A World Without National Socialism

I watched the excellent movie "Downfall" about the last days with Hitler in the bunker at the end of WWII. It is told based on interviews with his young female secretary who was 22 at the time she was picked to work for Hitler, as well as information from others in the inner circle that survived.

A lot of you have seen a clip from it since it is the base for hundreds of parodies about "Hitler is told", my favorite being Hitler being told that they couldn't get him a Harley to ride to Sturgis. My wife is kind of like his secretary in the hallway saying "that's OK, we'll find some REAL BIKERS!"

The biggest thing that struck me was Magda Goebbels, the wife of Joseph Goebbels killing all six of their young children because  "she didn't want them to live in a world without National Socialism".

What a shame, they could have just moved to Russia, or even Great Britain a few years later, or just have waited around for the "last days of BO", so at least their grandkids would have been "happy".

"Socialism, Communism, Fascism, etc" are all "worship of the state". For people that think, they MUST be atheistic, even though in their early stages their adherents will try to soft pedal the "Godless" aspect a bit. Hitler had very strong faith that you put a bullet through your brain and what you get is "peace" ... well perhaps, I've been reading Dante's Inferno lately ... there are ALWAYS alternatives!

When you worship man (and you WILL worship, your brain is built that way) ... collectively or in the individual ... yourself, Hitler, BO, it really makes no difference, it is simply idolatry, and humans are GREAT at idolatry.

The second thing that hit me was the young SS rounding up old men that failed to muster for defense of Berlin and shooting or hanging them as cowards. A set of them is confronted by a Waffen officer, and the SS officer says "who is going to stop me? them? you?" as he is gunning them down.

Ah, how much less boldness such officers would have if the population had .460 S&W mags and .223 ARs. One only needs to see a few of your buddies blown away to get a LOT slower at searching out the old coots that have "failed" to follow "Mien Fuhrer" or "The One!" as required. Standing out in open in the street shooting a few of your fellow citizens is cause for a lot less arrogance when it regularly results in your troop dying ignominiously in a hail of bullets.

Make no mistake, gun control is about CONTROL, a free person NEVER gives up their arms!

I wonder how many Americans under 30 can even tell you that "Nazi" stood for "National Socialist"? "Those that fail History are doomed to repeat it".

Ah yes, the dream of living in a world without ANY form of Statism ... Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc. Once our founders dreamed of such, but in the words of Franklin when asked what kind of government the Congress had wrought, he replied;  "A Republic if you can keep it".

Alas, we could not.

The Incredible PFT (feminism)

Louise Pennington: Femen: Reinforcing the Patriarchal F***ability Test:

I'll let you disambiguate the "PFT". While I well know that the percentage of what is going on in the world that I know about is well in the ".0000..." class, sometimes it STILL seems surprising to see what I've never heard of!

Long ago I read "A People's History of the US" by Howard Zinn (http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html) and became initiated into the "victim view of history" ... the savages were all "noble", the Communists were and are noble, Labor is noble ... Christianity, "Western Philosophy", and Capital / Business most of all, are EVIL. Take them away and Nirvana quickly ensues! It's a nice simple view, shared by a lot of our state supported colleges. It's a wonderful world.

There is another alternative galaxy out there far far away where the roles of men and women were defined in some murky past by a male conspiracy ... no doubt over beers and football, possibly including cigars.

While the essential part of the Zinn view is removing civilization, the essential part of the feminist view seems to be the removal of procreation. I'm not much of an evolutionist, but I'm thinking there might be a problem with that, but I'm probably wrong. I'm the kind of dunce that believes that solar and wind don't work on a calm foggy day, and some people actually need the belief that there is a CHANCE they will keep a good deal of what they make before they get up and go to work in the AM. I'm admitting my lack of touch with current reality.

Apparently, pretty much all of western civilization is based a vast conspiracy of males to want to RAPE young women ... they may of course consent, be of age and all that, but it is still rape as defined by the keepers of the PFT.

I'm quite sure that there is nothing at all "natural" about women of prime breeding age displaying their sexual availability, it happens in no other species. No doubt before the advent of the Western Male PFT, the "natural man" didn't even notice unless he was in some "appropriate age range". I can't even imagine the chief of some tribe in the 10K year ago African savannah  would EVER use his position to gain sexual favors!

No, such unnatural acts are the work of evil patriarchal conspiracy (I'm guessing it is predominantly right wing, but perhaps this is one or the very rare areas where the political spectrum comes together??) If there is such a thing as this being "natural" however, we are now highly advanced and with proper education we can definitely learn to counteract our urges.

Except of course for Gays ... they are the way they are and have no choice in the matter. Oh, and teens ... they need free birth control. Oh, I guess women as well ... they have to have it provided for them for free. It is a complex world, but the feminists and the Zinn historians as well as no doubt BO know the answers, and they will tell us for sure!

Anyway, I'm sure folks like the author of this and the linked articles have this all figured out. I'm just another lost evil western patriarch with everything signed over to my wife. They seem intent on "smashing the patriarchy" ... I imagine the matriarchy will be a real hoot.

Protest needs to be vibrant, engaging and culturally specific but we will not smash the Patriarchy by reinforcing its belief that the only women who matter are those who conform to the Patriarchal Fuckability Test.

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Good BO Summary

A word from Peter Wehner | Power Line:

The linked article includes an excellent summary of the BO regime ... grossly incompetent but very negatively consequential. WELL worth the very short read.

My defining moment of the Jimmuh presidency was the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic -- the failed attempt to rescue the US hostages being held in Tehran resulted in 8 servicemen being killed and never even engaged the enemy. In my lifetime at that time, it was the lowest point for America -- we had gone from being the dominant super power at the end of WWII to being in economic decline, high inflation, losing ground around the world to the USSR and  at that point unable to execute even a small military operation even "credibly" let alone successfully.

We recovered from that, but it wasn't easy -- a brutal recession that was virtually constant from '80-'83 was only part of the cost. The loss of faith in America as a worthy ally and the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism largely stem from that time.

Will we recover from BO at all? How difficult will this trough be? What seeds are being sown today that will haunt America 40 years in the future? These are questions that only time will tell, but the summary is a good place to pause and ponder them for a bit.

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Yellow Cake, Meaningless Facts, Stained Glass

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush - Larry Elder - Page 1:

This article goes through a topic that I've covered before with some new data. Saddam either had WMD, or everyone thought he did. This article says that Yellowcake was acquired and was there -- to which the left will say one of two things; 1). It's a lie 2). It doesn't matter, because it isn't severe enough to go to war (with hindsight).

To which Elder tries to say "But you SAID that talking about Yellowcake WAS the "lie" ... and we had a special prosecutor and everything based on the "proof" that was a lie!"

To which the left replies "Consistency is NOT an issue ... WINNING is the issue and we already WON! BO is in power, we spy on you at will, we target you when we want to for audits or other government harassment! W is long discredited as "Bush lied, people died", the America you fought for is history, SHUT the F UP!!!!

They are "right" in the sense that "might is right". Note how unpopular "speaking truth to power" is now! The rule of law has been destroyed, our poor bankrupt children have been brainwashed to servitude and each day we realize new revelations of how we now live in a new "changed" nation, no longer America. BOville.

We have been running down this road for a century now. First slowly ... "Progressive" became "liberal" because "progressive" was tied to "Socialists" and "National Socialism" didn't turn out very well. Fascism was identified as "right" (as in "libertarian fascists") ... so the people no longer knew the difference between political left and right (statism vs extreme liberty or 'anarchy").

The "New Deal" was the "Raw Deal" for what was America. FICA was a massive assault on future generations by the current -- a time bomb that only now is becoming somewhat visible.  The various government progroms  converted the once great engine of growth into a geriatric nation with hardening arteries and gout. We live today in that sad shadow.

WMD in Iraq is just one more in a long tired litany of these topics. The Alger Hiss / McCarthy smear was a big one -- Watergate was really the left just finally getting around to punishing Nixon for being right. The release of KGB papers after the end of the USSR proved that Hiss WAS a spy and Chambers was right -- but no matter, for 90%+ of Americans, the left still won.

The whole myth of the USSR was a huge left scam. Even in the early '80s I listened to NPR breathlessly describe their "free health care", their "full employment", their "state education" ... to listen to our own Public Media, one would have thought that the USSR was heaven on earth. In the early '80s, Reagan was a MADMAN for ever suggesting that the USSR had ANY potential of ending. By the end of the '80s, the lefty message was that it had been obvious for a long time the USSR was in real trouble, and the foolish Reagan likely slowed their demise with his bellicose posturing.

It **IS** true that the winners write history -- and the left has been writing and re-writing our history for nearly 100 years.

Such is the looking glass world we live in. Acid rain, DDT, impending global starvation, the ozone hole, Japan taking over the world economy and the planet being "out of oil" in the late '70s, an impending global ice age in the early '70s, are all examples of massive "total truths" that one was once a fool to not be in agreement with. What it takes many years to learn is that from the perspective of those that purveyed and believed in those "truths", "deniers" are STILL fools, or at least "weird scary odd ducks".

When your mother asked "If all your friends jumped over a cliff, would you just follow along?", it was a trick question! The right answer is that if it was "the whole school", then YES!!! You are a social animal, and since we have thrown religion and the constitution into "the ash heap of history", a current "smart person" WILL follow the crowd -- and if tomorrow it turns out that the crowd was "wrong", that view will be completely forgotten as if it never happens. It is part of what makes it VERY uncomfortable for members in good standing of the Dominant Party (Democrat / liberal) to even TALK to someone that might bring up heresy ... The Dominant Party Message has replaced both God, the Constitution, and "foolish reality".

It looks pretty obvious from both economic and climate data that two current liberal myths that are not going to survive reality are Progressive Economics and  Global Warming, **BUT** as in the elements above, one needs to realize that DOES NOT mean that "facts, the truth, common sense, reality, etc" are going to "win".

I'm no longer certain that there exists any level of reality breaking through on these people -- we could easily be down to a few thousand people in hemp clothes shivering and starving in a cave somewhere with the onset of the next ice age, blathering away about "Global Warming", "Overpopulation", and "excessive consumption".

It seems that the best we can do is have a nicer cave somewhere with some reactors, hydroponics, connection to the sea for ice fishing and maybe some cloned woolly mammoths on the surface for steaks!  Going to have to have a REALLY good library, computer systems, AND a very nice chapel with a lot of stained glass.

We will have a lot of history to write and re-write.

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Must Read, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard 1978

Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address:

I'd just started at IBM a few days before this address. Fresh out of college, other than a moderate level of Christian faith, a poster child for the materialist decadence Solzhenitsyn calls out.

This was the last time that Harvard allowed anyone that wasn't a "liberal in good standing", and usually an intellectual lightweight as well (this year it is Oprah) to take their "pulpit".  In 1978 the "Iron Information Curtain" fell one more notch after this speech. It continued the trend from "God and Man At Yale"  by Buckley in the '50s, and "The Closing of the American Mind" by Bloom documenting the '60s. The trend that would continue as religion was ever removed from the public square, and the voices of those that would stand for the necessary connection of man to God would be silenced in the academy as the once great America became ever more ruled by "The Party" (D).

This is all WELL worth the 20min it takes to read it. Solzhenitsyn was a prophet. He foresaw that the USSR was so corrupt it would not stand, and he foresaw that the west would lack the courage and conviction to deal with the terrorist/Muslim scourge. He saw the shape of our decline and suspected as I do that the odds against the recovery of civilization, at least without hundreds or thousands of years of a "Dark Age" ruled by evil were very long.

This paragraph is just a teaser. I strongly recommend reading it all!

 "To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections."

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Don't Compromise!!!

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - Harvard Business Review

When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader. At his first retreat with the Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t compromise.” The machine that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in the universe,” as he said, by accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

DON'T compromise? Do we really look at our homes, cars, devices, faith, values, jobs, vacation selections, etc and say "compromise"?

I don't think so. It is very true that in the real world, there are "trade-offs" -- size, weight, power consumption, cost, complexity, time, distance, etc, but the essence of things we care about is that the sum of all those elements is creatively a whole that is greater than it's parts. It isn't "a compromise", it is perfect, righteous, lovely, etc.

We all understand this, we just forget we do. In '09, when the Democrats had both houses of congress, 60 votes in the Senate, and the Presidency, their and the MSM view was "We won!!". Now, having recently discovered that the SCOTUS exists and having to deal with evil Republicans in the House and less than 60 votes in the Senate, the holy writ of the day is COMPROMISE!!!

We are instinctively drawn to personalities like Steve Jobs, and to exceptional nations like the US was when we wrote that Constitution. It wasn't a blueprint for compromise, it was a blueprint for the greatest nation that the world had ever seen.

The US once "put a dent in the universe". Let's stop choosing safety over excellence before we have neither!

It's All Hopeless

Op-Ed Columnist - Freedom’s Just Another Word - NYTimes.com

When reality becomes apparent to liberals, their heart turns to hopelessness. Their shining knights of goodness -- currently BO, formerly Slick Wille, and in the 7o's, Jimmuh, of "Desert Classic" fame were all certain (in their minds) to achieve greatness upon election, but their images end up needing much burnishing of the kind that can only be gotten by working to tarnish those of Republican presidents -- even those from decades ago. In the Democrat mind, their leaders stand tall because they have buried their counterparts to the waist in mud. The way BO is going, it looks like they are going to need more mud. Perhaps BO will look "tall" if Reagan is buried to his ears.

I remember the Carter time -- the twin spots of Vietnam and Watergate could never and should never be expunged from our American political soul (the only kind of soul that Democrats will admit to). The situation was not fixable -- and of course, in their minds, it was not fixed by the '80s ... as Rich says in the article, a "cartoonish" era. America was and is a tarnished place -- racist, sexist, militaristic, unkind to the poor. In need of massive change, not jingoistic cheering of the Reagan sort. Oh, how sad the '80s were for guys like Rich.

Now, 30 years later, the twin spots of Iraq and "overspending" under Bush have added yet more rot to that imaginary American "political soul". There is a lot of sadness in being a liberal -- the only thing that apparently approaches "happy" is pointing out the supposed horror of being a conservative. There was a brief 2 years of hope under Slick Willie, before those hopes were dashed by Newt and that horrible band of pirates taking the house that had so rightly belonged to the Democrats for 50 years.

Now, after owning that house for 4 short years, and the whole of government for a mere two, they survey a wreckage beyond what they beheld in '94 and possibly commensurate with the devastation of '80. How can it be so?? They are so good, so right, so intelligent, and yet the powers of reality seem to work against them -- yes, yes, it MUST be that "political soul", corrupted by the evil right ... with their lies and machinations of power cooked in kettles by Rupert Murdoch and the demons of Fox news.

Oh, the pain ... the sadness. The little people are blinded and even the brilliant BO has failed to transmit the proper message to their sorry "political souls" ... oh, the humanity!! Perhaps if we put on sack cloth and ashes and tended our boils alone in the wilderness -- then, maybe then, we could see the truth of life as seen by guys like Rich. Yes, there ought to be the campaign mantra of the Democrats --- vote for us, pay your penance in poverty and pain, admit to your political sins and willingly accept your punishment. Only by seeing the decadence and failing of America and by being very very sorry for the sins of electing evil people like Bush and Reagan is there hope of atonement for America -- and even then, it is but very very dim!

I think I'm beginning to understand why Howard Dean's favorite New Testament book was "Job". To the liberal mind, that IS reality!!

We Came We Saw, We Lost Interest (Moon, Shuttle)

RealClearPolitics - The Moon We Left Behind

Just read it all. I'm half through "Apollo" by Murry and Cox that I'll Blog on later, but the lament of 40 lost years of the American and human spirit of exploration and conquest is a sad tale. In remembering and reading the histories of that era, we get some sense of the focus and passion that we lost.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive. 

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

BO Relativism

RealClearPolitics - Hovering on High: Obama Surveys the World

The essence of fascism is the equivalence of all on a moral and very earthly plane, so that the brilliant leader of day -- Hitler 70 years ago in Germany, BO here today can make their Olympian pronouncements as the nearest thing in a godless world to holy writ.

Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see. Traveling the world, he brings the gospel of understanding and godly forbearance. We have all sinned against each other. We must now look beyond that and walk together to the sunny uplands of comity and understanding. He shall guide you.

The sheep are prepared, be it a foreign policy of bowing scraping profuse apology, buying the car companies to force Americans to buy the cars that BO and the climate Nazis approve of, or providing us with a health care system as as soulless as the post office, the fascists are on the march.

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds -- while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well -- but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge? 

That's the problem with Obama's transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn't mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

The sheep become so used to the dialectic of "on one hand this and the other ...", while the supposed comparisons are more like "in one universe thus, and in some other, not related universe ...". It seems that with media support, the level of critical thought for many is nil.

Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership, but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one's own country.

Actually, distorting history is far worse than that. Along with the constant false equivalence rhetoric it prepares the weak minded for the removal of the "other side" as "too dangerous". Some 88 year old crackpot shoots someone in the holocaust museum, a lone gunman shoots a late term abortionist ... Rush Limbaugh says something controversial -- how long can we "put up with this dangerous hate"?? The preparation for the complete destruction of any opposition to BO is now being sown in earnest.

Krugman's America has a Soul?

Op-Ed Columnist - Reclaiming America’s Soul - NYTimes.com

Wow, Paulie is a pretty strong leftist, I always thought he would have been a strict "randomness is god" materialist. Why would nature, let alone a nation, suddenly develop "a soul", and what would it look like?

Well, certainly not the Constitution to Paulie -- I've not seen any limits on what he finds acceptable for confiscation of private property, let alone the power of the federal government. He seems to be very sure of himself though.

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

Never? Golly. Like what "moral ideals"? Hatred for Republicans? BJs for all in the oval office and perjury is cool as long as you are a Democrat? Buying votes with other peoples money? Avoiding putting caterpillars on terrorists?

Slick Willie was doing foreign renditions, and it was the CIA that asked for the ability to use "enhanced interrogation", not the Bush administration. Anybody want to take a guess how Slick might have handled any request for executive guidance on interrogation methods? I'm thinking "don't ask, don't tell" was probably a really important Slickster policy for a lot more than what we know about.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

WOW, that is quite a paragraph -- first of all, Paulie knows "facts". He has defined the line for torture for starters, and there is no need to write any memos trying to figure it out. Writing memos is beside the point -- the fact that the previous 4 CIA directors as well as the current one did not want even the memos released is a "non-point". It was BUSH that INSTITUTED the "torture policy" -- the fact that the CIA REQUESTED it has nothing to do with it. What is more, Pauli knows WHY! It was to extract "false confessions" to justify the war!! Man, that is really amazing -- how come both the Senate and the house, including most Democrats voted for the war WITHOUT any such confessions at all??

How mushy does one's head have to be to listen to this guy? I would love to see Pauli spend say "15 min" pointing out his "vision of the soul of America" to old General US Grant and General Sherman in a nice Union camp after one of the major battles. Suppose they ever had any captured rebel soldiers that needed to be asked a few questions? Suppose they wrote a lot of "memos"?

My guess is that Pauli would pee his pants the first instant Grant or Sherman focused his attention on him. His inflated ego would just start folding in on itself as he realized that America really did have a soul, but it was once so real and powerful that just being exposed to a couple of embodiments of it would be too much for the sort of maggot that now infests the rapidly decaying carcass of our once great nation.

The "Southern Strategy"

Op-Ed Columnist - Bigger Than Bush - NYTimes.com

Here we have a standard little "assertion that requires no support" from the NYT recent Nobel Prize winning "economist".

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves.Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

Let's look at a little number relative to the Civil Rights act of 1964:

The original House version:

• Democratic Party: 152-96   (61%-39%)
• Republican Party: 138-34   (80%-20%)

The Senate version:

• Democratic Party: 46-21   (69%-31%)
• Republican Party: 27-6   (82%-18%)

Now I know that the MSM constantly harps about the "fact" of "Nixon's Southern Strategy", with the not very subtle message being claim that the "Republican party was nothing but a bunch of racists", but one would think that a short look at the numbers above might indicate that the idea that the Democrat party, the party that did all it could to allow slavery to live on in the 1800's and spent the 100 years from 1865-1965 as the party of Jim Crow wasn't exactly "individually responsible for the voting rights act".

Yes, the Democrats had huge majorities in both houses of congress, but it was really REPUBLICAN VOTES that allowed this to happen. The DEMOCRATS from the south were filibustering, and 46 votes isn't going to break a filibuster! 82% voting for the act is a lot better than 69%! One might have some idea that the party that fought the bill tooth and nail and had 30% of it's members in the Senate voting against it might be seen as less than "a champion of the black man in America"--but one would not have taken the media and general lack of public interest in critical thought into consideration. Something repeated enough times tends to become true to most people, so the idea that Republicans are some sort of racists has become "truth" to many Americans.

So Krugman feels that the worm has turned--ding dong, the evil Republicans are dead, long live king BO! Hopefully we have entered an era where facts are no longer a factor and we can all prosper by being bailed out!

How Bad Can Presidents Be? (malaise)

Here is a YouTube of the old peanut farmer himself telling us that "the end is very near". By golly, it is 30 years later and we are still here! Not only that, we seemed to have MUCH more and MUCH cheaper gas once we got Mr doom and gloom out of there. Can the world get darker than Jimmuh? I bet we are about to find out!

The Official Democrat Platform for Election

Uh, well, from 1864, against that warmongering Republican Abraham Lincoln. I guess they only seem to have inconsistency in the short view. When one considers historic willingness to cut and run before the job is done, they really ARE a lot more consistent that I give them credit for. They really DO love that Constitution-unless they are of course trampling it with Federal regulation of business, finding new Federal rights like abortion, taking away specific enumerated rights like that of bearing arms, etc. It is very much worth the short read, some things indeed never change:

Resolved, That in the future, as in the past, we will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution as the only solid foundation of our strength, security, and happiness as a people, and as a framework of government equally conducive to the welfare and prosperity of all the States, both Northern and Southern.

Resolved, That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.

Resolved, That the direct interference of the military authorities of the United States in the recent elections held in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and a repetition of such acts in the approaching election will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means and power under our control.

Resolved, That the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired, and they hereby declare that they consider that the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution — the subversion of the civil by military law in States not in insurrection; the arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial, and sentence of American citizens in States where civil law exists in full force; the suppression of freedom of speech and of the press; the denial of the right of asylum; the open and avowed disregard of State rights; the employment of unusual test-oaths; and the interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms in their defense is calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union and the perpetuation of a Government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.

Resolved, That the shameful disregard of the Administration to its duty in respect to our fellow citizens who now are and long have been prisoners of war and in a suffering condition, deserves the severest reprobation on the score alike of public policy and common humanity.

Resolved, That the sympathy of the Democratic party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiery of our army and sailors of our navy, who are and have been in the field and on the sea under the flag of our country, and, in the events of its attaining power, they will receive all the care, protection, and regard that the brave soldiers and sailors of the republic have so nobly earned.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

I'm behind in my book reports, and this book has to be passed on for my son to read, so no more procrastination! My rediscovery of reading history continues to be enjoyable thanks to this book by Walter Issacson. An American icon comes to life in a solidly researched and written book that shows the human side of Franklin, but doesn't try to bring down the guy that edited Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence from "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" to "we hold these truths to be self-evident". Through the magic of the internet you can see it here. That is an example of a historic edit!

Franklin was the best known American of his day and one of the best known scientists in the world as well. His work with electricity was groundbreaking, but possibly more important he was a practical tinkerer and experimenter much as Edison subsequently was that sought to apply his brilliance to matters of utility rather than theory. lightning rods to save buildings, bifocals, better stoves, printing improvements and many other little inventions.

Franklin was the solid champion of "the middling people", really the very founder of the idea of the American Middle Class and the concept of upward mobility. Sometimes referred to in jest as "America's first Yuppie"--kind of funny that it took until the Ronald Reagan '80s for that term to be created. The elites have always hated the idea that the common man could better themselves and be upwardly mobile. Ben believed that self improvement was possible through education, self discipline, and hard work.. In those times of rigid class and nobility, the idea that "anyone could improve their selff" was cutting edge thinking. Although still very much aware of the dangers of "rabble rule", Franklin was much more of a believer in democracy than the rest of the founding fathers. He is the only founding father to have been involved in and a signer to all four of the founding documents: The Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, treaty with England, and The Constitution. He worked closely with Jefferson and Adams in France, and when the new nation was meeting in Philadelphia, under the mulberry tree at his home was a common informal meeting place.

Many great businessmen including Thomas Mellon and Andrew Carnegie found inspiration in the maxims of frugality and hard work that both Ben and his literary creation "Poor Richard" described.. Franklin is often thought of as the father of the self-help movement. Four of his written rules of conduct included:

). Frugality
2. Truthfulness
3. Industriousness
4. Speak ill of no man

He did very well with 1 and 3, is pretty solid on 2, and like anyone, struggled with 4--and the issue

Franklin's favorite theme--"slow and steady diligence is the way to wealth". Is anathema to the left, because such thought makes both success and poverty significantly in the domain of "individual responsibility", a concept they find completely odius. Worse, it would indicate that there is the potential of virtue as opposed to only corruption in an earned dollar. The only kind of wealth that the left tends to like is that which is inherited--or in the case of John Kerry, married into.

His view on social engineering is summarized by: "Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence we need to be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good."

He was a master of the simple yet elegant maxim. Most of them were heavily borrowed from even more ancient statements, but the following are attributed to him--some much more famous than others:

"A penny saved is a penny earned"
"Haste makes waste"
"Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"
"Half the truth is often a great lie"
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine"
"There's more old drunkards than old doctors"
"He's a fool than cannot conceal his wisdom"
"Nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes"

At one point in his life Franklin put the following goals for a worthy life to paper and is said to have attempted to follow these rules during his life:
1 Temperance - Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation
2 Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation
3 Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have it's time
4 Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve
5 Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to yourself or others (ie. waste nothing)
6 Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful, cut off all unnecessary actions
7 Sincerity:Use no hurtful deceit, think innocently and justly and if you speak, speak accordingly
8 Justice: Wrong none by doing injury or by omitting thne benefits that are your duty
9 Moderation: Avoid extremes, forbare resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve
10 Cleanliness: Tolerate no no uncleanliness in body clothes or habituation
11 Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles , or at accidents common or unavoidable
12 Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of another's peace or reputation.

A friend suggested that he missed "humility", which Franklin agreed with, so added a 13th virtue. He was quite libertine sexually for the time and fathered a son out of wedlock that he did care for. He tended to befriend and was certainly flirtatious with much younger women. He tended to treat their intellectual curiosity seriously and assist in their education. No doubt having one of the worlds foremost scientists paying intellectual attention to a young lady was very unusual in the day, interesting to the young lady, and no doubt the cause of plenty of disucssions about "reasons". (at the time, the intellectual development of women wasn't considered a high priority).

There is a lot of "conjecture" of course about "how far the relationships went", but I have a lot more patience for Franklin than say Billy C for a few reasons:
a). He didn't support or sign any sexual harassment law
b). None of the women were in his employ
c). He seemed to actually care about them, and they about him for decades -- many letters. Yes, a few flirtatious in content, but far from pornographic, and the most of them interested in their lives, studies, thoughts, etc.

Is that a "double standard"? I'd claim it as having some standards as opposed to none. Those that would lump Ben in with a Kennedy or a Clinton because he seemed to "like women a little too much" are well on the way to no standards at all. There is no evidence that Clinton cared one whit for the women he was involved with beyond his sexual gratification. I do hold him in higher regard than Kennedy, although Clinton may have raped one, he didn't kill any. There is reasonable evidence that Franklin's relationships were chaste and positive for both parties and that the rumors to the contrary are based on the acknowledged fact that he did father a child out of wedlock prior to marriage, and some cases of "opportunity" with some of the young ladies whose company he obviously enjoyed. Being a family man was certainly not Franklin's strong suit, but it seems that much of his reputation may have been based on what today we would applaud as "affirmative action" for young intelligent women.

The book is well worth the time to read. I found a lot to love about old Ben, and will look forward to the opportunity to learn more about him in the future.

Gettysburg, Stephen W Sears

https://www.amazon.com/Gettysburg-Stephen-W-Sears/dp/039556476X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

I read this book before and during the trip out to Gettysburg and DC. What a marvelous opportunity for education; to be able to read an excellent book, and then take in the sights of the actual battlefield, having the history and geography come to life in that special way. If I had such an opportunity as a youth, I may well have been a historian today ... or who knows what else. We have a desperate need to find ways to leverage our computer and video technology as well as travel to improve the quality of education. How sad that for all the advances since since the Civil War, the most common method of education is STILL to put a bunch of kids in a room with a teacher. Other than the dress and the quality of the building, they may as well be in Civil War Times. Maybe it was better then? Only the children of the North had to deal with "Union Teachers" ;-).

The book is very well written and focuses mostly on the actual events leading up to, during, and immediately after the battle. Lee and his army were very confident after whipping the Yankees at Chancellorsville, but it appears that the loss of Stonewall Jackson may have been more grave than they realized. They came north to beat the Union on their own turf and turn public opinion against the Republicans and the war. Some things really do stay the same.

As a business person, one of the items that jumps out are the managerial, political and logistical problems of a war effort the size of two 80-100K armies maneuvering, being supplied, planning, communicating and acting. Naturally there are vast differences in style between generals, and all of them make mistakes. Even "St Lincoln" seemed to be unable to understand the difficulties involved. I had not remembered that Hooker was replaced with Meade 3 days before the fighting began on July 1, 1863. Jeb Stuart set off to "ride around Hooker's army" and ended up having a new general named while he was riding.

The issue of Jeb Stuart and the missing cavalry is a topic made well known during the book, but never fully made clear what really caused it. It is clear that Stuart picked up a Union wagon train that slowed up down, and just seemed to run into a lot of bad luck, but the fact that he was not there to provide intelligence and screen the movements of the Rebels was a critical factor in Lee's poor showing.

At least in this battle, not dealing with Stuart being missing was one of the many areas in which Lee seemed to lack the flexibility to adapt to the situation that he found himself in. Lee is considered almost a God in the south, and Pickett is often blamed for the failure of the charge, but it is clear in this book that the primary responsibility rests squarely with Lee. Had Longstreet's advice been taken and the Confederates flanked Meade and got on high ground between Gettysburg and Washington, Meade would have been forced to attack, and the Democrats would have most likely had their day.

Gettysburg is the point where rifled gun barrels and precision cannon fire made defense of a position a real advantage. We can see today where air power makes staying stationary pretty much suicidal. Prior to Gettysburg, the inaccuracy and difficulty in reloading of the smooth bore musket gave the advantage to the rapid charge. The movie characters like "Outlaw Josie Wales" give some idea of the technique -- 4, 6, or even more loaded pistols on a brave horseman charging into the line and killing numbers at close range, then galloping behind the lines to cover, reloading, and killing more -- including unarmed supply workers, horses, etc.

Massed infantry with cartridge rifled barrel firearms and coordinated cannon fire turned the infantry and cavalry charge into a slaughter.

Over 50K soldiers died in 3 days of fighting at Gettysburg. With all that people have in this country today, most can't think of anything worth dying for, yet Muslims living in a culture that is the antithesis of what the left calls "good" are willing to die either individually or in large groups. The soldiers from the South died to preserve a way of life--a way of life that included slavery to be sure, but also honor, tradition and the right of states to exert political control greater than the federal government. We ALL paid a high price for the South's loss.

The main factor that aligns Lincoln with modern Republican ideas is "principal over popularity". He was forced to make a decision between conflicting principles--the value of the freedom of the Southerners to govern themselves, vs the huge loss of individual freedom caused by slavery. The Democrats were of course the party of "the easy way", the way of public opinion. As political opportunists they picked up the pieces of the civil war and presided over the "little slavery" of blacks in the south under Jim Crow for 100 years.

It is a book that I will long remember having walked the streets of Gettysburg and toured Little Round Top, The Wheat-field, The Peach Orchard, Cemetery Hill and stared at The High Water Mark. I hope to have more opportunity to mix book and maybe even classroom study with other areas of the world. The Panama Canal and parts of Europe are a couple that leap to mind.

1776 and Mixed

One of the books that I'm currently reading is "1776" by David McCullough. If one depended on "the odds" for America to happen, it wouldn't have. In those days, they believed in "providence" and "the hand of God", and for some reason, both seemed to often come to the rescue of the US. The US declared Independence in 1776, the Constitution was ratified in 1789, and we fought a REAL civil war in 1860. Can Iraq get everything done in 3-4 years? It seems that with the modern media and a good half the population, it is never too early to declare failure. "Cut and run", the motto of much of current America.

Speaking of running, the French continue to show the wages of socialist give-away governments. Maturity, taking responsibility, delaying gratification, entering the arena to compete and being willing to try, fail, and try again, and valuing striving for personal independence no matter the outcome. Those are characteristics that have to be worked at every day. never come easy, and can always slip away. Learning to believe that one is entitled ... to a job, a home, a lifestyle, that others are responsible, that we are victims, that things are "unfair". Those lessons are easily learned and take no effort, and are VERY hard to unlearn. The French appear to have learned them well.

I heard a bit of old Kevin Phillips blathering about the evils of the current Republican party on NPR at noon today. He is an old "country club Republican" ... the sort that can't believe that the party is now full of a bunch of middle and lower-middle class "evangelicals". The way he says "evangelical" reminds one of how you might say "child molester". The problems of the world are pretty much all caused by people that say they believe in God according to Kevin. Of course, none really do believe, some are just playing at it to lead others, and many are just too foolish to realize that they are being taken. In the old country club days, rich Republicans were willing to sit down and be the lapdogs of the Democrats, and only occasionally complain about a deficit or something. It was so much more civilized, and nobody got crazy about religion. Oh, for the good old days.

What is wrong with the world today? Pretty much all the same things that have always been wrong ... and right. Technology lets us see a little farther and have a lot more, but life is still pretty short, and most of it is spent doing "less than the best". Like a lot of things, "wrong" depends on expectations. A view that life is a gift, grace is a gift, and we have the freedom to make our own success, that is one outlook. That everything is going to pot, today is worse than yesterday, and tomorrow is worse yet, and especially, that somebody, somewhere is taking advantage in an unfair way, that is another perspective.

Which kind of people created America in 1776? What kind are in Iraq? What kind are in France? and in the US, is it still 50/50, or are the polls right and we are headed toward acting like the French? BTW, I don't know about the Iraqis ... they may not succeed, but I don't really expect them to be WAY better than our founding fathers.

A lot of the future is very hard to predict, but there are a lot of signs that it will be a competitive future, and that competition will be impossible to hide from and maintain anything like the level of lifestyle that Americans have become accustomed to. "Entitlement" isn't a word that the global economy seems to care about much.

Fighting the Last War

The following is stolen from The Best of the Web, I couldn’t see how to write the sentiment any better.

"In a letter to his top deputy in Iraq, al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader said the United States 'ran and left their agents' in Vietnam and the jihadists must have a plan ready to fill the void if the Americans suddenly leave Iraq," the Associated Press reports from Washington: 

"Things may develop faster than we imagine," Ayman al-Zawahri wrote in a letter to his top deputy in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam--and how they ran and left their agents--is noteworthy. . . . We must be ready starting now." . . .
"More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media," he wrote.

Is Iraq another Vietnam? Zarqawi thinks so, as do "antiwar" politicians here in America and many in the media. And in this respect, at least, Iraq does resemble Vietnam: America's enemies and domestic opponents of the war, acting in sync if not in concert, are attempting to defeat the war effort "in the battlefield of the media."

But there the similarity ends. For one thing, the media are nowhere near as monolithic, or as powerful, as they were during the Vietnam era. Arguably the war in Vietnam was lost when Walter Cronkite declared as much after the Tet Offensive. Cronkite's lapse into advocacy was, as Newsweek's Howard Fineman argued in January, the beginning of the end of "the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press." Cronkite and his successors squandered the public trust they had earned, with the result that no journalist today--no, not even your humble Moose Blogger!--comes anywhere close to wearing the mantle of "most trusted man in America."

For another, there is no serious antiwar movement today. Antiwar protests in 2005 consist of the same crackpot rent-a-mobs who long before 9/11 were disrupting meetings of groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Cindy Sheehan is a case in point: Sold by the media as a grieving Everymom, she turned out to be an America-hating lunatic. Thus, as we noted Monday, there is no move among American politicians, outside the Angry Left fringe, to withdraw from Iraq or defund the effort there.( The Senate voted last Friday to give President Bush $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism, money that would push total spending for the operations beyond $350 billion. The vote was 97-0)

But what about those public opinion polls that show a majority of Americans think liberating Iraq was "a mistake"? The same polls show a majority opposing a precipitous pullout. This seems to be a contradiction, but it really isn't. The idea that Iraq was a "mistake" reflects anxiety about another Vietnam-like defeat; the opposition to withdrawal reflects a determination not to let that happen.

In short, those who hope for another Vietnam appear to have succeeded, for the moment, in persuading most Americans to fear another Vietnam. But that is a far cry from persuading them to accept another Vietnam.

One of the many things I never understand about the left is if it gives them any pause to be in agreement with the people that one would assume are their enemies as well as the enemies of all civilized people. Guys that like to set up roadside bombs, cut off peoples heads with glee, and unquestionably took credit for 9-11 are matter of factly saying that they are thinking that the anti-war folks and the MSM in the US might be “winning” soon, which would bring the troops out of Iraq, so al-Qaeda should “be ready”.

Since I eschew the “left is stupid” idea, I’m left with thoughts like the following:

• They are incompetent or deluded on this. They either don’t care to follow the news well enough, or have decided that there is some conspiracy making things like this note up and the terrorists are really living in fear of the US leaving Iraq.
• They simply don’t care. 9-11, or “9-11x1000” they feel the US deserves it, and it doesn’t matter what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each US soldiers life is just too precious and it doesn’t matter how many future civilians may be lost.
• What is important is that Bush proves to be a failure. In some ways, the higher the cost, the better. This US system, and especially any US with Republicans in charge needs to be changed by any means possible. If that takes a US loss in Iraq and massive terrorist attacks on US soil, it is a small price to pay for “a decent government in Washington”.

My gut tells me it is some version of “all of the above” with a lot of Bush anger and wishful or avoidance thinking about the future to drive the not caring or not looking at who their bedfellows are. This is a problem that goes way back though. The Jane Fonda’s, and even the John Kerry’s of the Vietnam era really didn’t seem to mind being associated with Ho Chi Minn or other North Vietnamese leaders that turned out to be responsible for the massacre of millions. In an even bigger picture others had no problem with being on the side of the USSR or agents of the USSR in Nicaragua, Cuba, or other places. This isn’t a new phenomenon for the left.

One can only hope that the BOW is right about the polls and Americans are able to see beyond the MSM into what needs to be done, even (especially) when it is hard.

Miles Gone By

Not even slow savoring could prevent getting to the end of “Miles Gone By” by William F Buckley. Very hard to imagine a life more blessed than his, and hard to picture someone making better use of that blessing than WFB. Intelligence, faith, fearlessness, great family, wealth, super education, exciting and rewarding work, great experiences in life, and the list just goes on and on.

Born to privilege, his youth was spent in Mexico, Paris, England, and much at a mansion in Connecticut called “Great Elm”. By virtue of time spent in his youth, he always spoke fluent Spanish and French as well as English, with a good deal of Latin and German thrown in from his education. Lots of horseback riding, including being in events at Rhinebeck, NY, just north of Hyde Park, where the box alongside his fathers, was that of FDR. Much sailing as a young man, a passion that he never gave up.

He did prep school at St Johns, Beaumont, in Windsor England … the very same Windsor where the name “Windsor Castle” comes from. His father took him to the airport to watch the plane of Neville Chamberlain land when he returned from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time”.

He was in the military service stateside towards the end of the War, and then on to Yale, graduating in 1950, as the class orator, I suspect with some level of honor.

 He wasn’t all business, he learned to fly in college and had a number of misadventures in airplanes, including deciding after only a couple of flights with the instructor that he would let a friend that had been a pilot in the war fly himself to Logan airport in Boston, and WFB would just fly the plane back, his first solo! The trip in was uneventful, but Buckley didn’t know how to use the radio, so took off without telling the tower, had navigational difficulties, and night was falling too fast, so he luckily found an airport, made his first solo landing and hitchhiked back to Yale. The kind of foolish and fearless personality that would perform a stunt like that often ends up dead, but sometimes they end up famous.

His first book at age 26 was “God and Man At Yale”, and it caused a huge stir. It was the first book to explicitly make that charge that higher education in the US had become anti-Christian, anti-Capitalist, and in many cases Anti-American. Leading edge thought in those days. The formulation; “I believe that the duel between Christianity and Atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle produced on another level.” is a brilliant summary of a lot of what has happened in America and the world since the 50’s.

His list of friends, associates, acquaintances is utterly amazing. Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Whittaker Chambers, Roger Moore, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman (nice pair of economists there), Claire Booth Luce, Alstair Cooke, Princess Grace, Vladimir Horowitz, Tom Wolfe, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, and on and on.

More than any other conservative of the era 1960-1980+, he was THE intellectual powerhouse of the movement, National Review was the publication of record, and “Firing Line” was the ONLY place where one could learn that there were at least one other side to most things presented in the media on TV. Liberals often loved to hate him, but they could not ignore the force of his intellect. He points out in one place, relative to his being in debates when running for Mayor of NYC; “It was widely speculated that I had an advantage, having in pursuit of unpopular ideas been frequently been required to face the opposition. I suspect-and admission against personal interest-that those points I have scored are primarily on account of their own cogency, rather than on account of any personal adeptness at formulating them.”

While he isn’t known as a modest man, in this case he is being a bit too modest, but he has a point as well. Since liberalism remains the dominate thinking in the mass media, not very many liberals have a solid understanding of how to defend their points. Their ideas are presented as the "universal"  ideas, why do they need to be defended? What WFB understood, and was able to articulate well is that the conservative position attempts very strongly to be CONSISTENT. Consistency means that there is a lot less to learn. 

Liberals need to recall that an unborn child has no right to any sort of life, but a Snail Darter in a stream somewhere has nearly unlimited rights to stop all manner of development. Kosovo is a great place to go to war without UN backing, Iraq, a few miles down the road is a TERRIBLE place to go to war without UN backing … oh, and by the way, genocide is an excellent justification in Kosovo, but it is a “who cares” in Iraq. It could go on for pages, but the point is when most of your positions are made up out of feelings, the phase of the moon, and political considerations on a given day, keeping it all straight can get very difficult. The best strategy is to curl your lip and look like you are going to cry like Bill Clinton. 

From the right though, one can lean back in their chair and pounce on the liberals like the intellectual tiger that was Buckley, and is not likely to be soon duplicated.

While he had a huge positive impact on history, the point that strikes me the most from the book is the intellect, the wit, the faith, and the pure joy of his life. His short essay on a pilgrimage to Lourdes is alone worth the price of admission. His experiences at sea, his love of sailing, boats, navigation, skiing, wines, racing at sea, and his trip to the Titanic aboard the Nautile are all captivating and so well written. He recounts how he had been told that; “Offshore yacht racing is like standing in an ice cold shower tearing up thousand dollar bills”.

I write this on a day when one of the Walton heirs, number seven richest in the world, died in an ultra light aircraft near Jackson Wyoming. Many of the wealthy realize that challenge, risk, and loss of physical comfort are an unavoidable part of living a worthwhile life. You can’t really buy the skill to compete in an off shore yacht race, and you certainly can’t buy the weather.

I’m very glad I bought a high quality hardcover of this one. I hope to pull it down off the shelves and give it a read once every decade or so as long as I’m around!

Lion Hunting in Socialist Computer Utopia

The attempt to create a computer system with better graphics than reality hit a snag last night on the issue of Extended ATX vs ATX power supply. Our ASUS A8N-SLI Motherboard turns out to be “EATX”, so our super cool (and super complicated) Thermaltake Xaser V500D case is lacking a couple of pins of connector power. After massive perusal of Web, we have determined that either:

1). It makes no difference if not doing dual processors or graphics, just plug and go.
2). There is a simple “converter” that works just great, now on order for $10 and shipping

3). We need to go get a REAL EATX power supply, of which there are not many.

The “build your own computer” hobby has provided a lot of fun, and occasional significant head scratching over the years. This is one of those scratching times. The ASUS web site is amazing. It seems hard to imagine that we are the first to hit this particular snag on a MB install, yet there seems to be no mention of EATX, either in the manual or on the web. We ordered most the parts from Mwave, which I generally like, but a little bit of “cross checking” about a couple things like “did you really want to order a case with ATX power and a MB with EATX?” Would have been very helpful.

Such things would be nice, but sadly, as a programmer, I also know they are far from free. The specs aren’t well structured data, they change frequently, and the only way the software acquires the knowledge to ask is by an investment in real work.

After reading Zinn though, I now understand that the reason for this is not due to any facility of the universe that makes things complex, but rather due to the wealthy 1% of the US population conspiring to confuse us! In a 687 page death march of a book, Howard finally got to the part about how to do things better. The simplicity of it makes the horror of 100s of years of wasted humanity seem even more tragic.

“The society’s levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state – the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need – by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country – to reconstruct the economy for efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most.

We would start in our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the workforce – children, old people, “handicapped” people. Society would use the enormous energy now idle, the skills and talents now unused. Everyone would share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of our money system and be available – free – to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, and transportation.”

“The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods – a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name socialist”.

There you have it. We are close enough to nirvana that if we could take the controls away from the evil corporations and military, the basic non-competitive good nature of humans would take over with only the slight complexity of a bit of communication difficulty! I’m sure a tear is crossing your cheek right now as you consider the simplicity of it all, how close we are to bliss, and yet we have been denied entry to this paradise by our corrupt American system.

Power supply mismatches are just one very small example, but it is easy to see how the right thing would happen in Zinnworld. Little engineering conclaves, much like artist conclaves, would see their socialist brothers need for better graphics in first-person shooter games. After their “few hours” of joyful group labor providing “free” food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation to themselves and their just society, they would no doubt gather in an earthen hall to reach instant agreement on the proper standards for all manner of connections, voltages, and software parameters. I can almost hear a little socialist hymn to the benefits of agreement and sameness arising from their smiling lips as they power up the ultimate socialist game machine – there is no doubt in my mind it would be completely friendly to the environment and be the ultimate in human factors engineering as well!

It is completely breathtaking to me that after reaching the end of what I was beginning to fear was an endless diatribe against America, the family, private property, western civilization, religion, competition, capitalism, democracy, and countless other elements of our society, that “the answer” to all this is a thinly veiled threat of revolution against the system we live in, followed by two paragraphs of pabulum on some abstract utopia that bears no resemblance to anything that ever has, does, or is ever going to exist as long as nature and humans are involved.

Has Zinn really missed that competition was not exactly “created by man”? We may argue about HOW it was created, but it seems pretty obvious that it exists in nature as well as in human society. There is ONE way to make man give up the idea of personal property, and at least reduce the competition in the masses - it isn’t like it hasn’t been done before; Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. 

Zinn may not like the US, but it isn’t like the alternatives have exactly produced garden spots. It is too bad that Howard can’t spend some time in North Korea. The freedom to be paid by the state to criticize the state (university professor), and be the darling of “the permanent adversarial culture” (those that Howard hopes will eventually revolt) might look pretty inviting from a prison cell were he to try the same line of work there.

I suspect this book will kick me off into a few days of writing on what I consider the “fundamentals” of the left and right. While fortunately, over 50% of Americans would consider Howard’s ideas to be absurd (in the unlikely event that they submit to the torture of reading them), there is one thread through this book that should be taken seriously. Zinn is very much a cheerleader for violence from the left, and found the Vietnam years with their riots and bombings and lack of respect for American institutions to be very refreshing. 

This is a lull in politics, but guys like Zinn, and Chomsky are always out there, and not very far removed from men like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Harkin, and others. If you ever doubt that threats to America from people within our borders are real, and that revolution is still being preached on our own campuses, you need read no further than Howard Zinn. Fortunately, apparently even more than 50% of the teens have a better grasp on reality than Howard.

This is how he closes the book:

“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many; they are few!

Keep the right to bear arms! If the “lions” ever get out, shoot straight, and make sure you have plenty of ammo!

The Zinn of Oppression

The life of the blogging Moose has not been easy the last couple of days with a journey to Northern Wisconsin to visit Mom in the hospital, and then back this AM to attempt to still do justice to work.

I think I’ll refrain from more quotes from Zinn. One of the advantages of reading the blog ought to be that you can be spared such agonies. Suffice to say, the litany goes on … oppression of Indians, Blacks, Women, the poor, the young, in other words “the people”. All by evil private property owning, competitive, white men. So far Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby, Reggie Fowler (multi-millionaire black businessman trying to buy the Minnesota Vikings), Oprah, and even such folks are Theresa Heinz and Martha Stewart are spared mention. Apparently the net of oppression has a few holes.

I guess I have to put in one more quote:

 “The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of the wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law – all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.”

 There is some liberal gene that just HATES "patriotism" ... one can see the sneer!

It seems that is what REALLY makes Howard sick. America works! If only he could have his way, we would ALL be dirt poor, except for the Politburo, and there would be no evil of “the wealthy”. Meanwhile, rather than squatting over a ditch or living in some concrete mausoleum of state housing and standing in bread lines, we “buffers” are being “exploited” by being fattened up on cruise ships, living in suburbs with SUVs, and watching big screen TVs. All so we can serve our drone-like function of keeping the even worse oppressed … the folks with only one cell phone, a 27” color TV, and a DVD player without progressive scan … away from Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We have been duped!

If it wasn’t for America, many socialist paradises would seem, well, more like paradise, and less like 3rd world hell-holes. Howard is more up front about the basic fact that tends to bother a lot of liberals about America. It is so damned successful in spite of all the extreme flaws that they point out at any chance they get. To see such fair-minded people have such an unfair reality regularly rubbed in their faces is part of the sadness of this country. I’m sure Oprah would much rather go back to Africa, but it is likely hard to find suitable lodging for her Gulfstream in many areas, and thus she is forced to soldier on as an oppressed black woman in this unfair system.

I hope I can sleep with the guilt of our collective sins tonight.