Tag: politics

Mailvox: Why I am not a Libertarian

This is only one of the many reasons. The Libertarian Party is the only one that can make the Republican Party look smart. With a number of massive issues where both major parties diverge from the mainstream consensus, such as the banks, health care, and immigration, naturally the Libertarian Party ticket is determined to commit suicide on the issue of “gay marriage” according to the email I received from the Johnson-Gray campaign.

Gray said, “Unlike Mitt Romney or President Obama, Governor Johnson and I believe the right to marry who we choose is a constitutionally protected right. People of different faiths and different beliefs are free to follow those beliefs when it comes to embracing or opposing same-sex marriage within those faiths and beliefs. However, it should not be the purview of government to impose one set of beliefs over another. And government absolutely should not sanction discrimination against gay Americans who choose to marry.

This is a Libertarian Party that can’t even win the support of influential libertarians. And that is a sign of a party that is going absolutely nowhere. Where, I wonder, is the right to marriage found in the Constitution? And how could it be in there given that the Constitution predates marriage licenses?

WND column

Obama is Bad

Obama is bad. Not in the reverse meaning of the term, by which one indicates that an individual is actually cool or intimidating or otherwise superlative in some manner, but in the simple and straightforward negative sense. He is a bad president. He is a bad black man. He is a bad socialist. He is a bad peacemaker. He is a bad American. And most of all, he is bad for America and the world.

Mailvox: an alternative theory

As my prediction of Obama’s decision to refuse the Democratic nomination and retire to the global equivalent of the rubber chicken circuit looks less and less likely, a deep government insider emails me his outline of future events:

Sometime in the next four to six weeks (no less than four but no more than eight at the absolute outside):

1. VP Joe Biden announces that for health reasons, he is leaving the ticket — not leaving office immediately, but to leave office at the end of his term.

2. After a huge, agonizing, public display of, “Oh God no! What ever will we do?” milked for at least a week of prime time and front-page media coverage and a whole lot of talking head blathering about the looming “Constitutional Crisis,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reluctantly agrees to take the VP slot on the ticket.

3. Mitt Romney — ah, who gives a shit what he does? Whatever it is, it will be pathetically ineffective, irrelevant, and a day late and a dollar short.

4. On November 6, 2012, propelled by the overwhelming power of the stupid black, white bitch, dumb college kid, and pussified liberal male vote, the Obama-Clinton ticket absolutely fucking steamrolls the Republicans, and brings along with it filibuster proof Democratic majorities in the Senate, House, and most state government assemblies.

5. Sometime between November 6, 2012, and January 20, 2013, some horrible truth about Obama is revealed — pick one, it doesn’t matter — and all the built-up scandals finally come to a head and erupt in a massive public denunciation of the man. Eric Holder ends up being indicted and arrested by his own people. Team Obama goes to the mattresses in the White House but in the end, in mid-January, as Meet the Press is seriously discussing whether the Secret Service has the authority to arrest the President, the outcry becomes so massive that he must step down — and turn the office over to VP Joe Biden.

6. Biden immediately does a “Night of the Long Knives” thing, purging all those corrupt Obamunists who were the cause of everything that’s wrong with the country.

7. On January 20, 2013, with his place in history as America’s 45th President assured, Biden is downright honored to turn the office over to the new President, Hillary Clinton, and the media rejoice at this triumph of the American electoral system, that our long national nightmare is behind us, and that freedom and justice have been restored.

8. Only much later do honest historians, if any still exist, realize that this was in fact a brilliantly executed Stalinist coup of the first order.

Color me dubious. Among other things, I don’t see Democrats doing well in the state-wide elections. But if it is Biden who steps down, rather than Obama, we’ll know the theory is in play. Also, the total ineptitude of Team Clinton during the 2008 campaign makes me doubt that they can pull off anything that is even more complicated than simply knowing what the rules of the nomination are. They might have the ruthlessness, but they don’t have the necessary eye for detail.

Epitaph for the GOP

Pat Buchanan does the demographic and electoral math:

Republicans lose the Hispanic vote 3-to-2. In bad years, like 2008, they lose it 2-to-1. Whites are already a minority in California, and Hispanics will eventually become the majority.

Say goodbye to the Golden Land.

Asian-Americans voted 3-to-2 for Obama, black Americans 24-to-1. The Asian population in California and the nation is growing rapidly. The black population, 13 percent of the nation, is growing steadily.

Whites, already a minority in our two most populous states, will be less than half the U.S. population by 2041 and a minority in 10 states by 2020.

Consider now the Electoral College picture.

Of the seven mega-states, California, New York and Illinois appear lost to the GOP. Pennsylvania has not gone Republican since 1988. Ohio and Florida, both crucial, are now swing states. Whites have become a minority in Texas. When Texas goes, America goes.

This year could be the last hurrah.

Fortunately, Karl Rove has proved Buchanan wrong, as he has assured us that Hispanics are “natural conservatives”, as evidenced by the way they usually choose between a socialist party and a neo-communist party in their native lands. Or something.

The remarkable thing is that if you ask the average Republican, he will still insist that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a good thing and immigration is good for America. Thus proving that while Democrats are evil, Republicans are reliably stupid. If Romney 2012 is the last hurrah, then the party well merits its demise.

Backfire

We may have to rethink who was behind the possible false flag in Denver given the local response:

Colorado gun stores are seeing a big jump in demand for firearms since last Friday’s massacre at a midnight movie showing in Aurora.

Background checks for people wanting to buy guns in Colorado reportedly increased more than 41 percent after last week’s Aurora movie massacre. The Denver Post reports that firearm instructors have also seen increased interest in training needed for a concealed-carry permit.

“It’s been insane,” Jake Meyers, an employee at Rocky Mountain Guns and Ammo in Parker told the newspaper Monday.

Between Friday and Sunday, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm — a 43 percent increase over the previous Friday through Sunday and a 39 percent jump over those same days on the first weekend of July.

So, it wasn’t the Tea Party after all… it was the NRA! The rabbit hole, it runs deep indeed. But here is a serious point. Since Holmes isn’t talking and appears to be in a massively drug-addled state, how can anyone be certain that he was the shooter? No one saw him in the mask except perhaps the policeman who captured him, and it seems to me that drugging up a patsy dressed in SWAT gear, then sticking a smoking gun in his hands as soon as your colleague comes out the door and hops in the squad car would be trivially easy in all the darkness and confusion.

I’m not saying this scenario is likely, merely pointing out that it would be plausible in the absence of a coherent confession or blood matching the DNA of the victims all over Holmes’s clothing. After seeing that video of Holmes at the arraignment, hearing of his unintelligible rambling on his voice message makes me wonder how functional this highly intelligent individual was last weekend. And speaking as one who read the Unabomber’s manifesto because no one at the Pioneer Press could make heads or tales of it as well as a volume of Stalin’s works, I can attest that most intelligent individuals who turn murderous are not only willing to talk, they won’t shut up about their endless justifications for their actions.

Universal suffrage vs democracy

This post by Roissy should help explain why the Founding Fathers limited the vote to about one-fifth of the male population:

If you are apt to align your lifestyle with whatever is the latest fashion, (and ostracize those who don’t), you are probably also apt to blindly obey high status authority figures telling you what is good for you. If true, then we might speculate that women make better cultural foot soldiers for whichever elite authority is most tangible in their lives, owing to women’s greater propensity to accept authority dictums without question.

We may add to this speculation not only personal observation and confirmatory heaps of anecdotes, but in addition scientific evidence that women are, indeed, more obedient to authority than are men. Courtesy of reader uh pointing us to this Milgram experiment replication:

Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram’s subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a “cute, fluffy puppy” who was given real, albeit harmless, electric shocks. They found similar findings to Milgram: half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the end. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects showed more hesitance towards delivering the shocks.

Always remember: All female participants in the Milgram obedience to authority experiment continued shocking the puppy despite their tears.

Contemplate this: if all women are willing to shock cute little puppies simply because an authority figure told them to do so, what won’t they be willing to do? No doubt the women who participated in the experiment had no desire to harm puppies and would explain their behavior by saying “he made me do it”, but that malleability is the entire point.

Resistance to evil requires the ability to stand up to it and refuse to submit. Jesus was not merely obedient to His Father, he also refused to bow down before the Prince of the World. And note that it’s not only women who lack the ability to resist perceived authority, but half of all men as well. It’s not merely women’s suffrage, but universal suffrage that caused democracies to become dictatorial.

It also underlines the importance of watching women’s actions, not listening to their words. If asked “would you ever subject a puppy to a painful electric shock of no possible benefit to it?”, most of those women would quite vehemently deny the very idea. However, the evidence indicates that if instructed to do so, they would, in fact, do it, even though the action caused them significant personal stress.

Anyhow, I’d be interested to know how many people here, male or female, believe they would shock the puppy at the behest of the men in white coats. I don’t think I would object to giving it a mild shock or three in the interest of science, but if this experiment truly mimicked the Milgram one and I was told that the voltage was high enough to seriously harm or even kill the puppy, there is a non-zero chance I’d punch out the scientist before hooking him up to his device and giving him a shock or two. At the very least, I believe I would deliver a solid “WTF is wrong with you people” rant before kidnapping the puppy.

But then, it is well known that I regard scientists with nearly as much suspicion as male elementary teachers who just love children. So I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a test of authority in my case.

Obama paraphrased

“I should have told better lies.” Joseph Farah on Obama’s illuminating answer to a question about the biggest mistake of his first term:

“The mistake of my first term . . . was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” he said. “And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

What’s so hilarious about this answer is it’s Bart Simpson-like juvenile appeal: Imagine Bart up to his neck in some kind of mischief. He gets caught. The principal of his school asks him if he has any regrets. He responds, “Yeah, I wish I had a better story to tell. I wish I could talk my way out of this.”

I would say the biggest mistake of Obama’s first term wasn’t his failure to present better fairy tales to the American public. That’s not even in the top ten. But number one was failing to endorse Ron Paul’s attempt to audit the Federal Reserve. A close second would be his nomination of Ben Bernanke to continue as Federal Reserve chairman. Concerns about policy and the popularity of the White House policies are considerably less important than having absolutely no idea if the information upon which those policies are based even has any basis in reality.

The danger of a “gun-free zone”

The Denver Batman shootings once more demonstrates that cardboard signs are an inadequate means of disarming mass killers:

Gun advocates say the movie theater where a Colorado gunman opened fire Friday, killing 12 and wounded 58, has a strict policy against firearms on its premises – even for patrons with concealed handgun permits.

Cinemark Holdings Inc. owns 459 theaters and 5,181 screens in the U.S. and Latin America – including the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., scene of the mass shooting. The company does not appear to post its firearms policy on its website. WND’s after-hours calls and emails to Cinemark had not been returned at the time of this report.

Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, told ABC News the Aurora Century 16 movie theater’s policy prohibits firearm carry.

That helps explain why no one shot back. It’s kind of hard to do so when your gun is locked in the trunk. Now, I tend to doubt Holmes targeted the movie theater because he knew of the policy – although he was certainly smart enough to have been aware of it and taken it into account – but this intentional disarming of the theater crowd should give gun advocates the ability to punch back twice as hard when the gun control activists do their usual song-and-dance in the post-mortem of a shooting.

This is why you must carry

The Batman shooting in Denver:

A masked gunman shot dead 14 people and wounded 50 others at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie in Denver. The 6ft tall man, dressed in black and wearing a gas mask opened fire at the showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a mall in Aurora, Colorado and set off a smoke or tear gas bomb.

Witnesses said that the man, thought to be in his early twenties, burst through the emergency exit at the front of the auditorium, wearing body armour, and began firing into the audience with a rifle and two handguns as he made his way up the stairs, picking his victims at random.

It will be interesting to see if Obama is dumb enough to try running on gun control after this. The gas mask bit is certainly unusual and one wonders if the shooter was inspired by Bane or perhaps the local airport.

In defense of mass murder

I find myself contemplating quitting. No, not the blog. And not writing in general. But it is really incredible to see how few people at WND are interested in substantive matters like a conceptual revolution in economics versus other, considerably less significant issues.

There are all of two comments on today’s WND column. That’s less than one-twentieth of how many comment on any given column. And it’s not the WND readership, it wouldn’t be any better if I wrote for Salon, the New York Times, or the Daily Show. I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand MPAI, I coined the acronym after all. But that’s true for varying degrees of “most” and sometimes the percentage is just a little higher than I can fathom. I mean, the world is on the brink of a total economic meltdown, and still no one gives a damn about why? I feel like Jonah staring at the walls of Nineveh, stomping up and down the beach, gesticulating wildly and saying: “Go ahead and do it, Lord, let them have it, you know they deserve it!”

Seriously, I’m not sure I can deal with trying to pretend I don’t think a world where the best-selling novel is Twilight fan fiction deserves to perish in fire and ice. I used to wonder to whom the old Norse pagan religion held any appeal, but now I understand completely. If I read one more idiot Republican bank apologist claiming that the root cause of the financial crisis was Democratic politicians forcing banks to provide home loans to minorities, I may climb the Rainbow Bridge, wrest the horn from Heimdall and blow it myself. Then I’ll sit there and cheer for the frost giants and fire demons.

I’m considering a literary experiment of sorts. I’m wondering how much more interest would be expressed in the dumbest, most lowbrow column I can get past the editors devoted to the simple and straightforward concept of Obama being bad. Bad for the nation. Bad for the world! Bad. So bad. I’m thinking of calling it: Obama is Bad. Subtitled: Obama is really and truly very bad for America.

And if the column hits Drudge and results in an offer from Fox News to host my own cable news show, I’m going to give up op/ed, study genetics, build a lab, and start creating customized killer viruses.