be allotted, to carry out this critically important mission as thoroughly as he was confident his own people would before the land was turned over to his ally.”
– Gerhard Weinberg, The Journal of Military History 75 (July 2011): 701-718.
My apologies for the long post and being slightly off topic- I don’t post often..
I too reside in Kalifornia and early this morning I had an epiphany on this election…
In my newly-redistricted congressional district we had a very tight race with a useless 7 term incumbent dem facing a Sacramento RINO. Megabucks were spent in our little county on their race and the two propositions that mattered (one pro and one anti public sector unions).
The dem won – 52-48% much bigger margin than expected considering 30% of the new district was deep red.
In late September I received a voter registration card at my home for a woman I do not know. No one in my neighborhood by that name either…As advised on the registration card I immediately wrote a letter to the registrar of voters in my county informing them of the error. I also sent a copy to the county Republican party.
A month later I received election materials and an absentee ballot for this person (the fraudulent registration specified “absentee only” as their voting preference). I thought Ha! you can’t vote this ballot if I return it to the county as “unknown addressee -wrong address”.
I thought I had neutralized the threat until this morning when I remembered the SEIU member busted during the 2010 election with reams of pre-addressed absentee ballots.. and it hit me- they didn’t need the form..this fraudulent registration probably voted with a similar manufactured ballot and if so-my vote was nullified and I’ve just been disenfranchised!
In 2000 Florida dems used nails to double-punch and nullify republican ballots, can it be the case in 2012 that they now use phantom absentee voters to do the same?? If true that would explain both the confidence of the dems and the “already banked our votes” comment. Was zeros winning margin among women due to similar absentee women?
Remember the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland- where at the end of the ride you face a mirror showing a ghost riding along with you? Well I bet my experience is not unique and the regime has populated our houses with millions of phantom democratic-voting absentee voters.
I’ve concluded that Allen West is on the right track -This may have been our first “Haunted” election and I hope some Ghostbusters show up to audit a few select counties in Ohio and Florida….
It wouldn’t take many to tip the scales..I am truly heartsick and don’t know what to do about this…how can I find out if that specific registration voted? What more can I do if it did? One vote won’t change the outcome but I’d like to at least have my vote counted fairly.
Also, the notion that Stauffenberg approached Rommel during the North African campaign, and that Rommel was “unhappy” when he learned about the Final Solution in the East, is pure speculation, and doubtful. For starters, 10th Panzer Division, Stauffenberg’s unit, did not arrive in North Africa until fairly late in the game, near the end of 1942. It was sent to Tunisia and attached to Hans-Juergen von Arnin’s Fifth Panzer Army. At the time Rommel’s Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee was retreating across Libya to link up with Arnim in Tunisia. Consequently Stauffenberg would have had few opportunities to meet personally with Rommel. He might have gained access to Rommel during the Kasserine Pass battles in February 1943, when elements of 10th Panzer Div were attached to Rommel’s command, but one can only speculate in this regard. In any case it is certain that, if Stauffenberg and Rommel did meet during this period, news of the Jewish genocide would have been no news at all to the Desert Fox. Any unhappiness Rommel felt would probably have stemmed from the results of the fighting in the Kasserine area, and the progressive deterioration of the German position in North Africa.
Battlefield bravery and other kinds are two different things. Sometimes it takes way, way more courage to live than to die. Much easier to die in combat than face the Emperor in shame and maybe live in shame another 20 years. Suicide is always the coward’s way out. Do you use your last bullet on yourself so you won’t be taken by the Sioux like Capt Brown (but NOT Fetterman) or do you fight to the bitter end with nothing but a bugle like Adolph Metzger. Brown was mutilated, Metzger’s remains were protected by his slayers. Fetterman, by the way, was ridden down by American Horse who then clubbed him and slit his throat. Colonel Carrington lied about it in his very first post battle report.
For the SEALs
bunnylove @ 122 -Yes, the feats of the SEALs in Benghazi were fitting for the MoH.
But don’t dismiss the feats of Kurt Mix.
1) Why is he the ONLY BP employee who has been criminally charged, though he did not enter the scene until well AFTER the deaths of the 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon?
2) Why has he not been given his Sixth Amendment rights to know the nature of the charges against him? How could he have possibly obstructed a grand jury iinvestigation by his actions?
The answer is he is the key witness against Obama and Chu for their sabotage ot the “top kill” operation during the night of May 26-27, 2010. That was precisely the time the Government bureaucrats were burning the midmight oil at 2 AM to craft the illegal drilling moratorium.
1) Does anybody believe Czar Carol Browner’s elves keep such business hours? 2) Does anybody remember the 19 hour news blackout?
3) Does anybody know why the on-scene commander was abruptly replaced amid the end of the joint Coast Guard – BP news conferences?
4) Does anyone know why Admiral Thad Allen asked for an after-action report starting on June 1, 2010 when he was appointed as National Incident Commander beginning on May 1, 2010, thereby escaping oversight to the top kill operation?
5) Has anyone read the New York Times story http://tinyurl.com/d7lv4fb
A technician involved in BP’s efforts to plug the well said on Tuesday that there were various opinions on the flow rate among the experts at the time.
The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the internal workings of the response effort, said that Mr. Mix had personally resisted accepting the high estimates of some contractors, insisting that much less oil was flowing out.
6) Did anyone notice it was Kurt Mix who killed the well via the “static kill” when the government insisted it would not be killed until completion of the relief well?
WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, OBAMA CHU AND THAD ALLEN, OR THE GUY WHO ACTUALLY KILLED THE WELL?
If, as your screen name suggests, you love bunnies, do you also love dolphins?
CHU LIED, DOLPHINS DIED!
Democracy fail!
Voter turnout in St. Lucie County, Florida was 141% of registered voters. Col. Allen West has locked down the ballots and voting machines to get a true recount, or that’s what he’s hoping he’s doing.
The Republic is a delusion.
Meanwhile, best wishes on Veterans Day to all BCers who have served, and all honor to the veterans who are no longer with us. God bless you all.
87. Knight1; Old Salt
Consider Ft Worth TX before you make up your mind.
Socrates gave up his life to preserve the government, no matter how bad Obama was. It isn’t clear that Rommel, by not rocking the boat, did any such thing.
“Not a dimes worth of difference between them.”
What if they’re all in on it? What if Romney was a planned failure and the real object is to minimize the Tea Party? Tea party would threaten ‘both’ dems and reps because they are not a dimes worth different. And Tea party is actually real, grassroots that is, and they, dem/rep, are only for appearances. How will this end? I don’t know.
There are so many predicting collapse that it seems almost certainly wrong. This will go on as long as someone is still willing to hit the keyboard and create more electronic dollars. And as long as people still are willing to accept them.
We’re beyond inflation, beyond even hyper inflation, we’re on the other side of Weimar into terra incognito. There are monsters here that we don’t know about, it’s going to be a festival of unknown-unknowns.
“Brown was mutilated, Metzger’s remains were protected by his slayers”
Nice story. Does anyone here think the Nazis, who filmed the executions of Staffenberg’s band of traitors as they were strangled with piano wire, would have behaved an honorably as the Sioux?
Faced with Socialists as enemies, if defeated, I’ll take the coward’s way out. Better that than slowly tortured to death in the camps and filmed for The One Leader’s entertainment.
(Didn’t the Romans employ as entertainment the public strangulation of defeated enemies? If only they’d had celluloid.)
W: “All tyrannies die in the end from madness, and each approaches the end with the vague notion that this could not be happening to them. But by then there is nothing to grasp, even their tools have become shadows.”
“Even their tools have become shadows” is purest poetry. You are playing at the very top of your game here. Thanks as ever.
Thanks Wretchard for the lyrical historical musings here. I’m not sure if I am more or less depressed to see how we just keep repeating lessons, or if knowing that gives comfort there are lessons learned on how to- the problem is they seem to take generations to get on the other side.
CA resident here hanging on til kids are off to college. Wife and I actively considering where else to go- concur with the readers who notes that low tax states are tough weather wise- and no guarantee that taxes wont go up, as the fiscal situation deteriorates further. So it becomes more about culture- Sandpoint ID is full of new wealth- as is Kalispell, MT- and one fears they will go the way of Colorado, as liberal wealthy refugees from SF have spoiled places like Denver.
New Zealand has a high barrier to entry in required net worth, that makes it interesting.
Any thoughts from other readers
Doug @ 114
Interesting point about Christie and physical or health limitations from obesity, since both Lincoln and FDR had physical conditions as well. Lincoln had some of the symptoms of Marfan’s syndrome, although now people question whether he actually had it. Perhaps a physical disability to some degree lets people trust them a bit more to identify with the problems of all the people and makes people more willing to allow them the dictatorial powers that will be needed in the crisis.
I might agree with you about Christie personally, but I try to handicap the chances of public figures apart from my personal preferences. My own personal favorites, like Palin and Perry recently, often seem to not do very well once in the arena.
I have enjoyed Ann Coulter recently, she seems to have become a voice for sanity.
So here’s Ms. Broadwell asserting some information about the CIA annex in Benghazi that I had not heard before (video of statement provided at link):
Although she does say that this information is still being vetted, so I’m a little unsure why she would bring up unvetted intel at an alumni symposium. Make you wonder what other kinds of pillow talk she and the good General had. Add one more potential piece to the puzzle.
Just thought I’d point out an excellent post on an adjacent thread:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/11/11/another-woe-is-us-election-analysis-proves-one-too-many/#comment-427098
Rick Moran tries to pull back from full-throated despair, but nobody much is following him. Yeah sure the reaction is a little overdone, or, well, maybe it’s not, given what is likely to come, and soon, like immediately.
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Just to clarify my previous post, that was sarcasm or irony or something. I’d love to sell the farm and take off for the frontier just about now, if there was that option. Tennessee is developing a Republican super-majority, hmm? Or maybe Dodge City. More like sell the townhouse and move farm-adjacent.
But meanwhile, let’s all have some fun at David Petraeus’ expense, and there may yet be more of (minor) substance to that story.
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db @ 139: Make you wonder what other kinds of pillow talk she and the good General had. Add one more potential piece to the puzzle.
Well, we’re told their relationship was already ended six months ago, so she wouldn’t have gotten this directly from DP, …. eliding the prurient details, it doesn’t make the rumor false, either.
140 @Josh
Thanks for correcting me on the timeline. I haven’t had the time to read up on this issue as much as I would like, and missed that fact. Assuming the tryst was over, it’s not hard to imagine she still had access to quite a few other resources in the Petraeus’s staff, as well as back in the military. Still interesting grist for the mill.
As for Moran, I can see his point but I don’t agree with it. On a short-term scale, it’s just another relatively minor loss of ground. But taken in the long view, when does one say “enough!”? We all know the progressive game is gradualism. Are we to just keep cooking at a slow simmer until we’re frog soup? Is there really a point of no return (at least as far as working within electoral politics)? I suspect so. Look at California. It’s essentially a one-party state now. And even though it’s pretty much boned, has the electorate tried changing directions even once? Nope, just keep doubling-down. California, and what I know of human nature, is why I’m very pessimistic.
Time for everyone to take a deep breath and repeat two words. Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick won in 1972 in a historic landslide. Crushed McGovern top to bottom. And yet less than two years later he was boarding a helicopter in disgrace, no longer President. Barry O has his own “Watergate” to worry about. Chances are that he may, while not being threatened with impeachment, become President Pariah and radioactive. Time will tell.
Obama’s victory ws less than stunning. The House remains in the Opposition’s hands. The Tea Party is 48 million strong. We have some cards to play.
The structure of choice at courts works against long term calculation. The returns are irresistible until suddenly they are fatal. That dynamic always traps the weaker of two factions in the party of incumbency…Seneca and Rommel, their exertions ironically helped bring about a situation where they themselves would no longer count against Caesar. They unintentionally brought about the destruction of the internal checks and balances.
Courtiers are those who aren’t content with earning an honest living. They are either rent-seekers who want to skim money off the productive folks, or else control freaks with a need to tell others how to live their lives. Both groups are naturally drawn to government as it is the only place they can do either.
Power is what draws everyone to court, the lust to weild it, or even just the thrill of being in proximity to it. Not all men are slaves to it – the honest farmer, the good burgher, the typical small business owner, they’re not drawn to power. It is the politicians and their hangers on who are, and for them, checks and balances are not important features but annoying obstacles. They think the fuse that blows when they try to plug a thousand toasters into the same plug is the problem. They don’t figure their breakfast plans are what’s wrong. They want to wedge a penny into the fuse box.
But all politics is local, and all power struggles are too when you are at Court. Wealth is not a zero sum game, you can always have a bigger pie to share. But power, that is a zero sum game. If you have more power over me, I have less power over you. There is no way around that. Eventually your allies at court have to become your enemies, because wolves voting on lunch will eventually run out of sheep.
Had the Second World war (by some miracle) not supervened it is interesting to speculate on whether a longer but shallower series of failures would have worn the Third Reich down. I think the probable answer to that question is “yes” because that is in fact what happened to the Soviet Union over the period now known as the Cold War.
Interesting question. Stalin was monstrously evil and terribly misguided about what would and would not work, but he was fundamentally sane. OTOH Hitler was clearly insane in addition to being evil, wrong, and stubborn. It is interesting to speculate on whether Stalin’s long reign allowed the Kremlin to create some minimal checks and balances that could deal with loons before the loons commited the USSR to an unwinnable disaster.
Of course the long run was unwinnable for them, but the absence of megalomaniacs from their circles of power is perhaps what kept them from immolating themselves the way the Germans did.
Pretend for a moment that pro baseball umpires abide by the tenets of politically correct liberalism in all its facets.
It would be the death of pro baseball. Things would occur in the game that would make no sense. There would in reality be no rules. Pretend however that the games are played regardless, year after year. It would be madness. The worst teams would be uplifted, the best brought down, the games based on woulda, coulda, shoulda – blame and excuses.
Liberalism is a cultural suicide cult.
JMH…
At one point Stalin was actually examined by the USSR’s foremost psychiatrist.
His conclusion was that Stalin was the most extreme, insane paranoid he’d ever encountered.
When, after a time, he divulged his diagnosis to his lifelong best buddy/ a fellow MD, he found himself in the tender arms of the NKVD, ( nee KGB ) dying two weeks later.
As for Adolf: it’s impossible to scope his behavior without noting that he was on meth with variations during most of the war. His consequent erratic behavior was so extreme that Himmler had SS doctors peak into Hitler’s medicine supply, on the QT, of course.
It was an evil brew of everything from amphetamines to arsenic. (The latter because it was the only anti-syphilitic available before Penicillin. Hitler was down to one nut, and didn’t want to suffer any further impairment. That’s why he sought out Germany’s foremost physician with expertise in Syphilis.)
So, your thesis is off: you have two whackos — whether by nature or prescription matters little.
INRE Rommel:
He lived in a fishbowl. His chit-chats with Claus were, obviously, never reduced to writing.
The plot only ever moved forward after Stauffenberg had his replacement in hand. Getting Rommel on board was the actual starting point of the plot. Without a nationally prominent name that would draw instant allegiance, the plotters had absolutely no one to turn the nation over to.
The SD determined that the absolute heart of the plot was the Stauffenberg-Rommel axis. Everyone else could be replaced, not them.
The plot was not to kill Hitler. The plot was to replace the NAZI government, entire. Berlin, with Goering and Himmler floating around — both with their own armies — with serious formations in and around Berlin would not be a safe place for new policies.
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INRE The Shoah being extended into the Levant: Rommel, uniquely, persuaded Hitler to ENTIRELY exclude the SS and SD from his theater. ( And, for the record, it was officially an Italian Campaign; not withstanding the military domination of the German forces. Rommel was there to rescue the Italians — and nominally had to report to an Italian general. Examine their command ceremonies.)
Yet, the SD was the exclusive agent of Operation Reinhard. IIRC, Rommel wouldn’t even permit Jews caught on the battlefield to be separated from the general haul of prisoners. ( He’d dump prisoners into the hands of the Italians, as soon as possible, and make them their obligation to feed and tend. That’s why there were so many Allied prisoners sitting in Italy for us to liberate in 1943; they didn’t get shipped off to Germany. Even Frank Sinatra could explain it to you.)
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Rommel and Stauffenberg were playing for all the marbles — not a couple of disposable SD goons. When you’re a major field commander, living in a fishbowl, you can’t play James Bond. Only Stauffenberg could do that. ( And, you’ll note that Stauffenberg started plotting when at the same rank as the mythical Bond: O5. ( Commander=Lt Col ) It’s enough pull to get around, yet low enough to not be dogged by a security detail.
Lastly, it was a Roman Catholic plot, for the most part. The plotters weren’t motivated by personal gain. It was always a morality issue — and the Shoah drove the principals.
The other plot center was Army Group Center. It is almost always omitted from popular accounts. It was, in fact, the locus within the Heer that spewed forth conspirators. EVERY officer in the HQ was lined up to kill Adolf — they took a vote on it — AFTER hearing an exposition on the scope and purpose of the Shoah. THAT’S what did it.
Fred@137
I would suggest you try WA (Australia), the biggest state in the Anglosphere, and still booming despite our socialist federal government trying to screw us.
But unfortunately, you cannot abandon the US (NZ is more PC than you know!). We all need our Yankee cousins riding shotgun for the planet. If you cant fix up the US, we are all totally screwed.
Blert
about the Jews in Libya, the fashists had already interned them in camps
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/libyajew/LibyanJews/RoumaniAspects.html
and weren’t reluctant to send the Balkans Jews to Germany when they occupied the aeras, nor the Jew coming from Libya for finding asile in Italy, from 1943 when Germany took control of Italy
Another example from many years ago: Quid est veritas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_18:38
#140 Josh
This may be just me, but I tend to take Rick Moran with a bloody great grain of salt.
He has a blog, RIGHT WING NUTHOUSE. Immediately after Obama was first elected, he did a piece about how the millenium had come and how it was incumbent for everybody to submit to Obama’s greatness. As one could expect, this did not go over well, and the comment thread was huge and if I remember went over a couple of days with both Moran and his commenters getting rude, crude, and downright socially unacceptable. Moran ended up shutting down comments on his blog for quite a while. Which was fine with me, as I stopped reading there at that point. I avoid him at PJM, because of the bad taste he leaves in one’s mouth after reading him.
I just now read the PJM piece you referenced. Not overtly unreasonable, except in its Pollyannaish optimism. I then donned full HAZMAT gear and went back to RIGHT WING NUTHOUSE. Here is the first paragraph of his blog post for November 8, 2012:
The piece went on to characterize the opposition to Obama in more detailed and hostile terms.
He may try to pose as semi-rational at PJM; but he IS working for the enemy elsewhere on his own turf. YMMV.
Subotai Bahadur