Flotsam, Jetsam and Lagan.

In his brilliant novel, The Man Who Laughs, Victor Hugo wrote that there are things that float on the surface of the ocean (flotsam), things that float to shore (jetsam), and then there are those things that sink to the bottom (lagan). This post is about the latter.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night, and I had the first religious experience of my life: I could not stop praying, "God, please let it be over."

This review has some spoilers, so in that spirit, I recommend you read on.

Seriously, the hype I read about this movie was mildly overrated. The comparison that many made of the prescience to our current political situation would be laughable, except that the comparison will be lost on 99.99% of the American public. The endless symbolism I found grating and was longing for even one concrete idea stated unapologetically.

The story was endlessly slow to develop, with a meandering plot (if it had a plot) that needed a mini-series to properly develop. I got extremely tired of the machine-gun presentation of scenes or shots of scenes that lasted only a few seconds or fractions of a second (if that). The score was annoyingly ever-present and overly loud, when there were definite moments that it should have shut the ____ up. Perhaps for an hour or two. (At several points I had to put my fingers in my ears.)

The plot (again, if I can call it that) was a predictable pastiche of many movies that came before. The villain "Bain" was so obviously Darth Vader as to be laughable. The phrase "cliche-ridden string of memes" comes to mind, except, "meme" is really just an avant garde synonym for "cliche", so I repeat myself.

There was virtuallly no development of character motivations in any serious sense. The secret villain who is only revealed in the climax (in a ripoff of Othello), is supposed to make us believe that all the death and destruction was motivated by nothing more than revenge for the death of .... well, I'll leave out that spoiler, except you saw it in a few dozen other movies and hundreds of TV shows. How that ties in to Obama's class warfare shtick can only be done with sewing thread of some kind of bubble gum.

Then we have the absurdly unlikely plot elements, like, when every single cop in the city of Gotham descends en masse into a big sewer hole to chase the bad guys, who are nowhere to be found, but who have clearly orchestrated this unlikely event so that the cops can be bottled up like bugs in a botanist's bottle by explosions that seal off the sewers. Why the bad guys didn't simply kill them all in some visceral demonstration of Darwin's theory, I don't know.

And there the cops stay for the next three months while Batman decides if he wants to save Gotham, getting physical therapy in some remote prison fortress that consists of hanging him from a rope and having someone fix his protruding broken vertabrae by punching the bloodied chunks back in place as hard as possible.

Yes, chiropracty has come a long way, though there was never an explanation for Wayne's recovered knee, elbow, shoulder and other cartilage, which a doctor in the opening to this pot-boiler tells us is "non-existent". I should think the elixer for that cure would have a market.

The prison thread is replete with the ethereal appearance of Obi-wan-Kenobi pretending to be Liam Neeson, who arrives to taunt the clueless Wayne, but this merely spurs Batman on to rebuild his strength and escape his fortress of solitude for debauched superheroes. Escape involves a pointless "leap of faith" in an obscure kiling apparatus that Austin Power would have approved of, involving climbing a hundred feet up the inside of a convenient vertical smokestack of badly set bricks, and then, when halfway up, abandoning that successful strategy to jump across the empty space of the 15 foot column to a conveniently placed concrete shelf jutting out on the other side, from whence you climb another 50 feet up the remainder of the stack to emerge in the middle of a remote desert without even a taxi to get home.

This "leap" seems to kill most prisoners that attempt it, but not Bruce Wayne, and he falls over and over again to the end of a 50 foot length of rope that stops his descent without the obligatory ripping-of-the-spine-in-half denoument.

The curious thing no one noticed is, this rope tied to Wayne's torso is clearly shown going out the top of the smokestack where it it belayed somewhere.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why Wayne didn't just climb the rope. Don't trouble yourself with that thought.

The cops back home have meanwhile subsisted on 3 months of K-rations generously donated by the bad guys, who seem to care in some touching way for them, but are finally saved by the Catwoman who can do more with two rockets on her borrowed Batcycle than the combined forces of the entire Republic --in the intervening three months no one, not even the cops, have attempted to remove the 10 trillion tons of debris keeping the cops in their sewer-bottle.

Cops are released, uniforms cleaned, pressed, dry-cleaned, but sans body odor and other public health issues (seriously, what's your underwear like after three months in a sewer?), to do battle with the bad guys, hand-to-hand. Guns are still wrong, you see. But even hand-to-hand, they can't seem to muster a single brain with a plan, and the obvious solution is to just run at the bad guys as a mob and get mowed down by machine guns and cannon fire. I must remember this strategy for future reference.

The only positive thing to this movie was the Catwoman, who had a shred of characterization and intelligence, and I recommend her line near the end, when Batman is getting his ass kicked once more by the evil Darth -- sorry, Bain -- and she shows up to rescue Batboob (living proof that his hydrocephalitic cowl is concealing not a shred of perceptive ability) and blows Bain to hell and back, saying something to the effect of, "this non-violence thing isn't really doing it for me."

Me neither. At this point in the movie, the bad guys have killed about 40 berzilion people and are about to set off a nuclear weapon; I think we're past the point of self-restraint.

The obligatory nuclear weapon itself is based on time-tested dramatic principles of contrived science and phony time-pressure that would make James Bond's nemesis Goldfinger proud. In the beginning the "fusion core" (fyi, "fusion" doesn't use a core -- that's "fission") is reported to be a little unstable when unhooked from it's computer console in the storm sewers of Wayne Enterprises, but somehow that instability acquired a precision of microseconds by the end of the movie.

Yadayada. I could say more, but why bother. It held my attention at the level of trying to navigate the demolition derby of rush-hour traffic on the 805 in Irvine, or count my toes while taking a bath. If it was a fish, I'd throw it back. Can anyone write an adult movie?

They Can Do Whatever They Want

A number of people (including me) have highlighted the danger of Presidential Executive Orders which claim almost unlimited authority for any type of "emergency" (see my post here) .  For instance, this story in the American Thinker ("Do Obama's Executive Orders Reveal A Pattern?" ) recently was making the rounds with an argument to that effect.

Reading it, I started to dig into whether the argument was valid.  I read many of Obama's recent EO's, and then was drawn to a White House webpage title "Presidential Actions", that lists presidential proclamations, orders and whatever else Presidents do on any given day.   We'll put aside the several hundred special days, weeks and months that were designated in the last couple years -- things like "National Poison Prevention Week", "Workers Day", etc.  It's what Presidents do.

More interesting was ALL the national emergencies that I found which are active **right now**.   Just going through the first 42 pages of the "Presidential Actions", I found that we are presently in a State of National Emergency with respect to:

Russia's proliferation of Highly Enriched Uranium
Somalia
Western Balkans
Burma
Yemen
Libya
Cuba
Terrorists Disrupting the Middle East Peace Process
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Iran
Sudan
Congo
Columbia
Terrorists and their supporters
Terrorist attacks
North Korea.

Let me say again:  we are in a state of national emergency with respect to all these entities.

I'm sure there's a lot more.  That's just the ones I found for the last year or so that were declared or re-authorized.  Some of them go back to Bush and Clinton, maybe further.  I didn't trace back but a few.

It's clear to me what's going on:  under "precedent", a President can bypass Congress by declaring a national emergency via an Executive Order.  There is no established Constitutional authority for doing so, but no one ever challenged the precedent, so they are just doing it.  (Again, it started before Obama.)

So, in my blog posts of awhile ago ("The Unbridled Authority of Presidential Executive Orders", or "Totalitarianism Redux", etc) I was rather missing the Amazonian rain forest for the Charlie Brown Christmas tree when I ruminated on the dangers of allowing the President the authority to declare any undefined emergency.   That bus has come and gone decades ago.  Presidents for quite some time have been asserting that authority endlessly.

The purpose seems clear: to circumvent Congress and U.S. Statute, they declare an emergency, and then no existing law on the books applies to them.   They can do (in the words of Bill Murray, from "Groundhog Day"):  whatever they want.

No restrictions whatever.

Let's review just what it is they do claim they can do in an emergency, if their mood sees fit:

1. Seize all highways, seaports. (EO 10990, originally, superceded by later EOs)
2. Seize and control the communication media. (Well, that's a fait accompli, but it started with EO 10995)
3. Seize all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. (EO 10997, et al)
4. Seize all food resources and farms. (EO 10998...)
5. Force all civilians into work brigades. (EO 11000...)
6. Take over all health, education and welfare functions. (EO 11001. Sounds just like Obamacare, doesn't it?)
7. Establishes a national registration of all persons. (EO 11002...)
8. seize all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft. (EO 11003.  Pretty much what happened after 9/11)
9. Relocate communities, build new housing, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations. (EO 11004.  Not unlike what Fannie, Freddie and the CRA accomplished, but more draconian.)
10. Seize railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities. (EO 11005)
11.  The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry. (EO 12656)
12. Enforce “industrial support” with the Dept. of Justice. (EO 11310)
13. Take control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. (EO 11921)
14. Asserts that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review actions under this EO for six months. (EO 11921. This EO is a massive expansion of previous EOs, under a Republican Administration.)
15. increase domestic intelligence and surveillance. (EO 12656) It grants the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians.
16. authorize all Executive Orders to be put into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis. (EO 11051)

I'll leave you to ruminate on just how far down the path of statism we've actually gone, and what's holding them back.

Psychology and Music

I've thought for some time, and I'm thinking much more, recently, that an excellent way, and in some respects, the best way to study the workings of the human mind is via music. The piano, especially. Think about it -- if I gave you a string of, say 30 random numbers, could you recall them?

Or 1000 numbers in a pattern? Now watch what a pianist does: he plays many more things in sequence, in much more complex variations, sometimes for hours without ever looking at a piece of sheet music. What process of memory is involved? What does that say about the principles of how memory works?

Or consider what neural connections must be formed to precisely play a complex work of music? All the practice, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of hours over years, to refine the semi-automatic selection of tens of thousands of muscle fibers in endless variations of control so that ten fingers precisely fly over the keys, in precise coordination with a streaming flux of sound. A precision that eliminates all contradictions in the choice of those thousands of muscles, made in milliseconds.

 Or consider the emotions evoked by any composition -- how music (as Ayn Rand noted) is the only art form that is a direct link between perception and emotions:

 The fundamental difference between music and the other arts lies in the fact that music is experienced as if it reversed man’s normal psycho-epistemological process. The other arts create a physical object (i.e., an object perceived by man’s senses, be it a book or a painting) and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception of the object to the conceptual grasp of its meaning, to an appraisal in terms of one’s basic values, to a consequent emotion. 

The pattern is: from perception—to conceptual understanding—to appraisal—to emotion. The pattern of the process involved in music is: from perception—to emotion—to appraisal—to conceptual understanding. Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man’s emotions directly.  (Art and Cognition,” The Romantic Manifesto)

...musical phrases can be artistically engineered like a universal language with a precise vocabulary to create the exact emotions a composer wants another person to feel, and influence, to that extent (however generally, yet in some sense, so precisely) the thoughts another person might have, and that the composer wants them to have.

 Or volition -- which directs the learning process, maintains the effort, guiding your perception to focus on every note and correct every mistake, accepting no errors (because if you do accept errors, your learning never converges on competence), refining the precision, speeding the tempo, defining the nuance of interpretation.

 Or the method of repetition that starts from slow, halting attempts at precision (in the beginner) in moving ten fingers in so many patterns, gradually automatizing the control (because you can't consciously control all of it directly) while correcting errors one at a time, but always under focused conscious direction -- faster and faster (as required by the piece), so that dozens of notes per second can be played with a precision of force and timing in complex relationships -- but every single note played by every single finger in every instant is all under the full awareness of your conscious mind, as if time has slowed down while you play it.

 Or abstraction, as you learn more and more pieces, and your mind integrates the endless varieties of musical patterns, until it generalizes the principles, in some sense, of melody and harmony and chords and rhythms so that playing an instrument feels like a direct link between the sounds in your mind and the motions of your hands, or the notes on a page and the sounds in your mind, an almost effortless translation, an extension of your body and thoughts....

 I'm not there (and never will be -- too much an engineer with too little training, too little practice, and too little discipline!), but I do have so much admiration for those who are there, who've had that dedication, and who have achieved such a remarkable level of ability, of which any performance is a testament to their integrity to that purpose.

 A lot more could said, but I think there's something here that could be applied to any field of learning. Imagine if everyone in every field could function with the virtuousity and dedication and passion and honesty of a concert pianist toward his craft. What a world we would have.

Follow the Network

That title echoes one from David Horowitz, who has a site dedicated to tracing the connections of the Left, Discover the Network.

I'm reading Trevor Loudon's book on Obama ("Barack Obama and the Enemies Within") -- he's the main original source who exposed Obama's communist past and many communist associates, including Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Bill Ayers, etc.  Extremely well-researched and documented, not a conspiracy theorist -- and one chapter I was reading last night quoted several communist leaders who discussed the fact that the strategy of using stimulus funds was planned before Obama's election.

For example, a few weeks after Obama's election in 2008, Sam Webb, the leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) said:

"This favorable correlation of class and social forces couldn't happen at a better time... Our policy of singling out the extreme right and its reactionary corporate backers and building the broadest unity against them... in this year's election we applied that policy consistently and creatively... It is not immodest to say that both our overall policy and our tactical adjustment were on the money.  We should not claim bragging rights but our strategic and tactical approach captured better than any other organization or movement on the left the political algebra of the election process... It doesn't claim to capture reality in all of its complexity...the strategic notion of stages of struggle has to be employed judiciously and flexibly... or as some like to say, dialectically..."

You may note the connection to Obama's "flexibility" expressed in South Korea recently.

"Obama is an unusal political figure..  He has... an almost intuitive feel for the national mood... Let us give Obama some space.... Marxism is a guide to action, not a dogma...  These web-generated forms of organization and action were formidable in the elections and will in all likelihood contine to be a forceful presence in the coming years.... Unity is on a higher level... differences have to be handled in a way as not to break the overall unity... Although we are not in the socialist stage of the revolutionary process, we are, nevetheless on the road... the force of economic events will compel millions more to consider socialist ideas that in past were dismissed out of hand..."

He goes on to explain what he means by that:

"...We should consider initiating meetings to discuss the economic crisis and how to respond to it at the local, state and national level...  We should also mobilize support for Obama's stimulus package, for aid to the auto corporations -- albeit with strings -- and for immediate relieft for homeowners..." ("A Springtime of Possibility", posted on the Communist Party website, 2008)

And then brags:

"It sure feels good to be on the winning side." (p 239 - 246)

Another comment came from Mark Rudd, a key former communist associate of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn with the radical SDS, and a leader in "Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the parent organization for "Progressives for Obama" which unites all the leading communist groups in the U.S., including CPUSA and Democratic Socialists of America (*not* socialists).  (Per Loudon, according to the FBI, Rudd once made a trip to Cuba during the Vietnam War that "involved terrorist training in camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine.")  After Obama's election, Rudd said,

"Obama is a strategic thinker.  He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn't blow it... What he's doing now is moving on the most popular issues -- the environment, health care and the economy... The economic agenda will stress stimulation from the bottom sometimes and handouts to the top at other times... By the second or third year of this recession, when stimulus is needed at the bottom, people may begin to discuss cutting the military budget... Obama plays basketball... you have to be able to look like you're doing one thing but do another...."

Anticipating further "progress", he adds,

"...Look to the second-level appointments.  There is a whole government in waiting that Podesta has at the Center for American Progress... This is no stupid guy.  Had any of the stupid Republicans read his books, they never could have said, "We don't know who this guy is."  You know every thought he has ever had.  Our job now is to organize both inside and outside the Demo party..."  (Mark Rudd, "Let's Get Smart About Obama", Nov. 28, 2008, p250 of Loudon's book)

Another communist activist, Jeff Jones said a day after Rudd's article, about Obama,

"This guy is really SMART... He is going to successfully extort green concessions from Detroit.  He will convince Congress to pass a major stimulus package that will lay the foundation for the development of an alternative energy manufacturing industry... redistributing financial resources downward are presented as unconnected pieces of legislation but actually they are interlocking comiponents of Obama's coherent multi-layered agenda... Even Lenin would be impressed."

You can see the connection to Solyndra.

On the board or as members of  Democratic Socialists of America, by the way, are Rudd, Dohrn, Ayers, Angela Davis (who beat a rap of providing the weapons used to murder a judge, prosecutor and jurist during a trial), Noam Chomsky (noted linguist and leftist MIT professor), Tom Hayden (former husband of Jane Fonda), Mike Klonsky (Maoist/CPUSA who gave Obama a job with the "Small Schools Workshop", a communist organization in Chicago), other former Weathermen and Marxists / Leninists, etc, etc.  A real Who's Who of communism in the U.S.

But as I said, the umbrella organization for DSA is MDS, and prominent members are Michael and Robert Meeropol -- the two orphaned sons of executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, adopted by Abe Meeropol, a teacher, writer and CPUSA member (p 253), who taught several other notable writers, including  Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon and James Baldwin.

An interesting tidbit.

This barely scratches the surface of the connections. It's a tight world they all live in -- former SDS and Weathermen, communists formerly affiliated with the KGB (CPUSA was KGB controlled), "progressives", "democratic socialists", and right in the middle of it all, Barack Obama.

They succeed, in part, because few people are willing to grasp the full extent of it all. Loudon's book is a good job of trying to, though it's mainly just a compendium (664 pages) of excerpts he accumulated over years of research -- but which could be tied together more concisely for people to get the entire picture of what we're confronting.

Psychology of a Killer

This article, A Shrink Asks: What's Wrong with Obama? doesn't provide a very good psychological analysis, but it mentions this much, which is worth considering to get to the correct conclusion about Barack Obama (I'd say "the man" but he's too sub-human for that):

Obama himself is a strange bird. He doesn't fit easily into any diagnostic category. Many people attribute Obama's oddness to his narcissism. True, Obama has a gargantuan ego, and he is notoriously thin-skinned.  Yet a personality disorder like narcissism does not explain Obama's strangeness: his giggling while being asked about the economy; his continuing a shout-out rather than announcing the Ft. Hood shootings; or his vacations, golfing, partying and fundraising during the calamitous oil spill.

Take also Obama's declaring on the "Today Show" that he wants to know whose ass to kick. Consummate narcissists would never stoop to this vulgar display of adolescent machismo.

Obama is flat when passion is needed; he's aggressive when savvy is required. What's most worrisome is that Obama doesn't even realize that his behavior is inappropriate."

The author is correct:  despite all the claims that Obama is a narcissist, that designation is completely wrong as an identification.  Narcissism is "excessive self-love".  There's nothing about himself that Obama loves, and nothing worth being excessive about;  he is dominated by a well-earned self-loathing.

The meaning of that is significant, and not to be dismissed as a harmless aberration.  Quoting John Galt in Atlas Shrugged,

"You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists'—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man…

"It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the 'heart' over the mind.

"It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living…

"...a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value:

"The professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students,
"The businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors,
"The neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem,
"The incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement,
"The mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness,
"The eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure —

"and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue."

Except for the businessman, Obama is all of these (and he deals with those kinds of businessmen -- the George Soros / Warren Buffett / Solyndra variety).

The real reason many people promote the narcissist term -- aside from ignorance of what it means -- is that they want to denigrate self-interest as such and attack such self-respect as any man or woman may have earned for themselves.

The article goes on to examine Obama's dysfunctional childhood and ask if there's some blame there for what he's become, but no definitive conclusions are offered.

The answer, in my opinion, starts with the one I've given for years: Obama is a megalomaniacal power-luster:

meg·a·lo·ma·ni·a (m g -l -m n - , -m n y ). n. 1. A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence.

As for the cause of this affliction, Obama is born of a sort of ideological brainwashing -- the kind that shapes children into monsters.

Obama's mother was a radical, revolutionary communist.  So was his birth father (who died while trying to overthrow the Kenyan government, and who worked for the KGB).  His adopted father was a communist revolutionary.  His own admitted mentor was a communist under KGB control (Frank Davis).  His grandparents were communists (probably under KGB control).  Etc.  The man's entire life has been spent in that red-light district, and it produced a lifeform dominated by one emotion:  hatred for anyone of ability, hatred for anyone with a love of life.

Consider that monster designation — as the old Jesuit saying goes, "Give me a child for the first seven years and you may do what you like with him afterwards."  His parents, grandparents, mentors, associates—had Obama for an entire lifetime.

Victor Hugo, in his novel The Man Who Laughs, put it this way:

…The comprachicos, or comprapequeños, were a strange and hideous nomadic association, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unknown today. 

…Comprachicos, as well as comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word that means “child-buyers.” The comprachicos traded in children. They bought them and sold them. 

They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is a different industry. 

And what did they make of these children? 

Monsters. 

Why monsters? 

To laugh. 

The people need laughter; so do the kings. Cities require side-show freaks or clowns; palaces require jesters … 

To succeed in producing a freak, one must get hold of him early. A dwarf must be started when he is small … 

Hence, an art. There were educators. They took a man and turned him into a miscarriage; they took a face and made a muzzle. They stunted growth; they mangled features. This artificial production of teratological cases had its own rules. It was a whole science. Imagine an inverted orthopedics. Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where God had put harmony, they put deformity. Where God had put perfection, they brought back a botched attempt. And, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it is the botched that was perfect … 

The practice of degrading man leads one to the practice of deforming him. Deformity completes the task of political suppression… 

The comprachicos had a talent, to disfigure, that made them valuable in politics. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was the iron mask, but that is an awkward means. One cannot populate Europe with iron masks; deformed mountebanks, however, run through the streets without appearing implausible; besides, an iron mask can be torn off, a mask of flesh cannot. To mask you forever by means of your own face, nothing can be more ingenious…

(translation by Ayn Rand)

There we have the essence of the creature called Barack Obama, but with everything in a hideous reversal:   He’s a plausible-appearing mountebank with a fetching smile and a mask of civility to conceal his mangled soul:  his squint of unreason, his self-image of self-loathing, and his convictions, motivations and intentions— those of a killer.

A smile to mask you from the world—what could be more ingenious?

Ellsworth Toohey, the arch-villain in The Fountainhead, when asked by mediocrity Peter Keating what he was after, confessed

"Power, Petey." ...Toohey was smiling, almost indifferently.
"You...always said..." Keating began thickly, and stopped.
"I've always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It's not my fault if you couldn't hear."

So it is with people today.  Toohey goes on to elaborate how one achieves power, and among his methods,

"Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul--and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to his obedience--anything goes--nothing is too serious.

There you have the explanation for Obama's giggles. Quoting Galt once again,

"Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator...

"Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages—and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust...

"A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent, 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind...

"A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads ...

"...the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man's life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it, A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

"No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as 'The People,' no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension—in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture...

"there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life...

"Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice—and you are the last of their victims."

Toohey was more direct, in explaining what he wants to do to independent men:

"I don't want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped--and alive. He'll get up when they tell him to. He'll eat what they give him. He'll move when he's told to move and stop when he's told. He'll walk to the jute mill, when he's told, and he'll work as he's told. They'll push him, if he doesn't move fast enough, and they'll slap his face when they feel like it, and they'll beat him with rubber hose if he doesn't obey. And he'll obey. He'll take orders. He'll take orders!"

For more on Toohey's motivations, which match Obama's perfectly, see my post, Good Night, America.

The meaning of it all is this:  Obama is an incredibly dangerous man for the future of this country — and for your own life.

Those Who Get It, Those Who Don't.

Today, it was reported that Pope Benedict XVI, on a trip to that Caribbean paradise, has said, "...Marxism was out of place in the contemporary world," and has urged Cubans to find "new models".

"Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality." 

Not that it ever did correspond, but recognizing even this much is what I call "progress".

Reading that story, my eye happened on another story linked from September 14, 2010, which is much more entertaining, and I don't know how the hell I ever missed it:

"Capitalist storm clouds loom over Havana after state cuts 1M jobs ... Cuban workers told to become entrepreneurs in bid to boost island's private sector"

This is brilliant -- the communist nation held up as the model of communism for the West for 50 years is abandoning communism and laying off one million government workers.

Let's put that in perspective: Cuba has a population of 11.2 million people. That's almost ten percent of the population are being given pink slips. If it was the U.S. -- with a population of 312 million -- that would be the equivalent of laying off almost 28 million government workers.

Note that total Federal Government employment today is about 3 million.  (And isn't it interesting that the population of Cuba has plateaued?  What would have caused that?)

Echoing the Pope, a year and a half earlier, Fidel Castro told a correspondent of The Atlantic magazine:

"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."

The shock heard 'round the communist world.  Not that it ever did work, of course, but I'll give him that shred of his pride to hang on to.

It was supposed to be the start of a brave new world in which the customer was king. But the teenage boy in the barber's chair stared at his reflection, aghast and almost crying. "What have you done?" he asked, caressing uneven clumps on a shorn scalp.
The barber, a fortysomething man with a grubby white coat, put down the scissors, lit a cigarette, and shrugged. "Looks OK to me. Don't know what you're on about."

That about sums up Obama's approach. But the difference is that Cuba is fleeing from communism, while Obama is still racing towards his Brave New World.

... providing good customer service, let alone expanding market share, is an alien concept to many accustomed to receiving the same pittance wage regardless of job performance. "I don't want to take over this place," Luis, the barber, who preferred not to give his surname, told the Guardian. "How do I know it'll make a profit? How do I pay suppliers?"

Oh, the pain of independence. But he'd better start learning: sheep shears do not a profitable barber make.

"The Communist party document admitted lack of experience, insufficient skill levels and low initiative could sink new enterprises. "Many of them could fail within a year," it says.

This just sounds like the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act -- or just Solyndra.

...Unemployment last year was officially 1.7%, but with average monthly salaries of only $20, supplemented by a ration book and free health care and education, many Cubans make minimal efforts, prompting an old joke: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."

And there you have the Obama vision for all of us. "Hope and change" really meant "hope for loose change."

"Leftwingers abroad may feel let down by the cuts, but Cuban officials believe the thriving black market is an indicator that the private sector will soak up surplus labour."

God knows, Barack "Che" Obama is probably feeling let down. Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, said,

"We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working," he told the national assembly last month.

Can anyone imagine Barack "Mao" Obama saying such a thing? Easier to imagine him asking to extend unemployment benefits by another trillion or three.

[Said Raul Castro,] The decades-old US embargo – a crippling, punitive measure – could no longer be blamed for all the island's woes...

And over here, capitalism can no longer be blamed for all our woes, after the decades-long, crippling, punitive measures that have been imposed on it.

Even the Cuban Labor Federation gets it, as they issued this mea culpa:

"Our state cannot and should not continue maintaining companies, productive entities, services and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls [and] losses that hurt the economy," said the official Cuban labour federation, which announced the news. ...It was no longer possible to protect and subsidise salaries on an unlimited basis and cuts will affect all government sectors, said the labour federation. "Losses that hurt our economy are ultimately counterproductive, creating bad habits and distorting worker conduct."

If Obama wants to continue appointing communists to be his Czars, I could probably get behind these guys.

Leftwingers abroad may feel let down by the cuts, but Cuban officials believe the thriving black market is an indicator that the private sector will soak up surplus labour. ...One Havana-based western diplomat was less sanguine about Cuba's response ... "People knew this was coming, but now it's here, it's real, and they're worried. Bosses will get rid of the least productive employees, the ones who don't work or show up for work. The type of people who may lack the get up and go to start a business."

Amen to that.

Cuba has a lot of growing up to do, and that last quote echoed something said by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged -- his words are good advice for anyone on the long road back to independence and self-respect:

"Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

Postscript from the Department of Life meets Grand Irony:
The day after writing this, I read this report of Obama's trip to look across the DMZ and see North Korea through binoculars, where he said,

"It is like you are in a time warp," Obama said Sunday, after he toured a rocky border post in the demilitarised buffer zone that has split the Korean peninsular for longer than he has been alive. "It is like you are looking across 50 years into a country that has missed 40 years or 50 years of progress..."

"If a country can't feed its people effectively, if it can't make anything of any use to anybody, if it has no exports other than weapons and even those aren't ones that in any way would be considered state of the art. If it can't deliver on any indicators of well-being... for its people... then you'd think you'd want to try something different. There are certain things that just don't work and what they are doing doesn't work."

This doesn't mean Obama "gets it", or "gets" anything at all.  From his perspective, those dumb North Koreans simply don't know how to properly run a communist state.

In a related news item that has exploded over the web, at the summit he attended in South Korea -- concerning nuclear proliferation -- Obama got caught talking very candidly to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in this exchange:

President Obama: "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space." 

President Medvedev: "Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…" 

President Obama: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility." 

President Medvedev: "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you."

Flexibility for what?  On all of what "issues"?

You have to wonder what Obama's true allegiances are.  Well, I  know.  And I'm sure Vladimir knows.  You all recall my many posts on Obama's goal of unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States?  My claims that after the election he will attempt to eliminate all U.S. nuclear weapons by Executive fiat?  Stay tuned.  After the election he will have more "flexibility," for this, and so much more.

Post-Apocalyptic Musings of Henry Bemis

Many people are in love with their e-books -- and the convenience is certainly a factor.  I'll stick with my print copies.

But when I hear from many friends who delight in their ability to dispose of all their print books -- and many of them are literally throwing their books in the garbage -- I imagine the most-pessimistic scenario: post-apocalyptic, end of the world stuff, and descent into a new Dark Ages.

Maybe it's the aftermath of a global nuclear armageddon, or maybe it's just slow decay into world-wide despotism and economic decline.  But suppose before it happens most of the print industry ceases to be cause of e-books.  Maybe in the post-Armageddon period most of the print libraries are burned to the ground, or burned for heating.  Everybody has their e-books, of course.  But there's no way to power the damned things.  Industrial civilization  is in smoking ruins.  No power plants, no chargers.

But it gets worse:  the microchips and hard-drives that all the knowledge of humanity is stored on  -- those electronic devices die of their own accord after awhile.  Atoms move around randomly over time, cosmic rays break down crystal structures, heat de-magnetizes disk platters.  Most of it won't work after 20 years, but after 50 years?  Not much will remain.

So your world has ended, most libraries are gone, everyone got rid of their print books -- and e-books go permanently dead.  Education goes completely in the toilet in the short term, without books.  And in the long-term -- the utter lack of books will greatly facilitate the decline into a _Very_ _Dark_ _Age_.