Rage On—and on and on…
Occupy Wall Street?
I’ve been following the Wall Street protests, in New York and elsewhere. I read as well of the Democratic Party’s sorta interest in turning the anger of a few into a left-wing Tea-Party-like movement of many.
Against that background, I’ve also been counting up Barack Obama’s excuses (ATM machines are to blame and so are the tsunami, the EU, George W. Bush, the nine-month-old Republican House, the Arab Spring, the D.C. earthquake, and rising oil prices). He’s also growing his target list of various insults (everyone and everything from Clarence Thomas, Nancy Reagan, and the Special Olympics to fat-cat bankers, corporate jet-owners, millionaires and billionaires, and “the teabag, anti-government people”).
Out of all that chaos, I think there are two constants that explain the Obama frustration and the current outpouring of invective at Wall Street, “them,” the affluent, and our capitalist system in general.
So Sorry — It Doesn’t Work
On a wider political level, there is a growing realization that today’s brand of liberalism is really a form of slow societal suicide. We see red states recovering from recession; blue states are still broke. Greece is a mess; so is the entire anti-democratic, statist, and redistributive EU. Keynesian economics is about as dead as global warming/climate change/climate chaos in the age of Climategate, Al Gore, Inc., and a planet cooling over the last decade.
The old idea of open borders is also over. The notion is discredited that teaching new arrivals multiculturalism and ethnic chauvinism, providing them massive subsidies, and ignoring federal statutes was both more humane and more efficacious than the old melting pot of our youth. Solyndra was the epitaph of the lie of “millions of green jobs.” Obama will never utter that now bankrupt phrase again. “Green” means millions of dollars in printed federal money for each job produced, but even far more millions to crony capitalists who hid their malfeasance with hope and change sloganeering.
The Façade Peels Away
Independents are starting to see the end of the latest liberal experiment. Society simply cannot continue paying a half-trillion-dollars to import gas and oil, and hundreds of billions to subsidize inefficient wind and solar, even as known U.S. coal, gas, oil, shale, and tar sands reserves soar — but remain vastly underutilized. The administration’s Energy Department (e.g., gas should reach European levels, people cannot be trusted to buy the right light bulbs, California farms will blow away) is now simply the sibling of the EPA.
Raging Against the Machine
Soon even some mainstream Democrats will grasp the lie. Obamism not only does not work; its fiscal, energy, cultural, and foreign policies result in Greek-like stasis and chaos. It hinges on scapegoating those who say it does not work. Its current anger is sort of like the furor directed at those who were either trying to change or depart from the ossified medieval Church, when altruistic doctrine hides penances, exemptions, and vast estates. Stop the Smears begat JournoList which begat AttackWatch.com.
Again, all of the above is why Obama’s target and excuse lists grow and the old calls for civility and unity fade. How can a Democratic president, with a Democratic-controlled House and Senate for two years, keep faulting the present mess on either an ex-president who left almost three years ago, or a Republican-controlled House of some nine months tenure?
Junior Has Been Had?
But on a personal level, these more cosmic issues are coming home as well. Many of the current group of protestors down at Wall Street — remember the summer’s earlier flash mobbing here and the hoodies in the UK — are unknowingly raging against just this “system” where some have more than they do and will always have more, given the current frozen economy. About 2010, the music stopped and those without chairs were out of luck.
Many are furious that they have or soon will have very expensive degrees, bought at the price of either exorbitant loans or near insolvent parents who paid the $100,000-200,000 for today’s BAs. The students cannot rage against the modern corrupt, but ideologically sacrosanct, university. There, diversity czars outnumber French professors. Academic success is calibrated by avoiding introductory undergraduate classes — and all for the “student.”
The Old Way
After all, in the old days, faculty taught 6-8 (and more) classes a year. Administrators taught too and were relatively small in number (unlike the 1-1 ratio at the CSU system, the world’s largest university). The curriculum was designed to instill inductive thinking. It prepared the student to write well, think, and have a corpus of dates, events, people, and places at his fingertips for reference and elucidation.
In the Belly of the Beast — And?
Politicking was rare even in the 1970s. Well over thirty years ago, I took some 30 courses in Greek and Latin language and literature at UC Santa Cruz, and another 12 PhD seminars at Stanford — all from whom in retrospect I would imagine were mostly hard left. But who knew? Not once in eight years of undergraduate or graduate education did a liberal professor go off topic to rant or, indeed, to mix politics with history or literature or language. There were no points given for politically correct answers. No sermonizing poured forth from the rostrum. There was also simply no time to do so, given the enormity of the assignments. Reading five pages of Thucydides in Greek for each class or understanding the structure of ancient Athenian democracy left no time to blast an aspiring Ronald Reagan. I am sure indoctrination started in the early 1960s, but even in the 1970s it had not completely taken hold.
Relatively Cheap, Really Good
In other words, for much of the 20th century, college was not that exorbitantly expensive (my hardscrabble grandfather farmer sent all three of his daughters to college, two to Stanford, on the meager profits from 100 acres of raisins in the midst of the Depression). Students emerged literate and mostly disinterested and inductive. The most impressive degrees, of course, were not history or English (much less environmental studies). Instead the palm went to engineering, physics, mathematics, and biology. These were the hard sciences and skills that few of us could master. Social sciences were relatively small enclaves. And while science majors got As in their gut GE anthropology, sociology, and psychology courses, the opposite was not true: the latter majors panicked when forced to take a basic physics or physiology class to graduate.
I note in passing that not only were there no black, Latino, gender, green, film, gay, peace, or leisure studies courses, programs, and empires, but also a general impression that no one would wish to pay for such classes that imparted little real knowledge about the inductive method or the necessary referents of literature, history, and science. So many of these classes were therapeutic. Some were downright accusatory: go back through history and as melodrama point out the bad and good guys (based on present-day liberal standards), or study how modern capitalism should be replaced by a more humane model — in environmental, financial, religious, racial, class, and gender terms.
So here is where the last thirty years all led: to too many students who are indebted, poorly educated, and without skills like high-tech engineering, sophisticated medicine, or computer design that the country needs. They are consumed with contemporary furor as the education bubble of nearly a trillion dollars in debt is about to burst. They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them, but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance — and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.
Beyond Reproach
It is taboo for the Obama technocracy to consider exploiting the vast natural riches of America. And how can one admit that printing money destroys prosperity? Who can confess that expectations of government subsidy ruin personal initiative? So how, then, can students question the utility of their educations? They don’t dare object to the university’s manner of operations, or how their loans underwrote the need for a six-figured assistant provost of internal development or associate vice president for diversity awareness — or a vast number of new hip professors who just thirty or forty years ago would not be seen as professors at all.
I think in over twenty years of teaching I received about 5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression, what the chair, dean, provost, president was doing about it (usually setting up a watchdog faculty committee) — and not a single one wondering how we could bring rigor to the curriculum and real learning to the students.
The End of the Dream
In sum, there is panic. Obamacare, near-zero interest rates, more environmental and fiscal regulations, government takeovers, bailouts, and stimulus, nearly $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion in annual deficits, vast increases in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and hectoring the private sector — all that and more did not restore prosperity. More likely we ruined a natural recovery — if 9.1% unemployment, anemic GDP growth, ruinous debt, precipitous declines in the standard of living, and the return of the old record misery index are any indication. All Obama in 2012 is left with is the old trifecta of “Bush did it,” “they” will cut your Social Security, and a subtle racism fuels all opposition.
There is a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis in all those who believed that you could get a government subsidized $100,000 loan, receive easy As in environmental studies or sociology, buy a prestigious BA certificate, and then enter the lucrative world of the government bureaucracy — teaching, administering, suing, and regulating.
Not Enough Smelts or Pipelines to Go Around
But it did not work that way (there is not room enough for all of us to champion the delta smelt, find insidious racism in the Detroit schools, shut down an oil pipeline, or sue Arizona). Instead, we are left with an energy-poor country sitting on energy riches, a moribund economy with millions in the private sector piling up cash rather than investing or hiring, and cohorts of young, flat-broke, indebted, and politically prepped but poorly schooled students wondering where is the good life and why a Wall Street fixer, or computer nerd, or company man civil engineer makes so much more than they, the anointed, do.
So they rage on — and on and on…
heathermc
Don’t be hasty, now. Obama and friends are showing off the OWS crowd on TV, with plenty of microphone time.
The reason?
I think one of the main things Obama must do is wreck the Tea Party… and what better way, than to make it equivalent to the OWS???
By Christmas, no one respectable will want to be part of the Tea Party.
Did you notice that Nancy Pelosi mentioned that the Tea Party people had spat upon some Civil Rights leader during the budget debate? Now, we know that this is a complete lie, and I don’t think Pelosi is ready for the funny farm. But she is as smooth a liar as I have ever seen.
And I think these lies will work during November 2012. The one great hope has been that the voting will be honest, and that has depended upon the active participation of Tea Party types. Well, what if they stay home?
The propaganda arm of the DNC (aka the lamestream media) have done a fairly effective job of painting the Tea Party as extremist. The problem is, they are preaching to the choir. Most thinking people quit paying attention to the old media long ago. Soros and his sheep will spend many millions of additional dollars trying to discredit the message. Let them. It is a delicious irony that in this round they are doing so by trying to draw a direct comparison between the Tea Party and those insufferable wretches banging on their drums. There is no valid comparison between the Tea Party and the flea baggers. We are hard working, responsible adults. They are impulsive, impetuous adolescents. Let the progressives spend spend all the money they want trying to discredit the Tea Party. Maybe Obama can hold that up as more jobs “created or saved”, while every day, more and more thinking Americans see that the progressive utopian fantasy is unachievable.
Barry Soetero on inauguration day- “We are here today to find out if government works” …
Well, it doesn’t. Or rather it DOES work. It works itself, AGAINST us.
Wow! A glut of champions of the delta smelt!
“I think in over twenty years of teaching I received about 5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression”
Wow! oppression-ism, man!
The addition of autobiographical elements (where necessary) to make and demonstrate points has been most effective here at PJM. Especially since all the left ever does is lie about themselves and invent fantastic stories about how fantastic they are.
Wow! It’s the Irritable Bowel Movement!
Do you have the slightest clue what the delta smelt is, where it is found, and what the EPA’s maniacal concern for its well-being has done to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the food supply of this nation?
In my darker moments I think the best possible thing that could happen to us is a complete economic and governmental collapse that would teach the Beltway parasites and college campus lotus-eaters a thing or two about due regard for the contributions of the dirty, sweaty men in flyover country who provide the food with which they stuff their sneering mouths.
It is already in motion, and coming our way. It is called hipster Armageddon.
It’s doubtful that a complete economic and governmental collapse that would teach the Beltway parasites and college campus lotus-eaters a thing or two
would generate anything other than blaming the Joos.
The present administration and its disciples indoctrinated with the “You owe me” bug are blind to reason and reality and as Dr. Hanson wrote, previously The curriculum was designed to instill inductive thinking. It prepared the student to write well, think, …. was discarded and now they have to contend with the face of cognitive dissonance.
Oh how emotionally disturbing it is to have one’s beliefs shredded.
Screw the delta smelt. Are they good to eat? Otherwise, what’s the point?
Heather, by Christmas nobody will want to associated with the occupiers, who are associated with the White House, the dems, DSA, CPUSA, and of course North Korea. More than half of the USA is very sympathetic to the American ideals associated with the Tea Party. The USA is the last best hope for mankind.
Maybe Heather is right no one will want to be “associated” with the Tea Party.
But a growing number will still be for limited government, upholding the Constitution, and throwing the bums out of office. So how is that different than
holding the same goals at the Tea Party? That faction of concerned voters in this country increases by the day. Name it whatever you like, they’re not going away no matter what slanders Ms Pelosi uses against Americans.
In essence, the tea-party has always been here. More often than not referred to as the “silent majority” and being brought to the fore because the left assumed that in their silence they actually didn’t exist. They were wrong.
We do exist and we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.
We were silent primarily because we have lives, families JOBS and so forth and our attentions were involved with the responsibility that comes with freedom. Raising the family, WORKING at our jobs, PAYING our bills. But as this version of government started with its oppression of the silent majority, they struck a nerve and we got angry.
So angry in fact that we assembled, peacefully, with all the right permits and held rallies that disbursed quietly, policing ourselves as we left to make sure no one had to clean up a mess behind us. That’s the functional, working, self-actualized part of America and we’re still the majority.
The Obama administration and the state-run-media belittled and pooh-poohed the crowd volumes and barely acknowledged our existence, the way Captain Smith barely acknowledged the iceberg warnings that night.
But we are still the majority.
And we are still here. And we are not going to let the nation suffer because a minority of national socialists want power and are playing little mind-games to get it and keep it. This goes double for the RINO’s who think they are safe. We’ll vote them out as quick as a jack-rabbit on a date.
We know all the rhetoric the left throws at us is BS. Sexist, racist garbage that only floats in cesspools. We are the people who, in spite of anyone’s race, gender, creed, etc. happen to believe that the Constitution was well-written and is no less valid today than it was in 1787.
Both the left AND the right know exactly what the words in the Constitution mean. The left however has tried to make it something that it’s not. But Obama clearly learned SOMEthing as a “scholar” when he had said, “The Constitution tells the government what it CAN’T do” which is exactly what makes it so unique. By choosing that language, and that approach, it makes it very difficult for megalomaniacs to validate a specious argument as to why a particular law is so necessary. Like—universal healthcare.
Perhaps the most pitiful thing of all that this article points out by its very omission is the YEARS that academics have spent their efforts on driving to socialism/marxism without ever having taught anything of any value. In essence, they have sequestered themselves in academia, living a profligate lie, amassing large salaries without the self-examination of wondering where that money comes from. Or if they did, they’d be forced to admit they are part of the machine they say they despise.
So it comes full circle. The left lies. Then they cover those lies with more lies. It’s a way of life. Ironically, their issue in the 60′s was that the government was lying to them. Yet such masters they’ve become at the very thing they say they hated.
This is an exceptionally insightful comment. Well written, well reasoned, articulate.
I wish I could capture my thoughts as well as this.
Thank you.
Mike-USN Ret, you beat me to saying it – I always like to read SG-1′s comments as they elucidate whatever the topic is so well. Thanks SG-1!
Well said, SG-1. Let’s hope the American spirit isn’t nearly dead in the majority of our citizens… and if it is, why then, we’ll just have to revive it. Revolutions don’t always involve guns, and I think we have one of those in the making. A real one, not the imaginary, movie-kind of romantic fantasy “revolution” touted by the Occupynuisances.
Amen.
A very well constructed and articulated argument and response to the critics and vengeful element who wish to destroy the Tea Party. I am pleased to see the positive responses to your comments.
With your permission, I would like to use in full, in part, or attempt a brief summation of all you wrote.
It is time we who labored in silence to raise a family, pay our taxes, and do the right thing by standing up for the ones who left the comfort of their homes and gave us a voice. Defend the ones who have withstood the slings and arrows of outright lies, accusations of racism where none existed, and most of all, the accusations of not being a patriot or being unAmerican.
If we don’t do this, they may win, maybe not by a significant margin but any margin of victory is enough to insure a defeat in 2012.
Our work is not finished by a long shot. We need the words of a VDH to use in our arsenal of truth against the lies of the left. We need the words of others to strengthen and reinforce our own.
Once again, thank you for your great post and once again, thank you VDH for being our intellectual voice of reason and clarity.
Bart, you have full permission to use any/all parts of my post. The important thing is that the nation comes to realize that we are here and we know the truth. We will take action in November of 2012 and we hope that the tide will turn. If I have been helpful in that regard, I am glad.
I have read many of your posts. I agree with all of the compliments regarding your writing. You are able to explain your position without using foul language, etc. It is always nice to read your well thought through comments. Thank you!
“But we are still the majority.”
We are?? Fooled me. With 47% of Americans paying no federal income taxes and benefitting from government largesse; with 85% percent of adults receiving some form of government welfare or pension; with the biggest electoral states still firmly in the blue; and with the real possibility of illeagals voting in “12 do you really think we are in the majority? If we were the majority how come Zero was elected?
“And we are still here. And we are not going to let the nation suffer because a minority of national socialists want power and are playing little mind-games to get it and keep it. This goes double for the RINO’s who think they are safe. We’ll vote them out as quick as a jack-rabbit on a date.”
And how do you propose to fight the left? Winning elections? Really! Think they will not undermine the next election; do you really believe they will allow an honest election? Think they will just go quietly if somehow Odummer is defeated and they lose the Senate? You think they will not bring violence with them?
They are preparing for violence right now. And even if we do win, they still own Wall Street, MSM, colleges and unions which means they still control federal and local governments, what people think and say, and the money.
Sorry to rain on your otherwise very good comments.
Blotto, I hear and I understand. Trust me, I am usually very grouchy, frustrated and very, very angry with the way things are going these days concerning our government. But according to the polling data I’ve read and heard about from Rush and other sources, Americans still overwhelmingly consider themselves conservative by something just over 70%.
I think the biggest mistake to date concerning this is that in the last election, conservatives stayed home rather than vote for McCain. This is a huge error but I understand the motivation. What to do when you don’t like ANY of the candidates? There’s no simple answer to that. Personally, I hate the thought of having to hold my nose and vote for the least socialist of the bunch.
But the results are in and very obvious as to what happens when that’s the mindset. Either a slow stroll toward statism or a fast and furious sprint. Both are bad. And conservatives have good to excellent instincts in that regard but are frustrated when lame, pathetic even, candidates are thrown up at us when we know they are appeasers, not fighters. “Reach-across-the-aisle” types have only served the greater bad, resulting in lax enforcement of our borders, drugs, and so much else that whittles away at our constitutional requirements.
So what to do? Well, aside from ousting the ruling class in DC, I’m not sure what else would work. The underlying problem, the way I’ve always seen it is a cynical look at how deeply embedded the ascot-wearing, elite types have become in their positions. They like it and they know they aren’t going away any time soon.
It does frustrate me when I deal with a so-called conservative who cannot argue their points directly. The time for polite conversation on so many matters has passed. Indeed, I have encountered a great many who lack the candid speaking skills. This is what I like about Cain. I’m not endorsing him but I like that he speaks in plain terms, with little ambiguity.
I was raised around salt-of-the-earth people whose intelligence was masked by their plain-spoken-ness. Why use twenty words when two will do. I once watched and listened when the expensive, technical guy went on a long harangue as to why the machine was in dire need of repair and all the heretofores, and whatsits involved but my dad’s friend looked at him and said, “So, what you’re saying is, ‘it’s trashed and we need a new one’ “.
I was eleven and that event spelled out a very clear notion. However, over the years I’ve noticed I’ve become rather verbose. I can’t help but see the details in things and though I try not to get bogged down in too much, I can’t help by try to describe the fine hairs.
But when a candidate, like Reagan was at his peak, he could say things like, “Government IS the problem” and the people understood and sided with that position. He would then explain what he meant by that clearly, concisely, with strong points that backed up the original statement.
But the only tool we have as conservatives right now is the vote. Given that taking to the streets is relatively new to us, and the outright dismissal the media treated us with, we know that our fight is one of the uphill battle kind.
And I’m sure there are those conservatives who say, “Well, I guess I’ll have to buy healthcare because we can’t afford the fine…and I can’t go to jail because I have to take care of my family” which is what the neo-nazis are counting on. They KNOW that conservatives generally don’t “do” civil disobedience or unrest because they also KNOW that the costs are too high if penalties are levied on them. This has been their tactic all along and they like having us cornered. They also welcome the opportunity to do so because when one conservative lashes out, they can say, “A-ha! See? SEE? They’re violent, I told you!” and the media will support that.
We have been trying to fight the logical war with people who are not only illogical but who have the backing of media to make everything fit their template and way of thinking. And it’s beyond frustrating.
But also remember, it took about 50 years to get here. It may take twice that long to get back to where we were if we ever do. But my statement that “we’ve always been here and we’re the majority and we’re not going away” is true.
Because at the end of the day, I’ll submit that I’ll fight in ways that I know how. I’ll give a lot of lip to a bureaucrat and harass them unmercifully when the opportunity arises. I am clever enough to make them frustrated enough to use their own rules against them. And, I can write..and I do.
The new media is growing. And conservatives have flocked to it by the millions. In another blog and here at PJ as well, it’s been noted how the old media has lost HUGE sums of money because they cater to the left, socialist mentality. They ARE a minority in this country. The SEEM to be a majority because they have commandeered the media. But we still read our bibles, clean and collect our guns, have nuclear families and teach our kids the solid, strong values that are the glue of a concrete society. It will rise again.
I think our society is suffering from a malaise; a virus of the kind that afflicts all societies from time to time. We call them hippies and I knew back in the 60′s that they would reappear. I wasn’t looking forward to it but my mom looked at me when I was eight and laughed when I said, “You know, they’re gonna show up again in the government someday when their friends elect them into office”. I was already smart enough to know that like-coated animals prefer to be among each other. And I had also had talks with my grandparents about generations and how things change and, more importantly, how they don’t from one generation to the next. They were as confused as I was about this one though. The hippies, I mean. Why they were so angry, what they were angry about and all the misguided, misbegotten ideas and so much bad behavior.
Eventually, they will go away. But I’ve mentioned that Rome had similar problems. What makes us unique is that we still see that there are ways to get rid of tyrants without resorting to bloodshed. I hope that remains the case. But as you so clearly pointed out, though without mentioning it specifically, we may have to resort to other means.
Oh well, when nobody whose anybody wants to be associated with the tea party I still will. They’re the only sane ones left in this looney bin, as far as I can tell.
Obama knows that he has one path to re-election: “Apres moi, le deluge”
He needs to sell the idea that he is the only guy who can stop the Republican Congress from instituting “extremism” and ending the goodies you’ve come to expect.
The problem is, it has become painfully apparent to everyone…even the true believers…that he has no plan of his own to make things better. It has also become increasingly apparently that our current trajectory leads to disaster.
So the choice in 2012 is between the still-declining status quo, or a chance on something new and potentially scary.
Ever so slightly askew of the main thread, but a similar, but smaller (about 100?), group of nutters in Israel has the unlikely title: “Anarchists Against the Wall”, which is where they should be stood…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchists_Against_the_Wall
Citizens Occupy Wall Street. But don’t have a cow!
They will be nothing but a bad memory, a month from now.
But we need to remind all the camp followers (sic!) that they backed this trash, and name the trash that backed it.
Remind them of who their bedfellows were, and what glowing words they showered on the unwashed, the mohammedans, the marxists, the nazis and the jew-bashers.
I think that facts will eventually trump this propaganda. Too many people have either personally observed, or seen utube videos, of both Tea party and OWS rallies, or knows a trusted friend who did, and is aware of the difference between the 2 movements. The MSM and the leftist echo chamber will continue the lies, but I think enough independents are aware of the real facts that the truth will win. The last time I remember the left being so completely discredited was in 1979. The economic policies of Obama have failed so distrasously that it will be extremely difficulty for him to lie his way out of it.
Let me do some thinking out loud for a moment:
IF a Romney wins in 2012 and his party carries the Senate and House, we will no longer have Obama. But we will still have a large majority of big government politicians in charge.
They won’t be able to fix our economic mess. At best, they’ll try several ineffective bandaids.
That would pave the way for an OWS-type reprisal in the next round of elections. And this is the scenario I fear most – because amongst them, there is surely a Robespierre.
Our Time of Troubles has just begun.
Well Stallion, your comment is very dark indeed and unfortunately, a very real possibility. I think Romney is just part of the elite Republican wing and has no problem with big government, they just want to be in charge of it. You are correct, I fear, that, if elected, Romney’s band-aids will just prolong and quite possibility add fuel to the problems and real mass violence will spread throughout the land. Romney, in my opinion, has been trying for far too long to get his hands on the presidency and there is just something that is not right when people want this kind of power. The presidency finds you, you don’t find the presidency and this is one of the appealing characteristics about Herman Cain – the presidency seems to be seeking him out. I hope we are both wrong about Romney if he is elected, but I don’t want to see the Romney experiment make it out of the lab and into the real world.
GOP: Reject Mitt Romney or lose everything!
Let’s not fool ourselves. Anyone who goes after the Presidency is a person with a giant ego who thinks he or she has all the answers. It’s the Presidency itself which usually knocks them down a peg or two — except in the case of an oblivious, reality-challenged malignant narcissist like, for instance, Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. I don’t think Romney is one of those, although he is certainly not my first pick, nor my fourth. But if it comes to that, I’ll vote for him before I’ll vote for Obama, because at this point, if we elect Anybody But Obama, we have nothing to lose.
Even though I distrust Romney for his politics, I hope that there will be enough Tea Party or Conservative Republicans in Congress to keep him under control, if he is elected. Given the choice of Romney or Obama, I will vote Romney, but I fear Romney and a Democrat- or RINO-controlled Congress.
Agreed. The key is not just getting rid ov Obama, but getting a repub senate as well, and making sure a high proportion of repubs in both the house and senate are Tea Party repubs.
If Romney is the GOP candidate, we will emigrate. We will start over on some foreign shore with very little in our pockets, at the age of sixty, and we will succeed. Mark my words, we will succeed, because there is always a land of opportunity somewhere in the world. What a shame that it is no longer the US.
Getting a college degree or other training in a tech field no longer is worth the money if you plan to stay in the US. Here’s why:
Just Say No to student loans for high-tech education
Both parties use immigration and visa programs to put you out of work
BULLS EYE!
You are describing the entire philosophy, world view, self respect, social status, and economic support of the left. Without that, they are nothing. It is, for all practical purposes, their religion and it is unquestionable. The obvious failures will be ignored or explained away. The phrase “Double Down” comes to mind.
They will not go quietly or peacefully. Law, ethics, and morals will be regarded as “bourgeois constructs” in the service of their enemies.
It closely resembles the deconstruction of the Euro. It is inevitable that it will fail, despite all the meetings, the public assurances, and the printing presses. The outcome will be ugly indeed.
We will see that collapse, and know better what to expect in this country as the entire current infrastructure collapses as well.
Very bright article and succinctly put. The informal, piecemeal ideological monster of political correctness is in fact truly a cultural suicide pact, putting the most successful at the service of failed Third World immigrants and the deluded race-based policies of never needed or wanted multiculturalism and diversity from the political Left.
Obama is only the tip of the iceberg as this destruction of America continued unimpeded under Bush as political correctness is not so much a political animal as it simply a weird zeitgeist full of weird ideas about how reality works and spread throughout our culture. Democrats keep putting a splint on the leg that’s not broken.
For some reason, this seems like the most depressing piece vdh has written.
Have the marxists not only defecated in in the well, but also spoiled the seed corn of future generations?
Somebody please, tell me that we still have science and engineering students who don’t spend their entire lives learning nothing other than how to create models that prove the latest marxist redistributionist con game. Or at least tell me that there are a few librul arts majors who have the sense to be mad at their university brain-washers rather than the diminishing number of citizens who still make the country run.
Have no fear! Engineering student here!
I’m finishing up my B.S. in Computer Engineering, and I plan on starting my own business once I graduate and we kick Barry to the curb.
Liberal indoctrination still happens in our classes, but it is mostly confined to the humanities and communications courses. The overt liberals tend to be career academics, while the professors who have come from 40 years in industry to teach in their sunset years appear to have no political persuasion at all (which probably means they are conservatives who do not want to get fired by the flaming liberal department chair).
My speech professor last year failed me primarily because I stood up to her attempts at liberal indoctrination and voiced my opposition. She would play video clips of liberal students trying to persuade politicians to legalize gay marriage…she would play clips from NPR and The Daily Show…she even tried to use her position as a professor to steer the opinions of the class about the Wisconsin Union thuggery. I stood up to her and voiced my opinions, and backed them up with facts. Then, when it came time to do persuasive speeches, I chose Concealed Carry on Campus as my topic, and she said that was fine. I was late submitting the outline for it, and I missed class on the day I was supposed to present, and she told me I couldn’t give a late speech (but she had allowed 2 students to speak late that same week, and had even offered a re-do to one kid who gave a particularly horrible anti-concealed carry speech). I had really poured a lot of work into my speech, and it really pissed me off that she was so blatantly shutting me down because I was espousing a view she opposed.
I will say this: there are more sensibly-minded students in engineering than other disciplines. Politically-knowledgeable conservative students outnumber politically-active liberal students on my campus, and those in between tend to lean conservative on principles, even if they don’t realize it. I do my best to take every opportunity to point my peers to the writings of conservative thinkers and free market capitalists (such as Uncle Milton).
OWS is a godsend as far as distinguishing the radical left from the Tea Party. Anyone who takes an honest look at the two quickly realizes they are nothing alike; that the Tea Party is made up of everyday people, and OWS is made up of fringe troublemakers and lowlifes.
Nice comment! Well done.
If you are going to start a business and be a professional engineer, it would behoove you to be on time to meetings and get proposals in on the date they are required. When you screw up, don’t blame someone’s politics or point out the unfairness of it all as that won’t get you far in business either.
I agree – but there was more to the post than that & I totally agree with the rest of it.
If we end up with Mitt Romney instead of Obama, he will do nothing to roll back the big-government, business-killing regulations of the Obama era.
If he becomes the GOP nominee, I suggest that you join me and my family in emigrating. Start your business somewhere else where your efforts will be appreciated and rewarded.
Please tell me, where on this planet, would you run away to? Everywhere you look there are socialist/communist governments, economic chaos, Islamist terrorism, declining morality and values, and riots and social unrest. Just where would you go?
People like us need to stay put and fight against all this nonsense. I won’t abandon my country.
Emmigrate to where? Aren’t we the last bastion (as screwed up as we are) of hope on the entire planet?
Milton Friedman is famously quoted as saying that we cannot depend on electing the right people, we have to set it up so even the wrong people do teh right things–words to that effect.
I have serious doubts about Romney, too, but if the choice is him or Obama I’ll hold my nose and vote for him, and do what I can to elect as many real conservatives to Congress as I can. Because my read of Romney is that in large areas he will follow the path of least resistance and if that path is to work with rather than against a more conservative Congress, he will often do so.
That, and keep people like Christie and Daniels and Jindal hi-profile so Mitt knows that 2016 is not a given.
I agree with you about Romney. He will be OK as long as he faces a conservative senate and house, since he is a natural compromiser, while Obama will never compromise his leftist views. So making sure we elect Tea party senators is even more important that getting rid of Obama.
You have staged yourself well for a winning assault on life.
I would be envious had I not done the same as you 50 years ago.
I “went Galt” in 1969 during marxist mob free-for-alls of the “Great Society”.
The fall of the empire, despite leaf-like dips and pauses, remains unstoppable.
That was prelude, this is the finale. My golden advice to you: Go Galt.
http://www.ThornlessPath.com
Well said
Studious,
Sorry to hear about your experience. I finished my four year degree as an adult student 20 years ago. My lowest two grades in my return to school were in Speech and an economics history course.
I received a C on a speech refuting CFCs and the loss of the ozone layer. It was quite well researched, but left a sour look on my prof’s face. The history teacher was a white “hip dude” who was also in the African Studies department. He actually screamed at me when I had the audacity to suggest that the Northerners could have made an agreement to “buy out” the Southern plantation owners in exchange for an end to slavery.
I watched a couple of conservative Christians fail their way through a religion class because they kept arguing with the prof about the exclusiveness of true Christianity.
My daughter is currently in college. I tell her to bite her tongue for now, because an F from a petty proffessor can hurt you permanently, while losing an argument won’t affect the life of the tenured prof one iota. I quoted her a line from an Indigo Girls song, “I spent fours prostate to a higher mind, got my paper, and I was free.” Of course they were talking about the dodgy, conservative teachers then, but the reverse is true now.
These bad tastes accelerated my shift from independent to conservative. I always say that nothing shatters the illusion of the superior intelligence of liberal thinking like being an adult student.
In the 80′s I had a similar experience. In the largely conservative private university, I was doing well academically….until I ran into the new English professor. She was a San-Fran loopy lefty and how she got hired to the university, I’ve no idea. But when I started class, she seemed to like me and we enjoyed some great exchanges and she seemed cheerful.
That changed the day I showed up to class on a uniform day. I was in ROTC.
Her demeanor towards me changed 180 degrees. From that moment on, my speaking points were met with disagreement, opposition and stubbornness from her.
My question was, and remains, “Why did you get a job at a private, well-known-as-very-conservative university where almost half the undergrads are in a military commissioning program?” Perhaps she had an axe to grind and planned to fail as many ROTC students as she could. I found out after I graduated that she got fired for unethical behavior.
Probably smoked a doobie on campus.
Studious, I commend you for your choice. Clearly you are involved in real learning and hopefully you will be a great success. Your writing skills are clear evidence of a thinking and critical mind. I wish you the very best of luck and good fortune!
Diversity in all things except thought.
VDH is a bit vague on chronology. The decisive move toward multiculturalism began in the late 1960s, but the diversity brigade had to get its doctorates first. So by the late 1970s the move was on to downgrade science and engineering. You can see the transformation at Pacifica radio where I once held forth. I wrote about that here, with examples of movers and shakers: http://clarespark.com/2010/10/21/links-to-pacifica-memoirs/. But for another specific one that named names see http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/.
My daughter and her husband are both chemical engineers working at coal-burning electricty plants in eastern Oklahoma. They are in their early 20s and VERY aware of Obama and his ilk and the way they threaten our society…young, conservative, accomplished, hard-working Christians, AKA “enemies” of Obama…
There are lots of students in the hard sciences who have no interest in the sophistry of the left ..because that rhetoric is based on empty opinions without factual support or even, false data and totally illogical.
The basic ideology of the left is a desire to remain children and dependents; they want someone else to provide all their wants and needs. They also have no idea what wealth is and how it is generated by private business. They think it comes from ‘Papa’s pockets’. Just consider some of their demands:
1) 1.5 trillion more spending to create 25 million public sector jobs. Heh – these stuck-in-kindergarten kids want someone else, the taxpayer/Papa, to give them a ‘job’. Unionized, benefits, pensions..to pencil push.
2)Free public transportation. Sheesh; who do they think will pay the drivers, pay for the trains and buses, pay for the upkeep? Oh, Papa Daddy.
3)Free university education. Heh. Only if those old pontificators, the profs, work for free.
4)Single payer health system. Check out how it works in Canada. Hmm. Not so good.
5) End free trade. Why?
6) A trillion dollars on environmental programs. Don’t worry, Obama is already doing this.
7) Forgive all debt. Now, that means that all your student loans, your mortgages, your car loans, your credit cards? Not bad, not bad.
Amazing how economically DUMB these people are. And there are other demands:
- abolish home schooling. [How's that for expressing freedom of speech and thought?]
-ban the private ownership of land. [Ahh, totalitarianism!]
-open the border to all – legal/illegal definitions disappear
-6 hour workday and 6 weeks of paid vacation
-raise the minimum wage to 18-20; and insert a maximum wage level.
The stupidity, the astonishing ignorance of these demands is, well, it’s mind boggling. They can only come from a Five Year old who thinks that wealth comes from Daddy’s Pocket.
But remember, people are turning against the Democrats; they are electing conservative agendas, …so, I’m relying on the smarts and rationality of the realists. Not these cloud-blowing Five Year Olds with their hand in Daddy’s Pocket.
Getting a computer science degree is essentially getting a degree in logic. If you fail to be rigorously, coldly, completely rational, your program will fail. (Herman Cain, by the way, holds a master’s degree in Computer Science.)
While in college we computer science nerds got together and mouthed the politically correct slogans at our easy, liberal arts classes. We solemnly agreed with Marxism, embraced women’s studies, and wrote earnest essays on the failure of capitalism as embodied by The Great Gatsby.
Then we’d get together in our study room at the library and mock the professors relentlessly before we buckled down and got to the hard work of learning math and physics and engineering.
Now my kids are in high school and are subjected to global warming, overpopulation rants, and liberal dogmas disguised as “teaching.” What have I taught them? To say “Why, yessa, massa, thatsa wonnerful thing!” Then we mock them relentlessly around the dinner table, and the kids get to work studying math, chemistry and physics. There are ways to survive the liberal professors in college. I suggest getting an “A” from them.
Even back in 1980, when I was an electrical engineering major at UCSD, I found that when I *had* to take a humanities class for my major, the best way to get an “A” was to give them what I realized that they wanted. Usually I was making fun, but the problem with leftist teachers is that they have no ability to detect ridicule. The weirder you are, the more they think that they have “reached” you.
In one class “introduction to art making” or some such, our leftist T.A. (who actually showed us communist propoganda from a friend of hers that trashed capitalism as “art”), gave an assignment to make a mask which had at least one dimension of three feet. I strung together three old tennis shoes from my closet the day that the assignment was due and hung them around my head, talking about Dali’s fetishistic object collections and Duchamp’s found objects. The teacher’s face positively glowed and I got an A in the class. I tell you, these people have no ability to evaluate themselves. As we can see in OWS, you just can’t parody them worse than they parody themselves. How can you reach people like that?
While in general agreement with the essay, I question some of the chronology. There was a large cohort receptive to New Left ideologues and I wrote about them here: http://clarespark.com/2011/10/24/turning-points-in-the-ascentdecline-of-the-west/.
Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster had this to say about the Occupy “brand”.
What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.
Obama, Pelosi, Reid and the mass media/Hollywood/academia propaganda machine have all embraced the movement.
So…speaking of inductive reasoning…is it fair to say that opposition to free-market capitalism and pro-radical redistribution is what is really behind EVERY move made by this administration and their lackeys, minions, groupies and mouthpieces?
This would go far in informing us about George Soros, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, the New Party, Jeremiah Wright, the Midwest Academy, Frank Marshall Davis, Barack Obama, Sr., Cooper Union, ACORN/SEIU…influence on policy decisions made in the past two and a half years.
If one is vehemently opposed to free-market capitalism and is radically extreme in attempting leftist redistribution schemes…then connecting the dots between the insane leftist fringe above and the seven seizures, the global warming hoax, DOJ hiring practices, gun running, destruction of our border protections, …OWS (Obama Wants Socialism) astro-turfing is not a tool…it’s a weapon.
We may now examine every act, every deed, every pronouncement, ever piece of unread legislation, every appointment of a czar or czarina, every Che poster, every Mao genuflection, every union/Workers Party favor, …they are all cut from the same bolt of cloth. Furthering the destruction of free-market capitalism and advancing a statist…and ever more intrusive, invasive, and smothering Big Mother. Big Brother only watched. Big Mother forces you to eat a certain way, not to guzzle gas, and how to manage your health, wealth and consumption.
His whole life points at someone who embraces the overthrow of the free-market capitalist system. Every close contact is a radical fringe warrior in that regard. These are the extremists who have had his ear since he was a boy…and to this day.
Why then…are we all pretending that the truth is otherwise? Is the alternative too horrible to contemplate? That our own President is engaged in the stealth overthrow and radical redistribution of our accumulated wealth?
That our own media is a conspirator in hiding this intent…and a lifelong devotion to it? That EVERYONE around him is …and has been…on record saying they want this very thing?
Why do we slumber still? Why is our reaction to the radical rape of our economy…so mild?
The OWS is not the disease…it is the festering boil erupting as one of the final raging symptoms that alert us to the disease. Yet, we still do nothing.
31% of them say they want violence.
By our silence and apathy…we may yet provide the petri dish that grants them their wish. The Drone King has set the dominoes in motion…here and abroad.
Heaven help us all, if we continue to sleep through this next act as well.
No, its nothing. The left has mis-fired again. Don’t let the 24 hour news coverage fool you. They didn’t get the kind of momentum they needed before the cold comes.
There is much ground for optimism. I caught a clip of Debbie Wassermann-Schultz the other day and I really don’t know if these Dems understand the situation they are in. I guess its her job to spin things in hopeful terms, but she really seems to think they stand a chance. She has no idea what is really happening out here. I know a lot of blue-collar working men and women and many of them were passionate Obama supporters. I don’t think a single one remains so. At best you get an embarassed silence when his name comes up. More often than not you get a frown of resentment, because they now know they were conned. So they see mouthpieces like DWS as crooks just trying to keep the con going. The more she speaks, the more she reveals herself, and the more they despise her. If ANY of these folks turn out to vote for The One in 2012 I will eat my shoe.
On the other hand the majority remain moderate Conservative, only more so; And much more politically aware and engaged than before. Over the last three years I’ve watched their mood go from guarded optimism to stoic acceptance to bewildered hurt to dawning realization to bubbling anger and now – smoldering fury. When a population gets to that stage, things don’t normally go well for those in power. If any of them stay at home on election day I will eat my other shoe.
On the third hand, most of the academics and young urbanites I know are still trying hard to like Obama. They tend to view him as an honest broker following a flawed ideology, but no more so than the one pursued by Bush, though their arguments are weak and contradictory. And even here there is not nearly the Obama fervor there was in 2008.
I guess deep down the Dems do get it, because they’ve decided to double down. They know now that their only hope is to charge straight into the fire and hope they make it to the other side. Their pathetic little Days of Rage redux is already petering out, so they may now escalate to foreign war or false flag incidents to distract us. In the end that will only help us to nail them since the more reactive they become, the more variables they set in motion, the more they are at the mercy of the forces they have awakened, and the more ammo they give us to pepper them with. In the end their exit strategy will be to sow as much chaos, and loot as much as they can on the way out.
Our task come 2013 will be to make sure some of those same forces are channelled to further our purpose. Perry has the right idea in founding the recovery on a revival of the oil industry, but will he be able to wage the vitally important ideological counter-offensive as effectively as say a Palin or a Bachman or even a Gingrich? This isn’t about regaining some ground from the Left. This is about obliterating them completely, and it will take the better part of a two full terms. The counter-attack will have to be sudden, multi-dimensional, relentless and overwhelming. We will have to stay several cycles ahead of the lefties’ ability to recover from one assault before two more come at them; and we’ll have to continuously find creative ways to bypass the mainstream media… All of that will have to take a focus and stubbornness of mind that so far I only see in Herman Cain, but does he fully perceive the nature of our enemy?
great comment
Hmm, let’s see, in two election cycles you are going to “obliterate” a strand of American politics which has been around in one form or another for at least a century? How many times has the demise of lefties (or righties) been predicted in the last fifty years, depending on the state of the economy and the last election? Many are so resentful of the presence of the other side that they live (at least in internet discussions,) in a world of melodrama and say the oddest things.
Big ships turn slowly, although some here would prefer to talk about sinking.
VDH, despite his impressive ability to organize his material and “build” his case, is also apparently full of resentment and subliminal outrage, to the extent that real world solutions come as “collapses” rather than slow, incremental changes, one way or the other.
Righties and lefties talk as if personal outrages have been committed upon them by the other side. It’s fine to talk that way, but you don’t really beleeeeve it do you? I don’t.
Wait and see
The problem is that the otherwise well-intentioned uninformed (including people who consume MSM exclusively) truly believe that liberals are the good, kind, and nice people. They want to be on the good, kind and nice team. And giving away money (especially other peoples’) is nice! Republicans need to counter this in every way they can by SHOWING what liberal policies have done. Show how states with Republican governors (Louisana) are doing better and better and deep blue states (Rhode Island) are digging themselves deeper. Contrast THIS IS WHAT THEY SAY v.s. THIS IS HOW IT AFFECTS PEOPLE IN PRACTICE. Make it so obvious that even unsophisticated KoolAid drinkers can’t miss the difference between the dogma and the result. We have seen a good example of this with the emergence of Herman Cain as a serious GOP presidential contender; the ‘racist’ charge looks even sillier now than it did before.
“Righties and lefties talk as if personal outrages have been committed upon them by the other side. It’s fine to talk that way, but you don’t really beleeeeve it do you? I don’t.”
You must not have read Dr Hanson very much if you are unaware of the assaults and outrages upon the farm which has been in his family for generations. He has much personal experience of the sort of vile attacks made upon someone who is merely trying to live in peace and security while earning a modest living. It would be advised for you to do a little research before writing on a topic where your lack of knowledge shows so baldly.
I have read all of them. His issues with criminals stealing his stuff, in my mind, should be separated from the guys on his faculty who have different political views, or the folks who are “protecting” the smelt But he tends to create a macroscosm where everything fits together to screw him and maybe you, and it is Obama’s fault. Fine points of distinction are not the coin of the realm, here. Granted, one finally has to pull the trigger, or not pull it, vote for x, or vote for y, but when the discussions leading up to these decisions are so one-sided, it make the concept of a decision irrelevant, because the whole discussion is all pushing ONE way.
“I guess deep down the Dems do get it, because they’ve decided to double down”
there is nothing for the left to do but double down as the inertia of american liberalism is near equivalent to a toilet flush– there is only one destination that can be reached and everything in its wake gets sucked down with it
Having said that; instead of just tearing each other down, it would be nice to see our candidates connect Obama’s support for violent insurrection with his long past as an Alinsky trained Marxist revolutionary.
Rick Perry keeps trying to make Romney the villain in this nomination process, when before Perry got in, the main focus of debate was defeating, and repealing Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation. Perry has become worse than a distraction, the media lives for him to start yet another kerfuffle with Romney, when the message needs to remain the extent to which the 0bama phenom was a history’s greatest con job, and how far the abuse of power by congress/executive/Supreme court has cost us all, dearly.
What an odd analysis of the GOP primary race. As I recall, Perry opened up an instant lead and was dogpiled by Romney, Bachmann, and the rest as a result. Or do you think it was Perry’s plan to spend the debates arguing about Gardasil or tuition rates? When the topic did turn to economic policy – specifically, social security reform – we got to see Romney play to the cheap seats by attacking Perry from the left.
What Perry’s entrance into the primary race, and the subsequent attacks by most of the other candidates has done for me, is to make me look more closely at Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain. Neither seems to be attacking the other candidates and I like that. Both have put forward plans to repair the damage resulting from the democrats being in power. I never liked Mitt, he seems to way to liberal for a republican. Perry has problems too. From being Al Gore’s campaign manager to his liberal ideas about educating the illegals so they can get jobs. Very sad. I am beginning to think a Gingrich/Cain ticket would be ideal. Yes Newt has problems of his past but I think he’s overcome them and has morphed into a true conservative constitutionalist. Plus I think he has the ability to out debate Obama on any subject that might come up in the main campaign.
TO CHRIS IN CA (below–why no “reply” click?)–You are so right about Newt. I would pay a lot of $$ to see Newt debate President Obama using the 3-hour format. Come to think about it, maybe I should donate that money to the ELECT NEWT campaign to help make it happen!
Folks used to joke about a Democratic firing squad – it being arrayed in a circle. Now it seems Democrats are sitting on the sidelines, watching as the Republican front-runners try to tear each other down. Is it *really* that significant if Romney’s lawn care provider was using illegals? Two years ago I had flooring installed for a kitchen upgrade. I ordered the tiles and installation through Home Depot, but the Hispanic fellow who came in to do the installation spoke little English. Was he an illegal? I have no idea! And why, given what’s at stake, are the divisive social issues like abortion once again taking center stage?
This is why Newt, slowly but surely, is moving up in the polls. He is the man who keeps his eyes on the prize. He also focuses on the issues. So refreshing. In my opinion, Newt is in the process of shaking off the ‘unelectable’ albatross. The idea of having a truly intelligent person, who understands history, politics and economics, who also has a proven track record of making bipartisan legislation, is VERY EXCITING!
Super commentary and insight! I too have been frustrated by our Rep candidates inability/unwillingness to rationally articulate Obama’s genuinely REACTIONARY advocacy for “violent insurrection”(well documented). Obama/Holder represent an undeniably hateful and racist element in current leftist politics. Obama is the godfather of the “flash mob”. The chaos fomented(domestically and internationally)by this duo is breathtaking. Obamabots are now using Obama’s sanctioned assassinations of Bin Laden, Al-Awlaki and Gaddafi as record of his homeland security “cred”. Sadly, it will take a long legacy of bloodshed and frank war before many Americans will recognize the diabolical intentions of Obama/Holder. True, post-modernist agitators who “bar NO holds” when it comes to their attempts at recasting the world to their leftist, redistributionist mold!!
Do you think an idenpendant national ad campaign (along the lines of the Swift Boat campaigns) demonstrating that Obama is a Marxist stealth-revolutionary would help? What organizations could we approach to help organize and finance such a campaign?
Agree, but lately they have been too busy tearing each other down in order to become the last man standing. It’s too bad because there is so much to pound Obama about, right now.
I enjoy your posts.
“Obama, Pelosi, Reid and the mass media/Hollywood/academia propaganda machine have all embraced the movement.”
In case you missed it, the American Nazi and Communist Parties also threw their support behind the OWS crowd. “Birds of a feather..” as they say.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/10/figures-nazi-party-throws-support-behind-occupy-wall-street-movement/
“31% of them say they want violence”
They have been threatening that for decades, but personally I do hope they eventually carry out their threats– they won’t know what hit them. There isn’t any support for a violent revolution in most of the republic, so they’re trying to coax an Alinsky moment to demonize their opponents with.
Give them all the space & time they want– and wait. They don’t have much time left, and they know it, hence the reek of desperation.
cfbleachers, every day since O took office, there is a new outrage. His words do not match his actions, and yet some still believe that because it is called a “jobs bill” or “health care bill” it is actually about jobs and health care. If you have not read Trevor Loudon’s New Zeal Blog, here is another back door way of stealing elections.
http://trevorloudon.com/2011/10/warning-progressives’-npv-plan-for-white-house-control-2012-permanently/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewZeal+%28New+Zeal+Blog%29
To all those that took the time to respond to my comment, thanks for the insights.
My comment to VDH’s essay was an attempt to highlight a couple of key points.
1. If one accepts Doug Schoen’s synopsis of the OWS movement, (and I do), then it is primarily a group of “overthrow capitalism” radical fringe extremists.
2. Obama and his flying monkeys in mass media have fully embraced the radical fringe “overthrow capitalism” movement.
3. Upon examining that embrace is it fair to now re-examine:
a)his lifetime surrounded by radical fringe extremists who hate free market capitalism, hate America, hate her allies (the West in general and Israel in particular)
b)his mentors and idols and icons and dear friends that included radical fringe extremists such as Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, the Cooper Union crowd, Heather Bloom, the New Party, Bill Ayers, George Soros….ALL of whom embraced and advanced the destruction and overthrow of the free market capitalism…or, in other words…our system of government
c)his acts to date which have included the Seven Seizures, the Eric Holder Department of Radicalism in our Justice System, the ACORN/SEIU favoritism, the Workers Party over-influence in policy decisions, the cozy relationships with our enemies and the frosty relationship with our allies, the global warming hoax intent on redistribution of our wealth through fraud, the assault on Middle America, the apology tour, …every odd, bizarre and strange decision made to strangle our natural resources, yet prop up the extraction of resources elsewhere
d)The far, far, far reaches of Cloward Piven, wanting to stir up a frenzy…what is the actual separation between that…and this administration? Shouldn’t we be examining how closely they are related…how the stealth acts from the inside are not all that different from the announced insurrection on the outside?
If the ANNOUNCED INTENT is to crash the system…and the acts undertaken seem to be embracing and advancing that outcome…is it unfair to ask about the intent, the nexus, otherwise…why the embrace? If you DON’T agree, you DON’T embrace, right?
If you DO agree…then what are you doing to advance the cause?
Soros, Barack Obama,Sr…both on record wanting to crush capitalism.
Yet, OUR leaders tiptoe around this subject, fail to connect the dots, fail to call out the con game. They fail to take on the mass media conspirators, fail to describe the ongoing staging of the insurrection and overthrow. Fail to draw a line in the sand. Fail to bridge the nexus, fail to make the case.
The Marxist radical fringe revolutionaries have declared war. They have declared the overthrow. They have engaged in the Seven Seizures. They have radicalized our DOJ. They have ACORN actively engaged in voter fraud. They have weakened our ability to secure the borders. They have placed the Workers Party at the head of the line in a bankruptcy seizure. They are attacking the banking system. They have overtaken our mass communications and conspire to tell us lies and distortions. They own entertainment and academia.
And, still we slumber. They want to confiscate our wealth through brutal taxation, through hoax, through fraud. And, still we tiptoe around the issues.
They brutally slander Middle America and all our candidates…so that they are marginalized and not effective. And, still we pull the covers over our eyes.
No…I do not believe that we can “eradicate” them in one election cycle. They are buried deep within our State Department, our Department of Justice…they hold our highest offices in the land, they are getting close to a majority on the Supreme Court.
Awaken from your slumber, don’t get cocky. This is a much tougher fight than you have ever imagined. Right now…THEY have the advantages…we don’t.
Obama will have more than a Billion dollars to spend.
He also has more than 50% of the electorate — without spending a dime!!!
47% of the hoi polloi who don’t pay taxes and don’t want to start paying
40% of the hoi polloi who are on the Federal dole one way or the other
25% hard core Democrat and coastal liberals (can’t reason with them)
13% blacks that won’t change
12% hispanics (not Miami Cubans) that are true believers “La Raza”
5% vote early & often, little ACORNners, junkies, illegals and dead people
Granted there’s overlap and imprecision in those percentages. But the Collectivists and Nihilists don’t need so-called “Independents” (people with their thumbs in) to keep control in 2012. The most discreet sum of the above numbers will yield far more that the 43% that Bill Clinton won with.
The best hope may be Cain, but he’s in a maelstrom of Country Club Republican Schmoozers. And anyway, bottom line:
You can’t sell it when the girl across the street is giving it away for free.
Even here, it seems the blinders exist, and the blind are ubiquitous. I weep for a once great culture now known as “The West”.
One more thing CFB. Every once in a while on a conservative blog someone asks “why do we do nothing”? It’s a cris-de-coeur and I share its sentiment. But it is important to be clear that there are only two alternatives. 1- Defeat this leftist cabal through elections followed by an aggressive De-Demicfication campaign waged in Congress, the criminal courts ,and the court of public opinion (i.e. Acting within the framework of the Constitution). Vs. 2- Some kind of armed counter-coup or civil war which would mean a de-facto suspension of the Constitution until further notice. It’s not that I’m against storming the Capitol and rounding up these traitors, it’s the follow-up I worry about. How do we control what comes next?
Other possible scenarios exist. I myself floated the idea of pressing charges of treason against this administration. Others have made the case that Obama has committed impeachable offenses… But against a sitting administration, these are long-shots. It would be good publicity for our side I think, but the Dems would tie up proceedings at least up until next November. So they would have little actual effect in terms of stopping the Dem assault.
As for civil war, well, it may come to that. In fact it probably will once we isolate and corner the hard-core marxist-globalist cabal. But it will be a brief affair and relatively bloodless, since once separated from the sundry useful idiots who are out in the streets today, the ones willing to die for their cause are few in number. That is why, if there is to be a civil war, we want it to be on our terms. We want to be in control of government, with a strong, pro-Constitutional president, backed by a surging economy and with the momentum of a mobilized citizenry with us. We want to achieve the moral high ground by exposing the crimes of this administration and its puppet-masters, turning the economy around and restoring our credibility on the world stage (which will be difficult). Once we achieve these things, we can press our attack home. They will be cut-off and isolated and easy to mop-up. The mid-level statists will scurry back into the shadows, the “bottom-up” malcontents will be forced to return to the job market to earn their living like the rest of us and we will have bought oursleves another couple of decades (if we’re lucky) to grow stronger and wiser and to prepare the next generation to defend their freedom too. For it is a never ending struggle.
Anyone else have any thoughts on how to rid ourselves of a rogue administration without inviting even greater chaos and disruption?
I understand, Gylippus, I truly do.
However, I believe that there exists an asymmetric “mind warfare” that exists and will necessitate coming at this problem from a much more oblique angle.
You are absolutely correct that traditional attempts to press charges of treason will not be sustainable. And armed conflict is simply not in the cards. Won’t happen, there is no will for it and I am not advocating it in any way, shape or form.
However, there exists an asymmetry in “messaging” to the extent that I believe they have an overwhelming advantage. The mass media is an arm of the Marxists, they lie, cheat, distort, slander, propagandize, …it is nearly impossible to get the truth to the people.
Moreover, EVERY person who tries to stand up…and gains any national traction, is brutally slandered.
This requires a full, frontal attack…and full exposure. It requires a cohesive effort and no shirking, cowering, trembling, half-hearted declaration.
EVERYONE on our side has to stand up and say that we see, we recognize and we oppose the radical fringe Marxist attempt …and we can’t do this by half measures.
We must announce that we believe the media are conspirators, entertainment and academia are traitor indoctrinators and the “Democrats” are no such thing if the word is in any way attached to democracy.
We must vet the un-vetted Drone King and connect the dots, make the nexus available to the masses.
What is missing in the national conversation is the open declaration of opposition to radical fringe Marxism.
We MUST call it what it is, announce our recognition, tie it to the actions and results, shine a light on its stealth efforts, accuse the conspirators and draw a line in the sand.
No more tip-toeing around the issue. No more “maybe it’s incompetence”. No more fearing the return slander from their propaganda machine. We must engage, declare, and paint the picture for the masses.
To Gylippus: to “isolate and corner the hard-core marxist-globalist cabal” was the dream of all Euro capitals after the turn of the last century, but the cancerous Bolshevik cells spread unimpeded world wide ever since then, as indeed do today’s Soros-et-al Nihilists groups, but this time they have ALL academia and press behind them.
Isolate? Hardly. The virus has metastasized throughout and for long.
To Gylippus: “with the momentum of a mobilized citizenry” — a lovely Glaustarkian thought. Oh, if only!
But it’s impossible with the indoctrinated under-educated 100′s of millions our teachers have given us.
I’m all too afraid your option (2) is all that could work, but in doing it we would destroy our goal.
All that’s left is option (3): join their game of the Grand Calamity, but plan to pick up the pieces faster than they can.
To cfbleachers: “…announce that…the media are conspirators, entertainment and academia are traitor indoctrinators… “Democrats” are no such thing…vet the un-vetted Drone King…to the masses…shine a light on its stealth efforts, accuse the conspirators…No more tip-toeing around the issue.”
Glenn Beck did that in spades, and the Right as well as the Left called him crazy. And FOX’s Roger Ailes, Murdoch, or whoever other supposed right-wingers over there, hustled him off the stage PDQ. So much for the brave J’ACCUSE among us today. Ain’t gonna happen.
BTW, Beck might indeed be unstable, but he named names and got all of it bang on right.
We’ve been “wing nutted.” People, including most elected and appointed officials, simply do not want to see what their eyes are showing them. You can lay it out as logically and dispassionately as is possible and they just say you’re being paranoid. Otherwise sane people have bought the racists meme. America has been so safe and so comfortable for so long that people simply will not believe that there has been a coup d’etat by a group of people bent on destroying the US as we know it. Whether motivated by communism or mohammedanism or both, it is clear that everything this junta does is predicated on a plan to eliminate the ability of the US to act unilaterally in its interest, and they’ve pretty much accomplished it. The Junta has served up the whole former Byzantine Empire to the Revanchist forces in radical islam. Iran will behave until after the US election but on the assumption that the Junta remains in power, they will destroy Israel and the US will not lift a finger. Saudi Arabia will take that lesson to heart and pledge fealty to the Caliphate. Then they can return to their conquest of The West. We’re going to need a lot of Charles Martels and Polish Hussars, and soon.
AMEN. What I think we need (and VDH has laid some philosophical groundwork here) is to create a public perception of “alternate educational establishment” the same way that we are creating an awareness of the “alternative media”. I am thinking that it is going to be nearly impossible to *reform* the current university system, but those colleges and universities that are different should perhaps agree on and publish a new (old) philosophy. If more and more institutions divest themselves of the current majority of useless classes and majors and get rid of the entire pc infrastructure, and adopt some sort of “contract with america” type of public commitment to a simple set of real academic standards, how much could they cut costs while at the same time producing quality educations that would benefit the students and the country?
As the old system slowly collapses under its own weight, if there was a growing movement of “smart colleges”… wouldn’t the free market reward us?
We on the Right control over half of the state governments. Most of those governors appoint and legislatures confirm appointments to state university boards of regents and other governing bodies. They also usually control a great deal of the university system’s budget. In my experience in government if you control the appointments and the budget, an agency’s heart and mind will follow you.
Art Chance – I appreciate the sentiment, but my reply would be a cynical “good luck with that”. If any of these conservatives tried to do any reforms like that, I am afraid that they would quickly *lose their majorities* as they were barraged by a wall of media narrative “anti education”, “anti academic freedom”, “thought control”, “government interference in education”, “anti american”, “anti freedom”, “mullas on the right”, “destroying free exchange of ideas”, “education nazis”, etc. etc. etc. Would it be the right thing to do? Absolutely. Would they mount good arguments? Of course. But right now the educational/media complex is way too linked.
I frankly think that the left actually wishes we *would* try to do that because they know it is a fight that they would win. Even Reagan found it impossible to remove or even trim the brand-new Department of Education, even though he was successful in most of his other endeavors.
Don’t get me wrong – I would *love* to see them try to do this in some state. The red/blue state gap is getting bigger and more obvious as time goes on (“you shall know them by their fruits”?) but this path is fraught with danger and many have died on that hill without achieving their objectives. SO, whatever we can do through conservative state legislatures, I am all for. I just think we need to do more. We need to *crush* the narrative that the left has constructed, and nothing succeeds like success.
@SMeloche – I’m a longtime bureaucrat and Republican appointee; I don’t have any illusions. I’m very much an incrementalist. My adversaries were communist trained union reps; some even knew they were communists, and I got pretty good at dealing with them and their Democrat allies. If I try to fire a Regent for example, the Left/Media make him/her a martyr. I can wait. When one retires, I’ll appoint a conservative if I have a conservative/Republican legislature, a nice moderate with a business background who’s never publicly called the NEA the National Extortion Association if I have to deal with Democrats/moderates. The Left took over America in baby steps until November ’08 when they reached for the brass ring. They don’t have a firm grip yet, so it can be taken back by taking what’s on the table. If they over-reach and over-react, that is another question and I fear that will have a bloody ending, but I intend to be standing at the end.
That is a very encouraging post. I wish you all the best – and wish that there were more like you were here in CA. A few years back we had a group of conservative parents get elected to a school board near here trying to bring some common sense to local school policies. The left was ready with their strategy – since many of them were Christians, and some of them wanted to propose a sex ed curriculum that included (gasp) the option of abstinence, the teacher’s union sympathizers made sure that every school board meeting ended up being about abstinence and creationism. After carpet bombing them in the media and tying up every school board meeting about creation vs evolution (not the parents’ goal in getting on the board) the conservatives were eaten alive and kicked out in a recall election – despite the fact that they went from a huge deficit (missing millions of dollars) to a surplus and fixed up several things. To this day it is remembered as a proverb in this state never to elect conservatives for school boards. Now the district has big financial problems again but at least they are not telling students about abstinence!
There is probably no group more rabid than the educational unions (as evidenced in Wisconsin this last year). They are vicious! If you are taking them on, I respect that greatly and wish you success. Maybe living in California has just made me too pessimistic.
@SMeloche – CA is a particularly tough case. I just inherited some property there and I think I’m just going to give it away.
I knew several of Aahnolds labor relations people back when he did the initiatives against the unions. I told them they were going to get killed an I hate to have been so right. I worry about the situation in WI and OH for the same reasons. You cannot take on public employee unions if their dues stream is intact; they will kill you. Unions are only reasonable if they are gasping for breath and facing imminent death. There is hardly a union in the Country whose dues structure could stand a legal challenge. It is black letter law that compelled dues cannot be used for “social, political, and fraternal” activities if an employee objects. They know they’re safe in Democrat governments because those dues are the IV that the Demorats feed on. They know they’re safe in most Republican governments because most Republican governors and AGs are afraid of being called partisan and mean spirited if they take them on.
I assure you that you can indeed cut off a union’s dues income and threaten their very life and live to tell the tale. You’d best not be wanting to work in a Democrat Administration or get a contract from a Democrat government if you do it, but you can do it. In WI and OH, as was the case in CA, they haven’t attacked the dues, so the unions and Democrats still have their whole shadow government intact, so unless those governors get a lot of help from outside their states, the unions just outlast them, elect a Democrat, and it all becomes a memory. I’ve been there and done that too; the wilderness is a very lonely place if all your “friends” are feckless Republicans.
Yes CFB, I agree, it must be brought to light that the heirs of Marx, Lenin and Mao have taken control of the Democratic Party, and are ensconced in the White House. They have joined hands with globalists at the UN and international financiers as well. (But it might be best, for tactical reasons, to leave that part out, for now…) It would be very risky for a candidate to come out and say so, but extra-ordinary times require extra-ordinary measures. Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and many others have all made pretty explicit claims that Obama is a hard-core Marxist. But it seems like many in the conservative commentariat still don’t really believe that this administration is fully committed to terminating democracy and the free-market in America a.s.a.p. And setting up a system that transfers control to an unelected global elite. I agree with you that it is disappointing that none of our erstwhile leaders will come out and say “the emperor has no clothes”. I think Art Chance wrote a great summary of why this is. All I can say is that the first candidate who did, and who connected Obama’s policies (and their results) to his Marxist past, would earn my loyalty for life! And it would certainly put Obama on the defensive during the debates (and make for good ratings too!) I’m not counting on it though, such self-less heroism (the ultimate attribute of leadership) is rare nowadays. That is why we may have to do this ourselves. Smeloche correctly points out that education reform is the top priority, and gives some innovative ideas on how to approach it. But if this to be a truly grass-roots driven process first and foremost, that means choosing a candidate who at least sees the nature of the threat in its full scope. Previously that was Palin. Now it is Bachman, Gingrich and perhaps Perry. I like Cain because he’s willing to think out of the box and put his ideas out there, but I don’t know if he realizes we are beset by Marxists… Once we regain the executive, we will then need to develop mechanism to instantly and massively communicate our support and/or opposition to any given measure – directly onto the executive. An executive we trust, and who trusts us. We will work as a giant team to sideline the leftists. They will be vulnerable once they are out of power.
I never said it would be easy, or pretty, but I am absolutely certain that even without a Reagan (or another inspiring, charismatic leader like Palin) we can reclaim this nation from the totalitarian left and the dark future they have in mind for us. I already see much more creative thinking and positive energy coming from our side, and have for three years now. And those are the magic ingredients.
Pelaut: The US is a land of firsts. There is still a majority of individualists who do not take kindly to servitude. As I’ve argued before, exposing the crimes of the “Top Down” element while producing a positive alternative (as per “SB”s suggestion above) will go a long way to restoring equilibrium. Freewheeling, open cultures like ours are vulnerable to centripetal pressures. That is why each generation must commit to defending the structures that preserve us. For me, going Galt is equivalent to ceding the battlefield. Personally I think we’re a long way from that point. There is nothing that ails us that a bit of concerted energy and will cannot reverse. Besides, what our ancestors have given us (not only the dream, but the reality of freedom) is something that, from my point of view, should not just be given up without a fight. Remember: the rise of the Tea Party itself is a sign that we are the same as 19th century Europe. In fact we are preparing to birth something wonderful and new!
Correction: “…that we are NOT the same as 19th century Europe.”
One thing I can’t keep straight with the right is whether the belief is that Obama is a mastermind, socialist, commie, muslim with designs on dismantling all things American or if he is a bumbling, unqualified and nieve boy? I read these posts and it changes every so many.
Hmm?
Your thrust here’s a weak one, Ed. Is this the first time you’ve noticed that there’s more diversity of opinion on our side than on yours?
But as long as you’ve asked this on PJM, let one of PJM’s stalwarts explain it to you:
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/10/24/obamas-foreign-policy-manchurian-candidate-or-keystone-kop/
First of all, what is “nieve” ?
Secondly, what’s with the snarky “Hmm…”
And don’t forget “…ever so many.”
Heather, Stallion, George and Jane, keep the faith. Millions of us are with you out here. Conservatives ( tea party or not) only know how to play the decency card. Never the left. Zero always equals zero and as I determined years ago at 2nd encounter with him, the narcissist who became our big ‘O’ in the White House can never fill his empty space with worthwhile or effective ideas or policies.
This just seems apropos (from the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, Chapter 14:)
6) And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
7) Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
8) And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
9) And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,
10) The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:
11) And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
12) Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.
Taken somewhat metaphorically, we are watching something very like this are we not? Who knew the Apocalypse would be so subtle, instead of so earth-shattering? That the those drinking the wine of God’s wrath would do so by their own choice? That their torment would be self-inflicted? A “Great Shaking” or “Commotion,” indeed. But Peace in the midst of it, for those who have done well, even as the smoke rises ever upwards.
Nah – it’s coming. Prepare because it’s really gonna hit the fan this time. Bible pretty much says that the ones caught in the flood during Noah’s time got off easy compared to what’s coming down the pike for us.
Hasn’t the recent failure of Harold Camping (again!) to predict the end of the world convinced you guys (i.e., fundamentalist Christians) to give up the prophecy game? 2000 years and counting of false predictions of the apocalypse…
“Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance—and spiced with occasionally glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.”
Brilliant.
I can’t add anything to that.
OK knuckleheads – Now get yourself arrested and add a criminal history to boot.
The debacle that post-secondary education has become is part of the history of the stagnation of Western Civilization that results from the institutionalization of civil (non-governmental) instrumentalities and the political co-option of those intitutions,once formed, into the governmental mechanisms.
The determination of the objectives of those institutions shifted from the initiating civil purposes to determinations of objectives made by the functionaries within those institutions; and those objectives generally and increasingly confirm Public Choice Theory.
The answer for post-secondary education will not be reform or revision, it will be circumvention, as has begun to counter the institutions of “Public Education.” New instrumentalities are forming (despite entrenched opposition); non-formal (i.e. classroom)instruction, lectures and research facilities. The ground is shifting.
Change is underway, whether it can lead to realistic hope remains to be seen in two generations.
I think a lot of people are missing the point about how people in college should be majoring in engineering, medicine, etc.
The catch is, those things are really, really hard.
Maybe 5-10% of the students currently in high school can successfully make it through those types of degrees. And of those that do, maybe half can get a job in their field (at least engineering).
And then you have to deal with competition from people coming in from other countries. Worse, a lot of times you have them as your teachers (grad students) and you have no idea what they are saying because they can’t speak English very well.
What are the other 90-95% supposed to do? Trust me, they won’t be getting Engineering degrees, unless you dumb them down so far as to make that degree worthless.
The problem with this country is that we’ve deprecated practical skills in favor of college. We’ve also demonized every job that isn’t professional. 100 years ago, working as a cashier for a store was considered a fairly good job. Now it’s sneered at as “retail”.
thank you for your insightful post.
The “99%’ers” are a dead quantity. There is no hope because they have been consumed by the cancer of mediocrity. They will be a drag on this country for a couple of generations.
Hopefully their childeren will learn something useful. If not, Sianara!!! The University system as we know it will die with them.
Eliminate welfare and let them work or starve. Working will let them figure out the worth of what they earn. Once they do that, if they can, they will realize how wrong they have been and how they were cheated. I think few will actually starve, hunger is a great motivator to get busy and find a way to earn money to buy food.
Whenever someone comes begging while I’m shopping, if they ask for money, I suggest “can I buy you a sandwich?” Many of them walk away with rude comments so I assume they really weren’t hungry at all. I’ve had a few accept and thank me profusely. If they do that, I tend to either give them some money or offer them some work. It’s amazing what a little real charity will do. Welfare is not charity.
Good insight. I often feel conflicted in those situations – sounds like you have a good “middle of the road” approach.
Proverbs 16:26 – A worker’s appetite works for him, For his hunger urges him on.
How do you propose to do that, when their vote counts as much as yours? We are in a situation where an increasing number of people have two marketable commodities: their votes on Election Day and their bodies in a riot.
The meme that everybody needs a college degree is dead. The society needs less than 10% of the liberal arts majors that it currently churns out.
For the vast number of liberal arts majors, college has become a hole they can never climb out of. They would be better off learning how to cook or fix toilets and cars.
Think about what you do and need in your life, from the grocery store to the oil change place to the restaurant to the doctor’s office. Sure, in the back office there have to be business people who can run the numbers and plan expansion and optimizations, and at the doctor’s office the doc and a few others better be well educated; but for virtually all of the front-line people (at least 90%), what good does a college education do them? Nada.
The economy simply does not support or require 16 years of schooling. And it isn’t going to change either.
It’a all been a myth, probably created simply to create a class of overpaid, impossible-to-eradicate, brainwashed academics who don’t knows their asses from their elbows. Like everything else in the librul fantasy world, college for everybody not only is a false reality, it destroys lives.
The problem is that we don’t have enough work for the one-third of Americans who aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Those folks used to work on assembly lines for the big manufacturers. But automation, robotics and globalization have eliminated some 70% of American manufacturing blue-collar jobs. In the 1950s, 40% of Americans were employed in manufacturing; today it’s less than 10%.
Some of those folks can become plumbers or trash collectors. But we don’t need tens of millions of plumbers.
Go ahead, tell me how you would employ 40 million Americans who only have a high-school diploma. What sorts of things can they do these days besides flip burgers for the minimum wage?
painting, auto repair, appliance repair, food service, store clerks, construction work, medical testing (not interpretation, testing), transportation (cabs, trucks, railroad, busses), virtually any kind of maintenance, landscaping, cooking, grocery stores, big box stores (even including store managers), almost any retail, medical transcribing, health insurance processing, data entry, almost any government job, most security jobs, child care, many sales jobs, customer service jobs, any cleaning job, and carrying job, heavy equipment operation, assembly line work, a lot of computer work (1 or 2 years of training is often enough), bank tellers,…
to name a handful.
Like I said, except for a limited number of back office planning positions, docs nurses and high-level medical technicians, scientists and engineers, and the 25% of lawyers we actually need, a college degree is a waste of time. It didn’t matter much 30 years ago when an education was cheap and a bachelor’s was equivalent to a master’s today, but now, it saddles the kids with a life-killing debt, and what they learn is never used…meanwhile, they waste 4 years of earning and skill acquisition and have an expectation that they will be given something by merit of their “degree” that they didn’t earn (given the quality of eduction today) and don’t deserve.
One thing that needs to be done is to get rid of the mild stigma attached to “vocational training.” Yes, brainwashed/brainwashing professors at liberal arts schools will resist, but young people can actually learn to do the work that their fellow citizens want done and are willing to pay for.
Liberal arts degrees exist as a foundation for graduate school, mainly law school, and as a way for employees to weed out the bright and/or hard-working young people from the lazy idiots (though to the extent grades depend upon how closely the student’s views appear to match the professor’s, it’s not perfect).
Too bad rampant affirmative action has degraded the value of college grades in judging minority graduates. I do believe we are now ruled by our first affirmative action president. Though he is widely acknowledged to be “brilliant,” I see absolutely no sign that is so. (Cleverly devious, maybe, but that is not the same as brilliant.)
plumbing is the foundation of western civilization
:-) “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain” (Scotty in The Search for Spock)
Trouble is, it now takes sixteen years to get less education that one got in eight or ten years less than a century ago. And to make it worse, those with the sixteen or more years of “education” have no practical skills because they’ve resisted all attempts to give them any unless you consider a vast knowlege of pop culture and the ability to use all sorts of electronic entertainment devices a practical skill.
My grandmother had 10 years of what passed for public education in rural Georgia in the late 19th Century and she had two years of “Normal School,” a teaching “college.” She could rattle off great long passages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin, she could read Greek somewhat, she knew great long passages of Shakespeare and the KJV by heart and could rattle off from memory the proofs to those Geometry theorums that drove me nuts. Admittedly, she had a very limited knowlege of physical science, but, frankly, as a “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it” Christian, she wouldn’t accept much of what she did know of “science.”
I had the best of both worlds, the rigorous old-fashioned academics of the Southern Jim Crow schools and the beginnings of federal aid to education that enabled us to have books that didn’t promise that someday railroads would span the continent. I grew up in a poor, rural Southern community. If many of my schoolmates’ parents weren’t illiterate, certainly their grandparents had been, but failure was not accepted and there were desks in rows, kids in them, and teachers were addressed as “Mam” or “Sir.” A public education was a rising tide that raised all boats and that was true of the segregated Black schools as well, though I’ll make no pretense that the separate schools were anything like equal. Frankly, all the promises of the integrationists have proven wrong. C. Vann Woodward as much as admits in later writing that much of “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” which underlay most of that thinking was fanciful. The assumption was that segregation and particularly segregated schools was the root of Black poverty and lack of opportunity. The promise was that access to “White” schools and institutions would remove the barriers to progress by Blacks. Instead it has destroyed education for both Blacks and Whites because rather than admit that Blacks largely did less well in the integrated schools and take appropriate remedial steps, the civil rights litigators and the “educational professionals” dumbed down the curriculum so it wouldn’t be apparent how poorly Blacks were performing. And on top of it, the welfare schemes enacted to help the transition out of poverty that was promised destroyed the Black family and not a few poor White families as well. In the ’50s Black and White illigitimacy rates were about equal and quite low. Almost 80% of Black babies born this year will be illigitimate and most will never know a father figure.
I’ve experienced three iterations of public education: in the ’50s and well into the ’60s a public education was a rising tide that raised all boats. School for my bio daughter in the ’70s and ’80s was much less rigorous but not yet the enemy of the family. School for my step-kids in the ’90s and ’00s was simply the enemy; no failure or excuse went unrewarded. They were bombarded by propaganda in the form of teaching them to avoid and report abuse that was patently intended to undermine parental influence; the school taught them that parents were stupid and abusive and they were to report anything they didn’t “like” at home. There was nothing resembling academic rigor, little homework, and the only way to get a bad grade was to not be there at all. We did what we could at home, but when the school is pounding them with your stupidity and awfulness, it is hard to get and keep a kid’s attention. They’re all doing OK today, though the two younger ones are doing no more than OK; it’s hard to get ahead when nobody buys your excuses any more.
I see no solutions other than a gray, depressed socialist society with a youth culture out of “A Clockwork Orange” unless and until something can be done to restore discipline and academic rigor in schools and we stop encouraging and subsidizing illigitimacy. Traditional Black family structure and culture has been destroyed, destruction of traditional Hispanic family structure and culture isn’t far behind, and Whites are trying as hard as they can to catch up with the Blacks and Hispanics on the sleigh ride to Hell.
You do see clearly, Art.
The answer is of course teachers, but from Kindergarten up. Reform from the Ivory Towers down depends on the improbable continuity of rightist wins.
Any societal changes which would restore us to unfolding the path our Founders lay out for us would take so long or be so destructive that me and mine would be many generations in the grave.
Going Galt is all that makes sense.
Yes, they are hard. It is interesting that some countries are much better at turning out SEM graduates (science, engineering and math) than others. If we have to subsidize anything, maybe the government should pick up the college debt tab of any American SEM student who graduates with an A average.
Or not. Seems like a good way to guarantee a large increase in the number of SEM graduates with A averages, awarded by charitable professors and eroding the value of an A average in determining the best and the brightest.
Our governor, a Republican, wants to provide a free state university education to all HS grads with a three and change GPA so long as they keep a three and change GPA in college. Anybody with a brain knows that they’ll ALL graduate HS with a 4.0 even if they can’t read the diploma and they’ll get As all through college so long as the state picks up the tab.
That’s pretty much the case anyway; if you show up and pay you get a degree. If you do anything at all you’re on the Dean’s List.
Flashback to one of my favorite columns :
“Why is this so? It is not merely that so many are so ignorant of history, or that most who are degreed and certified are glib and swarmy, but not educated. No, the better explanation is that they rarely work among, know, see or care about the type of Americans now barreling to Baghdad —who are still a different, and I think, a better sort of people.
And now thousands of them ride on to Baghdad.”
“There was also simply no time to do so, given the enormity of the assignments”.
“enormity” – Aaargh. Please consult a dictionary. Try “immensity” or “huge number”.
There was no time to comment on how GREAT the column was, given the enormity of the commenter’s ego.
I’m with you on that! Yes, it was a great column, but “enormity” is one of those words like “peruse” that everyone just gets wrong!
I dunno, dude. “Peruse” has contradictory meanings built in – look at sense #1 here, both a and b:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peruse
You can use it to imply both “studying hard” and “hardly studying” – needs the help of a wink and a nod to get your meaning across!
You weren’t a Classics guy. Believe me, translating six pages of Thucydides is an ENORMOUS assignment for one 24 hour period. (Translating 24 pages of the New Testament in six would be a smaller task.)
Try sense 3 here:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enormity?show=0&t=1319582883
I think your stuck on the Susie Sontag definition.
The rage and panic are an inevitable part of the death throes of the Left.
Rage and panic are just the precursors to their death throes. It’s their last ditch tactics that worry me.
Clearly, all “collective bargaining rights” for Public Service employees/unions must be abolished. All at once, everywhere, or we have little chance of remaining free men.
The kapo class is immense/enormous/huge, interconnected in realtime, closely-coordinated and depends for its livelihood on obeying the orders of superiors, the overseers, who they believe pay them. Their allegiance is increasingly to the Brotherhood, not the community.
OWS is a human denial-of-service attack. Imagine when 2-3 million newly-unemployed city/state/fed gov’t workers with no marketable skills join the ranks, along with all the unfunded NGO employees, while we have zero funds for unemployment insurance payments. Add in the 20 million unemployed/unemployable coming off the roles, after 99 weeks of no work. Gets to be a big angry crowd.
Unshackling looks harder every day. And, we’ve got to start with the Rep leadership, wherein even acknowledging the Tea Party demands for NO More Compromise on Spending is considered too extreme. What, we should continue letting them spend more “borrowed” money to further enslave US?
Time for a new movement: OPCOLDTURKEY.
This may sound Swiftian, but I suggest we set our employment-starved environmental studies majors to eating the civil servants. The retirees would be too tough, but a nice tender assistant provost, smothered in delta-smelt sauce, might go down real fine.
Very nice summation of what ails that peculiar segment of our society that is so blind to its emotional and intellectual shallowness, but at the same time its members’ academic abilities empowers them to believe that what little they know (or is it what little they believe in?) is actually a form of high-mindedness and profundity.
How should PC addled universities and colleges go about reforming themselves? Their dilemma is that if they want to get rid of useless social studies curricula the people needed to vote those programs out of existence are the people teaching them. States, like California, won’t step in and do what needs to be done before its universities implode from this disease. Red states, as the professor points out, have done a much better job in this regard, or at least haven’t allowed PC to metastasize too deeply into their public universities.
And yet, after the cataloging of all the “o”s faults and failing, lies and screwups, we still must worry about the possibility of his re-election. . . . how many will vote for him again? We are doomed. . .
“Soon even some mainstream Democrats will grasp the lie. ”
You have much more faith in democrats than I do.
Having gotten through their studies (and most of their lives) with the help of educational and spiritual viagra, they can’t get it up by themselves. A rage over impotence is an impotent rage.
My kids will play no part of this stoner, slacker, tatted and pierced, free love, free spirit, bang the drum OWS movement (one in med school, one planned to be there), and I agree with most of the comments here. Lord knows we spent a small fortune on K-12 private education to group with parents of like mind. Apparently, it worked.
From what I have observed now for the better part of a decade, you can kiss a a large part of this 18-29 generation goodbye. Taken as a collective, I have never met a more amoral, debased bunch of imbeciles in my life – and the blame rests at the foot of their parents – those who are my age (45-60). Not only do their kids have the morals of alley cats, they couldn’t put a drill bit in a keyless chuck or jump start a car. Helpless.
These parents are the 40 year result of liberal policies and Woodstock mindset. Parents who wanted to be friends with their kids, who believed in innate self esteemed and tolerance, freedom from religion, more concerned with bullying in schools than their kid learning sciences. Hard to imagine it will get worse, but with OWS as parents, it will.
A shame, because there are legitimate grievances against Wall St. that need to be addressed – corruption and cronyism being two. But not by this bunch of bleating sheep, and certainly not by this feckless, lying, hypocrite and community activist for President.
I fear for the country I am leaving my future grandchildren, and I am feeling much overwhelmed in number. I come to PJM to make sure I’m not the only one concerned, and I thank you for providing a small degree of hope.
Our offspring are 22, 24 and 26. They are all doing just fine. One in college, one worked for a few years and is now in business school, one an entrepreneur who employs an impressive number of people. They are pleasant people who do not expect to be supported by the system. I have to speak up against generalizations. The OWS kids are not representatives of this age group.
I said a large part to cover kids like yours and mine. But my experience is many, many meet my description of the OWS crowd and I adamantly disagree with your insinuation that this is but a fringe of the generation.
I can walk the halls of half the public schools (and have walked through several) and tell you that you these OWS folks are not some rare bird. Quite the contrary…and I believe the failure of many of these schools would prove exactly that.
There are certainly many bad teachers and administrators. But let’s not minimize the real problem. Millions of rotten parents share a large part of the blame.
It’s not like there’s tens of thousands of them. For the most part, I’m seeing a pretty small turnout even in very large cities. They had an Occupy rally here in my hometown and the paper said “more than 30 protesters” showed up. It does get cold up here in late October but we know how to dress for it and way more show up at a high school football game. I’m more concerned that the legacy media is making more out of this than it is. It’s actually been kind of self defeating and beyond parody.
There weren’t more than, at most, a few tens of thousands bolsheviks, and look what that brought us.
“Not only do their kids have the morals of alley cats, they couldn’t put a drill bit in a keyless chuck or jump start a car. Helpless.”
I’ve found the young’uns remarkably resistant to learning how to do ANYTHING practical or physical. When our oldest conned his mother into buying him a car, I went through the drill of showing him how to check the fluids, add oil, etc. I got the teenaged “uh huh, uh huh, I know, I know” as he rolled his eyes. Never has “lowered” himself to anything like that. Even though he really doesn’t make enough money to rely on somebody taking care of vehicles for him, he goes to the full service gas stations and pays somebody to do everything. They’ve all been propagandized about this to the point where they think anyone who does anything with their hands is a lower life form. It was totally incomprehensible to my step kids that I worked on my vehicles and boat myself because I liked doing it, that I built stuff around the house because I could – won’t go so far as to say I always liked that, but I could do a half-a$$ed job myself, so why pay for one, and a half-$$ed job is about all you can get anymore no matter what you’re willing to pay.
I found that when I did those half-assed repairs with my kids, they picked up on them and now tend that way themselves. When my son and his friends actually replaced a motor in the Monte he bought, I was impressed. That was far beyond anything I had (or could have) showed him. Your experiences with your step-children may have a whole different dynamic going on there. You seem to be implying that they go more with their mother’s values, than yours, which may have to do with a lot of other things.
I agree with your statements about the TENDENCIES of a lot of kids these days, but I don’t see why we have to be helpless, or just bitch in the face of all that. People are people.
I never said we had to be helpless. My point is that I’m not holding parents wholly responsible. Like the words of the song, “Momma Tried,” sometimes they are remarkably resistant to whatever parents try to teach them, and the natural tendency seems to be to swim for the shallow end of the gene pool.
“…and the natural tendency seems to be to swim for the shallow end of the gene pool.” Well, I’ll give you credit for a good line. Mine did not use their BS’s in Earth Science, but swam toward warehousing pursuits that, ironically, seem to be the sort of thing recommended on this thread. Go figure!
“In sum, there is panic. Obamacare, near-zero interest rates, more environmental and fiscal regulations, government takeovers, bailouts, and stimulus, nearly $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion in annual deficits, vast increases in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and hectoring the private sector — all that and more did not restore prosperity. More likely we ruined a natural recovery — if 9.1% unemployment, anemic GDP growth, ruinous debt, precipitous declines in the standard of living, and the return of the old record misery index are any indication. All Obama in 2012 is left with is the old trifecta of “Bush did it,” “they” will cut your Social Security, and a subtle racism fuels all opposition.”
This is what the Republicans should be concentrating on, not sniping at each other. Instead of attacking each other over stupid issues, the candidates should focus on how to get us out of the mess that is shown in the above list. If Republicans can’t win when all Obama has left is “Bush did it” or “They will take away grandma’s Social Security,” then we deserve to lose. Unfortunately, the country literally cannot afford another four years of Obama. We are broke and getting further into debt with very little to show for it. That is what the Republican candidates need to tell the American people. Hopefully, the American public will be listening this time, rather than just chanting stupid slogans, like they did in 2008.
“…Obamacare, near-zero interest rates, more environmental and fiscal regulations, government takeovers, bailouts, and stimulus, nearly $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion in annual deficits, vast increases in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and hectoring the private sector …”
Outstanding analysis, Dr. Hanson. You make it very tempting to want a law outlawing academic tenure. State law, that is,….and a federal law that bars people from running for office if their state allows academic tenure. I won’t even get into congressional tenure.
But please note that the budget is $1.3 trillion, not 1.6 trillion. In addition the national debt is almost $15 trillion, not nearly 5 trillion as stated in your article. By some rough calculations it will hit $15 trillion by the end of November (yes, November 2011). And let’s not forget the unfunded liabilities of $115 Trillion and climbing. (Source: usdebtclock.org). This makes the individual taxpayer liability a bit over a million dollars. And the OWS protesters are complaining about a measly $50-90K in education loan debts? Since Obamacare took over the education loan program, I fail to understand why all the Occupiers are not in DC…oh, I know, their professors told them to go to Wall Street. Perhaps an Occupier could be found to give us a coherent explanation of why they are not in front of Congress and the W.H.? Naw, forget it….coherent is not-allowed/non-existent in OWS speek.
“You make it very tempting to want a law outlawing academic tenure. State law, that is,….and a federal law that bars people from running for office if their state allows academic tenure.”
Umm, where in the constitution does it permit the Federal government to outlaw people from running for office, let alone everyone in a state for NOT passing a law? Actually, since that would be to deny such states equal suffrage in the Senate, you couldn’t even amend the constitution to do it.
College tuition? It’s a ripoff! Postpone college until the bubble bursts!
Biology is not a “hard science”. You cannot equivalence it with Physics, Math, etc.
Biology is a refuge of taxonomists, and they regularly get it wrong.
Consider the millions upon millions of species created every year, the perhaps billions in existence that are unknown and the whining about the paltry hundreds that “disappear” every year.
“Disappearing” species are the biologist’s way of telling us he or she spent more time screwing in the pup tent than out counting tracks and turds during their field trips. They come back to report no gerfunknik rabbits to be seen this year, all gone, global warming is to blame.
Biology (not physical biology, etc.) is a HUGE sham, not a science.
So true. Despite being 5 year regular reader I still burned comparable sums on a law degree.
Writing as someone who studied hard, and earned an M.A. in mathematics in 1966; what you say about your own experience and conclusions on university life sure do bring back memories—and, ongoing sorrow.
What’s that saying about the blind leading the blind? I guess average people will always outnumber the superior ones, and envy will continue to be one of the dominant characteristics of mass society.
Take the subject of geometry.
Yes, everybody, even those below average, SHOULD have to take geometry—or not graduate from high school, and not be allowed to even go to college!
In my sophomore year in high school, the teacher in our honors geometry class was too ill to teach, so we had a substitute for the whole year—Mrs. Crump—who knew little or no geometry. What to do?
We students were each assigned a section and taught HER and the rest of the class, on a day-by-day basis. And, what a thrill it was!
Later. I did some teaching, fulltime and as a sub, so I personally got to see and experience the dumbing down of the vital subject of geometry. We were “lucky” enough to have to learn and understand and use PROOFS of the naturally invented theorems.
By the time I retired, theorem PROOFS were out of sight, man!
Understanding the geometry I learned SHOULD be only the basic gain from schooling. Since it is not, what we have is a vast DUMB majority of “citizens” who simply don’t know how to think clearly.
Where is the logic?
It’s been a constant amazement for me to see Americans slowly morph into Dumbkopfs!
Just think—not only has the education system managed to spit out people bereft of an ability to use logic, but also in the social sciences, especially history, they end up not knowing true facts but believing so much that is suicidally false.
The inmates have long been in charge.
So right! Though I have degrees in Physics and Mathematics (1960), everytime I meet someone fortunate enough to have gone to a Jesuit high school, I’m shamed by my feeble grip on geometry (logic). Not Catholic myself, I didn’t have their advantage.
Everytime I meet any American under 65 years, I’m shamed by their feeble grip on reality (Hayek vs Keynes, the mighty Sun vs tiny motoring man, on and on and on).
The only “B” I’ve ever received in my adult incarnation of college student was in Logic. It was a 200-level class and good for three hours towards general requirements as either a math class or a non-lab science class. 37 of us started the class including a whole bunch of Ed Majors who were trying to get a teaching certificate with just a BA/BS before the program ended that year. The professor, an adjunct, was a lawyer that I sorta know from politics and remarkably for a university even in a Red state, he was an activist Republican. He also had both a Ph.D in Philosophy and a JD from Jesuit schools, Gonzaga, I think. 6 of us were still around to take the final, four passed, and I was proud of the B, though the work required was unheard of for any other class I’d taken or even heard about there. His idea of a final for a sophomore class was to give you about a 2000 word extract from Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in John Marshall’s baroque 18th Century legaleze, distill that torturned prose into standard form, identify all the syllogisms, and analyze them for logical valitiy. And then you had a hundred random sentences and syllogism to analyze for logical validity or identify any fallacies. They ran him off the next year.
I still have my very marked up copy of “The Art of Reasoning” and bought copies for all my staff an made them read it, a task thought most onerous by most of them. Though they warmed to it as they discovered that most union grievances were subjectivist fallacies and you could just dismiss the arguments as fallacious rather than having to become an instant expert on all the underlying facts. The only problem with that is that only the older arbitrators and ALJs had any background in logic and could understand your arguments in those terms. The young ones were fine with “I feel strongly” arguments.
Did you go to Edmonds high school?
Didn’t go to Edmonds High School. Went to Roosevelt High School.
Obama has nothing left except to ramp up his “community action” divide and incite jealousy tactics between the productive vs. the non-productive. He continues the work of Rev. Wright and Karl Marx.
Perhaps Dr. VDH can do a review of Republican candidates THUS FAR with respect to which one might best defete Obama and try to “obliterate” the socialist agenda. Maybe too much to ask of a conservative academician observer and who would really hate to be publically wrong but who will be ever ready to say “I told you so” after the election. Speak now Dr. VDH. Be brave.
“5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression, what the chair, dean, provost, president was doing about it (usually setting up a watchdog faculty committee)
Every school system in the country such as the university system in California, should be identifying the state and university regulations and committees to be abolished. In Wisconsin the CFO’s of the Schools made a list of five hundred state regulations that were making the system inflexible while not contributing to education. The governor abolished them all. One third of the savings at the local school board level came from changes in scheduling etc., which could happen once these regulations were gone (and once the unions could not block the changes.) This could happen elsewhere but it requires a group to start now to identify non-functional regulations.
Apparently there are plenty of them but making the list takes time.
Another way to save money is to renegotiate all contracts – health care, lunches, school bus etc. Usually they are simply approved year after year.
Formula for State budget health the Wisconsin way:
Abolish collective bargaining but keep civil service protections.
All state employees pay into pension and health.
Abolish useless regulations.
Renegotiate all contracts when the current contract expires.
Move to Federal government. Do the same.
” Out of all that chaos, I think there are two constants that explain the Obama frustration and the current outpouring of invective at Wall Street, “them,” the affluent, and our capitalist system in general. ”
VDH, I agree with your statement and I would like to offer two different constants that I consider realistic.
First, In the arab, muslim tradition history is not considered a tool for recording past events accurately. It is viewed as amorphous changeable narrative that serves two purposes. The first is the advancement of Islam. The second is to make the listener feel good. In order to understand the reasoning used by BHO one must first accept the obvious even though most people will deny it. Once one accepts the obvious all the actions of BHO and all his statements fall neatly into place. The problem with this model is that while it works over the vast expanse of time as memory fades and myth replaces fact , it is very difficult in the near term. After all the Obama narrative may become the accepted view in a hundred years if the Islamists win. However in the here and now, getting the western mind to accept falsehood as truth has made inroads but is still rejected by most. That explains the frustration.
Second, the OWS movement is best explained from the perspective of a radical community organizer. With Holder, unwilling to prosecute certain elements even though they prevent others from voting, and the newly appointed head prosecutor for the Federal Election Commission, Anthony Herman, formerly in charge of Covington & Burlings pro-bono work on behalf of GITMO detainees, solidly in place, the OWS becomes simply a practice run for the 2012 elections. The structure, communications, advertising, fund raising, and troops available for mobilization are all prepared. Ask yourself how many middle aged white voters will not go to the polls if the streets are blocked with anarchists and thugs are patrolling polling places?
Sound scary? Sure. But oh so obvious once one accepts reality.
“First, In the arab, muslim tradition history is not considered a tool for recording past events accurately. It is viewed as amorphous changeable narrative that serves two purposes. The first is the advancement of Islam. The second is to make the listener feel good.”
Have you ever wondered about American Exceptionalism and our reverence for the Founding Fathers, Old Glory, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, The War to End all wars, and the Greatest Generation? Life is always messy, but we want our Golden Age history to posit a time when we did things right. That is the essential fallacy behind most of this thread. People, disgusted with our current messiness, bluster and babble about how we can make this all as it should be. It is the “rage on” mind-set of the left and right. Conservatives supposedly accept the messiness and the limitations of human existence, but you would be hard put to find such acceptance here.
It is an ego problem. We want to think that our times are special; if they can’t be the best ever, then we will make them the worst ever, and increase our volume and affect until we can get people to nod their heads. You will look long and hard before you will get any clear-eyed analysis of the state of our Republic now, vs the Revolutionary War, Shay’s Rebellion, the War of 1812, the aftermath thereof, the Panic of 1857, the Civil War, Reconstruction, innumerable busts after booms, WWI, Prohibition, the Great Depression, The Vietnam War etc. But forget about those times. Obama is our President and this is the WORST ever, ever, ever.
Grow up, study history, and just for the hell of it, try to maintain a little perspective. VDH does not usually use history to present a balanced perspective (and who knows what that would be?) but as a blunt instrument to bludgeon Obama and academic liberals who have frustrated him for many years. I had hoped for more; foolish me. But, in his rare moments, when he actually does present a viewed tempered by historical perspective, readers here tend to accuse him of going soft.
Our state is the CURRENT state of all civilization, and it is generally better here than elsewhere. Is there somewhere else where it is better? Is there some other time when you would wish to live? I feel lucky to live in 2011 and be as well-off as I am, much more economically secure than my parents. My children will have to more or less fend for themselves; I did.
American Exceptionalism is a fact not a fiction. Otherwise Man would never have walked on the moon, German would be spoken throughout Europe and the USA would not be a magnet drawing oppressed peoples from all over the world. Our times are indeed special. Never before has Mankind had the opportunities for both good and evil to such an extreme. Never has the world been as inter-dependant as it is today. I try to build a better world for my kids and I hope they do the same for their children. And Obama is not being bludgeoned , he is swinging the hammer. Those being hurt are those who suffer under the yoke of his policies.
Gary Johnson promises to kick ass. This is a guy who has summited Everest, and who thinks nothing of bicycling 60 miles in a day WHILE doing campaign stops as well. He says that he’ll balance the budget in 2013. BALANCE. Stop digging the hole.
Discouraging, watching these videos.
America’s morons have come home to roost
A series of videos here, the first kid was on tv last week, reportedly lives off of his daddy’s trust fund
I take issue with the Solyndra “crony capitalism” line — more accurate is “crony socialism”.
You were lucky to have avoided proselytizing Marxist professors. I had the poster boy of such teaching the required English course in the fall of 1970, my freshman year at a small Eastern liberal arts college. This was the year after “The Strike” closed the whole campus down so students could demonstrate against the Vietnam War. We read works such as “Mother Courage” and had to write response essays. My first attempts were honest, thoughtful–and I believe, well-written–responses. I got C’s, which I was definitely not used to getting. At some point the light bulb went on. I began–very cynically–sprinkling my prose with phrases such as “the proletariat”, “oppression of the masses”, “revolution”, yadda. Miraculously, my grades improved! Despite the earlier C’s, I got an A for the final grade. The prof was probably very pleased that he had re-educated me. At a very young age, I saw through these people. I Googled the guy just now. Apparently he hasn’t changed much: http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/ LOL!
Wow.
Looks like your man could use a seminar in web design.
A 7th Grader could do better than that.
I attended Fordham University, starting in 1976, on a full scholarship. I was considered a person of promise, but I showed them.
I was not only the sole undergraduate registered as a conservative; I was the only one with his own business. I went to school from 8:30 AM until 12:30 PM and then took my ice cream truck to the Throggs Neck Projects in the Bronx, until Midnight, 7 days a week.
I was arrogant and confident as well as physically intimidating, being the only white guy with a tattoo and an earring. I spoke out in favor of less government, less taxes and capitalism as a panacea for the ills of humanity. I carried and read The Wall Street Journal, when everyone else had the Times. It didn’t buy me any friends, but it also didn’t make me any enemies.
Living now, 2 blocks from where I grew up, I have spent decades listening to leftist, liberal preaching and recriminations in a manner that would have made Jeremiah Wright blush. I often said my piece and then let it go. I love you; you are my friend, if I disagree with you on politics, so what?
Yet, since I have started writing articles and being much more outspoken in public with my opposition to this President, I find that tolerance only goes one way.
I have lost friends, because they disagree with me on Barack Obama. An article I wrote on racism cost me a friend of 37 years, a woman I have been introducing as my sister for decades. She felt that as an African American, she could call me a racist and I should be all right with it. I told her never to contact me again.
People are surely angry, on both sides of the political debate. The left, however, reserves the right to be angry with you for the slightest conservative leaning, even while you tolerate their ridiculous beliefs.
If they know you, you can say a lot, until what you say threatens their livelihood or the livelihood of their close ones…which in liberals’ case is government dependency. Then they begin to fear what you stand for and friendship will no longer matter.
It’s similar to pointing out to a lifelong factory worker that his job will soon be automated or shipped offshore. The fact that what you say is inevitable, logical and necessary in a free society, as well as your freindship, will no longer matter.
The common factor in liberalism seems to be a condescending belief that their positions are intelligent and good because the people that hold them are intelligent and good. Therefore everybody who has an alternate opinion is just stupid and evil. If I have any disagreement with a liberal, including family members, their attitude seems to be that they are magnanimously coming down to my level to enlighten me. If I actually dare to reply to their arguments (which always seem to consist of a mixture of accusations and ‘argument by assertion’) they lose their composure quickly, no matter how tentatively I frame my arguments (I try to use questions rather than assertions in the Ben Franklin model). It’s like they are saying “come on now – I came down to your level to give you the obvious truth and you are personally rejecting me! I’m hurt! After all I have done for you!”.
The really sad part of this (for me) is that most of the ones I have known are *really nice people* in every other way. I remember at one of my previous workplaces there was a wonderfully sweet old secretary that I loved to talk to. One day she quoted some liberal maxim that she had heard on NPR. I replied that I had heard NPR stood for “Not Partisan, Really!”. Her entire demeanor changed and she said “they are *completely* unbiased and *always* give both sides of the issue, not like that biased Fox News!” (Then why does *every* car I see with an NPR license plate holder always have an Obama bumper sticker?) I repled that I sometimes watched Fox News. She was literally struck speechless – she stood there sputtering for about 15 seconds and then said “I can’t talk right now” and ran from the room. The next day we pretended that the previous conversation had never happened and everything went back to normal. I marveled at how strong the hatred was for conservative views in someone I had heretofore considered apolitical.
“…apolitical…”
Did you mean apoplectic?
:-) Seems to end up that way a lot, doesn’t it? Reminds me of Proverbs 29:9
“When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, The foolish man either rages or laughs, and there is no rest.”
I have found that I just do not fit in with old liberal friends.
It hit me at a party where a stalinist enforcer accused me of racism and my friends did not defend me. They were cowards because they feared the social ostracism of the enforcer.
If I see them socially I am polite and my comments perfunctory. They think I am an buthole for turning my back on them. I see myself as a saint for not busting the guy up.
My friends from the neighborhood would fight Mike Tyson for me. My school friends — fear the wrath of the liberal orthodoxy.
the most important question — and the truly big issue — is, will obama be reelected, or not?
the cold, stark, harsh reality now is, that nobody knows what the voters will do, nobody at all.
The essays of VDH are always insightful reading. He (you – if you happen to read this comment, sir)can boil down complex subjects into easily-assimilated form. I agree with the above comments from those that point out that it is only the 5 to 10% of the young that can go to college and have the intellectual capacity to emerge with the technical and scientific degrees that still insure good jobs and lasting careers. What of the 80 to 90% that are good students, but just don’t have the intellectual capacity that the 10% are blessed with? They are ill-served by high school counsellors that urge them to go to college anyway, only for them to emerge with degrees that will not land a useful job with good prospects for a upwardly-mobile career. They would be better served by being told the truth. American youth that “don’t quite have it” but are reasonably smart, have good motor skills and hand/eye coordination, and (this is the key) are willing to work should be guided into fields that this country is going to need in vast numbers in just a few years.
As an IT service professional of thiry-plus years experience, that DID NOT go to college, I can tell you that, in the next decade, the country is going to need hundreds of thousands of technicians to service and repair the vast number of complex technical devices that we rely upon daily. Hospital laboratory instruments, medical imaging systems, industrial robots, power distribution monitoring and control systems, and hundreds of others need skilled and adaptable technicians daily to keep running correctly. Careers for these people are rewarding and lasting. The huge numbers of technicians in the Baby Boom generation, like myself, will start to retire in the next decade. This country will then require something along the lines of 50,000 to 80,000 new technicians PER YEAR entering the workforce within the next decade. These same numbers and statistics apply to fields like long-haul trucking, highway construction heavy machinery operators, petroleum exploration/transportation/refining technologies, and many others.
If the young “skulls full of mush” don’t get good, honest advice from high school counselors, parents and political leaders, we won’t be able to fill the ranks of the technicians, truckers, and operators that will, all-too-soon, be forced to retire due to age and declining capacity that is brought on by age. All we’ll have are good little liberal robots that sit and wait for “Big Mother” (I like that expression) to take care of their needs as long as they keep pulling the lever for Dems and liberals.
I agree. However, it’s not just “intellectual capacity” that makes a good college student. Personality has more to do with academic success than mere intelligence. A clinically-depressed genius is less likely to succeed than a less-intelligent but emotionally healthy kid. Most people don’t fail or drop out of college because they’re stupid but because they have other things going on in their heads and in their lives.
You can ridicule these young college graduates with their naive anti-capitalist rantings, but one fact is indisputable:
The Banks and Wall Street got a huge trillion-dollar bailout to smooth over their bad decisions, college students with a mere $100,000 in student loans won’t be similarly blessed. Nor will homeowners whose home equity has collapsed, and who are suffering from job losses in this cruel recession.
What the Banks and Wall Street got, if anything, was nothing remotely resembling capitalism. A few more “victories” like TARP, and capitalism really will extinguish itself.
And, as always, the biggest problem is not Obama, or the Dems, or the RINO’s. The biggest problem is the ruler of this nation, the sovereign, the king: We the People. For decades We the People have allowed and encouraged our elected reps and execs, and our judges, to grossly violate and trample our own foundational Law in the dust. This has resulted in the bevy of unConstitutional Fed bureaucrazies that throw not sand but boulders into the gears of the economy of the Republic, from EPA to OSHA, from SocSec to Medicare, from Dept of Labor to Education, and many, many more. Once upon a time the Founders expected that every citizen who voted would read and understand the Constitution, and require their reps to abide by it. Now not 1% of even those who call themselves conservative who vote can tell you anything intelligent about it. The vast majority of citizens couldn’t care less about it.
Our military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Were they to actually abide by that oath, they’d have to take action against most of the citizens of this nation. This does not end well.
The left has wormed its way into every aspect of our society and is so deeply entrenched that, in my opinion, violence will be the only way to remove them. My only question is – when do we fight? I don’t know the answer to that question and I dread the thought of it but one thing I do know is that once you’re on the train to Auschwitz, it’s too late.
I am a parent of a UCLA student who is in the sciences. Here is what bothers me. My son is taking a basic Calculus course (which I still remember the struggle with). His instructor in this course can not speak English and there are a lot of good kids who simply feel that they are dying in this class. How can an institution of higher learning employ a person who can not speak English to teach any course. Unless my son took a crash course in Mandarin, I doubt if he will pass this course let alone learn anything in it. In this vast country, I’m sure we could find some individual who has mastered English to teach this course. When I taught high school, we had a couple of PHDs in our math department who spoke fluent English and were very capable teachers. This being the case, why does UCLA relegate itself to one teachers who are not fluent in English (it still is the primary language), teachers who can’t each and teachers who don’t give a damn about their students.
Another thought, it doesn’t take a PHD to teach Calculus. It only takes somebody who is capable in the subject be he/she a MA or BA.
Odds are the person teaching the class is either a grad student or an “instructor”. The last being a euphemism for a scut monkey. These people are hired to teach the “plebeian” intro classes that are now beneath the dignity of full professors to teach. My son has encountered similar problems only now magnified by the use of computers to ensure that no professor should ever sully themselves by actually talking to a student.
See the Khan Academy calculus courses at http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#g/c/19E79A0638C8D449 .
Even though I try to balance the blame for America’s internal self-loathing on more than just this administration, it really is appropriate for them to wear the crown of shame for it all. The way this president coddles actual anti-government, drug abusing, ranting, directionless protestors and denegrates the Tea-Party, a group basically all about curtailing wasteful spending and intrusive government in a peaceful and appropriately lawful way, is a real disgrace.
When George Bush promoted the term “compassionate conservative” I thought this conterproductive because it left the implication that conservatives, in their natural state, were not at all compassionate. The venom directed by conservatives at OWS makes me wonder, now, that conservatives are, in their natural state, pretty grim and, to boot, have pictures of “Henry F. Potter” above the fireplace. Certainly the conservative radio talkers show no sympathy for those afflicted by the New Aristocrats, no holding of “communion of interests and sypathy of sentiments” (Federalist No. 57) for those hammered by banks, by outsourcing companies, by the Big Shot tax escapers, by the Big Guys with the clout to get government officials to protect them from risk of loss with public funds. So — either all the “conservative” radio talkers that tack the anti-OWS line are modern versions of “Henry F. Potter” — or liberals out to discredit all of us conservative populists who seek to restore our founding legacy of government — ending government of, by and for the insiders with government of, by and for the people.
Arrogance and Ingnorance
Dr Hansen writes: “Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance….” The bankrupcy of our educational system has led to a tragic (and obnoxious) result: students have strong opinions on subjects they know nothing about.
While teaching a logic course, I once conducted an experiment. First, I asked the students whether they favored or opposed nuclear power. Not surprisingly, nearly all were strongly opposed. Then I asked for a show of hands of those who knew how a nuclear power plant works. No hands were raised.
Dr. Hansen identifies the cause of this phenomenon: students are not taught to think inductively. They do not reach their conclusions by reasoning from observed facts; instead, their views are based on authority and emotion — the authority of their professors and the anxiety that result from their inability to deal with reality.
The problem can be fixed only by changing education. I have written a book (The Logical Leap) on the inductive method, and Falling Apple Science Institute is developing a curriculum that will teach students to think inductively.
Of course, we should do what we can to improve the dismal state of our political system. In the long run, however, the country will survive only if the next generation can think.
David Harriman
I believe we are in the midst of a long term slow motion civil war complete with casualties over the failure of the welfare state and progressivism. The war is being fought over debt bondage/slavery of our children, by proxy armies composed of illegals, unions and anarchists (see OWS). I have written what I believe is a critical examination of these issues in a book titled “Surviving Civil War II” as discussed at the noted website.
UC Berkeley is probably 60% asian. Asian kids are getting serious degrees. If they are not smart enough in science or math, they pursue law or business. The aspire to be professionals.
UC Berkely grads camped out in Oakland are devolving. They see themselves as victims much like the homeless who are sleeping next to them on the lawn.
Some years ago. a Jesuit Educated Priest decided that instead of taking vows, he would study history. Some thirty years, fifteen or so huge volumes and perhaps fifteen thousand pages later, resulting from intense and honest study, he, like God, paused and rested. Will Durant decided to summarize what he had learned from his study of civilization starting at its dawn to close to the present day. His book “Lessons of History” is only about a quarter of an inch thick, double spaced. With respect to economics, he says that there has been an unmistakeable trend stretching back thousands of years that keeps repeating, and that is that over a period of time, wealth tends to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and then something happens and it is distributed. The Russian revolution, for example, or the New Deal of Roosevelt fame, or England after the end of WW II to mention a few that are not too much in the past. We read that most of the wealth on the US has become concentrated in a very few hands. So if this is really true, will something happen to take it away from them and “distribute” it somehow. I can’t help wondering if they are worried about it.
It’s not true. There is no country in history with a wider distribution of wealth than the US, including every Commununist country. In them, 99% of the wealth is concentrated in the commissar’s hands.
I wish that were true, but it’s not. Not anymore. The only unbiased, politically-neutral way of measuring income distribution across societies that I know of is the Gini coefficient. It is a measure of statistical wealth dispersion across a given country’s population which delivers a number from “0″ (total equality – everyone has the same income)to “1″ (total inequality – one person holds the all income while millions starve). In 1967 the U.S. index was 0.399. As of 2009 the U.S. measures along the range of .45 – .49, which makes fully 69 countries more equitable. Sadly, this includes countries such as Bulgaria, Ethiopia and Yemen.
More income inequality is not necessarily bad – it depends on what typical salaries are. If the highest salaries are in the millions and the lowest still provide ample funds to live well, then there is little concern. In the case of the U.S.however, our rising inequality is a reflection of the hollowing out of the middle class and a low and high class moving nearer to the extremes. It also reflects the growing statist policies of our government and the fact that we have now absorbed about 1/9 of the population of Mexico. Not good. As Fiddler points out, the trend is for more wealth to be concentrated in fewer hands. Not that I’m siding with the OWS lunatics – Marxism (Communism) was the smartest plan ever devised to quickly concentrate an entire nation’s wealth into the greedy hands of inner party members.
The top 10% in this country controlled 39% to 46% of income from 1917 – WWII. It peaked at 46.3% in 1932. As WWII ended it got to the mid-low 30′s and stayed there until it crossed above 40% again in 1995. It reached 45.6% in 2008, the latest year for which we have records. This suggests that as the economy recovers, the wealth expands at the top. It does the same for the lower 90%, peaking in 1929 at an avg. of $9829 in 2008 dollars then dropping during the depression and rising dramatically during the war years. This cohort peaked in 2000 at $33,572 and has fallen since. The point is that this is not new but it part of the economic cyclicality the world has experienced before. This should also suggest to governments that if they prolong the downturns by bailing out their cronies they hasten the time when their reigns will end. Notice the 10 governments in Japan since 1990. This will be coming to our neighborhood soon if we continue with our current folly.
Dr. Hanson writes, “The old idea of open borders is also over.” Really? I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. The bodies still pile up out here in California as well as across the border. Also, he writes that in the “old days,” college faculty taught “6-8 classes” each year. I have taught English at a private post-secondary for-profit college for twelve years and teach six classes per quarter. Sometimes I grade six hundred full-length essays per quarter. The “old days” still seem pretty lazy to me. As a former newspaper editor who actually made his living writing (how many college English teachers can say that?), I don’t find this difficult; time consuming perhaps, but never difficult. The hyper-paid and benefit-laden professors at public universities make me ill.
tantrums are working – today Obama announced his payback to OWS (downpayment for his campaign) – reduced rates and streamlined terms for student loans- (translation: free rides at YOUR expense, forcing us to buy these worthless degrees for those who despise USA, his fanbase)
Barker’s First Law:
For every action, there is an equal and opposite excuse.
Barker’s Second Law:
For every inaction, ther is an equal and opposite excuse.
I fear the OWS gang of dummies will provide Obama with his 1933 Reichstag Fire moment in about August or September of 2012. What to do then? I fear we’ll all just Sieg Heil along with the rest and suffer the fate of the previous group to go down that path. Quite probably the legal mechanisms are all ready in place to drive the train in that direction as left overs from the cold war. We’ll see how it goes. Buy C-bennies and bullets. We’ll probably need them. Cheers
The Left always collapses under its own weight.
Victor nails it, “[There are] Not Enough Smelts or Pipelines to Go Around”
Self-preservation is kicking in everywhere, including the Democratic Party and anyone with a brain can see that socialism never works for that primary reason. Some, however, have no choice idealogically but to keep digging.
Obama does not count on being president after 2012, his rhetoric is obviously designed not to “sway independents” but to keep him in charge of The Left for the Coming Insurrection he intends to lead. He had hoped for a less violent coup but he’ll take the cards he is dealing.
de socii nihil nisi bonum
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