Same song, different band.........

[Simple Minded]

from a recent email to a friend:

Here you go Walley,

When I read the following sentence:

VDH: I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end [4] and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself.

I instantly thought of Ayn Rand's almost identical phrase ("logical conclusion") from the 1930s describing the eventual outcome of America implementing the New Deal, and similar fates for Europe and the USSR due to the adoption of similar ideologies.

The same is true for the individual or the mob, the philosphy one chooses to adopt determines one's behavior!!!

Human nature is very consistent. The belief in square circles and the desire for free lunches seems universal, and when implemented on political level includes enough self-destructive/counter productive perverse incentives to wreak wide spread havoc. On the individual level, it is merely affects the individual adoptor.

Seems to be true for Greeks and Germans as well as Americans......Has nothing to do with race or political parties or administrators...

June 21, 2011
The Metaphysics of Contemporary Theftby Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

Same Old, Same Old…

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving by saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,” and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos” [1] — like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out.

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant, who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house — carting off the refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave. But why? Do these miscreants wish a civilization of the sort that all houses must seem occupied all the time, or are otherwise considered “communal property” for the taking? Don’t the appliance thieves have homes, and if so, do they have locks on the doors to protect their investments from the likes of themselves?

These days I sympathize with gloomy St. Augustine, writing after the sack of Rome in 410, and then again contemplating things lost when back home, near death, and besieged by the vandals at Hippo Regius. He died I think convinced that a millennium of culture was about to end. And despite a Belisarius to come, it did.

Reflections on the Redistributive State

I think the public would react in two different ways to the above occurrences — and such a dichotomy explains a lot why the nation has never been more divided.

A majority would believe the thieves took things for drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an iPhone or DVD, rather than out of elemental need (e.g., the thief hawked the chainsaw to purchase the family’s rice allotment for the week). In this view, contemporary American crime arises not so much then from Dickensian poverty, as we see in South America or Africa, but out of a sense of resentment, of boredom, from a certain contempt for the more law-abiding and successful, or on the assurance that apprehension is unlikely, and punishment rarer still. After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, and the government itself sympathize with, even romanticize [2] those forced to take a chainsaw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

The remedy to address theft would be not more government help — public assistance, social welfare, counseling — but far less, given that human nature rises to the occasion when forced to work and sinks when leisured and exempt. I don’t believe my thieves have worked much; instead, they figured a day’s theft beats tile setting or concrete work beginning at 5 AM.

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs (and, in terms of illegal immigration, once wrote about in Mexifornia [3] — a book I seem doomed to relive in Ground Hog fashion each day — nearly a decade ago): gangbanger A shoots up gangbanger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis.

Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end [4] and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself. There is not always a Germany for every Greece [5]. Let me offer a few examples:

In the American Southwest, open borders, unassimilated illegal immigrants, ethnic and tribal chauvinism predicated on racial solidarity (after all, La Raza, Inc. is not complaining about the deportation of the Korean or Ugandan who overstays his visa or agitating for an open immigration policy with Kenya), a culture of grievance and complaint, all embedded in a contempt for federal law — all that leads to enclaves that resemble more the country abandoned than sought out. In other words the entire therapeutic vision of illegal immigration would lead to a society to which illegal immigrants would not wish to flock. Only assimilation, intermarriage, integration, legality, mastery of English, and acceptance of American culture would ensure the continuance of the sort of society which future illegal aliens would wish to cross into.

The same is true of unions, pensions, and compensation. Highly paid and pensioned California teachers and professors are resembling bishops, knights, or rooks surrounded by a host of part-time, temporary, one-year-contract pawns, lacking the salary, security, and benefits of the kingpins. Yet the liberal establishment in education cannot continue in such an apartheid world of unionized winners and exploited subordinate losers, or public fiefdoms propped up by private toilers. It is a contradiction in terms, and there is no money to pay for it, despite the fiscal logic of its exploitation. The logical conclusion to the blue state would be a handful of six-figured union grandees surrounded by a sea of part-time lackeys (sort of like the CSU system with its blue-chip administrators and tenured faculty propped up by legions of part-time lecturers). Note the surrealism of the European unrest: who are the “they” who “stole” the money that is now no longer there to fund socialism? Did not the socialists at last get what they wanted? The “they” who used to fund it by expanding the economy disappeared a long time ago and now are in the graveyards of Europe.

I went to the warehouse local food store the other day, soaked it all in, and wondered: if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps? We are nearing 50 million recipients. So what will come next? Food stamp A; food stamp category B? Super food stamps? Can 100 million receive them? 150?

Our California prison system is said to be letting out 30,000-40,000 criminals. If all the court rulings mandating libraries, counseling, second medical opinions, legal help, etc., coupled with the cost of a unionized, highly compensated guild of guards, make prison too expensive, then will we be left with virtual prisons in which trials and sentencing are followed by freedom? If it is cheaper each year to send the felon to UCLA or even Stanford, why then have a prison — a new metaphor for almost everything gone wrong with contemporary American society?

This liberal notion of being careful of what you wish for extends to energy. If Obama promised “skyrocketing” energy prices [6], and to “bankrupt” coal [7], and has discouraged almost all new fossil fuel production (a great wonder of the age is how private enterprise keeps finding new gas and oil reserves despite the discouragement of the government), why then is he worried about $4-a-gallon gas? Is not $4 or $5 gas the point [8]?

It is near $10 in Europe. So why not soon here the same? If the university president cannot afford to drive his Lexus to campus, if the trial lawyer cannot take his Mercedes to Yosemite, if the professor’s Volvo is too expensive to drive to the postmodern lit conference, have we reached nirvana or chaos [9]?

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host. That does not mean it has not done a lot of damage and will not do even more in the next two years; only that it never quite wanted to see cap-and-trade legislation enacted, blanket amnesty, Guantamo shut down, or Predators ended; these were simply crude slurs by which to demonize Bush, ways of acquiring power and influence, but not a workable plan of living. Note that Obama is now zealous on just those issues which he could have easily rammed through his Democratically controlled Congress in 2009-10 when he had large majorities, such as amnesty and cap and trade.

You cannot fly to Costa del Sol on solar panels. The light switches might not go on at Vail without coal burning somewhere. The Holder or Obama children might not be safe in the Stockton or Parlier city schools. Some right-wing nut in the Dakotas is still necessary to pump the oil to refine the gas for Air Force One [10]; there is no golf without an irrigation system and a supply of either ground or surface water.

In short, the currently insulted class is necessary and Obama knows it.

If I were not flying economy today for eight hours to speak on the other side of the country, and did not write this reflection, cramped up on the plane, there would soon be no more chainsaws or copper wire [11] for the oppressed in my region to steal.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

URLs in this post:
[1] “cholos”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo#United_States" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[2] even romanticize: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010 ... g-boomers/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[3] Mexifornia: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... asmedia-20" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[4] is reaching its logical end: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/ ... the-shark/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[5] a Germany for every Greece: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/reawakenin ... tionalism/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[6] “skyrocketing” energy prices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4 ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[7] “bankrupt” coal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aTf5gjvNvo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[8] Is not $4 or $5 gas the point: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011 ... aphenia-2/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[9] nirvana or chaos: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011 ... erfection/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[10] for Air Force One: http://deceiver.com/2009/04/23/obama-ce ... the-earth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[11] or copper wire: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/0 ... gh-or-low/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[skyhook77sfg]

"Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host. "

MY EXACT CONCLUSION AND EVEN SAME METAPHOR

We are in to parasitology here...

[Azrael]

There should be especially stiff penalties for infrastructure theft, like the theft of copper wire. And monetary damages, including punitive damages, should be imposed.

[Simple Minded]

One of my friends that received the original email replied that he thinks he has been watching the "Fall of Rome II" for several years.....

[Hapax Legomenon]

I am of the opinion that TSHTF very, very, very slowly. DoU is right--Mr. Murphy is going to collect his due.

[skyhook77sfg]

COULD BE A LOT WORSE DEPT

REDEFINING PATHOS



Mumpy Sarkar, from a village in West Bengal, India, took her life June 27 in the hope of providing organs for her father and brother.


Both of her brother’s kidneys were not fully functioning, with one damaged and the other growing weaker. Her father was slowly losing his eyesight.Her father is a day laborer in an agricultural district and the family was unable to afford medical treatment, The Times of India said.

Mumpy poisoned herself with the pesticide Thiodan, leaving behind a suicide note explaining her wishes.

However, the note was only discovered the day after the girl was cremated.

[skyhook77sfg]

The Left Right Paradigm is Over

Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc.

I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.

For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.

The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.

This may not be a brilliant insight, but it is surely an overlooked one. It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing.

Consider:

• Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations;

• The biggest influence on legislative votes is often Corporate Lobbying;

• Corporate ability to extend copyright far beyond what original protections amounts to a taking of public works for private corporate usage;

• PAC and campaign finance by Corporations has supplanted individual donations to elections;

• The individuals’ right to seek redress in court has been under attack for decades, limiting their options.

• DRM and content protection undercuts the individual’s ability to use purchased content as they see fit;

• Patent protections are continually weakened. Deep pocketed corporations can usurp inventions almost at will;

• The Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations have Free Speech rights equivalent to people; (So much for original intent!)

None of these are Democrat/Republican conflicts, but rather, are corporate vs. individual issues.

For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit.

What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.

How about government spending? The past two presidents are regarded as representative of the Left Right paradigm – yet they each spent excessively, sponsored unfunded tax cuts, plowed money into military adventures and ran enormous deficits. Does Left Right really make a difference when it comes to deficits and fiscal responsibility? (Apparently not).

What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms?

In many ways, American society is increasingly less married to this dynamic: Party Affiliation continues to fall, approval of Congress is at record lows, and voter participation hovers at very low rates.

There is some pushback already taking place against the concentration of corporate power: Mainstream corporate media has been increasingly replaced with user created content – YouTube and Blogs are increasingly important to news consumers (especially younger users). Independent voters are an increasingly larger share of the US electorate. And I suspect that much of the pushback against the Elizabeth Warren’s concept of a Financial Consumer Protection Agency plays directly into this Corporate vs. Individual fight.

But the battle lines between the two groups have barely been drawn. I expect this fight will define American politics over the next decade.

Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO.

And you are losing .

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/yo ... porations/


as any marketeer worth his stock options knows...

change in attitude always precedes change in behaviour.

always.

[skyhook77sfg]

The Fraud of the Two Party System has been exposed. Can we stop playing along now?


http://my.firedoglake.com/debbierlus/20 ... along-now/


The writing is on the wall. In fact, the writing was on the wall before Obama even won the election. He is not a progressive. He is not a liberal. He is a politician who serves the corporate powers that placed him in office. He does not serve the people.

He is not negotiating with Republicans. He is going through the necessary theatre to convince the populace that he is ceding away their safety nets, environmental protections, labor rights, and government protections as a matter of necessity. It is pure bullshit.

The democrats controlled three branches of government and they acted as operatives for the private health insurance companies, the oil companies, the military industrial complex, and the big banks. I am fully convinced Obama wanted a loss of control of Congress for his own reelection chances. Mighty difficult to pretend you have to cede every important principle and election promise when your own party maintains full control of the government. The democrats failed utterly to represent the American people, they lost the mid-terms, and this was scripted as a sign that the people actually wanted MORE corporate/military/wealth friendly policies. Not only did Obama gain the cover of needing to capitulate to the supposedly ‘right wing agenda’ (actually his own agenda imposed upon him by his corporate donor benefactors) with one of the branches now in the ‘opposition’s control. He was able to spin the loss as a need to further betray not only his base, but the entire American populace.

The President and democratic leadership are fully aware that they don’t serve at the pleasure of the people, they serve at the pleasure of those who buy the election cycles. It benefits the wealth and corporate power structure to maintain political representatives who will be able to foist their policies of greed and dominion over the people while tamping down the possibility of a grassroots and revolutionary backlash to their slimey dictates. Policies that would be universally decried under a Republican administration by the democratic base are accepted, sometimes defended, and worse yet, even advocated for under the Obama administration. The creation of candidate Obama was a brillinant corporate coup…the perfect way to stem the anger of the American people after the eight year nightmare of Bush. The face of change with zero change. People gobbled it up.

It was obvious as soon as Obama appointed his first Presidential cabinet what had really just occurred. The corporate power structure had placed a representative in power who not only served to diffuse the anger and hunger for change in the populace, but also had a political leader who would make it politically feasible to implement policies and laws that would have been heavily resisted under a Republican’s charge. Even after two plus years of continuous demostrations of political alliance and favor for the corporate wealth and against the benefit of the American citizenry, Obama still retains credibility (albeit weakend) among many of the traditional democratic base. He is still able to keep the people preoocupied and divided enough to stem any true united movement against the political power structure. There has been no real liberal/progressive challenge to the Obama presidency, he faces no threat at the current moment of any third party challenger within the democratic party, and there is no Bernie Sanders type politician who is stepping in to challenge him independently. He has been able to tamp down any real challenge to his Presidency and political doctrine from any liberal source, and now he only faces a weak and extremist field of right wing idealogues who will be sure to motivate enough of his prior supporters to the voting booth, if only out of sheer fear. He will retain his corporate sponsorship as long as he is able to continually deliver on their demands for privatization of government and dismantling of programs that empower people to exist outside its complete and total control. No unions, no strong public education, no financial safety nets for the elderly or disabled, no environmental rules that impinge on the scourging of every bit of land and water for the profit of the wealth and the few. None of it.

Obama is delivering it all. Why would they want to change horses?

Social Security and Medicare being placed on the table right before a Presidential election cycle? A striking demonstration of how far this process has already played out and how far Obama will go to keep corporate dollars pouring into his reelection coffer.

Meanwhile, the fascist power structure can’t lose. They have two political powers fighting to prove who is more willing to whore themselves out for their favor. Either way, they get what they want. It will continue as long as the people go along with the game, and acquises their representation to leadership who seek nothing but their own power. The writing is on the wall.

The only wild card is when the people finally wake up and decide they have had enough of the game.

I don’t see it for 2012. I hope I am wrong. I hope Medicare and Social Security will be the final straw and it will galvanize people into the streets. But, if we don’t rally for real change and we continue to futilely support political leaders and structure that have no agenda to represent our needs, change ain’t gonna come.

The Presidency of Hope has turned into the Presidency of Disempowerment and Hopelessness. And, sadly, I think that was the plan all along.

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

and the two party scam goes on.....


Republicans are doing the squawking now because there is a Democrat in the White House. But back when there was a Republican president, Democrats did the squawking.

On March 16, 2006, one Democratic senator in particular denounced George W. Bush’s request to raise the debt limit. “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”

That senator was Barack Obama, and he, along with most Democrats, voted against a higher limit that day. It passed only because almost every Republican voted for it, including many who are now among the strongest opponents of a debt-limit increase.

TURN OFF AMERICAN IDOL AND SMELL THE ROT...

TIME FOR RON PAUL OR GARY JOHNSON OR JESEE VENTURA OR MIKE GRAVEL...

ANYBODY WHO DOESNT OWE THEIR SOUL TO THE COMPANY STORE

ANYBODY


if we dont do it at the ballot box NOW
it'll take bullets in the not so far future