Morning rant #3

I disliked reading Anne's 'This is the way a society dies'. As a Briton I find these things so shameful that I avert my eyes. I thought that America would stay self-reliant, then came Obama. Truth is stranger than fiction. The standard model of politics is that the pendulum will swing back, but this time liberals may engineer prolonged power. Let's face it, Obama's domestic agenda is mostly Bush's compassionate conservatism on steroids + disdain for unborn children.

'1984' hit the zeitgeist in 1948, still in the age of Hitler and Stalin, but the negative utopia of 'Brave New World' better describes present trends: hatcheries, conditioning, vaccination-workers, embryo-workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and so on. Were distopian Islamism prematurely to pursue total war before the West has hollowed itself out, then the West would be forced to a moral re-armament. Liberals realize that war breeds virility. Virility + American history = live free or die....soooo 18th century. The deep, sometimes subconscious motive for hating the Iraq war wasn't hatred of war, but fear of the politics of martial virtue. Hence both liberals and subtle Islamists will avoid all-out war, but rely on the ease with which a pacified, passified, dependent society can be switched from Brave New World to 1984 and Big Brother may be an Ayatollah. It's not a conspiracy, it's a co-incidence of interests.

So where's hope? Where's change? Well, events, dear boy, events.

A new Ice Age in London

In 1991 British Rail was paralysed by a light dusting of snow. The immortal explanation was that it was "the wrong kind of snow." Last night's once in a millennium hell-storm dumped a stupefying 3 inches or more and London's shut down, at least the public sector, with one brave exception; His Excellency, BoJo, the Mayor of London, cycled into City Hall to announce:

"This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities. I have never seen anything like it."

I look forward to the London Olympics. Meanwhile it's been fun to wander round with my new camera, a Canon 5d2, and 2 fine lenses, Canon 85mm f1.8 and Sigma 50mm f1.4. This gallery shows the area round my apartment in the last 24 hours.

Thoughtcrime

Snow in London

Geithner confirmed as Treasury secretary

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.

This appointment of tax cheat to Tax Chief adds to a list to make a cynic wince:

+ Charlie Rangel, tax cheat, nepotist, Head of House Ways and Means Committee.
+ Chris Dodd, received bribes from Countrywide, top beneficiary from Fannie and Freddie, Chairman Senate Banking Comittee.
+ Nancy Pelosi, pro partial birth abortion, pro gay marriage, Catholic, in line for President after Joe Biden, House Speaker.
+ Joe Biden, serial liar, Vice President.
+ Barack Obama, killed Born Alive Infants Protection Act, nice teeth, pleasant baritone, President.
+ Reid, Clinton, Holder....

It is not nor it cannot come to good.

Maybe I will jump out of that window

Every time I think that America will pull out of recession quickly, I'm knocked back to pessimism by the crassness of government. Now I realise that the most powerful female in government is insane:

PELOSI SAYS BIRTH CONTROL WILL HELP ECONOMY
Sun Jan 25 2009 22:13:43 ET

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic "stimulus" package, claiming "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

Pelosi, the mother of 5 children and 6 grandchildren, who once said, "Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom," seemed to imply babies are somehow a burden on the treasury.

The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC's THIS WEEK.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

This is crass in so many ways that it's dizzying. Apart from anything else, if it's good policy to borrow trillions more from our children, isn't it a good idea actually to have children?

Less is more

but more is less:

Morning rant #2

Stroll with me down memory lane to the darkest days of The Bush Tyranny. In 2006 Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that:

President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program is illegal and ordered the National Security Agency to shut it down, issuing a sweeping rebuke of the once-secret domestic-surveillance effort the White House authorized following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The ACLU opined thus:

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit, hailed the ruling as a victory for the ``rule of law."

``Today's ruling is a landmark victory against the abuse of power that has become the hallmark of the Bush administration," Romero said. ``Government spying on innocent Americans without any kind of warrant and without congressional approval runs counter to the very foundations of our democracy."

I won't go back into the details. The judgement was a joke and Judge Taylor should have recused herself as trustee of an organization funding the ACLU Michigan, one of the plaintiffs. 'Rule of law', gadzooks! Bush was right both in policy and in law. The NYT that betrayed the secret, the ACLU, yea the whole vast left-wing conspiracy - they were wrong; usefully, idiotically wrong. Now in The Age of Obama, very quietly so far, it turns out that:

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor.

This isn't quite equivalent to endorsing Bush's policy, but it comports with it and with Obama's correct support of immunity for telecoms which cooperate with the governnment in tapping suspicious calls from overseas. Here comes the rant. I confidently predict that as the Obama cult comes under pressure, it will invoke national security to restrict privacy, freedom of speech and parental rights. There'll be scarce a squeak from the ACLU and pragmatically supportive op-eds from the MSM which will be sucking on the state tit of government job ads and social engineering notices. Repression, damn, that's what Liberal Fascists do. You faux civil libertarians are dupes. Foamy the Squirrel couldn't find invective insulting enough for your dupidity, but he'd try:

Reasons to be cheerful #1

Never mock a man with a bayonet:

Morning rant

I can be a bore on this Geithner thing. It doesn't take a holistic view to condemn Geithner. There's no nuance required. It's black and white. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. One more time. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. It destroys consent and taints the whole Administration. It's less Geithner's character that interests me in this matter than Obama's. If he won't act on this elementary point, he lacks cunning as well as good policy. Maybe he's just Carter II. Conservatism's outstanding politicians, Romney and Palin,should team up now and start campaigning for and against Obama's good and bad policies. Why wait? History won't. 'What good policies?' you ask. Oh, I dunno. I just said that as tho Obama weren't the authentic fake that Spengler describes.

Taxation For Dummies

The first saying on the quotes page of the IRS website is:

Tax is what we pay for a civilized society.

The New York Times editorialises ahead of today's Senate confirmation vote on Timothy Geithner, Obama's nominee for Treasury:

... the nominee admitted that his failure to pay tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes had been “careless” but “unintentional” ...

We were not impressed with Mr. Geithner’s excuses for his tax problems, but barring any new damaging disclosures, we heard nothing disqualifying. He is clearly an intelligent man and Mr. Obama is entitled to pick his own team.

I was not impressed with the Times's blatant scofflaw scofflogic. There are 2 ways for Government to ask for my money:

1. Give us your money or we'll take it by force and you will get hurt. That is theft.

2. Give us your money, it's right to obey the law. That is citizenship.

Had Geithner a better record than accomplice in the present mess, it were still wrong to appoint an obvious, serial tax cheat to the job of tax chief. Maybe if he were pro-life that would disqualify him in the eyes of the New York Times as it seemed to disqualify otherwise unassailable appointments to The Supreme Court. It's not only the partisanship of the Times that grates, but also the stupidity. If I were a machiavellian President, I'd conserve colorable moral authority, especially in fiscal matters. Now noone need pay federal taxes because it's the right thing to do. You can't steal from a thief. How about a tax on hypocrisy?

The last quote on the IRS page is:

Income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.

Full disclosure: In this society I might cheat at tax were I sure I'd not be punished, partly because I'd be richer, but also because the authority to take my money depends on votes from people who pay little or no tax but receive subsidies. Their votes are bought with my money. However I'm not auditioning for Treasury Secretary. In fact I overpay tax since the effort of tax avoidance is outweighed by the disturbance to the intellectual tranquillity on which my speculator's lifestyle depends.