The Clinton's Millions

After a long wait, HillBilly finally released their tax returns. The poor "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" beset Clinton family has been forced to scrape by making only $109 million in the 7 years since the end of "The Great Stain" Presidency. They seem much more charitable than the Goreacle, having given $10 million away (I'm not sure to whom-the society for willing big haired young women maybe?). For those that don't recall, in '98, Gore gave $353 to chairity on an income of nearly $200K. Not that anyone in the MSM cares, he was in favor of having a lot of other folks pay a lot of taxes and killing the unborn, so he was OK by them--but I digress.

Slick and the First Enabler also paid $33 million in taxes (Willie's used underwear deductions must have gone down some), which still sounds like a pretty good rate for $109 million two income couple. So they had to scrape by on only $66 mil -- with use of government planes and a ton of other provided percs for ex-presidents and senators of course.

I note that there isn't a lot of howling from the MSM on this one. A lot of this money came from corporations paying $255K for an hour speech. I'm certainly hoping that he spoke on topics that he has expertise in -- how to get sex at work, get caught, but still keep your job, how to bomb other countries (twice) at critical points of personal scandal, but not have any significant questioning of it, etc. The MSM seems to question the motives of Bush constantly, yet back when Slick was launching attacks after coming off vacation and saying "I have to go and do something Presidential", it was the height of being "Un-American" to wonder if there could be a relation to his scandals. One just absolutely couldn't question the motives of his royal slickness without the media having a good howl.

How things have changed--I'm sure that it must all be due to the sterling character and brilliance of the Dope from Hope, and that is why he is worth $250K an hour. No thought of cashing in on "influence" from the Dem side, they only have "the best interests of the people" in mind while they rake in THEIR $109 million. Think of the idiot CEOs that make $10-$20 million a year for leading companies, producing products and making profits for shareholders. They get yelled at constantly for "gouging" and there is constant talk of regulating their salaries, yet Bubba rakes in $250K per hour and it is "no problemo".

They hate a cat fit when Reagan left office and went to Japan and made some speeches. Newt was investigated, castigated, and forced to pay money on "ethics charges" for his book deal, but Hilly rakes it in while in office without a peep from the MSM. I really don't mind that they make the money. If Republicans were treated even a TINY bit the same by the MSM on the subject, it would be just fine.

Clintons Release Tax Returns | The Trail | washingtonpost.com

Lieberman Lives

One of the ways to completely disappear from the MSM is to be a "Maverick Democrat". The disappearance of such a person is so complete in the MSM that I don't think I've ever even heard the term applied to a Democrat that actually breaks ranks with the party. The place that I've heard it applied is for a Democrat that is so far to the LEFT (like Wellstone or Kucinich) that the term comes out. Actually though, Joe Lieberman is still alive, and thanks to the still not silenced Conservative blogsphere, one can actually read what he has to say.

Very worth reading, I thought his best line was exactly the Democrat and MSM position on Iraq.

"What I'm about to say, with respect to my colleagues who have consistently opposed our presence in Iraq, as I hear the questions and the statements today, it seems to me that there's a kind of hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq."

It doesn't get a lot more clear than that. Forget the security of the country, forget the sacrifice of our troops and most of all, forget the Iraqi people-all that counts is failure in Iraq to be blamed on Bush at any cost.

Since we are on the subject, consider the idea of "Maverick Republican"? A Republican that sides with the Democrats--Olympia Snow, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter ... and even sometimes John McCain. Certainly common to see them called out as "mavericks", "courageous", "principled", etc, AND what is important, they are CALLED OUT in the MSM when they do the bidding of the Democrats. McCain was a DARLING as long as he was taking positions against the Republican leadership and Bush. He is of course less good now as he is due to be the Republican standard bearer, and they are loathed in the MSM.

Watch how much coverage Lieberman's stand on Iraq (and Lieberman in general) gets, and then think back to McCain when he took positions against the Republican leadership.
Lieberman is a non-entity today, yet his party is in power and he was the VP candidate in 2000. Think of how Lieberman's views would be covered if he were a Republican standing strong against the leadership of his party, and then try to imagine that the MSM is unbiased.

Glenn Beck: The $53 trillion asteroid

Glenn Beck: The $53 trillion asteroid - CNN.com

This article is well worth the read, as are a number of books on the subject - "The Coming Generational Storm", written in 2004 is one that I found to be very solid on the subject. I suspect that few are going to listen, so "what happens will happen" in the future. Some of my thoughts on why this is so:

• It is a bi-partisan problem at this point. FDR put us on the path of the government funded pot of gold at the end of the retirement rainbow. His intent of course was that nearly nobody would ever collect, and he envisioned an ever increasing workforce. Both assumptions are now radically wrong, so we have a radically big problem, but it has been the "third rail" for a long time. Both parties have bought into the madness.
  
• Everyone loves rights and entitlements, nobody likes waiting, working, responsibility. There is an endless supply of people who want someone else to solve their problems, and are willing to vote accordingly. On an individual basis is there is no cost to vote irrationally.
  
• People who have more have more options as well (at least perceived) - more talent, more intelligence, more health, more money, more wisdom, etc. than the people that have less. Christ was right when he said that "to those that have, more will be given, and to those that don't, even that will be taken". It is easy for God to understand how the universe works--if you are certain that you have little, and no options and the only chance you have for success is for things to be given, you will lose what you have (since clearly, you are not even aware you have it). If you are certain that you are blessed with a lot (maybe even more than you deserve), you will see the blessings continue to flow. So the general population is voting to lose what they have. Those that have more will be better off, but the whole will lose a lot.
  
• The idea of "retirement" is generally bad for healthy people. Not surprising that government would be encouraging it and going broke while doing it. Sort of like the free cigarettes given to the soldiers in WWII. Big win for government and tobacco companies. Not so big a win for the soldiers.
  
• Government has been using FICA as a giant extra tax and spending all the money-which is always what was intended. FDR just wanted to increase the government take and buy votes. He did it the old fashined way ... he created the worlds larges ponzi scheme, now the $53 trillion bad debt is coming our way.
  

Letter to a Christian Nation

In the subject book, Sam Harris, writer of the "The End of Faith" is still all worked up about those pesky Christians-they are a national and world emergency. His basic premises remain the same - Christians and all believers of any stripe are dangerous fools, atheists are wonderful, loving, geniuses. (in general, Sam is probably quite superior to the general lot if you really get down to detail).

He continues to speak a bit of truth about Islam: "With few exceptions, the only public figures who have the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European society seem to be fascists. This does not bode well for the future of civilization". He seems to have Islam pegged pretty well for what it is, he is at best a thousand years late with his understanding of Christianity. In his materialist mind, all non-scientifically proveable ideas are equivalently useless, so holocaust denying suicidal terrorists in planes are really no different from Mother Theresa. "Mother Teresa is a perfect example of the way in which a good person, moved to help others, can have her moral intuitions deranged by religious faith".

He goes on to quote Christopher Hitchens:

" Mother Theresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction".

There we see the flower of the superior "innate morality" that comes to the surface once the shackles of religion are thrown off. So abortion is the only known cure for poverty? Certainly an atheist with no ultimate standards can come up with something better than just killing the unborn? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and so many before have led the way. To the atheist, there is NO "gift" ... of any sort. Only meaningless randomness. What would the reason be to stop the killing at only the UNborn? None.

"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is no even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. ... Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."

No new arguments are presented- Since Harris is made of material and lives in a material system, he has chosen to ignore any prospect for the non-material (or even the as yet undiscovered material) This leaves him with no consciousness, love, beauty, kindness or countless other abstractions. If one can't produce a scientific proof to justify it, it simply doesn't exist to the faithless.

"Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity-birth, marriage, death-without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is."

But Sam, what theorem would create "profundity"? Aren't even those emotions just provably electro-chemical chimera? Why waste the time on new rituals? Why even mark individual birth and death? Marriage? Isn't that PURELY some old religious relic that has nothing to do with the "natural order"? Doesn't every bit of science that we have point to "natural man" living in a state where the "fittest" would acquire as many women as they desired? Isn't that "naturally best"? I'd expect a solid atheist to be making those "reasonable noises" before even giving any sort of a nod to someone creating something like "profound transitions"? Profound how? By some "random selection" or potentially by the "selection of the fittest idea"? Hmmm ... but what would signify fittest? Might?

"The fundamental problem with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies.". If we remove the "lies" and insert "incomplete information", we pretty much have human existence. Naturally, Sam is very impressed by what our modern sciences can do, and they are certainly very convenient. Jets, electricity, computers, modern medicine -- all are very nice. One is left with that nasty little fact though, "if we are so smart, how come we die"? Sam is convinced that "maturity" means that it is just "accepted", but one doesn't need to be much of an armchair psychologist to know that denial and repression are a lot easier for the human psyche than the supposed "mature acceptance" that Sam thinks is going to be so easy with the right "profound rituals". If those "profound rituals" are going to show up, one would have thought a brilliant atheist would have just rolled those puppies out by now.

"Everyone who has eyes to see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath-and the God of nature is too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eles to the realities of the world".

Sam likes to complain that "Christians" write him nasty notes or say bad things about him. I can see where that would be painful for him, he obviously holds them in high regard. It reminds me a lot of many on the left who deplore the "loss of civility" in our society with the advent of things like talk radio and Fox news. Sam's basic solution seems quite the same -- if the opposition can be completely and utterly destroyed, then we can all be "civil". Why would one really stop so short of nirvana as to only wipe out "poverty" by killing the unborn?

Certainly guys like Sam can make the world "safe" through "rational means". Once one gets by the foolishness of "ultimate authority", the kind of "pragmatic group morals" that "make sense" can give us a world that is OBJECTIVELY better! There may have been "flaws" in the versions of some of the previous geniouses that faced "reality as it is" such as Satin, Hitler, etc ... but, there will always be new opportunities. Guys like Sam are ready and waiting to lead the way!

Monterey and San Francisco

Yesterday we launched fairly early from the Hearst Castle up the very beautiful but a little challenging to drive highway 1 past Big Sur and on into Monterey. It was a gray rainy day, but we decided to go out whale watching anyway. We saw 3 humpbacks at relatively close range, but they seemed to be a bit cagey and the lightly loaded whale watch boat didn't seem to be very interested in ranging any farther to find any other subjects. Oh well, I can understand them not wanting to burn too much fuel on a 100' boat with only 10 folks or so at $35 a head.

We drove on into our hotel that is right off Fisherman's Warf in San Francisco and went out for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe -- loud with expensive glasses with drinks, but kind of fun and the food was fine. On the way home we stopped by some street painters doing pictures of the golden gate with spray paint. They were fun to watch and did them very fast with a lot of loud music to listen to, we ended up with two of them at $10 each. Not great art, but a fun memory.

Today we slept in a bit and toured San Francisco via cable car, bus and lots of shoe leather. Keenan wanted to see the Haight Ashbury area since so much of the rock history came out of there, so we went up there, Golden Gate park, and then walked most of the way across the bridge. Three large container ships went under the bridge during the time that we were out there, so that was fun to watch.

We picked up dinner on the pier - bread bowl clam chowder, shrimp cocktail and a crab sandwich, and then brought our sore feet back to the hotel.

La Brea Tar Pits, San Simeon

Sunday we got a little later start and went down to Uncle Bill's Pancakes in Manhattan Beach. The buckwheat blueberry cakes that I had were excellent, as were the buttermilks and the fried potatoes, but the omelet wasn't up to our high CA standards. The homes along the beach were very nice, I suspect that they are priced in the millions, but they didn't all LOOK that way, and it was really fun to imagine settling down to one of those for a few weeks in the cold part of the year. Maybe no quite warm enough for some in the family though!

We had hopes of doing the Getty Museum but discovered it was closed on Monday. We ended up going over and standing in line for only about an hour at 2:30 to get a Pink's Hot Dog!
We saw them on the hotel TV the first night in and thought we had to try them out--they were right, it is almost always well over an hour wait. We stopped in on Saturday, and waited for about 45 min before we realized how slow the line was going and that it was going to interfere with too much to wait then. They are good hot dogs, not that expensive by Hollywood standards, but in no way "worth the wait", although it is clear that the wait is part of the experience!

We saw the La Brea tar pits, which I've been impressed with ever since I was a small kid reading the encyclopedias. They make much the same point that I've heard a few times that most of the large mammals-ground sloths, north American Mastadon and Mammoth, north American Lion, Sabre Tooth "tiger"( cat) etc, all went extinct in a short period around 10-11K years ago. Caused by man? Climate change? Something else? Nobody seems to have the answers, and compared with a lot of geologic / paleontology mysteries, not that ancient. Interesting place, right in the middle of the city now.

Keenan was a bit under the weather with some sniffles, so he retired to the hotel and Marla and I headed down to the beach to watch the sunset, downtown Santa Monica for a little shopping, and then to Lares Mexican Restaurant for dinner. It was very highly rated, nice place, valet parking, but the food was only "very good"--would rather eat at a couple places around home.

We launched at 8:30 with Keenan feeling better. Stopped and had breakfast at Paradise Cove in Malibu. Great view of the water and excellent food. Hit the road and booked it north up Hwy 1 to the Hearst Castle. Lots of beautiful strawberrys being picked out of huge fields along the roads. Amazing farming in California.

The Hearst Castle was more that I expected it to be. 5 miles away from the ocean and 1,600' up, it sits atop a hill where the Hearst's had a hunting camp when WR was a child. His mother took him to Europe for a year and 1/2 when he was 10 and he was impressed with the great homes, cathedrals and ruins. He wanted it all brought together, and he enjoyed "projects". He hired a brilliant woman Architect, Julia Morgan and they created together without an overall plan ... a number of false starts and do-over's including three rebuilds of the amazing Neptune Pool.

The thought I had in walking through it was that today's rich lack imagination. Hearst was the first leading Newspaper man with an empire that ran from coast to coast, centered on his San Francisco Chronical. He was a congressman three times as a Democrat, and considered himself a progressive/populist Democrat. I suppose today, Rupert Murdoch might be somewhat of an equivalent, but I don't see him building the modern equivalent of the Hearst Castle. Maybe that time is past, or the wealthy are simply too busy to spend time and money in the construction of great projects.

It is interesting for one in their 51st year to note that he didn't get started until he was 56 in 1919, and worked on it continuously until his health would no longer allow it in 1947.

Reagan Library and Griffith Observatory

Day 2 in CA included a trip up to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, and then up to the Griffith Observatory, high above Hollywood. A little time was remaining for a run down to Redondo Beach Pier for a great seafood dinner at Tony's.

As is normal on early vacation we have been going so hard that there isn't a lot of time to spend writing about all the details. Here is the start of the photo album.

California 2008

I Was Just About to Quit

Here we have a BO dissemble worthy of Slick Willie. Golly, he was just about to leave that church anyway! So he actually DOES understand, it was just taking him 20 years to get around to doing anything about it.

The bottom line is pretty much Slick all over, only this time the drug is black racism and it is BO claiming to have "not inhaled" over 20 years at the church. Like Billy though, Democrats never believe that character is an issue in their candidates, otherwise they wouldn't be able to find anyone to run.


Power Line: Obama lowers the bar again

Two Books In Flight

Winging my way toward LA from Minneapolis at midnight central time, 10 LA time. It would be nice to sleep, but Mooses and airplane seats aren't all that good a match. About half way through two very different books that I just started on this trip, but have gotten tired of reading in the dark with bleary contacts for now. "Blue Like Jazz", a very different sort of a Christian book by a youthful Christian male that is very honest and has a unique perspective since he spent some time at Reed College in Portland that is a private pagan school that pretty much explicitly worships "whatever feels good", but also is very demanding and full of very smart people.

The other book is Sam Harris, "Letter to a Christian Nation". I read his "End of Faith" a couple years ago. Sam is pretty angry and disappointed in America because of Christianity. To Sam there is nothing beyond the material world and his own intelligence. Religion is not just horribly stupid, it is horribly dangerous. It must be fixed, somehow.

Blue is pretty much the complete opposite in both message and attitude. An infinite God that is beyond our ability to understand loves us beyond our ability to comprehend. The material universe is far from "all", and in the eternal view of things only really counts in relation to that eternal. Harris isn't going to let a God that allows slavery, little girls to be raped and killed, tsunamis and Katrina to exist. Sam wills it to be abhorrent, and so it must be--to not agree is to not meet his standards of being "god", so therefore there can't be one. One of the bumper stickers the Blue author saw at Reed said "Let's Throw the Christians to the Lions"-Sam would seem to agree. Violence is bad, but Sam is very close to thinking that Christians are just so far out that it may be required in self defense.

The Blue author and his few Christian friends "came out of the closet" during the peak of the main "do what feels good" orgy at Reed when basically anything goes on campus and the local authorities are kept away. How they "came out" is to have a "confession booth", but the confession was for the Christians to confess how bad they were as Christians to anyone that anyone who wanted to stop. They failed the poor, they sinned, their churches didn't set good enough examples, there was an inquisition--they took all the blame and let the folks that stopped know they would do their best to love them, but they could never do it well enough since they were just trying to do the best "impressions of Christ" that a poor broken but forgiven human could do, and it fell way short of the kind of forgiveness that God becoming man had provided.

Sam is right, that kind of love is just as dangerous today as it was 2K years ago and Sam is very angry that anyone could be so irrational to believe in such a horribly foolish thing as something beyond the material world, let alone something beyond the material world that would love human beings specially. We are not special, the rest of "randomness" (what just happened without any reason) is every bit as special, and the only reasonable thing to do is to give up this foolish God stuff and love the randomness-and of course ourselves.

The contrast between the two books is very revealing. Blue is sure of his fallibility, the greater power of God and the trust that in the big picture, God and Grace are sure, and while useful and interesting (at least to us), whatever "amazing" achievements human kind has "created", they pale in scope and perfection next to the infinite. Harris is clearly "left", but the Blue book is anything but "right", unless the core of "right" is the belief that man and the material is NOT "all there is".

It seems to me that is the rub; at least true Christians are always sure that they are NOT the "final answer". They haven't fallen prey to the fundamentalist heresy by which everything that man needs to do is in or can be discerned from the Bible. Christ is alive to and in them, as The Word. A Word that is revealed as spirit and truth that is beyond just words.

The message of Christ speaking in parable and metaphor says that you CAN'T have a cut and dried answer in the same way as a fundamentalist would want. The method is a major portion of the message. The fundamentalist is forced to "fake righteousness" in the same way as the scribes and pharisees. Don't drink, don't smoke, don't dance, don't go to movies, don't watch TV, maybe avoid certain fashions ... the list of rules and regulations can go on endlessly, but when they are done, one prideful judgment, one momentary enjoyment of "I think I'm better than X", one self-centered moment of failing to love God with the whole heart is no different in ultimate terms than a lifetime of whatever you believe the worst sins to be. God and Grace is beyond our calculations - reason is very useful in this material world for getting planes in the air, cars on the road, the internet connecting and generally "keeping the trains on time", but compared to the infinite, it is less than spit in the ocean.

Throwing ourselves over to the other side however and invalidating logic with pure human emotion is just as much a trap. Our emotions, especially love, may be very major hints to the nature of God, but they are only hints-in the same way as quantum mechanics is a hint that the universe is far more special than a "clockwork".

We arrived safely, and in fact it is now Saturday night after a fun day out in LA. Breakfast at a little open air place in Venice Beach, walking out on the pier and talking to the fishermen, talking to a Christian biker gang "Set Free Soldiers", driving around a lot of "just plain old LA", with a focus up in the Hollywood area. We spent a good hunk of time walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard with all the stars. Lots of wild looking people, shops and "glitter". Very crowded-Hollywood seems to be surviving the "Bush Horror" quite well.

Checked into the hotel down in Santa Monica, drove down and looked at some of the beautiful condos along Oceanfront drive, ate seafood for dinner out on the Santa Monica Pier, walked around a bit more, and here we are.

Hillary Not Swift Boated

I don't read Ann every week, but this week she is right on. The MSM is treating poor Hillary as an "honorary Republican". The MSM actually found the video of her landing in Bosnia with no gunfire and figures that if she isn't telling the truth, she must be lying. Why, this is almost how they would treat a non-Bush Republican! Except in the Bush case, when he takes action based on the same information as everyone else in the world that says Saddam has WMD and it can't be irrefutably proven by finding them in sufficient amounts, THAT means "Bush lied". As I've covered before, most people are held to the status of having to report correctly about facts that they actually know-like "gee, isn't amazing that the Secret Service let me get off the plane in Bosnia when we were under fire, I've been under Secret Service protection for a long time, and in general, they are really adverse to gunfire--no matter, it sounds great to have landed under gunfire, so I guess I'll just go for it".

Failing to accurately predict the future (especially when your prediction agrees with everyone else's) is not NORMALLY considered "a lie" ... but the MSM has made a pretty huge exception for Bush there, and the vast majority of the sheep are perfectly willing to bleat along. Normally, Democrats are immune from lying, and if proof is found that they did lie, the evil people that found the proof have to be investigated and a lot of stories written about how they must have had a political agenda to find things like the blue dress, that Nixon wasn't President in December of 1968, that Kerry's boat never went to Cambodia, etc, etc.

The whole column is very much worth a read this week-insightful and funny, but I copied a couple things out. Enjoy.

Welcome to AnnCoulter.com

Also, unlike Kerry, Hillary acknowledged her error, telling the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke."
(What if she's sleep-deprived when she gets that call on the red phone
at 3 a.m., imagines a Russian nuclear attack and responds with mutual
assured destruction? Oops. "It proves I'm human.")


The reason no one claims Hillary is being "swiftboated" is that
the definition of "swiftboating" is: "producing irrefutable evidence
that a Democrat is lying." And for purposes of her race against matinee
idol B. Hussein Obama, Hillary has become the media's honorary
Republican.

In liberal-speak, only a Democrat can be swiftboated. Democrats
are "swiftboated"; Republicans are "guilty." So as an honorary
Republican, Hillary isn't being swiftboated; she's just lying.

Indeed, instead of attacking the people who produced a video of
Hillary's uneventful landing in Bosnia, the mainstream media are the
people who discovered that video.

Bumper Sticker Chairity

I've commented on this before, and I really need to read this guys book. Liberals like to talk a great game, but the data is in-they don't put their supposed generosity where their mouths are in dollars, time or even blood. Apparently they look at charity like everything else, they want others to do it, but for themselves, never mind.

The whole article is worth going out and reading, and I'm sure the book is too. I find that people's behavior means so much more than their words. My guess is that at least some of the reason that liberals have 6% higher incomes is a higher percentage of dual income families, but they don't go into that. No matter, even though they have more to give with, they give less in percentage. I guess to them, "greed" is defined by not being willing to try force others to pay more in taxes, but with the dollars that are yours, just keep them.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Conservatives More Liberal Givers

Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming "Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All," "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty," "The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion," "Arms Are For Hugging," "Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India)," "Jesus Is a Liberal," "God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts," "The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans," "Republicans Are People Too -- Mean, Selfish, Greedy People" and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: "The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses."

-- Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

-- People who reject the idea that "government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.

The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism, Willett says, is religion. It increasingly correlates with conservative political affiliations because, as Brooks' book says, "the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have 'no religion' has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s." America is largely divided between religious givers and secular nongivers, and the former are disproportionately conservative. One demonstration that religion is a strong determinant of charitable behavior is that the least charitable cohort is a relatively small one -- secular conservatives.

The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr

http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Switch-Rewiring-Edison/dp/039334522X

The subject book uses the history of industrial power from manual to water to steam to local generators to electricity supplied by utilities as a model for the ground covered to date and assumptions for the future of the move of computing power from individual companies and homes to the global "cloud or grid" of utility computing.

Carr believes that the Amazons, Googles, Yahoos and such are going to defeat Microsoft. In general, so do I, the model is changing. Software and solutions are already being delivered as services over the web with nearly zero impact on the client/user side. This Blog is done using Blogger, a free service of Google paid for by advertising. I happen to be typing it on a Mac computer, but that really makes no difference, the Firefox browser that the Blogger software runs within runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and I'm sure a number of other platforms. This Blog is part of the cloud of the future.

He does some analysis of what we ought to all know to have been true since the first human whacked something with a rock or stick. Tools provide leverage; they allow one or a few people to create a lot more value than people without tools. They also move value around. Carr laments how small groups of people at YouTube, Facebook and such were able enlist vast groups of people to create all the content and then sell out to larger corporations for 100's of millions of dollars. He suspects more of this will happen and I suspect that he is right--I also suspect that a lot of other different large fortunes will be made in ways that are unforeseen to both Nick and I. If we DID foresee them, then I would guess we would go out and make them ourselves, or at least invest in those that will. He doesn't really say what he might DO about that, he just does some lamenting.

He ends up with a little ghost story about how the guys at Google want to create a computer smarter than we are, and they are really serious. In the epilogue he talks of how the move from candles to electric light caused us to "lose something" ... candles gave a glow, a reality that electric light did not. We have lost that. He laments that by the turn of this next century (2100), we will no longer have any people that had dealt with the world prior to the computer, and that will be a loss. He closes with this quote:

"As older generations did, they take with them the knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It's in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be."

It is a nice wistful quote, but how about books? At least the Roman Catholic Church would argue that we suffered a great loss due to books, since the reformation would not have happened without them. Fire? I'm sure that life prior to man having fire was very different than life with control of fire. Anesthetic? Certainly not having that would allow us to be MUCH more in touch with our bodies during surgery!

I don't disagree with him that much, and I like his prose, I'm just left with the "and your point would be"? I don't think he is suggesting either that we should give up progress or that we ought to really slow it down.

Maybe it is sort of like "once the Christmas of your son or daughter being 6 is over, it will never come again, no Christmas will we really like that ... we should be aware of that".

Very true! So we are aware. Now let's get that superhuman computer built and create the equivalent of fire that we will be unable to imagine the world without it's existence!

Liberal Facism, Jonah Goldberg

This is one of those books that I'm sure not many liberals will read, but for the few that actually care about America, they really ought to. The biggest point is that "Fascism", while it is probably the least well defined commonly used political term, is a lot more like "religion" or "desire for unity" than anything associated with a specific political party. The desire to "all be part of a national family, all be taken care of, all agree on nearly everything, feel safe, feel that we have a common purpose, feel that we are working for a cause" ... all those "nice human emotions" are what is subverted by Fascism. It doesn't HAVE to be evil, but it is always extremely dangerous because it destroys individual liberty and public skepticism.

The left in this country stole the term "liberal" in the 30's. Prior to the 30's, a "liberal" was like a "libertarian"--small government, low taxes, individual liberty. When the term "socialist" became unpopular because of association with the USSR, Germany and Italy, they decided to take over the term "liberal" and did so successfully.

What is less known and more insidious is that "Nazi" stands for "National Socialist Party". It doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that a revolutionary, totalitarian, anti-traditional, socialist, anti-Christian and dictatorial state isn't "conservative, libertarian or right wing" in any way. It is LEFT WING, and in fact prior to the holocaust discovery, the much of the left wing in this country revered both Hitler and Mussolini and vice-versa. Much of what both Hitler and Mussolini did was modeled on the Woodrow Wilson government in the US. Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson and FDR were all "progressives", which is close to "fascists". They were men of "collective action vs individual liberty".

Part of the confusion here is that the media and the left simply juxtaposes "facist, right wing, nazi, racist, militarist, evil, Republican, etc" in one tidy package and uses it for name calling, one of their favorite pastimes in lieu of rational discussion. Mussolini was certainly a totalitarian fascist-he created the term "totalitarian" to mean "the government takes care or your TOTAL life", but Mussolini was not anti-semitic or racist in other ways. Hitler was a fascist and he WAS racist. Franco was fascist and NOT racist. Racism is just another human problem, like flatulence, a fascist may have a problem with it, he may not. Same thing with Nationalism--Castro is very nationalist, but he would call himself a communist, as would most Americans.

Prior to the problems between Hitler and Stalin, there wasn't a lot of animosity between communism and fascism. Both were very much "workers parties", communism was just generally international, while fascism was generally nationalistic. The lefties of the world all correctly saw communism and fascism as pretty much the same thing -- heavier and heavier state control, less individual liberty, more collectivism, more central planning. When WWII happened, there was a rift between the USSR and Germany, so it tended to be couched in ideological terms. A lot of the book is spent on quotes and discussions from Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and others showing that they were part of one big happy movement -- until they decided that a bad thing had happened in Germany, and they didn't want to be part of that. So, they picked the obvious scapegoat, "the right", even though there is nothing about "the right" that would lead one to think that "National Socialism" would be found there.

The book is 405 pages long, and the history of progressivism -> liberalism in this country and socialism, communism and fascism world wide is covered in a good deal of detail. The main point is NOT to say that "liberals are Nazis", although the cute little cover with the smiley face with Hitler mustache is certainly going to make liberals think that. Goldberg makes it clear in the book that fascist does NOT equal Nazi -- Fascist is pretty much "why can't we just get beyond politics, find a 3rd way, and let the smart experts do what needs to be done so we can we healthy wealthy and wise". That isn't evil, it is just dangerous ... because if you believe that can actually happen, you are already not thinking very straight, and if you think that the attempt at it isn't going to have a horrible cost in individual liberty, then you have been a grass munching sheep for way too long already.

I could quote and quote, but I'll leave with this one:

In America, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal (old style) institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free speech, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines. This is why conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism and Whiggism are different flags for the only truly radical political revolution in a thousand years. The American founding stands within this tradition, and modern conservatives seek to advance and defend it.

Veterans In MN School Too Political

Forest Lake event canceled; too political

It sounds like the issue is really "too confusing". These tender young folks have been fully brainwashed with the "simple truths" like "Bush Evil", "Iraq War Lost", "Military Bad", "America Bad", "Muslims Good", etc. Star Trib readers have to get pretty up in arms when some veterans show up with a more nuanced opinion. I mean, what do THEY know, they were only actually over there. Certainly their viewpoints can't be allowed to complete with those of MEA teachers and the unbiased folks at the Star Trib! It is worse than Fox News and talk radio, people can't be expected to deal with all these differing viewpoints, so best to just get it back to one way of thinking, then we can be CIVIL!!

This country was founded on the idea that political speech ought to be curtailed wherever possible. We really can't have divergent opinion running around.

US Ranks 24th, Britan 7th

I suspect that this might some play in the MSM because it fits with their model of the universe. Of course economic freedom, how GOOD the health care / housing / transportation / etc are are no doubt not taken into account. There is certainly no consideration to the population difference (50M UK, 300M USA) or vast land mass differences. How well would this REALLY match with what liberals think if they thought for a couple minutes? How much diversity is there in Sweden for example? How much "freedom from religion" in the Vatican?

A lot of these places I haven't been to, but I have been to the UK a couple of times. Anyone from the US that wants to go there better get used to a RADICAL reduction in lifestyle if the size of your home, space, roads, shopping after 5PM, interesting television, and a whole list of other things are part of your idea of "lifestyle". It IS true however that the beer is excellent and they figure you ought to drink LOTs of it, so maybe that is a point that really counted in their favor. On that front, they may well be #1 in my book!


Britain is world's 7th most stable and prosperous nation - Times Online

It looks like the big issue was really guns and drugs. Well, the dead are the MOST stable, so I guess "stability" isn't everything, in fact, how well does liberty mesh with stability, and which is most important?

Mr Le Mière said that the US had fallen down the scale, although it still
scored an average of 93 out of 100, partly because of the proliferation of
small arms owned by Americans and the threat to the population posed by the
flow of drugs from across the Mexican border.

I supppose it is pretty sad for a lot of liberals to see Iraq not make the bottom 10 ... indicating that even the UN sees progress there, I thought our MSM and Dems almost always thought the UN had it's head on straight ... I guess the idea that it shows progress in Iraq may be trump the lower rating for America, and we won't see it in the news much anyway.

I wonder how stable and prosperous Canada would be if the US actually became unstable and not prosperous? Supposedly Canada is 23rd to our 24th with a population of 33 million vs our 300 million. Guess there must not be any points at all for scale!