Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

Last night at church we reviewed Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. Those who wish to “bicker and argue over who killed who” in the recent election may benefit from a stroll in Lincoln’s boots, as he hoists himself from seemingly overwhelming carnage in the Civil War (north of 45k Americans killed/wounded/missing at Gettysburg alone that year) to speak of the bigger picture, from which vantage he can say:

I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

“Humble penitence” is an attitude which we’ll do well to rediscover, and it may be that we’ve just the sort of economic program in place to bring about the occasion. Nevertheless, not the lack of finger-pointing afoot in Linconln’s words. As with Psalm 51, “perverseness and disobedience” is better discussed in the vertical direction, where one is less able to shift attention from one’s own contributions. As we seek to mend a divided nation, a thankful, forgiving approach is key to bringing the hordes of Prodigals home.

And, for all that, don’t forget to score you some flesh:

I’m giving Thanx in my ambush tree with my bow&arrows for som pure haunch shank slabbage venison

— Ted Nugent (@TedNugent) November 22, 2012

This post motivated by Hayward.

by Smitty

If U discuss Ds’ 80 yr old free stuff strategy, Ds say UR racist & estab Rs say UR mean & divisive. This is pure insanity. #tcot #p2 #war

— Matthew Vadum (@vadum) November 19, 2012

 

More fully: “If you discuss Democrat’s 80 year old ‘free stuff’ strategy, Democrats say you’re racist, and establishment Republicans say you’re mean and divisive. This is pure insanity.”

In the Newtonian realm, we talk about force being the product of mass and acceleration. That’s the 2^th Law. For those who’ve spent the last few years leading a parched herd of horses to water and wondering why they vote for thirst, I’d like to suggest a Newtonian analogy.

The rational, intellectual, economic, historical, patriotic, liberty-oriented arguments that have been offered by conservatives everywhere from blogs to policy have been, well, massive.

Yet those arguments haven’t overcome the acceleratingly negative, emotionally-oriented racial and class-warfare rhetoric of the statists. The Left has a substantially greater negative vector  than that of the Right. Remember: enough speed in the wrong direction can weaponize a piece of insulating foam. Similarly, when dealing with people, a nonsensical argument delivered properly can devastate even the truth.

Why?

The facts don’t sell themselves. The stupefying Gramscian trajectory of the last decades has meant that no mass short of the Sweet Meteor of Death is going to budge our benighted electorate.

Thus, without losing any of the enlightened mass that has built up on the Right, the challenge is to uncover our own means of accelerating that mass in the public discourse. For example, had I the budget, I should look to run really short (15 second) spots in swing states at a low frequency, say quarterly. All thse would do is feature a snippet of family dialog pointing out how jacked up the Obama Administration policies are.

Kid: “I want to go to college.”
Parent: “We had to raid the college savings for gas. If you take loans, you’re a slave to the bank. Plus, you’re white, so you get no assistance. Because fairness.”

Vary the theme that liberty is giving way to patronage. Say it sharply, quickly, a thousand different ways.

The physics of the situation are ugly, but turning the inertia around is going to take a long time. Sorry. The quick fix was served with the free lunch. At Ché Bernanke.

Now that we know for a fact that President Obama deliberately deceived Americans about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — remember, the president promised to “get to the bottom of it” — now the Senate Majority Leader does his part to suppress the ugly truth:

If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t make it clear enough to Republicans that he opposes a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks, he said it again Friday: No way.
In letters to key Republican senators, Reid put his foot down — again — on the idea of a special panel to dig into the Sept. 11 assault that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three diplomatic aides in Libya. A select committee would need a floor vote to be created, and Reid said he wouldn’t permit it.
“I refuse to allow the Senate to be used as a venue for baseless partisan attacks,” Reid wrote in the three-page letter, released Friday evening.

And, of course, by “baseless partisan attacks,” what Harry Reid actually means is, the truth.

by Smitty

Head ‘splodes:

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) confirmed Thursday that she will seek the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee next year but told The Hill that she cannot commit to doing a budget.
This opens up the possibility that Senate Democrats will avoiding passing a budget resolution for the fourth year in a row.
The last time the Senate passed a standalone budget resolution was in 2009.

via Insty

Also, Ron Paul’s farewell speech is great. Yet I think I can state my problem with Ron Paul now. Paul makes a purely intellectual pitch. Foreign policy is not as clean as a chess game. Paul arrives at an idealism as ungrounded as that of the Socialists. Which is not to endorse the foreign policy adventurism, either. I’m after some (perhaps equally nebulous) mid-point between the two.

Anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee once had what is colloquially known as “f–k you money,” but suffered a reversal of fortune:

John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.
“I had no clue,” he said, “that there would be this tandem collapse.”

What’s an erstwhile multimillionaire to do? Move to Belize!

He has spent the intervening years building a new life for himself on the coast of Central America. He has just auctioned off the last of his sprawling properties back in the United States and sold or given away many of his possessions. He has taken a huge financial hit, he says, but that’s okay. He has enough to fund his latest passion, his gift to the future: developing new kinds of antibiotics from herbs found deep in the rain forests of Belize. . . .
He describes the economic injustice of the developing world, the imbalances of education and capital, and how tapping the biodiversity of the rain forest for natural cures will help address those problems. “The product is something the world desperately needs, or will need, within a few years,” he says, “as our last lines of antibiotic defense are breached by the ever-growing ranks of drug-resistant bacteria.”

Hmmmm. Does this sound vaguely . . . flaky? Yeah, it sure does. And when the going gets flaky, the flaky get going:

As dawn broke over the interior of Belize on April 30, an elite team of 42 police and soldiers, including members of the country’s SWAT team and Special Forces, converged on a compound on the banks of a jungle river. Within, all was quiet. The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead. The compound’s owner, a 67-year-old white American man, emerged bleary-eyed from his bedroom with a 17-year-old Belizean girl. The police cuffed him and took him away, along with his guards.
Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal. The guns were licensed and the lab appeared not to be manufacturing drugs but an herbal antibacterial compound.
After fourteen hours, the police let the man and his employees go, but remained convinced they had missed something. Why else would a wealthy American playboy hole himself up out here, far from the tourist zone on the coast, by a navigable river that happened to connect, twenty miles downstream, with a remote corner of the Mexican border? Why else would he hire, as head of security, a rogue cop who’d once plotted to steal guns from the police and sell them to drug traffickers?

You really should read the whole thing, including the part about how McAfee, 66, moved to Belize with his 28-year-old girlfriend (whom he started dating when she was still a teenager) and then developed a business partnership with a 31-year-old Harvard biologist, Allison Adonizio, who rebuffed his crude and weird advances:

He showed her websites devoted to various kinds of outré kink, and became increasingly open, when his girlfriend Irwin was out of town, about bringing prostitutes off the street and into his bedroom. (One day Adonizio came upon “literally a garbage bag full of Viagra.”) After she’d broken up with a boyfriend on the mainland, “he kept trying to set me up with these weird friends that were into polyamory and crazy kinky stuff,” she said. “He tried to convince me that love doesn’t exist, so I might as well just give in and sleep with all these crazy circus folk.” He liked to hint that he had connections to dangerous criminals, implying that he could have her ex-boyfriend killed: “I have someone who can take care of that,” he told her.
When at last she decided she’d had enough and asked McAfee to buy out her share of the company, he exploded, she says, screaming and lunging at her. She fled and locked herself in the lab. McAfee pounded on the door and shouted obscenities. Afraid for her safety, Adonizio called a friend to escort her off the property. The next day, she boarded a flight back home to Pennsylvania. . . .
“As soon as I started questioning his motives, he turned on me and became a horrible, horrible person, controlling, manipulative and dangerous,” she told me. “I’m thankful that I got out with my life.”
In the wake of Adonizio’s departure, McAfee grew more isolated. An investor who’d wanted to back the anti-quorum-sensing venture backed away. A joint-venture agreement with Dr. Louis Zabaneh, one of the country’s most powerful men, fell apart. The hangers-on drifted away. After 14 years, Irwin left him.

So, if you were a gambler, would you bet that things got better or worse after that? If you bet on “worse,” you’re a winner:

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force’s Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

The report goes on to explain McAfee’s downward spiral into oblivion:

In July of 2010, shortly before Allison Adonizio pulled the plug on their quorum-sensing project and fled the country, McAfee began posting on a drug-focused Russian-hosted message board called Bluelight about his attempts to purify the psychoactive compounds colloquially known as “bath salts.”
Writing under the name “stuffmonger,” a handle he has used on other online message boards, McAfee posted more than 200 times over the next nine months about his ongoing quest to purify psychoactive drugs from compounds commercially available over the internet. “I’m a huge fan of MDPV,” he wrote. “I think it’s the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.”
Elsewhere, he described his pursuit of “super perv powder” and warned about the dangers of handling the freebase version of the drug: “I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life.” He recommended that the most effective way to take a dose is via rectal insertion . . .

Ah, so the software genius and former multimillionaire becomes a crazed and lonely recluse in a Central American jungle, shoving weird hallucinogenic drugs up his bunghole, suffers some kind of psychotic breakdown, shoots a man and takes it on the run, an international fugitive wanted on a murder charge.

They say that the difference between “crazy” and “eccentric” is that eccentric people are rich. John McAfee used to be eccentric.

 

by Smitty

Dear Instapundit,

You’ve got the audience to pull the guy in. I (and perhaps other Tea Party types, I suspect) should really appreciate some re-assurance on the value of continued support of the GOP.

If the last five or so years of paying close attention to politics, and actually getting involved in supporting my local Republican Committee, the gnarly truth that politics is a hard slog has come home. Those who are quick to scream for heads on silver chargers, somehow, are not out there themselves making it happen. So the inent here is not to join the critical chorus. Here are some questions:

1. Looking to 2014, and 2016, what fully legal aspects of the Democrat ground game does the GOP intend to incorporate?
2. Are Tea Partiers too strident? Does it make sense to walk back the intensity on some of the rhetoric, in order actually to win elections?
3. Could Tea Parties get assurance that there is not an unspoken Progressive Wisdom at senior levels?  That is, an understanding whereby Ruling Class, in its Democrat and Republican forms, holds the country on its current course, despite the occasional howls from the people?
4. The Tea Party effort is acquiring a 1992 Ross Perot feel, as though it was cool to have some spontaneous grass-roots action, to spice things up in 2010. But by 2012, those zany ‘Cousin Eddie’ Tea Partiers, and the Representatives they helped get elected, sure were stinkin’ up the joint, and, arguably, didn’t get as much support as one might have liked.
5. Are the various New Media activities like blogging, grassroots activism, and doing campaign gruntwork really maximizing the value of Tea Party efforts? That is, can we get more feedback than “Hey, thanks.”? What’s the Tea Party grade on 2012? Did the Tea Party wind up harming rather than helping? Seriously; we’re adults, and a lot’s at stake. Are we fighting for causes that are simply ‘lost’, from the vantage of Those Calling The Shots?
6. Should SoCons veer a bit toward Ron Paul’s libertarian example on social/reproductive issues? Is the effort to impart values through legislation, instead of through personal relationships, costing elections?
7. Can the RNC Chair attend CPAC, and spend a little time in the Blogger Lounge, and offer some unfiltered feedback on just what the deal is?

To belabor the point, the idea here isn’t to look back, or demand scalps. The Christmas Vacation reference is not meant to insult anyone, but rather to indicate taking the subject matter seriously, and the self, not so much. And yes, I’m a Social Conservative, clinging joyously to such notions as:

• form follows function with respect to the midsection,
• the meaning of marriage is invariant in the eyes of the Almighty, and impervious to foolishness under the sun, and
• if you peg the beginning of life to some moment after conception, it’s likely a precursor to a murderous sophistry.

Having said all that, if the Maniacs want an altar to Baal, where they alternate between debasing themselves and butchering their children, well, better one state than losing the whole country, say I. You can build the 14th Amendment case that the unborn should be protected federally. But also note that the inflexibility is losing elections, and that some hypothetical ‘net sin’ figure may be driven upward by an absolutist view. Howl away at me.

by Smitty

Jerry Wilson over at Goldfish and Clowns offers up a fine post that is worth your time in full, but here is a taste (emphasis mine):

Economically, there will continue to be no sense of urgency until either Obamacare’s reality in the form of slashed Medicare coverages starts adversely affecting a multitude of families, the tax burden for all who actually pay taxes becomes onerous or the government stops handing out money. If the first two happen, they happen. The latter is far less likely to take place unless it is forced, and the only way that can happen would be if House Republicans refuse to pass any more appropriation bills, thus shutting down the government, until a genuine deficit reduction program is installed. That said, it’s doubtful the GOP has the guts to turn off the money spigot and shut government down, no matter the pain it causes, until Obama and the Democrats agree to genuine financial reform. However, nothing else short of another massive terrorist attack or full blown war on American soil will get the public’s attention.

I submit that this is true insofar as it goes, but the real problem here is indifference. Not just on election days, but the other 2 * 365 – 1 days in between*.

Folks, if we don’t explicitly keep our Republic, it will be taken from us!

I’m preaching to a choir here, so the real question is how we can broaden the discussion past the choir. Guys like Glenn Beck and Mike Church have been instrumental in my own personal education on what this country really was intended to mean. It did not seem possible to me that a society could achieve the level of daftness the U.S. did on the 6th of November. BHO should have been overwhelmed at the polls, far past the reach of any minor accounting boo-boos that may have crept in.

The notion of division of labor goes back a really long way in economics. Yes, we use elections to divide the work between a handfull of officials and the rest of the populace. Sure, it would be swell if we had some higher-caliber statesmen in play. But we the people can’t expect to tune in for elections only and expect the country to stay on course. DC is a tiny fraction of the total area of the country, and holds a distorted, statist worldview. The Silent Majority is pulling off a major sin of omission, methinks.

---

*Don’t get pedantic with me about leap years and goofy off-year elections like Virginia’s.

Unless [email protected] is a parody account, I think the e-mail he sent me eloquently refutes certain Republican arguments for “Latino outreach”:

Nice article pal. Let me simply explain what happened to your pathetic white party. yes, white party. not white republican party, just white party. it all boils down to laziness. first, you jackasses brought the black as slaves to work your fields because you were too fucking lazy to do it yourselves. what happened? the slaves fucked your white women and multiplied their population while the white man was getting drunk and fishing. then, incredibly, after not learning your god damm lesson the first time, you import latinos in the latter part of the 20th century to work your construction and blue collar jobs. and what happened, they fucked your white women and multiplied their populations while you were getting drunk and watching Nascar. But worse for you, this time you really did yourselves in! why!!?? because the last time, you imported slaves from Africa. A long ways from here. This time you imported them from Latin America!! Now they are not only coming to America to work, they are bringing their whole families and starting families here!! When will you jackass white people learn???!!! Mccain, you are not “The other Mccain”. You are just another fucking idiot white man! Now get the fuck out of the country and let the latinos lead you jerkoff!

Thank you for explaining this, Mr. Cortez: Hispanics who vote Democrat don’t do so because of policy issues, but because they identify the Republican Party with white people and a lot of Hispanics hate white people.

This is of course not limited to one group. The Democrats are adept at making Republicans proxies for whatever anyone happens to hate: If you hate rich people, Republicans are the party of the rich.  If you’re gay, Republicans are the party of homophobes. If you’re female, Republicans are the party of that jerk ex-boyfriend who dumped you because your thighs are too fat.

Democrats are the party of organized hatred, and the fact that key constituent groups within the Democratic coalition openly hate each other — e.g., most black people aren’t really down for the whole “LGBT” agenda — does nothing to distract from their unifying principle: Hating Republicans as symbolic scapegoats for whatever aggrieves them.

Who taught this “Blame the Gringo” ideology to Luis Cortez? Democrats.

To people like Luis Cortez, “Forward” means stick it to the gringo, just as to the disgruntled union worker, “Forward” means stick it to the boss man.

The problem is that hate doesn’t work as a policy. And when you let your personal resentments persuade you to vote for Democrats, you will eventually discover — if you aren’t entirely stupid — that the policies of the Democratic Party don’t actually make your life better. In fact, Democrats actually end up enacting policies that hurt their own constituent groups. Yet the culture of hate propagated by Democrats prevents many people from seeing through the lies.

The Lonely Conservative observes: “I don’t know how any Republican wins in this culture the left has created.”

Ace of Spades has some interesting thoughts about the 2012 wipeout.