Monday, January 18, 2016

Have you noticed that nothing’s changed in America, 153 years on?

“O for a garden, a vine and a fig-tree, and my library!” Such a lament from the losing side during the Civil War.

“While the soldiers are famishing for food, what is called ‘red tapeism’ prevents the consummation of contracts to supply them.”  Such a fact from the losing side during the Civil War.

Have you noticed that nothing’s changed in America, 153 years on?


Except… Today’s giveaway from government (advertising on radio) takes the form of EMT, Emergency Remediation of Taxes, a program fostering (and encouraging) irresponsibility in the American public.    

Sunday, January 17, 2016

“A sad house is that in which a father’s seat in vacant; a sadder house is that in which the father has vacated his influence

“Success is the only standard of merit in a general,” said a Confederate during the Civil War.  But if we fill in the blank today with ? a President Obama, unfortunately, since we live in a world inherited from Clinton, success must first be defined.


“A sad house is that in which a father’s seat in vacant; a sadder house is that in which the father has vacated his influence and left the children fatherless even whilst he lives.” Such a sentiment from the mid-1800’s must also be re-worked today.   

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Our Enemy, the State

 “Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.”

Albert Jay Nock’s 1935 masterpiece, Our Enemy, the State; Nock distinguished “social power” – voluntary choices, actions, and arrangements such as occur in markets and in mutual-aid societies – from “State power”

The State of the Union (STFU) is a sordid spectacle of self-congratulation

The State of the Union (STFU) is a sordid spectacle of self-congratulation
“The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live. It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention. It’s worse than the Oscars.”

Kevin Williamson 

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

“Salvation by Force”

 “Salvation by Force” or What Politicians Really Think of the People (You)
No believer in force truly respects his fellow-men.  He always slightly despises them, even while he serves them.  They tend to become for him mere material for carrying out his views.  His views may be honestly and sincerely held; they may be excellent in themselves; but when he uses force on their behalf he commits the capital mistake of exalting himself and his views into the first place, and of degrading his fellow-men, with an intelligence and conscience like and equal to his own, into the second place.  Thus it comes about that the user of force loses all hold on moral principles; he becomes a law, and a very defective law, to himself; and thus it comes about also that politics – which are simply the method of force – are in every country not only the battlefield of opposed fighters, but the hotbed of intrigue and corruption.

“lying sack of crap,”

To quote Glenn Beck, our “lying sack of crap,” has done it (?) again… what you ask? The big ‘O’ has lied via magnificent, lachrymal theatre.  

Hope & Change

Hope & Change
North Korea says it has successfully carried out a hydrogen bomb test, which if confirmed, will be a first for the reclusive regime and a significant advancement for its military ambitions.
If true, the symmetry of the Norks announcing they’ve armed themselves with the H-bomb on the same day that Obama went full-Boehner while proposing disarming innocent Americans of their firearms is truly staggering. But then, when it comes to generating absurdity, there’s no way any satirist can compete with reality.
Or with the Obama administration, for that matter.


Monday, January 04, 2016

THE ‘LITTLE MEN’ OF YORE WOULD BE GIANTS TODAY

CAROLYN MCLAUGHLIN:
THE ‘LITTLE MEN’ OF YORE WOULD BE GIANTS TODAY

“Never before did such little men rule such a great people.  Our rulers are like children or drunken men riding docile horses, that absolutely keep the riders from falling off by swaying to the right and left, and preserving an equilibrium.  There is no rule for anything, and no stability in any policy.”  During the Civil War, a Confederate appraised HIS administration.  So sad that it applies to our United States of America  today.  Note:  $470,000  a day for Obama’s Hawaii vacation.