Sunday open thread
Bookworm on Jul 18 2010 at 8:31 am | Filed under: Open Threads
Off for a family outing, which will mean being away from my computer today. Have a happy Sunday and, if you feel so inclined, have fun with this open thread.
Related posts:
Email This Post To A Friend
25 Responses to “Sunday open thread”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Have fun, Book. Make sure you beat those mosqits and kill em. Parasites one and all. Don’t let em get the children!!
http://tv.gawker.com/5587434/tea-party-discussion-on-larry-king-live-turns-into-four+way-death-match
Take a look at the woman on the right’s smile
Pure Alpha there. It has all the traits and qualities.
I love it when the righteous dominate effortlessly their inferior Leftist counterparts.
Excellent disclaimer – not to be missed slam dunk humor!
Speaking of mosquitoes, I saw an item on Instapundit about a group of scientists who are working on a way to immunize mosquitoes against the parasite that causes malaria.
What a neat outside-the-box approach! The thinking is that if you can breed mosquitoes that cannot carry the parasite, then release them to mate with normal mosquitoes, eventually their parasite-resistant trait might carry through all the species that currently host the parasite.
Hmm…can we apply the science to progressives?
Otherwise, an old-fashioned fly swatter would do nicely
This article – America’s Ruling Class – by Angelo Codevilla has been generating a LOT of comment over the last few days on various sites. Everyone’s sitting up and taking notice. I’ve read parts of it – it’s long and intricate – but it’s being highly recommended reading.
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print
It starts off discussing the financial emergency that hit just before the November election – the “emergency” that sank the McCain campaign and guaranteed Obama’s victory. It became clear during that month that there was no “emergency”. They’d been howling that we had hours, or maybe days, to prevent collapse, yet days and then weeks passed as they got wrapped a bit around the axle… and no collapse! In the end, as the article suggests, it was the ruling elite, suddenly scared, using our tax money to simply bail themselves out. Nothing more.
The premise of the article may explain a lot. We think our politicians are totally out of touch and totally ignoring us. Ignoring the will of the American people. It may instead be that Republican and Democrat leadership alike are both actually part of a broader “ruling class elite”, two factions of the same united group, and what’s going on in Washington DC is nothing more than an INSIDER STRUGGLE for supremacy within the ruling elite. In other words, the reason they don’t seem to care about the American People is because, truly, they no longer do. All they care about is themselves.
And we, the People, are the rubes that both sides intentionally take for a ride. We exist solely to fund their power elite games.
There’s always been corruption and insider-ball playing in Washington. What may be new is that it reached depths of a whole new intensity like nothing we’ve seen before. Perhaps the controlling powers used to take their civic duty seriously and would have died of shame had they acted in ways that would harm the nation and harm the People. But perhaps these days, such civic duty and such shame is dead, and they simply no longer give a damn at all about the rest of us. Perhaps that is the nature of the beast that is devouring our America.
I intend to give the article a good close read over the coming week as time permits.
I read the AS on Friday and sure wish I had a printer. Although I love reading on line, the article demands that you hold it in hand and absorb it.
Mike Devx, you point out the both parties share the same ‘golden pot’ [my words, not yours]. The last few weeks I’ve been ruminating over the very same view. It’s like taking a road trip, you’re lost, you ask for directions, one person says turns left the next tells you to turn right and in the end they both take you nowhere you wanted to go.
The system will not support a third party, even if it’s the majority. It doesn’t mean, that a grass roots effort [Tea Party] cannot effect change locally. The conundrum is ‘if’ at some future time, the Tea Party becomes a viable choice will they eventually collapse under the weight of entrenched bureaucracy. It reaffirms my belief in term limits.
Oh how I hate the words ‘career diplomat’ or lifetime D or R unless you’re an Arlen Specter, when you get to play both sides.
Well, I finished the article by Codevilla. Not so tough to do so, actually.
It expresses my concerns about the GOP establishment better than I could have, better than anything else I’ve read.
Sarah Palin is the latest example of a public figure NOT in the “ruling elite class” that has come under attack from the ruling elite, both right and left. It explains a lot. She doesn’t speak in the same code words, act the same, function the same. For them, she and those of us who love her are the enemy.
Reagan was the enemy. As Codevilla quotes George Bush the Senior:
> former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, “Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him…” This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors.
George Bush Senior and Junior view themselves as being among the ruling elite class. Reagan did not. Palin does not. They call us “populists” – meaning reactionary and dangerous – but that’s not the truth either. We’ve been calling them RINOs and Democrat-Lite, but that may not describe their essential nature either. The “ruling class elite”, which includes non-politicians such as Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and the other Palin-haters, are in there too.
And the choice is in fact clear: Succeed in reforming the Republican Party to be our avenue for change – or split from it, repudiate it, and actually start a third Party.
Should a split become necessary, the apparatchiks of the ruling class elite would remain in the discredited, moribund GOP – principled conservatives are by their nature in the anti-ruling class elite crowd and would not remain – and it and the Democrat party would coalesce into one party of what it really is: The ruling class elite party.
Can the GOP be reformed. We’ll know soon after 2010 and 2012, should the GOP succeed in wresting control. The Tea Party movement – which is NOT a political party, but is instead a raucous rebellion along the lines of the Boston Tea Party – will inform the direction of such a reenergized GOP. If the article is correct, the ruling class elite, or that portion of it within the GOP, will deliberately marginalize those associated with the Tea Party movement. We’ll have to repudiate THEM, and then we’ll see what happens.
Take a look at this, hat tip Instapundit, concerning what our snobbish elite betters within the GOP elite are saying about us:
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2010/07/gop-dumps-on-tea-party-rightblogs.html
Methinks the war for the soul of the GOP is already ON.
Me thinks the war for the soul of the Nation is on!
The barbarians are always at the gates.
Mike, of course this all parallels why I keep talking about aristocrats, ruling class, peons, serfs, slaves, and plantations. They aren’t simply phrases for effect. They are the literal truth. That is the enemy we face. It is not a fabrication, but the developing embryo of totalitarianism. In some cases, it is already birthed and in adult form, here and today.
These people aren’t out for malice or incompetence. They’re not simply parasites. They are on the path of destroying America, not because they want America destroyed, but because for them to stay in power and thus survive, they must defeat all true Americans and utterly obliterate their military and economic strength. Plantation masters do not like their slaves being armed with weapons, for obvious reasons.
People need to figure out whether they want to wake up or stay asleep in the matrix.
If this doesn’t tick you off, nothing will…!
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html
For those that missed it, here is Book’s AT article about the sexual revolution of the Left and how it was designed to damage human prosperity.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/sex_and_state_power.html
She didn’t manage to include the Bella Dodd connection, however. Judging by the comments there, people knew of the Frankfurt school as early as 1930, but not other crucial Communist influences of the same period. And they should, because they’re not going to understand the Left just by watching modern propaganda in action (news).
Suek, if you ask me, I would say it is cause Obama gets a big fat grin on his face whenever an American dies or suffers. He and Michelle can’t allow themselves to go there, because they’d smile at the wrong time, involuntarily. They can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet. Not before the secret police powers are up and running.
This may sound like paranoia. Then again, most Americans can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s a con, so I’m not too worried about the public’s ignorant opinion on the matter.
Link
At the podium in Bethesda, Maryland, stood Arnold Fisher, the chief fundraiser for this precious center that may need to care for hundreds of thousands of victims, searching in vain for one White House official, one Cabinet officer, one member of the Joint Chiefs, one senator. He found none. And he asked again and again, “Where are they?”
“You are injured,” Fisher said. “We are all here. Where are they?”
They are obviously at the all you can Hope and Change buffet
Ymarsakar – They’re always AWOL
Thought of you as I read these two stories and just know you’ll have Plan C in the works ;
Senior Washington officials tell the Guardian of a ‘change of mindset’ over the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/19/obama-afghanistan-strategy-taliban-negotiate and if the above works out, here’s Plan B http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/afghanistan+the+plan+to+aposreintegrateapos+the+taliban/3716677
My prediction for Obama on Afghanistan is still the same. He’s going to send in some troops to the meatgrinder, hoping they get killed and attrited, like what Lyndon Johnson did, then try to drag things out long enough to benefit him politically, then either leaving like Fall of Saigon or passing the buck to the next Republican President for the Repubs to pull out of Afghanistan, thus getting the blame.
The purpose of keeping troops in is to not appear like a spineless dove. The purpose of pulling out needs to be done so that somebody else gets the blame, like corrupt Karzai or Republicans. Thus all the allies dying in Afghanistan just buys Obama more time to get things working so that the PR image looks good when Obama sells Afghanistan to the Taliban for some lucre.
Remember Obama’s big fat grin. Whenever you hear an American got wounded or killed in Afghanistan, that’s Obama’s grin right there.
The article by Codevilla, brilliantly coalescing the concerns driving the Tea Party movement and the fear of Democrats and the mistrust that Republicans will actually implement anything resembling conservative government… it’s really striking a chord out there. Many links popping up.
To avoid moderation, I’ll just throw out two of them. The first is depressing, concerning “conservative” Senators McConnell and Cornyn. If you think our Senate GOP has any intention of limiting the growth of government, this will wake you up. McConnell is as convincing as Pelosi was when she was insisting that Democrats would freeze the growth of government with “Pay As You Go.” Ha ha ha ha, I laughed and cried at Pelosi, and I’m ready now to laugh and cry at the GOP just as much :
http://www.nationalreview.com/exchequer/231149/do-not-trust-cornyn-or-mcconnell-spending-cuts
In other words, it doesn’t matter if the GOP retakes the House or the Senate in 2010. It’s not going to change a thing.
In that link above is a graph showing the growth of the national government from 1965 to 2008. I knew Reagan really didn’t slow the growth of government much at all, but when you look at the graph, you’d expect to see SOMETHING distinguishing his years 1980-1988. It’s indistinguishable to the eye, which is really depressing.
My second most important link is an Instapundit response to the Codevilla piece. The Instapundit piece has advice from his readers to the question, “Yes, OK, but what can we DO?” Book has asked the same question. Here are some answers, for what they are worth:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/103118/
Some other links popping up concerning the Codevilla concepts, which you’ll have to replace the DOT with an actual period to get to (so I can avoid moderation by having only two real links)
A Poll on how the DC Elites view of the country is vastly different from that of the rest of us:
www DOT politico DOT com/news/stories/0710/39809 DOT html
Victor David Hanson discusses our cultural elite:
pajamasmedia DOT com/victordavishanson/pity-the-postmodern-cultural-elite/
Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media describes how the cultural elite will not go down without one hell of a fight (and are you ready to get right back in their faces, and punch back twice as hard???)
pajamasmedia DOT com/eddriscoll/2010/07/16/the-ancien-regime-isnt-going-out-without-a-fight/
The Codevilla piece that has acted as a catalyst for the new burst of conversation (WELL WORTH a read!)
spectator DOT org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/
As for me, and Book’s question, what can we do?
I’ve decided that first we have to break the one-hundred-year-long cultural mindset of unending government growth. We’ve been at it for four or five generations now, or more, and it’s practically instinctual. I don’t think we can win by targeting this program, or that program. I don’t think so anymore.
To break the cultural mindset, I’d propose that for four years, we do nothing more than reduce the size of government by exactly 1% each year. IN EVERY BRANCH and PROGRAM. And yes, that includes even the military. Everything. After four years of 1% reduction, we’d have a 4% reduction. If you take another look at that graph in the first link, and imagine a four year downtick in it, that would be immeasurably revolutionary all by itself. I don’t think we can fight against specific programs until the cultural mindset is changed. A four year, 1% reduction each year, introduces the mindset of frugal, limited government to all the American People. After that initial four years of national sacrifice, we might then be ready to go after specific programs. Cut the Department Of Education by 80%. Cut this, cut that. We’d have had a little training for four years in the concepts and practices of frugality and sacrifice. We might then be ready as a nation.
And the howls at just those 1% reductions would be fiercer than anything you can imagine, just them. That’s why succeeding at 1% per year for four years is revolutionary enough. Win at that, and I think we’d be on our way. We conservatives would view a 4% reduction in the military as profoundly distasteful, but it would be the compromise to get the program off the ground. Remember that Reagan didn’t even succeed at reducing the size of the national government. No one’s succeeded… YET.
Just ran into another link discussing the same issues that I’m greatly enjoying:
http://elkhorncreeklodge.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/november-and-the-gops-long-march-back/
He raises a lot of the same questions about the GOP’s readiness for the fight. But in wondering what the GOP can do, he lists a lot of specific possibilities that may generate enthusiasm. (Enough for me to say, yeah, in addition to my 1% per year reduction everywhere, let’s choose a few specific popular things to REALLY go after as well, such as gutting implementations of ObamaCare until we get a President in there that will repeal it… blocking every liberal judicial appointment… etc. Some of them mean political WAR, for sure. Exciting stuff.)
Yar,
I do not think that LBJ intentionally sent men into the meatgrinder for his own political gain. He spent hours in the White House looking at battle maps and asking for solutions. Military solutions. Despite the Liberal organizational crap he left us with, he was a patriot.
I do agree that Obama will send a few troops into what he believes in his dark heart of hearts, is a lost cause, so he can “strategically withdraw” from Afganistan. And further the perceived decline of the US Military’s ability.
Two years ago, a few of us could see through Obama’s grin. Now, many more of us see through Obama’s Chesire Cat grin. Those in power who have real power, do not have to grin. The grin is actually a sign on weakness. Obama is grinning because he knows he is on thin ice.
It is time to bring forward the facts of the engineered economic downfall, to delineate the steps that the Libs took to cause us grief, to expose the voter fraud that was forced on many states, to support the party of the Country, to educate the voting politic, to create new organizations of news, and to throw the “ruling class” out.It is time to crack the thin ice that Obama is standing on. And all of his henchmen.
Al
Al
The GOP may be able to fight their way out of a wet paper bag. May be
“I do not think that LBJ intentionally sent men into the meatgrinder for his own political gain.”
LBJ increased the troop numbers in Vietnam due to political pressure from Americans to push the war to a resolution. LBJ, at the same time, placed restrictions on who the US military was allowed to engage in Vietnam and the surrounding areas. LBJ, at the same time, started talking about attritoin and how attrition was going to win the day. Attrition that he was artificially increasing in terms of American casualties by sending in troops hobbled by his artificial Rules of Engagement.
Now people can say LBJ messed up or whatever, but he did it. It wasn’t an “accident”.
” he was a patriot.
So was Benedict Arnold.
>>Attrition that he was artificially increasing in terms of American casualties by sending in troops hobbled by his artificial Rules of Engagement.>>
I’m not sure we’ll every really know the ins and outs of the McChrystal story – but I’ve wondered if this part of history wasn’t part of it.
My understanding is that he was a liberal democrat. How does that happen?? How liberal? Old time strong defense democrat? Will I live long enough for the book to be written??? Probably…I’m beginning to feel left out – it seems like _everybody_ writes a book! I’m waiting for Book’s book! But…since she’s anonymous – would we even know???
McChrystal knows and abides by the definition of honor.
You may have heard about Rules of Engagement and how it was blamed on McChrystal. The Rules of Engagement were not the issue.
You may be right, Y. I’m just not sure exactly what the issue _was_. The whole incident seems really odd to me. I think it’s going to take the historians to figure it out – if we have actual historians when the time comes, and not just simply a “history as we wish it were” writers…