Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m feeling nostalgic, and not in a good way.  First, a little pointed humor from the 40s:

(Hat tip:  Patriot Post)

Bob Hope reminds us that the OWSers are nothing new:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And should we be bothered that tuberculosis, the scourge of the 19th century, has emerged in a non-treatable form?  Yes, I know it’s currently in the back of beyond, but that’s where all scourges begin.  The problem is that that’s not where they end.

I get Obama campaign emails because I signed up for them.  It’s always interesting to see what the opposition is doing.  That’s why I got to enjoy this “classy” email from Obama’s 2012 campaign:

Friend –

Everyone’s got that special conservative in their life.

Maybe it’s your dad, who forwards you every chain email about the President’s birth certificate, or your neighbor, who just put up a Mitt Romney sign.

Dealing with these folks can be … frustrating.

This holiday season, we’re giving you a chance to have a little bit of fun at their expense. Let a Republican in your life know they inspired you to make a donation to the Obama campaign — chip in $3 or more today.

When you give to the campaign, simply enter your Republican friend’s email address and they’ll get a note letting them know that they motivated you to donate — which will surely make their day.

Not only that, but when you donate today, you’ll be entered to win a chance to have dinner with the President and First Lady. Just picture how good it’ll feel to let your honoree know about those dinner plans.

The other side is busy scrambling for the Iowa caucuses and a long string of primaries, trying to find a nominee. Meanwhile, we’ve got our candidate — and we’re already doing the work to get ready for November.

Give your conservative friends the gift of knowing they’ve inspired you to donate. After all, actions speak louder than words.

Please donate $3 or more today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Your-Inspiration

Thanks,

Julianna

Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America

P.S. — Really want to fire up your GOP friends? Buy them a gift from the 2012 store. I recommend the birther mugs — they get the message across pretty well.

I happen to think this is a great idea.  Not, of course, the part about donating money to the Obama campaign, but the part about Republicans ending up on the Obama email list.  Why?  Because emails such as this one give us a great insight into the mind of the liberal, and it’s not a pretty picture:  Obama’s campaign is smug, vindictive, sarcastic, immature and condescending.  In other words, it’s Obama himself writ large.

I can’t remember if I wrote it here, but I know that, in lunches with Don Quixote, I’ve discussed the parallels between the OWS protests and the Chicago convention in 1968.  Rather than gather my slightly fragmented thoughts, I’ll just pass the baton to Bruce Kesler, who ably discusses the issue.

UPDATE:  Charles Martel’s reminiscences about Chicago in 1968 were too good to hide in the comments section:

I was in Chicago during the 1968 convention. I was part of a Los Angeles-based group called Monitor Training School. We went around LA in 1967 and 68 training protest marchers how to avoid or resist violent confrontations with the cops and provocateurs like the Students for a Democratic Society.

(One of my betes noires was a USC student named Mike Klonsky, a rabid violence freak whose m.o. was to try to pry his way into a group of peace marchers and instigate an angry response from the police. Our tactic was to surround him and the four or five lapdogs that were always trailing him and seal them off from the rest of the marchers. If his name rings a bell, Klonsky is still rabid and is one of Bill Ayers’s closest friends.)

Anyway, I drove with two friends to Chicago to teach people what we’d been teaching in Los Angeles. We held daily sessions in Lincoln Park, on the city’s north shore, where we vied with some guy who was teaching people how to form a giant conga-like line where they supposedly would swish their way around the cops, all the while proclaiming “Wa-shoi! Wa-shoi!”

I digress: The comparison between the two events has one or two significant differences. While the scene in Lincoln Park had its share of derelicts and grungy hangers-on, drawn by the prospect of dope and the free nooky that Abbie Hoffman kept pimping, the majority of demonstrators were well-fed, well-educated college kids out to experiment with rebellion. If the rebellion failed—the election of Dick Nixon says that it did—there was always graduate school or Daddy’s bribe of a nepotistic office job once Junior or Missy came to their senses. The economy was not on the skids like it is now, and the higher education bubble was still a pipe dream.

Fast forward 43 years: The job prospects for the OWS people are pretty dismal, both because of the economy in general and the demonstrators’ own remarkable lack of higher-order thinking skills in particular. Yes, many of the Chicago ’68 kids were ditzes, but they still operated with far more cognitive functionality than their descendants.

In any case, almost everybody at the park had a place to sleep or stay while they were in Chicago. Some hopped the train to head up to Evanston or some other suburb, while others drifted back to nearby college dorms or crashed with friends and relatives. The Yippies tried to confront the cops over sleeping overnight in the park, but the Chicago cops were not like the weenies in present-day Oakland or Los Angeles. They were perfectly happy to apply billy clubs and drop tear gas canisters with abandon. The Yippies wisely quit contending the issue after one teary, bloody night.

If the Democrats decide to set loose the hounds of OWS on the GOP convention in Tampa, it will backfire even more royally than Chicago 1968. Some of the more cynical and manipulative leaders at Chicago (I remember sitting in an office somewhere in downtown Chicago with some of the best minds of the New Left, fascinated by intelligence that had been seduced by the pursuit and prospect of total power) knew that a reaction to the demonstrations very likely would result in Nixon winning the presidency. To their Marxist minds, however, that simply meant that the “contradictions would be heightened,” leading to oppression, leading to a revolt by the awakened masses.

Our current Marxists, who are far more febrile and syphilitic than their 1960s forebears, probably think that history is now finally on their side. No more need to heighten contradictions when you can go in for the kill. OWS-type clamors in Tampa will cause such a police overreaction and such an awakening that they will sweep Obama back into power. But what will really happen is the same thing that happened after Chicago: Voters, disgusted by what they see, will vote for a Republican.

Throw in one other consideration: In Chicago, I ran across two demonstrators who were armed. One was a crazy girl from Berkeley, named Gail, who packed a small pistol (we later persuaded her to leave it where she was sleeping and never carry it on the streets) and a black guy who was a street tough hanging around for dope and sex. These days, as the petulance escalates, there will more armed thugs among the demonstrators. Gangbangers, union members and anarchists all have access to good weapons and the motive to want to see pig blood flow. If/when that happens, they will create a firestorm that they cannot control.

This is what passes for humor on the Left: Get a “celebrity” who’s been in prison for rape, has bitten off people’s ears, kicked strangers in the groin, is a high school drop-out and — oh, yes — happens to be black, and have him pretend to be Herman Cain in a parody that calls Tea Partiers racist (despite the absence of any evidence to that effect) and describes Herman Cain as an insane Uncle Tom. 

I’m coming to prefer Gingrich, but it doesn’t mean that any cell in my body approves of these heinous, racist, baseless, ugly attacks on Herman Cain, a man of stature and accomplishment.

On the heels of Bookworm’s excellent, hard-hitting essay on narcissism comes a nice coda on man-made global warming that is emblematic of Bookworm’s theme.

Because of major discoveries involving the interaction of atmospheric aerosols and cosmic radiation, “climate models will have to be revised,” stated a communication from CERN that promises to completely overhaul scientific understanding of climate science. CERN is the European center for nuclear research. These discoveries are important, because they deal directly with the dynamics of the overwhelmingly dominant atmospheric greenhouse gas, water.

The complete article by Andrew Orlowski, in the U.K.’s The Register, is found here complete with supporting links:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/25/cern_cloud_cosmic_ray_first_results/

These recent discoveries regarding cosmic ray effects on climate pretty much render obsolete all previous climate prognostications by self-proclaimed experts. To use an analogy, it is as if these experts had tried to authoritatively explain the inner workings of an automobile by studiously ignoring the engine.

“When (leading CERN physicist) Dr. Jasper Kirkby first described the theory in 1998, he suggested cosmic rays “will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” continues The Register‘s Orlowski.

The underlying theme here, however, is not cosmic rays or global warming, it is hubris. It is the self-righteous certainty and self-proclaimed wisdom with which scientists, politicians, media ideologues and demagogues could claim sufficent knowledge and command to engineer huge changes to society on the basis of their own self-righteous objectives. Their narcissism, in other words. In their world, their view was revealed truth, all else was anathema. We ourselves discovered some of this self-proclaimed righteousness from previous commentators on this blog. This is exactly the “fatal conceit” of which Friedrich Hayek.

http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Conceit-Errors-Socialism-Collected/dp/0226320669

A qualifier is in order: I am in no way suggesting that the work by CERN is definitive. It does, however, illustrate how little we know and that, when pursuing any form of scientific inquiry, humility is a stellar virtue. No doubt, many more blockbuster revelations await us regarding  the complexities of climate dynamics, but we the main point is that we fallible humans are in no position and will never be in a position to mandate radical changes to either the globe or humanity on the basis of perceived knowledge. The believe otherwise is not just unwise, it is, forgive the term, stupid.

The CERN  announcement is emblematic of what is happening today, as we see other revealed truths such as socialism, Keynesianism, multiculturalism, peak oil, environmentalism and government central planning collapse under the repeated poundings of 2x4s called “reality”. It’s a painful process but, hopefully, it signals the birth pangs of a more practically-focused world to come, where the humility, skepticism and spirit of inquiry bequeathed by our Western philosophical traditions can once more hold sway over ignorance, dogma and ideology. Given the $-trillions of resources and human capital that have been wasted to date in pursuit of climate science and the other myths and illusions of our time, this would be a good thing.

We desperately need it.

There are  few issues that have been obfuscated as diligently by the media organs of the MSM Left as has been the housing crisis that led to our current economic depression. Why, of course they would do that: the Democrats are guilty as sin! We’ve observed on the pages of this very blog the attempts to divert responsibilities for this disaster to vague, shadow conspiracies orchestrated by conservative capitalist dirigistes.

So, here’s kudos to a Pulitzer-winning journalist for the New York Times writer, a Wall Street financial analyst, and to one of my favorite old-school democrats for cutting through the murk and exposing the ugly truths to this disaster in simple, easy-to-understand terms in book summarized by Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest (h/t to smalldeadanimals.com).

Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Econonomic Armageddon, By NYT journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial analyst Joshua Rosner.

Walter Russell Mead is one of my absolutely favorite political writers. Though he is a confirmed Democrat, he hails from a disappearing Democrat tradition that once (long, long ago) allowed me to be proud about being Democrat. It was a time when the intellectual ferment was seasoned by the ideas of Democrat greats like Henry Jackson and  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (I sure do miss Moynihan). Mead reminds us that there remain still-flickering embers from those bygone days, before the Democrat party succumbed to a motley collection of Leftists and other pervs.

Here’s how Mead’s book review opens: “The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction”.

Here’s the book review.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/07/fanniegate-gamechanger-for-the-gop/

Then buy the book and distribute it to your Democrat friends, reminding them that this is a pronouncement descending from the hallowed heights of the NYT. Because, as we were recently reminded, the NYT is their “god”.

Is our democracy germinating the seeds of its own destruction?

Alexis de Toqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has come. It is not yet gone.

Democracy  in ancient Athens lasted about 250 years. We in the United States are at about that same point in our history today. In Europe, alas, democracy came but as a short, brief whimper in time. Now, post-Lisbon, it is gone…at a national scale and, very soon, at the local level, too.  EUro democracy – so ancien regime! In EUrope, the new aristocracy is already taking form, with power centered in Brussels and Strasbourg. In America, our own Washington, DC-centered aristocrat wannabees remain diffuse and riven by competing factions, but they are there and waiting.

What went wrong? I propose that the primary seed of our destruction lies in our own human nature. It is the “tragedy of the commons” writ large. The tragedy of the commons, formulated by ecologist Garrett Hardin in the 1960s, describes the dynamic whereby individuals and other animals, when confronted with limited resources, have a self-interest in expropriating the maximum amount of those resource for themselves while they can, thereby hastening the resource’s destruction. The tragedy of the commons is neatly summarized by Illinois’ de facto state motto, “where’s mine?” (with a respectful hat tip to Chicago Tribune editorialist John Kass).

I suspect that, deep down, many serious people in America’s contending factions (Left, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian) believe that we are now in the end game and that we are thus witnessing a mad, vicious scramble by traditional Democrat constituencies (e.g., public sector unions) to secure to themselves as much wealth and political power as possible before the inevitable financial collapse. The primal screams and vile demagoguery harmonized by the howling mobs of Wisconsin, Greece, France and Britain (or from our Commander in Chief, for that matter) are but the beginning of this process. Change can be ugly when people lose hope!

“Where’s mine?”

It still remains incredible for me to contemplate how we in the West, endowed with the richest standards of living every conceived in human history, still could not find satisfaction from living within our means. The wails and tribulations of the Left notwithstanding, all groups in America are living far better material standards of living than they did 25, 50 or 100 years ago or than the vast majority of our world enjoys today. How could we not find it within ourselves to be grateful for and respectful of what our forebears built and accumulated as their legacy for us. Indeed, our unparalleled wealth and quality of life appears only to have fueled resentment of “the other” in tandem with an exponential growth in our appetites and expectations. Thus have we now come to the point of destroying ourselves and our inheritors through impossible debt obligations, gained in our quest for ever more lucre and comfort gained on other peoples’ dimes.

“Where’s mine?”

So today, confronted with hard choices on whether to cut back on our expectations and regenerate the wealth that we have lost on one hand (the Paul Ryan plan) and a mad scramble to secure our own selfish claims upon the commons before its dissolution, our country confronts the fork in the road that, as Yogi Berra put it, must be taken.

Why do I suspect that earlier in our democracy, when government was not expected to fulfill everyone’s economic and social needs, a national belt-tightening to confront an existential crisis would hardly have been considered controversial. A split electorate today, unfortunately, does not bode well for constructive solutions. From my limited perspective, I suspect that 25% of our population seems committed to the conviction that the government’s largesse can continue forever and another 25% (public employee unions, Liberals, Democrat politicians) cynically manipulates events to amass all it can before the inevitable collapse.

“Where’s mine?”

I propose, however, that these manipulators on the Left and their followers are fundamentally mistaken in the following ways:

One is to believe that whatever political and financial power they accumulate in these days will translate into power and wealth in the future. I don’t think so. You can’t, for example, pay pensions on the back of a collapsed market economy. You can’t fund ObamaCare promises through foreign largesse. Princely union boss salaries will be worthless when union members inevitably catch on to their betrayal and they, too, ultimately depend upon a healthy private sector economy.

Two, we can never really predict the future.  Revolutions lead to unpredictable ends and often end-up eating their own. Anarchists and Democrats can try to collapse the system, perhaps, but nobody can know what will replace it.

Three, the real threat to our society today is not our debt but the destruction of our debt capacity. Debt capacity refers to our ability to absorb more debt in response to crises: for me, for example, debt capacity is represented by my home equity line of credit, to be drawn upon in emergencies. We can be guaranteed that our Western civilization will face serious crises that will threaten our very existence. With our home equity line exhausted, from whence will we find the capital resources to fund our survival? How will we build back from the rubble?

When FDR embarked on his wildly irresponsible debt-financed financial adventures, our country’s ability to absorb debt was still great by the time WWII arrived. We survived and, as a result, thrived. I am not so certain that we could do so today. Not to veer too far off path, but does anyone else get the sense that the ineffectual flounderings of the U.S. and our NATO allies in Libya, a misbegotten economic and military backwater of 6.5 million people, hardly reflect the actions of robust democracies?

I sense that our Western democracies have reached a point of exhaustion. Perhaps this reflects the natural lifespan of democracies. I hope not. The Ryan blueprint presents our 50:50 nation with an existential fork in the road. We shall soon discover the true strength of our national fiber. Will we tighten our belts, retrench and expand the national and global commons as we have in the past…or will we intensify our mad struggles to secure dwindling remnants thereof to ourselves? If the latter, then our democratic experiment will truly be at an end. And that would be a tragedy.

I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.

- John Adams

Will Democrats once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Here’s a very encouraging report about the latest NATO (mostly American forces) offensive in Helmand province, one of the last redoubts of the Taliban. I don’t know how much play this will get in the Mass Media, as they generally don’t like to talk about American victories.

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e26ecf2ee26395baf808e9e46&id=dcfc142250&e=25d267a94d

I am still seething about the Vietnam War, which helped to define my generation. It was a war we won militarily at great sacrifice and lost politically, when we betrayed our treaty obligations to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.  I believe that the point at which the Vietnam war was lost was when CBS’s Walter Cronkite pronounced the Tet Offensive as an American defeat (it was quite the opposite).

So, here is my question: will the Democrats and MainStream Media repeat history and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, or will they play this to a conclusive victory?

Just askin’

Democrats are the friends of big business, Conservatives are the friends of small business. Democrat government inevitably ratchets its way to corruptocracy.

If you don’t agree with this, can we at least agree that Democrats favor highly regulated economies and societies and conservatives don’t?

Let me explain with two examples.

1) The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about how the EPA has decided that milk, because it contains 4% butterfat, should be regulated under the same environmental control standards as petroleum. Consequently, dairy farmers will have to file Federally approve emergency plans on how to deal with “oil spills” and such. Large dairies (some dairies in California milk 10,000 or more cows at a time) will probably be able to comply. Small dairies (goat and sheep milk farms, Vermont dairy producers etc. ) are just out of luck. I happen to know something about the dairy industry – it’s a highly politicized, highly subsidized industry that operates on very thin margins. I’m sure that they will come to an accommodation with the EPA and Federal Government…at a very steep price, politically and $-wise!

2) As it becomes increasingly clear the degree to which Obama Care really is a pig-in-a-poke, there is frantic activity to opt out of it. The numbers of entities that have received waivers from ObamaCare (other than Congress) magically rose from about 200 to 700+ immediately after the SOTU speech. Those entities are large companies and unions on the inside track. The way you get a waiver is to have a lobbyist obtain it on your behalf. Money exchanges hands. Large companies can afford this, small companies…out of luck! If ObamaCare is so great, why the rush by Congress, favored businesses and union to obtain waivers?

Increased regulation is inversely proportional to lobbying activity. The less regulation there is, the less the need to influence government. The more regulation, the more the need to petition the royal aristocracy at a heavy price. The need to petition our government for redress under regulations fostered by our government is a corrupting influence. If you lack influence and can’t make payment, you are out of the equation. Here in Chicagoland, we know all about this. Here is what happens:

Society sediments into three classes: a) an aristocratic Democrat nomenklatura that controls the regulatory and judiciary structures of society; b) a wealthy, economic class that can afford to exchange favors for regulatory exemptions and waivers…at a price; c) a lumpen proletariat, outside of the power structures, imprisoned into forced into regulatory straight-jackets (taxable prey…if you will) that they will never be able to escape unless willing to surrender at the price of their souls. It is this last class that pays the bills for the others. This isn’t new…despite its “progressive” tag, it’s a regression to 19th Century economic “shakedown” realities.

My entire career, I have been a champion of entrepreneurs and small companies. They are vital to our society and economy, as innovators, risk-takers and employers. I would hate to see this glorious period end as we slouch toward third-world corruptocracy.

I know that Democrats mouth have historically mouthed platitudes about looking after the “little guy”. I would like to think that only the truly moronic and armchair philosophers walled into their temples of abstract theory can fail to see how Orwellian and corrupting these platitudes are.

Have we as a nation arrived at a point where we can stop this from happening or is it inevitable? A Jewish relative once remarked that no Jew sleeps without two shoes under his bed stuffed with a roll of cash, in case of a quick getaway. I am starting to understand his point.