No Ground To Stand On, Post Modern America

How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic:

This somewhat longish column is a poster child for an attempted left wing analysis of "what went wrong"? How did they discover that something went "wrong"? Trump was elected. The wordy article leads us on a merry chase of how this terrible thing might have happened -- it is written by Kurt Anderson, who is a writer that graduated from Harvard and founded "Spy" magazine. An example of what "Spy" was about:

Founded by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. The magazine specialized in irreverent and satirical pieces targeting the American media, entertainment industries and the mocking of high society.[4] Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Seagal,[5]Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump.[6] Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g., "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal", "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump",[7] "churlish dwarf billionaire Laurence Tisch", "bum-kissing toady Arthur Gelb", "bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord" and "former fat girl Dianne Brill" became a Spy trademark.

Strangely, although Anderson finds Trump to be a disaster of the first order, a quick read of the paragraph would indicate that Kurt and Donald ought to be bosom buddies ... "former fat girl Dianne Brill"?  Indeed. So what IS the shape our peril according to Kurt?

By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists.

Kurt certainly seems to have a solid view of "reality" -- to the extent we can discern it's base, the key point seems to be strong materialist atheism -- creation, angels, heaven, and "a personal God" (we will assume he means Jesus) come in for special snark. For those of us that believe in Christ being God made Man, the "Word of Kurt" (WoK) calling him "some guy" seems just a bit presumptions. Somehow, I'm guessing he is far less snarky about "allah" ... at least around Muslims. They don't love their enemies, they kill them.

Kurt goes on a long discussion of how "America" has gone "haywire". So why is it that Kurt's ideas on this are supposed to be of interest to anyone at all?  Kurt does a great job of answering the reason for that right up front -- there is really no reason to read the rest of it.

Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

 So what are the qualification of one of the founders of "Spy" magazine to give us a psuedo-intellectual tour of history? He is admittedly Ivy League educated, but certainly not philosopher, theologian, scientist, political scientist, or even sociologist; on what does he stand to provide us the answer for the deep meaning of "haywire". Clearly KURT believes that Trump defines "haywire", however what expertise, philosophy, revelation, equation, data, "standard", dream, etc is Kurt standing on as he says it? I'd argue it is exactly like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography ... "you know it when you see it'.

Kurt HIMSELF has clearly stated "expert's be damned" -- The WoK is being proffered as useful because he himself finds his own views to be "equal or superior to anyone else's". He invalidates his own case right up front.

My view is that we forgot that "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of all wisdom". Transcendence, something unchangeable and beyond mere matter -- TRUTH. A book that points out where we left the track is from my perspective is "Ideas Have Consequences" and the point and which we first became unglued was in the 14th century.

"This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged."

Without SOMETHING that is at least very close to an eternal principle, we ALL lack any place to stand to make any sort of judgments at all! Science leaps from the precipice that says "the universe is ORDERED, and results that we see today are assumed to be repeatable across time and space". The foundation of science is INDUCTION -- "it worked today, it will work tomorrow, and it will work anywhere for all time".

The difficulty with this is PERSPECTIVE. The Thanksgiving turkey postulates that humans are a benevolent species that cares and provides for turkeys. On the very day in which the turkey's "proof" has gained the status of maximally proven scientific "fact", the induction crashes and the turkey finds himself at a meal in which he is the guest of honor. The turkey lacked the perspective of a larger view -- as do we humans relative to eternity.

The other problem is of course that right/wrong, beauty, consciousness, love, etc are completely outside the realm of science, as science is about STUFF ... material, matter. Human life is founded on human consciousness -- right, wrong, up, down, inside out, or non-existent, it IS what WE perceive as humans!

Kurt certainly views HIS consciousness as a superb basis for analysis ... as do we all unless we recognize a power greater than our own perspective (eg. "the fear of God" or maybe "fear of Kurt"??).

Let's look at Kurt's "analysis" a bit":

Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

Therefore, Kurt's "reality" would also be relative ... however, since he wrote this long article, we are to understand that it isn't really. Somehow, "The WoK" is privileged. (See "reality based" above}.

So what kind of heresy has failure to accept the WoK unleased?

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.” 

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty.

Ah, "simple truth" --- or as we can see from the column, "the WoK". Sadly, the evil American Right thought that there WERE ultimate truths ... like the Word of God, which included Genesis, now known to  fail the "reality based" test, according to the WoK. So the decried "relativism", as now apparently so does Kurt -- it's just that he finds any "relativism" according to the "Word of Kirk" to be bad -- therefore, he is a "rightwing fundamentalist" in relation to the "Word of Kirk"!

"Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared." 

Here I think we arrive at the crux of the matter. As long as whatever was being stated was duly approved by a part of the Administrative State lodged comfortably in the womb of the Federal Communications Commission, all could be certain that only Administrative State, Union Approved, Ivy League vetted, Davos Certified, "truth" would be provided to the masses. Everything was "ideologically SINGLE sided", which was "the good", and the idiots that provided the alternative comic relief -- Bill Buckley and the American Spectator, were "fringe" --- as heretics ought to be!

Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid; or the way today we immerse in the real-life fictions of Disney World. Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Perhaps there really were consequences to Slick Wille having BJs in the oval office, lying about it, and skating. Maybe calling a vast power grab and re-distribution scam called the "Affordable" Care Act, "affordable" even though it added a grab bag of new benefits to health INSURANCE thus being certain to radically increase the cost, was slightly disingenuous. However, saying that "If you like your doctor you can keep him", "if you like your insurance plan you can keep it", etc was TOTALLY a direct lie which anyone that paid any attention understood to be a LIE ... or to put it in Kurt's words, "a show and a sham".

I personally know MANY people that budgeted for retiring with healthcare TOTAL costs (insurance + deductables + co-pays) of $8K for a 60 year old couple, finding that they needed $22K for insurance along, PLUS, another 8-10K for deductables and co-pays. $30K vs $8K ... PER YEAR!

Slick Willie ushered in the age of fake. BO made it the standard.

So what do I believe caused America to "go haywire", and turn into BOistan?

We have to stand on SOMETHING! As John Adams said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". That morality was founded on Jesus Christ --  we never had any other rock to stand on, and sorry to say, the WoK isn't much of a substitute.

So what does the "word of Kurt" say on this point?

What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations. We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.

What is "reality"? Is it matter only, with meaning defined by induction? Kurt, founder of "Spy" magazine firmly believes in the "World of Kurt" ... if you follow Kurt, you too can be "reality based". Isn't that special?

Choose ye this day whom you will serve ... Kurt? or something larger? Trump is only a very temporary occupant of the highest office in what is at this point the failed state of BOistan. I believe that God is bigger than Kurt, Trump, and BOistan, so God is my choice as the basis for reality -- eternal reality. 

What about you? 

'via Blog this'

Petraeus vs Sandy Berger

A double standard on government secrets for David Petraeus - LA Times:



I had to chuckle as the LA Times got concerned because David Petraeus is "getting off easy" in their book for letting his lover / biographer look at some secret documents.



My memory is too damned good-- and having a blog and a search engine makes it all too easy.



Back in '06 I linked this little gem on Sandy Berger, seems that "good old Sandy" as Slick Willie commented took documents out of restricted areas hidden in his pants and then hid them under a construction trailer.



Naturally, even though reported in the MSM, Sandy being a member of TP in VERY good standing ... and most likely covering up for the Clintons, received NO PUNISHMENT!!!



Ah yes, such concern for "double standards"!



'via Blog this'

Bush Lied?

I've been over it so many times, it is like a broken record, but on the other hand, the MSM record is just as broken The lefties in the world believe that if you say something enough that makes it true. For the record, these quotes are ALL prior to Bush taking office, so if someone was being "misled", it certainly wasn't by BUSH! I just happened to see them linked by another web site, and couldn't resist having easy personal access to the information.

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998.

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998.

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998.

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"We urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998.

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998.

"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999.


These and more are collected out on a Web Site that does a great job of debunking "Urban Legends", or "Internet Legends" ... from ALL sides. They are a fine example of non-partisan reporting. Something that I would MUCH rather see more of than "Rush Limbaugh vs Public Radio". (http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp)

If Saddam really didn't have any WMD, then he misled the world. If did have them, he successfully hid them. Which is true? Does it make any difference? EVERYONE with any sort of brain cells believed he had them. Reasonable people act based on the best information that they have. Fire departments treat every call as if it is real, even though a significant number are false. Something like 98% of people in the US were pretty darned certain that Saddam had WMD. Many of the anti-war people felt the potential of him using WMD on our troops was a reason not to go to war.

So any lefty that says "Bush lied" is only showing their own willingness to lie (not that we usually need any extra evidence). There are 100's of quotes like that above from "Sainted Democrats" ... the kind of folks like Bill and Hillary that the MSM trusts completely. When Billy attacked Iraq in '98 at a time that "seemed oddly related to impeachment proceedings", but he told us that he HAD to attack Saddam due to WMD and subsequently Secretary of Defense William S Cohen and Gen. Henry H Shelton (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) announced the action had been successful in "degrad[ing] Saddam Hussein's ability to deliver chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."

On 23 September 2002, former Vice-President Al Gore addressed the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on the subject of Iraq and the war on terrorism. Among the comments he offered there were the following:

Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

Gore MUST "know" (to the extent that anyone can) at this point that Saddam has WMD. He was VP while his own administration attacked Saddam with WMD being a major support for that attack. If he DIDN'T "know", then we have to assume that Clinton and Gore were lying to us and ... what? The '98 attacks really were a "wag the dog conspiracy" for public opinion modification at the time of impeachment?

It is at points like this that "consistency not being an issue" comes to the aid and comfort of the lefty brain. It is OK for them to "selectively forget / ignore", and move forward with the world fitting the model that they now like, and simply forget what that would mean to a reality based on historical fact.

Sandy vs Scooter

In the world of thought and opinion, we have very little in the way of "facts" to objectively test how the various parties in the MSM really think or feel. Our best mechanisms are statistics and comparison. That is what I find so fascinating about the contrast between the MSMs treatment of the story of Scooter Libby, and the story of Sandy Berger. The contrast is even more delectable since Richard Armitage came forward and admitted that the Plame leak was his, not Libbys at all.

The WSJ has an article with a few more details on the strange case of the Berger leak, which is of course of zero interest to most of the MSM. Clearly an ACTUAL case of obviously secret documents being taken for "some purpose" arouses ZERO suspicion if the person stuffing the papers in their pants has a "D" next to their name. Conspriacy theories and finger pointing on "responsibility for 9/11" at the Bush administration who was in office for less than 10 months at the time of the attack have abounded. ANY attempt to ask or conjecture about the Clinton administration that was in office for 8 years prior to the attack (even a fictional one in a TV movie) has been met with howls of protest from the MSM and of course the Democrats.

This is just "partisan MSM politics as usual", but the fact that 9/11 really DID happen, and information as to "why, and how it might be prevented in the future"OUGHT to be something that "rises above politics" makes one wish it were different. We see the effects of the media here. With Republicans, the CHARGE that they did something ("punished" Joe Wilson by outing his CIA wife) is converted into "truth" by constant repetition, even though there was never ANY truth to the entire story. It was completely manufactured. On the Democrat side, the FACT that documents were taken by a very high level Democrat and that while we have tantalizing hints as to "why", no investigation is forthcoming.

The difference in personality types is obvious here as well. Republicans don't really even consider "making up a good story and seeing if they can get it to fly". No doubt that isn't entirely due to "superior morals", since they realize that given the MSM, there is no chance that their fabrication would be successful. Democrats, and indeed the MSM often ASSUME on the other hand that WMD, 9-11 itself, gas prices, off-shoring of jobs, and even the whole Islamic terrorist threat itself at somehow "manufactured by Republicans and the corporate media". Since even in the age of talk radio, blogs, and Fox news, the the "dominant media" is still the NY Times and the major networks, such conspiricy thinking applied to the right still gets some significant creedence.

Sandy is a Great Guy

The MSM at least reports a bit here that Sandy Berger took classified documents out of an archive that he was not supposed to during the 9-11 investigation. There is of course no concern about this in the MSM, or curiosity as to "why"? No less an honorable and trustworthy authority than "I didn't have sex with that ..." Slick Willie has stated, laughing; "Oh that is just Sandy, he was always doing something like that". It is enough to warm the cockles of the heart. Just a folksy removal of classified documents, a little "storage" under a construction trailer.

There is no need for curiosity here on the part of the MSM, and of course there isn't any. There is no way that the Clinton administration could POSSIBLY be to blame for anything relative to 9-11, and of course they are all WAY too honorable people to try to do anything like steal some documents that pointed to something embarrassing on their part. It "just wouldn't be done". Only evil Republicans would consider something like that, and the fact that rotten bloggers are out their suggesting that this was anything other than innocent just shows how "corrupt" the conservatives are, and how much they want to create problems for honorable Democrats.

Meanwhile, we know that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield have the worst of motives and the highest level of incompetence possible, and will stop at NOTHING in order to hide, cover, mislead and constantly LIE about their many and nefarious plans and misdeeds. When it comes to light that a scummy operative like "Scooter" who was CERTAINLY trying to "strong arm" poor Valerie Plame has somehow managed to get Richard Armitage to indicate that he was the ACTUAL source of the leak claiming it was "inadvertent", you know that there is something rotten afoot. Most likely Armitage has been paid off by Chaney / Halliburton to cover the tracks.

We see a number of "slight differences" in the press on these kinds of issues. The "real truth" is most likely somewhere in between, with each of our biases taking us to the side that we most align with as to where the truth is at. At least it is easy to see where the MSM is at, when something like Sandy arouses very close to zero suspicion, but old "Scooter" is just evil incarnate, until it is at least as proven as our legal system can do that the whole idea of him "outing" Plame was a pure fabrication by Wilson and the MSM. Then they simply pretend that the "new news" that proved their previous conjectures utterly false just never happened.