Rahm Rapture
Some things need no words of explanation- such as this from the Lucianne.com site.
M.C.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
What Next?
THIS week, VEEP Biden gives away his 'unknown location', the President laughs at a disabled person being made fun of (by a lesbian), and to his credit (it's not all downhill, sorta) decides military tribunals are not a bad idea after all. He also changes his mind about releasing 'torture pictures', as release of them may 'hurt us' in the Muslim world! You think? And maybe, just maybe....they aren't as extreme as he expected, therefore disproving the point that terrible things happened in the Bush days. And maybe, just maybe, he is rethinking his 'torture' position, too.
One thing about a narcissist, when they feel their image is threatened in a real way, they will reverse course.
They have to realize it, though. It may come as a shock, but the POTUS is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Welcome to the decline and fall of the "Roman Empire", 21st century style.
M.C.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
SUNSPOTS AND CICADAS
We read recently that some scientist has announced that he has determined that cicadas are not following their usual patterns in emerging in broods (ie., 5 yrs, 11 years, 19 years, etc). The reason he had deduced behind this disruption?
Picture Source: http://www.cicadamania.com/gallery.html
Joe Green: Tibicen resonans, Florida, 2007
Global warming. Of course.
Of course...it has been well established that the brood emergence patterns also follow another cycle...the sunspot cycle. And of late, there has been a dirth of sunspots, fewer than has been seen (for longer periods) than in the lifetime of any living scientist. One wonders, could it be the (already established correlation) SUNSPOT cycle that is influencing the cicadas instead?
However, ala "wheels within wheels"...it also turns out (largely unremarked in the print and BIG media) that the sun is emitting more energy than it has in along time, also (since sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun's surface, this seems counter intuitive- until you consider the energy being conserved in the solar thermal cycle by the reduction in sunspots is being expressed in enhanced thermal output!). Could it be...?
Could it be...enhanced solar thermal output is leading to...global warming!? The NATURAL CYCLE that many have already well documented, for years. Not caused by man? Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize co-winner, soon to be memorialized by REPUBLICANS in his home state...is wrong!?
How could this be?
Maybe the answer lies in bugs and (solar) BTUs, after all.
"There is nothing new under the sun...all is vanity."
M.C.
Friday, May 8, 2009
The New Bigotry and Pod Thinking
Here is an article by Charles Winecoff, whom I just read the first time. It speaks eloquently and the art work is dynamite (unfortunately you can't see it all here, so the link is pasted in..take a look!). The article is copied here for reading and comment. Here is the image that says it all:
So sadly true.
M.C.
__________________
Here is the link:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/cwinecoff/2009/05/04/denied-bigotry-of-the-obamatrons/#more-113614
By Charles Winecoff
Recently, at the office (a place I sometimes affectionately refer to as Obama Central), I made the mistake of printing out a Washington Post editorial that questioned the foreign policy expertise of our new Commander-in-Chief. By the time I got to the printer to pick it up, someone else had already seen it - and stamped “DENIED” across the top of the page in red ink. Next to that was scrawled, “RIGHT WINGER GO HOME.”
The first thing that went through my mind was: cross burnings. The second was: children are evil (my workplace is overrun by hundreds of twentysomethings).
I tried to be rational. Whoever defaced the page had no way of knowing who had printed it out - just as I had no idea who the defacer was - so it wasn’t personal. Still, it was hurtful.
And it was bigoted. The defacer didn’t know anything about me - my political affilitation, my sex, my race, nothing. Die hard Democrats read mainstream editorials, don’t they? So much for the good will of Dave Matthews’s “American Prayer” starring Idi Amin and Perez Hilton - and Michael Moore’s patronizing, post-Election email exhorting his followers to be kind to their Republican friends (as if they have any).
I’ve been the object of hate before. As a teenager, holding my black boyfriend’s hand in Greenwich Village, a truck swerved to hit us while we waited to cross the street. To be honest, I prefer that kind of hate. It’s direct, out in the open, and in response to an action - in that case, our hand-holding - not in response to a thought. Had I committed a hate crime without realizing it?
As I headed back to my office, images of the Ku Klux Klan, going after people they didn’t know in the middle of the night, raced across my brain. Then I had to stop myself. And chuckle. There was no comparison.
But my gut kept telling me there was. Whoever stamped ”DENIED” across my document clearly felt justified in defacing it. Though petty, this was a hostile act - another tiny blow in the insidious war on free thought. And one thing I’ve noticed in the stifling PC smog of LA: the Obama generation doesn’t think twice about openly ridiculing folks who don’t follow in lockstep. They’re still acting like there’s a Texan in the White House. They can’t let go. They don’t want to. Because, like the believers of a certain 7th century ideology that’s made a big comeback in recent years, their objective is not, despite claims to the contrary, to coexist. To quote Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, it’s “to rule.”
Instead of gossiping at the water cooler, today’s privileged jugend hover in packs around TV monitors to mock the usual suspects - poor old Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Miss California (chivalry is deader than dead). Together, they telegraph their warning to anyone who might disagree: don’t.
They believe Loose Change is an important documentary, Al Franken a natural for the Senate, and Arlen Specter a hero. They judge people not for their principles or achievements, but by the letter that comes after their name. The one coworker I saw who dared walk the Yes We Can-festooned halls in a McCain T-shirt last fall got singled out by a supervisor (”Are you serious?”). The answer? Of course not - the tee had been donned as a joke.
Kids today. They enjoy complete freedom to open their pieholes at the slightest brainfart. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That should be a benefit of freedom. Yet despite the apparent spontaneity of their farts, a strange uniformity pervades.
To their credit, Americans born after 1980 seem to be almost entirely free of old-time prejudices like homophobia - kudos to Will & Grace, I guess - though it’s hard to tell where genuine acceptance ends and “Vote No on Prop 8″ fanaticism begins. Where I work, no one voted “yes” - at least no one would say so - so we’ll never know if “DENIED” would have been stamped across a human forehead.
But too much of a good thing, even media-sanctioned tolerance, becomes oppressive. “You’re so negative” is an accusation I’ve heard many times since moving to Hollywood, usually in response to less than total elation about the release of the latest Spiderman sequel or the nasal squeals of the current American Idol. Whatever happened to critical thinking?
I used to think its absence here was an organic deficiency of the West coast. Back East, where the weather stinks, people spend more time indoors, are more likely to pick up a book and exercise their own imaginations. In the easy, optimistic climate of California, kids grow up tanning and surfing, and the sky is generally blue. Irony gets bleached out. Life is good. Why bring everyone down? Opinion - “DENIED.”
Sometimes I wish I had been born in Malibu.
But lately - okay, since the Election - I’ve begun to suspect that the rejection of critical thinking is more than a regional custom. Forget the swine flu, anti-thought is a viral pandemic - and it’s spreading fast. As Marge the Palmolive lady used to say, “You’re soaking in it!”
Twenty-somethings are fond of declaring, “It’s a free country!” But is it? Really? And what exactly does that notion mean to them, anyway? Because from what I can tell, they believe the First Amendment is a natural phenomenon which, unlike the climate, will never change. At the same time, these kids - who see nothing odd about surrounding themselves with creepy, halo’d icons of The One - mock folks who actually make the effort to exercise their right to free speech on talk radio, at Tea Parties, and at workplace printers.
Talk about a false sense of security. They think this double standard is perfectly normal.
As a young’un said to me not long ago, “But Republicans… aren’t they, like, evil?” When I was growing up, the only Republican I knew was my grandfather - and he used to describe himself simply as a “skeptic.” Party affiliation aside, I always thought skepticism was supposed to be a good thing.
Not anymore.
As the media distracts us with constant fear-mongering about hate speech, racism, and possible assassination attempts on our President - by rightwing nuts, of course - a virulent new strain of politically correct intolerance has risen swiftly and silently in our midst: an all-out intifada against the individual.
In 1950, journalist Edward Hunter coined the term “brainwashing” to explain how some American POWs were converted to Communism during the Korean War. Today, the practice is commonplace. In 2009, every time an American turns on a television, he faces non-stop identity assault from a rat-tat-tat of guilt-inducing messages and innuendo: America is bad; America is collapsing; America should become more European; America deserves to be put in its place; America must bow to the wise and humble global community (especially if it’s Third World).
I’ve talked with otherwise well-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings who seem unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between the cavalier anti-war ravings of Madonna in concert and the published propaganda of Hillary Clinton (Making History) and Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope). While it’s reassuring to know that Gen Oers still know how to read, it’s chilling to observe how readily they accept the words attributed to their idols at face value.
For reading these books, they are validated by their peers, complimented for their good taste - and tacitly discouraged from turning a critical eye to even a single sentence. No surprise, then, that brainwashing is also known as “thought reform,” with social acceptance the dangling carrot. The thoughts in these books are “good.”
This is the exact opposite of how Gen Oers are taught to view literature by conservative thinkers like Mark Levin and Ann Coulter (who, BTW, actually write their own books). In these cases, the same kiddies are emboldened to ridicule, condemn and name call - no reading required. The thoughts in these books are “bad.”
Guilt also plays a major part in brainwashing. Everyone from gay activists and environmentalists to socialized medicine zealots use it to browbeat people into submission (like any of us need more that). If you resist their arguments, then you must: a) be suffering from internalized homophobia; b) own shares in Exxon, or c) secretly want minorities to die waiting to get into the ER.
Brainwashing can only work in an environment of isolation - and there’s no lonelier place for a conservative than New York, San Francisco or Hollywood. Hopefully, that’s changing as many of us are starting to speak out. Still, the Left controls the arsenal of psychological weapons (film, print and digital media) used to break people down.
The challenge for young people is that, unless they already know someone who at least identifies as a “classical liberal,” their malleable minds will be hard pressed to discover the joy of civil discourse or rational debate. They won’t be exposed to any.
In 1983, best-selling shrink M. Scott Peck published his second book, People of The Lie. In it, he tells the stories of several patients whom he came to believe could be clinically diagnosed as “evil” - a character disorder he describes as “militant ignorance.” According to Peck, an evil person prefers to psychologically destroy others rather than face his (or her) own faults, exhibits zero empathy towards his targeted scapegoat, and enjoys falsely labeling other people as evil.
You know, like spending eight years comparing people you disagree with to Hitler.
Self-deception, Peck states, is the number one risk factor for evil, easier to maintain in groups - like MoveOn.org, Al-Qaeda, Queers for Palestine, Rachel Maddow’s Facebook page - than individually. Ironically, Hollywood has long told us this sort of mass bias is wrong. Just watch Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman’s Agreement, Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan in Storm Warning, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton in Monster’s Ball, the entire Screen Actors Guild in Crash… the list goes on and on.
So when did groupthink suddenly become cool? When did words start meaning the opposite of what they were intended to mean? When did “progressive” come to mean ”do nothing,” and “conservative” mean “progressive” (i.e. “do something”)? When, as Andrew Klavan has so eloquently pointed out, did the belief system of the angels get reduced to the two-syllable mantra: “Shut up?”
When did dissent become a de facto hate crime?
In Don Siegel’s classic sci-fi flick, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the citizens of Santa Mira, California, are gradually replaced in their sleep by emotionless impostors - the proverbial “pod people.” The film is often interpreted as an allegory for Communism and McCarthyism (a tactic first reviled, then hijacked, by the Left). But Body Snatchers is more relevant than ever - right here, right now.
You walk the halls, wander the streets, visit the homes of other two-legged beings who appear to resemble you on the surface, yet seem to have no clue you exist as a separate person, mentally, emotionally or spiritually. These seemingly intelligent beings talk about you, in front of you, as if you were in another room, automatically assuming you are of like mind. (Maybe they just never read Miss Manners.)
If you say something to correct them - or just ask a question about their leader - they blink, not comprehending. You repeat the question. They smile at you wanly. It does not compute. Welcome to Santa Mira, a.k.a. Hollywood, a shifty dreamscape, where nothing is exactly as it seems, where a marine layer rolls in every night, blanketing its sleeping citizens in a fine vapor of paranoia.
Does anyone know the way to San Jose?
Back in the harsh reality of daylight, the O generation carries on, oblivious to its own cruelty or mortality. As long as they have Dancing with the Stars and Tivo, all is well with the world. Are these overgrown, enlightened rejects from Village of the Damned the new ugly Americans? If so, they are primed to be thrown over, fatally, themselves. By whom? I think we all know - and it ain’t The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
At the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter have managed to escape pod-dom by staying awake for days on end. Exhausted, Wynter finally succumbs. When she awakens, changed, she gives McCarthy some icy advice: ”They were right… Stop acting like a fool, and accept us.” If she’d had a rubber stamp, she might have branded him - “DENIED!”
McCarthy flees, desperate for human help, lamenting in voiceover how “a moment’s sleep, and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction.” Watching the attractive people I see everyday, working out at the gym, driving their Smart Cars, grabbing a Starbucks, watching CNN, listening to their iPods - and talking about Hope - I know how he feels.
When did they all fall asleep? When are they going to wake up? Perhaps when they learn, the hard way, that freedom is not just another convenience.
Meanwhile, try not to express a dissenting or individual thought - and don’t gasp if one of them lashes out viciously at a friend who steps out of line - because that’ll clue them in that you’re still human.
And then they’ll come after you.
M.C.
__________________
Here is the link:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/cwinecoff/2009/05/04/denied-bigotry-of-the-obamatrons/#more-113614
By Charles Winecoff
Recently, at the office (a place I sometimes affectionately refer to as Obama Central), I made the mistake of printing out a Washington Post editorial that questioned the foreign policy expertise of our new Commander-in-Chief. By the time I got to the printer to pick it up, someone else had already seen it - and stamped “DENIED” across the top of the page in red ink. Next to that was scrawled, “RIGHT WINGER GO HOME.”
The first thing that went through my mind was: cross burnings. The second was: children are evil (my workplace is overrun by hundreds of twentysomethings).
I tried to be rational. Whoever defaced the page had no way of knowing who had printed it out - just as I had no idea who the defacer was - so it wasn’t personal. Still, it was hurtful.
And it was bigoted. The defacer didn’t know anything about me - my political affilitation, my sex, my race, nothing. Die hard Democrats read mainstream editorials, don’t they? So much for the good will of Dave Matthews’s “American Prayer” starring Idi Amin and Perez Hilton - and Michael Moore’s patronizing, post-Election email exhorting his followers to be kind to their Republican friends (as if they have any).
I’ve been the object of hate before. As a teenager, holding my black boyfriend’s hand in Greenwich Village, a truck swerved to hit us while we waited to cross the street. To be honest, I prefer that kind of hate. It’s direct, out in the open, and in response to an action - in that case, our hand-holding - not in response to a thought. Had I committed a hate crime without realizing it?
As I headed back to my office, images of the Ku Klux Klan, going after people they didn’t know in the middle of the night, raced across my brain. Then I had to stop myself. And chuckle. There was no comparison.
But my gut kept telling me there was. Whoever stamped ”DENIED” across my document clearly felt justified in defacing it. Though petty, this was a hostile act - another tiny blow in the insidious war on free thought. And one thing I’ve noticed in the stifling PC smog of LA: the Obama generation doesn’t think twice about openly ridiculing folks who don’t follow in lockstep. They’re still acting like there’s a Texan in the White House. They can’t let go. They don’t want to. Because, like the believers of a certain 7th century ideology that’s made a big comeback in recent years, their objective is not, despite claims to the contrary, to coexist. To quote Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, it’s “to rule.”
Instead of gossiping at the water cooler, today’s privileged jugend hover in packs around TV monitors to mock the usual suspects - poor old Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Miss California (chivalry is deader than dead). Together, they telegraph their warning to anyone who might disagree: don’t.
They believe Loose Change is an important documentary, Al Franken a natural for the Senate, and Arlen Specter a hero. They judge people not for their principles or achievements, but by the letter that comes after their name. The one coworker I saw who dared walk the Yes We Can-festooned halls in a McCain T-shirt last fall got singled out by a supervisor (”Are you serious?”). The answer? Of course not - the tee had been donned as a joke.
Kids today. They enjoy complete freedom to open their pieholes at the slightest brainfart. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That should be a benefit of freedom. Yet despite the apparent spontaneity of their farts, a strange uniformity pervades.
To their credit, Americans born after 1980 seem to be almost entirely free of old-time prejudices like homophobia - kudos to Will & Grace, I guess - though it’s hard to tell where genuine acceptance ends and “Vote No on Prop 8″ fanaticism begins. Where I work, no one voted “yes” - at least no one would say so - so we’ll never know if “DENIED” would have been stamped across a human forehead.
But too much of a good thing, even media-sanctioned tolerance, becomes oppressive. “You’re so negative” is an accusation I’ve heard many times since moving to Hollywood, usually in response to less than total elation about the release of the latest Spiderman sequel or the nasal squeals of the current American Idol. Whatever happened to critical thinking?
I used to think its absence here was an organic deficiency of the West coast. Back East, where the weather stinks, people spend more time indoors, are more likely to pick up a book and exercise their own imaginations. In the easy, optimistic climate of California, kids grow up tanning and surfing, and the sky is generally blue. Irony gets bleached out. Life is good. Why bring everyone down? Opinion - “DENIED.”
Sometimes I wish I had been born in Malibu.
But lately - okay, since the Election - I’ve begun to suspect that the rejection of critical thinking is more than a regional custom. Forget the swine flu, anti-thought is a viral pandemic - and it’s spreading fast. As Marge the Palmolive lady used to say, “You’re soaking in it!”
Twenty-somethings are fond of declaring, “It’s a free country!” But is it? Really? And what exactly does that notion mean to them, anyway? Because from what I can tell, they believe the First Amendment is a natural phenomenon which, unlike the climate, will never change. At the same time, these kids - who see nothing odd about surrounding themselves with creepy, halo’d icons of The One - mock folks who actually make the effort to exercise their right to free speech on talk radio, at Tea Parties, and at workplace printers.
Talk about a false sense of security. They think this double standard is perfectly normal.
As a young’un said to me not long ago, “But Republicans… aren’t they, like, evil?” When I was growing up, the only Republican I knew was my grandfather - and he used to describe himself simply as a “skeptic.” Party affiliation aside, I always thought skepticism was supposed to be a good thing.
Not anymore.
As the media distracts us with constant fear-mongering about hate speech, racism, and possible assassination attempts on our President - by rightwing nuts, of course - a virulent new strain of politically correct intolerance has risen swiftly and silently in our midst: an all-out intifada against the individual.
In 1950, journalist Edward Hunter coined the term “brainwashing” to explain how some American POWs were converted to Communism during the Korean War. Today, the practice is commonplace. In 2009, every time an American turns on a television, he faces non-stop identity assault from a rat-tat-tat of guilt-inducing messages and innuendo: America is bad; America is collapsing; America should become more European; America deserves to be put in its place; America must bow to the wise and humble global community (especially if it’s Third World).
I’ve talked with otherwise well-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings who seem unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between the cavalier anti-war ravings of Madonna in concert and the published propaganda of Hillary Clinton (Making History) and Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope). While it’s reassuring to know that Gen Oers still know how to read, it’s chilling to observe how readily they accept the words attributed to their idols at face value.
For reading these books, they are validated by their peers, complimented for their good taste - and tacitly discouraged from turning a critical eye to even a single sentence. No surprise, then, that brainwashing is also known as “thought reform,” with social acceptance the dangling carrot. The thoughts in these books are “good.”
This is the exact opposite of how Gen Oers are taught to view literature by conservative thinkers like Mark Levin and Ann Coulter (who, BTW, actually write their own books). In these cases, the same kiddies are emboldened to ridicule, condemn and name call - no reading required. The thoughts in these books are “bad.”
Guilt also plays a major part in brainwashing. Everyone from gay activists and environmentalists to socialized medicine zealots use it to browbeat people into submission (like any of us need more that). If you resist their arguments, then you must: a) be suffering from internalized homophobia; b) own shares in Exxon, or c) secretly want minorities to die waiting to get into the ER.
Brainwashing can only work in an environment of isolation - and there’s no lonelier place for a conservative than New York, San Francisco or Hollywood. Hopefully, that’s changing as many of us are starting to speak out. Still, the Left controls the arsenal of psychological weapons (film, print and digital media) used to break people down.
The challenge for young people is that, unless they already know someone who at least identifies as a “classical liberal,” their malleable minds will be hard pressed to discover the joy of civil discourse or rational debate. They won’t be exposed to any.
In 1983, best-selling shrink M. Scott Peck published his second book, People of The Lie. In it, he tells the stories of several patients whom he came to believe could be clinically diagnosed as “evil” - a character disorder he describes as “militant ignorance.” According to Peck, an evil person prefers to psychologically destroy others rather than face his (or her) own faults, exhibits zero empathy towards his targeted scapegoat, and enjoys falsely labeling other people as evil.
You know, like spending eight years comparing people you disagree with to Hitler.
Self-deception, Peck states, is the number one risk factor for evil, easier to maintain in groups - like MoveOn.org, Al-Qaeda, Queers for Palestine, Rachel Maddow’s Facebook page - than individually. Ironically, Hollywood has long told us this sort of mass bias is wrong. Just watch Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman’s Agreement, Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan in Storm Warning, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton in Monster’s Ball, the entire Screen Actors Guild in Crash… the list goes on and on.
So when did groupthink suddenly become cool? When did words start meaning the opposite of what they were intended to mean? When did “progressive” come to mean ”do nothing,” and “conservative” mean “progressive” (i.e. “do something”)? When, as Andrew Klavan has so eloquently pointed out, did the belief system of the angels get reduced to the two-syllable mantra: “Shut up?”
When did dissent become a de facto hate crime?
In Don Siegel’s classic sci-fi flick, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the citizens of Santa Mira, California, are gradually replaced in their sleep by emotionless impostors - the proverbial “pod people.” The film is often interpreted as an allegory for Communism and McCarthyism (a tactic first reviled, then hijacked, by the Left). But Body Snatchers is more relevant than ever - right here, right now.
You walk the halls, wander the streets, visit the homes of other two-legged beings who appear to resemble you on the surface, yet seem to have no clue you exist as a separate person, mentally, emotionally or spiritually. These seemingly intelligent beings talk about you, in front of you, as if you were in another room, automatically assuming you are of like mind. (Maybe they just never read Miss Manners.)
If you say something to correct them - or just ask a question about their leader - they blink, not comprehending. You repeat the question. They smile at you wanly. It does not compute. Welcome to Santa Mira, a.k.a. Hollywood, a shifty dreamscape, where nothing is exactly as it seems, where a marine layer rolls in every night, blanketing its sleeping citizens in a fine vapor of paranoia.
Does anyone know the way to San Jose?
Back in the harsh reality of daylight, the O generation carries on, oblivious to its own cruelty or mortality. As long as they have Dancing with the Stars and Tivo, all is well with the world. Are these overgrown, enlightened rejects from Village of the Damned the new ugly Americans? If so, they are primed to be thrown over, fatally, themselves. By whom? I think we all know - and it ain’t The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
At the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter have managed to escape pod-dom by staying awake for days on end. Exhausted, Wynter finally succumbs. When she awakens, changed, she gives McCarthy some icy advice: ”They were right… Stop acting like a fool, and accept us.” If she’d had a rubber stamp, she might have branded him - “DENIED!”
McCarthy flees, desperate for human help, lamenting in voiceover how “a moment’s sleep, and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction.” Watching the attractive people I see everyday, working out at the gym, driving their Smart Cars, grabbing a Starbucks, watching CNN, listening to their iPods - and talking about Hope - I know how he feels.
When did they all fall asleep? When are they going to wake up? Perhaps when they learn, the hard way, that freedom is not just another convenience.
Meanwhile, try not to express a dissenting or individual thought - and don’t gasp if one of them lashes out viciously at a friend who steps out of line - because that’ll clue them in that you’re still human.
And then they’ll come after you.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Cinco de Obama or Bomber Biden
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." --Lord Alexander Tytler on the fall of the Athenian republic.
Wow---that about sums it up, doesn't it? My wife found this gem and I think I can hardly add to it. So I won't!
In addition to the great historical context this quote frames for us, here is something contemporary and much more banal (is there is any longer a distinction in this Administration?) from our President (imagine how the 4th estate would have greeted this from GW Bush !):
In trying to enagage in a little word play with the Mexican Ambassador about Cinco de Mayo, yesterday (May 4), the President says Monday was "Cuatro de Cinco". When questioned about what he meant, he said it again, apparently never realizing what he was trying to say was "Cuatro de Mayo"---as silly as THAT was. A great intellect, truly and bilingual to boot. Not.
Meanwhile, the Veep says everyone should avoid trains and planes, so as to avoid H1N1- and then proceeds to take the train home! Such an example for the Nation. His spokesman says (really!), Joe Biden misconstrued what he meant to say.
Say what?
M.C.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
AUDACITY
During the campaign much was heard about 'the audacity of hope'. Well, 'audacity', at any rate, was on display this week big time...and maybe there was some hope, of the most cynical, Orwellian kind.
Or, maybe, Obama thinks he is a Jedi master making use of "Jedi mind tricks" on what he thinks of as the dim (Dhimmi?) witted masses? :
"You didn't see the President bowing before the Saudi King. Move along, nothing to see here."
The Administrations says that the President is taller than the King and he was making a two handed handshake- it just LOOKED like he was bowing. Paraphrasing Mark Steyn, who are you going to believe,the Obama spin machine,or your lying eyes? It's all there in living color, and no one has suggested the images have been doctored. Audacious, all right. and underhanded (no pun intended).
This really is monumental arrogance, cynicism and perversity all rolled into one. And, as the old Carpenters song lyrics went, "We've only just begun...".
More on this another time. Ponder this...why did he bow. And what are the Saudis to make of the bald-faced lying denial?
Nothing at all, methinks. Par for the Dhimmi course.
M.C.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Third World American Government
So what does this week bring? More proof of the 'Third World-ism' of our government.
The Department of State issues a sex-line number instead of the right number for a call in to Hillary. Most telling is that the DOS spokeman seemed to think this is not a big deal (maybe in the current administration that really is the case).
Obama bows low to the Saudi king. Hmmm, wouldn't one expect a Muslim to do that? And the Old Media portrayed BUSH as being beholden to the House of Saud!
Obama refuses to release the proof of his nativity...while lawsuits pile up.
His staff all drive foreign cars, while he pillories American automakers, issuing illegal edicts (that are only illegal if someone objects, I suppose). Auto de Fey at work. No pun intended!
In case you haven't caught on yet, these embarrassments are a DELIBERATE attempt to 'run down America' overseas and at home and a deliberate attempt to create turmoil and unrest.
Meanwhile the media ogles Michelle's toned arms and is all agog- she touched the Queen! Gasp!
Bread and circuses.
And the people's representatives...do nothing. All it takes for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing.
And nothing is being done.
The final note: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy gets my vote for adult of the week for not kissing the Prez. Maybe class does tell?
M.C.
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