Tag: politics

Women ruin everything

Even, ironically enough, TITLE IX.  I’m skeptical that even the most confirmed cynic could have seen this one coming.  This isn’t fourth- or fifth-wave feminism, we have clearly progressed all the way into the fantastic realm of metafeminism.

In fall 2011, faced with the prospect of another season watching
their daughter, Rose, play field hockey against boys, the Grenens had
finally had enough. They wrote to the PIAA, which invited them to come
to its offices in Mechanicsburg and give a PowerPoint presentation. At
the meeting, in January 2012, Mrs. Grenen figured that she would have to
persuade the PIAA to be on her side. But in the middle of the meeting,
someone interrupted her.

“You’re preaching to the choir,” a man said.

The
PIAA had been discussing the issue for years, but it felt that its
hands were tied because of a Commonwealth Court order that was nearly
four decades old.  In 1973, the PIAA had a bylaw which stated,
“Girls shall not compete or practice against boys in any athletic
contest.” The attorney general asserted that this provision violated the
new Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment, which stated, “Equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania because of the sex of the individual.”

In 1975,
Commonwealth Court entered an order that declared the PIAA bylaw
unconstitutional, saying, “The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic
Association is hereby ordered to permit girls to practice and compete
with boys in interscholastic athletics … .”

At the time of the
order, few girls-only sports were offered. The order was meant to give
girls who wanted to play sports offered only for boys the opportunity to
do so. As the years passed, and more girls teams were created, the
order began to be interpreted so that boys could also play on girls
teams if the sport was offered only for girls — which had the opposite
effect of the order’s original intent.  The only way for the PIAA
to change the interpretation of the order was to have the case reopened
— a task that would take legal man-hours and resources that the PIAA
didn’t feel it had. Basically, the PIAA needed people like the Grenens
to fight the battle, and the organization would be glad to offer its
support.

“It could be a large expense, and we still don’t know the
outcome,” said Bob Lombardi, the PIAA executive director. “The Grenens
have provided a great opportunity because they are attorneys to work on
this.”

Key to the Grenens’ hope for reopening the case was a 1985
interpretation of the Pennsylvania ERA that said the ERA “does not
prohibit differential treatment among the sexes when that treatment is
reasonable and genuinely based on physical characteristics unique to one
sex.”

In fall 2012, the Grenens filed a petition with
Commonwealth Court to reopen the 1975 case. The court granted the
request — a huge victory and likely the only hope to change the status
quo.

On Feb. 26, the Grenens, the PIAA and representatives from
the attorney general’s office will meet in Harrisburg for a status
conference. The Grenens and the PIAA’s hope is that they will agree on a
common-sense bylaw that will outlaw boys playing on girls’ teams while
staying in accordance with the ERA.

In other words, we are expected to believe that legal equality means girls being able to play on boys teams, whether there are girls teams or not, but boys cannot play on girls teams, even if there are no boys teams upon which they can play.

Even if you think, well, what does it matter, it’s just sports, keep this in mind: Title IX is now being applied to science.  Orwell put it beautifully.  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.  And the Sports Guy put it even better: women ruin everything.

Do you really think it was an accident that women were never permitted any voice in the governance of the Roman Republic or the great historical democracies such as Athens, Thebes, Imperial Britain, and Revolutionary America?  Do you really believe it to be a mere coincidence that many modern democracies, including Germany, Italy, and the member states of the European Union, were not able to survive even 100 years of female suffrage?

Politicians are lying bastards

And in other news, water is still wet:

[B]efore Senator Joe Manchin III invited a group of 15 businessmen and community leaders to lunch last week to discuss the topic, he had only a vague idea of how anxious many of his supporters were.

“How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?” he asked.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical….

On Thursday a group of Democratic senators led by Dianne Feinstein of
California plans to introduce a bill that would outlaw more than 100
different assault weapons, setting up what promises to be a fraught and
divisive debate over gun control in Congress in the coming weeks. 

I imagine the other half are just as skeptical now.  How out of it, or how dishonest, does a senator have to be to fail to see a bill as obvious as Feinstein’s coming only a week before it is announced?  Public Enemy had it right when Chuck D rapped about the fact that is corrupt like a senator.  But I think Nate may have had it right when he concluded that the pile of executive orders that Obama dropped on the nation last week represented him backing down on guns after Sandy Hook failed to be the game changer the media billed it as.

Can you even imagine how much trouble the guy in charge of orchestrating false flags is right now?  No doubt he’s desperately defending himself.  What’s he supposed to do for an encore, find some patsy, drug him up, and turn him loose in an animal shelter to shoot up puppies and kittens?

The American people have made it eminently clear that even if 100 kindergartens are machine-gunned tomorrow, they’ll pull their kids out of school and take them shopping at the gun store rather than disarm.

Rush and the bifactional ruling party

It’s a little late, but Rush Limbaugh has finally begun to realize that he’s been played for decades by the Republican branch:

You know what this was? This was perhaps, folks, one of the best
illustrations of the whole concept that we’ve spoken here about on
numerous occasions of the ruling class, the political class. It doesn’t
matter what party, they’re all part of the ruling class, the political
class in DC, and when the rubber hits the road, they all circle the
wagons around each other. Well, the Republicans join in circling the
wagons. The Democrats never do when it’s a Republican involved, but for
the most part they do. They close ranks, and they protect one another
because what they’re protecting is themselves.

They’re protecting the ruling class, the political elites, and they’re maintaining the status quo….  So what we had here, folks, was the ruling class circling the wagons
and protecting each other. Party affiliation did not matter. We’re
always hoping at hearings like this that somebody on our side is gonna
stand up and give the Democrats what-for, somebody is gonna stand up and
nail ’em to the cross or whatever, ask the tough questions, get to the
bottom of it just as the Democrats do with our judicial nominees or
anybody in our party who falls in the crosshairs.
We keep waiting for it, and it never happens. They never do it. 

Now, I have no idea if he is right about setting the stage for Hilary in 2016.  I don’t care.  After the last election showed that I have been too long gone to have any ability to correctly read the US electorate, I am officially out of the business of political predictions.  But it is interesting to see the man who was once Mr. Republican finally beginning to understand that there is not a real two-party system in the USA, there is merely one ruling party with two cooperative factions.

A Day of Resistance

If the Rabbit People are frightened over the exposure of a single fake book reviewer, this announcement of a large scale public protest by gun owners should have them seriously popping pellets:

While Barack Obama is calling for Americans to give up their freedom, their rights, and their guns, we’re calling for Americans to resist. We’re calling on Tea Partiers, moderate Republicans, Libertarians and even moderate Democrats to stand up one month from today, on the 23rd of February and say, “No more!” Right Wing News is joining Dustin Stockton, Western Representation PAC and The Tea Party.net in calling for rallies all across the nation next month on the 23rd. It’ll be a Day of Resistance where gun owners and patriots can peacefully gather and show Barack Obama, the media, and the knockkneed Republicans in Congress that we may have lost a battle last November, but we haven’t lost the war. Don’t meekly give up your 2nd Amendment rights when you can stand with us and RESIST!

Tea Party II, this time with guns.  What is not to like?  You can almost hear the theme from Muse playing already.

Digging out the Rabbit People

A few people have asked me what I mean by “Rabbit People”.  It is a term that derives from an outmoded, but still relevant concept from biology, r/K selection theory, which was coined by the famous biologist E.O. Wilson and refers to evolutionary pressures causing population groups to evolve in one of two different directions.  There are a lot of problems with this, both empirically and logically, but that’s beside the point.  A useful metaphor doesn’t depend on its literal truth, much less the current scientific popularity of the theory from which it derives.

The fact that it does not actually “rain cats and dogs” in either the scientific or the colloquial sense does not render the expression either inexplicable or useless, although one does tend to wonder how it was originally coined.

Anyhow, Wikipedia explains r-selection as follows: “In unstable or unpredictable environments, r-selection predominates as the ability to reproduce quickly is crucial. There is little advantage in adaptations that permit successful competition with other organisms, because the environment is likely to change again. Traits that are thought to be characteristic of r-selection include: high fecundity, small body size, early maturity onset, short generation time, and the ability to disperse offspring widely.  Organisms whose life history is subject to r-selection are often referred to as r-strategists or r-selected. Organisms who exhibit r-selected traits can range from bacteria and diatoms, to insects and weeds, to various semelparous cephalopods and mammals, particularly small rodents.”

Rabbits are one of the more commonly cited examples of an r-selected species and a number of people have taken r/K selection theory, traced out the logical consequences of it in modern societal terms and applied it to politics.

“Obviously, from avoiding conflict and competition, to single
parenting, to low-loyalty to in-group, this r-selected Reproductive
Strategy is the psychomotive origin of the Political Left, or as it is
known in America, Political Liberalism. It produces a model of human
which is cowardly, competition averse, promiscuous, supportive of single
parenting, supportive of earlier sexualization of young, and which has
no real embrace of loyalty, honor, decency, or any other pro-social
trait designed to foster group cohesion and functionality, or success in
group competition. Females will become manly, to provision and protect
their young, which they raise alone, while men become effete castrati,
designed for fleeing and fornication, and capable of little else of
meaning.  As we see in any society which begins to produce resources freely and
copiously, it will gradually begin to trend “r” as time goes on,
further highlighting this relationship of resource availability to
political psychology, and reproductive strategy.”

It doesn’t hold up perfectly and its scope is excessively broad as one would expect from any binary heuristic, and yet it is much more strongly supported by the empirical evidence than many familiar political tropes such as the idea of a causal relationship between poverty and crime or the fear that carry laws will result in increased firearms homicides, road rage-inspired gun fights, and blood running in the streets.

Now, my minor contribution to the concept came about when I was reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric last summer.  One part in particular caught my attention, namely, this paragraph towards the beginning:  “Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over
their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the
speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. Moreover, before some audiences not even the possession
of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge
implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”

I realized that there is a very strong correlation between the people identified r-selected and the individuals that Aristotle described as being incapable of dialectic.  In other words, rhetoric is the language of the Rabbit People, just as their preferred form discourse is alternatively described as postmodern and sensitivity-driven.

Now, it is important to note that theory notwithstanding, the communication-based division is observably not a direct function of politics, ideology, sex, religion, or even intelligence, although there are clear patterns and relationships that can be observed in those regards.  Most people have at least a bit of rabbit in them, and although insufficient intelligence restricts many people to the rhetorical level, there are many highly intelligent people of both sexes who are capable of the dialectic who nevertheless shun it, or worse, utilize a perverted, rhetorical form of it.

In my next post on the subject, I’ll explain how the Rabbit People communicate, how one must communicate with them, and provide some examples of rabbitry both high and low.

Impeach Obama

But much more importantly, DON’T RAISE THE DEBT LIMIT!

A second Republican congressman is suggesting that impeachment should be an option as President Barack Obama takes executive action to enact gun control measures. In an interview with Florida’s “The Shark Tank,” Florida Republican Trey Radel addressed Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman’s statement that he might seek impeachment if Obama goes forward with executive action to bring about gun control measures.

“All options should be on the table,” Radel responded.

Obama announced 23 executive actions during his Wednesday press conference.

Obama should be impeached, although there is no chance that the Democratic Senate would vote to remove him from office even if he barbecued the children he was using to sell his Second Amendment violations in the Rose Garden and ate them in front of the cameras.  But more importantly, he can’t continue his disarmament campaign against the American people if the government is in default.

I don’t expect the House Republicans to follow through on this, of course, they’ll cave a third time, just as they did before.  But if they actually intended to defend the American people against the metastasizing government in Washington, they would do so.

What part of “shall not be infringed” does the administration not understand?  It’s not just “Congress shall make no law”.  Unlike the First Amendment, the Second Amendment means the Executive Branch is also barred from taking any actions whatsoever that limit the people’s right to bear arms.  There are no mental health exceptions; these 23 executive dictates collectively amount to straightforward unconstitutional dictatorship.

Inside view of the next Treasury Secretary

Pseudo-Spengler used to work for Jack Lew:

“When Lew was a COO at Citigroup, I was strategist for a credit derivatives hedge fund that did a great deal of business with Citigroup. We created collateralized debt obligations out of credit default swaps written on junk-quality debt, and through the magic of structuring, turned the junk debt into AAA-rated bonds. Citigroup not only underwrote these bonds, but bought virtually all of them through its so-called structured investment vehicles (SIV’s). These are off-balance-sheet devices sanctioned by the deaf-dumb-and-blind monkeys at the regulatory agencies that allowed banks to lever up AAA-rated paper at a ratio of 70 to 1. That is, Citibank bought $70 of these phony AAAs with $1 of actual shareholders’ capital. Of course, the supposedly AAA-rated paper rubber-stamped by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s bore no more relation to a true AAA security than a Thai counterfeit Rolex bears to the real thing (in fact, the Thai Rolex holds up better under scrutiny — at least it will tell time). When the crisis hit, the price of these supposed AAA-rated bonds collapsed, leaving Citi with losses multiplied by the 70:1 leverage factor.

“That’s why Citigroup went bankrupt (or would have except for repeated federal bailouts). There was a daisy-chain between the hedge fund investment side run in part by Jack Lew, the structuring desk, and the structured investment vehicle. Citigroup took a fee for investing in hedge funds, took a fee for structuring the hedge funds’ investments, and also bought a great deal of the dodgiest product. We used to tell our counterparties at Citigroup that they were crazy to buy this garbage (in effect, we were short the phony AAA paper that Citigroup was buying with 70:1 leverage. And I told the whole world this was the case on CNBC.) One of the reasons I knew with certainty that the banking system would blow up in 2008 was that I knew in detail what Citigroup had bought on Jack Lew’s watch.

Perhaps those feigning outrage at Jackie Chan’s charge that the USA is the most corrupt nation on the planet should consider taking this sort of thing into account.

Obama bypasses Congress

The totalitarians don’t have the votes to disarm America, so they’re going to try to bypass the democratic process by utilizing Obama and a collection of unconstitutional executive orders.

The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control,
Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the
administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last
month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Let’s see them try it.  If nothing else, it might put an end to the use of executive orders.  More likely, it will explode the last tattered vestiges of the veil that disguises the dictatorial nature of the ruling oligarchy in Washington DC.

And yes, I know Republicans have used executive orders too.  That’s because they’re part of the problem, not the solution.

The first shots are fired

However, at the moment, it’s not violence, merely very loud political protest:

Rifle shots were fired early Monday into the Athens offices of Greece’s conservative party, which leads the fragile coalition government, causing no injuries but intensifying a wave of political violence in the debt-wracked country. 

Remember, the US is actually worse off than Greece, by some financial measures.  The only significant difference is that Greece can’t print money because the ECB won’t permit it, while the US can’t print money because the Fed won’t permit it.

I suspect these are the first shots to be fired in the great wave of political dissolution that is about to sweep over the world.

Of austerity and contraction

Texas cuts spending, tax revenues go up:

In 2011, when it looked as if Texas was facing a multi-billion-dollar
budget deficit, the Texas Legislature cut spending, especially funding
for education, Bloomberg notes. However, partly because of the fracking
boom, revenues from the sale of oil and gas soared, bringing in
unexpected tax revenues. The jobless rate also declined sharply,
currently down to 6.2 percent. Revenue from sales taxes has increased as
well.

Meanwhile, California has lost over $1 billion in tax revenues in less than two months by increasing spending and tax rates:

After Proposition 30 passed on November 6, 2012, the State of California experienced a decline in the total state revenue for the month of November. California State Controller John Chiang reported that the total revenue for the month of November declined by $806.8 million, which is 10.8 percent below budget.

The State of California experienced a decline in its revenue as several of the high income earners have relocated to other states, and have also relocated their businesses out of state. This led to a decline in corporate and income tax revenues by more than $1 billion.

It’s 2013.  How is it possible that any government, at any level, is still using static revenue models?  At some point, inept ideology can only be described as willful idiocy.