Friday, December 30, 2011

Stephane Hessel - Nincompoop

Stephane Hessel is a 93 year old nincompoop. His little book, “Indignez-vous!”, actually a screed pamphlet, has been the Best Seller in France for 2 years. One loses all respect for the French when you see how much nonsense and how many errors and falsehoods crammed into 29 pages of text the gullible French suck up as truth. Have they no common sense? Now the pernicious pamphlet is invading the U.S. in an English translation entitled “Time for Outrage,” surely destined to be popular among elite faculty and mindless students. The core of the rant is hatred of capitalism as best expressed by the United States; the other lunacies in the screed are too innumerable to comment on. Hessel feels it is better to suck up to the Evil Empire than think the people of the world would be better off with a Wal-mart in every town. Hessel opines “...—and even as we had to lend a favorable ear to communism in order to counterbalance to American capitalism–.” He calls for “peaceful outrage” by the loony lefties of the world. Has he never heard of an oxymoron? Outrage by lefties throughout history is defined by deaths and followed by oppression.

What is it about lefties, socialists, liberals and academics that they justify the death and poverty caused by socialism as better than prosperity and growth under capitalism? In addition to the “favorable ear” to communism by Hessel, we have Neil Clark writing in the UK Guardian about Vaclav Havel’s good struggle for freedom:

“No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgment of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.” “Positive achievements” of communism - is this man insane?

And the morally blind Simon Winchester says of the evil North Korean dictator:

“The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.”

Is Simon Winchester justifying starvation in North Korea because the country was saved from Wal-Mart?

How quaint that Materialists can protest about too much materialism in society. Now that’s another oxymoron.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

New York Times guilty of shoddy journalism on gun story.

Plus, more scorn aimed at the Times, from gun journalist Bob Owens. “In other words, 200 permit holders were convicted of felonies out of 240,000 permit holders, or 0.0833333334-percent of NC concealed carry permit population. I would love for the New York Times to do the research and see what percentage of the NYPD, Chicago PD, Los Angeles PD, or New Orleans PD is convicted of felonies in any given year.”

Research? Where guns and the NYT are concerned, “research” means copying the latest press release from Brady or Bloomberg.

And, from SayUncle: “Of course, no expose into the Mayors Against Guns crowd, who are 45 times more likely to be a criminal than a FL permit holder.”

He’s not joking about that. “Comparatively speaking, Mayors Against Illegal Guns members are almost eight times more likely to be convicted of crimes than Florida concealed firearm license holders – but that number is based off 23 years of licenses versus four years of MAIG. Assuming the mayors had as much history as the licenses, and assuming the same trend (11 mayors convicted in four years – a sizeable assumption, but it is all the data we have to operate on), you are looking at MAIG members being over 45 times more likely to be convicted of crimes than Florida concealed firearm license holders. How funny is that?”

Related: BlackFive: Misused Gun Statistics Kill The Truth. “Did you know there is a nationwide rampage going on where crazed fanatics with concealed carry permits are slaughtering innocent citizens? Neither did I, but thankfully the NY Times is on the story. With their usual, thoroughly accurate, fact-checked, journalistic professionalism propaganda, they have concocted a faux outrage that simply doesn’t add up.”

Plus, from Robert VerBruggen:
All of these numbers are completely meaningless; in any large population, there will be some crime. The only way to see what these numbers mean is to compare concealed-carry holders to the general population. Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find.

North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter. Instead of “rais[ing] questions,” the Times has demonstrated yet again that permit holders are more peaceful than the general population.

Monday, December 26, 2011

THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM

Recently two men died. One promoted Liberty and the other Despotism. One was mourned by people of conscience and the other justly descended into Hades. Unfortunately many Liberals and Socialists, unable to distinguish between good and evil, attacked the light and justified the darkness.

Consider first Neil Clark writing in the UK Guardian, who informs us regarding Vaclav Havel’s good struggle for freedom:

“No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgment of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.”

These comments are, of course, repulsive beyond belief, in addition to being historically illiterate, but as far as Clark is concerned, no good will come of Havel’s death if people like Clark cannot use it to lie about history.

In praise of evil, Kim Jung Il, the morally blind Simon Winchester says of the evil North Korean dictator:

“The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.”

Let’s give the mike to Brian Micklethwait, for a reply. “No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with ‘For all its faults …’. You’ll struggle to top that one.”

As I interpret, at least tyrant Kim saved the Korean people from Wal-Mart's American style consumerism by starving them to death. As Liberalism and Socialism proudly proclaim, ‘Let us all be poor together.’

Saturday, December 24, 2011

The Day Obama Lost Iraq

The few remaining rational lefties are appalled by Omama’s squandering of victory in Iraq for cheap politics:
Peter Wehner: “What is happening in Iraq is sickening, in part because the gains came at such a high cost and in part because what is happening there was so avoidable. Obama was handed a war that was largely won.”

Jennifer Rubin: “America’s reputation has been damaged for the president’s personal political game, or perhaps because he is a foolish man or a spiteful one, who could never accept that President George W. Bush was right and he was wrong about the surge.”

In the Washington Post: “President Obama has undone much of what had been achieved there, almost in the blink of an eye. And when the history of his administration is written, it increasingly looks as if he will be fairly judged to have been the man who lost Iraq.”

Paulinni: Bush (eventually) won the war in Iraq, but Obama is losing the peace.

Friday, December 23, 2011

OBAMA LIES

Shortly after hearing prevaricator in chief, Barack Obama, hold forth in the White House presenting evasions, half-truths and outright lies about the Social Security tax cut shell game, I happened to read Gorbachev’s comments on propaganda in the old Soviet Union:

“Propaganda of success - real or imagined - was gaining the upper hand. Eulogizing and servility were encouraged; the needs and opinions of ordinary working people, of the public at large, were ignored. In the social sciences scholastic theorization was encouraged and developed, but creative thinking was driven out...Similar negative tendencies also affected culture, the arts and journalism, as well as the teaching process and medicine...At some administrative levels there emerged a disrespect for the law and encouragement of eyewash and bribery, servility and glorification.“

When even a dedicated Communist can finally speak the truth about how government interference corrupts economics, morals and reason, is it too much to hope that the truth could come from Obama’s forked tongue?

“Perestroika” a book by Gorbachev contained an unsparing indictment of the socialist system over which Gorbachev presided. He said that Soviet society has suffered “a gradual erosion of...ideological and moral values.” If only liberals could also learn to speak the truth. We unfortunately hear daily about Green Jobs and Green Energy as the future and salvation of America. Obama hectors Americans with false pieties and outright lies about the cost of these Green Projects. Electric cars are an article of religion among Obama and lefties but what do they really cost us, the poor taxpayer? Does each Chevy Volt, a General Motors’ plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, cost taxpayers up to $250K? According to James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether. Hohman looked at total state and federal assistance offered for the development and production of the Chevy Volt including 18 government deals featuring loans, rebates, grants and tax credits. The amount of government assistance does not include the fact that General Motors is currently 26 percent owned by the federal government.

Government and politicians, especially Obama, lie!

Thursday, December 22, 2011

FRUITS OF CAPITALISM - BOWLS OF CHERRIES; FRUITS OF SOCIALISM - SOUR GRAPES

The world isn’t always linear, so as a matter of logic it certainly does not follow that imposing more state control over the economies of the west – say, imposing the amount of additional state control endorsed by “Progressives” such as Paul Krugman or even Harold Meyerson – would necessarily move the west closer either to the economic consequences or the political consequences (or both) that we witness today in North Korea (and that were everywhere the horrific results when states had such extensive power – e.g., Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia, and Castro’s Cuba).
But let’s be clear about one indisputable fact: capitalism vigorously pursued has never produced the atrocities – starvation, tyranny, and genocide – that are produced by statism vigorously pursued. Nothing remotely close.
Capitalism vigorously pursued might produce trade cycles and long periods of high unemployment; it might produce anxiety in yesterday’s successful entrepreneurs who now face competition from today’s upstart entrepreneurs; it might cause too many people to become obese; it might kill off animal species in unusually high numbers; it might cause the earth’s climate to change; it might create asset bubbles; it might spark envy and over-work in the Smiths who are trying to keep up with their neighbors, the Joneses. It might do these things and others that reasonable people might regard as unfortunate in comparison with some imaginable paradise.
But we must never lose sight of this important asymmetry: complete or near-complete state control of the economy has proven to be a sure recipe for deep impoverishment and brutal tyranny, while historical periods that have been close to laissez faire – that is, much closer to laissez faire than is America at the dawn of 2012 – have produced nothing remotely of the sort. Indeed, whatever problems might be caused by more and more reliance upon laissez faire capitalism are always accompanied by – and are at least partially (and arguably more than completely) off-set by – unambiguous benefits of capitalism such as the elimination of starvation, more abundant supplies of clothing, and better housing.
Any problems promoted by greater and greater reliance upon capitalism, in short, are first-world problems (which isn’t to say that these problems should be tolerated); they are problems incomparably more tolerable than are the horrors promoted by the elimination of capitalism.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Greatest Horror Show:

Imagine Obama as a Vampire. Then think of the worlds greatest narcissist vampire looking in a mirror and not being to see his greatness reflected. Shudder.

On 60 Minutes the Great Narcissist responds to His place in history:
“The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln -- just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we've got a lot more work to do. And we're gonna keep on at it.”

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Obama and his cronies only want to help you

Boston Democrat Politician
Michael E. McLaughlin, who abruptly resigned as Chelsea housing director last month after his $360,000 salary was revealed, put in only 15 full workdays in Chelsea all year to earn his extraordinary paycheck, according to a Globe review of his work cellphone records.
Of course while ‘helping’ the poor in Chelsea he did manage to spend 47 work days in Maine and Florida with his top female assistant. In cashing out he also managed to pocket over $200,00 in ‘unused sick pay’. It is the Liberal mantra, especially Barack Obama, that all business people are corrupt and only by having government run everything can we have honesty and integrity; apparently Mr. Mclaughlin didn’t get the message. But I think most ‘public servants’ really don’t give a damn about the public.

A blogger notes:
“The Keystone Pipeline will create wealth and jobs, both directly and as supporting businesses then expand for the demands on goods and services increase with the new incomes advancing. This is the exact reasons Mr Obama wants to kill the pipeline and all jobs across the country.

He needs the economic collapse and government enforced dependancy of the masses for the final social re-engineering of the nation to a nightmare utopia of his own insane and narcissistic dreams.”