"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
This would be funny were it not for so many other similar “Bobs” clogging our society. h.t. Jim Lyon
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*heh*
So, sometimes, at least when it comes to entertainment, the Great Unthinking Masses (GUMmies) can get it right. What am I talking about? Well, last night on “So You Think You Can Dance” the right person was selected by watchers of the show as “America’s Favorite Dancer” (for the 2008 SYTYCD season, that is :-)). Joshua Allen was definitely the right choice.
Now *sigh*, if only America would pay attention as closely to its politicians as it does to budding talent, we might, just might, mind you, have a bare chance of pulling the Republic out of the toilet.
Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?
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…then again, yes I do.
The latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, pseudo-hippy, tie-dyed, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarian/vegan/macrobiotic, effete faux-intellectual, crybaby surrender monkey, “gimme, gimme,” anarcho-tyrannist, multi-culti dumbasses that make up the voters willing to support The Obamassiahs, Reids, and Pelosis of our country have convinced me that they are so stupid and ignorant that they couldn’t find their own @$$3$ with a mirror on a stick after having the location clearly defined with GPS and approach radar, while being talked through a “landing” by someone competent to find their own with no problem at all.
And that’s on their good day. (No, not “good days“) Assuming any of them ever have one.
But those idiots are not the ones that bring me almost to despair. No, that honor is reserved for the folks on the other side of the Uniparty invisible aisle who believe that Juan (“I wanna be a lapdog to a Mexican president too!”) Mexicain and his ilk are in any way, shape, fashion or form “conservatives”. *sigh*
Time to play Taps for America? Not quite yet; the Uniparty (fully enabled on by the vast mass of stupid and ignorant American voters) just hasn’t gotten around to finally pulling the plug yet.
(Please, don’t even mention the Libertarian Party as an alternative. Just saying: don’t go there. *sigh*)
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T H E 1 0 C O M M A N D M E N T S
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this:You cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians, because it creates a hostile work environment.
Yeh, poor babies. Wouldn’t want lawyers, judges and politicians *spit* to feel assaulted by *shudder* moral standards of behavior.
(With apologies to the few honest, decent lawyers, both judges and the politician who do observe decent moral standards. OK, so I’m assuming there’s a politician somewhere who is still a decent person fifteen minutes after becoming a politician. And, actually, there may be more than that, since there are so damned many of the critters–and no, I am not using profanity when I refer to politicians–as a class–as “damned”. Think about it. )
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, , Adam’s Blog, Conservative Cat, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Back in the day when there were liberals on The Left, liberty was a concept that was much-valued by those who called themselves liberals. When I was but a lad, as the expression used to go, I exposed myself to John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, which dealt not so much with liberty of conscience or of will but liberty as exercised by individuals within the civil realm, in the social order. Of course liberty of conscience and social liberty are closely related, but Mill made clear that freedom to express oneself in the marketplace of ideas was a different thing to liberty of conscience.
Those who call themselves liberals nowadays seem to have forgotten any kind of liberty in their pursuit of extirpating all discourse that challenges their dogma in the areas of
homosexual behavior/priviledges
pseudo-scientific dogma in everything from Darwinism to anthropogenic global warming
economic suppositions
statist control of private matters
property rights
education
religion
and just about all other areas that touch our lives.
Of several things that Mill said in his famous essay that influenced much of my behavior during my formative years, two stand out: his comment that truth need not fear debate and that we must always be wary of the tyranny of prevailing opinion stifling debate.
A simple example to demonstrate that the typical soi-disant “liberal” of today is no such critter is Algore’s response to those who would challenge his AGW position with… facts.
“There’s no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the evidence.”
Funny thing, that “no more debate” meme he seems intent, along with other AGW dogmatists, on making fact: real scientists (as opposed to AGW dogmatists) are debating it, examining the facts and the hypotheses. You can find links to quite a few real scientists (AGW dogmatists simply dismiss real scientists as “deniers”) who have some inconvenient facts to discuss with Mr. Gore here, although anyone who can type “google” can find many, many more references (including this one–pdf, and do note the creds the interviewee has that Algore lacks).
Cutting off (or shouting down) debate on an issue to avoid having to deal with facts is the mark of a weak argument, which says a lot about most fake liberals’ arguments.
I do encourage you to track down (there, that wasn’t so hard, was it?) and read a copy of Mill’s essay, On Liberty. I have my copy, first read as a wee lad *heh*, within reach of my right hand, as I have had for many years. You might find it useful to purchase a hardcopy for marking and note-taking (it’s interesting to me to go back and read my “arguments” with Mill and see how they have changed over the years).
BTW, Mill’s arguments concerning liberty bear very closely on an upcoming post on authority, one I keep deferring but need to write soon.
Trackposted to Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Faultline USA, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, McCain Blogs, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Cao’s Blog, Wolf Pangloss, Democrat=Socialist, A Newt One, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
I’ve commented before about the availability of really high-quality reads on the internet–for free, no less.
There are things like Project Gutenberg, where one can freely read or download for offline reading any of thousands of public domain works–literally a lifetime of reading if one wishes.
Then there is “MIT OpenCourseWare [which] makes the course materials that are used in the … all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge…” FREE courses. From MIT. Wonderful!
And I’ve also mentioned before that one can read many of the books available from the Chicago University Press for free online, books like The Founders’ Constitution which retails for $475 (and can be bought for anywhere from $80 for a not so good used copy all the way up to retail). For free, though… online. (And once again, I HIGHLY recommend The Founders’ Constitution for all American citizens and citizen wannabes. Highly recommended. Very highly. Seriously.)
Other books available there as well, such as biographies (a great book on Fred Hoyle, for example), history, and more, much more.
And then there are singular finds sprinkled all over the web. One such is find number 1,546,328 (approx. :-)): Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, an amazingly prescient work written in 1930 (from lectures/essays dating earlier). Consider this extremely short excerpt from Ortega y Gasset’s introduction to the work:
The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.
“…the brutality of its features” indeed.
May I seriously commend this book to your attention? Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset may be a dense read for those not enamored of the rather pedantic tone it sometimes assumes, and Ortega y Gasset’s view of the accomplishments of the common man may shock contemporary American sensibilities, but in this day and age where the democratic urges the Founders rightly feared are wreaking havoc on our society as a whole, it’s a very important read.
And it’s available for free on the web. Amazing. Dontcha just love the internet?
Trackposted to Maggie’s Notebook, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Democrat=Socialist, , CORSARI D’ITALIA, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Yes, both “us” and “US”. This will be short (relatively), and I will provide zero supporting elements. Any comments resulting from readers doing their own homework on the elements below are welcome. Comments that demonstrate absolutely no knowledge of the elements below will be mocked. Do your own homework. I will NOT provide links here. You can type “google.com” as easily as I can.
Barry Hussein Obama-Winfrey floats a lot of hot air about “hope” and “change” (yeh, he hopes to change the US into a completely socialist society filled with grievance groups of “victims” leeching off producers–and he has a good chance of success). Well, unless we, as an electorate, take steps to knock a few politicians *spit*, bureaucraps and assorted other leeches on the head (metaphorically, you understand) in order to change the direction our coutry is headed, I hold out little hope for a future U.S. with any resemblance to the City Set on a Hill envisioned by the Founders.
What must be done (apart from throwing the bums out of office–darned near every elected official we can find)? Several things would stem the tide–perhaps even roll it back.
1. Don’t take this lightly. Every person I’ve presented this to so far (and I’ve been talking this up in the RW for years *sigh* so far w/o much movement) has expressed a positive response–even those who view themselves as “lefties”:
Each State of the Union needs an amendment to its State constitution providing that
a. every elective position on each ballot include “none of the
above” as a choice on the ballot
b. if “none of the above” recieves a plurality of votes, then ALL
candidates listed for that ballot position are disqualified from
seeking that office in the future and
c. a new election must be held for that position with new
candidates.
Frankly, I could see “none of the above” winning in a landslide in the upcoming presidential election…
2. Get the feds OUT of public education, at ALL levels. Out. No influence, no monies, no diktats. Nada, zilch, a big zero with the rim kicked off. Then work on reducing State influence on local schools. Make local school boards and parents completely responsible for their children’s education. With around 2/3 of recent college graduates functional illiterates, largely as a result of early intervention by “feddle gummint” busybodies’ stupid policies, we need to get the fedgov out of education.
It’d be a start.
3. Do some commonsense things to get our economy back on track. No, I’m not talking here about the recent Chicken Little wails about recession. I’m talking here about the fact that we’ve been strongly encouraged (in large part by stupid fedgov meddling) to become a nation of consumers surrendering more and more of our nation’s producing capabilities. “Line jobs”–factory work, even low-to-medium skill work–is dropping off, and this suits socialists just fine (more dependents for government handouts) but does nothing for a republic of free folk. Look, by definition, half our population is “below average” in intellectual potential. What are you going to do for productive, meaningful work for thse folks as more and more real goods manufacturing is moved offshore? Put ’em all in call centers making telemarketing annoyances of themselves?
Or maybe they can all go to work for McDonalds. Ya want fries with that?
To stem the tide of manufacturing jobs bleeding from our society (mixing metaphors is what metas are for, IMO :-)), two simple things would make a huge difference. (Do remember Clausewitz’s admonition that “everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult” and remember that we The People must recognize that we are in a sort of war with our political buffoons *cough* leaders.)
a. despite the opposition of politicians who do NOT want to
reliquish the power over your life that the IRS and the income
tax gives them, we must press for The Fair Tax.
Do your own homework. I’ve posted enough FACTS here at twc in the past to demolish most of the disingenuous arguments against the plan, so any comments demonstrating you have not done your homewoprk will be roundly raspberried. Rational argument demonstrating you’ve done your homework will be welcome, though. (*crickets chirping*)
b. a 10% accross-the-board tarrif on ALL imports from
EVERYWHERE, no exceptions whatsoever. Period.
These two things alone would do much to restore America’s competitiveness in manufacturing, create more jobs for the average joe (and josephine :-)), strengthen the dollar and encourage thrift (more investment capital–of the right kind).
4. Get a handle on illegal immigrants who are stealing American jobs, stressing American health and social services, Close our borders. Period. Make sure we facilitate LEGAL immigration, but close our borders, seriously police them–like Mexico does its Southern border (complete with shoot to kill orders, exactly as Mexico does). And aggressively go after ALL employers of illegal aliens (are you listening, Tyson?). Shut down the jobs and social services (all social services except for legitimate health emergencies–provide emergency health care and then a free ride to the border) and watch the flood of illegals make their way to the borders. And make no mistake, of the 20,000,000 or more ilegals in this country, much more than 75% of them will head south… Eisenhower accomplished similar results in the 1950s, and what man has done, man can aspire to do… It ain’t rocket science.
Reminder: any arguments with assertions made above should show you’ve done your homework.
5. Make some commonsense decisions about energy policy. Right now, energy policy is being made by stupid, short-sighted politicians who’re either afraid of their shadows (eco-whackos) or bought and paid for lackeys of oil companies, OR by greedy, short-sighted energy company execs who just want to cash in now without serious thought for the future.
a. eliminate our need for fossil fuels for electricity production.
E-lim-in-ate.
MIT has put plans for a modular pebble bed reactor in the public domain. China likes it. Although China is now leading the world in oil imports (actually, energy imports of all kinds), it plans on being a net exporter of energy within the next decade, relying largely on pebble bed reactors. Now, admittedly, PBRs are not the most technically advanced possibilities for nuclear energy production, but the technology is here, now, and is safer than any other energy production method, save possibly hydro-generation, that can approach its ability to provide large-scale electricity production. Safe. (Do your homework. Oh, and include readings on radioactivity, hormesis and what actually happens when Cobalt60 is accidentally introduced into the building materials for a large apartment complex… yeh, you get one link from me to start you off. It’s a PDF file. :-).) And please, no cries of “What to do with nuclear waste?” That problem’s been solved, solved and solved again. Take your pick of safe, eficient and easy methods. It’s 19th Century engineering.
But oil for other uses? Why the heck is the U.S. importing oil at all? We already have enough reserves for short-to-medium term oil production. If the fedgov would get out of the way, that is. And technologies like thermal depolymnerization manufacturing of oil are proven technologies. Heck, if every lil burg simply contracted with a TDP company to process its raw sewage, the lil burgs would have their clean water as a “by-product” and the contracting company could sell the oil. Everybody wins. And the odor some folks complain about from TDP plants? Not any worse than raw sewage, my friends, and the odor from TDP plants has this advantage: it smells like money. Talk about win-win-win-win: lower costs could be assessed on citizens for water treatment, city has a new business to tax (*feh*), the Saudis and Hugo Chavez take it on the chin, and the TDP business makes money.
And nuclear energy, available proven reserves and TDP plants are just three of many things we could be doing right now to wean ourselves of foreign oil. No pie in the sky technology leaps necessary, just political will.
There you have it: the twc five-point plan. It’s not exhaustive (I’ve not mentioned, for example, annual meetings of Mass Media Podpeople with Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether or many of the other things that would benefit our society), but you get the picture.
Argument welcome, but remember the warning above: comments that demonstrate the commenter hasn’t bothered to do his/her homework will be mocked.
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Peple who know me in the “real world” have long known that it’s easy to get a rant out of me: just present me with another instance of “gummint” knowing what’s good for me… and punishing me if I disagree.
Take the national “Click It or Ticket” campaign that’s been going on for a couple of years now as but one example of many intrusive “gummint” policies. What a piece of bullshit! (Nope. Not getting a bowdlerized euphemism out of me on that one.) Stealing from–and modifying–the Chesterton quote in my right sidebar,
“Though not using a seat belt may be dangerous, it is a danger that cannot be forbidden to a citizen, but can be forbidden to a slave.”
Or, as The American Spectator put it a couple of years ago when the “Click It” bullshit began,
The late conservative intellectual Sam Francis came up with an excellent term for all of this stuff — “anarcho-tyranny.” In brief, he meant a situation in which the truly lawless (violent criminals, big-time crooks) are increasingly treated with kid gloves while at the same time, ordinary schlubs who never commit serious personal or property crimes are increasingly hassled over Pecksniffy technical fouls and “lifestyle violations” such as failing to wear their seat belts.
Invariably, the punishment involves money.
Anarcho-tyranny has another dark side beyond the simple harrassment of citizens with ever more restrictive laws and regulations along with the encouragement of dangerous outlaws: the infantilization of America. Big Brother will force you to either give up what “he” considers bad habits or pay an ever-increasing price. You are no longer responsible to yourself, your family, your neighbors and community for the effects of your behavior, because now you are responsible directly to Big Brother for your behavior (and soon thoughts–that’s what “hate crime” legislation is about, after all) regardless the results.
“When will politicians realise that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual?”–Derek Clark, Member, European Parliament
So, don’t wear your seat belt, drive safely to your destination and start home–still safe–until Big Brother’s thugs decide you’ll be an easy, safe way to fill a ticket quota. Your safety is NOT the issue: compliance with authority is the issue.
As this slide into infantilization of the American public continues, expect ever more interference in your life. After all, you asked for it, didn’t you, when you voted for Any of the Above instead of None of the Above every time you went to vote for the last couple of decades?
That said, do I wear my seat belt? Usually. Have I ever been ticketed for not wearing my seat belt? No. Does it matter that I have not been ticketed? No. The law restricting my freedom to make my own decisions about my own safety is reprehensible. As are all other laws that presume to dictate my actions supposedly for my safety.
Note also:
“A nation of sheep will surely beget a government of wolves.” -Henry de Jouvenel
Trackposted to DragonLady’s World, Adam’s Blog, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, Wolf Pangloss, , Conservative Cat, Right Voices, D equals S, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
And about time! Cringely’s of my generation (well a little younger) and makes his point well about the chasm between technology use by different generations. While I may sometimes chuckle and wrying shake my head when my octogenarian father describes his (do note: successful) struggles to master his computer and make it a useful part of his lifestyle, my children, I’m sure, chuckle to themselves and wryly shake their heads at my abandonment of my cell phone and lack of any desire whatsoever to “text”.
But Cringely goes beyond the obvious divide in different generations’ integration of new technologies as genuinely useful parts of their lives and notes a specific impact of the effect on education.
These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.
Speaking about the shift from knowing stuff to Googling stuff–yeh, who hasn’t “put down” that eBook to do a quick search on “Albegensian” or whatever? *heh* I picked that because I already knew a bunch about that word’s historical implications from “old guy” stuff rattling around in my head… and still did a search on the term some months ago. Google is sometimes better than memory, you know–Cringely notes:
This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.
Read the whole thing for a twist you might not see coming… 😉
h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Mail. Drop by. Read. And wish Dr. Pournelle well.
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From a wide array of socially destructive interests affecting youth today, one stands out as the 500-pound gorilla: prisons for kids, AKA public schools. While I have some arguments with some of his sub-points, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education is a book every American should read… those that are able to, that is. *sigh*
Why, in the face of readily, easily, available source information, free courseware (here and elsewhere, as well), tutorials, literature and direct interaction with Wise Men is the electorate of our democratic republic ever more stupidly uninformed (as can be inferred from the candidates it votes for)?
I think I can assuredly assert that at least a major part of the reason is our nation’s prisons for kids, AKA public schools.
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.
Gatto’s book, linked above, is available in full on the web. I’d like to reorganize his website to make it easier to read, but if you stick with it (and do open links on the TOC page in new tabs–that’ll help) and read the whole thing, you’ll soon be foirwarding the link to everyone you know… especially those in your addressbook who are teachers.
Don’t expect politicians to read the thing. They don’t have the time or inclination to read things that would tell ’em how to actually fix what they’ve broken (and the record shows they do not have to fear an electorate holding them accountable for the child abuse they encourage–and in cases outright dictate–in the classrooms across our country). You’ll have to read it, spread the word and build a grassroots groundswell of “take your damned hands off my kids!”
*heh*
Trackposted to Nuke Gingrich, Faultline USA, Allie is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.