Goons, Loons and Other Scrofulous Creatures

Back to ruminating on more serious matters.

I read this article by Charles Krauthammer, who argues that Obama's primary reason for agreeing with the Republican extension of the Bush tax cuts was political expediancy so he could extend the stimulus. Perhaps. Or not.

I agree with Krauthammer that extending the tax cuts in the absence of budget cuts amounts to stimulus, but it's a continuation of a status quo that's been going on since Bush. The economy has kinda absorbed that message already. The Treasury's "quantitative easing" was going to give us a trillion dollar stimulus *anyway*, and the only thing worse than stimulus is stimulus with tax increases. The only thing that the government could do good right now is cut the goddamned budget by something substantial -- say, 2 or 3 trillion dollars -- and start firing federal workers en masse, by the millions. Ain't gonna happen, though.

I stand by my contention that the main reason for Obama agreeing to extend the tax cuts is to get that bill passed *now* so he can get the START treaty done next week. It might not happen -- strangely, and ironically, the Left, represented by Socialist Bernie Sanders, is standing in his way -- but Obama's primary goal is the destruction of the United States' nuclear deterrent, and that's what's motivating him more than stimulus.

However, I agree with Krauthammer that the Republican's are completely ignoring the message of the election. Utterly. There is no evidence whatsoever that they learned a single thing, and the next election will prove it with candidates like Paul Ryan. (I predict he will have Palin his running mate, giving the Republican's their dream team of pretty boy and goldilocks -- she's already saying nice things about him.)

My take on events right now is that there is a pure, unadulterated evil stalking Washington the likes of which has never taken over the place. Despite good trends, we're heading towards some kind of political armageddon in this next election. As the good rises up, the bad is redoubling their efforts. The good better be very, very good.

If both parties get their way (either Obama Term 2 or Ryan Term 1), I think the country may be irreversibly headed towards some kind of total economic collapse, social breakdown and complete dictatorship in 10 - 20 years after that. I won't say it's inevitable ("may") cause my predictive abilities are far from perfect, but things will get really, really bad with either candidate in charge. Seriously, our choices are going to be Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters vs. Darth Vader and the Empire. It's that bad.

It might require some kind of general uprising that goes beyond the Tea Party, and an American version of Marie Antoinette's fate to re-vamp both parties and stop it, but you've got to know you're in a war to win it, you've got to know what you're fighting for to wage it, and you've got to know what you want to replace it with or you'll descend into anarchy when you defeat the other guys. Red Army vs. White Army (remember what Ayn Rand wrote about that.)

There's too few people in this country right now that know any of this, so it ain't gonna happen. More likely is the country descends into pure despotism in the next 5-10 years, and in 15 - 20 years the people rise up in pure anarchy, civil war, the country becomes balkanized, etc. -- or worse, they become complacent and accepting European-style serfs. None of it pretty. The only hope for this country is if enough people learn about Objectivism. The only hope.

Hippos from Space

There's a time for ruminating on START treaties, TSA goons, theories of induction, the end of the world as we knew it.... and there's a time for fun.   One of my favorite activities is vicarious travel via Google Maps or Earth.  This week takes us on a big-game expedition to the deepest bowels of the inner reaches of Africa.   The southwest corner of the Central African Republic, to be exact.  Latitude 3^o 12' 04.13" N, Long. 16^o 07' 02.79" E.; You can copy that directly into Google Earth to visit yourself.   Let's journey there, shall we?

Note the little village in the picture above.  Now zoom in a bit more and see what's there...

My personal guess -- that's a lot of hippopotami swimming around.   Click on the pic to enlarge.  I've scanned this area of Africa before and seen large groups of them in other rivers.  So cool to think you can see this stuff without watching a Tarzan movie.  How else can you go to this part of the world?

New START a Dead End

My take on the Obama tax cut offer is that he's offering only to try to quickly clear the tax legislation from the Senate agenda so he can pass the new START treaty with Russia before he loses much of his Senate votes in a few weeks. It needs 60 votes. This treaty is an absolute disaster for us -- it's a completely one-sided nuclear arms reduction that will eviscerate our strategic deterrent. I've been warning that this was a top priority of Obama's for over 2 years. Some of you know why I think that.

The "Republican" leading the charge in the Senate is Richard Lugar. Consider that before Obama ever even ran for President, Lugar was trying to pull Obama (a few months in the Senate after his election) onto the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where things like START are brought to a vote. Then, Lugar took Obama to Moscow (again, before he ran for President), and the two disappeared into a locked room at the airport for something like 4 hours, with no communication with anyone from their entourage.

I've long had grave doubts about Lugar (I like that word "grave", and it fits in this case--the guy looks like an undertaker), going back something like 15 years. In my firm opinion the guy is a communist posing as a Republican. Maybe I can't call him a "mole" if he's American born, but I do think he's been deliberately working against American interests, like Strobe Talbot was (Clinton national security advisor), whom Sergei Tretyakov, our most important defector in 20 years (he ran the U.N. spying operation of the Russian SVR/KGB) called "the most important American asset Russia had in the 1990s" (before Tretyakov was killed this summer by Putin). I might note that Lugar was a friend of Talbot and worked with him frequently.

Lugar has been working furiously right now to build up the votes he needs for this START treaty. It is very much the top Obama priority.

Obama, you may remember, also wrote a paper in college on nuclear arms reduction.  You might argue that's his motivation here, but you may also note that it's the motivation of the communists, too.  And the Russians.  They can't get Cap and Trade right now (which is ideal for weakening the infrastructure of the United States, a long-time goal), so all priority has to go to START.

One Cell Short of a Full Lobotomy

Reading this story about a muslim woman, arrested for drunken driving,

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) ― A Muslim woman who refused to remove her headscarf for a Boulder County jail booking photo has been told she'll have to explain her refusal to a judge.

I thought: is this not political correctness gone insane, when the police defer to an arrestee merely because she is Muslim?  Then the same day I saw this PJ column

Democrats on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
December 5, 2010

and was reminded again of an excellent talk called "Modernism and Madness", delivered in 1994 at the Ford Hall Forum, which argued (from memory) that there appeared to be a relation between the insanity of post-modernism in the intellectual life of the country (or world) and a resurgence of genuine schizophrenia among people who adhere to its tenets. I've long remarked myself on the fact that many on the far Left seem on the verge of full-fledged psychosis (seriously, not metaphorically), which leads me back to a scene in my favorite movie script (sorry, no embed code is available, just click to see the video) where network executive Max Schmumacher (William Holden) is leaving Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), an ambitious young woman with whom he has been having an affair, and she is forced to confront the mania of her life's work, which included giving communist revolutionaries a weekly reality-based television show, as they robbed and murdered people across the country.  Substituting the nation for Schumacher and Obama for Christensen in this morality play,

                AMERICA
It's too late, Barack. There's nothing left in you that
anyone can live with. You're one of Immanuel Kant's
humanoids--and if anyone stays with you, we'll be destroyed.
Like the Democratic Party was destroyed.
Like the Republican Party was destroyed.
Like everything you and the institution
of progressivism touches is destroyed.
You are post-modernism incarnate, Barack.
Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy--
All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality,
as you posture for moral superiority while destroying any
semblance of reason or justice--of honesty, or integrity.
War, murder, death are all the same to you
as bottles of beer--or another photo-op.
The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy
for your amusement, as you destroy the lives of everyone you
profess to love, in the name of everyone
you profess to hate. You even shatter
the sensations of time and space into split-seconds
and instant re-plays--of omnibus bills, tax increases,
climate-change treaties and nuclear defense cuts,
while destroying businesses, fortunes, livelihoods, nations.
You're madness, Barack--virulent madness,
and everything you touch dies with you.
Well, not me!
Not while I can still feel pleasure...and pain...
and love.

For whatever this country once stood for.

It's MY party, TSA...

I made this comment to some others, and can't resist posting here:

What if we had another "opt-out" day where everyone that went through security screening asked the TSA if they could touch their junk?

Felt Up with the TSA

This security video shows outrageously thuggish TSA behavior to intimidate a young mother, even violating their own rules, much less the Constitution.  She requested a copy of the video after they held her up from her flight for 40 minutes because she wouldn't put breast milk through an X-ray machine. They were waiting for her when she arrived at security screening, because she complained a week earlier -- a cop told her this.  The TSA had asked to cop to arrest her this time.  She had a copy of the TSA rules, and they refused to let her access to it before stuffing her in a holding cell.  On what legal authority in the absence of any crime can anyone do that?  Only the legal authority of a slave state.

This is silent, with long dead zones between some of the text. Just drag the progress bar to speed past the woman's waiting, and waiting and waiting in her glass cell.

From Poor Robb's Almanac

Reading some of the comments to an excellent Forbes online column by Wendy Milling, I couldn't fail to be dismayed by the readers there (if that is the word) who failed to grasp what she was saying, so I had to leave my own comment:

Too many of these commenters are forgetting what Ben Franklin said:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Milling is right. The solution to air security is to destroy the states that train, sponsor, harbor and support terrorists, not to expect all Americans to sacrifice their Fourth amendment rights (and now First Amendment, too, judging by the TSA's new policy of collecting intel on opponents).
If we as a nation choose to passively and meekly accept the routine, daily violation of our rights as the norm, America as an ideal will have died.

A friend remarked that Wendy's article should be "must" reading for everyone in Congress.  Agreed.  Someone care to send that telegram?

http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/29/tsa-body-scan-pat-down-opinions-contributors-wendy-milling.html

(excerpts only here)

Commentary
Nude Scanners Vs. The Foundations Of Capitalism
Wendy Milling, 11.30.10, 10:00 AM EST

To make travel safe, improve foreign policy rather than violate our rights.

Just as the moral is the practical, so is the immoral impractical.

By now, anyone who does not live in a cave, and everyone who does, is aware of the TSA's policy of putting passengers through the Scylla of nude scanning or the Charybdis of "enhanced" pat-downs, which involve breast and genital contact.

...The right to liberty includes your right to physically move about in the world in pursuit of your goals.

...The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness therefore include the right to be free of interference with flying.

...You cannot reach your flight destination if you are sitting in jail or prevented from flying, and being offered an alternative that you cannot accept because it goes against your values is not a "choice," but coercion.

...The nude scanners and enhanced pat-downs are desperate measures to achieve a marginal return on security in order to compensate for a patently failed foreign policy, and they represent a crossing point--not a Rubicon, but an event horizon of a national security black hole.

...All it would take to return to the era of safe and unmolested air travel would be to ruthlessly stamp out Islamism by completely destroying all the states that support it and laying down the law for the survivors in those states. Terrorism cannot occur if its perpetrators are dead and its sympathizers thoroughly demoralized.

...People should not have to prove they are not terrorists before boarding an airplane...

(continued)