Comments on The Belmont Club "Santo Claus versus the Martians"

A related video that comes up after Monster a Go Go is The Thing that Couldn’t Die. Considering the next thread and the theme of this one, could this administration put Rahm Emanuel in charge of “The Ministry of Love?” Will Emanuel’s brother, Dr Kevorkian, find a future running “Information Retrieval?” Where is our Harry Tuttle?

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The Ivans are back at the Belmont Club and Georgia is surrounded. I expected this weeks ago but maybe something will happen before campaign season ends. There is of course no truth at all in the KGB fantasy that the CIA created Osama and Co. CIA support went elsewhere. The seeds of the Islamist terrorists were sown by the KGB. They are shocked that the monster came back to haunt them. Regarding Serbia, Milosovic and Karadzic behaved so brutally that any grievance they may have had got erased by their own misdeeds. In terms of culpability for the suffering they brought upon themselves the Serbs resemble the Palestinians who have no legitimate claims any more. Whatever issue they could have made in theory has been washed away in blood.

Aug 31, 2009 - 8:10 pm

Comment on The Belmont Club "Rahming things through"

The great American Odd Couple. Obama is an artificial projection of his follower's dreams who concealed every fact about his past and who has almost never done anything that could be called work. Emmanuel from the little we know of him is also a self reinvention. The former ballet major, with a physical defect (he lost part of his finger), according to the wiki both his first and last names were chosen to honor members of fringe terror groups from Israel's War of Independence. At the same time he has put forth a story of having served as a civilian volunteer with the IDF, which grossly overstates a few days cleaning truck brakes while he was stuck in Israel during the first Gulf War.

There is something about Emanuel that comes across as infuriatingly wrong. To me it is his assuming the cloak of jewish orthodoxy and ethics while confronting the world with unremitting hostility and abuse. For good ends it is necessary for a man to sometimes use force, not just physical but emotional force. Arguments have to be won, people need to get fired, decisions have to be made. The purpose behind socialization, the familial, communal, educational and religious processes we have discussed on other threads, is to ensure that force, even emotional force, when used is done proportionately and is tempered with a constant appreciation of the fragile nature of the structures (social human or physical, all are God's work) that are being changed. Rahm Emanuel is a caricature, a human pit bull. He will destroy more then he creates or preserve. As Grandma would have said, "Bad for the Jews."

Since his energy is so untempered by apparent mature reflection on the results of his deeds he is subject to manipulation. He is focused on process, on winning battles without regard to how the world will be after after the war, He has to surrender his critical judgement to someone because his world otherwise becomes one of random disconnected confrontations without a purpose. Emanuel has linked himself to Bill Clinton, David Axelrod and Barack Obama. All three are possibly sociopathic manipulators who treat humans as objects. Emanuel is a classic case of the ideologue that a skilled intelligence agent could flip into an asset, without any use of torture. He is a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone who knows how.

Comments on The Belmont Club "The last brother"

Amit,
(who asked if it is moral to use the blue pill that sanctifies on a monster)
Kennedy's father lobotomized his own daughter. To the power mad we are all objects to be arranged, used and disposed of. Real education is part of societies balancing act. We need to raise people who are empathic and other directed while at the same time secure in their own individuality and creative. People who are not easily manipulated but who decline to manipulate while remaining engaged. We need people who do not simply live in a herd but who explore the path, without going out onto that ledge. How is this balancing act achieved? Through the family and religion and education.

Broken families or abusive ones spread dysfunction like a virus and yet millions do survive and rewire a path around the damage. The brain can compensate for a defect on the retina and still allow the eye to see a normal picture, until the damage is to great to work around and the failure in the neurology becomes catastrophic.

While partisans might argue for the purity of their religion there is a commonality among most but not all creeds. It is clear to me that in principle how a religion describes the nature of God and of man does affect the ability of someone to walk the line without viewing members of their own community as sheep or those of other communities as cattle. Did the callous hypocrisy of the Kennedy's stem from some defect in 20th century Boston Catholicism or were they a force of nature that the diocese could not control? Perhaps the Vatican will seek to repair any damage the infection they brought caused. Was the malevolence of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed caused by the Wahabi creed or is it general to Islam? If either can it be contained or cured?

Can education serve a moral purpose? In 1987 John Mearsheimer gave the "Aims of Education" address to the incoming class of 2001 at The University of Chicago. http://tinyurl.com/nc7t3y If you search using the terms "John Mearsheimer on moral education" you get an interesting set of responses.

My fear is that those who seek to rule believe that there is a blue pill that will "turn a fanatical monster into Mother Teresa" and they want to use it. Sixty years ago little old ladies in tennis shoes got excited about the fluoridation of water because they thought that it represented an effort to slip the blue pill into our system. All they did was set themselves up for Alinskyite ridicule as caricatured by Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove. There the little old ladies morphed into the lunatic General Jack Ripper. My worry is that those who want to hand out the pills to others are at heart themselves Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds.


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Mad in Madtown,
(who worried that John McCain admitted that he broke under torture)
Everybody breaks. That is the lesson of SERE school. Every military pilot and every CIA Clandestine Service officer goes through it. Once you know where your line is you are stronger. It is the fear of the unknown that weakens you. I did not have to go through it, others I knew did.

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exhelodrvr,
Thank you for confirming my thoughts on SERE school.

wretchard,
And so it is with the war terror. Such an impolite word
The designation WoT always suffered for being an elision. If it had to be broad enough to threaten the NorKs as well as Islamofascists then we should have considered calling it the "War to make the world safe for Democracy."

Bogoe wheel,
Stanley Kubrick disliked The Ox-bow Incident (which was shown to me in Junior High under the title "Due Process Denied") because it condemned the lynching of an innocent man. He made a point of rubbing in how guilty Alex was in A Clockwork Orange because he wanted to drive home his objection to any State control of an individual, even a guilty one. Kubrick was talking through his hat. He knew photography and filmaking but nothing of the subjects he instructed on. Born in 1928 he was an adolescent in NYC during WW-II and somehow he managed to avoid Korea.

wretchard,
the process of more or less killing the wrong people
You mistake the purpose of revolutionary terror. People are not killed to effect justice. Their guilt or innocence is incidental to their fate. They are killed to instill fear in the audience who are thereby stripped bare of all defenses and made receptive to the messages of the revolutionary vanguard. Terror is a heuristic tool. When the Black Marias come for you what happens once you are off stage is a mere administrative or technical problem. The important moment is when you are taken, with your neighbors leaning on their doors listening.

Mongoose,
May I propose a campaign theme for 2010?
You don't have a damn thing to apologize for.
You don't own anybody anything.

Aug 30, 2009 - 8:28 pm

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luddy barsen,
Agreed about Barry Lyndon, Good movies are a collection of good photographs and Kubrick was a great photographer. He was also a perfectionist about details. His unmade movie about Napoleon would have interested me. What he did not understand were the underlaying issues behind war (and peace) and crime (and punishment). He did have the right attitude about drugs though.

Aug 31, 2009 - 7:00 am

On Credentialling

Comments from the end of the last BC thread.

James,
a culture of deferring to experts

One problem with Socialism as a cultural system is that ti debases expertise just as it debases the currency. Both rely on symbolic representations of value that are vulnerable to counterfeiting and inflation.

Have you seen this story from last week? Germany expands probe into Ph.D. bribe scheme. There are two ways to look at this. It could be an attempt by the regulators to justify their existence and by officials in the guild of degree granting institutions to limit access to the field by entrepreneurs. Alternatively, it could be as it purports an indication that less qualified applicants found a way to evade the traditional standards demanded to receive the doctorate.

In Germany, a Ph.D. is a highly-sought credential for those aiming for the top of their field. Professionals referred to as "Herr Dr." and "Frau Dr." are common in disciplines far removed from academia and medicine, such as politics and finance.

With the pressure to secure the career-elevating honorary so high, people are often willing to pay to expedite the lengthy process of locating a professor with the correct expertise and enough time to advise their doctorate work, said Matthias Jaroch, a spokesman for the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers.

"A doctor title is not only an earning advantage, it's prestigious," Jaroch said. "That's the source of people's willingness to pay for this, even by illegal means."

Americans are as fascinated by titles as Europeans are, maybe more so. We are impressed by a Baron or even a Baronet more I think then people who come from the places that produce such creatures. Our research universities of the 19th century were based on the German model and our devotion to the honorific "Doctor" approaches the germanic. At the same time the conditions of centralized bureaucratic administration that accompany a socialized government regulated society create powerful drives to increase credentialling.

The whole idea of the Civil Service is to remove the ability of politicians and by extension managers to subjectively evaluate people. Therefore there is an incentive to rely on theoretically objective criteria, such as academic credentials. What this really does is off load the evaluation onto the subjective opinion of the authority that granted the degree or certificate. The pay scales become tied to the accumulation of certifications and degrees. This results in an industry that provides government workers with courses and certificates that can be used to justify professional advancement. These can have little relevance to the actual work performed, which is as previously noted difficult to evaluate. There becomes a drive to actually allow this activity to replace the work for which the taxpayers hired these putative experts in the first place.

In the public schools in NYC teachers have mandated paid time for attending these courses and thousands are employed in producing these credentials. The doctorate in education (D.Ed.) from Teacher's College at Columbia, or from Nobody Heard Of It State, will boost the recipients income and promotability to a Superintendency as much or more then a Ph.D. that represents work of more intellectual merit.

Originally the academic degree granted by a law school was a bachelors degree (the LL.B.) which was not even required to enter the profession and which was considered a sign of a liberal arts education. However when the lawyers who established the federal pay scales realized that importance of possessing a graduate degree the humble Bachelors of Laws metamorphosed into the Juris Doctor (JD).

This pressure to credential is resisted within a hierarchy by the desire to be promoted of those who are not in possession of such externally awarded qualifications. This results in two competing dynamics. Those who rely on credentials and those who rely on tenure. The latter is known as "Buggins' Law" as in Buggins got here first so he gets promoted.

In the Federal government every job lists minimal qualifications for consideration. These include Knowledge Skills and Abilities (KSAs), minimum level of education for a pay grade and experience. With few exceptions service over one year in the next lowest pay grade qualifies for consideration for a promotion. Therefor consider two candidates, one has spent years at universities and has accumulated a BA an MA and a PhD. He is 28 years old and can apply for a position as a GS-9. His starting income will be about $40,000. Another candidate entered government service at age 19 with a High School diploma as a GS-3 and completed a BA from the local municipal college while being advanced in the normal course of service. Promotions from GS-5 up to level GS-9 are often not competitive and it is even possible to reach GS-11 without facing a review beyond general fitness for employment. Law enforcement jobs automatically promote to the GS-11 level or even higher. The even numbers do not really exist before the GS-12 level. It is possible that if he is minimally competent then before he is 30 he will be able to compete successfully for promotion to GS-11. There he will serve as the Supervisor for the entering PhD. The employee who entered at age 19 can then expect a total income, depending on locality, of around $80-100,000/annum. Obviously he is under some pressure to obtain certificates and degrees also, no matter if they are of lower objective quality, to increase his chances or promotion beyond the GS-9 level.

Robert Heinlein had Jubal Harshaw, MD JD refuse to use the honorific Dr until it will not be confused with a Playground Superintendent.

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JFSanders031,
(who would choose experience over credentials EVERY time)
Your point about the value of experience is well founded but my argument meant to focus on the defects of a centralized government bureaucracy in evaluating talent. In your private business you should be able to consider the strengths of all candidates for a job, both internal and external, and fit the right person into each position. My point is that in government both tools, credentials and tenure, are flawed and serve as improper substitutes for real managerial judgement. Once people who rely on these false criteria are promoted they produce flawed evaluations and countenance political manipulation of the HR process. This is either done covertly or can become codified under EEO processes. This decoupling of evaluations and promotions from honest managerial work related judgement is endemic in the government service. Even worse is that the government seeks through the legal system to force private employers to conform to government HR practices.

Aug 30, 2009 - 9:03 am

Comments on The Belmont Club "The political soap opera"

(people had been discussing RSS readers)
On my Safari Bookmarks bar is a “News” toggle that default carries NYT, Google, CNET, ESPN, LAT, BBC, NPR and USA Today. I usually glance at a couple those just to see what the official noise of the day is and I added Infolicious from Breitbart. Once a day I spend several minutes scrolling through that. The problem is that the front end is still the same biased AP reporting.

Regarding EMK, Ramadan and BHO as yesterday’s news. PJ O’Rourke once said that young women knew where the cutting edge was and got there. That was in the 80’s when the cutting edge was conservative. Sorry whiskey but he had a point. Well timed Alinskyite tactics could cripple the Left with ridicule and swing crucial cohorts away from them.

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Rurik,
(who knew someone in HS who had been a Hungarian Freedom Fighter)
When I was in elementary school I had a friend whose parents both had numbers tattooed on their arms. One day I asked what they meant. After they told me that they told me how later they had run across the bridge between Hungary and Austria with Russian soldiers on their heels shooting at them. They were carrying their infant child, my friend. Then they gave me wonderful food.

Comments on The Belmont Club "Pathways of stone"

pharmaguy,
(who claims R.I.'s Patrick Kennedy is the stupidist Congress member)
Dumber then Barbara Boxer? How does he keep breathing?

49erDweet,
In less than 250 years they’ve gone from “Minutemen” status to sucking on the public’s hind teat

When did the change happen? In Marquand’s 1937 novel The Late George Apley there is an ossification of the elites, and a sterile sense of nostalgia. Emerson is worshiped rather than appreciated. The ideals of the Revolution are as embalmed by Modernism as the memory of Latin was by the Humanism of Petrarch. Apley is already dead at the beginning of his story as a boy in the 19th century. Another humorous look at the same social relics was in the novel and movie, directed by John Ford and starring Spencer Tracy, about Mayor Curley, The Last Hurrah.

The Last Hurrah - The Trailer | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

Members, whilst at Sup, shall not be disturbed, except in the event of fire, flood or of Indian attack.

My guess is that the vigor of the New England Congregationalists bled out on the battlefields of the Civil War as the vigor of Old England Anglicans bled out in the trenches of the First World War.

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no mo uro,
(who gave EMK's base as Boston Irish, trust funders, and union thugs)
EMK did try to build a support base among women and illegal immigrants. Do you think that was ineffective?

Tee,
(who thinks EMK was a Great Senator)
Your definition of a Senator's job is in error, therefor your determination of EMK's stature is flawed. He was only a skilled politician. You fail to answer robohobo's view of the ethical background of the Kennedy clan.

Doug,
(who discussed EMK's overture to Andropov)
Well noted, his position in the United States Senate gave him no license to violate the Logan Act.

Contempt for the law and a willingness to align with foreign enemies seems to be a family trait. Joe Kennedy II, during his career in Congress on the Banking Committee, contributed to the Fannie/Freddie housing bubble that wrecked the economy. He also shoveled tax payer money into "affordable housing" schemes. That makes me think of Rezco and cash for Obama. Joe's most outrageous private abuse of privilege was his use of connections to obtain a secret annulment of his first marriage that was later overturned by the Vatican. His most outrageous private abuse of his family name was his acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Hugo Chavez. The Citizen's Energy advertisements with Joe extolling heating oil as a gift "from the people of Venezuela" were lobbying for a hostile regime and should earn him a trip to jail.

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steeple,
(who claimed there were no honest NY politicians)
Be fair.
Even Bloomberg’s enemies admit that he is honest. As a product of Boston he might assume that no one else is

Aug 29, 2009 - 6:42 am

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Steeple,
(who compared most of America to europeanized New England)
Good comment.

JMH,
(who noted that EMK benefited from his brothers deeds)
Concur,
We can descend into the endless fantasy game of the Left. What would JFK have evolved into? The evidence of his positions from his time in public life is that he might have taken Ted aside and beaten him to death.

Any chance in a few years that we will be able to dig him up and ship him out?

Regarding MASSvote, does “nonpartisan” equal tax exempt? Are there no lawyers on our side?

Aug 29, 2009 - 10:59 am

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Is Tee the return of Teresita of the multiple identities? The problem with people who display multiple personalities is that on closer examination they often prove to have no personality at all.

Wadeusaf,
Concur with your list of great liberal Democrats. Please add Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the collection. Even when I disagreed with him I had to stop and reexamine the issues. The time when he explained to Jesse Helms how a nuclear bomb works, “This is the part that goes boom,” was the best thing that happened in the US Senate in decades.

Aug 29, 2009 - 5:34 pm

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Best epitaph ever:

Here lies the Prelate, Judge and Poet, Peter,
Who broke the laws of God and Man and Meter

Aug 29, 2009 - 7:05 pm

Comment on The Belmont Club "5G"

MarkJ,
(who advocates an alumni boycott of left wing colleges)
The answer to “donations are down” for university administrators is “publicly funded.”

Marsh Arab,
What the left really wants in the right is a leader

ATOSSA: But who herds the manflock? Who lords the army?

- Aeschylus, The Persians

Aug 27, 2009 - 5:45 am

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mac,
Good catch and brave of you to visit Kos, hope you had a chance to shower after. Kos makes sure that there is only one car available for his family because he is a control freak.

Aug 27, 2009 - 5:55 am

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According to this report Panetta is out at CIA.
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie
ewerickson Looks like I was right. ABC News's Brian Ross says Leon Panetta is done.

Conservatives are in an interesting position. There is a tension between the belief in Democracy as a political system, along with its economic coevals Capitalism and the associated free market as a valuation and exchange system, and the belief in an absolute truth that is not subject to alteration at the whim of whoever can manipulate imagery to sway the opinions of a mob.

Haque is like the oily Inquisition interrogator trying to trap his victim into a confession of heresy. Sarah Palin is like Galileo standing before the assembled Cardinals and whispering, Nevertheless, it moves. Here is Jacob Bronowski on the trial.


Perhaps she is even more boldly to be compared to Martin Luther saying to the Emperor, Here I stand. (newer version) http://tinyurl.com/l2k7yo
(older version)


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Promethea,
(who visited family where everyone loves BHO)
Evanston Illinois, still so devoted to human liberty.
How is the Women’s Christian Temperance Union doing these days?

Aug 27, 2009 - 8:43 pm

Comment on The Belmont Club,"Losing the embed"

maineman,
(who asked why comments were closed on Edward Kennedy's death)
Finis

Regarding Yon and by extension the Kennedy and Obama and Dodd etc. scandals, control of the narrative is more important to the bureaucrat then effective activity. If Yon concentrated on stories of Troopers thinking of Mom's blueberry pie and prayers the folks back home in Britain support the NHS then the desk jockeys would be eager to have him around. Real reporting that discloses how to improve the function of the organization reveals errors and abuses. Does the US Senate want newshounds telling people about the waitress sandwiches that boozy Kennedy and Dodd made or do they want tame journalists who pen stories about the Lion of Camelot?

Comment on PJM, Nate Hale "Morale at CIA Plummets as Panetta Makes a Bad Situation Worse"

Crusader,
we won’t be hearing too much from the “torture is always wrong” crowd anymore

Unfortunately you are wrong. The Left shut up for exactly three weeks after 9-11. Bill Maher opened his mouth to preen and be snarky and got slapped down but he kept his job. After three weeks they rallied in October and Soros provided the seed money to use ANSWER to organize the opposition to President Bush. If you want to trace the recovery of the Left Establishment just go to http://www.charlierose.com, click on "view full schedule" and then go back to September and October of 2001.

The people at the CIA know they are playing for keeps. They should get all the documentation they can on Obama out to the public. Wonder if they have a copy of the Rashid Khalidi party video the LA Times sat on before the election?

Comments on The Belmont Club,"What's the frequency?"

One reason that a society of independent small business men is preferred to one of government agencies and large protected concessions is that the former give more opportunity for the social correction of misconduct. Remember when OJ went into a franchise restaurant and the owner told him to leave? If that was a government feeding plan cafeteria the manager would have been unable to express any such opinion. The fact is that while government workers are often rude in small things they can not challenge individuals about larger things. Here is another example, Dan Rather goes into the airport and passes through security. If anyone says anything that he objects to they are out of a job. Consider what would happen if the Security was not run by TSA at the behest of enormous airlines that avoid liability risk, but by Fred's Security Service under a contract with Happy Skies Charter Air. In the second case there is a chance that if Mr Rather showed up the Supervisor could at least loudly order his staff to check everything real carefully because this person had already dealt in forged documents. Fred of Fred's can't sit in judgement on everyone because he has a business to run but he at least has the freedom to speak up when he wants to.

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Tobb,
character should not be judged so much by someone’s goals but rather by the means they use

Well said, that was part of my point behind my shared unhappiness about poor conduct by a Host at a party. The best definition of a Gentleman I ever read, I think it comes from Anna Karenina, was that a "Gentleman is a man who strives never to be unintentionally rude." When the time is propitious and the achievement is worth while then by all means be rude to Dan Rather. When the occasion is one where you are expected to be gracious to guests then think only of what will make others happy.

A proper Liberal Education did not impart a vast store of technically useful information but it did provide a framework and examples that could serve as a guide to conduct. The idea behind "muscular christianity" was that well trained young men would at least think of ends and means before choosing a course of action and on the margin would tend to avoid the easier path to reach a questionable goal.

Personally I am not made completely comfortable by some of the evangelism we sometimes have in here but I am aware of how when properly guided that spirit can lead to conduct that is both disciplined and tolerant. There are few major cultures that do not support dealing honestly and justly with those who are strangers to the core community. Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism all would condemn Rather/Mapes' falsification for personal or even tribal gain. Even the extinct Nordic or Greco-Roman systems shared these standards. The position of Shinto is less clear to me and Confucian ethics did draw distinctions between duties to those close or in authority and strangers but that does not mean that dishonesty was condoned. The position of Scientology on this topic is also unclear to me.

In Communism, in Islam, and in some of the Native American tribal cultures, it is accepted to engage in deceit to gain an advantage over an outsider. The last are now marginalized and of mainly historical interest. Other small faith groups that espouse an unconventional view of morality exist, for example Crowley's Church of Satan. The first two global faiths mentioned in this paragraph are of course universal in their claims and both have the subjugation of rivals as a core principle. Judaism is not universal in its claims except at an abstract level. It has not routinely proselytized for over two thousand years. Christianity is a universal and proselytizing faith but it does not have the subjugation of others as a core principle and does not condone deceit to obtain a goal.

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A few years ago there was a minor explosion aimed at TSA when Ted Kennedy came up on the "No Fly List." The fact was that he was on the list and it was no accident. An airline submitted his name for good cause. If Ted Kennedy got on your plane at 10 AM it was no big deal but if he got on your plane at 7 PM the he was an abusive drunk who refused to follow aircrew instructions and who groped the stewardesses. They were sick of it.

Aug 26, 2009 - 11:03 am

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In The Portrat of Dorian Gray the monster within is revealed by a painting hidden in a locked room while the beast kept a fair appearance. In the case of Edward Kennedy his outward appearance displayed the corrupt monster within. The horror is that his followers refused to see reality and clung to the pretty pictures offered by the media.

Aug 26, 2009 - 1:05 pm

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whiskey,
(who thinks wanna be Princesses love the Kennedys)
Parvenau princesses have no clue what a real aristocrat is. If you asked any real Duke or Earl or Baron or Roman Senator or Greek Hoplite what their job was they would all have had the same answer, farmer. An aristocrat was always an independent farmer with the wealth and leisure to serve the Sovereign.

Aug 26, 2009 - 1:29 pm

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The mandate of heaven"

Ajami got it, It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation’s recovery of its self-confidence.

The plan for BHO and Rahm Emmanuel is to keep manufacturing crises. It doesn't matter to them what the crises is because the response has nothing much to do with the precipitating event. Remember Emmanuel's "Never let a good crisis go to waste?" The Democrats began this pattern before the election by cracking the economy and ramming through the TARP in a panic. Bush was simply overwhelmed by the orchestrated attacks and failed to rally the country.

Is there any reason to be pressing on Health Care while the economy is still under pressure? None at all, except that the atmosphere of panic produced by an unrelated subject can be used to stampede legislation through Congress. The problem for BHO is that after the seizure of GM and Chrysler to reward the UAW the magnitude of the bait and switch corruption became to obvious to hide. You can con a sucker once, or even twice but you can't con him and then con his friends and then come back a third time. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain had the con men know that they had to sneak out of town with the money before the third performance of the fake play. Is BHO the Dauphin or the Duke of Bilgewater?

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What Holder is doing is criminalizing the process of giving advice contrary to the desires of the Left. My argument that follows is somewhat tortured. It relies on a distinction between what could be defended as possible in theory, prosecuting an interrogator, and what would be extremely unwise in practice, prosecuting a lawyer for advising someone to order the interrogation.

It is not the act of waterboarding itself that important here. It is possible for reasonable people to disagree about that. If they had chosen to prosecute an interrogator for being personally responsible for causing suffering then a jury could hear the arguments. The interrogator could not win by pleading that they were "just following orders." The Nuremberg precedent precludes that. It would be unwise to do so because if it was deemed illegal to perform an act it does not mean that it would wise to make it be illegal to issue an order for someone else to do the act.

The Left are assuming that the public will accept that it was criminal for the lawyers who advised Bush and Cheney to advise a course of action and that it was illegal for them to act on that advice. What should protect the operator from being charged for acting in accordance with instructions is that doing so would be against the interests of those who give advice contrary to that which the operator acted on. Could they prosecute the chain of command all the way up to George Bush without indicting the lawyers and neocon publicists that justified the former administration's policy? It may have been possible to do so but Holder already began by threatening people like Douglas Feith.

Given that the Democratic Party is far more dependent on the legal community then the Republicans are it surprises me that there hasn't been a louder call from the ranks for them to pull back from this course of action. Once the giving of advice is criminalized then the entire apparatus that the Left has built up over the last seventy years is open to deconstruction. The entire network of lobbyists and law firms, of foundations and NGOs and research institutes that have become a permanent government in exile when they are out of office and an unaccountable sources of policy and personnel when they are in power will be open to attack. The Right by comparison has a shallow bench with only a handful of similar institutions.

If the Left begins to lose elections then the entire structure with tens of thousands of people in it will face investigation and possible retribution. The hard core pushing for radical change may desire this because it binds the troops closer to the radical agenda. If failure means exposure and poverty or prison then the nomenklatura will become as bound to the radical project as the purple shirts of the SEIU and Acorn.

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no mo uro,
(who said that winning ideas are not enough)
Well said. The triumph of the messenger over the message goes back to the Kennedy-Nixon TV debate.

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There are four different states in which groups of people can interact. These are legal constructs, like marriage, divorce or commercial-client relations are for individuals. People, even criminals, are assumed to be members of social and political communities unless they are certified not to be. People who are not members of any recognized community who then commit acts of violence are Pirates.

1) Comity, that is the state of trust and equality shared by citizens who are mutually pledged to support a common sovereign authority that they empower. Disputes and criminal damages are handled by the legal system.

2) Peace, that is the state of defined legal relations that foster peaceful trade and travel between citizens of different sovereignties. A state regulates its citizenry and takes responsibility for their conduct. Disputes or criminal acts done by persons when in a foreign jurisdiction are resolved by procedures agreed to between the respective states. If a citizen of one state causes injury to a citizen of another then the claim is made between the two governments. While this may be modified for convenience in practice the fact remains that if you as an American are owed something in France and the US government negotiates an agreement that settles all claims between the governments you may or may not get anything yourself. France will no longer owe you and any claim you have on the US government would be a separate matter.

4) War, this is a state in which most legal contracts are abrogated and violence by agents of the state may be used under defined conditions. A state regulates its armed forces and takes responsibility for their conduct.

5) Piracy, this is a state in which there are no legal boundaries binding the parties, making it in effect a "State of Nature."

Khalid Sheik Muhhamed is a pirate. The only constraints on how he is to be dealt with should related to determining his status to begin with. Once it is verified that he is not a criminal, subject to the laws and authority of a nation that takes responsibility for him, and that he is not a soldier protected by treaties and laws governing the treatment of prisoners of war, then the only protections he has are those administrative policies against random brutality. He is effectively not a human being but a dangerous beast.

Non-state actors, like al-Qaeda, cannot be allowed to claim the benefits for their members that are granted to state actors, even hostile ones, that take some responsibility for the people under their jurisdiction.

Aug 25, 2009 - 9:41 am

On the Study of Linguistics

From the BC thread "A Tribute To Our Decency," linked to below.
bob,
(whose daughter is enthused about a course)
The Origins of Language course sounds interesting. Linguistics is a complex field that draws from many other traditions, such as neurology and philosophy. It is however a very dense and jargon laced discipline that is, like the related subject of psychology, subject to abuse if taught at an undergraduate level before a thorough grounding in another area, such as anthropology, is obtained at the entry level. Instruction in complex and technical matters to students without a prior firm grasp of broader underlying principles can easily become indoctrination into arcane matters that are accepted as a faith.

The worst case scenario would be if the course was used to recruit adherents for the ideology of Noam Chomsky. Some years ago his work was discussed in the Belmont Club by others who know more about it then I do. My suggestion to you is that you read up on the subject and particularly on Mr. Chomsky. Given my criticisms of some web based information in the past you can understand my urging you to be careful when evaluating anything in wikipedia. Still that would be a good place to start by reviewing the articles on Linguistics and Chomsky. A look at the articles associated discussion pages may at least alert you to a partisan debate that is attempting to pass as an assertion of fact.

The good news is that Linguists are in demand in the job market. Intelligence shops, like the NSA, love them.

On the Regression to Feudal Law

From the BC thread "What a Wonderful World" linked to below.
Mad Fiddler,
(who commented on "Thought Crimes")
The continued rise of the concepts of thought crimes, the allocation of punishment based on inferred intent or reliance upon either aggravating associations on the part of the perpetrator or membership in a protected class on the part of the plaintiff or victim. troubles me. First as you indicated it empowers a bureaucrat to make subjective judgements. Second is that is a return to the feudal concepts of special laws for members of special communities or guilds. In England Peers of the Realm can no longer demand trial before the Lords and you no longer face special punishments for offending the nobility. In America however if you are charged with an offense against a member of a protected group then your motives will be examined to determine if that aggravates the crime and increases your punishment. In America between the end of the oppressive Black Codes and the rise of the EEOC codes, and related criminal and civil procedures, there was a brief period when the only vestiges of such laws giving special punishments based on the identity of the victim was in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Theo Spark is on a roll today.

1) http://tinyurl.com/lmlzej on the draining of FDIC and the Reserve Ratio. What will the next two points on the graph be?
2) http://tinyurl.com/mcu2mr What if the health care rules logic applied to Obama’s children?
3) http://tinyurl.com/l5ncou The continuing housing/credit meltdown.
What Barney Franks and friends have wrought.
And the best for last.
4) http://tinyurl.com/m6tp3u Telling it to The Man at a Town Hall.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"A Tribute To Our Decency"

bob,
(whose daughter is unfocused at college)
Seriously, do you think that a tour in the military might teach her the value of work? If she were a bad girl it would be a disaster because she would get in trouble but if she is a good girl and just needs to appreciate how things work then it might help.

My policy is to only walk out on one party a night. People expect little of politicians because they are no longer educated to expect better. The point of the old curriculum was to teach values, what were called “republican virtues.” Stories of the Roman Republic and the sacrifices they made. Like the Senator who killed his own son for breaking discipline. These served two roles. One it was a common language since everyone read the same histories along with Shakespeare, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Second the provided examples that people really could judge conduct by.

Compare that to my consternation at the bottom of the last thread in how people simply had no idea how to respond to rudeness that I encountered earlier this evening.

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Alexis,
(who called anti-Americanism "Royalism")
The chicken and egg question regarding European anti-Americanism is whether it precedes from or leads to their virulent anti-Semitism? The distinctions between right and left in this regard are of largely anthropological interest.

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It is getting hard to tell the players without a scorecard. The CIA that Bush 41 rebuilt and that by some accounts worshiped him, the same CIA that sabotaged Bush 43 with a thousand leaks, is now at war with BHO? What do they want? If this was a hostile tin pot dictatorship we would be sending high level emissaries over and offering them scholarships for the manager's kids. Instead they have Leon Panetta and the house is on fire.

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The circle to square is how to wish no harm for those innocents that MacAskill holds dear but to wish that he experiences a trauma great enough that he will know empathy, not a politician's sympathy, with the Libyan's victims.

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ADE,
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you are in the best tribe
Good point. My guess is that Oliver Cromwell would have sided with the King against Franks, Reid, Soros & Co.

Aug 23, 2009 - 7:06 am

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bob,
When I started at Chicago tuition was $1,000 per quarter and room and board ran another several hundred. Of course back then you had to share your room with a sabre tooth and dodge roving bands of aborigines between your cave and the quadrangles.

Peter Boston,
Socrates was threatened by the Oligarchs and killed by the Democrats.

Aug 23, 2009 - 11:02 am
-------
bob,
The wolves are only using the elk for training. Soon they will begin to cull herds of grannies.

Tony,
I agree the CIA prosecution is a distraction. Expect more otrages of the day to chew up newstime and column inches while Pelosi and Reid use reconciliation to ram through the socialization of health care and more.

Sythianeedle,
Nice nordic metering. Have you read Tolkien's play on the Battle of Maldon, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son?

Hige sceal pe heardra, heorte pe cenre,
Mod sceal pe mare, pe ure maegen lytla.

Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder,
spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.

Aug 24, 2009 - 7:12 pm
-------
The Battle of Maldon is totally On Topic in a discussion of the Sots, sorry I meant Scots, misplaced compassion. That was the battle one thousand and eighteen years and two weeks ago in which the Saxon commander, out of a misplaced sense of pride, allowed the Danish (Viking) army to cross a guarded bridge. The result was a battle lost, his life lost and much treasure in Danegeld lost.

Aug 24, 2009 - 7:47 pm

Hospitality

An hour ago I got back from one of the least pleasant events that I have ever attended. Had received an Evite for an End of Summer bar-b-que. The guest list consisted of people who had all volunteered on the McCain campaign last year. There was some concern on my mind as one of the invitees was someone who had behaved rather badly last Winter by informing me that I was of the wrong faith to be part of her social circle. Still I had not seen these people in almost a year and thought it would be proper to attend.

The evening began on an interesting note in that after picking up desert at the best German-French bakery in NY and gotten a bottle of liquor I walked down to the East Village. Just off 2nd Avenue on 10th street I saw an apparently young woman hunched over on a stoop. She was very still and supported herself with one hand on the pavement. After walking to the next corner I called 9-11 and reported it as a possible drug overdose. Somebody’s daughter, we still see such things and times are going to get worse.

Having arrived shortly after the appointed time I met the two ladies whose apartment we were in and things began well enough, meeting people, petting the dogs and nibbling on salad. Most people went to the back yard, a nice feature in NYC, to avoid some who were smoking where the grill was just getting set up. As a side note it is a good idea to start preparing the food before the guests arrive. One woman came over to me and said that I should not eat as others had not. I thought that was odd for three reasons, first it wasn’t her house, second the party had already begun and while guests were still arriving everyone had been eating whatever was available, and third I had not been eating at that moment, except for a piece of carrot and a grape. Later I helped set up a table and when some food was put out and others took some I asked for a piece and had some sliced hot dog bits. The same woman returned and said we should not be eating and took the cooked food away. Finally, about an hour and a half after the party began the people at the grill called out “Get some food” and after some people took some chicken I added a piece to my plate. The woman returned and yelled at me in front of the guests, “I told you to wait until everyone else gets to eat. You have been eating since you got here.” I asked “Who are you?” as one woman tried to stop her. She replied “I sent out the invitations.” So I said in a clear voice that everyone could hear that I would then leave and picked up the plum tart, best one in NYC by the way, and Slivovitz, and left.

Now the rules of hospitality and the duties of a host and a guest are simple, they haven’t changed much in 6,000 years. Leaving aside the technical matter that I had in fact not eaten before food was offered to others there are larger issues here. The fact that someone acted in a manner that is borderline deranged is not that unusual. At least I do not think that my concerns fall into the category of general internet gripe. Three issues come to my attention now.

First, are the general rules of hospitality. If someone had climbed the wall to steal food I would have called the police but I would never attempt to stop anyone from eating. You do not take food away from people once it has been offered. My biggest disappointment is that standards of conduct are so loose that people allowed this to happen and simply looked away. If I had seen someone else treated so shabbily I hope that I would have got up and left the party. If it was my apartment and someone had acted that way I would have thrown them out. If there was some arrangement between the hosts and the woman who sent the invitations that included the cost of supplies then I would have thrown money at her or asked for help before allowing a guest to be abused.

Second is what it says about the state of the conservative opposition that it gathered in this small group in New York City and could not handle this minor domestic drama effectively. The people are well meaning but clearly could not reach back into the collective memory and think of what to do when someone asserts unwarranted control and acts abusively.

That gets to my third point. If we are that ineffective in handling a situation that in any two reel movie or cheap novel could have been handled properly then how can we, and by “we” I mean those who were at the party and had been at the Tea Parties and fighting other losing causes, hope to have any chance against thugs like Axelrod and Emmanuel and the Jihadis? Rumsfeld said that you fight with the army you have and every political gathering attracts the socially awkward. That is especially true for struggling socially unrewarding movements like we represent in NYC. Add to those issues of gender and power that can provide a sub-text to any social encounter, especially likely given that we were across the street from Tompkins Square Park and the opportunities for the abusive and manipulative abound.

The ongoing challenge in any political or social group is to organize and motivate people to act correctly without either allowing the abusive to drive people out nor to allow excessive rigidity to discourage participation.

Hope the people at work appreciate the plum tart. Now what do I do with the Slivovitz?

Updated in Comments

Obama's Continued Slide

Posted on the last BC thread.

Take a look at today's Rasmussen Daily Presidential tracking poll, http://tinyurl.com/5tnd2b. He is now at -10 in the Approval Index. If my prior analysis holds up then the strong negatives will probably level off in the 40% range until the end of September. After that they will probably go up to at least 50% strongly negative. His strong positives are due in the next couple of weeks for another precipitous drop from the 30% range down to 22-25%. He will probably recover about half of that by November. Of the third of the likely voters who are in the middle the pattern now is that about twice as many are likely to break against Obama to the right as move left and support him.

This puts the Democrats in an almost existential position before the off year elections. While it is true that no congressional seats are at risk this year there are local contests.

The patronage jobs and union contracts riding on these elections are the life blood of the Democratic Party. The unhappiness this situation creates will be shared with Congress members. Given these facts it seems that the only way that Obama can push through any more power and money grabs is by using tactics that approach a Coup d’état. My prediction is that marginal or Blue Dog Democrats are going to be blackmailed and their families threatened. Some will break and go public about it.

Comment on The Belmont Club "What a wonderful world"

Talnick,
Good point, I'm expecting to hear that US Ambassadors start getting doors shut in their faces and wedgies on the elevator. The Italians could kick out the Sixth Fleet and the Canadians must be reviewing their options.

Dr. Sanity,
On the other thread we were looking for you. Technically speaking, just how nuts is Obama?
Good on you for the use of video on your blog. That is my style also. Elmer Gantry is a keeper.

The Civil Service credo is, "A good idea is an idea worth stealing and a great idea is an idea worth backdating a memo for the file for, so you can claim you came up with it first."

Comment on The Belmont Club,"The nine trillion"

bob,
I’ve never met anybody yet that hates Sarah
Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone that voted for Nixon. They are out there.
Try and get a good wife in the canoe
I’m considering leaving a trail of M&Ms, but do you really think a paddle would help?

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Unto Caesar"

One of the many strengths in Western Civilization is the separation between roles of the KIng or Basileus and that of the High Priest. At one time they were fused in the West as they historically were in the East. In the East a Despot or Khan was either God's agent over all realms or was a god themselves. In Eastern Orthodox christianity the Emperor dominated the Patriarchy and exercised jurisdiction in both roles under what is called Caesaro-papism. Western Christianity over the long term benefited because it had to survive without the protection of the Imperium. At the same time the material weakness of the papacy allowed independent political communities to develop.

This division between the sacred and profane powers is unusual and created enough complexity and variety in structures that doctrines of tolerance, individuality and privacy were allowed to develop. A parallel set of circumstances created out of physical disaster and dispersion allowed congruent doctrines to develop among the jewish communities that no longer had a unified state with an anointed KIng and a temple bound priesthood to enforce discipline.

In America religious communities have always influenced political debate but other voices would always jealously guard against being subsumed in one voice. Certainly much of the abolitionist movement and later progressive spirit came from the tradition of militant Unitarianism from the 19th century. The alternating alliances and rivalries among the protestant communities and between them and catholic or jewish immigrants helped shape the Republic. Uncertainty about having a religious voice to close to the political voice was raised when John Kennedy became the first Catholic President. That helped define the role of clergy in being a moral voice but keeping them ostentatiously away from formal policy roles over the following decades. Even Billy Graham while seen as a prominent voice close to the White House was not allowed to exercise as open a role in advocating for specific policies as theologians of an earlier era did.

The one exception to this was in the black community. There ordained clergy would regularly engage in roles as both pastors, politicians and organizational leaders with real financial influence. This may in part have been due to the paucity of university trained leaders other then clergy as a result of prior discrimination. Partly it might have been accepted as an indication of patronizing by the larger society in dealing with the minority as if it was a foreign client. In some countries military officers are similarly found in positions of commercial and political leadership also because they are the only pool of skilled professionals available.

Obama by attempting to mobilize clergy for a political dispute is spreading the structure of the black community into the general society. He risks inflaming those who will see this as an Islamic fusion in his mind of the roles of sacred and profane leadership.

We have a thread on the Czars, then we have a thread on Caesar. Do I detect a pattern? Which will come next Henry Kaiser or a thread on Egyptian Pharaonic monuments or Faro and gambling?
Place your bets.

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Promethea,
Reform Judaism has been a floppy branch of the Democratic party for 70 years Besides Reform is really an expression of German Jewish culture. That worked out well. At least the Sulzbergers of the NY Times left Temple Emanu-El and switched to Episcopalian.

Of more concern to me is the decline of what was the robust genuinely American theological movement of Conservative Judaism. This was in fact the bulk of American Judaism during the 20th century but it is under pressure, with some splitting off to become closer to Reform and new immigrants identifying with a reinvigorated Orthodox movement. They are not helped by a leadership that wants to change the relgion's name to something that sounds less "conservative."

Comment on PJM, Roger Kimball "My final piece on Yale and the Danish cartoons: Martin Kramer connects the dots"

$20 Million from the Bass family, with the expectation of $500 million to come, was insufficient to sway Yale to endow Western Civilization during the flush days but now that the endowment has been flushed the expectation of $20 million is enough to make Yale crawl. Now that the Saudis know what they are dealing with they might as well offer $50 and bottle of cheap liquor. They can say they are just dickering over the price.

Over a dozen years ago I said to John Boyer, Dean of the College at Chicago and the man who hired Michelle Obama before she moved over to the hospitals, that I was saddened by the cuts to the Common Core and the Western Civilization requirements that had been the signature of a Chicago education going back to the Hutchins era. He replied then that if I had $20 million I could endow the program and he'd name it after me. That was before the flood of Saudi money ate into our universities. They had been buying up American foreign service officers at wholesale for years and the British schools and since then moved into the schools in America. This is the same Saudi Prince who had his check was thrown back at him by Rudy Giuliani.

Comment on The Belmont Club,"Czar struck"

Habu,
But are the Czar’s any more than a kitchen cabinet?
Unlike the Kitchen Cabinet this lot get paid and come with a horde of locusts that eat out of the public treasury. In FDR's day connected people who had achieved prominence in industry considered it an honor to be offered a position as a "Dollar a Year Man."

All of the records and proceedings of these people who are occupying offices that are outside of congressional oversight should be subpoenaed for public review. Remember the Hillarycare Health Care Task Force? That also was an effort to make policy in the dark and it was exposed.

Once again Yes Minister proves to be the true oracle. They called the people given responsibility outside of Cabinet responsibilities "Supremos." When Jim Hacker became Transport Supremo he learned he was in trouble.
Jim: But I'm going to be Transport Supremo.
Sir Humphrey: I believe the Civil Service vernacular is Transport Muggins
The Bed of Nails, 1st of 3 parts.

part 2

part 3

Comment on The Belmont Club,"Healthy debate"

Wretchard,
My hope is that you are using the wrong analogy with Jutland here. If we are lucky then the Left are as arrogant as the Tsar who sent his fleet halfway around the world, only to see it destroyed at the Tsushima Straits.

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bob,
(who noted BHO said defining the start of life was "above my paygrade")
Good point. This could be a line in a film noir, "Say buddy, you know when life begins?" No, Mr. but I can tell you when it's time to end."

See, The Maltese Terrier starring Barack Obama as Wilmer the Gunsel, Barney Frank as Cairo, George Soros as Gutman, Hillary Clinton as Mary Astor (the fall girl) and Sarah Palin as Samantha Spade. In glorious Black and White.

Roderick Reilly,
(who quoted BHO)
We are God’s partners in matters of life and death
Where could he have learned this kind of arrogant, solipsistic, religious type of fervor and willingness to destroy real lives, wealth and laws in the name of an external certainty that holds him to a low standard of personal responsibility?

-------
With respect the model of Jutland or Gettysberg strike me as inapt. Theose were both meeting engagement in which neither side knew what the other was up to and neither was intending to fight a conclusive engagement at the time and place where it developed. While it might be true that the Republicans are flailing around in the dark the analogy just does not apply to the Democrats. They have been planning for decades to use health care as a wedge issue for overall regulatory expansion. The only thing that has surprised them is the effectiveness of the grass roots opposition that their plans have produced.

They Left walked into this cave knowing the treasure inside and knowing that a bear lives here. They just assumed that he was now old and toothless.

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Robohobo,
We are talking about controlling 1/5th or 1/6th of the largest economy in the world.
Be fair, they are trying to shrink the economy as fast as they can. Eight years of Obama with Cap and Trade and health taxes and everything else on their plate might produce an economy so small that even the Democrats can manage it.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The Collaborators"

History is written many times. Once by the victors and then rewritten by the scribes.
Reality is dropped into a hole by Winston Smith and everybody knows that Sarah Palin thought she could see Russia from her house.

There were Quislings and collaborators everywhere. The story in China of Wang Jingwei shows the wasteland that ambition and confusion can lead a man of talent into.

The fact is that most of the time the people who are advocating firm positions and calling for confronting power are cranks. Most people want to be in the middle, to get along, because that is where in a normal world production happens. The trick is to know when the shift to a true crisis has happened where you have to get up and join the unpleasant ideologues in risking all. The temptation is to wait until the choices are clear and then tell yourself that it is to late to make a difference.

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This sounds like another vanity project. Where is the audience for this? Not in America, not in China or the Phillipines. Not even I would think in Japan. Possibly in Europe and the Middle East. The investors should hire lawyers to protect their interests. In any other industry failure to exercise basic care to protect the capital that has been invested would result in personal liability. Hollywood needs corporate governance reform. Ever since the studio system got replaced by a web of agents, consultants and production companies, with distribution and financing controlled by divisions of offsite and often offshore conglomerates, there has been no accountability for where the money goes. Art Buchwald put a dent in the shell game when he sued years ago but a major overhaul is called for.

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There are differences in the social strata and groups that Communists and Fascist/Nazis drew from. To use the language of the Left, the communists are a proletarian based movement lead by a cadre from the intelligentsia, often from the upper bourgeoisie or old aristocracy. The fascist movements are rooted in the petit bourgeoisie and lumpen proletariat strata.

This fits with what is happening in America. The Left using shock troops from Acorn and the SEIU drawn from what can be called the laboring class are allied with wealth and power and the universities. They have their Kropotkins and Engels. They fear and despise the small business men and Joe the Pliumber upwardly mobile workers who they accuse of fascism.

Aug 20, 2009 - 11:30 pm

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Tcobb,
There is nothing so dangerous to an established regime as a prosperous middle class.

Your analysis is correct. The use of Marxist terminology is partly for fun and also because that is how they think. Know Yourself and Know Your Enemy. We need both the West (Delphi) and the East (Sun Tzu) on our side.

Historically aristocrats drew support from the peasant masses and the monarchy drew support from the middle class. When these alliances broke down the result was social upheaval and regime collapse. Examples include the English Civil War, when the monarchy lost the support of the Whig gentry and merchants, and the French Revoloution, when the nobility lost control of the peasantry. In both cases the fatal mistake for the monarchy was their attempting to base their support on the aristocrats rather than the commons. The aristocrats, or wanna be aristos, are always jealous of the legitimate Sovereign and the prosperous middle. This dynamic can even be seen in ancient Rome.

For your "established regime" I read "entrenched reactionary Old Regime."

Aug 21, 2009 - 7:06 am

On the cost of the "Thousand Year War"

Fletcher Christian,
(who asked on the BC "foundations of our world" thread)
The only true costs are opportunity costs.
Measure in the songs not sung, the books not written, the inventions not devised, the crops not planted, the lives and hopes blighted.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The foundations of our world"

One of the many things that infuriates about the preening transnational administrative class and their support base is the presumption that they know and care more about the mass of humanity while the bitter clingers of America are ignorant provincial rubes. We are the people who time after time have gone forth and saved the world. We are bound to distant lands with chains of blood. It is the Americans who escaped from the prisons of the Old World and then repeatedly have spent of ourselves to rescue our fallen cousins.

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El Jefe Maximo,
The plans for operations Olympic and Coronet are both covered in The West Point Atlas of American Wars. The maps are beautifully done and every student of history or the military arts should get the two volume set. The most striking thing about the invasion plans was that the code names for the beaches were drawn from American automobile marks. There were Cadillac beach, Pontiac beach, Nash beach, etc. The irony is to thick to do more then acknowledge it.

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The 8th Air Force was a death sentence. The Japanese couldn't do to the B-29s of 1945 what the Germans did to the B-17s of 1943-44. From the Air Force history fact page:

From May 1942 to July 1945, the Eighth planned and precisely executed America's daylight strategic bombing campaign against Nazi-occupied Europe, and in doing so the organization compiled an impressive war record. That record, however, carried a high price. For instance, the Eighth suffered about half of the U.S. Army Air Force's casualties (47,483 out of 115,332), including more than 26,000 dead. The Eighth's brave men earned 17 Medals of Honor, 220 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 442,000 Air Medals. The Eighth's combat record also shows 566 aces (261 fighter pilots with 31 having 15 or more victories and 305 enlisted gunners), over 440,000 bomber sorties to drop 697,000 tons of bombs, and over 5,100 aircraft losses and 11,200 aerial victories.

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Mark Framness,
(who linked to a photo of Corregidor)
Think about Tiny URL http://tunyurl.com, reduces the risk of being tossed into PJM/WordPress moderation.
I have walked along the ruins of the Mile Long Barracks and entered the hospital cave.

The fellow I relieved as Deck Division officer on the USS England told me that his father had gone from trading shots with the IJN across the River Shit that borders the old Subic Bay Naval Base to grabbing a meal at the Chuck Wagon O-Club dining facility, when it was a Quonset Hut. I got the Chuck Wagon polo shirt and remember seeing the wives of Commanders and Captains on the main club veranda, wearing Summer dresses and gloves. It was like the ghost of the Raj two generations after the British gave it up.

Aug 19, 2009 - 8:25 pm

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Fletcher Christian,
(who asked about the cost of a millennial conflict)
The only true costs are opportunity costs.
Measure in the songs not sung, the books not written, the inventions not devised, the crops not planted, the lives and hopes blighted.

Aug 20, 2009 - 3:31 am

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Seeing-eye cat"

There are hand lettered signs up in my building warning people not to throw cigarettes out the window or face a fine of $500. When I saw them I thought two things.
1) Who in h*ll granted these third world idiots legislative, police or judicial powers?
2) That is a great thing to show anyone considering buying into this bankrupt co-op.

One minor functionary from the building threatened me the other day because I was combing my four footed friend about 50 feet from his garage. I told him to get a lawyer.

One problem is that the lawyers for the landlord seem to feel no need to advise their client on what is in the buildings best interest. To many lawyers just view themselves as hired guns instead of as counselors.

General Frank Savage: [on stalling the transfer paperwork] There can be trouble in this.
Major Harvey Stovall: I don't think so, sir. I never heard of a jury convicting the lawyer.

- 12 O'Clock High

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bob,
My friend was fixed, and if an animal does not have the potential of producing show quality offspring it is the right thing to do. It is also true that different breeds have different issues. For example American Pit Bull Terriers do not know how to let go. Given that I still feel that when an animal gets in trouble it is usually a sign that some abusive or incompetent owner needs a trip to get an operation more then the poor beast does. How many jerks are there that get their jollies by waving a brutalized dog around like it was a loaded weapon? It shouldn't take an Austrian accent to figure out what kind of inadequacy they are overcompensating for.

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While blue eyed white cats are often genetically inclined to be deaf I would think that using a vacuum near an animal is a bad idea simply because they might be more sensitive to the high frequency whine emitted by the motor.

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Wadeusaf,
(who linked to the site)

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/day/2009/08/07/
Didn’t hold BHO back.

Aug 20, 2009 - 11:08 am

-------
Please adopt Pinky.

http://tinyurl.com/lum4eo
From Theo Spark.

Aug 20, 2009 - 8:37 pm

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Sitting in judgement"

bogie wheel,
Within living memory in England a man's home was his castle and the King himself could not enter uninvited without showing cause before a magistrate and obtaining a warrant.

Anything can be done in the name of health. The Nuremburg Codes The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour that set the legal basis for Nazi racial policy were considered part of the Public Health Code. Less then 50 years ago decent liberal people understood this. Listen to Spencer Tracy in Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremburg.

In The Lives of Others the Stasi agent has to sit in the attic in secrecy as he listens in to those suspected by the State.

In the future the State will be able to insist on monitoring equipment everywhere, for your own good, and will feel free to censure any conduct that might impose a cost on the public purse. How will this differ from the world of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its two way telescreens?

Liberals often justify nuisance laws on seatbelts and smoking by saying that those who violate the policy will use the public hospitals so, "We will all have to pay." When I ask who invited them to they lash out and accuse me of wanting to close all the hospitals and leave the poor defenseless. The natural instinct in the face of such idiocy is to either walk off in disgust or get physical. Either would please the adolescent ignoramuses. Like the bum on the subway they act as offensively as possible to preclude the possibility of being challenged.

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The Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, Instapundit follows Gallup but I believe that Rasmussen has proven more accurate over the last couple of election cycles, continues to provide comfort. Both polls are trending against Obama which is more important then any transient perturbation. My thoughts on this were laid out in more detail on the "Cloudy Crystal Ball" thread.

The next 15 months will be decisive for three (my magic number again) reasons.
1) The Census and related efforts to effect permanent change will either be rammed through or fail.
2) The mid-term elections will be determinative for both parties for the next 20 years.
3) The $3,000,000,000,000 bill will come due. Since China is in no position to swallow this we can expect a hard crash.

OK, add a fourth reason in the spirit of Monty Python's benefits of Roman occupation.
4) The 3:00 AM phone call will happen, maybe several of them at once from Caracas, Tehran and Pyongyang.

Aug 18, 2009 - 10:39 pm

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Gaffe Prices,
You are correct about how bad a ruling Dred Scott was. Sotomayor looks to be a hack capable of coughing up something equally bad. You are also correct that Roe v Wade has roots as solid as Birnham Wood that came to Dunsinane. There were however thousands of free blacks in the South at one time. New Orleans had an especially strong free black community. The legal fiction, using the words of the 1795 Militia Act, under which Lincoln fought the war, was that since in the Southern states "the execution of the laws of the United States was obstructed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or the powers vested in marshals" he could call out the State Militias.

Aug 19, 2009 - 7:29 am

Comment on The Belmont Club,"Heat beneath the dome"

It is possible for an aristocratic state actor to enter a war with the expectation that it will lose. That is possibly how Spain behaved in the run up to the Spanish American War. It is even easier for a non-state actor to provoke a war without the expectation of a conventional victory. Think of the small dog in the run who causes trouble and then runs behind its owner or the rest of the pack. You can just hear them say, "OK Dad now it is your turn." Hezbollah is writing checks for others to cash.

My view since 2001 has been that the boil should have been lanced first in Damascus. The Sunnis everywhere will be delighted if the Syrian Alawite regime is destroyed. The Iraqis, including most Shia should feel relieved if the Iranian proxy to their rear is dispatched. The Turks would benefit by no longer facing Russian encirclement. Israel should avoid the planned trap and strike at the strings (Syria) between the puppet (Hezbollah) and the puppet masters (Iran/Russia).

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Take your medicine"

The best friends that The Republic have are the friends of Barack Obama and time. The face of the nomenklatura is now Howard Dean. This is good. The MSM got this crowd into power by keeping everyone focused on the smiling face of BHO and his post card children. It was like a hypnotism trick or a magician's sleight of hand. Michelle vanished for the election. Some very brave soul must have the job of being her keeper.

The more they try to do the more the public will get to see the mob, Dean, Emmanuel and a score of other hateful thugs slavering at the bit like wolves, and always hovering behind the curtain, Soros. Think about it, Howard Dean, the crazy Doctor, the failed candidate, the man who left his church because they would not give up land for a pet cause. We want the public to see more of him and remember why he was a loser.

They know that time is their enemy. That is why they desperately used lies and panic to ram through the Stimulus and seized the auto industry. They knew that if they didn't get someone as unqualified as Satomayor onto the SCOTUS fast they never would. They have to push the seizure of health care through before the second slump hits.

It is possible that the off year elections in ten weeks will show that the tide is running out for them.
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Roderick Reilly,
Kevorkiacracy,
That is excellent. We need to buy or build billboards everywhere. Right now CBS/Viacom has a lock on that industry. My idea is simple graphics, photos of Emmanuel and Dean one or two others (hold off on using Obama's image until he goes down another 10 points in the polls) with a stark slogan,
Merchants of Death.

The same tactic should be used with images of Dodd and Franks and Rezco and Gorelick. Their slogan,
Poverty Pimps.

Then watch the lawyers and local governments and media go crazy trying to shut it down.

The editorial from the NYT that ran the "General Betray Us" ad will be a joy to read. We could start writing it now ourselves for fun.

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luddy barsen,
(who linked to a story of suicide advocacy at the VA from NRO)
Is there no peer review panel or state licensing board that can look at the doctor and pull his plug?

The difference between a Physician and a Veterinarian is that a Physician is sworn to preserve human life and a Veterinarian is sworn to relieve animal suffering. It looks like someone needs a career change but is to arrogant to admit their mistake so they want to make the rest of the world change to please them.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The cloudy crystal ball"

Many years ago my undone thesis foundered on my disinclination to cobble together a story based on numbers reported by the Chinese government. How big a threat will China become? The counsel of our fears tells us to expect the worst. There could be blue water fleets with red flags sweeping South and East in a replay of the Japanese effort of almost seventy years ago. Faced with the hollow shell of Russia to the North and the resource pools weakly controlled by barbarians to the South-West the Chinese could send forth million man armies in vast columns to grab in a replay of the Mongol conquests of almost a thousand years ago. But a small voice made me hesitate to tell a story based on numbers that are unreliable.

How big is the chinese economy? The truth is that no one knows. Mao constructed a system in which everyone had a powerful incentive to lie about how many eggs the chickens were laying. On a previous thread it was noted that Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich showed how communism made it more rational to lie then to tell the truth to authority. We have problems with our Generally Accepted Accounting Principles based business model in America but on a basic level we can believe that real numbers are available for judging the state of a firm or of the economy. In the case of China the picture is much murkier. We can get information on resources consumed as a rough guide to what is going on in there. The authorities themselves are probably facing the same problem. What, they must ask themselves, if they are in the same fix that Saddam was in? They could end up giving orders to move nonexistent divisions and fire inoperable missiles that their own agents had fooled both the Americans and them into believing in.

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The good news is that under Obama's leadership the American economy will become as corrupt and opaque as the Chinese. We can hope that the resulting uncertainty about conditions here will cause foreign adversaries to hesitate before challenging us. The American, Russian and Chinese governments will have to devote CIA sized resources to teasing out what will really be happening in the new socialist America. What a brilliant stroke on Obama's part. That should keep us safe for years.

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I was just looking at the latest Daily Presidential Tracking Poll from Rasmussen Reports. http://tinyurl.com/5tnd2b
It looks to me like there is a story in those lines that someone who uses technical analysis on the stock market could get into. Personally I think that much of that is Voodoo because the Easter Bunny told me so. If I had the money to invest I would try one of two radical decision making systems instead. One is rarely used but has been known to work, it is called doing your homework. The other with a distinguished pedigree is called darts.

Now getting back to the fortunes of BHO. Currently the spread, called the "Approval Index" is at minus 7 and it has varied between minus 3 and minus 11 over the last month. It appears that over the last 6 months about 10% of the electorate has withdrawn their previously highly favorable opinion of the current occupant of the White House. During the same period twice as many voters, fully an additional 20%, have shifted to expressing a strongly negative view of Obama. While there are constant perturbations in the daily polls these shifts appear to be permanent. That means that the moderate middle is shrinking and turning against the present administration. Excuse the use of allusions but I do not want to say President, the word under present circumstances sticks in my craw. Another possibly interesting point is that while the general trend of the rise in the strong negatives is fairly constant the pattern over time of the decline in his strong favorable rating is more complex. The line appears to descend in a series of sudden breaks of 3 to 5 points, followed by a partial recovery and then by another drop. This step function quality shows that response is being effected by the White House's efforts to fight back and spin the story after each shock but that those efforts are ultimately unavailing.

To me it looks like each downward step represents another segment of the cobbled together Democratic coalition of 2008 that has peeled off. The more linear path of the rise of the strong negatives to me shows that the forces moving against the administration are broad based and are not the result of astroturfing or the controlled manipulation of discreet constituencies. If these trends continue then it looks like that by November to January another 5 points will have peeled of of his high favorables and another 7 to 10 points will have shifted into the strong negative camp.

All of this is happening before the second wave of economic contraction that I fear will be triggered by the bad debt run up by the deficits. As our genial host has pointed out here, we can not count on China to fund Obama's binge.

Aug 17, 2009 - 10:50 am

On: "Pentagon Worries Led to Command Change"

Interesting WP article on the firing of Gen. McKiernan in Afghanistan. The WaPo tries mightily to spin things as an exoneration of Obama but the message is clear that political connections are all that count now.

The best comment I read was to the effect that we started this war with Clinton's generals and that Obama and company will conduct another purge in favor of the morally dubious who specialize in politically connected projects at the expense of combat capability. Right now BHO is throwing resources at the new team that the Congress would have fought giving the old team but there is no credibility in the American regime. The smell of defeat hangs over us and the allies that were cultivated by Bush and his generals, even as they carped and foot dragged, will now cut and run. The partisans of the left are shrill and desperate in their efforts to assign responsibility for their disasters to Booooosh.

The question that remains is what are the of new team like? Is McChrystal another Weasley Clark? Is he a good man who just wants his shot at getting a job done? Does anybody know?
HT/Instapundit

Note: BC posted a thread on this topic, "Just attacking in another direction." Future comments will be copied to here.

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Habu,
(who questioned the number of comments on a popular culture topic)
We need a moral purpose for our struggle here at home as much as the Pashtun do in Afghanistan. The thread about "Mad Men" was to me a discussion of, “What are we fighting for?” Any topic is instantly transubstantiated into a higher cause by being discussed in the Belmont Club. This place purifies by contact, Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Gay Talese related the story in The Kingdom and the Power of how appalled some people were by the Times' coverage of a tabloid ready scandal in New Jersey, complete with politicians, girlfriends and money. When challenged at a cocktail party with a "How could you?" a senior Timesman drew himself up and proclaimed, "When they do it, it is sex. When we do it, it is sociology."

Aug 17, 2009 - 8:34 pm

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luddy barsen,
(who gave my comments unwarranted praise)
Aww Gee, right back at you Big Guy.
Now if only I can get myself taken seriously by a man with a job, or at least money, or a woman with, well anything. That reminds me of my college roommate who one night yelled up at the ceiling, "Two eyes and a lung XXX. Two eyes and a lung. That's all I'm asking for." Considering who he ended up marrying he can't complain that the Lord wasn't listening.
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Has anyone been following this story? Russia: Missing ship found, crew OK. Anyone in Hollywood who isn't seeing a movie in this should be fired. The "Pitch Session" could be right out of Robert Altman's The Player. "We can't miss, I'm thinking of Angelina Jolie as The Slippery SEAL."

Comments on The Belmont Club,"You just might find"

bogie wheel,
(who quoted Spielberg on the popularity of dinosaurs)
They’re big, they’re mean, and they’re dead.

Mad Men is a Western. Only unlike the noble Indians in John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn they don't have Richard Widmark to explain things to the audience.

Clint Eastwood made two movies about Iwo Jima.

The audience gets to choose which side they identify with.

Hollywood could put out a remake of High Noon from the viewpoint of the crazy killer Frank Miller.

At one time Hollywood was part of a culture self confident enough to treat fairly with the "other" while still respecting the community that nurtured them. Think of The Bridge on the River Kwai where Sessue Hayakawa gives a fine three dimensional portrait of Colonel Saito without expecting the audience to cheer him or the Japanese Army on.

Women did not always make up abusive fantasy figures. Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey, and fell in love with him.

Perhaps she was the exception and the pattern was set by Mary Shelley in Frankenstien.


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What do women want?
A Prehistoric Man.


Ann Miller works for me, makes me want to beat my chest.

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It seems to me that there is no popular equivalent for young men of Mad Men/Sex in the City or post modern bodice rippers for women that, reducing men to the role of casual sperm donors, glorify hedonism and bastardy. Pulp for men in the mass market tends to not so much denigrate women as ignore them. The overt reduction of women to objects is largely confined to the niche markets (large as they might be) of pornography and rap.
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bogie wheel,
Okay, I’ll bite. In what sense is it a Western?

First as I have made clear I do not receive cable television and have only seen an episode or two of Mad Men.

As is well known (there is a tool of a phrase from the Old Left) there are only a handful of basic plots. For example My Fair Lady and Frankenstein are really the same story. King Kong is the same story as Beauty and the Beast. What makes for a Western? To me it needs a wilderness, a line between law abiding society and a savage zone, with a protagonist who can cross the line; bringing knowledge from one place into another but never completely at ease in either. If the story is simply about a primitive in their own place then it may be an interesting anthropological study (like Nanook of the North) but it is not a Western. The struggle between Law and the Wild can be set in many times and places, America, Japan (they instantly saw the connection), or Sumeria (think about Gilgamesh) or the future in Planet of the Apes. However John Wayne was spectacularly wrong about a film about Genghis Khan working as a Western. The story can work in reverse, with the primitives visiting civilization and they or those they encounter succeeding by adapting outside techniques to the new location. That was the idea behind Crocodile Dundee. The attempt to bring the Insurance Cave Men to television flopped but if done right it would have had the elements of the meeting between the ordered and the wild with growth happening. The idea of change happening because of the encounter is essential. As I said it cannot be a passive observation or travelogue. As I see it Mad Men is doing the same thing that Dundee did only here there are more primitives and they are home grown instead of imported. The women enjoy seeing them navigate through the corporate jungle and play with forks. What do they learn from us? What can we learn from them?
Aug 16, 2009 - 9:03 pm

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If we are going to talk about sex then we should talk about the consequences. This is worth looking at.
Childrens Parties An Adults Survival Guide,

BTW, I provoked a dhimmi or agent on Roger Kimball’s PJM blog post on Yale to amusing hauteur. His response reads like Charlie Gibson talking down his nose.
Aug 16, 2009 - 9:16 pm

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luddy barsen,
(BTW your new name has the air of Barsoom about it)

I am confident that Roger Kimball can handle any pretentious visitor from the Columbia Junior Faculty lounge or International and Public Affairs students taking a break from their 8th year of work on their dissertations. Still the thought of a delegation from the Belmont Club striding in there like the Ghostbusters cheers the heart.
Aug 16, 2009 - 10:01 pm

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Richard Aubrey,
Jesus Saves but Moses Invests. We who believe in life can have a future in despite of those who believe in death. The demographics regarding the immigrant groups the left depend on are not the same as those of professional liberals with one designer baby. The Left thinks that they can support their indulgences with imported labor. They will find, as the Europeans are finding, that the new workers aren't going to be happy toiling down on the plantations for the liberal Masters. Some on the Left may think that their families will survive as a sort of American aristocracy, like the Kennedys, and some just truly don't give a damn about what happens after they die. Worse are some who get a thrill from creating a nightmare future for others to live in. They are capable of anything.

Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?
Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?
Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future. Now, where's the girl? I want the only daughter I've got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Jake Gittes: Who do you blame for that? Her?
Noah Cross: I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING.
/IMDB, Chinatown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yJJWXhXbuI&feature=related
Aug 18, 2009 - 8:06 am

Comment on PJM, Roger Kimball"Yale & the Danish Cartoons: The Plot Thickens"

Is it possible for Ms Klausen to declare Yale in Breach of Contract and withdraw her book from YUP? Is there no other house out there willing to jump at a chance to take a book with built in publicity that promises to sell a quantum multiple of the usual scholarly text?

All the Islamists have is Other People's Money. They produce nothing. Soon improved power generation systems, think small nuke plants, and new production technologies will reinvigorate the West and relegate these barbarians back to obscurity.

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Terry Hughes,
Are you for real or are you a conservatives straw man parody of the anguished politically correct apologist for any assault on Western Civilization? Why any image of Muhammed was removed from any location is beyond my knowledge, and based on your hand waving use of the information the reason is beyond your knowledge also. Images of the bloody pederast were once added to many courthouses for three reasons.

1) 19th century Imperial display. We dominate all these people so let us display their symbols. A sort of historical zoo of anthropology. The Germans were intending to do that with the peoples they exterminated in WW-II.

2) As a hopeful gesture. Just as we often praise children not for what they have done but for what we want them to do we often are arrogant enough to choose positive images for people to relate to and then construct a story of their compatibility with our values that we hope everybody will accept. This rarely works. It breeds complacency and ignorance on the part of the dominant community while instilling resentment and contempt in the community being patronized.

3) Genuine ignorance and a fashion to feign erudition by seeking wisdom in distant places. This is similar to the current vogue among American jurists for citing the opinions of foreign courts when interpreting US law.

This does not mean that I deny the benefits of truly studying the works of philosophers and scholars from other cultures. When done properly they can be a source of inspiration and incisive commentary. For example I have no problem with any display featuring the Buddha or Confucious that precedes from a more serious impulse then the ones I gave above.

If an image of Muhammed was removed it was probably not done before 9-11 due to any respect for Moslem sensibilities. At least I would hope that any statement to that effect was issued as a throw away gesture. Images of the Butcher of Yathrib should be removed from the Temples of Justice because they do not belong there. He is unworthy of the honor.

My last comment form 3 hours ago is still in moderation. Hopefully this and that will be released.

Aug 15, 2009 - 11:06 pm

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The work of William Sloane Coffin at Yale has born fruit. Parasites always are surprised and angered when the host collapses beneath them.

Terry Hughes,
To pile on my point here. It is not the job of the Yale University Press to publish

an instrument advancing reason and tolerance among the people who one should most want to reach.

Nor is it their proper function to strenuously avoid being

excluded from internal debate among many more conservative Islamic people.

It is there job to publish scholarship and assist in the proper functioning of a research university community. That simple task, if properly performed, will produce an example of reason and tolerance, of civil discourse and intellectual productivity, that will shine like a light into dark places and invite those lost in ignorance to experience the benefits of Lux et Veritas.

Aug 15, 2009 - 11:42 pm

Comments on The Belmont Club "When good people turn bad"

Liberals like to talk about "Stakeholders" using the word like one of those meaningless small filler words that you find in Southern German. It is supposed to denote some level of caring for empowering those with an interest but no actual stake in an enterprise in determining policy. It is an example of the substitution of politics for economics and the denigration of property rights. Good managers like Mr Mackay, unlike Left wing poseurs, actually care about their various constituencies. If you talk to a successful businessman they will usually want to talk about their responsibility to not only the customers and the stockholders but also to the employees. At work I was talking with one of our older workers about the disappointing work ethic of the younger staff. He is a presumably gay older man and a retired interior decorator. I mentioned that I believed his political allegiances were to the left of mine but that we tended to agree on the important issues regarding personal conduct. He vigorously agreed and pointed out that he had run his own business at 21 and had employed many people. He knew what worked and how people should behave in a workplace.

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Mad Fiddler,
Last I heard they were instituting vouchers. No vouchers for education but vouchers for gov't cash that ends up with the UAW. This sounds ready made to propagate a whole new crop of shady brokers with Chicago style ethics.
Now Bub youse jest sign right heahr to show that you has owned dis fine ah means this clunker automobile for the requisite time and my cousin over at motor vehicles will adjust those records with just a few strokes of his fingers, Good now that's alright. Wonderful things computers jest wonderful. Now here be your check for $1,000 and I will just take voucher for $4,500. Pleasure doing business with you, have a nice day and yes please do send your cousin around to see me.

Followed by:

Sal my friend of course I have the vouchers, right here in my hands. What will you give me for them? $2,000 each? That's fine, real fine Sal. I'll bring them right over. You say you need them today because the cars are being shipped out of the country tomorrow? No problem.

The articles expressing shock at these future events are like obituaries. They can be written in advance.

Remember, We're all going to get rich!

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PA Cat,
(who linked to this image of Nietsche and a lover)

Thanks for the image of Salome as she did not dance. She seems such a nice girl.
Perhaps this explains Friedrich's later compulsion to rescue an abused horse at his own breakdown?
Given a choice between a girl named Lou and Nietzche's sister it becomes a close call.

herb,
(who was offered edit links on another users comments)
Is this a warning sign of Multiple Personality Disorder?

I'm not schizoid.
Yes I am.
No I'm not.

Definition of an Ensign. Argues with himself. Loses the argument.

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JJRedfan and Alexis,
(who were comparing network news staff to "cheap whores")
This depends on what your definition of “cheap” is. I tried to do some quick searching on how much the news division swallows and excretes in pay. We are clearly talking about tens of millions of dollars here. You have to sell a heck of a lot of cars and insurance and whatever pays for network news (don’t ask me since I don’t watch it) to feed this baggage train and all its camp followers.

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In my small hometown I go once a week to Fairway, they have the best chicken pot pies at a decent price and the blintzes are also very good and competitive. Everything else costs more then similar stuff elsewhere and if you pay retail here they should deport you.

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Doug,
(who quoted a screed from the spouse of a gender changer)
Bet she takes advice from Arianna Huffington too.

bert,
(who compared the moral vanity of the Left to 17 year olds)
Well put, the voting age should be moved back to 21 or better yet return to the original "Head of Household" franchise. No gender or other arbitrary restrictions in the law but only the self sufficient should get to vote. In the meantime we need a law that prevents a husband from entering the booth to "help" his wife. Why should some jerk from Whackystan get multiple votes by showing up with his wife(ves) and family?

Trader Joe's does alright out of Manhattan and as I said we have Fairway here. Think I will go down to Union Square today and pick up a $2 tomato.

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As everyone knows, there are two types of people,
1) those who classify everyone into one of two types of people, and
2) those who do not.

I am in the second category.

Aug 15, 2009 - 10:06 am

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luddy barsen,
(who noted that 109 Americans were KIA in Vietnam during Woodstock)
Age shall not dim them. They are with us as long as there are those who remember and they are in the company of brothers.

The great divide coming out of Vietnam was between those who went into the military and those who went to Yasgur's farm. Sure there were a few like Kerry who infiltrated what they already saw as the other side but they did so knowing where the line was and on which side they belonged. Forty years later the enablers of Ayers have burrowed in and control the commanding heights. Through the subversion of the educational system they have prepared their heirs to follow in their footsteps.

The lesson that everybody understood was that LBJ made his greatest error when he attempted to fight a war while feeding The Great Society. Not just because the policies were wrong but because they promoted a sense of normalcy and relativism in which domestic experiments were equated with national security in demanding the Federal government's attention. Indeed they soon surpassed the scope of the traditional sectors of government. In so doing they gave employment and power to an entire army that existed not only separate from the agents of the traditional government in the internationally focused departments of DoD, DoS and Treasury but in rivalry to them. Partly this happened because LBJ sought to buy support with domestic spending and partly this was because of his frozen worship of FDR that drove him to attempt to emulate in 5 years what FDR did with the New Deal and WW-II over 13 years. The fact was that the New Deal, which was a failure, ended with the entry of America into the war.

Bush 43 repeated LBJ's error when he failed to mobilize the nation and attempted to buy domestic tranquility by throwing money at special interest programs that fed his enemies. FDR might have been a second class mind but his first class temperament made him know that you had to mobilize the American people for war. If we had Frank Roosevelt in charge in 2001 then we would have had Hollywood, PC be damned, cranking out cartoons, comedies and melodramas ridiculing Islamic culture. Further, illegal aliens and Saudis would have been rounded up and deported before Christmas. Finally he would have tossed half the university's faculties into uniform and bullied the rest into silence. FDR never entered a fight to engage in a process. Whether you liked him or not and whether you agreed with his policies or not, he fought to win.

Sometimes Conservatives get so wrapped up in our justifiable admiration of Winston Churchill that we slight the leadership and tough mindedness that FDR brought to the war. He employed many woolly headed ideologues whose progeny (Ickes for example) blight the landscape. It is my belief that he would never have spent political capital pushing for immigration amnesty in wartime.

Aug 15, 2009 - 7:03 pm

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For the record today in Union Square I saw Heirloom Tomatoes on sale for $4.75/lb and less prestigious cousins going for $2.75/lb.. Heirloom indeed, at those prices they should be bronzed and put in a vault.

Reminds me of the obviously old story of the businessman who returned to the head office after big trip. His buddy thought he looked ill so he tactfully asked how it went and the answer was,
Wonderful, marvelous, everything was great.
Really? Where did you go?
Didn't have to go anywhere, stayed in the hotel, the restaurant, the meetings, everything was right there.
That sounds nice and convenient. So the firm arranged a good hotel for you?
Good hotel? It was the best. Six star hotel. The card on the back of the door said it cost $200 a night.
Two hundred dollars! Was it a nice room? Did it have a comfortable bed?
I tell you everything was perfect. I never felt a more comfortable bed in my life.
Well I'm glad to hear that, at least you must have gotten a good night's sleep.
Sleep? Are you crazy? At those prices I didn't want to miss a second!

Aug 15, 2009 - 7:31 pm

Comments on The Belmont Club "The price of information"

wretchard,
So Dan goes fishing in the government waters. After all, if they make them an offer, then they might be tempted to accept.

Both sides should low ball the offers under the following reasonable standard.
I have already determined what you are. Now we are just dickering over the price.

Both sides would raise the offers under the following time tested standard.
Other people's money.

The problem with the Internet is that it was designed as a piggy-back or parasite on other communications systems. The money should be in the provider not in the content. That was historically true for most communications. The railroads were worth more then the grain and cattle they shipped and they shipped people for almost nothing. Merchant shipping at sea was worth more then the bulk that got moved around. Otherwise Onassis wouldn't have gotten near Jacqueline Kennedy. The Internet does not offer similar opportunities. If it did then the operators of the infrastructure would subsidize the content providers, the same way that Onassis made money shipping oil with Panamanian flagged tankers.

Sometimes the profit is in a surprising corner of a business. Before the havoc wrought by the anti-trust judgement in the 1940s the multi billion dollar American movie studio industry was really just a shill for a popcorn and candy counter operation. The New York Times has been described as a money losing front for a profitable Canadian logging business.

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Discovered, The Inspector General, with Health Care.
Obama's Magic Elixer.

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It makes no sense to me that people pay for cable TV when they can get 90% or more for free on the internet. If the Left was relying on the MSM as a meme injector then the shift to digital was an act of self destruction. How many are now disconnected and learning to live with it?

Aug 14, 2009 - 10:31 pm

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Mad Fiddler,
(who praised Drudge for getting out the Monica Lewinsky story)
A difference between then and now.

Then, the MSM was caught by surprise and when NewsWeek tried to bury the story thousands of writers, editors, producers and reporters, most of whom were liberals, clung to memories of watching The Front Page and followed the story. It wasn't only broken by the minions of the extreme right. The damage control on the Left came late, after the facts got out.

Now (or at least a year ago), the MSM was well prepared and when word got out that the Los Angelas Times was sitting on a video of candidate Barack Obama at a party for Palestinian activist Khalid Rashidi that could blow his entire campaign right out of the water they clung together and helped bury the story. That video is in the same incinerator as his college files and passport records.

Aug 15, 2009 - 4:39 pm

Comments on The Belmont Club "Anything I own"

Every day at what laughably I can call work I see the relentless socializing of the 20 somethings. Their focus is completely on exchanging networking connections for future benefit via the exchange of opinions regarding sports or music or clothes or sex or drugs or at the shallowest level politics. Note that at the same time they can be displaying an appearance, unshaven, funny shoes, possibly offensive graphics on their T shirts, that show no interest or focus on how the real customer will perceive them. This is genetic. There is some evolutionary benefit in having the species go through an adolescent phase in which this sort of grooming builds community and supports pair bonding. Perhaps at the level of neurology there is some connection between the sense of affirmation the adolescent receives from approval, in the form of dopamine, and the vulnerability to substance abuse that we explored in previous threads.

What is happening in the case of Paglia is an inability to move on and individualize her existence. This may relate to the declining rate of stable monogamous bonding in our society. The pair bond empowers the individual and permits it a greater space in which to maneuver separate from the collective.

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RWE,
The bracing shock of reality that Victor Bolenko experienced when he saw the aircraft carrier is one reason that I believe in 6 months of universal basic military service. The professional officer corps hates the idea but I think it would help many cross the great divide between childhood and being an adult.

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presbypoet,
Democrats give you what you want, and think it’s what you need.
Republicans give you what you need, and think it’s what you want.

And you can't always get what you want,
Honey, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime, yeah,
You just might find you get what you need!

- M. Jagger & K. Richards

wretchard,
(who quoted Harry the King on leadership and group bonding)
May I claim dibs on all quotes from Henry V?

Conservatives do believe in group bonding and social dynamics. Anybody who does not believe that has not been in the military. What is annoying about the social networking of the Left is the shallowness of it. What would they do if one day Obama was revealed to be as wizened a fraud in a wig as Michael Jackson was? Would they destroy Jack Kennedy because he had Addison's disease? Would they accept an FDR today? Is there a narrower and less tolerant community anywhere then leadership of the Democratic Party? They make the Chinese Politburo look inclusive and broadminded by comparison.

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PA Cat,
(who pointed out you cannot be an Alpha to a cat)
One of life’s mysteries is that women tend to prefer cats and men tend to prefer dogs. There are no firm rules on this and I for one appreciate both but as a general principle there is something to the proposition. Yet cats are far less communitarian then dogs are. Dogs live for the pack. They are nature’s stakhanovites. If anything cats are a distillation of the selfish indeed purely narcissist carnivore that uses and abuses women.

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mac,
(who quoted Yaacov Ben Moshe)
"Virtue" was what inspired Robespierre the Incorruptible. His sincere minions were intending to replace God with Reason or The Supreme Being. In the name of Virtue anything is possible. The virtuous man, like Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness has no restraints at all.

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RCM,
(who pointed out how rural life encourages responsibility and community)
Concur, note you can't concat.

The literature on small group cohesion was based on studies of the German Army IIRC.
It was considered a correction to the myth that Prussian militarism and the spirit of Fredrick the Great was behind the German successes in both world wars. What the research results emphasized was the importance of good front line leadership, that is to say the sergeants. It also helps to remember that the nazis were not a Prussian /lutheran/ aristocratic outfit. They were at heart Austrian and Bavarian /catholic and petit bourgeoisie

Comment on The Belmont Club "Opium barons"

herb,
By your calculations the local farmer is making three times as much as people around him and the Headman must be making some multiple of that. No wonder they needed to be supplied Viagra™, to handle their popularity. We should have laced the stuff with whatever the CIA tried to use on Fidel’s beard. Honestly I would start a rumor that anyone who has swallowed anything provided by the Americans has “ingested Judaism.” This would divide the tribal leaders into three camps.
1) Those who go bonkers and start slaughtering each other to purge
     the stain in blood.
2) Those who desperately try to prove they are more Islamic then
     their neighbors, but who will never be trusted by anyone.
3) Those who realize that their bridges are burned and go whole hog,
     so to speak, in renouncing Islam.

One reason that Moslems are so paranoid is that they know that the submission to their authority is wide but shallow. The failure to provide for spiritual, moral or temporal satisfaction, except through bursts of self destructive violence, makes the whole edifice of Islam a house of cards. As an enterprise it could rapidly go into reverse and unravel. That is one reason that I was so dissapointed in the installation of theocratic constitutional structures in Iraq and Afghanistan under American sponsorship back in 2003/04.

Helmand could use several hundred high desert savvy agronomists with an alternative spiritual message. My suggestion is that we send in the Mormons.

Three Questions for Lee Kuan Yew

The Wobbly Guy,
(who asked for questions to ask at a dinner on September 2nd)
Ask him what he admires most about the West. Ask him how if we don't believe in ourselves then how can we get anyone else to believe in us? Ask him if he sees a path forward for renewal?

Posted on the bottom of the BC thread, "Bolt from the red, white and blue."

Natan Scharansky has a new home.

Credit due to CJ of LGF for advertising this. Natan Scharansky has a new home, the Adelson Institute.

Once I had the honor to shake his hand, after I inspected him. A handful of people brought down the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, Scharansky, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Sakhrov and Thatcher. We are in their debt. Scharansky is the last still fighting the good fight.

Comment on The Belmont Club "The Opium War"

The turn around in Iraq started with the interdiction of the rat lines. Afghanistan is a different war but some things are basic. Petreaus knows his craft. Regarding the drugs, I repeat my desire that we can find some biological agent that will destroy the crop. Regarding the culture of the villagers, they exhibit the boundless self pity and fatalism that Islam teaches them. The long term solution is to introduce a moral agent that is the equivalent in the human heart of what the biological instrument will be to the economic threat of the opium. We need to insert and support missionaries and change the culture. We need to change the culture domestically also. We must make the world safe for free people with free thoughts. Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Tao, Bahai or Hindu; all must be welcome.

Comments on the Drug Trade

These are additional comments on the last Belmont Club thread regarding Afghanistan and the Drug War, so I am posting them here lest they be lost in the end of a thread.

My fondest hope is that the Plum Island gang can come up with some virus, bacterium or fungus that will eradicate 90% of the world opium crop. Addicts lack Free Will and without that they are less than human. Without Free Will a person is a slave and a slave is incapable of participating as a member of a soveriegn political community.
Aug 11, 2009 - 7:02 am

-------
Almost twenty years ago when NYC was overrun by crack cocaine I learned that most of the trade came from a couple of small cities in the Dominican Republic. The NY Times ran an article detailing the wealth that the drug trade brought to the town of San Francisco de Macoris, complete with satellite dishes and fancy cemeteries, Dominican Journal; Filthy Rich With a New York Cocaine Connection. It made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now that we destroy the fancy houses and cemetery monuments paid for with the blood of our citizens.
Aug 11, 2009 - 9:17 pm

Comment on The Belmont Club "The bolt from the red, white and blue"

Let me try to wrap my brain around this. If we can get someone to prove the Unified Conspiracy Theory then there would need to be evidence that Diageo, the beverages conglomerate planning on closing a Johnny Walker plant in Scotland, is secretly linked to the Taliban supporting entrepreneurs of intoxication in Quetta. The clincher would be the exposure of their plans to start marketing a new product with a green and purple label blended with essence of analgesics and aromatic wormwood. So if we send a Predator to target the headquarters of the spirits company at 8 Henrietta Place, LONDON, W1G ONB (a very nice address indeed) will that result in the Afghan poppy crop being devoted to needs of medical research? Will its profits be diverted to fund a single payer health care system? Will happy Scottish voters rally behind the beleaguered Americans?

I think I need a drink.

Comment on PJM, Jon Rosenthal"The Trouble with Mary Robinson"

EdGI,
(who noted that Robinson allowed UN facilities to be used to help Saddam)
You raise an interesting point. Follow the money. Did Mary Robinson profit from “Oil for Food?” While the law practices of herself and her spouse may be successful it is unclear to me how she has obtained her considerable wealth. She is now part of the anti-semitic sewer that has been entrenched at Columbia University. The International Affairs school there under John Coatsworth has become an open sore. Who sponsored her? Who paid the bills and who benefits? Robinson represents a trifecta as she demonstrates the links between Columbia (where she is with Coatsworth and others who have drawn attention, as when Ahmadinejehad was invited and where there have been a series of anti-semitic incidents), Harvard (where both she and Obama went to law school), and Chicago (where both Obama and Coatsworth were employed).

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The wheel of misfortune

Most societies have faced the problem of how to dispose of surplus unskilled labor without succumbing to self destruction by internalized violence. Note that the internal violence to be avoided can come from either the bottom, that is by civil unrest or from the top, by massive repression. The second eventually fails as the repressive apparatus impinges on the creativity of the productive members of society. The former can become a cancer that eventually can threaten the larger society.

Historically there have been two ways of disposing of the surplus unskilled labor.
1) Through externalized violence, that is war. This is the Islamic solution. Declare the outside world Dar al Harb and send your young men off to be killed.

2) Through emigration. The record shows that this can work although the provider by doing so transfers away the potential creativity of the most risk accepting, and therefor most desirable, members of the marginally productive classes that are willing to make the journey. Mexico is commonly believed to be able to avoid explosion only by using the United States as a safety valve for ambitious but unskilled labor it cannot provide opportunities for.

Unfortunately there is not another empty Australia out there for the US to colonize with the 30% of our population who are net consumers. We can reverse the flow of new immigrants and deport the 12 million current illegals but they include some of our most potentially productive future citizens.

One question that needs to be settled first is who is a productive member of society? If whiskey is right then the straight white male creates massive wealth that everyone else eats from but the unproductive groups are seeking to destroy that wealth producing group. If he is exaggerating or Clark is correct then the knowledge workers are creating real wealth and the struggle between NASCAR proletarian whites and other groups is only over the spoils, with the descendants of Europeans and their judeo-christian culture having no superior claim. The one answer that is sure not to work is Marxism because it destroys the wealth creating potential of the society that will be needed under any circumstance.

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JMH,
(who pointed out the beneficial effects of the bubonic plague)
Your point is taken but I will quibble for pedantry”s sake. The Black Death was an event but not an emulatable methodology. That is unless you believe the Emmanuel brothers really do have a plan for reducing the surplus population.

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wretchard,
That’s why the object of every modern totalitarianism is to alienate man from transcendence.

My lessons on Maoist Totalism were taught by a wonderful gentleman named Tang Tsou, who is best remembered (if he is known at all) for America's Failure in China, 1941-1950. The key is the extinction of the sense of the self before the omnipotence of the State. It does not limit itself to breaking links to other possible moral guides and does not necessarily begin there. The elimination of all human bonds, even to the denigration of the most basic and physical such as sex, is basic to the totalitarian project. Remember in The Killing Fields when the child destroyed the link on the chalk drawing between the child stick figure and the parent stick figures? The elimination of God may be seen as a prerequisite that allows that to happen or it may be that the dissolution of the family and human bands is a precondition that prepares the atomized individual to surrender to a jealous Leader that will tolerate no other gods. The first text that I would recommend to anyone interested in the theory of totalitarianism would be William Kornhauser's The Politics of Mass Society.

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907ie,
You Work You Eat. You Don’t Work You Don’t Eat.

That is pure Leninism. There is nothing wrong with charity if it is done as an expression of human empathy to protect the helpless or right an injustice. Charity however should never be confused with an intervention by the State.

Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia it has been a bedrock principle in our civilization that the government should have a monopoly on the use of violence. In America the 2nd Amendment exists to remind the government that soveriegnty, which is the right to use force to achieve a goal, rests with the citizenry. That does not mean that a resort to violence for private reasons is considered legitimate.

Since the State has this monopoly power it cannot also replace the private impulse to charity without trapping the citizenry into the dependant status of subjects.

Originally in early modern Europe what we considered charity was organized and undertaken by the Church which acted in this matter at the behest of the secular authority. Sometimes the balance of power shifted towards the more overtly theocratic and it appeared that the temporal powers were acting within their sphere of physical security as agents of the spiritual authority but the division of labor was clear.

When after the Reformation Christendom fractured and political structures found themselves hosting multiple spiritual communities it became impossible for one Established Church to perform all the social functions expected on behalf of the national authority. For example in England the bulk of the population became divided between three confessional communities, the Established Church of England, the proscribed Catholics and the Nonconformists of varying sects. The pressure for the State to assume responsibility for functions, such as education, hospitals and poor relief, that had been historically the responsibility of the Parish Councils came first from the Nonconformists who were represented by the Whigs, and then they were joined by the Catholics. Jews and other minority communities have gravitated to this model of the State as a neutral and secular bulwark against intervention by established faith.

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Mad Fiddler,
(who proposed dividing California into 5 or more parts)
When I was younger I read a science fiction story that took place on a planet that was supposed to be an enormous mental hospital. The gimmick was that after some catastrophe the inmates were running the asylum and they had declared their wards to be independent communities. However they still had to interact and get along, with each community displaying defects and assets peculiar to their signature affliction. For example all the Paranoids lived in Adolphville (named after A. Hitler) where they proved to be hard to get along with but capable of being decisive in a crisis. The schizophrenics were in another location. Maybe they were better at looking at both sides of a problem. Wish I could remember the author but your plan for California reminded me of it. You have a big idea there. We could even call it Epic.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The wisdom of Bill Maher

wretchard
I wonder sometimes if he isn’t really just smart enough to realize how lucrative it is to be dumb.
So smart parents who dream of big things for their children should advise them to choose the right role models. There is a three step program for success here.

1) Work hard in High School but be sure to devote enough of your time to organizing a series of fund raising drives (Colleges react to the prospect of future fundraising like Pavlov's dogs) and organizing (In a nod to the Wasp heritage leadership is still prized over productivity) volunteer projects for approved special victim classes. The elusive illegal alien lesbian disabled minority Aids patient needing tutoring is the gold star project but demands patience and a good set of binoculars to locate.

2) Once you are in Harvard things get better as you can focus on balancing the various networks you will depend on in the future.

3) After graduation be sure to get photographed wearing a diaper (for Maher it is a virtual diaper, but still) and run around declaring that preselected targets are evil and stupid. Then just watch the money and power role in.

-------
While at university I had a job handing out visitor passes at the medical complex. Usually I was posted at the entrance to the Lying In Hospital, where a neighborhood youth was hired to share the desk with a student employee. One day I opened the desk drawer and saw some tracts that someone had left there. As I closed the drawer I smiled and Terry (odd that I remember his name since I have a terrible memory for names) asked me a little sharply, "What's the matter "LifeOf"? Don't you believe in God?" My reply was, "Terry, I only worry if God believes in me."

john lynch
When smart people are wrong they are disastrously wrong
More damage is done by the immodest overachievers seeking to prove themselves then by the talented who fail to do their bit. The most dangerous man in the world is the Petty Officer 3rd Class who decides to fix the nuclear power plant to prove himself smarter then the Chief thinks he is.

Mongoose,
No one over 30 with a sound mind, spirit and soul can hold such idiotic notions of oneself
That is why healthy men need women, to have someone who can laugh at us and say, "You are kidding, aren't you? Because the answer is NO"

Otherwise you end up like the Jack Nicholson character in Carnal Knowledge. Liberal Narcissism is a form of sexual dysfunction I suspect. A craving for power to replace what is lacking inside.

-------
Bill Maher demands to be told exactly how much smarter he is then the rest of us before he will love us. (with language lesson)

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wretchard
(who proposed 3 axioms in seeking the meaning of the world)
May I propose a Fourth Axiom?
4. If at any time when determining this "meaning" you hear music connected with the Monty Python team, stop. Go out for a long walk and a sit down dinner. Then try again.

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Two thoughts from Winston Churchill apropos this topic. I am not researching the quotes for precision here.
1. Democracy is a terrible system but is better then every other system that has been tried.
2. All your illusions about Democray can be cured by a 5 minutes conversation with the average voter.

Aristotle broke political systems into three categories each of which had an ideal and a degenerate state. The ideals were Democracy, Aristocracy and Monarchy. Each in turn degenerated into Mob Rule, Oligarchy and Tyranny. Maher and company think they are the Platonic Philosopher KIngs. Aristotle pointed out that even in Greece that had a culture that exhalted the "beautiful and the good" the best aristos became merely the few oligos. We now have the worst of all three degenerations of politics coming together. A mob lead by a thuggish self appointed minority ruling arbitrarily.

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Syd,
Always trace your ideas back to reality.,
In the Navy I was taught that every instruction, directive or order must begin by citing all the sources of authority that grant legitimacy to the document. For example an order instructing the crew as to the Uniform of the Day would reference the Area Commander's orders, the Fleet Commander's orders, Commander Naval Surface Forces Pacific's instructions, Chief of Naval Operations Instructions, Naval Regulations and the Uniform Regulations.

Every Bill passed by Congress should include a clear statement as to where in the Constitution is found the authority for Congress to pass that law. Such a reference could serve as an instruction to the Court in how to handle an challenge to the law if it came before the court on appeal. Congress has the power under the Constitution to give the Court such instructions and limits. That is one reason why the doctrine of Judicial Review that has produced the Imperial Court is extra-constitutional. Of course the corollary of that is that if the Bill does not have such a clear statement of enabling authority then it should be deemed defective on its face and void.

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E. Nigma,
The faux intellectual ... believes that by thought (and sarcastic banter) alone he can summon up a new reality.

From The Tragedy of King Henry IV Part I, Act 3, scene 1, by W. Shakespeare:

GLENDOWER

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

GLENDOWER

Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil.

HOTSPUR

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

HT/ shakespeare.mit.edu
Quote begins at 10:10, http://tinyurl.com/nnum4n

Infestations of Glendowers have been faced down before.

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M. Simon,
(who thought I was a Navy nuclear engineer)
Not a nuke. Never lived in a sewer pipe. Although I have on occasion glowed in the dark.

bogie wheel,
(who cited left handed compliments, that are really insults)
Sometimes it works.

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

Get a new people
Fredrick the Great of Prussia, the most Enlightened ruler in Europe of his time, the archetype of the Benign Despot, patron of Voltaire, viewed his nation as an appendage to his army rather then the other way around. The enlightened Left have a similar view of the nation as an appendage of the Welfare State.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Who goes there?"

1) Donofrio's website should not be considered a reliable source on this, or probably any, issue.

2) There is a distinction between "Naturalized at Birth" which Congress has the power to define and "Natural Born Citizen." The later may not be seen by the Court as within Congress's ambit. The former applies to a child of a US citizen born overseas. The governing law has changed over time. As I read it this bill extends the status of "Naturalized at Birth" but I doubt it will be seen as determining "Natural Born Citizen" status. In this it is part of a series of such refinements of the immigration law.

The fly in all these gymnastics was the need to validate John McCain's status as he was born on Panamanian soil while his father was assigned to the Canal Zone. Personally I think that he should be deemed as Natural Born and if need be we should amend the Constitution to protect the children of service members and diplomats.

The worst features in American law are the family unification provisions and the lottery systems. Both are I believe the work of Ted Kennedy and they replace the concept that an immigrant is an applicant proving their value to America with the idea that citizenship is a prize randomly awarded that the US is not sufficiently sovereign to intelligently grant or withhold.

It also has not been definitely settled as to whether a Natural Born citizen losses that status, but not their citizenship, if as an adult they take an oath to a foreign power or claim foreign nationality to gain some benefit. Once again it just my opinion but I believe that they do. This would apply to Barack Obama if he traveled on a foreign passport after his 18th birthday or claimed a special benefit as a foreign student. This could also prove a problem for people who serve in a foreign military. Thousands of Americans served in the Canadian, British or Chinese (Claire Channault's Flying Tigers) forces during WW-II and many others have served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Congress should be able to make exemptions for specified service with an ally while preserving the general principle.

The SCOTUS has already determined that except maybe in extraordinary circumstances citizenship itself cannot be lost for persons whose birth established them as US citizens under the 14th Amendment.
This discussion at justicia.com closely tracks what I was taught at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. http://tinyurl.com/28z6px

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Until you have sat down to learn the web of changing immigration laws and the special categories that have been carved out for both nonimmigrant and immigrant visas you can have no idea how deliberately irrational it is. My favorite bit is the special visa category for critical defense workers, and fashion models. Why? Because that is how the law was written. Laws can be read like a story by an Anthropologist or excavated by an Archeologist. Every quirk has some back story that a Hollywood screen writer can imagine but which usually remains buried from sight. Was the above provision slipped in over a three martini lunch or because some staffer had a friend who wanted a date with a girl? The truth might be mundane but the possibilities are endless.

When I was at FLETC I sat in the back row of my classroom. To my left was a black man, very soft spoken and with an old fashioned sense of dignity, who was born in Georgia and lived as far North as you can get in Maine. He is older then I am and I am no longer young. There was one member of our class of 47 who was older and they no longer accept anyone of our age. As we were more or less following the power point on this topic and the instructor was droning away I was suddenly aware that my friend, and he was the person I usually studied with, was beating his fist on his desk and cursing. "God damn, God fucking damn. I want to kill." Now it may not speak well for me but I will confess that when an older but vigorous black man who has been trained in law enforcement techniques, including firearms and wrestling, declares that he wants to kill I feel somewhat unsettled, maybe even perturbed. So I asked "What is it?" or words to that effect. He replied, "I have been doing a man's work since I was 16 years old, and for what? To support this?" I put out my hand and said "Welcome to the Republican Party."

-------
One question that hasn't been asked about this story of the valiant efforts of these selfless families pushing for this law in the face of heartless bureaucracies is, Why? Another would be, Is it a good idea?

What the proposed law does is grant any citizen the right to adopt any person who is under the age of 18 and bring them to America. That grants private parties the power to completely circumvent the entire immigration review process. That process includes a medical examination that excludes many applicants. Can such people now get admitted to the United States and receive the new health benefits because someone decides ex cathedra to do so? There are other grounds for excludability. If an Immigration Officer determines that someone is "likely to become a public charge," that is a welfare recipient, then they can be excluded. Obama's Aunt not only overstayed her visa but would normally be excludable on the public charge grounds. Suppose the adopted youth was a member of a terror cell or other criminal organization? Suppose they were a prostitute? Once their citizenship is granted then they can not be excluded or denied entry into the United States.

Comment on PJM, Ron Rosenbaum"The best steak I ever had"

Getting back to a lighter note. It is important for us to occasionally appreciate a good steak for what it is. As Ziggy Freud may have said, a good cigar is sometimes just a smoke.

The best steak I ever had was when I was traveling across country as an Ensign some mumbled decades ago. Traveling cheap I stayed in BOQs and I ate at the Officer's Club at Offut Air Force Base. There I ordered the prime rib labeled on the menu as the "SAC cut." Shakespeare would be needed to do justice to that piece of meat. It must have veen 1½" thick and was simple perfection.

BTW, the BOQ was full up if I recall so they put me up for the night in Senior NCO housing at no charge. The Navy had no Bachelor Officers Quarters that were as opulent as the Air Force enlisted quarters. Amazing outfit, I understand they also fly planes.

Comment on Theo Spark,"Tea Parties too well dressed..."

Rhymes with Rich.

Always seemed a bad idea to me to have high inheritance taxes. Thought England suffered from the erosion if the landed gentry. Now I am thinking that wealth over twice the national average, not including working family farms or inventory in a business the heir has been employed in if not a minor, should face a high rate. America has the most useless parasite elites on Earth.

Comments on The Belmont Club"Punch back twice as hard"

wretchard,
He is confident in his Old Guard and strangely obsessed with conceding nothing; in retaining and extending all the ground he has taken; in standing fast. There must be no retreat.
May he meet his Stalingrad.

But in any prolonged face off with the amateurs they’ll discover that the newbies don’t stay newbies forever.
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars the superiority of the Spartiates in battle was such a given that the Athenians went to extraordinary lengths to avoid challenging it. Fighting Sparta was the ancient equivalent of the “land war in Asia.” It was also considered a given on both sides that the Athenian fleet was an invinceble strategic weapon. After 30 years of almost constant warfare the Athenians saw their fleet destroyed and the all the hoplites in the greek polis, who were really small farmers, had become battle hardened veterans. Ultimately the Spartans were defeated on land at Platea.

——-
I am reposting this from “In the interests of honest debate.”

One reason people got excited is that it was so unnecessary to run this, if taken at face value with best intentions, rumor collecting operation from the White House. Soros, who owns this administration, has already set up Factcheck.org and they have dozens of other media outlets toiling on their behalf. So why the need to drag in the symbol of the Executive Mansion? Was it just to rub salt in the wounds of conservatives? A variation of Clinton’s renting out the Lincoln bedroom to prove it is theirs now? Much of what happens seems to be designed by Axelrod and company to deliberately inflame the Right in order to discredit it.

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buckets,
(on comparing Obama to Sauron, who spied bad news in the palantir)
Is there anything JRR Tolkien didn’t peg exactly right, lo those many decades ago?

It never seemed to occur to kindly old Professor T to explore either whiskey's culturally masochistic women or the human drive for technical innovation. His societies were remarkably static both physically and culturally. That was understandable for his creatures that are essentially immortal but seems to leave out a big part of what motivates human activity. The only one who is described as devising inventions is Saruman the evil fallen Maier.

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Unsk,
(who counseled nonviolence and courage and faith in the Constitution)
Well put. People are reachable often if we do not preempt the conversation into a confrontation. That does not mean conceding anything important. Remember the Left has grown up within the blanket of security and prosperity provided by traditional America. Many, probably most of them, cherish the role of gadfly but do not want to see the horse, or the cash cow, destroyed.

Yesterday I was talking to a woman, aged between middle age and elderly. Her door was well festooned with stickers from GreenPeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Wildlife Fund etc When the conversation touched on 9-11 I got the automatic reaction "That was the government." The fact was though that this committed left winger was very distrustful of crooks and charlatans and thugs, from any or either end of politics. They wanted competent honest government that would not threaten their rights. They wanted America productive and successful. Are there a host of issues in which they have been trained to react in a way we might find illogical? Certainly but that does not mean that we can not appeal to such people with clear honest communication that does not pander. If we keep explaining the corruption behind the housing meltdown and the links to the Democratic Party then we can win.

Brilliant Summation of the Fannie Mae Debacle from The Nose on Your Face

Comment on The Belmont Club"Rebranding"

wretchard
The President’s views aren’t ‘nuanced’, but ‘obtuse’, which the dictionary defines as “lacking sharpness or quickness of sensibility or intellect … difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression.” Obtuse in a prison we know too.

Warden Samuel Norton: I have to say that's the most amazing story
      I've ever heard. What amazes me most is that you were taken in by it.
Andy Dufresne: Sir?
Warden Samuel Norton: It's obvious this fellow Williams is impressed
      with you, he hears your tale of woe and naturally wants to cheer
      you up. He's young, not terribly bright, it's not surprising he wouldn't
      know what a state he put you in.
Andy Dufresne: Sir, he's telling the truth.
Warden Samuel Norton: Let's say for the moment this Blatch does exist.
      You think he'd just fall to his knees and cry: "Yes, I did it, I confess!
      Oh, and by the way, add a life term to my sentence."
Andy Dufresne: You know that wouldn't matter. With Tommy's testimony
      I can [get] a new trial.
Warden Samuel Norton: That's assuming Blatch is still there. Chances are
      excellent he'd be released by now.
Andy Dufresne: Well they'd have his last known address, names of
      relatives. It's a *chance*, isn't it.
[Norton shakes his head]
Andy Dufresne: How can you be so obtuse?
Warden Samuel Norton: What? What did you call me?
Andy Dufresne: Obtuse. Is it deliberate?
Warden Samuel Norton: Son, you're forgetting yourself.
Andy Dufresne: The country club will have his old time cards. Records,
      W-2s with his name on them. Sir, if I ever get out, I'd never mention
      what happens here. I'd be just as indictable as you for laundering
      that money.
[Norton slaps the table]
Warden Samuel Norton: Don't you *ever* mention money to me again,
      you sorry SON OF A BITCH! NOT IN THIS ROOM, NOT ANYWHERE.
/IMDB

Comment on The Belmont Club"First principles or principles at last?"

At Lehman brothers everyone lost except their borrowers (Fannie Mae). At Bear Stearns the small investors lost. At GM and Chrysler the shareholders and senior debt holders lost and the union one. At Goldman Sachs the senior management won. At Fannie Mae the senior management won. Is there any pattern to this? Only one that a good RICO prosecutor could follow. Every dime that has been transfered to anyone in senior management (yes I mean Jamie Gorelick and Howell Raines and Barney Franks’ special friend) by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the last 15 years should be clawed back.

Comment on The Belmont Club"In the interests of honest debate"

I spent an hour writing a post and the machine crashed and ate it. So much for communication.

The suggestions that people attempt to flood the White House portal strike me as ill advised. If the concern is that the administration is asking people to send them information that can be used to identify possible enemies then how does it help for those enemies to themselves send the White House their email addresses and IP numbers? It will be a simple matter to harvest those numbers and build a data base for future reference. Those numbers can then be screened out to prevent the inbox from being jammed in the future and effectively eliminating the opposition voices from any policy debate.

Effective communications require at least some minimum level of shared values. You can negotiate with an enemy who sees some value in your continued existence. You cannot negotiate with a wild animal that is seeking to kill you. Billions of dollars have been spent and whole careers have been built on a Middle -East Peace Process that is almost completely devoid of content. On the other hand the successful return of the two journalists from North Korea indicates that their can be some benefit in keeping a communications line open to even the most irrational corespondent.

The problem with communicating with the current White House can be summed up in two words, Rahm Emmanuel. He seeks power for its own sake. He is like O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If you fail to cooperate with his sincere efforts to manage the message then you may suffer for your Failure to Communicate.

Comments on The Belmont Club"And Last"

There are a few basic beliefs that I have about my country.

1a) Forms, procedures, precedent and Constitutional structures should be respected.
1b) We should always be open to innovation and Amendment and reject proven failure.

2a) Federalism is the most successful system ever devised for harnessing diverse communities in liberty.
2b) Neither the States nor the Federal government are filling their proper functions at the present time.

3a) Illegal immigrants should be removed from America and their children should not be granted birthright citizenship.
3b) America is a vast empty nation that should welcome more legal immigrants then we presently admit.

4a) Admission to the Union, as a citizen or as a state is a privilege that should be difficult to obtain.
4b) Just as America should welcome new immigrants it should remain open to the accession of new states.

5a) Both Cuba and the Philippines were opposed at different times by interests from the North and South that discouraged them from seeking statehood in the Union. These forces represented racial, religious and commercial partisans that at different times encouraged or discouraged efforts to admit these territories and further expand the United States.
5b) Our histories and fates are closely bound together and we have suffered by our rejection of those who believe in the American ideal more then many Americans do.

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The logical conclusion of these beliefs is that it will be a good day for America when we can welcome the people of Manila and Baguio and Cebu to join us if they so choose as fellow citizens of our Commonwealth.

Some become Urbane and others merely Urban

truepeers,
(who pointed out the poor manners of texters on the last BC thread)

At work the other day we were waiting for vans when one of us stepped over to answer a question from a motorist waiting at a light. One of the other employees, a guy who is not a chronological child but who likes to show off and prove what a big deal he is to impress the younger set, runs over and yanks on the rear door and then runs back to the curb laughing. I was visibly pissed and one of the kids gave me the "chill out, no big deal, none of your business" look. My instinctive or trained by my parents reaction was to think that if someone in the car had reacted by pulling a weapon then the jerk had placed myself and others in danger.

Later I was sharing with someone the point made on the Club that the Cash for Clunkers is a tax on poor people in that it subsidizes the upper middle class and removes used cars from the market that could be desired by working class drivers. The replies I got were "Most people are Middle Class" and "Poorer people shouldn't be driving anyway. They can't afford the gas and insurance." Most of them didn't even know that the cars were being destroyed and that it had been sold as a carbon footprint policy but they were determined to approve of anything that the Republicans disliked. Their strongest motivation seems to be more negative then positive.

Civilized behavior, the conduct needed to live in the civitas begins with teaching children to always look around and consider, that is be considerate, of how their actions might effect others. When children learn to not run around and bump into people and to shut gates after they go through then they begin to become civilized. I have heard the Walkman™ called an "anti-social device' because it trains people to ignore the human beings around them. The irony is that most of these self professed Socialists are profoundly egotistical and anti-social. They are Barbarians.

Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S.

Everything old is new again, only we are far far less ready now then we were in the past.

1) We should build a CVN every 15 months for the next 8 years.
2) We should build a LHA/LHD every 12 months for the next 6 years.
3) We should build 500 F-22 fighters and 5,000 F-35 fighter/bombers.
4) We should have on active duty 30 combat ready army brigades and
      7 marine brigades.
5) We should revitalize our Reserve and Guard centers to make them
      core of each communities Homeland Security and disaster
      recovery plans.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"WMMV"

View this debate as a three cornered table. First we hear from those who want to "Do Something For the Children."

The Imperialist Cultural Hegemonist Zionist Oppression of the Anglo-Saxons and their tiny word language must be smashed! It is the obsession with unregulated communication and crude productivity that chains the masses and distracts those who could bring a more nuanced and authentic appreciation for meaningful activity.

Second we have the representative of the Texters.

Buy, Sell, Oh look a bunny! Woo Hoo! Ohmigd is that a truck?

Finally there is a voice for Contemplation as a source of strength.

I sit beside the fire
And think of all that I have seen,
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been.
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were,
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire
And think of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things
That I have never seen.
In every wood, in every spring
There is a different green.

I sit beside the fire
And think of people long ago.
And people who will see a world
That I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door--

"Elbereth Gilthoniel,"
"Silivren penna miriel
"O menel aglar elenath!
"Nachaered palandiriel
"O galadhremmin ennorath
"Fanuilos, lelinnathon
"Nef aear, si nef aearon!
"Nef aearon!"

-JRR Tolkien

Texting should be communication and communication should exist for a reason, to connect two or more individuals so that value can be added to their lives. The acolytes of government seek to control for its own sake. They are Inner Directed but they lack any values from which to proceed. That makes them seek for issues to use in their thirst for dominance to feed the emptiness within. The shallow and self obsessed texters and those abusing other technologies are also seeking stimulation without considering how their activity could effect other people. They are selfish and therefor bring little to any conversation that they force themselves into. Kindly old Professor T understood that Wisdom came from understanding yourself first sufficiently so that you could have something to say worth another human being's time to listen to.

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Reepicheep,
*who praised face to face communications)
There has been a set of full car subway ads in NYC from a chewing gum manufacturer that pushes exactly your point. They show people hugging kissing and just being together under slogans that urge the viewer to take a break from the internet and make real face time connecting with people.

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Fifty or so years ago Ian Fleming had a passage in which Bond speculated on why it was dangerous for women to be drivers. His theory was that when women talked they had to turn around and look at the person they were talking to because they judged not just the words but the facial expression in determining the emotional content behind the message. Since that is missing in a phone conversation the theory would be validated to some extent if phones in cars adversely effected men as much or more then women.

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Jamie Irons,
(who posted a mock texting WBSMC, Who's Been Stealing My Chickens?)
If you are implying that USMC has something to do with Molester of Chickens then things could get exciting around here. I wasn't in the Corps. I was assigned to be the fellow standing on the raised platform at the back of the LCM or LCU with a machine gun to encourage them to get out quick if we ever did an opposed beach landing. Almost always liked being a JO on an amphib. Marines are a courteous well educated group and after a game of cards they pay up with a smile.

Yes I worked for the Bureau of Acronyms and Abbreviations. How did you guess?

Did you think that weapon was just for shooting at the enemy on the beach?

Courage Comes in Small PackagesHT Theo Spark

Comments on The Belmont Club,"We have to make judgements very fast"

Spector gave an interesting insight into how Congress actually works. What he said was that no one reads the whole bill and they just divide it up with each Senator reading a chunk. So if twenty Democratic Senators each take responsibility for fifty pages and if that really means that each gets a summary from a staffer of their portion of the whole, then 60 or more Senators will consider that assurance sufficient to pass legislation. This was described as a normal practice. These are the same Senators who passed Sarbanes-Oxley to criminalize less sloppy procedures in running a publicly held company.

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Campaign Poster in a can with cheap to produce TV radio tie in adverts. Sibelius' face and in bold the slogan "She is Offended by Us?"
T-shirt worthy. I want residuals.

Glamour has a new meaning HT Theo Spark

I hear theme music when she smiles and my heart goes pitter pat.

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buddy larsen,
(who noted that at least the Left can't abuse Laura Bush any more)

Laura Bush has grace and grit, she is OK.
Our host had a simple and elegant tribute to a Lady who passed away last weekend. We have had First Ladies in our democracy, including those whose politics I have deplored. Even in our theoretically egalitarian society they serve a vital purpose. They serve as a glue that holds the conversation together when passions threaten to break us apart. They serve as role models of how to handle pressure with grace, show compassion without demeaning, enjoy success without vulgarity. By all these standards we are being ill served and it is another sign of the poor judgement and questionable motives of those in power that they conduct themselves so badly.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"The murky future of health care"

Rufus.
Oh, and thank God we didn’t nominate Romney. He might have lost, and we would have ended up with Obama, and National Healthcare.

Or he might have won and we'd end up with Romneycare on the way to National Healthcare.

Sounds like the man who admitted that he was warned that if he voted for Goldwater we would end up in a land war in Asia and by gum they was right.

We need National Law care with lawyers assigned to locations based on an impartial government agencies determination of need and their pay to be based strictly on objective criteria of productivity with no Lawyer making more then double the average income in their SMSA. Oh and public rights to claim damages for any harm arising from the lawyer's acts as determined by a review board staffed by government clerks.

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blogstrap,
(who was appalled that we are debating an article from HuffPo)
The fact that the HuffPo or The Daily Show have any standing in a conversation among adults is a system flaw. They provide a wedge from the Left for making people comfortable with accepting arguments delivered via Saturday Night Live and Late Night. In my opinion there are equally discreditable sources on the ostensible Right, such as Donofrio's blog, that serve only to muddy the waters and prevent meaningful discussion. In the distant past a more conservative and self confident culture was comfortable with gatekeepers enforcing standards on who was considered a credible source. This demanded a highly self critical stance on the part of the providers of information. That ethical sense was internalized, as an expression in a mature society of what Max Weber called "Organic Solidarity" and is a mark of professionalism. The loss of that quality among Journalists is partly a function of shifting market forces and more a result of the termite like destruction of key institutions, academia, law and journalism, for over a century. This began long ago, certainly by the time of the Fabian Society of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and has accelerated under the label post-modernism.

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Personally I believe that every licensed hospital should receive a flat subsidy from their local government, amount based on the size of the catchment area, to provide basic stabilization and referral emergency services for ambulatory patients. The anticipated costs of basic services should be displayed and information should be provided to a patient prior to service being rendered as to the anticipated costs that they might be facing. These estimates should be based on a historical record of fees generated in similar cases and should be available for the top 50 basic walk in conditions. That does not apply to catastrophic injuries or complex infections or cancers but does apply to many simple cases. If someone walks into an ER as I did with a cut finger the Nurse should say to them "We can bandage you and send you to the County Hospital for free (or $50) or if you need a stitch it will cost you $200." What should never happen is their saying "Don't worry about it Let's take a look." followed by their rinsing it with water and putting a bandage on and then sending a bill for $1,100, as happened to me.

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Ernie G,
(who described a dog bite)
How’s the dog?
My suspicion is that hospitals are carrying phantom bills to the uninsured as a health care version of the “toxic assets” that ate the housing industry. Eventually someone is going to have to balance the books.

steeple,
(who called Obama an "economic moron")
During his years teaching across the Midway at The University of Chicago Law School did Obama ever visited the Economics Department, at that time directly across from the Law Quad in the top of Social Science Research? My belief is that he only would have been there if he got lost looking for a bathroom.

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Perhaps the key metric is not the number of doctors but rather the ratio between the numbers of doctors and lawyers?

Russian Rhapsody?

For the past two days the Pajamas Media site has been experiencing constant connection problems with the server and peculiar problems with the commenting feature. At one time on The Belmont Club the server was loading the name and email address of other users into the boxes provided. The email is supposed to be confidential so this is a security breach. While that problem is not still happening it is still dropping connections and deleting the content of the user ID boxes after every submission or reload.

Is this a virus? A DDoS attack? A hack to collect site users email addresses? Could it be Gremlins from the Kremlin?

Comment on Michelle Malkin,Remains of Scott Speicher ID'd

Eternal Father


--------
The above version has both the surface navy and aviation stanzas.
That is appropriate as Captain Speicher was an aviator.
The following has superior video.

Comments on The Belmont Club,"Cash for clunkers"

The destruction of real capital assets is an intellectual cousin, maybe a riff, on the practice of destroying functional weapons systems to purchase a non-good (it isn’t a “bad”) called “trust.” We destroy valuable and useable things such as ICBMs, CVs and LHAs and B-52s. We do these strategically and economically irrational acts without considering how these weapons could benefit our allies and stimulate new business for sub-contractors and refurbishers. We do this pursuant to treaties with countries that have a documented history of fraud and deception and indeed largely in accordance with treaties entered in to with a country that ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Imagine how the strategic paradigms would shift if we transferred those systems to Australia.

My suspicion is that no one i the White House has ever taken a High School accounting class.

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Jim Nicholas,
(whose grandchildren have outgrown his chevy suburban)
Get with the spirit of the program. Don't just scrap the old car, scrap your grandchildren. Think of the long term reduction in the "carbon footprint" that would give you. You could probably get a whole roll of green stamps or such from Al Gore for them that you could use to send ice to polar bears. Once you have sent the next generation to the People's Recycling Center then you won't need a car. In fact once there is no future then there won't be any use for you. That should wrap everything up nice and tidy.

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RHW,
(who remembered seeing used cars from the USA in Latin America)
If only the Pinto was evidence of a mad scientist plot by the CIA to destroy Chavez by flooding his country with self detonating cars. Bwhahahaaaaa

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Once read that the great thing about the Ford Model-T was that anyone could fix it with readily available tools, including baling wire and spit, and that it was guaranteed to break down every 100 miles. That car made America into a nation of engineers. The Good Old American Know How that won WW-II and built a foundation for global prosperity was founded on a jalopy.

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RWE,
Just to follow up. Exploding Ford Pinto.

Milton Friedman discusses the Pinto and automotive economics.

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subotai bahadur,
I offer a prediction. Once a whole bunch of people are hooked into this program, and have added to their debt load and monthly outgo; the economy will continue to tank. A whole bunch of people will not be able to continue to make their payments.

Brilliant connecting of the dots here. Are Barney Franks', Chris Dodd's and Jamie Gorelick's fingerprints to be found on this?

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buddy larsen,
My recommendation is to avoid spending any time or energy arguing the birth certificate angle. It is essentially "magical thinking" that expects a solution to appear because someone wants it to. Classic example, accepting the argument that he was a UK/Kenyan citizen from his birth father and then claiming that since his parents were not really legally married, true but irrelevant since his father was a polygamist/bigamist who would be denied US citizenship but not a student visa, he still had the Kenyan citizenship and therefore must have been born there. Nooooo it just means that he constructed a facade over the fact that he was probably born out of legal wedlock.

Your information on the criminal financial links to this administration is most interesting. Clear and unambiguous evidence of these stories, the web of sleaze and corruption linking Dodd, Franks, Gorelick, Rezco, Raines etc. and Obama need to be produced and distributed and hammered home before the next election. This is the spadework we all need to be doing. Everything we say must be accurate and reliable.

JFSanders031,
(who linked to Shadow Government Statistics)
Thank you for that link, The author should be cleared before we take his numbers as gospel but it goes with my gut instinct.

Tcobb,
(who noted the effect of Cash for Clunkers is to raise costs for the poor)
You have the elitist Mass Transit for the Masses agenda well worked out. I frequently ride the electric sewer aka the People's Urban Transit Zystem.

Josh,
(who liked my thoughts on destroying strategic systems)
Thank you for your kind words.

Doug,
(who linked to a story on Chavez's support for Columbia's rebels)
In the NYT? Is there a lover's quarrel in paradise?

Comments on The American Thinker,"Obama's birth certificate ..."

While I agree that Obama is a phony I do not think that the Indonesian citizenship argument is important as given in this article. Many American women marry foreign men and then after having a child or more get divorced. There have been cases of men from Saudi Arabia or some other moslem country kidnapping a child and taking it the father's homeland. If one of those children ever escapes and gets back to America the Customs and Border Protection Officer will say "Welcome home." No foreign man or court has the power to remove US citizenship from a minor.

Of more concern to me would be if Obama choose as an adult to claim Indonesian citizenship so that he could travel to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport or claim a student loan or scholarship by claiming to be a foreign student. If either of those cases are true then that should eliminate his claim that he is a "Natural Born" citizen eligible for the office he occupies. Even in that case however he would remain a simple US citizen, eligible to serve in the Senate.

It is very hard to actually lose your US citizenship. Formally renouncing it before Federal magistrate or at an American Embassy is a deliberately cumbersome process. As a legal punishment it would only happen if you take up foreign citizenship and move overseas to avoid paying US taxes. In that case the former citizen is barred from ever reentering the United States. A treason conviction could include a loss of citizenship but rarely does even when that law is prosecuted, which is in itself infrequent.

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If Obama failed to register for Selective Service then that should be an indictable act but given his present position there is no way to charge him. If there was a Republican Governor and Republican Attorney General in Illinois then it might be possible for them to charge him with violating a state statute by failing to register for the Militia while a citizen of Illinois.

People are persistently mischaracterizing the meaning of "Natural Born." If born on US soil, under the Sun in jus soli, then the parents do not have to be citizens. President Chester Alan Arthur had a father who was not a US citizen.

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This manufactured controversy is caused by Obama's refusal to release documents that are in his power to provide. He does so to enable his supporters to ridicule those demanding them. The documents themselves could be completely innocuous. This is the Democratic Patry's revenge for the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry who refused to authorize the release of his military records.

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This was actually from a series of exchanges on the Belmont Club thread linked to above but given the topic I decided to place it here. The poster bob followed up by stating that he had read other information elsewhere on the web so I must be wrong. Such logic ends the argument.

bob,
(who asked for my definition of "Natural Born" and how I came by it)
I was trained in Immigration Law at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. US citizenship for persons born outside the territory of the United States is based on jus sanguinis, that is by the blood. Citizenship for persons born on US soil is based on jus soli, that is under the Sun. The only place today where someone can be born a US national and not be a US citizen is American Samoa. The definitions of who is a citizen under what circumstances has changed many times but most of those changes deal with people born outside the United States. At one time it was possible to be born a US national within the US and not be a Natural Born Citizen. Ever since the adoption of the 14th Amendment all persons born in the United States "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" have been citizens and are considered "Natural Born." All Native American Indians are now considered US citizens if born in the United States. Indians from Canada have freedom to enter the US but are not citizens.

It may be possible to argue that the child of an illegal immigrant, the so called "anchor babies" are in fact not entitled to citizenship. If there was such an argument it would be interesting to see if it would apply only to the children of illegal immigrant mothers or also to the children of a US citizen mother who conceived with an illegal immigrant father. The question of the citizenship of a child conceived through rape would also have to be considered. All of those arguments would not apply to Barack Obama. His father had a valid student visa when he entered the United States. However as I have noted at this time a man like Mr Obama Sr. would be ineligible for an immigrant visa that confers permanent resident status and leads to naturalization. That is because he was a polygamist. I do not know if that was a legal bar 47 years ago.

If you are concerned that everything that we know about this man, his secrecy and dishonesty, his putative father Obama Sr, his friends and associates, Frank Davis, Ayers etc. are a reason to work to spare our country further damage then I am with you. My argument is just don't waste your time going down blind alleys.

Comment for The Belmont Club,"Maria Corazon Aquino"

She had the gift of simplicity. Not a false display of poverty or commonness but the grace of being a wealthy woman without pretense. This plain introduction on our host's part is all the more fitting for that reason. The policy differences I could undoubtedly find with her if I looked mean nothing.

The wife of the current American President cannot be mentioned in the same paragraph.

Note: BC closed comments.