The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Three Realizations About #ObamaCare

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 18 Comments

by Smitty From Is Obamacare Unraveling?

. . .the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years. . . .with the literal drop dead date for these old policies hitting by December 31, 2014, that would have meant those final cancellation letters would have had to go out about election day 2014. That would have meant that the administration was going to have to live through the cancelled policy nightmare all over again––but this time on election day. The health insurance plans hate the idea of another three-year reprieve. They have been counting on the relatively healthy block of prior business pouring into the new Obamacare exchanges to help stabilize the rates as lots of previously uninsured and sicker people come flooding in. . . . Republicans, and a few vulnerable Democrats, had essentially called for this last fall when legislation was floated in both the House and Senate with the “If You Like Your Policy You Can Keep It,” proposals.

Which brings me to the following:

  1. Hayek wins. Again.
  2. The insurance companies may have thought they were dealing with the pleasant Cthulhu, but the insurers are as much on the menu as the rubes who gave this no-talent rodeo clown a pass last November.
  3. The GOP is as much at fault for all of this idiocy, insofar as it plays the Progressive game, and doesn’t offer substantial reform that redistributes power, not wealth.

Other than the general political/economic collapse that’s unfolding in our country this year, things are going well. I’ve been studying to take the PMP exam a week from Monday. Come to think of it, though, our debt and misery seems to have increased with the number of advanced degrees and certifications issued. So maybe that’s a bad idea, overall. via Hot Air headlines

Category: Health Care

Boy-Crazy Teacher Meredith Powell Raped Tacoma Teenagers, Police Say

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 69 Comments

A 24-year-old Lincoln High School math teacher was charged Thursday with “two counts of third-degree child rape and communication with a minor for immoral purposes via electronic communication,” and on Friday she pleaded not guilty:

Meredith Powell performed oral sex on a 15-year-old student in her Tacoma classroom last month and sent him nude photos of herself taking a bath using the application Snapchat.
Documents said she also admitted to exchanging inappropriate texts with and having sexual contact with a second student, 16, during a Jan. 17 assembly in which they stayed behind and met in her classroom.
A third student, age 17, who was in her class during a prior year said he and Powell exchanged sexual text messages but did not have sexual contact.

According to an arrest affidavit, however, Meredith Powell admitted her crimes to Tacoma Police detectives:

On February 6, 2014, detective interviewed the victims. [He] disclosed the following: The day of the MLK assembly [Jan. 17, the boy] went to the defendant’s classroom. They kissed, he touched her breasts, and she touched his chest under his shirt. [The boy] then digitally penetrated her vagina. On the day of the assembly, [the boy] sent her a text asking if she wanted to stay behind and she agreed to.
During his interview, [a second boy] disclosed the following: The defendant is his teacher. They sent texts to each other and she sent him pictures of her naked in a bathtub. [The second boy] and the defendant kissed a few days after the MLK Day assembly when he went to her classroom and the door was locked. The defendant kissed [the second boy] and he touched her buttocks and breasts. The defendant touched [the second boy]’s chest under his shirt and performed oral sex on him. [The second boy] digitally penetrated the defendant. . . .
Detectives re-contacted the defendant and advised of her Miranda rights which she waived. She admitted the following: She preformed oral sex on [one of the boys] and her classroom door was possibly locked. He put his mouth on her breast and digitally penetrated her vagina. She told him to stop. She sent him a snapchat pictures. She thought they were of her in the bathtub and one of her in bed in the dark. The defendant admitted [one of the boys] put his mouth on her breast and digitally penetrated her vagina. They began texting after New Year’s Eve and it became inappropriate. She touched [one of the boy]’s penis over his clothes and he put his finger into her vagina. She knew her actions were wrong … When asked what she would say to the students’ parents, she said she would apologize.

“She said she would apologize”? Translation: “Hey, I’m totally sorry I got caught playing with your teenage son’s boner and stuff.”

Having recently written several items (e.g., “She Craved the Taste of Boy Flesh,” Jan. 12, and “Police: Ex-Teacher Tonya Drueppel, 33, Had Sex With 13-Year-Old ‘Girlfriend’,” Jan. 30) about sex-crime cases involving female teacher, I notice that this latest case in Tacoma is getting more media coverage than most, with reports at the Daily Mail, Daily Caller and NY Daily News. This can be explained simply: (a) the accused teacher is a skinny young blonde with a nice smile, (b) she seems to have had a habit of posting selfies on Facebook and Pinterest, providing lots of photo potential, and (c) the affidavit offers lurid details.

Dan Riehl comments on Miss Powell’s alleged crimes:

“There has to be some psychological stuff going on.
She could have just gone to a bar and found some
age appropriate men if all she wanted was some casual sex.”

 

We could speculate on what kind of “psychological stuff” Meredith Powell had “going on,” but that doesn’t explain what would seem to be a trend of these sex-crazed perverts, most of whom are not as photogenic as Meredith Powell. If more and more female teachers are having sex with teenage boys, you can’t really explain any one particular case except in the context of that trend.

However, let me make a simple observation: It is what it is.

When someone is apprehended in deviant behavior, the “why”/”how” questions — “How did they get so messed-up in the head?” — arouse our curiosity. But without a detailed personal history and psychological profile of the perpetrator, we can’t really answer those questions. The simplest explanation is that they made their personal choices and did what they wanted to do. If a woman is accused of giving a teenage boy a blow job, well, maybe she likes giving blow jobs to teenage boys.

Just throwing that out there as a possibility.

Finally, a friend on Twitter points out that Lincoln High is an urban school with lots of diversity: The students body is 27% white, 23% black, 23% Hispanic and 16% Asian, so maybe Miss Powell got kind of carried away with her celebration of multiculturalism.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex, Washington State

The Renegade Jesse Myerson

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 89 Comments

Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) in a March 2012 cable TV appearance.

“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
“The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws. . . .
“One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies . . . revolutionary violence of one class against another.”
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

When Lenin was wounded in an August 1918 assassination attempt, Josef Stalin knew what to do. The future Soviet dictator sent a telegram to Moscow, announcing that he was “instituting open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”

Stalin ignorantly blamed “the hirelings of the bourgeoisie” for the shooting of Lenin, but in fact the would-be assassin was a 28-year-old Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, who had spent 11 years at hard labor in tsarist prisons after being arrested for her part in a terrorist bombing plot when she was 16. What inspired Kaplan’s resolve to assassinate Lenin was the forcible suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, less than three months after the overthrow of the Kerensky government in October 1917 .

Lenin never erred on the side of leniency. Kaplan was executed with a bullet to the back of the head four days after her assassination attempt, as the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror which, among thousands of deliberate atrocities, resulted in the summary execution of some 800 members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

“[T]here is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
— Karl Marx, 1848

Communism’s explicit and enthusiastic embrace of violent “revolutionary terror” is among the many facts that self-described communist Jesse Myerson seeks to ignore or evade in pretending to correct our “huge misconceptions about communism.”

Supposing the enemies of communism to be as ignorant as himself, Myerson boasts of making “points” that his opponents are incapable of answering, thus to display his imaginary intellectual superiority. Myerson’s posing is intended, as I explained yesterday, for entirely selfish purposes: By presenting himself as an insuperable advocate of far-left “progressive” ideas, he expects to be praised and admired, and thus to be elevated to a position of leadership, obtaining for himself not only fame as a sort of radical celebrity, but also an easy income as a Professional Progressive Thinker.

Glorious Idol of the Obscure Masses

Myerson’s sociopathic dishonesty suits him well for this project of pseudo-revolutionary self-advancement, and his resemblance to Anonymous “famewhore” Barrett Brown is not coincidental, the main differences being that (a) Barrett is a much better writer, and (b) Barrett had the courage of his convictions, with the result that (c) Barrett is now in federal custody awaiting trial on enough felony charges to put him in prison for life, while (d) Myerson is still running free, getting paid to publish in Salon.com and Rolling Stone, and enjoying as much sex, drugs and rock-and-roll as he can afford.

Nice work, if you can get it, but not every leftist enjoys the privileges of the radical celebrity elite. For every rock star type like Myerson, there are many hundreds of their ideological comrades who toil in obscurity on behalf of the progressive cause. The leftist masses, by their silent acceptance of Myerson’s leadership, thereby acknowledge their inferiority to him: If they were as capable as Myerson of articulating their shared beliefs, they would be his equal. Instead, because Myerson is better than them, he gets the Rolling Stone commissions and the invitations to appear on cable TV talk shows. The role assigned to the progressive masses is merely to admire and applaud Jesse Myerson, contenting themselves to bask in his reflected glory.

Sic semper hoc.

The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement since Marx’s ridiculous insistence that only his socialism was “scientific.” Yet such is Jesse Myerson’s egoism that he imagines himself superior even to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. At least they had the integrity to admit that the abolition of private property — the expropriation of the bourgeosie — could only be accomplished by violent revolution, and that the victors of such a revolution would have to employ the methods of violent terror to establish their dictatorship.

When Myerson’s Jan. 3 Rolling Stone article drew criticism, he responded that he did not “want the 1% dead just dispossessed.”

This was ridiculous, as any true communist could have seen. Does this young Bard College alumnus expect that billionaires will voluntarily surrender their wealth? Eh, never mind: Myerson deleted the Tweet, evidently in embarrassment.

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is … And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.”
— Friedrich Engels, 1872

Nearly two decades ago, after undertaking a careful study of Marxist philosophy, I concluded that 19th-century Germans were envious of the French Revolution and craved a sans-culotte epoch to call their own. Marxism’s “dialectical materialism,” with its allegedly scientific devotion to historical development, assigned to the French Revolution a sort of runner-up trophy in history, declaring that the quest for political equality that had inspired the uprising of 1789 was mere “bourgeois democracy,” destined soon to be eclipsed by the coming socialist revolution of the proletariat. Though Marxism advocated internationalism and appealed to the “workers of the world,” its authors were distinctly German — deriving their concept of the dialectic from Hegel — and it was generally expected that Germany, with its advanced industrial economy, would be the scene of the outbreak of the proleterian revolution.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in backward Russia, critical sniping from the German social-democrat Karl Kautsky inspired contemptuous sarcasm from Lenin and Trotsky. But who could not pity the hapless German socialists? Here their own idea had been unexpectedly successful in an inferior nation — one the German army had beaten in the World War — and there was an unmistakable humiliation in the fact that the German people had once more lost out in the world-historic revolutionary sweepstakes. The 19th-century German socialists Marx and Engels borrowed the idea of revolutionary terror from 18th-century France, and yet it was 20th-century Russians who experienced the bloody fulfillment of that hand-me-down nightmare vision.

“Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the idea that the political autocracy of the proletariat is the ‘sole form in which it can realize its control of the state.’ . . . The man who repudiates terrorism in principle . . . must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.”
— Leon Trotsky, 1920

Terroristic violence is the sine qua non of communism, first in overthrowing the capitalist order and then in maintaining the authority of its revolutionary dictatorship “unrestricted by any laws.”

This explicit rejection of civil rights and the Rule of Law, this maniacal devotion to violence as a core principle, guaranteed that the Soviet government would be a murderous totalitarianism. Nevertheless, self-described communist Jesse Myerson airily dismisses the bloody record of Marxist-Leninist regimes with a bit of rhetorical arm-waving as he lectures us on our “huge misconceptions about communism.” Revolutionary violence disappears in a fog of moral equivalence:

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is, he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.
This is true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a title — deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means of production,” we are in the realm of property; when Fox Business Channel hosts move to confiscate my tie, we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?

Ah! We are ignorantly confused between “personal possessions and private property,” Myerson tells us, so that the principle which justifies expropriation of a billionaire’s wealth (property) will not be extended to your iPhone (a mere possession).

Of course, in actual practice — as opposed to Myerson’s word games — communism’s lawlessness routinely resulted in ordinary people being deprived not only of property and personal possessions, but also deprived of liberty and life. Beyond its inherent tendency toward terroristic violence, communism proved itself incapable of producing an adequate supply of those consumer goods (not just sophisticated devices like iPhones, but also such mundane items as shoes and bread) that Myerson takes for granted in capitalist America.

So not only do the rich people lose their wealth, but everybody else is doomed to hopeless poverty and — oh, yes, by the way — your communist rulers might decide to kill you and a few million other people, just so nobody forgets who’s in charge.

The Secret Elitism of the Occupy Movement

Did I mention that Jesse Myerson’s original claim to fame was as “media coordinator” for Occupy Wall Street? Remember when that mob of smelly losers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge?

New York City police say about 700 protesters have been arrested after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and blocked traffic lanes for several hours.
On the second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a large group of marchers broke off from others on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.
Police say demonstrators spilled onto the roadway Saturday night after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway. They face charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Some of the protesters said that authorities had tricked, trapped and then arrested them, according to The New York Times.
“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Jesse Myerson told the newspaper.

Blame the cops! Yes, that’s it — the cops tricked us into breaking the law!

Here’s another bit from the same October 2011 article:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and social inequality took their “solidarity march” to Brooklyn, but battled in a war of words against officers, chanting “We are not criminals” and “Let us go!”
Some protesters tried to get away as officers started handcuffing members of the group. Dozens of protesters were seen handcuffed and sitting on the span as three buses were called in to take them away, witnesses and organizers said.
The New York Times reported a few protesters had “clambered dangerously up the structure of the bridge to get to the wooden pedestrian walkway, which is about 15 feet above the road.”
Erin Larkins, a graduate student at Columbia University who says she and her boyfriend have $130,000 combined in student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she’s glad she did.
“I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again,” Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Oh, noes! A graduate student at Columbia (annual tuition, $44,716) is eating rice and beans and worrying how she and her boyfriend can pay their rent because . . . corporate greed! Social inequality!

Why do these neo-communists always have to attend elite private schools? Jesse Myerson attended Bard College (annual tuition $45,730) where he majored in theater and “human rights studies.”

Why would Myerson pay so much to attend an elite school in Annandale when, a half-hour drive away in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess Community College boasts that it offers “the lowest tuition in New York state,” just $3,200 a year? After a couple years getting your associate’s degree at DCC, then you could transfer to a SUNY campus — say, Albany, about an hour’s drive from Annandale — where annual tuition is $5,800.

Although I don’t know if Bard College requires any math classes to get a degree in human rights, by my calculations, the difference in tuition between attending Bard ($182,920 for four years) and going the DCC/SUNY-Albany route ($18,000) is $164,920.

Saving yourself $164,920 in tuition might not put you into the 1%, but it sure will buy a lot of rice and beans, so . . .

Why did Jesse Myerson go to Bard? Because he’s better than you.

Myerson’s intellectual superiority to others is both the premise and conclusion of his every argument, and you don’t expect someone with such superior qualities to rub shoulders with those lowbrow plebians at community college, do you? No, of course not. Educating the revolutionary vanguard requires the “prestigious faculty” and “vibrant” campus life “with world-class performing arts venues” that only an elite private $45,730-a-year liberal arts college can provide.

This young communist can’t be bothered to learn history or economics, nor has he studied Marxist theory enough to understand that his rejection of revolutionary terror condemns him to the same “renegade” category to which Lenin assigned the pathetic Kautsky. And this same Jesse Myerson (Bard ’08) presumes to enlighten us as to our “huge misconceptions about communism”?

“The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

At least Marx got that much right . . .

 

Category: Culture, Economics, History, Intellectuals

Meanwhile, Elsewhere In The Culture War…

Posted on | February 7, 2014 | 21 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


While Stacy is off trying to pound sense into the thick skulls of young Marxist wannabees, I feel compelled to help fill the content gap, and since I’ve actually been able to get some reading in between stints in the tax mines, I have a few things I’d like to recommend.


First off, Casey Neumiller (who wrote the action-packed Dead Man’s Fugue) sent me a review copy of his fantasy novel Destiny’s Heir, a nice coming-of-age story involving a young magician’s apprentice, the best thief in the local guild, and the epic theft that brings them together only to realize they’ve opened an ENORMOUS can of worms. Not just your average derivative elf & dwarf crap; this is an original combination of picaresque tale and Bildungsroman. Worth your time.


Also worth your time is Brian McClellan’s Promise of Blood, recommended by Schlock Mercenary creator Howard Tayler in his blog. Gunpowder weapons don’t usually mix well with classic high fantasy, since they sort of clash with the medieval aesthetic and all that, but McClellan makes it work in this bloody tale of magic, revolution, regicide and mystery whose style reminds me somewhat of Paula Volsky’s The Gates of Twilight. Mr. Tayler is right – McClellan’s writing chops are excellent, and the story is compelling. Also, it’s only $1.99 on the Kindle.


Marko Kloos has a sequel out to Terms of Enlistment, and there’s a reason Lines of Departure is currently #2 on the Kindle War & Military Fiction list. Our hero Andrew Grayson is back, having moved from shipboard neural net manager to forward observer for the drop teams the North American Confederacy is sending to hit back at the implacable Lankies – the aliens that have so far wrecked every human colony outside the “30 line” without a still-divided humanity being able to even slow them up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Grayson finds out during an all-too-brief shore leave on Earth that things dirtside are exponentially worse than they were when he enlisted, with many cities so close to rebellion as makes no difference. The real meat of the novel begins when Grayson’s leave ends and he finds himself assigned to a task force constituted mostly of old starships seconds away from the scrapyard and staffed with a brigade of mutinous Homeland Defense (was Territorial Army) troops. Some of the Amazon reviewers think this may be a better and tighter novel than Terms of Enlistment, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. Got this for free through the Kindle Lending Library program, but I think I’ll be shelling out my $4.99 next month when the loan expires. Very much worth it.


Speaking of sequels, knowing librarians has its privileges, and one of those is occasionally getting ARCs of books I wanted to buy anyway. For example, John Ringo’s To Sail a Darkling Sea, which I’d been agonizing over buying when a friend dropped the ARC in my lap. This is, of course, the sequel to Under a Graveyard Sky, which shows you the end of the world up close and personal as a virulent genengineered flu converts most of humanity into highly-infectious zombies. Among the few survivors are Steven Smith, a/k/a “Commodore Wolf”, who sets out with his family to rescue as many people from boats and ships adrift in the Atlantic as they can, rebuilding civilization one life raft at a time. The sequel mainly continues the story, with the added amusement of surviving Marines, sailors and Coast Guardsmen trying to help make Smith’s teenage daughters Faith and Sophia (Shewolf and Seawolf, respectively) into leaders de jure as well as de facto. As you may recall, the zombie horror subgenre bores me to tears – but for some reason, Ringo manages to hold my interest while dancing from greasy organizational stuff to a bit of the old ultra-violence to turning none-too-bright security guards and support staff into zombie killers to slams at chairborne officers who know a lot about management but damn little about leadership. A fun read, and highly recommended.


So…what have you been reading?


Category: Books

In The Mailbox, 02.07.14

Posted on | February 7, 2014 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: We Told You So!
Proof Positive: Putin It Straight
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Nancy Pelosi Pulls A Jesse Myerson
Michelle Malkin: The Left’s Valentine To Defiant Jihad-Enabler Lynne Stewart
Doug Powers: Susan Rice Blames A Video Again
Twitchy: Olivia Wilde Asks What’s Holding Back Equality For Women


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: More Than One In Six Men 26-54 Don’t Have Jobs
American Thinker: Targeting The IRS
Blackfive: Palate Cleanser – What Are 1000 High School Students Doing In My Hotel?
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Good Luck Getting Care, That Will Be $5000
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin – Pray For Noel Sheppard
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, February 6
Jammie Wearing Fools: Breaking – “No, Liberals Don’t Control The Democratic Party”
Joe For America: The White House Is Still Lying About The Keystone Pipeline
JustOneMinute: Power Station Snipers
Pat Dollard: Wisconsin II – California Initiative Would Render Public Sector Union Money Useless In Elections
Protein Wisdom: If Intentionalism/Language In Politics Is Fundamentally Unserious, Why Does The Left Want You To Ignore It?
Shot In The Dark: Journalism Saves The Day
The Jawa Report: Heartbreak! Christians In Central African Republic Expel Muslims
The Lonely Conservative: Report Finds Only 1.6% Of Americans Work For Minimum Wage
This Ain’t Hell: Waving A Hero
Megan McArdle: “Doc Shock” Reaches The Masses


Deadline to submit links for tomorrow’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday.
DO IT.
Deadline to submit links for Rule 5 Sunday is midnight Saturday.
DO THAT TOO.


Category: Linkagery

ObamaCare’s Compulsory Race Question

Posted on | February 7, 2014 | 64 Comments

You can’t see a doctor now unless you fill out a questionnaire about race and ethnicity, and Maetenloch comments at AOSHQ:

“Thanks Obama and Congress. These days
I always put myself down as ‘Mixed’ since
a) it’s true in the larger sense and
b) it fucks up all their statistics.”

Heh. If there is an option of fill-in-the-blank for “Other,” I would suggest writing in some archaic category: “Sumerian,” “Hittite,” “Hun,” “Hottentot,” “Creole” or “Octaroon.” As for myself, I’m pretty sure “Celto-Hibernian” or “Appalachian-American” would do.

Note to regular readers: Please excuse the paucity of routine blogging the past two days. Ever since Wednesday, when I began whacking that commie punk Jesse Myerson upside the head, I keep finding new reasons to maintain the momentum of the assault. His choice to reply with insulting sarcasm inevitably requires me to expose his ignorant folly with utmost ruthlessness. So I must beg for your patience, as I’ve been busy rooting around in the Marxist classics — e.g., “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna” — for materials necessary to the next crushing onslaught of this brutal campaign.





 

Category: Health Care

The Glorious All-American Hamburger

Posted on | February 6, 2014 | 102 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Who says we don’t love animals? Mmmm, tasty animals.

Inspired by Bryan Preston’s article on the Burger Wars in Austin, I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of decent burger joints in the Washington, DC area, especially with CPAC less than a month away. I’ve rated the various burger restaurants on a scale of 1-5 (awful to excellent) for burger taste, fries, sodas, and ambience; price is on a similar but inverted scale with 1 being “it costs HOW MUCH?” and 5 being “Yay! Cheap burgers!”.

Cheap Eats

White Castle: 1/3/3/1/5 (13)
There’s a reason everybody who raves about this place turns out to be either drunk, stoned or both when they went there. Having eaten there sober, I can testify this may be the worst hamburger chain ever. Its only virtues are that it is dirt cheap and open 24 hours. For God’s sake, and the safety of your gastrointestinal tract, if you must eat burgers of this sort, go to Krystal instead. You’ll thank me when you sober up.

McDonald’s: 3/3/4/4/5 (19)
The expanded Dollar Menu is a good thing in my opinion, since it makes bacon a regular component of the McDonald’s menu. This is the bog-standard baseline cheeseburger chain, where you can also get adequate chicken sandwiches and salads; they’ve become more low-carb friendly in recent years as well. +1 to Ambience for almost always have wifi in their 24-hour locations, which makes them great backup locations for bloggers whose power and/or internets at home are on the fritz.

Burger King: 3/2/4/3/4 (16)
If BK would just concentrate on their Whoppers and other flame-broiled California burgers, they probably wouldn’t be getting their asses handed to them by McDonald’s and (increasingly) Wendy’s.

Wendy’s: 4/2/4/4/4 (18)
Better burgers than McD’s or BK, including the mighty Baconator. Also generally nicer than the former two, even if 24-hour service and wifi are lacking.

Checker’s: 3/4/5/2/3 (18)
Also known as Rally’s in some parts of the country. Offers a bewildering variety of cheeseburgers, which are okay, but their real selling point is their fries, which are peppery and can be ordered with cheese and/or chili. Also, gigantic sodas. Unfortunately, it’s drive-through only unless you want to park your butt on their picnic benches, which is not advised even in the relatively mild winters here in the Washington area.

Hardee’s: 5/3/5/4/3 (20)
Also known as Carl’s Jr. on the Left Coast. This is stretching things a bit since the nearest Hardee’s are in Stafford down by Quantico or out in Luray, but they deserve mention for their awesome use of supermodels in ads (Rule 5!) and their in-your-face “Eat Like You Mean It” slogan. Plus points for Monsterburgers,  Thickburgers, and hand-scooped milkshakes & malts. Low-carb burger options available as well.

Roy Rogers: 5/3/5/4/3 (20)
The glorious Triggerburgers of yesterday are experiencing a revival, and the Double-R Burger (a cheeseburger with thin-sliced ham) is the top of the line. Plus points for the fresh fixins’ bar, which includes all the usual toppings plus mayo and horseradish on tap, and for hand-scooped milkshakes made with Hershey’s ice cream.

Siddown, Relax, And Chow Down

Red Robin: 4/3/4/5/3 (18)
More of a competitor to Chili’s and Friday’s, really, but the burgers here are very good and the fries are unlimited. Those of us watching the carbs have the option of trading in the fries for a salad or unlimited broccoli, and getting our burgers wrapped in lettuce instead of delicious but evil burger buns. Plus points in ambience for wifi and a quirky loyalty program which not only hands out a free burger on your birthday and has a Buy 10 Get One Free system, but periodically throws a random freebie at you for no reason.

Five Guys: 5/5/5/4/3 (21)
Arguably the best burgers and fries; the latter are fried in peanut oil and served in enormous quantities, while the former are cooked to order with your condiments conscientiously applied. The original Five Guys at King Street & Beauregard Avenue in Alexandria appears to be closed, but there’s plenty of others around now. Bonus points for having the newfangled Coke dispensers which offer a million zillion flavor options and have pretty much every kind of soda and bottled water made by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Allahu akbar! Plus points to ambience for playing excellent 80s & 90s rock on their Bose speakers, partially offset by wooden chairs.

Pretentious Yupscale Burger Emporia

Smashburger: 3/3/1/3/2 (12)
People who think this place serves the best burgers need to get their heads examined. Nothing about this place is worth going out of your way for, unless you actually like your burgers raw in the middle and accompanied by mediocre julienne fries. No refills on the fountain sodas, either. Fargin’ iceholes.

Big Buns: 5/3/3/3/2 (16)
The burgers here are actually very good, and the buns are good quality fresh-baked ones, too. Aside from that, they don’t have a lot going for them aside from free parking in Arlington, which is not to be sneered at. Veggie, salmon and other non-beef patty options available for those of weak liver. Small cups for soda are irritating, but at least you can refill them.

Burger 7: 3/2/5/2/2 (14)
If you are a crunchy con who insists on having all your beef organically grass-fed and your milkshakes made from organic milk, then this is your burger joint. I don’t care for grass-fed beef (too dry and stringy compared to corn-fed, imo) and I definitely don’t like the taste of fries cooked in olive oil. Price is about what you would expect an organic grass-fed cheeseburger to be, i.e. $5 and change for something that is definitely not as big as McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder with Cheese.

Ray’s Hell Burger: (unrated)
Haha, like I’d actually go somewhere where my dining is liable to be interrupted by the Moocher-In-Chief and his posse of T-men? Yeah, no.

BGR – The Burger Joint: 5/3/5/4/1 (18)
Sweet bleeding Ronald McDonald with headcrab, the burgers here are EXPENSIVE. A double bacon cheeseburger with fries and a soda can very easily set you back almost $20. That having been said, you’re paying for prime beef grilled on an open flame, and the rest of the ingredients are similarly hi-falutin’. So you’re getting a REALLY GOOD double bacon cheeseburger. Plus points for having one of the aforementioned newfangled Coke machines, decent music on the speakers, and some comfortable wall seats so you’re not forced to sit on wood benches to atone for your carnist mouthcrime. Also, loyalty program with instant reward of free burger for signing up and a Buy Eight Get One Free offer.


I’ll be going out to Vegas in early June to scope out potential apartment locations, and will probably check out In & Out Burger as well as the Heart Attack Grill. Why, journalism demands it!


Category: Bacon, Culture, humor, United States

Teach Your Children Well

Posted on | February 6, 2014 | 94 Comments

Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) seems to believe he is so clever that the “points” he makes in advocating communism deserve a detailed rebuttal, and I suppose there may be people who have nothing better to do with their time than to supply such a response.

Both humility and impatience (as well as years of experience) lead me to avoid a point-by-point engagement with an impudent fool.

Jesse Myerson is not interested in the facts of history or economics that would contradict his communist enthusiasms. Myerson is merely striking the pose of a radical intellectual, expecting admiration and applause from those who share his socialist sympathies. No doubt he hopes these gestures will enable him to obtain TV appearances, book contracts and speaking invitations. His purported “idealism” is thus motivated by selfish ambition: The narcissist’s desire to be seen as praiseworthy, and to acquire an easy income by advocating ideas popular with the Left.

Many have trod that path before, and Myerson’s potential for success in this ideological endeavor cannot be underestimated.

Some people take Conor Friedersdorf seriously, you know.

Myerson is dishonest about many things, but mostly he is lying to himself, and foolishly believes his own lies about himself. He thinks he is a unique individual — a Special Snowflake™ — when in fact he is manifestly a type, and not a good type, either. His insulting impudence is reminiscent of Barrett Brown, now in federal custody awaiting trial.

Were I to learn that Myerson had a history of substance abuse and/or psychiatric problems, it would not surprise me.

Who Has ‘Huge Misconceptions’?

Myerson seems incapable of realizing that his insults are directed at someone who has seen his type a thousand times before. Presuming to lecture others about subjects which they know far better, Myerson petulantly pretends that their refusal to treat his faulty arguments seriously is proof of his own superiority. He imagines his elders who have lived through the history that he has merely read (and he doesn’t seem to have read it very carefully) need his sermons about their “huge misconceptions about communism.”

“In a socialist community the possibility of economic calculations is lacking: it is therefore impossible to ascertain the cost and result of an economic operation or to make the result of the calculation the test of the operation. . . .
“Too little attention has hitherto been given to these fundamental questions. . . . To understand the problem of economic calculation it was necessary to recognize the true character of the exchange relations expressed in the prices of the market. . . .
“It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry.”
— Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1922)

Myerson is not illiterate, and is thus as capable as anyone else of reading Mises or Friedrich Hayek or Thomas Sowell. That he has never taken the time to do so — that he has not encountered the arguments of, e.g., Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice — is self-evident, and damning proof of Myerson’s intellectual sloth. He presents himself as an advocate of communism, but I can guarantee you that I have read more communist literature (including Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky) than has Myerson, and that I am more familiar than he with the history of Marxist-Leninist governments. But while I have studied the works of communism’s foremost advocates, Myerson has not studied the works of the most insightful advocates of the market economy. His ignorance, however, is no hindrance to his arrogance:

Communism envisions a time beyond work, when people are free, as Marx wrote, “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In that way, communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity: tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even within a single person’s “occupation.”

And good luck with that, OK? You might think Myerson would be embarrassed to recite the theoretical speculations of Karl Marx from 1845 (!) as if acquainting us with something hitherto unknown. Overlooking this puerile insult, let us instead contemplate the passage in Marx’s treatise preceding the one quoted by Myerson:

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.

What Marx was doing here, laying the groundwork for his theory of alienation, was mimicking the method of 18th- and 19th-century social, economic and political philosophers who were forever dragging readers back to a mythical State of Nature in the primordial past, then leading them forward through a process of historical “development” in order either (a) to justify the existing order, or (b) to advocate some change to that order. If you’ve read through a few of these philosophical State of Nature field trips, you understand what Marx is up to here. When Marx’s particular “development” lecture ends with a contrast to “communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,” the astute reader recognizes an attempted trickery: Marx merely imagines the possibility of this “communist society,” without bothering to specify how such an imaginary society could actually operate.

Marx assumes as a premise the feasibility of communism, which had never been proven prior to 1845 and which most observers would say has been quite conclusively disproven since. Yet here we have young Myerson holding up to us this bit of Marxian sophistry as if he has discovered a new and wonderful idea with which none of us ignorant right-wing stooges were ever previously acquainted!

Do you see the futility of arguing with Marxists? If they gave a damn about facts or logic, they wouldn’t be Marxists. And yet the brutal exposure of their errors is no idle or trivial exercise.

“Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met in the fall of 1980. . . . I know it’s incendiary to say this [but Obama] was basically a Marxist-Leninist.”
— John Drew, Occidental College graduate

As anyone who has read Paul Kengor’s 2010 book The Communist is aware, the problem with Obama’s youthful Marxism is that he has never offered a conversion story to suggest that he ever abandoned it. When I was a young man, I was an ardently partisan Democrat — hell, I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984 — but I’ve often told the tale of when, why and how I became an ex-Democrat in the 1990s. While I was never a socialist, many others who once embraced socialism (including, inter alia, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan and David Horowitz) subsequently became conservatives, but all ex-Marxists in public life have typically made the story of their conversion a central part of their personal narrative. The absence of any such a conversion tale in Obama’s narrative is, as Kengor says, quite troubling.

Confronting the Anti-Bush Generation

Nor can we dismiss as an aberration Myerson’s enthusiasm for the discredited dream of communism. Perhaps others have overlooked how many college-educated 20-somethings like Myerson have taken up a far-left progressive stance. My interpretation of this phenomenon is that it is to a great degree a backlash to Bush-era GOP hegemony.

In the span of a decade (1998-2008), American public life went through a series of shocking events:

  • 1998 — The Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment.
  • 2000 — The Florida election deadlock and the Supreme Court decision that made George W. Bush president.
  • 2001 — The 9/11 terror attack and the invasion of Afghanistan.
  • 2002 — An unprecedented mid-term win for Republicans, securing GOP control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in nearly 50 years.
  • 2003 — The invasion of Iraq.
  • 2004 — Bush re-elected after the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry.
  • 2006 — Democrats recapture control of Congress.
  • 2008 — Barack Obama elected president.

This partial list of dramatic events occurred against a background of innovations and shifts in the field of political communication: The Drudge Report, the MoveOn.org list, the rise of Fox News, the leftward shift of MSNBC as a counterweight, and the accompanying development of the blogosphere, Facebook and Twitter.

During this decade, 1998-2008, when today’s 28-year-old went through his bildungsroman from middle schooler to college graduate, what did the Republican  Party represent to him? Insofar as this 28-year-old identified with the hegemonic liberalism of American’s most powerful cultural institutions — in academia, journalism and the entertainment industry — the GOP was clearly viewed as the enemy, representing war, greed, racism and homophobia.

Let us not bother to ask whether these perceptions were fair or accurate, nor engage in a useless blame game of finger-pointing. Whether these perceptions of “Republican conservatism” were unfair, and whoever we might blame for those perceptions, the reality is that a great many young people — especially alumni of elite private schools like Bard College, which is Myerson’s alma mater — have integrated these anti-GOP perceptions into their worldview.

To such young people, “Rush Limbaugh,” “Fox News” and “Republican” are epithets, and any policy or argument that contradicts their progressive worldview they reject with a knee-jerk reflex: “Sexist! Racist! Warmonger! Homophobe! Right-wing Koch whore!”

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

This is the problem for which our 21st-century “Republican strategists” and “conservative intellectuals” have no solution. Almost unnoticed in the quarter-century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a chasm has emerged between the political world where Republicans contend with Democrats in hyper-partisan battle, and the cultural world where smart young people are indoctrinated with beliefs incompatible with the conservative philosophy of the GOP. Conservative faculty in academia are as scarce as conservative producers in Hollywood, and the output of the emerging Progressive Culture-Media Complex tends to reinforce the progressive lessons inculcated in most K-12 education.

Only in such an environment could a self-declared communist like Jesse Myerson be permitted to propagate a neo-Bolshevik vision without being criticized by any prominent liberal.

Where are the anti-communist liberals? Why have we seen no latter-day “Scoop Jackson Democrat” types warning against the dangers of backsliding toward discredited Marxist errors?

Where is the 21st-century Jeanne Kirkpatrick to sound the alarm?

There was a time when Americans knew what Communism was, and had the courage to fight against it. I fear for the future.

 

Category: Economics, History, Intellectuals
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