Vox Popoli

While it would be much better not to put them on the Yellow Bus of Doom at all, I encourage parents of public schoolchildren to refuse to subject them to this melodramatic bit of Orwellian weirdness:

President Obama’s Address to Students Across America September 8, 2009 PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students Across America

Before the Speech:
• Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions:
Who is the President of the United States?
What do you think it takes to be President?
To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?
Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
What do you think he will say to you?
• Teachers can ask students to imagine being the President delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States. What would you tell students? What can students do to help in our schools? Teachers can chart ideas about what they would say.
• Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

During the Speech:
• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
What is the President trying to tell me?
What is the President asking me to do?
What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

Obama has transformed from amusingly incompetent evil to downright creepy with this overt attempt to further build his cult of personality. Yes, please do explain why is it important that children listen to their masterselected officials. And writing down “personally meaningful” phrases? In the immortal words of John McEnroe, “you cannot be serious!” But, on the positive side, it would be hard to imagine a better demonstration of the infantilization of the American Left.

This is bizarre, especially given the complete lack of scientific evidence that swine flu is any more dangerous than any other flu. But, as Rahm Emanuel says, no would-be dictator ever wants to waste a pandemiccrisis:

A “pandemic response bill” currently making its way through the Massachusetts state legislature would allow authorities to forcefully quarantine citizens in the event of a health emergency, compel health providers to vaccinate citizens, authorize forceful entry into private dwellings and destruction of citizen property and impose fines on citizens for noncompliance.

If citizens refuse to comply with isolation or quarantine orders in the event of a health emergency, they may be imprisoned for up to 30 days and fined $1,000 per day that the violation continues.

It’s interesting to see the increasing multitude of factors that now trump the Constitutional rights of Americans. Do Americans still believe they live in the “most free country on Earth”? It is rapidly becoming clear that they do not.

Mish uncharacteristically omits to connect one important pair of dots while citing more support for the deflationary scenario:

Eastern Europe, Spain and Ireland are now all experiencing the beginning of deflation. We believe that we will see much more deflation to come, which will have broad ramifications across the European banking sector. The periphery countries are net debtors, and the rest of Europe is the net creditor. When a debtor can’t pay, the creditor suffers. Germany, France and others will need to cope with recapitalizing the periphery and Spain. In the words of Plautus, “I am a rich man as long as I don’t pay my creditors.” A deflationary spiral means that most of the debt will need to be written off, and the creditors will have to absorb the losses.

Spain is not the only country facing deflation. It is a problem for the entire European periphery. Ireland, for example, has the highest rate of deflation in the world. Prices in Ireland are falling at an annual rate of 5.9%, well ahead of the drops in other countries – only Thailand, at 4.4%, comes even close.

That important question is: what did Spain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe all have in common. The answer, unfortunately for the green shoots-spotting crowd in the USA, is “housing booms”. As crazy as the US housing bubble was, the Spanish, Irish, UK, and Estonian bubbles were all even more out of hand. Germany, France, and Austria, on the other hand, saw no bubbles and therefore should be relatively well-positioned to the extent that they are not exposed to the deleveraging taking place elsewhere.

If Hawaii’s pagan abos want to return to living in grass huts, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be permitted to do so. They have the same right of self-determination that everyone else does. Let them reclaim their queen, their sovereignty, and their old way of life. But then, don’t permit them to immigrate to the mainland when they belatedly realize that they miss that whole haole “technology” thing either:

* The last day of school has long been unofficially designated “Beat Haole Day,” with white students singled out for harassment and violence. (Haole — pronounced how-lee — is slang for a foreigner, usually white, and sometimes is used as a racial slur.)
* A non-Native Hawaiian student who challenged the Hawaiian-preference admission policy at a wealthy private school received a $7 million settlement this year.
* A 12-year-old white girl new to Hawaii from New York City needed 10 surgical staples to close a gash in her head incurred when she was beaten in 2007 by a Native Hawaiian girl who called her a “fucking haole.”
* A vocal segment of Native Hawaiians is pushing for independence to end the “prolonged occupation” by the United States and governance by natives.
* Demonstrators shouting racial epithets at whites disrupted a statehood celebration in 2006.

Needless to say, none of these would qualify as “hate-crimes”, since they’re not directed at anyone on the official victims list. The reality is that very few minorities actually believe in equality or diversity or multiculturalism; for the most part, they simply make use of those ideological concepts in order to obtain more government largesse. Only those who happen to be in the sizable majority have the luxury of feigning belief in the equality myths. It’s ironic, of course, that those who understand pagan abos don’t like seeing their lands invaded by European Christians are completely incapable of understanding that the same holds true for Scandinavian-American Lutherans being invaded by African Muslims. I wonder if we’ll be able to convince the Hawaiians to take Obama with them when they depart the Union? After all, he was born there, right?

As evidence that the equality myth was always about obtaining power, not equality, I give you this woman’s insane demand for equality through inequal distribution:

If as many women as men use the loo in any given public place, and they take longer over the deed, we should be allocated more lavatories. In Britain, however, the rule remains that the number of appliances in women’s loos must equal those in men’s.

Now that is the true voice of the “equality” advocate. Meanwhile, the rational observer wonders how a property-owners decision regarding the number of restrooms could possibly be considered a legitimate concern for the national government.

There must be a lot of it if it is news that a judge actually bothers to check that the paperwork is correct:

He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model.

His opinions, too, have been greeted by a cry of affront from a bank official or two, who say this judge stands in the way of what is rightfully theirs. HSBC bank appealed a recent ruling, saying he had set a “dangerous precedent” by acting as “both judge and jury,” throwing out cases even when homeowners had not responded to foreclosure motions….

“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”

It’s not just large corporations, of course. The various levels of government are seldom held accountable to following the law or having its motions thrown out for a failure to comply by the applicable rules. The point, of course, is that there is no longer even much of a pretense at the rule of law in the United States. That has been replaced with rule by bureaucratic dictate.

It’s good to know there are still a few judges who are honorable. The key phrase from the article is this: “Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.”

“Hardly revolutionary” is correct. One would assume that this was always the case; one would, of course, be wrong. Indeed, the fact that a requirement to prove ownership is considered an unusual position only shows how endemic the acceptance of blatantly illegal behavior has become.

One suspects that the Obama administration’s failure to scrub the Internet in time to hide his environmental czar’s recent past is one reason the White House seeks emergency control of the Internet:

STORM’s Politics

STORM was never formally a “Marxist-Leninist” organization, and we never had a systematic Marxist theoretical framework. But we did hav a political commitment to the fundamental ideas of Marxism-Leninism. We upheld the Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation. We agreed with Lenin’s analysis of the state and the party. And we found inspiration and guidance in the insurgent revolutionary strategies developed by Third World revolutionaries like Mao Tse-Tung and Amilcar Cabral…. We also saw our brand of Marxism as, in some ways, a reclamation. In the face of a stereotype of Marxism that racialized it as white, we wanted to reclaim the history of Third World Communist struggle. After all, such struggles have made up the overwhelming majority of communist movements worldwide….

But if we were firmly within the Marxist tradition, we were not bound very tightly to any camp within it.

– Reclaiming Revolution: history summation & lessons from the work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), STORM, Spring 2004

It was never any secret that Green was the new Red. But, given the Magic Negro’s affiliations with the Chicago Left, the Latin American Left, and outright California communists such as Van Jones, there can be little doubt that he is, at the very least, sympathetic to Marxist causes. It is a mistake to look too closely at his ideology in an attempt to forecast his future actions, however, because as I pointed out in today’s column, the liberal fascist is, like his historical counterpart, first and foremost practical in his actions.

Liberal Book Banners

The issue was that the McCain-Feingold law bans corporate money being used for electioneering. … At the first Supreme Court argument in March, a government lawyer, answering a hypothetical question, said the government could also make it a crime to distribute books advocating the election or defeat of political candidates so long as they were paid for by corporations and not their political action committees. That position seemed to astound several of the more conservative justices, and there were gasps in the courtroom.

– New York Times, “Supreme Court to Revisit ‘Hillary’ Documentary,” Aug. 29, 2009

Few political books have ever been published with more perfect timing than Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.” Although Goldberg may have gotten the identity of the victorious liberal incorrect, his work has nevertheless proven to be a reliable indicator of the increasingly materno-fascistic behavior of the Democratic House, Senate and White House. The present Washington regime is the political version of the so-called helicopter moms who hover over their children at all times in an attempt to exert constant control over their decisions and behavior.

Gordon Brown is caught lying again:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal. Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

Has there ever been a worse Prime Minister than the One-Eyed Liar? The amazing thing is that as bad as Blair was, Brown has proven to be even worse. One would be tempted to call him a traitor destroying his country, but then, perhaps he’s just a patriot wreaking Scottish vengeance on England.

How can one call him worse than Neville Chamberlain? Because at least Chamberlain only gave away Czechoslovakia to a group of continental fascists. Brown, on the other hand, is giving away Britain to a group of continental fascists.

The 25-question final will be next Saturday and will encompass the book in its entirety.

JB followed the logic:

At first I felt your argument was intuitively incorrect. Then it occurred to me that the use of force would still be prosecutable. A contract to sell your furniture does not give the other party authority to break down your door, beat and bind you, and take your sofa. While you haven’t mentioned this, I think it would mollify most.

I didn’t mention it because it was always completely obvious. The mere possession of consent to sex doesn’t grant the holder a license to kill, commit assault, or rob a bank. Nor was that ever a relevant issue, for as I pointed out in the comments to the previous post, the greater part of the nebulous “rape” arguments begin with a knife-wielding stranger breaking in and binding the victim and end with the “victim” saying that she felt she was coerced because the “rapist” looked at her with puppy dog eyes.