Deepak Chopra isn't really any more of a "nut" than me -- and he is a better educated nut in any case. It just rhymed well. I find his brand of spirituality to be too amorphous, "I'm OK, You're OK", "just be and it will all be OK" sort of the kind of spirituality that promises everything but demands nothing, and seems to have no real "there, there".
He is however fascinated with the interaction between things like the "Heisenberg Cut"(HC), the "boundary" between Newtonian and Quantum Physics, as am I. My analogy for that boundary is like the hardware / software interface in computing, although sort of the "reverse". Above hardware interface in computers (the instruction set), all is "software" or "data" -- software is just data in a special format that the hardware recognizes as instructions.
Above the HC in the world, all appears to be "matter", but we know that it is also "energy". Below the cut, our attempts to discover if things are waves or particles becomes probabilistic. The answer seems to be "both", which may mean "neither/something else", but we don't know what that is. We may figure that out, but my guess is that at the below the HC, we are getting at least very close to the "stuff" (or non-stuff) of God -- meaning "spirit". Software runs on hardware, matter and our world might run on "spirit". At least I like to imagine that. It has a weird symmetry.
Third, until reality is united into one whole, science cannot justify its claim to understand nature. This isn't simply a piece of grumpy skepticism. The Heisenberg cut raises a wall inside the human brain, because the brain is both a large object and totally dependent on quantum events taking place at the very most fundamental level of brain cells. Being unable to fuse the two domains of reality comes to a crunch every time you think a thought. At the large scale level of classical physics, your thought can be detected as increased neural activity that "lights up" on a brain scan. Yet this isn't the same as reading your mind. Only you know what your thought is.
Last I checked, there wasn't any real "evidence" that thought requires quantum effects, but there certainly are quantum effects taking place in each and every atom in the brain. Are there "special types" of quantum "operations" taking place in some of the specialized cells in the brain?
If you were watching the registers of a computer flit through millions of instructions manipulating millions/billions of bytes of data without access to a huge hunk of the software that was running and other programs which allowed you to trace the operations against source code, only a TINY number of people in the world would have any hope of discerning what was happening in the "big picture" of the program. Modern RISC instruction sets are hopelessly compressed and obscure from a human logical POV ... they are meant to run efficiently on specific hardware and rely on sophisticated optimizing compilers to generate streams that fit the specific hardware structure. That optimization makes the meaning of the instructions flitting through still more obscure from even an expert human POV.
How much more difficult is our situation in watching neurons "light up" under a "Positron Emission Tomography" (PET) or some other scan? For a computer CPU, we can look up the spec -- how many registers, what is the instruction set, etc -- for the brain? We are men blind from birth painting a picture of something that has never been described -- consciousness. "The feeling of knowing" indeed!
On the face of it, you'd never connect the fantastic achievement of LIGO with the utter confusion that exists when it comes down to how the brain works. Yet they are intimately connected, simply by the fact that doing science is a brain activity. If you don't know how such activity produces consciousness, and then how it goes on to produce the image of a four-dimensional world, you can't claim to understand what reality actually is. Instead, you're like someone in closed room who hears banging on the walls from outside. This banging can be measured in all kinds of ways, but everything you can say about it cannot be confirmed, because you'd have to escape the room to really find out what's going on.
There is a group of us in this closed room. We can all verify with each other that we are hearing, seeing, measuring a whole lot of stuff. We all have feelings, and we have verified that feelings are required for us to make any decisions (people that lose feelings / emotion are unable to make decisions). When it comes down to what all the measurements "mean" or "why" we see and feel the things we do, there is a lot of disagreement.
Mr Logic: "The data just IS, try to use what we learned to make us money, pleasure, more data, etc"
Mr Feeling: "There HAS to be a why! Think about what this might MEAN!"
Mr Logic: "Quit thinking about that! Try to use the data to help us LIVE LONGER, we are all going to DIE, even our children might die! We have to get BUSY, PLEASE get BUSY! "
Mr Feeling: "Why live longer if there is no purpose?"
Mr Logic: "Pleasure you fool! Pleasure will make you happy! Long life and pleasure, that HAS to be the reason we are here! Besides, why die? We can find ways to live FOREVER! "
Mr Feeling: "This work is hard and demanding. If pleasure is the answer I would rather spend time with my loved ones and watch the sun go down. Why even live one day longer if there is no meaning? ".
Mr Logic: "Damn you! I can't complete this work alone! Less and less people are willing to do the important work of making our lives more pleasurable and hopefully longer! I can't understand why this has happened!"
Mr Feeling: "Then you DO understand that "why" is an important question?"
A very long but generally solid slog through some of the relatively recent history of the Republican party. I often like to read the perspective of those who are the enemy of a position -- they are more likely to be clear in their criticism! This paragraph does a good job of summarizing what has happened to being a middle class white without a college degree in America today -- I covered this here.
You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.
Seems that the left wing Atlantic and the Republican establishment have a hard time understanding why people that are dying of substance abuse and their own hand would be willing to take a long shot on Trump. I guess I'm just not quite intellectually removed enough to be able to understand that level of dispassionate analysis.
These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.
I'm reading "Darwin's Cathedral", a discussion of how religion "evolved. For an evolutionist, it HAD TO, right? There is no God, so why in the world should there be anything as stupid as religion! BIG PROBLEM! One of the big items he covers is John Calvin -- "the work ethic", how it allowed each and ever worker to see their vocation as a "holy pursuit". Being hard working was a VIRTUE!
Along came FDR and sold Americans that EVERYONE has a "right" to get more out of the government than they put in via FICA. Not that FDR cared -- he knew he would be LONG gone before the payment for the Democrat votes bought with FICA came due, but he and everyone who initiated it knew it was a Ponzi scheme based on 1). Perpetual population growth 2). Perpetual economic growth 3). 2/3 of the people dying before they received any "benefits".
All three assumptions are FALSE today, but even those WITH college degrees are generally not educated well enough to grasp these basic facts. As recently as 2005, W was willing to talk about the truth and propose putting some money in ACTUAL investments rather than spending it and putting IOUs in a box, but he was soundly defeated. The Trump voters are right, NEITHER party has their best interests in mind!
The work ethic is dead, the country is broke, over 50% of the population receives the major part of their income from the government, and neither party is stating ANYTHING as a "plan" to recover!
Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did. Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.
Politics ARE becoming more central because religion, family, work, community, friends and everything else was becoming LESS central to life -- and to the extent any of those elements are part of your life, you likely only associated with those who shared your political persuasion, especially if you were on the left. As the nation falls ever farther down the totalitarian socialist rat-hole, politics **IS** the most important thing in at least THIS life!
Basically "post Clinton", the Republican establishment has been uncertainly messing around with the following issues:
1). Reform FICA, Medicare and other government benefits so they are no longer targeted to the "most needy 100%" and hav some tiny wisp of hope of being there for the "bottom 60%".
2). "Triangulate" on SOME way to control immigration from Mexico, remove at least "some/most" illegals, WITHOUT losing 90% of the Hispanic vote for the future. Most likely impossible.
3). Maintain / extend SOME sort of tax relief for those of us that are or were in the low 5 figures and are fighting a losing battle paying the freight on the massive growth of government.
4). Struggling to have SOME sort of military capability without busting the budget. Try to prevent us from falling to the point where we were incapable of telling Mexico " Build the damn wall -- OR ELSE!"
It is easy to assert that they have done a TERRIBLE job of all of these -- however, the Democrat strategy contrast is rather amazing:
1). Unlimited spending at increasing rates on existing programs with over $100 T in unfunded liability while adding new programs with abandon (BOcare) with no plan at all on paying for any of it or controlled the deficit spending. They continue to give drunken sailors a bad name!
2). Open borders for all -- adding Muslims to the list including terrorists if possible. "Win/Win" -- more Democrat voters, more strain on system, more violence -- increases chances for more totalitarian crackdown! Being a Democrat has to be FUN!
3). Tax the absolute crap out of anyone making over say "$75K", hammer any entrepreneur / corporation as hard as they can! Get business to close or leave! The more people dependent on government and not working the BETTER! Class warfare is a WINNER for D -- fan the flames!
4). Make the military a social project -- more women, more gays, get busy on transgender in the military. Lose as ignominiously as possible in as many theaters as possible! Use the military to de-stabilize stable countries like Libya and hand them over to terrorists. Pull the military out of Iraq and hand that over to the terrorists. Screw up Syria and let that become a terrorist stronghold. Capitulate to Iran, Russia, China and ISIS -- make certain America is viewed as completely powerless! Today N Korea said they were going to nuke both the US and S Korea. Everyone loves the scent of BO (at least BO burning).
The new strategy soon proved a total and utter failure. George W. Bush’s tax cuts for high earners expired in 2013, and Republicans could not renew them. The drive to cut the deficit ended in budget sequestration, whose harshest effect fell on the military. The Gang of Eight deal never came to a vote in the House. All the while, Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership—an intensity of disapproval never seen by the Republican majority of the 1990s nor by Democrats during their time in the majority after the 2006 midterm elections.
I think there is plenty to be angry about relative to the Republican establishment -- however, we are to some degree complaining about the few people at least ATTEMPTING to do some bailing while the Titanic of the US goes under with Democrats drinking, smoking weed, whooping it up and using the lifeboats for campfires on the tilting deck.
When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism. “We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems … We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.”
That message did not resonate with those who’d ridden the S&P 500 from less than 900 in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2015.
Remember, this is a lefty magazine -- printing a bunch of money and having the stock market go up and calling it "BO success" makes sense to these guys. It really isn't too surprising it does NOT make sense to over half of the Republican party, and at least SHOULD NOT indicate success to even more of the Democrat party. If Trump becomes the nominee, the BIG QUESTION is if he is going to be able to get at least the white Democrats to look at the "are you better off?" question like Reagan did.
**IF** he was able to pull that off -- and it SHOULD be possible, since it is CLEARLY true that the "bottom 80%" of the US population has done terribly under BO, he could win. If that is a "good thing" and if he can accomplish anything to keep the US Titanic from the long fast trip to the bottom is highly questionable -- Can anyone???
Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”
The two biggest holes in the side of our ship are unfunded liabilities and the inability of the economy to grow. Can one be fixed without fixing the other? My personal belief is that W gave us our best chance to stay afloat in '05 and we blew it. We are going to go under -- the question now is "how far".
BUT, I do tend to be something of a pessimist -- the BEST thing going for Trump is OPTIMISM, and his ability to engender that in millions of people who are actually workers that WANT TO WORK! It is similar to Reagan, but Trump is no Reagan and our situation is MUCH more dire than it was in 1980. To have any hope of rebirth now we likely have to go through some cross between the '82 recession, the sick 70's, the Great Recession and the Great Depression!
Triple digit inflation? Years of deflation? Stock market "2,000"? No FICA payments to anyone with an income over "$15K"? I don't know how bad it is likely to get, but any of those would be better than "total collapse".
The linked article ends with a bunch of bogus "options" for Republicans to remain "viable" in the way they were before Reagan -- a perpetual minority party that provided the fiction that America was not ruled by a single party. The Atlantic finds that a great option -- but then, they still think we have an operational country, while the bottom 50% knows that what we have is a rapidly sinking ship with a lot of booze, weed and people shooting themselves in their cabins.
Remember, the Republican Party presided over the Civil War that was ANYTHING but "civil" -- 600,000 dead in a country with about 1/10th of the population we have today! In 1964, the Republicans lost the presidential election by over 20%, the Democrats had 68 Senators and a wide margin in the House.
If there is a small hope for saving America, most likely SOMEBODY has to take MAJOR, costly and risky action! Reading through articles like this shows that the "establishment" on neither left or right has nary a clue of the situation.
For all they are maligned, I find the Trump voters to have a lot more sense than the establishments of either party. They at LEAST understand there is a CRITICAL problem -- they may have the wrong approach to dealing with it, but SOME approach other than "business as usual" is certainly required!
In the excellent note linked above (just before the end), Edmund Burke has this to say:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
"Their passions forge their fetters".
The passion to be entirely free from moral strictures, free from work, free from a need to live within our means -- "free" in the sense of "free stuff", ignoring the facts of even science that "there is NO free lunch". Everything has a cost, and that which appears most "free" often has the highest cost!
The passion for an earthly savior -- "Hope and Change", with whatever imaginary policy or progrom one may choose to project on such vacuous words. "Make America Great Again" is "Yugely" specific in comparison -- it asserts a specific nation, with "greatness" for a goal, a specificity far beyond "Hope and Change", however it is still irrationally imprecise.
The slogans of BO and now of Trump are very thinly disguised appeals to hand over the nation to a "strong man". BO has already crossed the rubicon of usurping the Constitution on immigration and EPA regulation (stayed by the court for the moment). Trump. Hillary and Bernie have all declared they will do the same on various topics -- guns, income, jobs, walls, etc.
We are absolutely a nation that has lost the internal controlling power of religion -- 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"!
So deeply in debt, morally corrupt, and in mass, totally unschooled as to the the requirements of what keeping the nation bequeathed to us operating, we stumble toward an election which might provide us with the most vile alternatives in American history. It is a situation we richly deserve -- these things have been TOTALLY KNOWABLE for at least centuries, and to a significant degree millennia!!
Not a bad article mostly covering old ground on the questionable nature of the whole warmist industry -- who it hurts (common people), who it benefits (folks like Al Gore, government bureaucracies, etc), how much it costs, how there is no way to square rapid growth in electrical demand with wind and solar. I covered the fact that in the US, solar can be counted for only 8% of maximum power need and wind for only 14% -- so there MUST be HUGE "backup" generation for night, cloudy and or calm days!
The incoherence of the policies spawned by the U.N.’s earlier Kyoto climate accord is increasingly undeniable. Germany is subsidizing the construction of coal-fired power plants as necessary backups to renewables, and Britain is burning wood imported from the United States to generate electricity on a massive scale. Renamed “biomass” and declared “carbon neutral,” wood is no less polluting than coal. Headlines in the Daily Mail excoriate the retrofit of Britain’s largest coal plant to burn wood as a “forest-destroying symbol of the shameful absurdity of European energy policies.”
"Progressivism" displaying it's true result as "regressivism" -- we once advanced forward from wood and wind to coal, gas and even nuclear, and now we are regressing back to ancient times. Wicca is even the fastest growing "religion" in N America!
When "liberals" claim that conservatives want to "turn back the clock", they are a very very black pot casting aspersions on the color of the kettle -- "liberalism" is an bullet train back to living in caves with no power!
They are going all medieval on us! ... although, perhaps is in may cases of "liberal thought" (the worlds greatest oxymoron), they should just reconsider a bit!
I have been devoting a good deal of time to making the 3,500+ blog posts more accessible to ME if nothing else.
Some fine day I shall write a bit on my "schemes" ... one example is using the label "AAAA" for what are either highly popular, or I believe to be critical posts for developing a transcendent world view, rooted in revelation, history, science and tradition, while remaining cognizant and sympathetic to our fallen human nature, and the needs of our fragile selves in this mortal coil.
This quote from Adams is one which I return to frequently in the present dark times.
Included here in text so I may clip it, and in a graphic form for inclusion in a more eye catching form.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other" (John Adams)
This rather long intensely selfish article might be an appropriate parable for the elite of our lost age. It opens with dissolution of family, depression, anxiety, but passes through the "Satanic Rapture" that nothing has meaning save sensual pleasure, breaking of taboos, and "irrational exuberance". Ah, the pleasures of leaving behind the awful "irrationality of God" for the "irrationality of self". Or perhaps the ultimate Satanic rationality of denying the existence of all -- there is no creation, no self, only illusion as in the Buddhist philosophy.
I enjoy the vanity of the atheistic -- unburdened with the sense that they might have an audience infinitely more aware and existing more "solidly" as the pure spirit and source of all than the Buddha ever conceived in losing his soul to dissolution, they wax excessive about all sorts of details, nearly always focused on lost souls like themselves. When one is focused on something of supposedly cosmic import, need "gender-bending" be involved?
But it must, it must! (apologies to "Blazing Saddles") The perversion of the sexual is at the core of the Satanic impulse -- a place where the inversion of the male and the female and Gods created sexuality can be perverted in a myriad of easy ways, sometimes even pleasurable for a short season.
Reproduction -- one of the low but necessary functions of the fallen physical world, barely above respiration, consumption, defecation, etc, torn from it's intended purpose and trumpted as "freedom" -- from order at least, but blissfully unaware of service to chaos. Certainly we die when respiration or reproduction are prevented -- rather quickly in the case of respiration, in a couple of largely missing generations as we are finding in the west with reproduction.
I did have another insight here. We are told in these times of few "truths" beyond "Climate Change" being certain and settled, that sexual preference (unlike gender) is fixed very early in life. In fact, it is already illegal in some states to even ATTEMPT to get a person to change their sexual preference from being gay to heterosexual. If the left has their way, it will be illegal nationally. While the left has extreme aversion to laws acting in the direction of nature to perversion, it is critical to get as many laws as possible operating to prevent the move from perversion to nature!
You see, if you are gay, THEN your "orientation is fixed" -- but if you are heterosexual, it is HIGHLY likely that you are actually at least bi, or maybe gay. "Nature" only made non-adaptive sexuality fixed. Non-adaptive sexuality can be changed at any point in life just like gender! Isn't that special?
See, at age 50, this former heterosexual spontaneously converted to being bi -- with no therapy at all (although I'm certain that such therapy is TOTALLY legal, likely encouraged, and probably required to be covered under BOcare!) -- if she had been homosexual, there may need to be an investigation to find out what horror could have instigated a shift to heterosexuality!
They were adventures with both women and men. In my period of crisis I had discovered that I could have deep, sustaining friendships with women, as well as romance. I had been wrong about that part of my identity, too.
It's a "secular miracle"! It's enough to make a person "leap for irrational exuberant joy"! Does this woman really think there is anything new under the sun here? I suppose the "new" part is that if she and folks like her have their way, my ability to write such sacrilege as this will be declared "illegal" just like the idea that sexual preference (or at least the perversion of it) is FAR more a "choice" than a "characteristic".
See how much better that is than the church making laws and banning texts?
The saddest part of all of this is that if you are a person of intelligence and education with connections -- who knows what kind of support she had from her ex husband and kids, as well as her brother ... "Blake, an art historian who knows Italian (and French, German, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon), and got him to translate for me", on top of meeting the man that she married in that last paragraph, who was one of the founders of Pixar.
See, this woman is part of the "1%" -- or certainly the "5 or 10%" ... she has connections in major universities and corporations, lots of education. She can live the life of a dissolute bohemian and not end up as one of the statistics of addiction, mental illness and suicide like vast swaths of white middle America. Her "adventurous journey" can be proudly chronicled in the Atlantic rather than on the obit page of nowhere flyover country!
In this world, the average schmo -- the "bitter clingers" REALLY needed those Bibles, patriotism, families, communities, jobs and stability to stay alive at all, let alone have a "good life", but those have all been flushed down the toilet of post modern deconstructionist tripe. "Without vision, the people perish" -- but without any meaning or structure at all, they die horrible lonely deaths, often at their own hands.
Burns is a Black Evangelical Minister that is a supporter of Trump. Talk about a "Profile In Courage"! I hope he has bodyguards! Democrats "evolved" after Jim Crow from treating blacks as subhuman slaves to treating them as subhuman house pets that can't have any opinion but that of their masters. Blacks that have an opinion of their own are "not really black". Diversity of thought has never been something TP ("The Party-D) was in favor of!
Pastor Burns understands abortion very well -- it remains to be seen what Trump will actually DO relative to abortion, but is that REALLY any different from any other politician? We had 8 years of Reagan and 8 years of W -- abortion survived both of them, but 10's of millions of babies, many of them black, did not!
""The whole abortion deal is targeted to African-American women ... and gives them the option to destroy the next generation of future scientists, doctors, presidents, CEOs. It's the systematic destruction of, I believe, the next generation of African-Americans, led by the Democratic Party.""
Interesting read -- **IF** Trump was able to accomplish much of what he promises, a President Trump could be a wonderful thing for blacks. It would take very little for it to be better than a president BO has been!
I sometimes hesitate to call myself "Lutheran" due to the "Evangelical Lutheran Church in America" (ELCA) ... they may as well just change their name to "TP" (The Party, Democrat). They are on board with killing the unborn, gay "marriage" and climate change. It appears that Sharia Law for majority Muslim areas is just fine with them as well.
Christ said to love our enemies, he didn't say not to have any! (PJ O'Rourke)
We also don't need to PUBLISH works of fantasy about what we would imagine Islam to be if it wasn't actually Islam. This is obviously easy for the ELCA, as they have imagined a "christianity" that just happens to be the party line of TP -- they just have to stop saying "Christmas"!
Not much reason to read the attached -- the ELCA has published a booklet singing the praises of our wonderful (imaginary) Islamic neighbors. One of the Muslim leaders that is listed as "approving" of their fiction also happens to approve of Hamas, Jihad and Sharia Law ... no surprise at all.
It was William F Buckley that was my early model of conservatism, or better yet, the TRADITIONAL "liberal" model -- those that believed in the diversity that matters, the diversity of thought. Those that were willing to understand a broad range of ideas, discuss them reasonably, and held up "liberty of the individual" as the core value to be esteemed (thus "liberals"). Their name was stolen by the totalitarian statist left, and they never really fought. Maybe the problem started there.
I never saw WFB get flustered, but I did see him get VERY direct -- and I saw many "false modern liberal" statist, socialist, totalitarian guests decompose into gibbering fools in the face of the WFB verbal jousts on "Firing Line". WFB knew what he was about -- as did Reagan.
Now, the "Scribes and Pharisees" seem to have taken over.
Burn it down. Scorch the earth. Blow it up. If the GOP realigns itself behind Donald Trump and surrenders its alleged principles for a fleeting stab at power, it will almost certainly be blown up—by movement conservatives.
I do like that they said "alleged principles", what might those be? Smaller government? I've seen no evidence of that since Newt. Support for their own oath to the Constitution? If one cared a fig for the Constitution, would not articles of impeachment been introduced to the Senate over the BO "encyclicals" in immigration? Certainly they would have been voted down, but they should have shown up! Why bother with foolish oaths if they can be broken without result?
"Movement conservatives" -- constipation comes to mind. The Republican party has held both houses of congress since the start of '15, what "movement" has there been on any issue? Today is the one year anniversary of the failure to override the Keystone veto. On the big issue of the budget, the R congress handed BO unlimited debt authority and thereby unlimited spending authority so they didn't have to "shut down the government" or even fight about it!
There is still time to root for a brokered convention, where, with any luck, the GOP will pull off some highly undemocratic mischief and deny Trump and his many irrational supporters the nomination.
I would still MUCH prefer Cruz, but the same establishment that is now maligning Trump as the devil incarnate was saying they PREFERRED him to Ctuz as late as January 16! ... Because Cruz actually stood for something (which they hated) and they believed that Trump was a "player" (read, they could keep the corruption with Trump!)
I could go on -- the fact that the Republican Establishment has lost it's soul and has NO PRINCIPLES seems VERY clear. They would MUCH rather hand power to Hildebeast who DOES have both "principles and a plan" -- completely destroy the remaining tatters of the US and replace it with a totalitarian socialist state ala Saul Alinsky whose book she wrote her masters paper on!
For me though, the real bottom line is guys like Jonah Goldberg -- who I see as the heir to NRO mistakenly thinking that in going after Trump they are somehow repeating WFB's purging of the John Birch Society from the Republican party. Huh? Trump is populist chameleon using the husk of the Republican Party for whatever the hell his game is -- which I'm pretty sure that even HE doesn't know!
I thought it was only the left that did "loyalty oaths" -- you had to sign off on "abortion, gay "marriage", global warming, faking you were taxing the rich but killing the middle middle class, open borders, political correctness, no jail sentences for blacks, ... etc" ... AND you had to sign off on ALL of it ALL the time, or you were "no longer a member of The Party in good standing", and therefore they could go after you like Bill Cosby!
But **NO**, now you are supposed to be swearing on a stack of National Reviews that you will NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES vote for TRUMP!!! Sorry, no loyalty to the constipation version of "conservatism" for me!!
I am a proud TRADITIONAL Liberal in the Hayek sense! My only loyalty oath is to Jesus Christ -- all others make their case. As far as the new right wing version of the Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers go, they are not making a case that resonates with me at all!
I really don't think I've changed -- I'm still smaller government, strong Constitution, strong defense, strong moral values, BUT PRAGMATIC. I find cutting off your nose to spite your face to ALWAYS be a BAD IDEA.
It appears that a lot of the "conservatives" and "establishment Republicans" have lost sight of that maxim.
I have a ton of respect for Jonah Goldberg, but it has become apparent that he has fallen to "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (TDS), a recent variant of "Bush Derangement Syndrome". He definitely needs some "Whale Time" (see Bible) to reflect on deeper issues and a broader perspective.
What **IS** unique about this juncture is that TDS affects both sides of the political spectrum, so we are "crossing the streams". If you read this blog, you know that I am WELL aware of the tragedy of BO, but in my disgust, I have forgotten that history repeats itself "First as tragedy, then as farce"! I have realized that we are in the "Ghostbusters Election"!
I'm a member of the closed group "Fans of Best of the Web", and what is going on out there is THIS!
In all seriousness, can't conservatives get SOME sense of perspective??? My God, we lived through Slick Willie staining dresses and ejaculating all over the Oval Office! The Democrats have killed 60 million babies in their mothers wombs, Facebook has 58 genders (they had 57, but they got Heinz 57 jokes so they added one), people are cheering over 7 year old girls changing to boys. Sodom and Gomorrah were moral Amish Villages compared to America today, and people are worried about he "Republican Brand"?
Better the GOP do battle with a know-nothing bigot (and lose the presidency) than become the party of know-nothing bigots (and still lose the presidency).
That's why I embrace the Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump, initiated by conservative talk show host Erick Erickson. For too long, Trump has benefited from the assumption that the non-Trump faction of the party will be "reasonable" and support the nominee. Such thinking paves the road to power for demagogues.
"We have met the enemy and he is us". Being conservative is to have a STRONG willingness to face reality. Did the "establishment" of the Republican Party really think that we were going to live in the "post stain cesspool" that is America and not "get any on us"? As I've said before, what part of "NO RULES" is it that purist Republicans are missing? Sure, Trump may WELL be the "form of our destructor" (this IS the Ghostbusters election after all).
Have we forgotten that we face Hildebeast? The Abomination of Desolation!
I really don't even find the KKK flap to be worthy of comment. Consider this. How likely is it that some reporter is going to talk to Hillary about the BLM protesters screaming "Pigs in blankets, fry them like bacon" and see if she wants to "repudiate them"? The fact that the MSM treats R's like that and the fact that not only OUR supposedly conservative commentators that know better fall for it (like NR), is exactly why Trump is popular. People are so sick of the hypocrisy that they just want tough nasty in your face talk like BO and the entire left has been treating us "Bitter Clingers" to for 7 years and much longer.
They want to call us "racist" for saying "All" or "Blue" lives matter? Can any human NOT feel the "F you!" rise up in their craw when that happens? I **AM** PROUD to be a White American! I'm even proud to be a MALE -- and not "Cisgendered". TP and now apparently NR demand that half the country hang their heads and grovel. If that works, as it looks it will, we are even more "done" than I thought we were.
BO and "The Party (TP-D)" have been calling us out for a LONG time here. It has obviously made Mittens Romney and others "uncomfortable".
Take the "Rock Ribbed" pragmatic tough fight out of Republican and you REALLY have no "brand" at all remaining! Let THIS be the battle cry of 2016!
I recalled this having been written, but it was "pre-blog". Let me count the ways I love the "Way Back Machine" of the Internet! (oh, BTW, if you take the time to watch this episode, you will notice a b number of "small historical issues" (stoplights and city traffic at time of Beethoven, 4th of July as a holiday in early 1800s Austria, etc) ... those were pretty standard for Mr. Peabody!
Just read the whole thing, it explains A LOT, and it is VERY FUNNY! ... unfortunately, it is also very true, very real, and it could have been applied to a lot of (nearly always right wing) politicians in the past -- Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.
It will unquestionably be applied in the future as well ... like Trump, where it is happening on BOTH sides.
Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ``the most interesting'' theory as to why the president is ``suppressing'' the 9/11 report is that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies.
When Rep. Cynthia McKinney first broached this idea before the 2002 primary election, it was considered so nutty it helped make her former Rep. McKinney. Today the Democratic presidential front-runner professes agnosticism as to whether the president of the United States was tipped off about 9/11 by the Saudis, and it goes unnoticed. The virus is spreading.
Humans are NOT "rational", we are RATIONALIZING, and unfortunately, when the dominant liberal media starts chasing their own tail as primitive "whirling dervishes", they become IRRATIONAL!
First of all, I'll go out tonight and cast my caucus chit for Ted Cruz. I believe in his principles and character. I understand he is hated by the R "establishment", which is a positive for me.
If I had to pick a 2nd place, it would be Rubio, because he is more likely to win against Hildebeast. He seems "decent". I disagree with his abortive attempts to deal with immigration and his stupid "penis jokes" in the past couple of days, but he is young, and his level of crassness is like junior high fart jokes next to the in your face "schlonging" of Trump. We "screwed the pooch" (following the Trump idiom, a phrase commonly used by test pilots) in the immigration act of '65 anyway. Immigration at this point is a HARD problem -- very close to insoluble.
I really like civility and reasoned discussion. I've realized over the years that since 90% of what people believe is emotionally based and primarily about "what their friends like", the idea that minds will be changed by discussion is a fantasy -- therefore, it really isn't worth a lot of profanity, name calling, blood being spilled, etc. Reasoned discussion isn't going to solve anything anyway. Events either eventually will or they won't. It is in God's hands.
I find Lileks to be wordy, purposely obtuse, and odd -- that doesn't mean I dislike all his stuff, it just means that he is not a thinker or writer that resonates with me most of the time.
This long windy piece ends as follows ... not including the weird old Star Trek clip that makes me wonder about Lileks backbone and real (if any) values ... I suspect it is "Trump Fear". Scott Adams and I cover "Trump Fear" here. I'd cast Trump as a Ferengi if I had to use a Star Trek clip ... but Lileks is a traditionalist -- he likely hasn't cracked STNG yet!
Sorry for taking the long way; could have just linked and agreed. But the author's points deserve interrogation. Short version: no. Long version: hell no. On the off chance history makes marks in a ledger: I will not support Trump if he is the nominee. I will not vote for him. The devil you know is still a devil, and worse yet: you don't really know him at all.
It's still (for the moment) a "free country" -- you can vow to not vote for Trump and allow Hillary to win. You can, but if you are sentient and are not committed to single party socialist rule with the Constitution continuing to be shredded and all remaining incentives to anything resembling economic growth being removed, you wouldn't.
Hillary has a plan. Her Masters Thesis was on Saul Alinsky, who dedicated his book "Rules for Radicals" to Satan. Then there is the "Cloward Piven Strategy" if you want to dig a bit more. The left KNOWS what it wants to do -- destroy America and create a totalitarian socialist state, They have been doing it since Wilson -- BO has moved the ball a LOT, Hillary may complete the task!
Do you think Trump has a "plan"? Hah! That is both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength! Hillary DOES have a plan, and if it succeeds, there may be ZERO chance of any hope of recovery at all. Is the Trump hope slimmer than slim? Sure. Is he the ugliest R candidate in memory? Well, McCain was pretty damned ugly -- but maybe.
The "I'm too pure to vote for Trump" is just "anger at the anger" or simple snobbery. You think America has any "class" left after Slick Willie and BO? That IS "bitterly clinging"! We are a stained blue dress that can't define "is". Very charitably we are now the THIRD most powerful nation ... BO licks Putin's boots, draws laughable "red lines" in crayon and kneels to Iran.
We are a broken nation with bad options for leadership. BO succeeded in his "Dream" that he took from his father to destroy at least one of the "Colonial Powers" -- us! Do we want to go quietly into the gulag of Hildebeast, or do we want to at least make some noise if that is what it comes to?
I'm a "pry my cold dead hands" kind of guy. Trump may well be like that, but compared to Hildebeast?
The linked article has a nice tidy theory of "Evangelical voters".
Trump is drawing those voters who are Evangelical but don’t see themselves as “Evangelical voters.”In other words, they’re not imposing faith-based litmus tests on candidates, they don’t care about candidates’ personal lives, they’re less concerned with social issues, and they’re more in line with old-school Southern populists. Oh, and they really, truly don’t like being told what they “should” be doing and strongly dislike moral scolds — especially politically-correct moral scolds. Many of these voters were equally comfortable going for Clinton in 1996 and Bush in 2000.
Cruz is pulling more from the voters who define themselves as true-blue (I’m sorry, true-red) Evangelicals and who are craving someone who shows that he has the courage to confront the establishment and the liberal media without compromising one inch on core principle. If you’re talking to a voter who’s concerned first and foremost not just with a candidate’s faith but also with their moral and political consistency, then you’re likely talking to a Cruz voter. If you’re talking to someone who feels like the GOP has exploited Christians for votes, only to abandon the fight at the first sign of resistance, you’re likely talking to a Cruz voter.
Rubio, by contrast, is getting his share of voters who look primarily to a candidate’s faith, but he’s also drawing substantial numbers from Evangelicals who care deeply about a candidate’s manner. They want to see their candidate not just as a faithful Christian but as someone who can defend that faith in the public square in a particular way. They also tend to be more ambivalent about immigration — concerned about border enforcement, to be sure, but less closed to legalization. If you’re talking to an Evangelical who believes that their candidate can break down walls and expand the Republican constituency, you’re likely talking to a Rubio voter.
Tidy, but I don't buy it. Sure, like most theories, I suspect you can find SOME people that this would explain, but I think it misses the core of the Trump phenomenon.
Conservative Christian voters and MANY others have been disappointed by Republican Presidential options in the cases of HW Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney. W was "better", but a LONG way from Reagan! Add to that, absolute disgust with Republican House and Senate, plus party leadership since Newt, and you have a case where while they DETEST the Democrats, they have at best a STRONG DISLIKE of the Republican establishment!
As one ex Congressman said at a meeting I was at, "You have no idea how corrupt Washington is. It is is probably hopeless, but the best we can hope for is a LONG SHOT that Trump will "shock the system" enough to right the ship, otherwise, we are going DOWN!"
After an effective decade** of Democrat rule, the conservative R's are DESPERATE! Their "strong dislike" for the Republican establishment is pretty much at DISGUST after 5 years of House control and a year of both House and Senate, anyone of a conservative bent can see that we have NOTHING to show for controlling one of the branches of government. As I cover below in **, I can understand the reality of what is happening, but I can ALSO understand how R's FEEL, as well as have extreme disgust for the leadership in both House and Senate. Yes, they are likely to lose, but at least they could LOSE WITH SOME CLASS!
This situation has given us TRUMP. Rubio is "establishment", which is NOT popular, Cruz is hated by the establishment and doesn't come across as somebody that can win -- therefore Trump. (Cruz is still my guy -- Trump could always shoot someone, if that would even matter).
**NOTE, when TP controls ONE branch of government, since they control the media, they effectively control it all. If a a Republican president attempts to stop Congress from acting, he is considered to have "shut down the government", be "partisan/ideological", and "not willing to govern". (see HW Bush vs congress for reference)
Reverse the situation with R's in control of congress and TP in the WH, and any attempt by congress to get anything done or block presidential action is "overreach, partisan, dangerous"! (see BO interactions with Republican Congress).
"You shall do no injustice in judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly."
The Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In order to understand "Equal Protection", you need to also look at the 5th Amendment. The Magna Carta, clause 39 stated it:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
The 5th amendment merely says:
Nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
If the US was to have remained a Constitutional Republic, ruled by laws rather than men, people that voted should all be very aware of this "decent of law". They would at least understand what is behind the 23 Lawgivers around the chamber of the US House of Representatives in our capitol.
The judgement of all humans is corrupt, but we can look back through history to the Bible and see that the temptation is to judge unfairly, differently for "the poor or the great". Corruption is corruption, IN EITHER DIRECTION!
One of the spiritual rules of the universe is that when there is an inversion of meaning -- left becomes right, good becomes evil, evil becomes good, male becomes female and female becomes male, then you see the hand of Satan operating directly before your face. Let those that have eyes SEE!
The "Progressive Income Tax" in the US -- along with "Affirmative Action" and other such laws are examples of inversion! They EXPLICITLY celebrate the corruption of judgement as being a "good", when it is declared directly in the Bible as an EVIL. The corruption of judgement destroys and invalidates law. Without law, there is no civilization except that based on raw power and coercion.
The root of the end of America was the abandonment of God -- the increasing evidence of Satanic inversion is simply the proof of the fact that God's judgement is certain and as Reagan said:
