Moderates United

Finally watched this, and was very impressed.  GREAT MOVIE, wonderful acting.

I just hated the end.  It worked out to de facto Communist propaganda.  Communism is inspired by the French Revolution, and the word itself comes from the Paris Commune that if my math was right was roughly 20 years after the barricades in that movie, which would have been from about 1850.

We need to be clear that the Arc de Triomphe is a monument to wars following the French Revolution in which millions of people were killed.  Napoleon did not pay his troops: he allowed them to rape, loot and pillage.  Countless lives were damaged in addition to those lost outright.  As in Communist nations there was a great deal of horror and little to redeem or justify it.

The Eiffel Tower is a monument to the original French Revolution, one which led directly to the Committee of Public Safety (does this not sound a bit like Department of Homeland Security) and, I forget the number, at least tens of thousands of deaths in all sorts of awful ways. In addition to the guillotine I remember reading about people being chained and sunk on boats, and placed in front of cannons and blown to bits.

All of this was always insanity.  None of it ever led to anything that even remotely justified the suffering.  The French Revolution turned virtually the entire nation into Javerts.  If you didn’t wear the right colors or were accused by someone of some crime simply out of spite, you could get summarily executed with nothing even APPROACHING justice. 

That stirring scene with Ann Hathaway, when she realizes all hopes of a better life are gone: this story was reenacted millions of times BECAUSE of the French Revolution.  What happened to the farm wife whose husband was murdered by French Nazis, and who was gang raped, and all her lifestock killed or stolen?  What happened to Russian peasants reduced to cannibalism to survive?  What happened to those who supported the Revolution because they wanted bread, and who like Jean Valjean wound up slaves because they had to steal to survive, because NOTHING worked economically in that Alice in Wonderland world with real axes and real blood?

Those young men, the “idealists”, were weak. They wanted the world to be a certain way, and decided that they did not want to live if the world was not in fact that way.  This is delusional.  It is illness, pathology.

The world is the way it is, and if we want to improve it, we must start by understanding it.  All the wishing in the world will not only not accomplish anything, but if you mistake wishing for reality, it leads to death and suffering which was unnecessary and which would not have happened if you had not happened along with your bad ideas.

We all want passion in life, but I would submit that the modest ones pursued diligently across a life are infinitely more useful than grand ones pursued violently.  There are many ways to commit suicide.

I’ve never liked the term “inner child”.  Children are irresponsible, they whine, and they are not serious.  None of this, of course, is their fault.  We all start as children, and there is no other way to do it.  But I think many people use this phrase as an excuse to act like children as adults.

But there is a part in all of us, I think, which is childlike in important positive ways.  The capacity for wonder arises from this part.  Spontaneous generosity and affection arise from this part.  Curiosity arises from this part.  Happiness and joy arise from this part.  Connection with others on a deep level comes from this part.

I therefore propose the term “Inner Innocent”. Or perhaps “Inner Angel”.  I will likely come up with more terms.

I will add that I recognize that I am an odd mix of tendencies.  One moment I am talking about global tyranny, and the next I am writing things like this.

I forget if it was Christ or one of his disciples that said it, but I have always like the advice to be as innocent as a dove and as cunning as a serpent.  They are not contradictory at all: they merely exist at different levels of a well integrated personality.

Not only is there no need to be stupid to be a good person, it is strongly contraindicated.  There is no value in stupidity or naivete.  People who mean well learn.  This is the sign they actually mean well, and conversely the failure to learn indicates a motivation other than decency.

I read that roughly $1 billion is being wasted daily, diverted from alternative, better uses, in the name of stopping global warming.  This is crazy.

But look at the comments.  People are waking up.  It was not like this five years ago.  The Earth choosing not to indulge the fascists has been mighty inconvenient for them.

I will add that we spend roughly twice that on national defense.  I would like to see that number drop as well.

If we are becoming a banana republic, then we need to start thinking like one.  The rule is that one asshole seizes power, and then the Army overthrows him.  It worked quite well in Chile, which is why everyone still hates Pinochet so much.  He took power, ruled a while, then stepped down peacefully, which is something Hugo Chavez was never going to do.

Here, as long as the Constitution is more or less being respected–which is to say constantly trampled on, but never fully vitiated, and as long as  Congress continues to exert a strong policy influence–we should continue to work politically.  If at any point, though, the rule of law becomes subject to a dictator, if at any point our Constitutional Republic is brought to an end–if at any point Obama or a successor BREAKS THE LAW in patent and on-going ways even worse than what we are seeing today–I would submit that the proper role of our military is to take control, and return the power of the government to the people, and reinstitute a system of law based on the Constitution. Defending the Constitution is, after all, literally their sworn duty.

Being a land of laws is what has made us strong, and part of this premise is that NO ONE is above the law.

In my view, they should have contingency plans for this.

I would add that about the only way my “Capitalist Revolution” is going to happen is in such extreme circumstances.

Actually, I will add one more thing: Obama knows that most members of our military value freedom, and are strong patriots.  They will never willingly be made agents of tyranny.  This means that if he does plan to seize complete power, he will have to have an EXCUSE, one which will make reasonable people follow orders which they ordinarily would reject.  Presumably such an excuse would need to take the form of a false flag terrorist attack purportedly involving a wide conspiracy among precisely the Tea Party sorts Obama hates so much; or a generalized economic disaster, where there is widespread disorder in the streets.

Again, senior leaders need game plans for these situations.  Their JOB, their MISSION, is to protect freedom, not Obama.  Since it takes becoming a political animal to reach those positions, in general, many forget this.  They forget the mission.

Both scenarios, though, could easily be paid for with the tens of billions of dollars that disappeared from the “Stimulus”.

I think I may start using this as a synonym for “leftist” and Fascist.

It can be stated as a general rule that whatever word an anti-Liberal uses, the opposite is most likely the case.  The stated intent of Obamacare was to increase coverage and decrease costs, both for individuals and in terms of what the government was paying out.

This is a response to a non-debate with a silly person on the topic of Global Warming.  

The point I will underscore, repeated in the body of the response, is To the extent humanity still has problems, substantially ALL
of them can be placed at the feet of Socialists, who like all deceivers
go by many names.


This point is critical, and it is the first time, I think, that I have stated it so clearly.

Let’s simplify this. The question at hand is if it worth passing
economically disruptive regulations and installing in the process a
global government in order to stop something that is not even clearly a
danger.

Is it worth denying developing nations the benefits of
cheap energy? Is it worth raising energy costs across the board in the
United States and other nations, which will hurt the poor the most?

I
don’t believe anyone has shown clearly, much less beyond any reasonable
doubt, that the warming we have seen since the Little Ice Age is
anything but background variation. We have weather on a daily basis,
and climate across decades, centuries, and millenia. There were no coal
plants when CO2 levels were ten times what they are today.

I
don’t believe ANY of the climate models have yet predicted ANYTHING.
Quite the contrary, they make guesses, and simply adjust the models to
predicts in the past what actually happened. This does not inspire
confidence, is absolutely inconsistent with a scientific model based
upon falsifiable hypotheses, and CATEGORICALLY should not be used as the
basis for invasive, disruptive, and costly government interventions.

And
clearly many aspiring Fascists like Al Gore have seized on this issue
as a means of generating global government with few democratic controls.

This is made quite clear in this article: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

Global
Warming is nothing but a repackaging of the old Malthusian notion that
prosperity was going to make all of us poor. It was expressed for a
while in the claim that the Earth was going to get overpopulated. Some
initial Fascist policies were put in place, like forced sterilizations
and abortions, but none of the mass famines that were predicted have
happened.

In the past half century, virtually all mass hunger has
been the result of wars, usually wars involving Communists. To bring
back Mr. Boomtown Rats, the famine in Ethiopia was the result of INSANE
policies initiated at gunpoint by INSANE left wingers, who moved people
from places where they could feed themselves to places where they could
not.

To the extent humanity still has problems, substantially ALL
of them can be placed at the feet of Socialists, who like all deceivers
go by many names.

Global Warming–or Climate Change, which again is a lie–is simply one of those names.

There is no problem so bad that it cannot be made worse by a specialist.

I may have read this somewhere, perhaps in one of those Murphy’s Law books that used to be popular.  Still, I like it, and pass it along in the spirit of mild amusement, and perhaps a tad bit of wistfulness.  It is in fact quite true.  As one flaming example, Paul Krugman is a specialist.

Two points.  First, do you recall what Obamacare ALSO means?  It means the government take-over of the educational loan sector.  It means we are one step closer to Cuba, where education is “free” (even if even people with M.D.’s can barely make enough to eat, and the country as a whole is a squalid shithole ruled by two-bit Nazis).

Second, the rollout of these exchanges, and the lack of a reaction on the part of Reid or Obama, makes to my mind very clear they have NEVER cared if these things worked.  They were never the end game.  They were always just a step in the direction of full government control of the healthcare sector.  I think they quite literally thought that rhetorical work was sufficient, that no matter how bad these things stank, that because they had control of most of the propaganda apparatus of this country, nobody would notice.  If there were problems, they could blame them on Republicans, or just pretend they didn’t exist.  That is how they deal with all other real problems, and the truth is it works pretty well.  You just need to be an amoral asshole to use such tactics.  Given that–and Obama and Reid and Pelosi clearly qualify–you can cover a lot of miles.  Hell, there are people who still believe in Global Warming.

But as I have said, real people trying to pay real bills cannot be swayed by abstract rhetoric.  All is well and good until the shit gets real, THEN people notice how much BS has been floating around.

I will repeat: if the Republicans never rise above their normal level of incompetence, they may still make this a stake to drive through the heart of the Democrat Party for a very, very long time.  It is an awful law.  It is like it was written by children based on the fairy tale proposition that details don’t matter, and that everything always works out in the end for nice people. 

When it was passed, the ONLY concern was THAT it passed.  But now it is law–or likely to become law, assuming the usual cowardice on Capital Hill–and its many, many deficiencies will become clear to all.

Granted, my belief that Obama is an aspiring totalitarian backed by huge amounts of cash–provided both by a shadowy but very wealthy cabal and misdirected and misreported Federal funds–to help him pull it off makes me paranoid, but it does not seem to me this food stamp debacle was an accident.

It seems more likely to have been a test.  Obama now KNOWS that he can more or less induce riots on demand, and make them stop whenever he wants.  Further, among those receiving food stamps, he has reinforced both by withholding, and by being excessively generous the primary role government–HIS government–plays in the lives of these people.

It has been obvious for some time that his efforts to increase the number of people receiving handouts, whether by putting record numbers of people on food stamps in the first place, giving them free phones, paying them to protest, and the like, have had as their purpose creating people who over time will be unable to conceive of life where they have to fend for themselves, and who thus can be reliably counted on to vote Democrat.

What we now also know is that they are a potential tool for the creation of the sort of chaos that normally precedes a coup.  Violence in the streets is a couple keystrokes away.