“I’d rather be ruled by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty"

In a recent post, Bah! Humbug! for buddhists, I wrote:

This has been a low, dishonest year in American politics. To Nile Gardiner's neat ranking of Obama's 10 worst foreign policy blunders, I'd add this shining turd of appeasement - cancelling his meeting with the Dalai Lama 'to keep China happy'.

Obama appeased China ahead of the Copenhagen Global Warming Jamboree and got America predictably dissed there. Now that the Chinese know for sure that the assistant-law-lecturer-in-chief is weak, they're raising the stakes against the next scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama so when it takes place, there will be a breach with real consequences instead of a merely diplomatic breach if Obama had adopted Bush's practice from the off.

This stuff is so elementary. But not trying the 9/11 mastermind in downturn Manhattan is a no-brainer, you'd think; saying 'corpsman' instead of 'corpseman'; '57 states'; bowing to foreign kings; endless self-reference.....look, can anyone think of one smart thing this guy's initiated? One?

The cod psychology of a weak leader is that after rejection by tyrants they've hugged and purred to, then he over-compensates. That's the danger with Obama. He'll get into a tactical stand-off when it's much harder for an adversary to back down without loss of face. Result, the tactical stand-off ends as strategic defeat for America led by a poseur.

Quiz time

As US/China relations implode, name a single country with which America has better relations than under Bush. Sudan, maybe? Ok name 2. Note, the UN is not a country.

Damn Photo Competitions!

I compare the winning shot and runner up shot in last week's Daily Telegraph photo competition, theme 'Bridges',  with images found by a quick search on Flickr to show that the winning shots are familiar treatments of famous scenes:

My shot of London Bridge that should have won!

I did win a couple of weeks ago to my surprise with the theme 'Tall'.

Dissing Las Vegas

The remarks of the Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar Goodman, should be heeded. He's a defense lawyer who represented the most notorious mobsters in Vegas and appeared as himself in Casino. I've just ordered his biography, Of Rats And Men. If he says "You're a real slow learner", a wise man will take notes:

The Reality Distortion Field

Fly me to the moon

The moon from our garden in NJ a couple of days ago:

JFK told Congress in 1961:

Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

Toby Young writes:

A couple of years ago, my best friend Sean Langan was kidnapped by the Taliban while making a documentary for Channel 4 in Pakistan. During his three-month ordeal he was interrogated by his captors many times and he was often surprised by what they wanted him to confess to. One subject they kept returning to were the moon landings. They refused to believe that America had put men on the moon and, again and again, they tried to browbeat him into admitting that NASA’s programme of manned space flight had been an elaborate hoax.
Why did this matter to them? Sean’s theory is that the moon landings are clear evidence of the superiority of everything the Taliban are opposed to — of reason over revelation, of democracy over theocracy, of science over superstition. In its original conception, NASA’s Apollo Programme was supposed to be an advertisement for the superiority of America to the Soviet Union — a Cold War propaganda exercise — but in the eyes of these Islamist terrorists it also served to discredit America’s current enemies. Their response was to insist the moon landings hadn’t happened.
...
The Constellation Programme could have been all that and more. Yet Obama, in his wisdom, doesn’t see the point of it. To me, this encapsulates the difference between JFK and Obama. When it comes to putting men on the moon, JFK said, “Yes we can.” Obama, in yesterday’s budget proposal, said, “No we can’t.”

The Business of America is Government

h/t Powerline.

Another chart:

Postgraduate men and women are Obama's greatest supporters among gender and educational groups. Obama fares especially well among women with postgraduate education (64%). Whereas postgraduates are the only educational group among men that shows at least 50% approval for Obama, all four educational groups among women do. Also, there are essentially no gender differences among those with a high school education or less, but notable gender gaps at higher education levels.

So after 1 year's experience of Obama, almost 2/3 of post-graduate women approve.

The news from London

I'm not in London but I'll post this clip because:

• When I see this face on a Guardian columnist, I recoil a little, so I'd never before read or watched anything by Charlie Brooker, hence I was curious to see the clip via Hot Air.
• 

•  The clip has some nice shots of my part of London.
•  It's struck a chord in the US, tho British in sensibility.

It's not about me

Obama is a joke. I would say that, wouldn't I? I've always thought him ludicrous. But even the hyenas are getting the joke:

Stewart:



Dowd on The One:

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Trouble is, truth trumps satire:

And now for something completely different

There are certain phrases that once heard compel one to commit them to memory. One such is "the transformation of 2 stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube":

The road to serfdom

The squillion dollar stimulus is Obama's sophomoric tribute to Keynes. The Obamans are so incompetent that much of it won't get spent, yet much will get squandered on Democrat-friendly bullshit. When you think that 40% of the Federal budget is borrowed money, it's like watching the biggest binge in history....big government, big wages, big pensions, big public employee voting bloc, big vampire squid on the face of America, big hangover; same in Britain. Keynes was a great thinker.....he was also wrong as this video proves:


Oh well, I may as well add a clip of one of Hayek's followers. This is from her last speech in the House of Commons. She'd been betrayed by her own party after leading it to 3 successive General Election victories and turning Britain from a dosshouse into a powerhouse. But in defeat she was clad in truth:

UPDATE:

Thatcher's biggest mark domestically came in economic policy, when she rejected the ideas of the Keynesian social democratic consensus which had informed policy since 1945 in favour of monetarism, inspired by Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. The papers reveal little about the opposition to these heterodox views from the Treasury and other civil servants. Just two weeks after the general election, she was writing to Hayek: "I am very proud to have learnt so much from you over the past few years. […] As one of your keenest supporters, I am determined that we should succeed. If we do so, your contribution to our ultimate victory will have been immense."