HALF-FULL REPORT 08/13/10
Of all the headlines in all the news publications on the planet this week, there's one that struck me as the strangest. In today's (8/13) British newspaper The Independent, the headline blares out at you: Why Is The World Unmoved By The Plight Of Pakistan? Just to make totally sure you get the guilt-trip, right at the top of the article is a close-up picture of an old woman's tear-filled eye. The story is strange for two reasons. First, "The World" in the headline clearly means "The West." Why are we the world? Did all the oil-rich Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia (which spends billions on turning Pakistani boys into terrorists in their Wahhabi medressahs or Moslem indoctrination schools) just fall off the edge of the earth? Here's the second reason. Instead of this guilt-trip headline, why isn't there a headline in any major news publication asking: Why Is Obama Unmoved By The Plight Of The Unemployed? Far - far - more heartbreaking for Americans than Paks up to their butts in mud is the sight of their fellow Americans hungry, broke, and desperate for a job they can't find. Yet Zero doesn't care - he really actually couldn't care less. He'd rather be playing golf. He has no intention whatever of increasing employment other than put more people on government handouts (or government jobs which is the same thing). Most folks intuit this to be true but don't understand the actual mechanism engineered to make it true.
BLOW IT UP
It is important to drive this message into the thick dhimmitized skulls of New York City's spineless political weasels: The Ground Zero Mosque will not be built - this will literally not stand. Whatever measures necessary to prevent its existence will be taken. Period. While the Dhimmi Pols fulminate over this statement, and engage in the only behavior they know: call names - racist! bigot! - like a 5th grader as they are incapable of logical argument, we can get to work answering questions, starting with: How can the project be blown up as in economically sabotaged so it never gets built and has to be blown up physically? When you think about it, there are lots of ways to blow this thing up, as in ruin it, so that it never gets built at all. The Ground Zero Mosque is, in fact, a perfect opportunity to force the issue of Liberal/Democrat Moslem appeasement, to force the issue of whether Islam really is a religion or a totalitarian political ideology disguised as, pretending to be, a religion.
IF HITLER WAS GOD
The scene: It is November, 1943. We're in Camp Shelby, just outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where 5,300 German prisoners of war are interned. The Geneva Conventions are being strictly adhered to, with food (prepared by German cooks), clothing, and medical care equal to their captors. The German POWs have formed soccer and volleyball teams, with descriptions and results of the tournaments between them reported in the camp newspaper, The Mississippi Post. A Nazi church has been erected in the camp, where Nazi worshippers attend services held by Nazi chaplains. In their sermons, the chaplains instruct that: "Nazism is the true religion, the Aryan Soul the only true God, our understanding of Whom has been brought to us by His Holiness, Adolph Hitler. Our Führer, Adolph Hitler is the true Holy Ghost. He is the human form of the Aryan Soul instantiated here on earth. We believe on this earth solely in Adolph Hitler and his sacred teachings." The Nazi Bible, Mein Kampf, is treated with careful reverence by the American camp guards. "The Holy Mein Kampf must never be placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas," state the detailed rules issued by the Pentagon. "Only Nazi chaplains may handle the Holy Nazi Book, or by guards only after putting on clean white gloves in full view of the POWs." "The Holy Mein Kampf," states the Pentagon's directive, "should be treated like a ‘fragile piece of delicate art.'"
CZAR VLAD IS GETTING SCORCHED
Red-headed spy Anna Fermanova is no longer the hottest thing in Russia. Now it's the 500 out-of-control wildfires devouring thousands of square miles of the countryside. This conflagration makes California's annual blazes look like Boy Scout campfires. The fires have consumed entire villages and ravaged the critical wheat harvest; now they threaten a key nuclear-weapons-research facility. A huge naval logistics base burned -- along with 200 helicopters and planes. But the reputation of Russia's new czar, Prime Minister Vladimir "Czar Vlad" Putin, may have been scorched worst of all. The disastrous forest and peat-bog infernos encircling Moscow have exposed the Potemkin-village nature of Putin's vaunted efficiency. All the czar's men can't even put out a brush fire.
OUR KRYTOCRATIC GOVERNMENT
The majority on the Supreme Court was reaching the "desirable" result in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, his clerk said to Justice Stanley Reed. This observation was irrelevant and dangerous, Justice Reed replied, because if judges voted for results merely because they privately struck the judges as desirable, the Court would overstep its jurisdiction and set the country on a path to krytocracy. Krytocracy is government by unelected judges who substitute their policy preferences for those of elected officials and citizens. Thomas Jefferson warned: "The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. Advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one." Two recent federal court decisions are realizing Jefferson's fears.
AN INCONVENIENT ECONOMIC TRUTH
Where is the historical evidence to show that big increases in government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) lead to faster economic growth and more job creation? Answer: There isn't any. Compare the first four quarters after the bottom of the recession in 1982 that resulted in an average quarterly growth rate of 7.8 percent, versus an average quarterly growth rate of just 3.2 percent in the first four quarters after the bottom of the 2009 recession. In addition, unemployment fell sharply - 2 percent under the Reagan tax-rate-cut solution in 1982-83 versus no drop under President Obama's greatly increased government spending "solution" - in the first four quarters of the recovery from the bottom of each recession. Tax rate cuts trump government spending increases. Tell this to those who want even more spending, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and you'll get Krugman's silly rebuttal:
HALF-FULL REPORT 08/06/10
Relax. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, then another, think of a beautiful sunset and the smell of an ocean breeze. If it's not too early - the sun is over the yard-arm somewhere - pour yourself three fingers of your favorite adult libation. It's going to be okay. True enough, parts of the world around you went even more nuts this week. A left-wing looney with contempt for the Constitution became a Supreme Court Justice. A left-wing limp-wrist judge with contempt for the very basis of what makes us human and for millions of his state's voters forces his homosexuality upon us all. Yet there's also good news, good judicial news. While Judge "Swish" Walker was emasculating Prop 8, the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 209 - 6 to 1! - this week (8/02) which bans "affirmative action," i.e., preferential treatment of women and minorities in public school admissions, government hiring and contracting. The Left took a real hit on this one. Yet that wasn't the only one, for on that same day (8/02) the Left suffered a double-whammy when US District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the State of Virginia's suit against ObamaCare on the grounds of unconstitutionality. This, potentially, is a much bigger deal than banning affirmative action. Here's why...
REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONALISM
Required reading for most any course in the Philosophy of Science is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn distinguished between "normal science," which is essentially puzzle-solving - trying to answer unsolved issues arising within a framework or "paradigm" of accepted scientific principles - and "revolutionary science," which is when the unsolved issues can no longer be answered within the paradigm and must be replaced by a new paradigm. The classic historic example is Ptolemaic astronomy, which tried to explain the motions of the planets within the geocentric paradigm - that the sun revolved around the earth. This "normal science" finally became so unbearably complicated that it broke down, to be replaced by the heliocentric "Copernican Revolution" - that the earth revolved around the sun (which Sir Francis Bacon accepted but called "a rape of the senses"). So let's talk about The Structure of Political Revolutions.
BUSH WON THE WAR IN IRAQ, IS OBAMA LOSING THE PEACE ON PURPOSE?
One president gave his premature "Mission Accomplished" speech about Iraq on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Now another has given his own version as part of a Chicago-ward-politics sales pitch to disabled veterans. The difference is that the first guy was sincere. President Obama's pork-barrel speech to the Disabled Veterans of America yesterday (if you want to help our vets, Mr. President, shut up and do it) would have drawn a blush from those Soviet propagandists who cropped purged Politburo members from Stalin-era photographs. Ignoring his own opposition to the liberation of Iraq, supporting our troops and the surge, Obama spoke as if all's well in Baghdad -- thanks to him. We won that war, but we still can lose the peace. Obama shunned the fact that, almost half a year after its last national election, Iraq doesn't have a new government. Determined to abandon "Bush's war," Obama's been AWOL in Baghdad. Does he want to lose Iraq and throw away the sacrifice of all those Americans who died to win there?
WILL DEMOCRATS BECOME BIRTHERS?
Democrats may have more to fear this fall from disappointed liberals than from the Tea Party, thinks Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration. "A friend whom I'll call David raised a ton of money for Democrats in 2008 and now tells me they can go to hell," Mr. Reich wrote Monday (8/2) on his blog at the liberal American Prospect, which he co-founded. He quoted David as saying of Democrats: "They're all lily-livered wimps, and Obama has the backbone of a worm." Democrats are enraged at Mr. Obama for not being socialist enough. Thus the most interesting question arises: are they mad enough to become birthers?