U.S.S. of A.

I woke up this morning in a place I never imagined could ever exist -- my country turned on its head from free to a dictatorship led by the worst elements of the world socialist conspiracy.

I tremble for my grandchildren.

What Socialism Has Wrought

Detroit!

This is the inexorable result of left wing policies allowed to run amok and it's coming to all our neighborhoods should we continue to elect the elites who are more than willing to trade middle class life styles for their lofty ideals.

... and it's looking to me more and more like it will happen too.

Yesterday we went to see 2016 Obama's America.

I was very suspicious because it was given wide distribution even by the big chains like Regal who are solidly in Obama's charmed circle and my fears were proven to be correct.

It may have been that initially the Obama camp was distrustful, but after focus-grouping, they realized, as I did, that it presents Obama in a very sympathetic light, repeats many of his best moments from 2008 on screen including adoring supporters and children singing.

D'Souza was embarrassing. He continually injected his life in junxtaposition with Obama's (they born, married, etc. in the same year) and compared his feeling about colonialism with those of Obama, Sr., etc. As if any, but a handful of voters know or care about colonialism or what an Indian immigrant has in common with the half Kansasian/half Kenyan occupier of the White House.

The great revelation was at the end, a boring white guy, sorry his name and credentials didn't register, revealed that IHO the debt would reach 20 trillion by 2016.

Gadzooks!

People at the showing we attended were shaking their heads in disbelief as we walked out.   With all the stuff just waiting out there for somebody to connect all the dots, we get this foolishness from somebody who looked very much like the cat that swallowed the canary.

SURPRISE!

It's not your health Obama cares about.

Now that the post office is no longer necessary, we can turn all those buildings into medical facilities and keep the post office union people working.

 They don't know anything about health care sez you?

 So what, sez the prez!

 They vote for me and that's what counts.

IT AIN'T ROCKET SCIENCE

Hayek taught, freedom and the rule of law drive prosperity.

Via City Journal, The Road to Recovery, by John B. Taylor

...  As Hayek would insist, we need to be careful about what we mean by economic freedom. The basic idea is that people are free to decide what to produce, what to buy, where to work, and how to help others. The American vision, as I explain in my book First Principles, held that people would make these choices within a policy framework that was predictable and based on the rule of law, with strong incentives emanating from a reliance on markets and a limited role for government. Historically, America adhered to these principles more than most countries did, a major reason why the nation prospered and so many people came to these shores.

To quote Tom Lehrer, "It's so simple, so very simple, even a child could do it."

... Government policy has largely caused these problems.

Yes indeed, yet people who should know better, are buying into the notion that government is able to solve these problems which in my opinion, they not only don't want to solve, they are actively causing one crisis after the other to terrify people into giving over to them total control of their lives.

HYPERBOLE?

I think not.

For some time now, I've opined that if it looks like Obama will not be re-elected through the usual leftoid methods of buying votes and voter fraud, more pro-active measures will be applied, i.e., orchestrating crises followed by canceling the election and/or instituting martial law.

Naturally this has been met with, at best, cat calls and harrumphing, but now comes a real glimpse that they're getting set to use these measures . . .  from the The White House Press Office comes an executive order on the subject, entitled, "Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions."

No doubt, only the first of the many E.O. in our future setting the stage for the unspeakable to perpetrate the unthinkable.

A Thousand Apologies ...

for ever doubting that Artificial Intelligence could be the equal of, or even surpass human intelligence, but this article showing that man-made machines like to watch cat videos clinches for me.

We. are. not. alone.

I wish the article had told us which cat videos the Google brain likes best.  Below are links to vignettes of the life of Henri, the Existential Cat, my favorite online puss.   I laugh out loud everytime I watch these even though I've seen them many time. 

Henri 1

Henri 2

Henri 3    [Warning comes with embedded Obama campaign ad???]

Watch Henri 3 here if you don't want to watch the Obama ad embedded in the youtube link above.    I can't figure out how to get rid of it!

Must they taint everything in my life!!!!!

WOW!

Finally someone said like it is and whadda you know, it turn's out, it's it a girl, Deirdre McCloskey who did it. :

... The master narrative of High Liberalism is mistaken factually. Externalities do not imply that a government can do better. Publicity does better than inspectors in restraining the alleged desire of businesspeople to poison their customers. Efficiency is not the chief merit of a market economy: innovation is. Rules arose in merchant courts and Quaker fixed prices long before governments started enforcing them.

I know such replies will be met with indignation. But think it possible you may be mistaken, and that merely because an historical or economic premise is embedded in front page stories in the New York Times does not make them sound as social science. It seems to me that a political philosophy based on fairy tales about what happened in history or what humans are like is going to be less than useless. It is going to be mischievous.

How do I know that my narrative is better than yours? The experiments of the 20th century told me so. It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun. But anyone who after the 20th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.

 ... Lots more wow.

... Yes, I know, you want to reject all these factual findings because they are “right-wing” or “libertarian.”  All I ask you to do is, once in a while, consider.  Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.

CALL IT WHAT YOU WILL

Thomas Sowell via The American Spectator:  Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.

If every school child and adult citizen of the U.S. read and understood this article, sanity and propsperity would return to our fair land.

THE PASSIVE TENSE

I'm a big fan of the English language coming upon it as I did suddenly and without warning in the first grade.   I make no claim to expertise, but I do try to follow some of the simple rules the nuns taught us in grammar school.

The first rule was use words so that anyone reading them would immediately understand your meaning.   I smile when I think how innocent I was then.  I couldn't know that in my dotage, I would be outraged by professional semantists doing exactly that. 

From an article in the New York Post via Ace:

       ...  that was lost along with nearly 3,000 lives when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.

        


        Color me cranky.

and PS:  I hate Blogger's new format.

Say Goodnight, Gracie!

One way or the other, the socialists in power will stay in power. If they can't win fair, they'll win foul, if that doesn't work, they'll just grab it and We, the People, be damned.

From the essential Canada Free Press:  

This Executive Order was posted on the WhiteHouse.gov  web site on Friday, March 16, 2012, under the name National Defense Resources Preparedness.  In a nutshell, it’s the blueprint for Peacetime Martial Law and it gives the president the power to take just about anything deemed necessary for “National Defense”, whatever they decide that is.  It’s peacetime, because as the title of the order says, it’s for “Preparedness”.  A copy of the entire order follows the end of this story.

Dropping like flies

!!

If Only ...

Per the Washington Post:

GOP’s election battle plan: Use Obama’s own words against him.

GOP officials in Washington are quietly and methodically finishing what operatives are calling “the book” — 500 pages of Obama quotes and video links that will form the backbone of the party’s attack strategy against the president leading up to Election Day 2012.

...

One Obama quote will be featured prominently: In 2009 he said on NBC’s “Today” show that if he could not fix the economy in three years, “then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Maybe the stupid party finally wised up.