Metamorphosis
One of the hottest news stories in Britain was a decision by a local government unit to take away foster children from members of the UK Independence Party on the grounds that the adoptive parents were ipso facto ‘racist’.
The decision by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has provoked widespread criticism, with campaigners representing foster parents describing the decision as “ridiculous” and warning that it could deter other prospective foster parents from volunteering.
But Joyce Thacker, the council’s Director of Children and Young People’s Services, today said the three ethnic minority children had been placed with the couple as an emergency and the arrangement was never going to be long-term.
She told the BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “We always try to place children in a sensible cultural placement. These children are not UK children and we were not aware of the foster parents having strong political views.
“There are some strong views in the Ukip party and we have to think of the future of the children.”
Here’s the lady from the council expressing her deep concern. Nigel Farage of UKIP was interviewed by a radio station to give his views. Note how the radio interviewer argues that for Farage to object is “to politicize” it.
This follows the 2011 case in which an elderly black couple were told they could not be adoptive parents because they refused to undertake to instruct their children that a gay lifestyle was acceptable.
The Bigoted Couple
The couple took their case to the British High Court and lost. The Guardian reports “the judges in their ruling said they were not ruling against beliefs but against the discriminatory effects of those beliefs and that one set of beliefs could not take precedence in a pluralist society.”
Derby city council said it had never taken a view on the Johns’ application, adding: “It would be inappropriate for the council to approve foster carers who cannot meet minimum standards. It would be difficult and impractical to match children with Mr and Mrs Johns if they feel that strongly.”
Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights’ charity Stonewall, said: “In any fostering case the interests of the 60,000 children in care should override the bias of any prospective parent. If you wish to be involved in the delivery of a public service you should be prepared to provide it fairly to anyone.”
Yes it’s all about “the children” and their welfare. Understanding what is best for children requires a certain sensibility. It is not always obvious. Recently European authorities have considered banning facilities which accept abandoned babies.
BERLIN (AP) — German pastor Gabriele Stangl says she will never forget the harrowing confession she heard in 1999. A woman said she had been brutally raped, got pregnant and had a baby. Then she killed it and buried it in the woods near Berlin.
Stangl wanted to do something to help women in such desperate situations. So the following year, she convinced Berlin’s Waldfriede Hospital to create the city’s first so-called “baby box.” The box is actually a warm incubator that can be opened from an outside wall of a hospital where a desperate parent can anonymously leave an unwanted infant…
But they have drawn the attention of human rights advocates who think they are bad for the children and merely avoid dealing with the problems that lead to child abandonment. At a meeting last month, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said baby boxes should be banned and is pushing that agenda to the European Parliament.
Now you would think it is preferable to be alive than to be dead. But what do we know? It’s much better to abort the baby. That is so much more progressive.
In many ways the council lady could not expose herself to the liability of allowing children to grow up with monstrous bigots. You, reading these lines are probably a monstrous bigot. Can’t you smell the stench rising from yourself? When did people start discovering they were criminals? Quite suddenly, but decisively.
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
“What’s happened to me,” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out—Samsa was a travelling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.
But there’s hope. And the possibility of change and salvation too, though one must apologize for using outdated bigoted terminology. All one has to do is get with the program.
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Horrible, simply horrible – and somehow, I just know that there are child welfare authorities in the US who would love to disqualify families from adopting because they are Tea Partiers, or Republicans.
My money says the Rotherham MBC’s exercise in PC insanity has just handed Nigel Farage and the UKIP a nicely wrapped gift on a silver platter:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/9701502/Nigel-Farage-declares-war-on-David-Cameron-over-Ukip-racism-slur.html
It is always amazing how often those who profess the strongest distaste of fascism so often adopt fascist policies themselves.
One man’s fascism is another man’s defense against fascism.
Orwellian? Kafkaesque?
Things are just getting stranger and stranger, beyond anything coming from a writer’s wildest imagination. I have this awful feeling that “you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”
Obama’s Soviet Mistake
…Well, any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis . O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
Reading Putin’s speech without knowing the author, one would think it was written by Reagan or another conservative in America. The speech promotes smaller government and less taxes. It comes as no surprise to those who know Putin as a conservative. Vladimir Putin went on to say:
“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.
The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”
President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don’t they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.
“We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success.”- Vladimir Putin
The red, white and blue still flies happily but only in Russia. Russia still has St George defeating the Dragon with the symbol of the cross on its’ flag. The ACLU and other atheist groups in America would never allow the US flag with such religious symbols. Lawsuits a plenty against religious freedom and expression in the land of the free. Christianity in the U.S. is under attack as it was during the early period of the Soviet Union when religious symbols were against the law…
Orwellian? Kafkaesque? How about Hitlerian? Or Stalinesque? Historians have tried to explain how mid-20th century Europeans could have possibly believed in that Master-Race or Locomotive-of-History Worker’s-Paradise Lebenstraum bullshit. We laugh to think they were so stupid.
But maybe we should stop to think what impossibilities the average enlightened Western man has now swallowed whole. Global Warming, Political Correctness, self-hatred, Gaia, Xenu and who knows what else.
It could happen to us. Maybe it already has.
I wonder if they would have got the same response if they had been communists?
Demographics will take another 20+ years, but the left will depopulate itself.
Leftys have few kids, even the ‘religious’ ones.
People with traditional views are the ones forming families that want and produce kids.
The only question is: Do we have the time in order to prevail?
On a different note. Will Russia decide that it will align with Israel?
Sad to say but this sort of thing will continue and get worse unless and until the various bureaucrats and councils making the decisions are assassinated in the streets many times. Without deadly consequences this sort of stuff just grows and grows. Ramp this tendency out ten years. What do you have there and here?
It could happen to us. Maybe it already has.
I came to roughly that conclusion during the Clinton follies circa 1998.
The issue is whether we can recover from it without the 20,000,000 casualities.
I watch the ABC Sunday morning “news” show and I could be watching inmates at an asylum, for the unreality of it all.
What seemed to happen in the late Roman empire is that things got to such a state nobody wanted it to continue, and eventually it didn’t. OTOH it did take several hundred years to fall. The British empire fell much faster though even that took a generation or two, but then they hadn’t lasted as long either, and it was never quite the same thing. And with a glitch here and there, they continue to fall even today, it sounds like.
Maybe you’ve seen the Pravda link up on Drudge now (I don’t like to click on or post links to .ru, too much malware) that says the Americans electing Obama continue to make the Communist errors thanks to the illiterate electorate. At last, part of the MSM that is still functioning.
Maybe it was just cowardice? If you were a Menshevik or SR (who together held a huge majority over the Leninists), were you going to get fight back after you saw what the Bolsheviks were doing to the Kadets and Monarchists? If you were a German, middle-aged, centrist burgher, were you going to the streets after watching the Brownshirts kick the crap out of the Communist Party street gangs?
At a purely tactical level, that’s how it works — find some unpopular political group and make it into the lesson child. The tendency of the political “center” is to compromise, figure out a way to make it through without breaking anything.
Recently I heard of a case of a family that lived in a fairly rural area, on a 3 acre lot. It just so happened that a policeman liked to sit in his patrol car at the end of the street when he was not actually chasing bad guys. And one day the family’s 5 year old child walked out into the yard, and took a pee. The cop saw it and handed them a ticket with a $2000 fine.
Several years ago a family in a rural area of NC was undergoing their usual morning chaos as the kids got ready for school. Their toddler, naked, followed a kitten out the door (the kitten is thought to have been nude as well). One of the older children ran out and immediately dragged the little exhibitionist back in the house. Having a little kid wander outside unclothed is not all that unusual in my experience, but it appears a school bus diver passing by witnessed the display and reported the family to the authorities. It took them months to get the Dept of Child Protective Services off their back.
That’s the flip side of a government big enough to give you anything you need; it’s also big enough to really piss you off.
No wonder the Left wants gun control so badly.
The policeman that issued the ticket about the micturating child has been fired.
It could happen to us. Maybe it already has.
I may steal that for a signature.
Demographics will take another 20+ years, but the left will depopulate itself.
Leftys have few kids, even the ‘religious’ ones.
They don’t need to breed their own kids when they have yours in their public schools. THAT is their way of replicating themselves.
The people who brought you (the divine right to) sex without begetting children … are now begetting children without sex. Stands to reason, yes? Perversities R Us!
Remember the Child Catcher character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Stole all the kids of the subjects & imprisoned them in a dungeon underneath the royal castle while the childish & childless rulers frolicked in obscene luxury. By Odin, I never thought I would find myself living in that kind of upside-down world, but the creep-out continues apace.
The Catholic Church is always waaay ahead of the world on moral issues.
When the Church takes a strong position on an issue, best to listen even if you are not RC.
Most recently, the Church has identified as attacks on the family in its most pointed observations of where we err.
From gay marriage to the Democrats’ Julia to these aggressions against the role of foster parents, the family is being delegitimized and dismissed.
It’s a small step from foster parents to birth parents, isn’t it? In fact, why worry about a term like “birth parents” at all when gay marriage will erase the concepts of husband and wife, father and mother? And once you’ve done away with husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, how do you define a family?
Don’t worry…evidently, the state will tell you what a family is. And who are worthy to have one. Or keep one together.
I would love to know what their policy is regarding adopted starchilds such as Jerry Wills or Sammy Hagar.
Possibly OT or not and not relating to the commentators on this excellent thread.
From just before the election and increasingly since it the brakes have come off the social/political/legal conduct of the Left. Foreigners will refer to their political opponents or their own rural citizens with a sneering comparison to “your Republicans” in the confident assumption that any educated American city dweller shares their prejudices. Domestically Obama voters conduct themselves with swaggering aggressiveness on the subway or in the workplace. On this blog we have seen a flood of comments from the deranged or the illiterate or the juvenile or the simply destructive. Their sudden discovery of this forum makes me wonder if their presence is simply part of the larger phenomenon or is in fact part of a coordinated effort to discredit and destroy any refuge or possible incubator of future resistance. We are in Imladris and the Nine may have found us.
15. bogie wheel
They don’t need to breed their own kids when they have yours in their public schools. THAT is their way of replicating themselves.
That, and also the way they run one state into the ground, then move to another state where they continue their same voting patterns. The California disease has spread to Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico. Likewise, New Yorkers and New Jerseyites have been moving to Pennsylvania, while Massachuttans have been slowly conquering New Hampshire.
Leftists are like a plague of locusts, or the Borg. I don’t know how to stop it, other than “red” states forbidding new arrivals from being able to vote for a period of time.
19. rickl
I firmly believe that had we had voter ID requirements, Romney would have won.
In past years I was a pole worker volunteer and almost everyone coming in to vote would pull out there drivers license and we had to tell them it was not needed to vote. The primary objection to voter ID is from people looking for an easy was to commit fraud.
In regards to educrats – HOME SCHOOL.
I have a niece that is getting her collage degree online.
The amount of teaching materials, on all levels, available online is incredible.
If you love your kids, either home school or religious schools. Kids require being taught ethics, it does not come naturally, bullying does.
Caveat Emptor, not all religious schools are conservative.
#6 – Wretchard, you forgot the celebratory “victimhood” classification!
Agreed, the RC church has consistently been correct in identifying the left’s culture of death (nihilism) as the root of much of what threatens to destroy society. However, the left already defeated the institutional church before they completed the long march through the institutions of learning. Again having the fortune or misfortune to be a witness to history, I watched a whole generation of young nuns and priests leave the church for secular pursuits. I remember very clearly how one group of nuns moved from the convent to a neigborhood house to “be more in touch with the community.” Good on them for the last ditch effort, but they still almost all ended up renouncing their vows and moving on to be social workers or school teachers. The left offered them a path to “right” society’s wrongs in a “relevant” fashion without any of the overhead of celibacy and a semi-cloistered existence or any of the other baggage that the church seemed to bring with it. It’s true that the church does not need divisions, but it does need a priest- and sister-hood.
I suppose it is superfluous to imagine what the good councilmen of the town would think of putting kids with a Muslim fundamentalist family. I mean, hasn’t everybody already thought of that question?
#12. RWE…
It was actually PETA upset about that nude kitten.
…having no enforcement arm, they called in Protective Services.
rickl @ 19: “Leftists are like a plague of locusts, or the Borg.”
More like a virus, tiny intruders slipping into the DNA control centers of its host/victim and causing the body politic to start disintegrating. Can anyone think of a single institution which has been improved by Leftist control? If the question were institutions degraded by Leftist control, we would need a bigger sheet of paper — the Church of England, BBC, NYT, Nobel Peace Prize Committee … the list goes on & on.
When a lethal virus infects a body, there are only two outcomes: either the virus succeeds, which leads to the death of the body; or the body’s defense mechanisms finally triumph, and a weakened body ultimately succeeds in exterminating the virus.
Many of us had hoped that there would be a reasonably peaceful resolution to the wrong path the Political Class has chosen. I have regretfully come to realize that was a vain hope. The current situation can end only in total societal collapse due to extreme Leftist mismanagement, or in a civil war in which Leftists and their brain-dead supporters are terminated with extreme prejudice.
Either way, we should count ourselves lucky. We saw humanity at its peak. It will take 2 to 10 generations before human beings can claw their way back to the level of societal well-being we are fortunate enough to have experienced.
It’s utterly repugnant how trusting the leftist mind is with regard to governments and to expertism. This woman from Britain’s child services said they “talked amongst themselves” and then pronounced fiat: the couple is stripped of their children. And that flies. I might point out several grave problems here with regard to due process, to basic human rights, etc. And all that’s a niggling matter somehow. Nitpicking. Recall Pelosi’s reaction when questioned over ObamaCare’s Constitutionality: “Seriously?!!” What’s important is the experts have determined what’s best, wand viola! With sympathies, I’m sure.
They’ll trust your fate to their most reasonable private calculations, too. Bank on it.
The other striking thing is how bereft of sense and unmoored from comon decency it can rapidly get. See that pronouncement from the court regarding the black couple who sought adoption? “One set of beliefs could not take precedence in a pluralist society”, they said, as they slammed their set of beliefs down peoples’ throats. This is one of the finer examples of doublespeak going. Do you see what they mean by pluarlist? And by bipartisan? It is not what you mean.
Kafka’s roach is off a little. Some will wake and not see themselves as roaches, but wonder how they awoke as human inside a roach colony.
The other day I was in a lengthy convo with a Democrat friend, who really sought to pin me down on why I could trust business, commerce, markets, less regulation, and so forth. Could I not see the danger these things presented, leaving us vulnerable to human nature and all the machinations of bad actors gaining ill-advantage? Well, yes. I could see his point. He could never see mine: that government serving as his white knight, it, too, is staffed by humans with all their faults. And with broader powers for ill than any free association of men could ever dream up. They can’t see it. Won’t see it.
All one has to do is get with the program.
Indeed. One wonders what the program is though. Or, what it will be next. The obvious next step from not placing foster parents/adoptions with members of the out-of-favor party is to take their own children away. How long before voting Republican, or donating to a GOP candidate, or – worst! – attending a Tea Party rally, gets a visit form Child Protective Services?
Which brings up RWE and Vanderleun’s comments. At some point, you have to wonder if people will start doing unto before they’re done unto themselves.
And Swamp Woman, maybe he’s been fired, but has the union grievance run it’s course yet? My expectation is, after the press dies down, the union wins a reinstatement.
How long does it take them to go from this to confiscating the children of those deemed to hold incorrect beliefs? Once the state has set the precedent that some people are unfit to be foster parents solely because of their political views, then it is only a very small step to declare them to be unfit to be parents all together. There are already a few cases of this happening in this country. Barry Cooper is a Former DEA agent turned drug activist who frequently and publicly expresses a strong dislike of federal authority. One of his children was taken from him by child protective services because according to them, he was teaching the child to “fear authority”. I’m sure they thought a bunch of armed men dragging the child away from his parents in the middle of the night went a long way towards correcting that belief. It took the family months in court to get the child back.
Even if most responsible parents are able to eventually plead their children back from the court, the time, expense, stress, psychological damage to the child and parents, will all make this strategy an extremely powerful suppressor on voicing beliefs that run contrary to the party line zeitgeist. Once you’ve been targeted by the system, no matter how unjustly, it takes months or years to get out. There are always more pointless degrading hoops to jump through. You have to go through endless rounds of counseling, visits from the kind lesbian social workers, court appearances, and on and on and on. Not only can they use this strategy to harass and silence social conservatives, but they bleed the family of cash and create more government jobs. It’s an all around win for the Obamunists.
Suppose that keeping a gun in one’s home was considered a “danger to the child” allowing social services to grab the kid. Wouldn’t this be an effective back door way to deny the second amendment to most people? (in fact, social workers have already been known to ask about firearms kept in the home and hold it against the parents)
“Gay rights” has mostly been driven through school indoctrination over the last couple decades. What happens when the gay lobby and teachers unions decide that homeschooled children aren’t being adequately exposed to “diverse ideas”?
I have no trouble envisioning a future where some social worker sent by the local democrats knocks on your door and advises you that you shouldn’t go to any more tea party rallies if you don’t want your parenting “investigated”.
@ #8 Where will it end:
Although the wealthy elite establishment leftists have fewer children on average than conservatives, they are more than making up for this by importing third worlders looking for handouts. These people will always vote to keep the socialists in power and breed at many times the rate of social conservatives. Why do you think the left crows so jubilantly about “demographic changes” making whites the minority in a couple decades? The people are supposed to elect new politicians, but through open borders and handouts the political class has conspired to elect a new people. Why do you think they use taxpayer money to run ads in Mexico, in Spanish, advertising how to apply for US welfare benefits?
@#9 Vanderleun
This one reason among many why the left wants gun control so badly. Most nonviolent and law abiding people will draw a line at having their children dragged away by the state, especially when done as a form of political punishment or for the purposes of indoctrinating the child.
I think the heart of all my discomfort over the left’s wild errors, such as manifest here with this foster child and adoption lunacy, is that they present to me as symptoms of the left’s systemic error. Let’s face it the left is a system of thought, of belief and of behavior. Leftism is a governing religion, even if its practicioners can’t see it, refuse to see it, or (in the worse case) know it to be true yet cynically carry on for personal gain.
At its heart the left is content with centralized solution and the consolidation of power among a nominally rational few, ie, the Philosopher-King or some such stand-in composed of people who know better, who have greater wisdom. A highly empathetic Magic Negro might do, for instance, as the One We’ve All Been Waiting For. And yet the problem with all centrally planned systems even of the best and most careful top-down order, is that every error made becomes systemic in nature. In a distributed system, if one node goes down it’s not fatal. In the centralized system, the top has to be God. Design margins shrink as more power accumulates at the top.
But yet the left has not been sitting on its duff waiting for the grand central plan to emerge out of the blue. No, not at all. They’ve been organizing for it across generations. They’ve been actively seeking to actualize it, to “immanentize the eschaton” as it were. And they’ve got the damn thing built. “Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battlestation, Luke”. (Last election making more sense? Could not have happened with a lot of no-tell stormtroopers, as it were). We’re like Kafka moving about minnowlike in its waters. So you see these petty bureaucrats like the British twit, and she’s really just giving you a glimpse into their innerworkings. She’s nothing but a happy little soldier for the cause. And warmly welcomed and understood in the leftist salons as such. She’s probably happy for the gruel they serve her there! Just to be there, with the Party. But her indefensible run-in with logic, reason, natural rights, is a tell. It’s a display of how far off the rails they’re headed. Add in the British court’s insanity about pluralism, and there you go. These are glaring errors of thought, it’s obvious. But they can’t see them. They’re systemic errors inside the system they’ve purchased heart and soul. They’re blind to it, instead they’re cogs of it.
Welcome to the Machine, boys! I say to folks who’ve always seen it, of course, but for effect.
above post: meant to say “without a lot of no-tell stormtroopers”, key turn of phrase. missed the edit time. apologies.
“Most nonviolent and law abiding people will draw a line at having their children dragged away by the state, especially when done as a form of political punishment or for the purposes of indoctrinating the child.” Hasn’t happened yet, and the indoctrination has been going on for over 40 years (public schools).
@26 Cowboy and @30 Cowboy
Excellent insights, Cowboy.
I go along with it completely. There is just one issue that bothers me, and for which I do not have an answer (actually I do, but it is a vicious answer).
So my issue is this – In the event that a course of action is undertaken (eg, suppose that children were put into the care of the “Bigoted Couple” above) and something goes wrong, all hell will break loose. The outraged class (composed of whom, precisely – and that is a genuine question) will be on television demanding that “something must be done”. I will find it extremely difficult to articulate to my wife that life’s tough, shit happens, we can only worry about the mean, not the outliers.
So in a sense, I don’t blame the silly public servant. Error is stacked against her.
The fault is not with The Left, the fault is that the Right is not yet able to articulate the statistical “greater good”, on average.
We need a Karl Marx of the Right – to generate slogans. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds like a slogan only the hardest of hearts could oppose, but has failed everywhere. The Right’s equivalent “From each according to what they want to contribute, to each what the others have contributed, and the devil take the hindmost” doesn’t sound so good, but is the reality.
I’m lost.
ADE
ADE,
Long time since I’ve responded, so hate to disagree, (although maybe your “I’m lost” sign off means you were being ironic.) but I don’t think their IS a way to powerfully rebut free stuff for the masses.
de Tocqueville,
with:
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money”
May have been the first, but certainly not the only, wise person to come to this conclusion.
Something like this may be our only hope: How the Implementation of Obamacare Will Make the GOP a Majority Party
…but I worry, should The American Public Come to this conclusion, will the entrenched leadership of the GOP have the fortitude to take on the task?
…they’ve already caved on pandering to illegals, and probably to higher tax rates, dismantling Obamacare would be gargantuan task, in comparison.
…never have been a believer in MANDATORY term limits, until now, but need somebody better than the Grim Weeper Boehner, and the smart, but entrenched McConnell for these jobs.
—
Here’s where you can see how far ex-BC Commenter, Vietnam Vet Rufus, has been run off the rails by the siren calls of Socialism, the power of the left-wing takeover of our culture, our entertainment, and the monopolist educational establishment.
Cowboy #26:
In my time dealing with the Denizens of DC, I found that policy making has become such an intricate, and complex, and lengthy process that the Federal bureaucrats can no longer be troubled by minor issues such as whether the resources exist to implement their grand plans.
Thus, any decision is based on the wholly unrealistic assumption that resources are infinite and the bureaucrats do not have to figure out where the money and people going to come from. And that includes the Ultimate Resource, the number of hours in the day; they assume that more work can always be crammed into a given day. If a 12 hour day in the office is not enough, make it 14 hours, or 16, or 18; it’s still not their problem.
Thus, any Federal decision is based on insanity. Such people should not even be allowed to operate a motor vehicle, and certainly not make decisions that affect millions of real lives..
We homeschooled our son from 0 to 17, only class he ever took was in DC for his Air Force related ultra-high security rating.
Employed since 15 1/2, offered a job in Silicon Valley for 100k in the middle of the Internet Bubble, (we vetoed that) now has a great job w/Boeing for the Air Force in security for the Supercomputer Systems the AF uses for their tracking telescopes atop Haleakala, after earlier doing almost the same thing for UH (Hawaii) on his career path which started with the local ISP…
…also raised listening to Limbaugh, competently able to articulate principles of freedom, self-reliance, and independence.
…think he may have voted for BHO, my guess being so he could tell the truth about his vote to his peers in this Brite Blue Outpost in the Mid-Pacific.
…very sad.
When some true believers thought Linda Lingle had a chanch for Senate against a Japanese Democrat Lady, any GOP Local w/common sense knew they were dreaming.
35. RWE:
They DO know where the votes come from tho, which is why they have the welcome mat out to poor, unskilled, uneducated “Hispanics” while deporting, or making entry almost impossibly difficult for educated “non-minorities” from other Western Cultures.
It’s diabolical. Literally.
Diabolos in daily life. This is what it looks, sounds, and feels like.
There is the famous man who talked about two fathers, one in heaven and the other being the Father of Lies and all liars. This one has been a murderer from the beginning.
The world he described, and the other world he came from, are shown by events to be truer than I ever imagined.
We fight not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. At least we know….
And let me add this.
The problem is not just the DC bureaucrats, but those eagerly following their every word or thought or nuance at the subordinate levels. Each one is so often trying to do better than the other at being “more holy than Jesus”. Thus stupid ideas originated in DC are translated into total absurdities at the lower levels.
I recall hearing in the mid 70′s that a small town in eastern Oklahoma had built a new library with the aid of Federal funding. And people complained that the fine new facility had no bathrooms. A local radio station investigated this absurdity and found a bigger one. At some point in the bureaucratic chain a government official had decided that separate-but-equal bathrooms for the two sexes constituted unacceptable discrimination for a facility built with Federal funds. The local library officials had decided that the town was no ready for co-ed public bathrooms and so never unlocked the doors or put the signs on the bathrooms.
The radio station contacted their Congressional representative about the situation and he replied in an exasperated way, “Look we can pass laws up here in Congress but we really have no control over how they are implemented further down the chain.”
Very true, Mr. Congressman, and that is one reason why you should NOT pass so damn many laws and put your fingers into things that are none of your business!
Doug #36:
Unfortunately, Doug, it may sound racist to say it, but in my experience such minorities make the “best” bureaucrats. They wrap the bureaucracy around them like a security blanket, coordinate with their fellow minority employees, and concentrate on working the system to their own benefit.
From my earliest college years (the 1970s) I can recall arguments in favor of licensing parents and mothers. The antagonists of free births considered raising children as Christian to be a form of child abuse*. These people grew up and are now in charge of everything. They’re doing what they said they’d do. Quelle surprise!
Vanderleun: “Sad to say but this sort of thing will continue and get worse unless and until the various bureaucrats and councils making the decisions are assassinated in the streets many times.” You da man. I have begged people who object to fascism, “Isn’t time we rose up and slaughtered these people?” but apparently you and I are the only ones. Now I’m too old.
* Then these “nice people” (for that is how they continue to think of themselves) did not consider raising children to be Jews or Moslems as child abuse. How times haven’t changed. Well, maybe some: in San Francisco raising children to be Jewish is child abuse. Germany, too, for some Germans.
el baboso: “If you were a Menshevik or SR (who together held a huge majority over the Leninists), were you going to get fight back after you saw what the Bolsheviks were doing to the Kadets and Monarchists?”
As I recall, the SRs assassinated Lenin. Should have shot more Bolsheviks.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
“one set of beliefs could not take precedence in a pluralist society.”
Exactly how is the state promoting a homosexual lifestyle as “normal” not establishing precedence for a particular belief?
There are two inescapable conclusions we can draw from stories like this. One is that people in general, and so-called political leaders (including judges) in particular, are not nearly as smart as they were a few generations ago. There appears to be an appalling lack of wisdom in every area of human flourishing, economics, education, literature, art. Things are going downhill and nobody is available to even maintain what once was never-mind make any actual improvements. Maybe it’s a replay of the Romans who watched the roads and aqueducts turn into piles of rubble because nobody had the smarts or the skills to keep them functioning.
Even more deadly to the hope of a civilizing future is the moral inversion. What kind of monster chooses a policy of death over life? Not for them, you can be sure, but for the little people who increasingly view the good life as keeping their eyes down and not getting noticed.
Simple and universal rules of living once well understood can no longer even be remembered, and indeed must not be.
ErisGuy, Fanny Kaplan’s potshot at Lenin got the SRs pretty much all shipped off to the Solovetsky Islands… At least the ones that the Cheka didn’t shoot.
Doug @ 5 – Be careful with what you read in Pravda!
IIRC – You could read about how russia used nuclear weapons to seal blown out oil wells and how shutting in the Macondo 252 well would cause an underwater explosion that would be so massive as to poison all the land east of the Mississippi.
So “metamorphosis” means that when some sacred butterfly flaps its wings, then the world falls in line. If an enemy butterfly does it, then only impurities at home might succumb to such evil.
You’re all mad…… MAD…
RWE:
I live in a pretty conservative state but close to a college town of about 40,000 that would put Madison, Wisconsin to shame for its weak liberalism. There has lately been a dustup over people not shoveling the snow off their walks or, at least, not doing it in a timely manner. As things always do under a liberal government, the conversation quickly moved to the exercise of coercion through fines for failure to shovel walks before 9 A.M., then to escalating proposals for the amount of the fine (Now at $500 I think) to impose, and finally to a proposal for half the fine be paid as a bounty to anyone who turns in his neighbor for lack of timely shoveling. Did I mention that nearly all of the worthy council(persons) are liberals?
Like you, I am always amazed at how rapidly and with how little stimulus liberals will move to the use of power. That’s the real danger in the half of the population that voted for Obumble. They can be talked into a Putche with the drop of a hat. I believe they understand perfectly that the final result will be the enslavement of the majority but each assumes that he will be among the apparachiks that run the system and benefit from it. They read too much Marx and not enough Lenin.
RWE@38: “Look we can pass laws up here in Congress but we really have no control over how they are implemented further down the chain.”
George Will has an excellent column detailing the Congress’ action concerning the ‘Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’, its implementation and its funding.
This panel can rewrite existing law and receives its funding from the Treasury, rendering it completely unaccountable to congress or the administration.
George Will & CFPB
Re-reading a book I recommended here some time ago since the election. It is “Idols for Destruction” by Herbert Schlossberg. It is about the idols a post Christian society embraces and the dire consequences. Written in the early 1980′s the chapter entitled “Consequences and Expectations” is prophetic and dire.
The end of this story is likely to be pretty grim and unpredictable.
I find it useful to consider the underlying philosophy. At the basis of the myriad mistakes is the idea of human nature as good. It is a seductive idea, as most people wish to consider themselves good. It also pushes the source of evil outside onesself and often ones group. (As I recall from my very distant past, this was general view of groups of young girls and boys; the girls viewed the boys as yucky and gross; the boys viewed the girls as no good and having “cooties.”)
This causes a society to rip itself apart as any problem arises. With this opposition is not mistaken or wrong but evil. Each group, seeing itself as good and the other as evil, feels compelled to dominate. Compromise, even-handed law and respect for others become impossible. One is either with the group or person or one has embrased evil and is working to distroy all good.
This outlook is why leftists and Moslems can work together so smoothly. It is a shared fallacy.