Real Trumps Imaginary

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Apocalypse Now? Highly Unlikely

I well remember the global cooling crisis of the mid 70's -- it was much more academic then political as global warming has been, but anyone with any brains KNEW that we were on the verge of an ice age. "Shortage" was also the major watchword -- we were "out" of oil, metal, food -- you name it. "The end was near" -- unless of course we turned to the brilliant leadership of more Democrats. I remember the Carter drumbeat on campus -- one which I listened to and proudly went out and cast my first ever Presidential vote for that great reformer from Plains!

This is especially true:

Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

The areas that I know the very most about are areas where I have very little to no "belief" -- I know both what I know, and what I don't know. The set of what I don't know is always painfully larger than the set of what I do, but that is the price of knowing -- it much increases dealing in probability and reduces dealing in certainty. Such is the shape of the real world.

Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.

Indeed.

The Feeling of What Happens

I like to read about the human brain, and especially the subject of consciousness, so this book by Antonio Damasio was interesting TO ME -- but probably not to "normal humans".

It provides essentially a lot of detail on the theory that there are two types of consciousness -- "core consciousness" and "extended consciousness". He considers core to be an artifact of the body reflecting "current state" into some key low level brain stem regions that he calls the "proto self", or the mental image of the living body. There is a lot of discussion of how one "becomes awake" -- at least which regions of the brain have to be operating and maybe what is happening in them.

"Extended consciousness" takes our whole brain -- long term memory, our "life's story". While our "core" pretty much operates in "1 min short term memory bursts", the "extended" keeps track of all we have been and our hopes of all we will be -- even the core is clearly "human" in that it is more than animal, but it is the extended consciousness that is what we see as the "highest form or life on the planet".

There are lots of detailed long names for parts of the brain that nobody but a practicioner is likely to completely remember and keep straight, and there are a lot of very interesting stories about what happens when certain parts of the brain are damaged by some sort of disease or injuury. These are often interesting as well as scary.

I liked the book, but unless one has a true interest in quite a bit of depth on the neurological underpinnings of consciousness, it will be a slog.

A Moderate Gets Worried

Op-Ed Columnist - The Worst-Case Scenario - NYTimes.com

David Brooks is the NYT "token conservative" -- he is essentially "just to the left of Olympia Snow and Susan Collins". I don't know if he ever actually came out for BO, but he was close.

Here is a bottom line that I think he essentially gets right:

The crisis was labeled an economic crisis, but it was really a
psychological crisis. It was caused by a mood of fear and uncertainty,
which led consumers to not spend, bankers to not lend and entrepreneurs
to not risk. No amount of federal spending could change this psychology
because uncertainty about the future remained acute.

Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another — from
a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of
optimism to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain
financial habits applied to a society in which they did not. In the new
world, investors had no basis from which to calculate risk. Families
slowly deleveraged. Bankers had no way to measure the future value of
assets.

People indeed have a lot of brain cells, but at the bottom, our emotional repertoire is likely not much different from the family pet, with fear being by far the easiest lever to pull even unwittingly. Our cognitive / rational fore-brain only gets to play when our emotional low to mid-brain is satisfied that "the crisis is over".

The lefties were constantly in accusation mode that the Bush team "played on people's fears" relative to terrorism -- as if the worst foreign attack on US soil since the revolution wasn't something that was going to engender a legitimate fear response that was best dealt with by taking action to remove as much of the potential for future attack as possible.

When the new President gets up and tells us that if we don't throw $800 Billion + of pork fat to the beauracrats in DC, "the recession will turn into something we can't recover from", and then his Treasury Secretary gets up and says he is going to throw $1.2 Trillion around with no plan and all, while the President's appointees are dropping or backing out like Mormons at a Gay Bar, the scent of fear overcomes even the scent of BO.

The Rubicon has been crossed, the die has been cast -- at some deep level, even BO seems to now realize that he doesn't know what he and his troops are doing and that we may in fact head to some place that is "not recoverable". I'd argue that as long as he doesn't start down the path of the "Fairness Doctrine", and radical gun control, America WILL recover -- but it could be a very long time with an awful lot of pain.

Deja Vu

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Runaway Stimulus

As Will points out, we have been here before -- many times. How far will we fall and how fast? Nobody knows that. Will we recover? Nobody really knows that either. Unless our descent is total and "complete" -- say terrorist attack with Smallpox that takes out 70% of the population or so, there will likely be some sort of "tomorrow" that some living today will be around to recognize, but from this vantage, it is looking to me like the likely aftermath of this "change" may exceed any pain in the history of the US.

Lincoln is good for magnitude -- but maybe consider Jefferson Davis, or what would have ensued if Lincoln had LOST the Civil War? Think of the Post BO US as maybe Atlanta after Sherman.

Forget FDR, think Hitler. The  blind cheering crowds for "Change", "Hope", "Yes We Can" and the speed of the drive to the politicization of all while claiming "all is beyond politics" is so reminiscent of the Third Reich that one has to be willfully ignorant of history to fail to see the parallel. Think Berlin after WWII.

Will points out one that I would not have come up with:

Not yet a third of the way through the president's "first 100 days," he
and we should remember that it was not FDR's initial burst of activity
in 1933 that put the phrase "100 days" into the Western lexicon. It was
Napoleon's frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from
Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

This last quote makes the same point I've made a number of times -- the parallel to the period of '65 to '82. My current prayer is that we can sneak by somehow with ONLY that level of despair and destruction -- my reason tells me that we may likely end up wishing for something as "mild" as the '30s or even the Civil War. BO as Lincoln indeed.

In December 1965, John Maynard Keynes, although 19 years dead, was,
as today, enjoying one of his recurring resurrections as vindicator of
government management of the economy by manipulating "aggregate
demand." Keynes' visage was on Time magazine's cover and the
accompanying story said that happy days were here again and here to
stay.

President Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great
Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, "have used Keynesian
principles" to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price
stability: "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by
their adherence to Keynes' central theme" that a modern economy can
operate at "top efficiency" only with government "intervention and
influence." So, "economists have descended in force from their ivory
towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important
leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called
upon to forecast, plan and decide." Ten years later, the "misery index"
-- the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate -- was 19.9, heading
for 22 percent in 1980.

Not Likely

Commentary: Obama should have told us the whole sad truth - CNN.com

The concepts of "Democrat" and "Truth" are pretty much like "Prostitute" and "Fidelity" -- they make for odd sentences.

To be to the left means that "you are special" -- not only you individually, but your party, your group, your race, your "whatever". You have carefully achieved being "in the mainstream" -- from 1865-1965, that meant "Jim Crowe, overt racism against blacks, big corrupt unions, ties with the mafia, etc". Things changed SOME since, now all Democrats LOVE all minorities -- except for actual practicing Christians of course, but much is the same.

"Democrat truth" is how they "see/feel" about whatever they are talking about TODAY!!! They have NO "truth that lasts". So maybe he OUGHT to have been truthful, but that is an expectation that one really never ought have about a Democrat, let alone BO.

Over The Ledge

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama Stimulates Fear, Doom & Gloom

NPR was in full chortle mode this AM as they discussed the huge victory for BO, a COMPROMISE PACKAGE brought about by those 3 courageous Republicans -- the RINO Twins (Collins and Snowe), and the "Spectre" -- of destriction, despair and death.

When the Republicans were in charge, they NEVER had more than 54 Senators, so they ALWAYS had to get 6 votes in the Senate -- yet when they would pass legislation, it was "partisan politics" and "party lines" -- with Harry Reid able to point out how "The Bush Administration and Republicans refused all the attempts of the wonderful Democrats to make this bill better" -- and meantime, 6 of them voted to avoid filibuster and no doubt got more than their pound of flesh, of which we will never know.

Why is that important? Because even this AM, while seemingly giving strong thanks to the 3 Republicans that broke ranks, the seeds were being sold of "how much worse they made the bill". David Obey of WI hedged the bets sniff of "it isn't big enough". As is always the case with the MSM and Democrats, they lack the conviction of what they do, since they have no firm conviction of anything -- freedom, the abilites of the American people, the rightness of the Constitution, or a faith in God for that matter.

So they "hedge" -- and they would STILL hedge if they had all seats in both houses of congress, because the essence of liberalism is NEVER taking responsibility and NEVER staking yourself to a consistent position. Every business person and investor, not to mention soldier on the line, knows that it is ONLY putting yourself in a spot where you can succeed, fail and KNOW THE DIFFERENCE do you even begin to really exist. All else is a form of self negation -- by never taking responsibility for who you are, what you do, or the outcomes of same, you have effectively denied your own existence. Your life isn't even a life -- typically, it is only a "complaint".

800+ Billion Other Ways

Commentary: Republican strategy of deny, delay and do nothing - CNN.com

Begala and James Carvelle were Slick Willie's combination spinmeisters and attack dogs. It seems that they have come back to town to help shore up BO. Here Begala picks up a thread from BO himself prior to the press conference. It is a good study in how the sheep are fleeced.

The core is to act much like a magician with misdirection -- BO insinuated that it was either "His way or NOTHING" relative to the "stimulous". A slightly better mathamatician may point out right away that just numerically alone there are over $800 Billion answers between his and "nothing".

While not a direct lie (I'm sure there is SOME Republican, SOMEWHERE that wants to do NOTHING), it awfully hard to find the space to call it "misleading". I think that any fair minded person would realize that if it was Bush making the claim, it would be called "A LIE!!!!" by Begala himself and most all of the MSM. So BO's statement is mathamatically false by $800 Billion+, and rhetorically as close to out and out lying as one can get even with a massive benefit of the doubt.

Do some Republicans think that there should be some thought put in before $800+ Billion is spent? Well, yes indeed -- I guess that is "delay", but if one thinks about it for more than one hyperpartisan second, I think most of us would at least give some passing thought before we plunked down $800 Billion -- especially on what won't be spent until 2010 and 2011 -- exactly where IS the fire on that? Oh, yes -- it is of course $800 Billion that we don't have. I guess he is "honest" on "Delay", but is that not potentially a GOOD thing?

"Deny". I think most folks in business, fianance and the markets feel that the constant "this is another depression", "capitalism has failed", "this is the worst economy since the depression", etc is not, shall we say, "helpful". In much the same vein as "$800 Billion or nothing", there are some finer points between a GDP boom of 6% and absolute economic zero -- 100% unemployment and 0 output, everyone starves. Although firmly in charge of both houses of congress and busily spinning economic woes from those posts for two years prior to the election, Democrats (and the MSM) felt that the economy needed to be strongly talked down. I must admit, they did one heck of a job and folks are pretty well demoralized. Good job!

I'm thinking though, that one fine day they may wake up and realize that those reins of power are ALL firmly in their hands. They only need a couple Republican RINO votes to get around the filibuster rule, and they need no others. The only reason that they need "Bi-partisanship" is political cover -- as BO so succinctly put it, "they won". At some point, I suspect that Americans will tire of "the failed policies" rhetoric and ask the question "what have you Democrats done for us lately?". Something tells me that "Deny" will be raised to a whole new level!

Dow Votes No on Porkulous

Senate Passes $838 Billion Economic Stimulus Bill - washingtonpost.com

Well, BO managed to get the gigantic $838 hunk of lard through Congress, and the Republicans managed to hold together well enough so only 3 RINOs supported it.

The Dow cast it's vote with a 4% 382 point drop.

Hope to Doomsday

http://thehill.com/david-keene/from-hope-to-doomsday-2009-02-09.html

I mostly expected the hot air to stay in the BO balloon for a bit longer, but the descent to the abyss has been rapid. The inexperience of BO along with the natural anger and morose nature of Democrats, it isn't surprising that they would have a bit of the "dog that caught the car problem". They have had Congress for two years, now they have the whole enchilada -- all of sudden, they "caught what they wanted". Now they have no idea of what to do with it!

The way things are going, we can expect to wake up one morning to find the president of the United States wandering the streets of Washington in sack cloth with a placard predicting, well, the end.

He’s already given us everything but the exact date on which the world will end as he leads a chorus of his supporters demanding that Congress adopt his every nostrum lest our economic crisis transform itself into a “catastrophe,” as Mr. Obama put it, or “absolute collapse,” as Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) warned, or even “Armageddon,” in the words of Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.).

Eat The Rich

DealBook Column - Up Next for Big-Shot Bankers - A Public Flogging - NYTimes.com

Oft times we read about what horrid people are in banking, finance, big business, etc. They are rapacious, greedy, selfish disgusting folks, and someone needs to put them in their place.

“I want groveling,” wrote Patt Morrison, an op-ed writer at The Los Angeles Times, over the weekend, echoing a chorus of others. “I want show-trial sweating and stammering. I want their nine-figure bonus checks endorsed over to the rest of us. I want my 401(k) money back. I want blood; I’m a vegetarian, but I’d make an exception for a smoking plate of C.E.O. en brochette.”

The whole column is worth reading as a study in "liberal nature", but you get the main point. I'm so reminded of "The Unforgiven" when we introduced to "English Bob", and taught quickly to hate him. When the town sheriff, "Little Bill" beats him unmercifully, we are glad, but at least for some of us, we start to "wonder" --- if only because we know that in the end Clint Eastwood has to be some sort of "hero".

Clint does indeed "prevail", but at least I was struck in an almost spiritual way about how litte we know about how to "judge", and why the Sovereign Lord explicitly tells us that we are not able to judge. How easy it is for man to call for the darkness while thinking they are calling the light. There is no "calling" for the light -- salvation is always there, it isn't our "call" that brings it, it is our willingness to cease our "just refusal" of salvation, because to do so seems to be "unjust" to our human soul.

WE, must "work hard" to be "better than others", and thus "deserving". We strongly need to see "others as worse", and it is only "right" to see those that are worse be punished on this earth, and in the after life as well. Each of us though, unless living in Christ, is CERTAIN that we are "diserving", but others are not.

So, they "want to see them grovel"! They want what is THEIRS!!! Their "justly earned through a growing market 401K"!!! But wait, were they for the policies that let the economy, business and that 401K grow? Or were they for the policies that would "share the wealth", much of which was in that market and a lot of folks decided was better OUTSIDE it before the "sharing" (at gunpoint) began.

How do they think they will get their 401K back if they eat the rich?

Humans, Markets, Governments, Words

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Random Thoughts

Thomas Sowell on how bad things really are. The point of this to me is that we have a "race" -- can BO and company remove rights, control the media, shift the blame and take total control to the level that freedom is gone before the bulk of voters figure it out? The race is on!!

Human beings are going to make mistakes, whether in the market or in
the government. The difference is that survival in the market requires
recognizing mistakes and changing course before you go bankrupt. But
survival in politics requires denying mistakes and sticking with the
policies you advocated, while blaming others for the bad results.

More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with
which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is
the "Employee Freedom of Choice Act," a bill that will do away with
secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be
represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation--
which is to say, loss of freedom of choice.

The Rich are Worried

Wealth Matters - It’s Not Just the Money, It’s the Mind-Set - NYTimes.com

We have had downturns before, but people feel this one is different. Are they right? I don't know, I have money in BOTH the market and the "mattress", and plenty of firearms and ammo as well.

“This feels absolutely different because it’s so widespread,” said Eric
Dammann, a Manhattan psychoanalyst, in comparing this crash to 2001 and
1987. “It feels like everything is imploding at the same time as well
as this sense that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”

Strange behavior is not limited to Wall Street. Brad Klontz, a
financial psychologist in Hawaii and partner in Klontz Kahler, a
financial therapy and planning firm, said someone he worked with had
liquidated his portfolio, put the money into gold and silver and bought
a safe to store the bullion. This person, he says, is considering
buying an assault rifle to protect his wealth. “If it really got down
to that point it would be total anarchy, and there would be nothing you
could do,” Mr. Klontz said. “And this is a really smart guy.”

Rapacity of Audacity

American Thinker: The Rapacity of Odacity

Looks like the BO blew out of Washington and went back on the campaign trail after less than a month in office. This time, he was selling pork by the Trillion, with just a hint of lipstick. I love the "trio" of the now "heroic" bipartisan Republican Senators -- Collins, Snowe, and Specter. RINOs all, but oh how much more lovely these 3 are to the MSM than poor old Joe Liberman!

Couple of great paragraphs from this article. "The Road to Serfdom" covered this prior to the rise of the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany, so it is old news, but news that mankind needs to learn over and over. When you attack those that bake the pie, you end up with less pie for all.

Read it all, here is a teaser.

Socialism is rapaciously greedy -- that's what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,' when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people -- not hungry for food but power -- and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel.

That is why today, in his first month in office, President Obama needs to go after executives who earn more than 500 thousand dollars per year. Marxism has become the politics of universal envy and rapacity, as long as there is a victim group hungry enough to be led into battle against the ever-shifting enemy. That is why racial politics has not been left behind by the Democrats; on the contrary. The United States is more racially sliced and diced than it has been since the Dixiecrats lost their power.

Audacity is voracious because there's never enough free pie. It's the pie supply that grinds to a halt if the bakery is coerced into working without compensation -- a condition that used to be called "slavery." Without suitable incentives, producers can only be forced to work by the threat of punishment. And with full media control, our socialists make sure the baker gets the blame for any sudden pie shortage. We've watched it happen with Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Coal, and on and on -- but never with Big Media or Big Government. It's easy to tell who the demagogues are -- their names are never on the hit list.

As the bitter old Soviet joke went, "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the opposite." Only the apparatchiks, the new ruling class, win.

Gun Rights Under Attack

American Thinker Blog: More Gun Control Introduced in Congress

Remember all the howling in the MSM about how your rights were being trampled by the evil Bush Administration? "Looking in bedroom windows", "listening to your phone calls", "People afraid to speak" -- although there seemed to be no shortage of lefties speaking all sorts of things that were negative and had no connection to any reality.

Well, Bush is gone. How worried is the MSM about "rights" now? Well, they are worried about the GOVERNMENT'S rights to take every last dollar from current and future Americans and to take the guns from the citizens to make sure that nobody responds!

Oh, didn't BO say he was "strongly in favor of the 2nd amendment"? Was that like "I don't hire lobbyists?" ... prior to bringing in Mr "I make 2.5 million a year lobbying, and I don't bother to pay my taxes" Daschle?

Get a LICENSE from the Attorney General of the US to have guns -- with him having a nice list of where to come to collect them anytime they want. They don't even have to let you know they are coming! Since you want to make use of your 2nd amendment right, you forfeit your right to privacy! Isn't THAT a nice way to go!

BO = Fascism!

So Much for Hope Over Fear

RealClearPolitics - Articles - So Much For Hope Over Fear

Charles just has it right. BO is into trying to scare the American people with rants of economic disaster if his porky package is not passed. He didn't get his $2.5 million dollar a year lobbyist friend Daschle through, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

So, we were supposed to BELIEVE in the guy that said he was going to take public financing, and spent the most ever spent on a presidential campaign by a wide margin? Pleeeze!

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved
more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the
real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes
is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly
legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not
a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of
money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for
picking up the phone and peddling influence.