The past year points to a bright future for America. The country has been sick for decades, maybe since Calvin Coolidge. Its sickness is the enormous government tapeworm digesting enterprise into the whole crap sandwich of debt, tax codes, bought votes of public employees and welfare dependents, affirmative action and and and. Kill that tapeworm then America will thrive. But the worm is deeply entwined and it takes maximum pissed-offness for the productive voters to get angry enough to yank it out.
If Obama had been a cleverer politician like Tony Blair, say, then liberalism would persist maybe to the point of killing its host. In Britain the 'Conservative', David Cameron, will probably be PM by May. He sees himself as the heir to Blair. He personifies the triumph of liberalism. He is a soi-disant conservative who buys into the liberal theology of EU membership, Warmism, imposed 'diversity', nationalised health and most of the other bollocks. Cameron probably doesn't believe that stuff any more than he believed the conservatism he used to espouse. He just thinks he's more likely to get elected by the BBC/Guardian brainwashed swing voter. Meanwhile many ideological conservatives are likely to vote for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), both from principle and in dreams of a hung Parliament where call-me-Dave is dragged to a populist anti-EU stance.
Anyhoot Obama's move to control the last remaining facets of free enterprise has provoked America's immune system to produce antibodies sufficient to fight the underlying sickness. And it only took 12 months. That says America's immune system is in good shape and that says America has the best political culture providing it's sufficiently provoked and providing there exists the internet. Indeed the internet may be as big factor in America's recovery as Obama's provocations. I've been saying for a while "Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline."
What this rant is rambling up to is that America will boom in the near future. The strongest indicator of health is how a body deals with sickness and these 12 months show that America is the healthiest kid on the block. Try hosting a Tea Party in China. So roll up, roll up, fill your boots with the Dow Jones Index at 10,000!
February 10, 2010
Pre-socializing America
I've written in favour of George Bush for his personal quality and his political bravery. The hobgoblins of the left invented a demon called Bush for a scapegoat, so its a public service to defend him,
BUT
I must link to Michelle Malkin's "Things I don't miss about George W. Bush" for a cold shower. The phrase "pre-socialized the economy for Obama" will linger.
BUT
I must link to Michelle Malkin's "Things I don't miss about George W. Bush" for a cold shower. The phrase "pre-socialized the economy for Obama" will linger.
February 08, 2010
February 07, 2010
“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 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.
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.
February 04, 2010
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.
February 03, 2010
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:


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

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:
February 02, 2010
Fly me to the moon
The moon from our garden in NJ a couple of days ago:
JFK told Congress in 1961:
Toby Young writes:
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.”
January 30, 2010
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.
January 29, 2010
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.




