The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Guilt by association



There are probably white supremacists who oppose section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

There are probably Marxists and socialists and maybe even some communists who prefer Obama to the Republicans.

It is likely Iran hoped Obama would beat Romney.

Why, I think some conservatives even said so, at the time.

The unforgiven



Scroll down a bit to the attack on Pat Buchanan for defending Obama and Hagel, and opposing war on Iran.

No kidding.

The link is to Wonkette, radical feminist loony.


Not only is he a racist anti-Semite, according to SNIPY, but he’s old.

(She missed one. He’s white. Oh. And he’s male.)

Why is it only anti-Semitism when he rejects the views of Bibi, the Likud, and the American Lobby?

But not when they do it?

The professional left, I mean.

And yet, it's the left that says Zionism is racism and Hitlerism, and that the two-state solution is Israeli apartheid.

It's the left that regularly compares Israeli policy to the Nazis.

And he's the anti-Semite?

The politics of personal destruction



The vilest of ad hominem attacks are reserved for anybody opposing the liberal position on matters of race.

DOMA and prop 8



A conservative Supreme Court might rule against DOMA that family law is not a federal matter.

Doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the question of Prop 8, where it seems liberals just want the conservative Supremes to say the constitution requires states to allow gay marriage under equal protection.

I wouldn’t count on that.

Enemies of the people

Appeals court to Florida: No, you can't make welfare applicants pee in cups

Republicans harass applicants for government run assistance like welfare and unemployment.

They also harass women seeking abortions.

Democrats harass gun owners.

A plague on both their houses.

Not racist.


Not even offensive, particularly.

And since when are politicians actually so sensitive?


Pants on fire.

The Democratic war against (white) men continues



True, but not to the point



Actually, he said voting for it was perpetuation of racial entitlement, speaking of the congress-people who were, most recently, unanimous in extending its life.

On the whole, he’s right about that, though he exaggerates.

But that misses the point.

Two of them, actually.

The 15th Amendment says congress can enforce it by appropriate legislation.

And this about why congress critters vote for it sheds no light on whether it is appropriate.

Also, it's is not good that the Supremes get to decide this matter.

John Marshall did us no favors, creating an judicial veto that no one and nothing could override.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

“Sausage fest”? What does that mean, anyway?



I searched Wikipedia with “sausage fest” and it took me straight to this.


Definitely a snide, liberal feminist thing.

A generational thing, too?

Hence a geezer like me didn’t know about it?

Anyway, nearly all of the statues are of men and nearly all are of white people.

But there are some women and several non-whites of note.

These are statues of people who played a significant leadership role in American history.

So the preponderance of males and whites is no surprise.

This has always been an overwhelmingly white country, and still is.

Too, for much of our history blacks were mostly enslaved and, later, kept down by legally mandated exclusion and discrimination.

For much of our history, women were excluded not only from politics but from anything but menial work outside the home, or a handful of "women's" professions like teaching.

Welcome to America.

Welcome to the reality liberals profess so to cherish, but so often don’t want to face.

Anyway, time to get the leaders of the confederacy out of there?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

That would in large measure defeat the point of the place, after all.

And it’s certainly not time to take out all the white supremacists.

Far too many of the movers and shakers in most of our national history could easily be classed as that, for one reason or another.

After all, are we ready to run Andrew Jackson out of DC, quite yet?

Maybe John Calhoun?

Sam Houston?

Brigham Young?

Is Woodrow Wilson in there, somewhere?

Should we take Jefferson and Washington off Mr. Rushmore because they owned slaves?

Lincoln off because he thought blacks inferior and that, after slavery, they might best be sent to Africa?

And TR, too, because "The White Man's Burden" warmed his heart?

Strangely enough, not everything is about race.

And should we pretend that what was and is about race played no role in our history?

Just blot it out because PC liberals don’t want to have to look at it?

Ah, to be reality-based!

Bad enough they want fictional and artistic representations of the past to show an integrated America with no trace of inequality between the sexes, unless to castigate America's past and make today's white males feel guilty.

But actual history?

Is America a Christian nation? A euro-white nation?


What color is America?


Some 73 % white, about 13 % black, and the rest others.

Elsewhere in the Wikipedia article it says,

A report by the U.S. Census Bureau projects a decrease in the ratio of Whites between 2010 and 2050, from 79.5% to 74.0%.

At the same time, Non-Hispanic Whites are projected to no longer make up the strong majority of the population by 2042, but will remain the largest single white ethnic group.

In 2050 they will compose 46.3% of the population.

Non-Hispanic whites made up 85% of the population in 1960.

The report foresees the Hispanic or Latino population rising from 16% today to 30% by 2050, the African American percentage barely rising from 12.9% to 13.0%, and Asian Americans upping their 4.6% share to 7.8%.

"Browning of America"?

Really?

Maybe those stats about voting patterns ought to ignore the liberal fiction that Hispanic is a race unto itself and drill down to the real racial level.

Including Hispanics (and why the heck not?), whites will still be very much the majority in America even as far in the future as 2050.

The country will still be more than 70% euro-white - though of course it may not have a lot of Republican voters in it.

How are Hispanic whites lining up, as between the two major parties and as between conservatives and liberals?

By the way, Pennsylvania is just under 80 % white and just under 11 % black, the rest being other.

What religion is America?


About 76 % Christian, 4 % non-Christian, and about 15 % no religion.

Who is telling the truth, conservatives or liberals?

Republicans or Democrats?

Who is misleading you?

Why?

Would a presidential cabinet and political party that "looked like America" look pretty darned white?

If you thought your workplace looked as white-bread as it does only because of black unemployment, think again.

And it's no accident the place is all gussied up for Christmas.

And all the malls, too.

And yet . . . .



Ms. Rubin is the true neocon voice of the Republican Party and the majority of Americans who call themselves conservatives, since most of them are Jewish or Christian Zionist extremists.

Pat Buchanan in this piece is the voice of reason, Chuck Hagel, and . . . . Barack Obama.

Nice work, Pat.

Aren’t we lucky we have courts to safeguard the constitution and our rights?



Nor his right to non-excessive bail, apparently.

Makes you feel all warm and safe and happy to be an American, and at least we know we’re free.

More than anything else, this is supposed to send a message.

And does it ever.

So what are they serious about?



Global warming, racial griping, a department of peace, gay marriage, feminism.

But the heart and soul of the progressive agenda, more than a century old?

Well, not so much.

A film about what?



Slavery ended in 1865, not 1834.

It ended because a white president decided to fight a war over it and then arm-wrestled a bunch of white politicians in the House to end it in a formal amendment to the US Constitution.

Black soldiers fighting for the Union didn’t end it, however great their contribution to ensuring the North won and the white politicians had a chance to end it.

Occasional slave revolts in the US didn’t end it and some historians think they may actually have entrenched it more deeply in the South.

The same could be said for the rebellion in Haiti.

And the agitation of free blacks like Frederick Douglass didn’t end it, however much it may have helped, alongside the much more widespread white abolitionist agitation, prepare white opinion to accept the end.

Didn’t we have this argument once before?

When Hillary pointed out that Martin Luther King and the many participants in the civil rights struggle didn’t actually change the law, the nation, or its racial institutions.

The Supremes began doing that with Brown and after that numerous courts played a part.

But mostly it was about Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson and the almost exclusively white politicians he got on board for the cause.

The slaves did not free themselves.

Black Americans did not free themselves.

Black Americans did not overthrow Jim Crow and segregation.

And that’s the truth.

Looks like Zimmerman was actually attacked. Doesn’t matter.



Given the evidence, how can anyone say beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not self-defense under Florida law?

Thing is, do we really believe if he had not had a gun and shot TM he, Zimmerman, would have been killed or suffered lasting and grievous bodily harm?

If he had not had a gun on him at all then even if he had pursued and even if the fight had occurred, would not both he and TM be alive and basically OK, today?

And that surely ought to make people wonder whether it’s really not just plain stupid for so many folks to be walking about with guns on their persons.

Meanwhile, the liberals continue to exploit this and every remotely similar incident not so much as gun control propaganda but as fuel for the racist hatred of whites they constantly encourage and strive to legitimate.

Gay rights and lies


Anti-gay bigots shunted even further to the margins

They don’t want the Supremes to legalize gay marriage.

That’s just not the issue.

What they want is for the Supremes to take the question out of the hands of legislators and voters and write gay marriage into the constitution, where nobody can get at it ever again until and unless some future Supremes want to take it out again.

They just wanted to scorch him real good



They could have killed it in committee or filibustered it.

But all they really wanted to do was bloody him well enough so’s he’d remember.

Don’t think that wasn’t supposed to influence his behavior in office.

It was.

And it probably will.

When you think of it, one of the most important takeaways from the movie Lincoln was the compelling portrait of just how evil professional politicians are.

Even those on your side.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Yet another reason to wish the Republicans weren’t completely in the pockets of the plutocrats



This month House Democrats led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to create a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding that would serve to "target the root causes of violence" as well as implement "broad measures used to prevent violent conflict and create sustainable peace."

The bill, H.R. 808, the “Department of Peacebuilding Act of 2013”, would charge the new department with "developing national strategies and programs for violence reduction both domestically and internationally."

It would be very hard to vote for her.

But any Republican opponent would probably be totally unacceptable.

Why do the Supremes even get a say?



The 15th Amendment says in its entirety,

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

Why is it up to the Supremes to decide whether this is “appropriate legislation” under the 15th Amendment?

Why isn’t that the congress’s call?

Oh, right.

Because John Marshall said the Supremes have the last word on deciding the constitutionality of anything and nobody and nothing can overturn their decision but another supreme court.

Balance of powers?

Really?

Do you really think the framers or ratifiers intended a judicial veto that could not be overridden?

And is such a thing wise?

Looking forward to world government, are you?



Some of the worst offenders are among those guardians of the rights of humanity, the UN Human Rights Council.

Makes me feel so safe.

And free, too.

And who can blame them for dodging the issue?



The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.


What would the constitution say about this without the Fourth Amendment?

What does it say about this even with the Fourth Amendment?

See what I mean?

Way out on a limb, here, guys.

Where, by the way, is attorney-client privilege to be found in the constitution?

Just wondering.

A bug or a feature?



Tom Rob Smith’s novel Agent 6 describes extraordinarily vindictive and unconscionable FBI harassment under COINTELPRO of a famous American black singer popular mostly in the 30’s and 40’s.

Shameful, gratuitous cruelty, though it could supply a basis only for a transparently false “moral equivalence,” even between the “secret police” of the two powers, the USA and the USSR.

By the way, the trilogy is very good.

Interesting it’s written by a fellow far too young for the Cold War to be a personal memory.

I have disliked the characters she has played and now I dislike her politics, just as intensely



She plays man-hating parts and evidently actually is a man-hater "in real life."

And I don’t much cotton to that, my friends.

Anyway, the Daily Caller could be right, despite the way Aviva Shen sees things.


It’s not about what Aviva Shen thinks but about whether the right can spin Ms. Judd's remarks against her as well as the left spun Akin’s remark against him.

But McConnell is such a right wing loon on pretty much everything that I could not possibly prefer him even to such a silly “radical liberal” as Ms. Judd.

Sometimes it’s really annoying that the Republicans have fallen so completely into the hands of clericalists and class warriors for the plutocracy.

Still, I could not really stand having to say to others, or even to myself, that I voted for her.

I would have to sit that contest out, if I were from Kentucky, taking refuge in the certainty that my one lonely vote would make no difference, anyway.

And I would certainly vote against her in a primary, not only because I find some of her views repugnant but also because she probably would do less well against McConnell than a less polarizing figure.

She might not look far behind, right now.

But wait until the Republicans publicize her radical feminism, job-killing environmentalism, hostility to Christianity, and general “pointy-headed liberalism.”

Why politics is disgusting


Not the Democrats but the professional liberals who flak for them, supply many of their party activists, and make up part of their voting base are extremely annoying.

Their entire domestic agenda and their standard propaganda lines, especially as regards race and to a lesser degree as regards sex, are repugnant, apart from their erratic support for secularism and their often too limp support for traditional progressivism and American social democracy.

On the other hand, the entire domestic agenda and all the propaganda lines of the conservatives are repugnant, without exception.

And since they dominate the Republican Party that party is wholly repugnant, too.

What do they stand for, after all, but clericalism and capitalism unchained to do their worst?

As for foreign policy, the Democrats are only a somewhat lesser evil than the Republicans, while the professional liberals and the further left they effortlessly merge into and with whom they share many of their repulsive values are actually about equally evil with the conservatives and in some respects are even more evil.

They’re all a bunch of hateful liars, anyway.

Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

My blog, after all.

Russian Afghanistan



They were doing good work there.

We should have helped them and not the Islamists.

The Iranian Revolution should have taught us all we needed to know about Islamic fundamentalism.

Even then, the Islamists were an added threat in regions of the world where the Russians were not or were already in check.

Sure, it was nice that they bled each other for us.

But it would have made more sense to let the Russians have their way in Afghanistan, so long as they didn’t actually put much of a permanent occupying force there, than to let crackpot Islamism get another country to control, all by itself.

Why didn’t Reagan and his gang see it that way, though like everyone else they had just lived through the long agony of the hostage crisis?

My guesses.

First, a grotesque underestimation of the long-term threat of Islamism – a threat many of Reagan’s people would go on to wildly exaggerate post 9/11.

And second, as Jimmy Carter once put it, an “inordinate fear of communism” in Europe where we stood toe-to-toe unnecessarily (Europe could have handled it) with the Warsaw Pact.

Recall that the primary reason for the American role in the Cold War and the vacillation of the American ruling class between policies of stupid containment and stupider rollback was that they felt both mortal terror of and moral hate for both the planned economy and the utopian delusions of Marxism, for which Soviet Russia at the time still stood.

Of course, another is that they did not want Europe to emerge as an independent super-power capable of facing off the Soviets all by itself.

We are currently a world with one super-power, and that is the way our ruling class likes things.

Why is China OK today - though maybe not so OK tomorrow?

Not a super-power (yet), not in Europe, and no Far Eastern version of the Warsaw Pact exists (yet).

But perhaps most important of all, China is not a global advertisement for or champion of an economic full-scale alternative to capitalism.

And is not really likely to become one, so far as one can foresee that sort of thing.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Thoughts out of season: Celebrating Columbus Day


Well, after all, you can’t celebrate this holiday without celebrating the European discovery and settlement of the Americas, can you?

And, yes, much the same can be said of the US holiday of Thanksgiving, no?

And isn’t that history exactly what the followers of Howard Zinn refer to, with the gravest and most unreserved moral condemnation, as 500 years of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and theft of an entire hemisphere from its rightful owners and inhabitants?

If you accept the requisitoire and verdict integral to Zinn’s history - and this, after all, is why his history is valued - how can you not view the celebration of Columbus Day as an annual celebration of, as these people sometimes put it with that same unreserved moral condemnation, the greatest crime against humanity in all of history?

Genocide?

Counting mestizos as half, today’s Indian population of the Americas is some 100 times what it was when Columbus arrived.

Ethnic cleansing?

Well, there were certainly intentional displacements, but Mexico, Central America, much of the Andean region, and Amazonia are still overwhelmingly Indian, as they were 500 years ago.

The theft of a hemisphere?

But, amoralism apart, why accept the grossly unhistorical and even anti-historical, racist moral dogma that those who arrived in the New World before Columbus and all their descendants form a homogenous mass who, collectively and in all innocence, were and even remain the just owners of every inch of the New World, regardless of the actual, often violent history of their settlement and lives here?

And that whites arriving from Columbus onward are fully and irremediably excluded from that racially defined mass of rightful owners of half the planet, also regardless of the actual, and often peaceful, history of white settlement here?

But there are broader implications.

It isn’t just the colonization of the Americas that’s at issue.

It’s the history of successful European, white colonization of not only the Americas but Oceania.

And then there was the relatively unsuccessful colonization of Africa.

What is at issue is not so much the facts of the case – though to some extent those are at issue, too – as the moral assessment of the facts, as well as the politics to be based on that assessment.

The wholesale condemnation of this vast swath of white history is now an essential feature of the racism of the United Nations and of the liberal view of the world, as defined and certified by the PC commissars of the professional left.

That I do not exaggerate is abundantly clear, and you know it as well as I do.

And American conservatives rarely contest it.

Not even the handful of "neo-confederates" among them.

Imagine that.

And what's this all for, anyway, politically speaking?

Who benefits, and how?

Think about it.

And the left is fine with it



Well, at least the dictatorship isn’t hereditary in Cuba as it is in North Korea.

But it’s not even the party that picks the next dictator.

Not even a top level bureau of the party.

And yet, not only Castro but his regime, too, are still highly popular with the American left.

What with the spreading influence of Howard Zinn, strong now even among liberals at large, it’s less and less clear there’s much daylight between those who control the liberal brand – the narrow swath of liberal opinion that the Obama White House has called “the professional left” – and the hard left, not only on US history but on contemporary foreign affairs and politics abroad.

Once upon a time there were not only pro-Cold War, anticommunist liberals but pro-Cold War, anticommunist socialists like Michael Harrington, leader of the Democratic Socialists of America.

But there was also a pro-communist, anti-Cold War strain of the left that at all times had some influence on liberal opinion and does so, even now.

(I at the time was an anticommunist, anti-Cold War liberal with democratic socialist leanings.)

So true is this that the PC police of today’s liberal dogma deny Obama the title, “liberal,” rather than admit some liberals are OK with the global war on terror, with targeted killings of American al-Qaeda leaders, and with drone warfare, for instance.

If Hillary becomes president they will deny it to her, too, rather than admit some liberals are still as Zionist as Harry Truman, if not more so, as she certainly is.

And that some, like Obama, still want to use US power in Latin America to oppose the spreading influence of Cuba and the possible development of new communist regimes in the area.

PS. Odd, isn't it, that the hard left never complain that the communist leadership in Cuba is and has always been white, just like the pre-communist elites, though the island's population has long been majority black.

She looks ridiculous, like something out of the Star Trek TV series


More repulsive liberal self-righteousness



They are every bit as arrogant and dangerous as the clericalists who want to subject society to the will of God.

Authoritarianism in the name of God makes them furious and very bloody minded, unless it’s Muslim and overseas.

But authoritarianism in the name of right, justice, duty, moral decency, and the like liberal bluffs?

You betcha.

Not just OK but absolutely necessary and the only right thing, to limit your freedom in the name of their morals.

Which they make up to suit the occasion.

Presidential powers


It is an interesting question how far the framers – or ratifiers, for that matter – understood the constitution to authorize presidential use of deadly force as an instrument of international relations or foreign policy, short of war and without a special authorization by the congress.

Jefferson, not a framer, chose to read the constitution as creating a federal government too weak to found a bank and a president too weak to fight the Barbary pirates without specific congressional authorization.

He wrung his hands a lot before deciding neither the presidency nor the federal government were too limited in powers to make the Louisiana Purchase.

But not everyone of his age took such a chaste view of either federal or presidential power.

A different question concerns the authority of the president to use such force under such circumstances when the congress does authorize it, though outside the context of actual war.

And yet others, equally interesting, concern meddling in the internal politics of other countries by the use of such deadly force or by cooperation with locals in political violence.

American presidents did not create the entire national security establishment of the Cold War and later times that has enabled them to do such things all by themselves.

The Cold War is over and the scale of our international action ought to be much cut back.

But that is not to say the nature of our actions must or can nowadays be entirely pacific.

We still need a security establishment and a presidency capable of skullduggery, like it or not.

Including the deadly sort, meddling and all.

A bit more on Zero Dark Thirty


Staunch supporters of artistic freedom of expression, eh?


Harry Reid threatened to yank ABC’s licenses over The Path to 9/11?

Oh, really?

Masters of the moral high horse!

Hollywood Libs Push Boycott of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Well, did it win an award for anything?

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Great flick



But the 5 minutes hate stuck on at the beginning to make sure audiences blamed Eisenhower, the CIA, and America for the horrors of the Iranian Revolution sucked.

It’s a good film that didn’t deserve to be Best Picture.

Lincoln was better, and I don't know that it should have been Best Picture, either.

Here is a completely silly review in The American Conservative


A waste of ink with no real complaint about the opening attack on American policy.

George Clooney might have written this review in the same magazine by Scott McConnell that pretty much endorses the film’s attack on Eisenhower for installing the Shah and the Shah for bringing on the clericalist fanaticism of the Iranian Revolution.

(That's right. Liberals fault the Shah for resisting the mullahs and attempting a measure of Westernization.)

OK, even Truman didn’t want to do it.

But no mention of the leading role of the Brits?

No mention of the locals who actually willingly and successfully carried out the coup?

No mention of Mossadegh being in bed with the Iranian communists and the danger of his taking the country into alliance with Russia?

Not that I think IKE should have done it, but still.


A much better review in The Weekly Standard


But it spends too much time irrelevantly plugging the Israelis for their raid on Entebbe and the TV movie about it.

Though the complaint about the lefty propaganda at the outset is apt.

I searched NRO about a dozen times in different ways and found nothing about Argo.

Nothing at Human Events, either.

The fact remains that the collapse of the Shah’s government, the triumph of the Islamists, and the ferocity of the hatred for America and all things American by the Ayatollah’s regime were all entirely predictable, by the time the Ayatollah had set up shop in Paris.

The humiliation of America at the hands of these savages, still in power, was a horrific, shameful disgrace made possible in large part by the very wide swath of American opinion that even then put and kept America in the wrong about Mossadegh and the Shah.

And yet the major media did their level best to lull America to sleep and deny the danger, beginning when the Ayatollah was leading the clerical revolutionaries of his country from Paris.

I thought at the time that if the CIA were really the murderous and omnipotent gang of Nazis the left painted them to be the Ayatollah would die assassinated in Paris, with no real harm done.

Come to think of it, why didn't the Shah's Savak do it?

Didn’t happen.

Damned shame, in retrospect.

Hell hath no fury. Or something.



Would a woman who gives patriotic blowjobs for her country (the USSR) be that upset about being raped in training by an instructor, looking back?

Well, I guess.

It might even be all the more important to her, considering.

Wikipedia has almost nothing, so far, on this show.

In episode 1 the hubby wants to defect but the missus is outraged.

It's not clear she's really opposed to defection or just to what that would involve regarding the prisoner in their car-trunk.

That would be the KGB trainer who raped her but who has himself already defected and has warned the FBI about the deep cover agents in our midst.

A guy they kidnapped at the very start of the first episode and were supposed to ship back to Russia, but got stuck with when the boat left a little too punctually without the prisoner.

At the end of the episode she beats him up but does not kill him, leaving hubby the option to take him to the Americans as part of a defection deal.

But hubby learns of the rape during the beating and instead kills the guy.

He doesn't much like the wife, but he's come to feel she and the kids are the only family he's got and his only shot at a real life.

So the episode closes with a bit of renewed bonding between the two.

A little back-seat sexual intercourse in that same car.

The couple that kills together . . . .

Update, 02252013, 0745 hrs EST.

I wondered about this.


According to an article in the entertainment trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter (THR), executive producer Joel Fields expressed his hope for the show’s impact: “It might be a little different to believe and get used to, but we want you to root for the KGB. They’re going to try to get the Soviets to win the Cold War.”


I don’t recall anyone in Hollywood ever being tempted to do the like with the Nazis.

Why would you want to do it with the Red Menace?

Murdoch owns this network?

Oh, are we really supposed to believe the Russians let their trainers rape the female trainees as a "perk"?

I realize this is fiction, but jeez.

Coming around to the left, a little



Well, the terrorists are still evil but the corporate rulers, or whatever they are, are starting to look bad, too, what with manipulating power outages and food supplies for reasons that are still mysterious.

All the same, nothing justifies the clichés of this Wikipedia description of the future setup as a “police state.”

The future of 2077 is a dystopian one in which world governments have collapsed and corporations now dominate the planet, instituting a high-surveillance, technically advanced police state and removing certain social freedoms, specifically criticism against the "Corporate Congress".

Actually that seems to be the only freedom they have interfered with.

There was something said about no more elections, but I suppose that goes with the wholly unexplained and even undefined “collapse” of world governments.

On the other hand, if there are no governments what does the "Corporate Congress" do, exactly?

The society seems relatively free, with a working class that enjoys a high standard of living in contrast with scenes of severe persecution upon a downtrodden people who cannot afford food.

In the most recent episode we first learned of the existence of people not being fed, and it looked like food was being withheld from some fairly small number, perhaps to secure obedience, rather than denied to a significant part of the whole population.

No hint of an oppressed and starved underclass.

The moral dilemma this presents is that the group of eight from 2077, while self-admittedly having killed tens of thousands of people as collateral damage, consider themselves to be freedom fighters against the Orwellian corporate regime that dominates their time.

That’s a “moral dilemma”?

Damned thin gruel, if you ask me.

So far, absolutely nothing in the story justifies so vacuous a use of “Orwellian.”

Not one thing.

And no hint of the real threat of unchecked corporate plutocracy, a lot fewer toasters and a lot more Bugattis.

Unchecked intensification of the class struggle, that is, with ever enhanced exploitation of the disempowered many for the enrichment of the ruling few.

Kiera's actions are primarily focused on preserving her timeline so that she can return to her family rather than considering the broader implications of her society.

She has already released a woman who committed a murder in the present because she would go on to use stolen technology to develop an efficient new power supply for the world of the future, but is otherwise willing to treat the crimes she investigates on their merits in the present rather than constantly worrying how they will affect her future.

It was an odd and questionable move, but no kind of political commitment, one way or the other.

For her, getting back to the future and stopping the terrorists are jobs one and two, though the order isn’t always clear.

Four or five episodes in and the alleged moral/political dilemmas are just bluff, so far.

Just another cop show.

A pretty good one, but that’s what it is.

The queen bitch



Doctor Megan Hunt, boss from hell, everybody on her team hates her.

Also everybody not on her team.

Always, every time, every thing is all about her.

The other doctors, the techs, the detectives, and even the people who mop up hate her.

Always the last word, and it’s generally scornful and always arrogant.

And yet, she’s the main character, the heroine.

Must be a feminist thing.

She’s what the girls in the audience wish they were?

Wow, what will life be like when they are in the boardroom?

The glass ceiling is the only thing protecting us.

Quondam Democratic hero exiled to the woodshed



He was the front half of Woodstein

Their work on the Watergate scandal was, says Wikipedia,

“The single greatest reporting effort of all time,” says Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times.


And speaking of a lack of integrity, the hypocrisy of the destruction of Richard Nixon by his Democratic enemies was just awesome to behold.

I watched the hearings on TV and the show was breathtaking.

It was the Ninth Wonder of the World.

Sam Ervin was so spectacular in his effrontery as to be downright extra-terrestrial.

Not a single one of those toads in the congress hadn’t done worse, in his time, than Richard Nixon, or approved worse when done by someone of his own party.

Well, maybe one.

But I can't even guess who he might have been.

The only excuse for this shameful farce was that the Washington culture of impunity for political crimes and shenanigans had to be broken with and could not be perpetuated.

So Nixon had to be punished once the cat was out of the bag.

But this ignores why the cat was out of the bag, and who had spilled it out.

And, anyway, what actually happened to Richard Nixon and the nation did not put so much as a dent in that same culture of impunity.

The excuse was a lie and the whole affair was just a singular act of spectacular hatred.

“Well, he had it coming” misses the point by a country mile.

But the victors write the histories.

And the news, too.

Nietzsche's moustache


A Nietzsche miscellany:

Nietzsche on rehabilitation and deterrence

The Dawn, aphorism 366 The criminal’s grief

The banal Nietzsche

The Dawn aphorism 370 To what extent the thinker loves his enemy

 – What? You can never stop listening to claptrap and simply disbelieve, once and for all, in The Tooth Fairy?

The man without politics

The Dawn, aphorism 374 The value of sacrifice

The Dawn, aphorism 436 Casuistic – philosopher-kings, or something like that

The non-nationalist, non-anti-Semitic Nietzsche

The Dawn, aphorism 377 What we may conclude from fantastic ideals

More in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld

The Dawn, aphorism 393 Dangerous virtues

Without God or justice

The Dawn, aphorism 563 The illusion of the moral order of the universe

Who says he’s gay?

The Dawn, aphorism 503 Friendship

How philosophers read Nietzsche

The Dawn, aphorism 412 Ingenious and narrow-minded

The philosopher of the future

The Dawn, aphorism 453 A moral interregnum

 – To this day, some atheists look forward to a civilization without God. But also without morality? John Lennon, imagine that!

And last but not least, there is Nietzsche’s moustache

The Dawn, aphorism 381 Knowing one’s “individuality”

You can look them up, this time.

By their numbers, here.


Saturday, February 23, 2013

Sometimes it seems just as well I don’t live there, any more



Winters are generally a lot worse there than here.

Even if I often miss the place, this is not what I miss.

Not enough to repeal it, his outlook and constituents demand this lie

Administration wants DOMA overturned as unconstitutional

Ah, that over-worked equal protection clause, again.

Like inter-racial marriage, abortion, and so much else, they want gay marriage protected not only from the people but from future action by even the federal legislature, as well as from any state or inferior government.

See this.

Anyway, bound by the constitution to see that the laws are faithfully executed, does this seem quite proper for a president careful of his oath?

And when the shoe is on the other foot what will liberals and Democrats say?

Meanwhile, I doubt that even the most candid, honest, and clear-sighted conservative court would dare overturn Loving.

And how refuse this, really, without doing so?

We have never had an honest constitutional jurisprudence.

The balderdash began with John Marshall.

Can people be trusted to keep their engagements?



Even governments?

Even in matters of life and death?

Silly question, isn’t it?

And what do you suppose is the moral of the tale, regarding humans, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power?

Natural born killers



The episode dramatically assumes a fictional, clear, and strong tie between the so-called “warrior gene” and criminal sociopathy.

Testimony to the popular credibility of sociobiology and the behavioral significance of genetic endowment.

Not that a public convinced sexual orientation is considerably more nature than nurture is likely to doubt that.

“All men are created equal”

Obama a marker on post-racial path


“All men are created equal”?

What does that mean, exactly, even ignoring the embarrassing notion, best neglected, that this is a self-evident truth?

Neither taken individually nor in groups are all men – all humans – equal with regard to everything, or even merely everything that matters.

Neither in their acquired skills nor in their natural endowments, and again neither as individuals nor as distinct racial or other, smaller, population groups.

Men are larger and stronger than women, and only a fool would deny this is nature as well as nurture.

And men are more violent than women, too; and this is likewise rightly attributed to both nature and nurture.

Jews are smarter than gentiles, and for a very long time this has been attributed, at least in part, to the intelligence-killing genetic impact of millennia of monasticism in Christian lands, during which intelligence was simply bred out of the Christians.

As for the apparent natural intellectual inferiority of American blacks to those of Africa as well as to the euro-whites of America, it has been said that only the less bright Africans were taken as slaves, survived the passage, or survived and were allowed to reproduce under slavery.

Analogous explanations have been offered for a sometimes suspected inferiority in intelligence of American euro-whites to the whites of Europe.

I am not aware of any like explanation for the like inferiority of American Indians to American whites or East Asians.

In any case, only fools, fakers, and those who wish to be deceived claim none of this is real, or none of this is nature and all of it is nurture.

Too, no one thinks all individuals are in fact or by natural endowment equal with respect to special or especially noteworthy talents or abilities.

Mozart began composing at five and wrote an opera at twelve, if I recall correctly; I can barely whistle a tune.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was making ground-breaking discoveries in math in his teens.

Saul Kripke taught himself Ancient Hebrew by age six and had read all of Shakespeare by age nine.

So what, after all, is the significance of the Declaration’s ringing claim that all men are created equal?

Despite being propaganda intended for the wide public of the time, it was not a demagogic rejection of the obvious diversity of human endowments and achievements.

It was not even a rejection of the idea of natural inequalities of races or nations.

It was and is a rejection simply and solely of hereditary differences of power, status, authority, rights, or privileges.

It was and is a rejection of caste.

It was a rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, and slavery.

It was a demand for republicanism and popular government.

That, at any rate, was the intention of the 18th Century, of the Age of Enlightenment, honestly construed.

It was not quite a demand for government of the people, by the people, and for the people – an idea that, despite bluster and boilerplate and probably not excepting Lincoln, no one really takes both literally and seriously.


Government by the people?

Actual democracy?

Many are the reasons both obvious and weighty against it, not the least compelling being that the exercise of political power is a full time job.

And another, too, is decisive, all by itself: the people are often malevolent and at all times and in all nations vain, willfully ignorant, impulsive, egoistic, gullible, and stupid.

Whereas, though it’s a matter of degree, their betters are generally only vain, egoistic, and often malevolent.

A sensible person would want to make a government more democratic only in order to give the many a chance to protect themselves from the predations and indifference of the few, managing for themselves a better share, so far as they are capable, of the benefits of civilization and social life.

And always in despite of the awful vulgarity of mass politics and mass culture.

Hence, by the way, a crucial function of the system of representation is and has always been to ensure those with their hands on power were not as bad as the people as a whole, and so would not rule as badly.

To keep the rabble out, in other words.

Not a perfect mechanism, no.

But something.

When to look back


The Dawn, aphorism 317 The judgment of the evening

To be borne in mind on considering the eternal return of the same.

Good advice for serial killers


The Dawn, aphorism 278 The gracious memory

And inveterate pederasts, serial rapists, and habitual criminals of all sorts!

Nietzsche no racist? No nationalist? No anti-Semite?


To my knowledge, no one has gone so far in sanitization as to claim Nietzsche was no sexist.

But there are now feminist “approaches” to his work and feminist “readings” that I have not read and likely will not read; so I cannot say for sure.

Still, since Kaufmann’s day it has become common for his readers, translators, interpreters, and writers of notes, commentaries, and introductions to say Nietzsche was no racist, no nationalist, and no anti-Semite.

Not really.

And despite what the unwary, incautious, or uninformed reader might take to be evident indications to the contrary in his work.

So they say.

But, just as a man is not apolitical for having failed to write a book on political justice, he is not an anti- or even non-racist for having refused to gush with enthusiasm over Chamberlain’s silly Teutonism.

Nor does that make him an anti- or non-nationalist (German, ethnic, or of any sort), either, "good European" though he may sometimes have claimed to be.

Nor is he a philo-Semite, an anti-anti-Semite, or even a non-anti-Semite for having rejected or despised the mass political and cultural phenomena of 19th Century anti-Semitism.

Be your own judge.

See these aphorisms in The Dawn.

272 The purification of races on racial purity and mongrelization.

241 Fear and intelligence on the intellectual inferiority of blacks to whites.

334 The charitable man on the Jews.

Why, the PC lynch-mobs who forced MSNBC to fire Pat Buchanan and The National Review to get rid of John Derbyshire would have spared no effort to force publishers to refuse Nietzsche’s works as soon as they had got the scent, had they lived back in the day.

Nothing of Nietzsche’s would have won a National Book Award or ever come out as a Princeton Notable Book, you may be sure.

Friday, February 22, 2013

So who doesn’t think he’ll run for it?

Pistorius granted bail

Talk about a miscarriage of justice.

This was an abortion.

Well, didn’t you think something was up?



I personally thought it had to do with the recent pedophilia scandals and the pope’s role in cover-ups and evasions of prosecution.

But maybe not.

I don’t find this Guardian story makes it clear just why or how the pope’s resignation is supposed to have been related to the alleged secret report, the gay clique, or blackmail.

No doubt the Italian press will have more for us, later.

A gentler – OK, less frank – way of saying, “It’s the class war, stupid!”



But a better title for Joe Conason’s article might by “Why it wouldn’t matter if they did make these changes.”

Pat Buchanan talks sense when, and only when, it doesn’t hurt his party



That’s more often than nearly anybody, but still.

And even his history is both tendentious and mendacious.

Why, after all, didn’t Eisenhower do it himself instead of telling JFK to get out of Europe?

Talk is cheap, they say.

And it’s really easy.

And what are we to think of PB’s citing MacArthur, the man who wanted to invade China and whom Truman could not control or trust and so had to fire, as a dove to JFK’s hawk?

Really, now.

A dime for a dollar? No way, says Republican governor of Pennsylvania



Different reports cite different numbers, but it is commonly said Corbett refused some $40 billion in federal Medicaid money over ten years because, according to him, it would cost Pennsylvania taxpayers some $4 billion over the same period.

Pennsylvania voters not only put him in office but gave control of the state legislature to Republicans, too.

And make no mistake.

The days when Pennsylvania Republicans were a different breed from those of the American South and West, a more moderate and even liberal breed, are long gone.

This is the age of Limbaugh and KDKA talk radio conservatism.

This is the age of the Tea Party.

This is the age when Pat Toomey drove out Arlen Specter.

Pennsylvania voters knowingly chose these guys.

Democracy doesn’t always work out the way one might hope.

A glimmer of hope



President Obama in his recent state of the union address proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00.

Republicans have, of course, flat refused and taken the opportunity to declaim against the Marxist, socialist, communist, anti-American, and un-American idea that there should even be such a thing.

Making it all the nicer that Democrats and liberals can remember the working class, once in a while, without yelling about race.

But have you noticed that when liberals address a class war issue without yelling about race they don’t yell, at all?

You can barely hear them.

They almost whisper.

Laura Clawson writes,

A minimum wage of $9.00 an hour still represents minimum-wage workers falling behind by many measures.

Depending how you calculate it, if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages, it might have been close to $10.50 today.

If it had kept pace with productivity, it might have been more than $18.50.

And if it had kept pace with the growth of wages to the top one percent?

Forget about it—when union members in skilled professions make that much these days, they get attacked as greedy.

And she makes a crucial point.

It's time to stop keeping people working hard to support themselves and their families stuck below the poverty level.

And, with the last increase to the minimum wage having come in 2009, it's important to tie the minimum wage to inflation so that workers don't have to wait years for their next raise.

Getting ready to slash at federal payroll taxes


The classe politique is starting to convince itself cuts to the federal income tax have gone about as far as possible and the next place to cut - and there always has to be another place to cut - will have to be payroll taxes.

Those are the taxes that fund Social Security, Medicare, and (in some usages of the phrase) unemployment insurance.

Cuts to them are direct attacks on the blood supply of American social democracy, earned benefits, so-called (by their enemies and lukewarm friends) “entitlements.”

Brace yourselves.

The apolitical anti-socialist


Modern workers – recall Nietzsche wrote in the second half of the 19th Century, roughly from the time of our Reconstruction Era – are admitted by all to be worse off than slaves, he says.

They live under worse conditions and work longer and harder.

Human, All Too Human, aphorism 457, Slaves and workers

Some historians have said as much.

But we have far too many racial skeletons in our national closets for that to be a common view, here in America.

The connoisseur of morals


For Nietzsche, the German morality of commands and obedience ranks below the Greek morality of virtue and distinction.

The Dawn, aphorism 207, The German attitude to morality

The morality of willing self-immolation ranks below the morality of self-control, severity, and obedience.

Living for others ranks below living for self.

The Dawn, aphorism 215, Morality of sacrificial beasts; aphorism 151, Fashions in morality

The morality of the pagans/masters ranks above the morality of the Christians/slaves.

But even among slaves there are exceptions.

The Dawn, aphorism 546, Slave and idealist

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Never-ending appeal to philosophical rabble.



Can’t wait to read it.

But it's the Europeans who made him a star specifically among philosophers.

Later American philosophers only followed their dubious example.

And far too many middle-class middle-brows who preface their borrowed banalities with herd reassurances that would have made Nietzsche wild, such as "we today know," or "as we today understand."

Nietzsche to the workers of Europe: Run away!


Nietzsche's post-World War Two apologists, perhaps starting with Walter Kaufmann who found him guilty all the same of sexism, insist up to our own day that he is no anti-Semite, no German nationalist, no ethnic nationalist in any sense, he is a man without politics, and certainly no racist.

That is what they say.

You should be your own judge.

Here, he declaims against the condition of the working masses of Europe as a dreadful slavery.

But socialism, he says, would be another kind of slavery.

"Don't rebel," he says. "Run away!"

He urges the flight of 25% (his exact percentage) of the European population to the colonies, where he looks forward to seeing how European colonial societies might develop as glorious examples for old Europe!

Meanwhile, if Europe wished to replace the lost labor it ought to import "Chinamen" (the translator's English for what, exactly, in the German, I wonder) who, in his eyes more suited to such a social fate, Nietzsche says would give Europe the stability it now lacks and much needs.

Nietzsche, aphorism 206, The Dawn, The impossible class

He often in his books comments on the Asiatic stability of Chinese civilization.

But not with admiration.

Maybe not an anti-Semite, but certainly weird about the Jews


Nietzsche, aphorism 205, the Dawn, Of the people of Israel

Go west? Are you nuts?



Generally speaking, the weather seems to be more awful the further west you go from the Appalachians toward the plains and the eastern portions of the Rockies.

The west coast is OK, but that long stretch before you get that far is weather hell, winter and summer, what with arctic temperatures, snow measured in the feet, and flocks of tornadoes in the summer.

The gulf coast and much of the east coast get hurricanes, of course.

Much of the USA seems uninhabitable, when you think of it.