TO TAKE AMERICA BACK:
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ELITIST TOADIES: The Ivy League has been reduced to training ground for America’s version of party-hack nomenklatura, for being sponsored by various forms of thugocracy. The Ivy League’s “elitism” consists less in instilling fellow-empathy than in facilitating pack-preying. As much as anything, the Ivy League has “whored-out” to enhance skills for fear-mongering (overplaying: Dishonest Science, Global Warming, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Class Warfare), while holding sanity hostage (underplaying: Secretive Societies, Islamic Terrorism, Socialistic Mind Control, Costs of Notions of Entitlement, Pyramiding Debt to Finance Addictive Pleasures, Threats to Family Based Civilizing Decency, Voting Rights Delivered to Incompetents). The Ivy League has become training ground for delivering us into moral shallowness and shamelessness.
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MUGGING THUGOCRACY: The N.W.O. thugocracy now sponsoring Ivy League hirelings consists of a New World Mind Control Set (NWMCS), which now, through-and-through, infests America’s lobbyists, regulators, politicians, political parties, governors, judges, Orwellian speech codes, educational systems, academia, media, Hollywood, rap worlds, game worlds, science propaganda, spirituality shrinking, and secularly progressive theologies. Rot on a Shakespearean scale has stretched its connecting and choking roots far beyond Denmark.
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SAME BEAST: The NWMCS Beast is humming along, substituting its power for that of America’s. The main political parties have become mere sock puppets, one covering the left hand of the Beast, the other covering the right hand. But it is the same Beast.
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BEAST PHILOSOPHY: Is there a reigning philosophy for this Beast, and, if so, how can it be re-caged? Do Beasties really believe humanity would be better off, morally, under their rule of “trickle down goodness,” rather than under the rule of representative democracy (“trickle up goodness”)? Or, do Beasties believe the "reality of is" trumps the "morality of ought," by dictating that only the most ruthless and powerful are worthy of surviving and flourishing, to pull the strings that tumble the rest of us about?
How should Beasties rationalize that their rule would be better, morally, than the hegemony of an America where the electorate has devolved to be overbalanced by a multitude of derelicts? Or, have Beasties themselves brought about such devolution, to use it as “justification” for imposing their rule?
What may history suggest, regarding secretive rule by deceitful money-masters? Which is more likely: that the fellow-empathies of power-hungry Beasties will be aroused, or that the destiny-purposefulness of the American electorate will be revived and refined?
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CHOICES: Make choices we must. Yet, even among blends of notions of capitalism, humanism, socialism, communism, dialectical materialism, and scientism, no single choice can replace the enlightened empathy to be received in common, spiritual, humility before “God.” What is most important to our humane, enlightened empathy is that we appreciate our spiritual interconnection, which devolves from a myriad of ambiguous possibilities of Will (aka, “God”). In single-minded prodigal-zeal, divorced from God-empathy, there lurks the blind evil that ever-challenges our forgiveness.
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TO TAKE AMERICA BACK --- each person should:
1) Seek to be true to higher purpose;
2) Help sound alarms against THUG-BEASTS, i.e.: Thug-Effrontery (Soros), Thug-Socialism (Obama), Thug-Capitalism (Bush), and Thug-Big-Government (Paulson, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Murtha);
3) Defend lines of free communication;
4) Educate responsible persons;
5) Redirect followers of the Beast;
6) Help make remote consequences of Beast-o-cracy more immediately felt, as by shutting down jobs in anticipation of ruinous wealth-redistribution taxes;
7) Decline to ruin profits for producers, but, instead, redistribute the personal wealth of billionaires (do this not by taxing or redistributing wealth in corporate stocks or businesses, but by taxing in respect of particular transactions and CONSUMPTION; that is, end income taxes on corporations and individuals; instead, impose sales taxes on most transactions, and impose a progressive consumption tax on individuals, and impose property taxes on all owners);
8) Undermine the power not of ordinary producers, but of Beast-Billionaires acting in their individual, democracy-undermining capacities, as fronted by Soros, Obama, and Bush;
9) Re-inspire hope for humanity;
10) Refine the electorate; and
11) Work to improve checks and balances to defend individual freedom and dignity from puppeteering strings of Beast Thugs.
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Plumbing Philosophy ("Joe the Plumber"):
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under JFK and author of "Excellence."
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Orwellian Lunchtime Manipulation of News and Information:
Snippets from http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/hedge_funds_politics_and_the_m.html:
October 21, 2008
Hedge Funds, Politics, and the Market Crash
By Ed Lasky
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The collapse in the American stock markets was a calamity for the campaign of John McCain. In September, McCain was running strongly against Barack Obama. Some polls had him leading Barack Obama by 3 percent before the market broke. By October 7th, Obama had taken the lead across America. What changed in one month? The trigger was the market crash. Who pulled the trigger and why? Who benefitted?
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Who else may have benefited? Indeed, who may have helped precipitate the crisis by taking actions that would weaken the ABX Index? We don't know, but there are some obvious suspects.
George Soros for one.
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Soros's hedge fund -- like most hedge funds -- is based overseas and escapes much scrutiny and regulation (more on this later). Word of Paulson's early success got "around in the world of hedge funds" and Soros invited Paulson for lunch, "asking for details of how he laid his bets, with instruments that didn't exist a few years ago"
Paulson made billions betting against the ABX Index. When you bet against the value of an index it exerts pressure on it -- hastening a decline and thus a decline in the value of the products that are priced using this index.
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Robert Morgenthau, the legendary district attorney for Manhattan, penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal recently highlighting the dangers of overseas hedge funds (Too Much Money is Beyond Legal Reach):
A major factor in the current financial crisis is the lack of transparency in the activities of the principal players in the financial markets. This opaqueness is compounded by vast sums of money that lie outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators and other supervisory authorities.
The $700 billion in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's current proposed rescue plan pales in comparison to the volume of dollars that now escape the watchful eye, not only of U.S. regulators, but from the media and the general public as well.
There is $1.9 trillion, almost all of it run out of the New York metropolitan area, that sits in the Cayman Islands, a secrecy jurisdiction. Another $1.5 trillion is lodged in four other secrecy jurisdictions.
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Hedge funds are a major source of donations for Democrats. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Schumer heads, received $779,100 from employees of private-equity head funds in June 2007 (as the tax battle was heating up in the Senate), far exceeding the $60,000 received by the Republican Senate Committee.
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... sources have mentioned that "financial terrorism" may be at work.
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It seems that Obama was just lucky that a market slide seems to have decisively swung the campaign in his favor. That Obama was again lucky that the meltdown occurred just as John McCain was overtaking him in the polls. And that Obama simply lucked out that one of his most influential supporters, one of the world's most adept fund managers (as the Bank of England learned the hard way) also benefited from the meltdown in the markets.
This financial tsunami, and its timing, like the election-eve sex-scandal exposés of his opponents during his Illinois races, might just be one in a long chain of Barack Obama's "lucky" breaks.
If so, Barack Obama must be the luckiest politician, ever.
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Market manipulations to achieve geopolitical ends. Is it beyond the realm of possibility?
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And here's a final, unpleasant thought: Pakistan. This is a country with 25 percent inflation and a currency in free fall; a country with a jihadist insurgency on its border with Afghanistan, permanent hostility on its border with India, nuclear weapons and a tradition of street demonstrations in response to suspect newspaper articles. Dozens of people, with all kinds of agendas, have an interest in using financial markets to destabilize Pakistan, and Afghanistan along with it. Eventually, one of them will.
BTW — HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE AN ELITIST — SEE: http://townhall.com/Columnists/BenShapiro/2008/10/21/you_know_youre_an_elitist_if.
14 comments:
SOROS’ FRONTED EFFORTS TO BURST BUBBLE OF WESTERN HEGEMONY:
FRONTING OF DISHONEST SCIENCE TO INDUCE A “PREMPTIVE-CRINGE” AMONG WESTERNERS TO SURRENDER THEIR ECONOMIES:
RE: GLOBAL WARMING AS “PREMPTIVE CRINGE”
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Snippets from http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html:
October 18, 2008
An open letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy
By The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Dear Senator McCain, Sir,
YOU CHOSE a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change - a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.
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Britain and the United States, like England and Scotland on the first page of Macaulay’s splendid History of England, are bound to one another by "indissoluble bonds of interest and affection". Here in this little archipelago from which your Pilgrim Fathers sailed, we have a love-love relationship with what Walt Whitman called your "athletic democracy". You came to our aid - to the aid of the world - when Britain had stood alone against the mad menace of Hitler. Your fearless forces and ours fight shoulder to shoulder today on freedom's far frontiers. The shortest but most heartfelt of our daily prayers has just three words: "God bless America!"
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Let me summarize the irremediably shaky basis for the UN's alarmist case. It is not based on physical theory. It is not based on real-world observation. It is based on computer modeling, in which - astonishingly - the models are told at the outset the values for the very quantity (temperature response to increased carbon dioxide concentration) that they are expected to find.
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It is far more difficult than the UN's climate panel and certain politicians have suggested to distinguish between natural climatic cycles and any supposed anthropogenic influence in recent decades.
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As Professor Bhat might say, the right questions that a true scientist rather than a mere politician would ask are these: When did the recession of the glacier begin? And what has been the trend in temperature at the summit of the mountain? The answers are these: the glacier began to recede in 1880, and more than half of the "snows of Kilimanjaro" had already vanished when Hemingway wrote his novel under that title in 1936. Furthermore, since satellite monitoring began in 1970, the surface temperature at the summit has averaged 12.5 °F below freezing, and has never exceeded 3 °F below freezing (Molg et al., 2003). The glacier is not, therefore, melting. It is ablating, not because of "global warming" but because of desiccation of the atmosphere caused by a prolonged and natural regional cooling, compounded by imprudent post-colonial deforestation of the surrounding territory. The High Court judge rightly had harsh words to say about a certain Democrat politician's highly-publicized suggestion that Kilimanjaro had melted because of "global warming".
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It is true that the excitable media reported that melting glaciers would have a very large effect on sea level, but this was because the UN's bureaucrats had inserted into its 2007 report, after the scientists had signed it off, a table in which the estimated contributions to sea-level rise from glaciers and from ice-sheets had each been multiplied by 10, by the simple expedient of moving four decimal points sideways. When I wrote to the UN pointing out this error, the UN quietly corrected, relabeled, and moved the table: but by then it had obtained the alarmist headlines that had been intended: and not one of the newspapers that had printed the incorrect figure bothered to correct it once the UN had been compelled to revise the table. It is episodes such as this that ought to have led you and your advisors to think very carefully about whether the UN's climate panel is as independent, unbiased, science-based, and competent as would be necessary to justify the very drastic damage which you propose to inflict upon the US economy.
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You will recall that in the 1940s the Arctic was warmer than it is today. Therefore "Warming Island was then an island, and was still visibly an island when the explorer made his map in the late 1950s. Then a natural cooling cycle supervened, and "Warming Island" became what we might call "Cooling Peninsula". Now it is "Warming Island" again.
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As to your suggestion that "we are likely to see reduced water supplies", you have yet again blamed "global warming" for a problem that has nothing to do with warmer weather. As the human population expands, its demands on water supplies increase, leading to shortages. That, and not "global warming", is why many parts of the world do not have regular supplies of drinking water.
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Two prominent dissenters - notably Emanual (2008) - have resiled in recent weeks from their previously-published opinions to the effect that the intensity of hurricanes might be expected to increase with warmer worldwide weather. There is, therefore, no longer any credible, scientific basis for your implicit conclusion that "a higher incidence of extreme-weather events" has occurred because of anthropogenic "global warming", for three reasons: first, there has been no increase in extreme-weather events in the observed record; secondly, it is not possible to attribute any individual extreme-weather event to anthropogenic "global warming"; and thirdly, for the past ten years there has been no "global warming", so that, even if there had been "a higher incidence of extreme-weather events", which there has not, "global warming" (whether natural or anthropogenic) cannot possibly have been the cause.
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How long has the polar bear stalked the Arctic, and has the Arctic ice-cap been there throughout that period? The answer is that polar bears evolved from the land-based brown bear some 200,000 years ago. But 125,000 years ago there was an interglacial period, during which global temperatures - so the ice-core analyses tell us - were about 6 °F warmer than they are today. We may legitimately infer that there was no ice-cap during that interglacial period: yet the polar bears survived. How? Because they are warm-blooded animals and are perfectly capable of surviving on land - such as Greenland, or Siberia, or northern Canada, or Alaska - if there is no Arctic ice-cap.
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Instead, there are five times as many polar bears in the Arctic today than there were in the 1940s. As you may think, that is hardly the profile of a species facing imminent extinction as its habitat shrinks away. Polar bears do not breed on the Arctic ice-cap, but in land-based dens. Though their current staple diet is seal-blubber, their land-based origins are still evident in the fact that their favorite delicacy is blueberries, which do not grow on the Arctic ice-cap, but only on land.
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The obvious principal cause of forest fires is human activities - such as arson, which has accounted for a significant proportion of all forest fires in the United States in recent years, or accidental discarding of cigarette-butts, or arcing power-lines. It would be cheaper, and hundreds of times more effective, to police the forests more efficiently, to educate the population not to light fires near standing timber during dry weather, and to create fire-breaks even in natural forests so that if fires do start they are easier to control.
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The astronomer Herschel, in 1801, noticed when reading a table of grain prices in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations that the price of grain was inversely correlated with the number of sunspots visible on the surface of the Sun. The warmer the weather, the higher the grain yield, and - in accordance with the law of supply and demand - the lower the price. So there is no scientific basis for your implication that "changes in crop production" will be negative, or that any negative changes will be caused by anthropogenic "global warming".
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When Sir Nicholas Stern launched his now-discredited report on the economics of climate change, he made it plain from the outset that his analysis was political, and from a Leftist perspective, by announcing that State intervention on a massive scale was necessary to overcome what he described as "market failure". His then Prime Minister, Tony Blair (a Socialist), also used the phrase "market failure" at the Press Conference at which the Stern report was launched.
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… given the late Milton Friedman's Nobel-prizewinning observation that the State consumes twice as much of the world's resources to achieve a given objective as the free market, it is the State, not the market, that has failed, and it is the State, not the market, that must be cut down to size, regulated, and controlled.
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This illustrates a central point that your advisors seem to have missed: namely, that even if the fancifully-exaggerated estimates of climate sensitivity generated by the UN's climate panel were correct (and they are not), the world will have largely run out of the fossil fuels that are the alleged cause of the alleged "problem" long before any significant environmental damage can occur. And long before the fossil fuels become exhausted, their price will rise (thanks to the free-market law of supply and demand), so that the market will ration them by price long before any State-imposed system of rationing, whether by "cap-and-trade" or otherwise, could possibly have gained sufficient public acceptance to make any difference.
Therefore the "decisive shift away from fossil fuels" that you say is necessary will occur - and rapidly - quite irrespective of any action by the State. The economic competitors of the Western nations know this perfectly well. Russia, India, and above all China have made it abundantly plain that they do not propose to reduce their "carbon emissions".
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All that we should achieve, if we inflicted upon ourselves a severe enough system of rationing actually to reduce our emissions by the three-fifths you have suggested, would be to transfer our industries, our workers' jobs, our emissions, and our well-controlled environmental pollution to China, which is opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week, and whose record of pollution is currently the worst on the planet. What conceivable economic benefit could such a policy have, even if China's dictators were prepared to go along with it (which they are not)?
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Your proposal to introduce "cap-and-trade" would require a vast, complex, costly, bureaucratic nightmare of controls, regulations, intrusions, and interferences that would swiftly and forever destroy the economic vigor and prominence of the United States. And, in doing so, it would actually increase the "carbon footprint" of the nation, by transferring into the inefficient public sector a range of activities that - to the extent that they were necessary or desirable at all - would be far more efficiently and cheaply and hence non-emittingly done than the same activities done by the public sector.
The facts are that "cap-and-trade" is a concept invented by the Environmental Defense Fund - no friends of the Republican party. We shall see, when I reach the final section of this letter, the catastrophic worldwide effect of a previous intervention in politics by this organization. Given the unsatisfactory track record of this organization, which has long been bitterly and implacably inimical to the Western freedoms for which the Republican party stands, it is no less than breathtaking that you could so insouciantly advocate the introduction of a system of arbitrary, State-controlled rationing at that organization's instigation.
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For you cannot escape the central flaw of the Environmental Defense Fund's "cap-and-trade" system. If carbon trading is to work, it will not be cheap; and, if it is cheap, it will not work. And when I say it will not be cheap, I am not talking purely in financial terms but in human terms. If you introduce cap-and-trade, you will destroy millions, and probably tens of millions, of jobs throughout the United States and in all sectors of the economy.
And those jobs - the livelihoods of working people and their families throughout the Republic - will have been sacrificed for no environmental benefit whatsoever: for whatever we cease to make, China will make in our place; whatever we cease to emit, China will emit in our place, and will emit in greater quantities because her systems of power generation are far less efficient than our own.
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If you were to impose "cap-and-trade" on top of steep and inexorably-continuing increases in the price of oil, you would merely drive the economy from recession to destruction. In short, the market has already done your job for you. Gasoline prices are higher than they could ever have been under a "cap-and-trade" regime; so are electricity prices. You can safely leave the market to bring about reductions in carbon emissions. No State intervention is either necessary or desirable.
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… environmentalists are not always working to a good purpose. They are a narrow, special-interest group just like any other. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that, after the Berlin Wall fell, many on the Left found a new home in the environmental movement, seeing it as the new hope for the destruction of the Western, capitalist hegemony that they so detest.
One of the founders of Greenpeace - a man with a genuine concern for the environment but otherwise with no political opinions - has told me that he was compelled to leave the movement after a year, when the international Socialist Left took it over and used its true objectives as a mere front for what is in all material respects indistinguishable from Communism.
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At the very least, there is an obvious coincidence of interest between those who persistently exaggerate the supposed adverse consequences of "global warming", as you have done in your speech, and those who have long planned and intended to dismantle and destroy the economies and liberties of the free and prosperous West from within. In our schools, the slick, relentless propaganda of the alarmists - based not on fact but on fear - infects the minds of innocent children.
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You, of all people, who have served your country and the cause of freedom so gallantly, and who have been tortured and imprisoned to keep us free, ought to be alive to the threat to our liberty that the perversion of environmentalism that is the "global warming" scare ineluctably entails.
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In giving naïve and uncritical credence to the pseudo-scientific gibberish that is "global warming", you have adopted a policy long beloved of our own Foreign Office - that of the pre-emptive cringe. You have declared to the enemies of liberty and of capital that they have won; and that the opening words of your Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are henceforth irrelevant, meaningless, and one with the Treaty of Westphalia, which Pope Innocent X described as "null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane, and empty of meaning for all time."
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It is understandable that you should have made a conscious decision, in framing your policies for the Presidency, to adopt a "One-Nation" approach, reaching out to those in the Democrat party whose central belief is in government of the people, by the bureaucracy, and for the bureaucracy - in short, in the tyrannical, anti-democratic system of command-economy administration that we in Europe would call Communism, or Fascism, or International Socialism: there is little to choose between them except in the numbers of people they kill.
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We can no longer afford the luxury of over-extended, over-ambitious, centralized government. The framers of your Constitution intended that power and wealth should be and remain in the hands of the people. Your proposal to concentrate vast additional powers in the hands of government is not merely doomed to ignominious failure; it is not merely guaranteed to increase your nation's "carbon footprint" under the guise of taking steps to reduce it; it is an explicit and abject abandonment of the liberty for which the Republican party stands. If you continue to advocate a policy so purposeless and so self-defeating, you will lose the Presidential race, and lose it spectacularly: and you will deserve to lose.
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During the "eight long years" of the Presidency of the current leader of your party, the United States has succeeded in reducing its "carbon emissions", while the European Union has not ….
… As the European Union's dictators lecture the world about the need to control their emissions, its own emissions relentlessly rise year by year, even as those of the United States fall.
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Consider what would happen if your "cost equalization mechanism" were imposed on China. Then the workers in your own country whom you had flung out of work under the pretext of "Saving The Planet" would not even have the compensating advantage of being able to buy cheaply from China the goods that they had themselves made until you had stopped them. All goods, worldwide, would become more expensive. Free trade, which has allowed not only the free West but also the emerging tigers of Asia to grow and prosper, would be stifled. That would not only harm the United States: it would also harm those nations against which it was directed.
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Unthinking politicians worldwide, panicked by the nonsensical calculations by the UN's climate panel (calculations that egregiously exaggerate the actually very limited effect of carbon dioxide on climate), rushed to support the "biofuels" program, under which agricultural land that had previously been used for growing food was instead used for growing fuel for automobiles.
The entirely predictable result was a doubling of the world price of all major, staple foods.
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It matters not that learned paper after learned paper demonstrates with devastating clarity the fact that the production and use of "biofuels" emit more carbon dioxide than the production and use of the gasoline they so inefficiently replace.
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… No one doubts that your intentions in proposing what you have proposed are honorable. But the road to starvation is paved with good intentions.
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No surprise, then, that even the UN has begun to reconsider its position. At first, it favored the conversion of food into "biofuels". Then, last year, one of its senior spokesmen called for a five-year moratorium on the conversion of food to biofuels. Now, the UN's rapporteur on food for the poor has said that when so many are starving it is "a crime against humanity" to burn their food in our automobiles. The consequence of the policy to which you have given your enthusiastic support is mass starvation. And that, Sir, is morally unacceptable.
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Above all, to propose, as you have proposed, to inflict upon the nations of the world a policy of ever-grimmer energy starvation calculated not merely to inconvenience the prosperous but to condemn the very poorest to remain imprisoned in poverty forever, and to die in their tens of millions for want of the light and heat and power and food which we have long been fortunate enough to take for granted - that is a moral issue.
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The world needs the United States to continue as the engine-house of prosperity, the wellspring of invention, the hope of freedom, the guarantor of peace. You must not transform your great nation into merely another stifling, inept, corrupt, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship such as China, Russia, or the European Union.
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Not for a single moment longer must you allow yourself to be distracted by the murderous foolishness of the climate alarmists. If the United States does not stand firm against cruel, pseudo-scientific nonsense of the sort that is already killing millions through purposeless starvation, then who will stand firm? Not Britain, alas, nor Europe, for we are closed countries now, administered by closed minds.
Only your "athletic democracy" can save us now - save us from the follies of policy that will merely inconvenience the prosperous but is already killing the poor. Therefore, Sir, I end this letter with the words of your poet Longfellow, addressed by Winston Churchill to your great wartime President in that darkest hour before the new dawn of freedom:
Sail on, o ship of State;
Sail on, o Union strong and great:
Humanity, with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging, breathless, on thy fate.
Monckton of Brenchley
Socialism tends to be a lie, promised most to those derelicts among the multitudes who suffer debilitation from work-a-phobia, to trick them into voting into power such thugs as will not easily ever be voted out. Of course, once thugs are in power, there becomes little to incentive anyone to resist siren calls of work-a-phobia.
I. Self Delusion is not Elite:
Who but Ivy League, “mommy-coddled elites” would be so skilled in artifice as to delude even themselves into believing that government should or could encourage and finance every person, no matter how unqualified, to undertake mortgage for pursuing his/her “right” to the American dream of home “ownership”?
Having endured the economic wreckage of one group of mommy-coddled elites, now should we endure the political wreckage to be given us by another?
So long as we accept leadership of mommy-coddled elites, so shall we endure the folly and wreckage to be imposed by toddlers.
Hitchens, Powell, Noonan, Buckley the Younger, and McClellan can KMA!
Why have American adults gone AWOL?
II. Spreading Wealth is not Moral:
It is immoral to take from those who produce in order to "spread their wealth" and income around to work-a-phobics.
III. Allowing Rule-Leveraging for Money Masters is not Democratic:
It is immoral to fail to check against institutions calculated to advantage such disproportionate accumulations of wealth and power as to sink democracy under the rule of oligarchic aristocrats.
IV. The way to check against both the immorality of (1) wealth-spreading and (2) money-ruling is not with taxes on income or with giveaways to non-workers. Rather, the way to check against such abuses is by taxing consumption, progressively.
V. Consumption tax revenues should be used to build, rebuild, and maintain the infrastructure that is used by all citizens.
VI. Such use would create jobs. Such tax would not harm the poor. Such tax would help check against the sort of oligarchic influence we suffer on account of those who now own and control our politicians, journalists, and professoriate.
Adults of the world must rise up!
Missing Greatness:
At one time, did America care about constitutional governance and civilizing family values?
How is it she has come to wish to change, to disrobe her constitutional garments and to toss out her family values?
As her starry eyed electorate gapes in addled hope, groping in wild addiction to open “door number 1,” what lies behind — if not a wasteland?
– Why does business seem never to apprehend how representative governance dies for everyone when nothing is done to counteract widening gulfs between haves and have nots?
– Why does youth seem never to apprehend the abusiveness and inefficiency of big government?
– Why has academia so utterly failed to espouse a workable, progressive tax on consumption, to defend democracy by countering widening gulfs in political and economic influence while providing funding to build and maintain civilizing infrastructure?
REGARDING CENTRISM:
I am down with centrism in respect of lending a hand (and health care), but not with "spreading wealth around."
We have two main problems: To keep alive (1) purposefulness and (2) democracy.
1) Conditioning people to believe government owes them purpose and a living is unhealthy to any society that hopes to endure.
2) Enabling people to leverage wealth to the point of buying up politicians, media, and academia is suicidal to democracy.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE (?): End redistributive income taxes. Instead, resort to progressive consumption taxes. Add up all individual, non-business related purchases; allow no deductions for charities or political contributions or overseas or internet purchases. Then, tax every citizen's consumption --- progressively. Allow no political contributions from investment foundations, businesses, or corporations.
Unfortunately, the only candidate advocating a consumption based tax scheme is Bob Barr, and he is unelectable. So, I forecast rain --- and the dream is deferred ....
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/10/27/the-real-obama-forget-the-constitution-economic-justice-demands-redistribution-of-wealth/#comment-6887
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/10/27/the-real-obama-forget-the-constitution-economic-justice-demands-redistribution-of-wealth/
COMMENT BY DLANOR:
To cfbleachers:
Well said.
I would like to copy and email your summary (or similar summaries) to various obama-bots.
However, lest they feel and see the wound with their own eyes, they believe not.
For convenience, it may be a good idea for summarizers to carefully collect and insert website addresses in clear support of each statement.
I know, folks in denial will not likely be persuaded.
But, we have to try.
I cannot believe the greatest country ever is going to break faith and spurn the freedom so selflessly paid for by so many.
After all, apart from whining, what have modern day socialists ever paid, to earn the right to profane what America's forbears have paid for in blood and sweat?
We don't have to reach that many!
But, time is short!
See http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/11/sudden_talk_of_a_mccain_win_in.html:
Comment:
Susan Estrich is also actively playing the race card. See http://www.creators.com/opinion/susan-estrich/the-final-days-2008-10-31.html.
The race card has become so tiresome! Like many folks, I have cousins married to blacks, my daughters have dated blacks, and I have served in government and the military with blacks.
I find it dishonest and loathsome to suggest that my voting against Obama is based other than on substantive reasons: fundamental defense, fundamental freedom, and fundamental economics.
In my judgment:
1) Obama has no executive or military experience, and I have detected no reason to trust him in the least to be Commander in Chief.
2) Soros wants to burst the bubble of American supremacy to replace it with a bubble of supremacy by a cohort of international pirates of volatility, and Obama is just their frontman.
3) Obama overvalues social security and shared misery over individual freedom and dignity.
4) Obama's social and family values are the same as for most secular humanist democrats, which is to say, I suspect he has many values at all for which he can draw or defend any hard lines.
5) Obama wants to erase physical, national borders, as well as civilizing, moral, family borders.
6) Obama's religion is a front for black redistributionist "justice." (I call it like it is; if any group is racist, consider the percentage of blacks voting for Obama for no specific reason they can explain, other than his skin color.)
7) Most Americans share a fundamental love for individual freedom and responsibility, which rate rather low among Obama's priorities.
8) Obama's social and economic policies are not calculated to help lift Mexico to American middle classness, but to reduce America to Mexican style poverty.
Bottom line: I don't give a crap about Obama's skin color! I am very tired of inexperienced, academic bubble-brains suggesting I must be stupid, mean, or racist to oppose Obama.
Frankly, I oppose both McCain and Obama. I would prefer someone who could lead us to a progressive consumption tax. Without that, whoever is elected will simply continue to dance to the tune of an international cohort of pirates of social and economic volatility. Obama style governance is faux economics, for which the real capitalists will continue to be international financial bandits. Both parties are continuously engaged in making that problem (“bubble”) ever worse.
I have voted for McCain only because the damage he likely would do would not be as deep or as long lasting as the damage Obama will do.
The same people who want to be in charge of the next Obama fronted nomenklatura tend to be the same people who own and run media and academia, now mainly comprised of a mess of cheap sluts for the pimps who own them and tell them how sweet and elite they are.
If this country blows, it will not be over racism, but over a fundamental dispute about whether everyone should be entitled to liberty or to a faux free lunch. Now, if it should ever come to bullets, given this Country's history, just which side does reason suggest will prevail?
Comment by Dlanor at http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/229431.html:
Mr. Anderson has listed some of our important priorities: Economy, social values, defense, borders, health care, retirement system, and posterity.
From a human standpoint, however, what is the point of any such priorities, if human freedom and dignity are surrendered? What is the point of “giving,” if it is as forced as rape?
George Soros is fond of making money by predicting and bursting “bubbles,” such as the home-loan bubble and the American-hegemony bubble. But, there is another bubble: The bubble of rule by an international cohort of financial pirates.
Conservatives have long believed that a capitalistic marketplace of evenly competitive ideas and businesses is best for supporting individual freedom, dignity, responsibility, and initiative.
But, what happens when markets become monopolized, when capital becomes leveraged out of all sense of proportion, and when financiers become free of national boundaries and constraints?
How, then, does capitalism avoid jumping the shark, to become the tool of pirates of international volatility? How, then, do small businesses and even large nations preserve parameters of freedom, once most of influential media, academia, politicians, regulators, and military-industrial complexes are bought and brought under control of a cohort of international, big-money pirates?
Democrats have been conditioned and deluded to idealize socialism, while Republicans have been conditioned to idealize capitalism. Meanwhile, such idealistic bubbles have been brought under reflexive control of financial, bubble-mastering pirates.
There never has been pure socialism or capitalism. Rather, there has always been a blend of disproportionate, opportunistic, individualistic competition (“will to power”) and communitarian cooperation (empathetic “will to multiply" or math).
Democrats and Republicans, alike, have been diverted, entranced, or asleep. Meanwhile, Western Civilization has become enshrouded under a cloak of international piracy.
Western Civilization will not preserve freedom and dignity by inciting quarrels about whether capitalism is better than socialism. Rather, neither capitalism nor socialism will well survive power being monopolized to a cohort of international pirates.
Nations of peoples must reassert physical, moral, and financial boundaries. PROGRESSIVE CONSUMPTION TAXES must be applied to reduce influence of international money-pirates. Human freedom and dignity depend upon it.
Otherwise, we shall continue to see: international monopolization of media, academia, politicians, and generals; invasive indoctrination of politically correct thought and expression; reign of terror of extra-national W.M.D. bandits; and abject surrender of individual free will.
REGARDLESS OF WHO IS ELECTED, it has become imperative these next four years to DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE TO REDUCE THE VASTLY DISTORTING POWER OF INTERNATIONAL PIRATES OF FINANCIAL VOLATILITY.
CIVICS EDUCATION:
See http://townhall.com/columnists/CalThomas/2008/11/20/the_other_deficit:
“Thomas Jefferson's admonition: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be."”
Comment by Dlanor, at http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/kathleen-parker-and-the-oogedy-boogedy-blues/#comment-157580:
JMH (“Most Americans feel that, if the values you are promoting are good and worthwhile, you shouldn’t need government authority to force them on people. You should be able to convince people with the merits of your position.”)
Well, it is not so much the values conservatives who are using law, legislatures, and courts to promote their values. Rather, it is Democrats, Gay Activists, Secular Humanists, ACLU, and Community Organizers.
So, you are saying values conservatives should just, like, lay down and enjoy it? Come on! Values-neutrality is not some sort of elite, superior position, nor does it persist any longer than any other vacuum. If conservatives do not conserve even the most basic of values, just what the hell are they “conserving”? In your values scheme, do you somehow expect government should conserve a “matrix of human batteries” more so than mothers should be expected to defend their unborn children?
BTW: Overturning Roe v. Wade would not impair any “right” to abort. Conservatives who seek to overturn RVW would not thereby be requiring women not to abort. Conservatives are not asking the Supremes to rule that women cannot abort. Rather, they are saying the issue should be resolved by States. Why think it “right” for liberals to have pushed the Supremes to intrude in this issue, but not right for conservatives to ask them to butt back out?
*****
Snakes Among Conservatives:
To be anything, a thing needs to have defining characteristics. For example, “America” is a country of boundaries that are physical, political, moral, and aspirational. “Conservatives,” wishing to conserve America, defend borders, restrict in-comers to legal immigrants, extol an informed electorate, promote family values, and fight for individual liberty. International “Socialists,” wishing to see America torn to bits and fed to ravening primatives, defend no borders, advocate “rights” to cross borders, whip up, mislead, and indoctrinate electorates, cede responsibility for rearing children to the State, and seek the security of mobs of protesters.
So, many Conservatives, out of sense of human morality: oppose blanket amnesty for invaders; detest the enabling of voter fraud; want States to decide how to regulate abortions; defend the authority of parents; and do not seek to undermine efforts to conduct the nation’s defense.
Faux Conservatives (what are they “conserving,” apart from self-delusion of elitism?), while denigrating homage to any basis for morality as “oogedy boogedy,” mock such concerns and values, even going so far as to argue, illogically (albeit, in cutesy language), that Conservatives reduce their electoral power by actually standing for such things.
And so, this last election cycle, we ran a “Republican” who actually acceded to most arguments of faux conservatives. Problem: Democrats already own the monopoly on voters who lack moral values (i.e., unwillingness to defend partially born babies, unwillingness to defend borders, willingness to gather in groups in order to expropriate the production of others). That is why their candidates run on vapid notions of “change.”
A Republican cannot defeat a Democrat by trying to out-do vapidity or the trashing of moral values. (Well, duh!)
Modern Democrats (and faux conservatives) spend little time discussing moral values, except to ridicule values of Conservatives. Values of Democrats are not moral, but selfish. Yet, Orwellian Democrats take taxing others in order to vote for handouts for themselves as “unselfish.” Remarkable! Democrats: give less to charities; want government to take from workers to redistribute to layabouts; want or claim “rights” and entitlements to free health care, free college education, and free equality in income (i.e., “free lunch”). When Conservatives advocate the contrary, faux conservatives (spineless snakes) spit poison in our eyes and complain of splitting and losing the base.
But nothing could be more fork-tongued. One does not defeat the free-lunch crowd by joining them. One defeats them by joining with the non-free-lunch crowd. When everyone waits for free lunch, no lunch comes to anyone. That is socialism.
Comment by Dlanor, at http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/mein_kampus.html:
Trent ("It is now time to institute a rival post-secondary education system that is both cheaper and better than the traditional university system, something which will force the traditionalists to either become more politically honest, or end up financially dead."):
Suggestion: Contact David Horowitz. Ask him to shop an idea among respected, conservative, tenured professors throughout America. Have them unite to start an online campus for offering two year associate's degrees in modern political and conservative analysis. Coordinate to associate with, and coax, solid four-year universities to allow transfers of partial credit.
Even thoughtful liberals should welcome such a breath of fresh air!
******
Comment by Dlanor, at http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/mein_kampus.html:
Crab Bucket Professors:
To reprise a metaphor, our interconnected world has become one big crab bucket. No crab (nation) is permitted to sustain excellence or to scale to freedom from the crab bucket before many others grab and pull all back down.
How much jealous foreign money is indirectly funding the professoriate that continuously reduces each succeeding generation of American students to crab tank-think?
You've heart of research tanks? Welcome to University Crab Tank! Boolah boolah!
*****
To tc ("This is territory which the right has to fight upon. During the island-hopping battles of the Pacific, our strategy had to fight for every inch of land between Hawaii and Japan in preparation for a possible invasion of Japan. If the White House is Tokyo, then the the K-12 system is Midway, Saipan and Guadalcanal.....the public university system is now our Iwo Jima. Marines--FIX bayonets! "):
True, that!
Comment at http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/enough_with_the_illinois_bashi.html:
Howard Beale: "Well, I'm not going to leave you alone!"
We're human beings, goddammit!
*********
For more about the “Chicago Way,” see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/us/politics/16legal.html?_r=1&th&emc=th).
Our short sighted Liberal-Entitlement-Greed and Libertarian-Ayn-Rand-Morality are pressuring us, not to a tipping point, but to a volcanic erupting point. Either Conservatives and Red Ass Moderates act decisively, soon, to vent corruption out of politics, or we doom our progeny to pandemic political corruption as the norm.
Liberty lovers are confronted by two main problems: To keep alive (1) individual purposefulness and (2) individual free expression and enterprise.
In respect of such problems, we should remember:
(1) Enabling people to leverage wealth to the point of buying up politicians, media, and academia is suicidal to democracy; and
(2) Conditioning people to believe they are so entitled that government must owe them purpose and a living is unhealthy to any society that hopes to endure.
After all, apart from whining, what have modern day socialists — whether poor or mega-wealthy — ever paid, to earn the right to profane what America's forbears have paid for in blood, sweat, and tears?
Red-Ass Position for Squaring the Circle:
We must provide a floor of civilizing decency, promote free expression and markets above that floor, and constrain such freedom within parameters above, so that no one person or cabal is allowed to become or remain so powerful as to substitute personal dictate for social or market forces. In other words, both Liberals and Libertarians must pull their heads out and put them together. Thus sayeth a Red Ass Moderate.
Curbing Abuses:
Billionaires who abuse their wealth by fomenting sedition and international financial panic must have that wealth confiscated, under some sort of “RICO” like act.
Even those Mega-Wealthies who do not abuse their resources ought not be permitted to use them to leverage inordinate political influence. Rather, money spent by individuals to buy political influence should be cumulatively accounted for and then taxed, yearly, quite progressively.
Non-individuals and foreigners should be entirely precluded from contributing to campaigns for electing individual candidates.
Investment foundations, businesses, and corporations should be very restricted in making political contributions. This is because such gang style investments are so easily twisted to undermine equal opportunity in representation for all.
Social Revenue:
We should end re-distributive income taxes on corporations and individuals. Instead, we should impose differential sales and trade taxes on most transactions, impose a progressive yearly consumption tax on individuals, and impose property taxes on most owners.
Buying political influence must be considered a form of consumption, and taxed as such!
Spending money may be a form of "speech," but not purely so.
Except for perverters, surely, our Founders ought not be taken to have Constitutionally ordained political graft as protected speech.
****
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under JFK and author of "Excellence."
Larrey,
I admire your ability to clearly express your insights.
It may be worth your time, sometime, to consider writing a piece about the roles of stare decisis and burden of proof for helping us navigate between needs for change vs. conservatism.
Humanity shares an exhilarating bubble that is both rapidly changing and in danger of changing too rapidly.
For example, some want to indulge radical change to discard tried and true traditions, religions, and family values, even as they advocate extreme efforts to conserve our environment. Are they radical nihilists or stodgy conservators?
Regardless, Big Science will bring us Big Change.
So, regarding Change vs. Conservation: When should our opinions turn based on emotion and when on reason?
Quite often, we have insufficient facts and data, and some problems likely defy being reduced to comprehension. Yet, we have no choice but to make or rationalize choices (like when best to design one’s Capital One Credit Card).
History shows how our bubble is both exhilarating and fragile; how our world is self-healing at times and at other times like a beaker of nitroglycerin.
So, for one wanting to be both decent and reasonable, how may a philosophy for how to place the burden of proof help — if at all?
Without vision a people are lost. So, who has vision?
Maybe none of us has a quite good enough answer. Maybe all of us need to remain humble enough to listen every so often to the still, quiet voice upon which everyone's "religion" seems to be based --- howl though they may to the contrary.
Comment at http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/12/the_response_to_bill_ayers_the.html:
Who wins the wars writes the history; who wins the elections writes what is fair.
We ought not pretend that a "general law," like "the fairness doctrine" is any kind of intelligible guide apart from a general license for powers-that-be to rationalize their every whim.
Rather, to propagate "The Fairness Doctrine" is to surrender rule-of-law to rule-of-fronted-elect.
We are being porcupine-quilled with all manner of such general licenses for (Bush Blueblood) rulers to rationalize their one-way rule for rewarding their (Obama Socialist) enforcers and reducing and ending the freedom and enterprise of their subjects (Moderates and Conservatives).
All these sorts of general homilies sought to be enacted as prescriptions of "law" should be rooted out.
More examples: p.c.; profiling; hate speech; affirmative action.
One does not very well fight an unidentified enemy; identify him, and he becomes less invisible.
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