Necessary Forerunners to the Obama Nightmare

A disastrous presidency such as the Obama regime could not have come out of nowhere. A lot of people worked very hard to make it possible for such a president to be elected.

Across the US, universities, media organisations, foundations, and large lobbies, activist groups, Federal Courts, and politically connected organisations were largely taken over by persons of collectivist and anti- US Bill of Rights perspective. It has gotten so bad that in many places of employment in media, academia, or anywhere with political connections, a person cannot express pro liberty (as per the US Constitution) points of view without being shunned -- or sometimes dismissed.

It is into that increasingly monolithic, collectivist milieu that unknown politician Barack Obama made his triumphal march from obscurity to domination -- without ever once having been thoroughly examined for the benefit of the voting public.

Here is a short glimpse into part of the decades-long preparation that went into making such a debacle possible. Keep in mind that the term "conservative" is used to cover a broad range of anti-leftist POVs including libertarian -- and the term "liberal" is used to refer to leftists, collectivists, "progressives", and the broad range of ideology that opposes the individual liberties as expressed in the US Bill of Rights and Constitution.

Recent studies have confirmed that American universities have become bigoted and biased against the expression of conservative views. One new study documents bias against the expression of conservative views among social and personality psychologists, including those at universities:

We find that respondents significantly underestimate the proportion of conservatives among their colleagues. … that conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, we find that conservatives are right to do so. In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents are, the more willing they are to discriminate.

Also note this passage, from the 2009 book The Politically Correct University:

Substantial anecdotal and quantitative evidence indicates that there is a decided leftist bent to colleges and universities, particularly the most prestigious institutions … Moreover, as several of the following contributions discuss, this political imbalance likely stems from practices within the academy that discourage conservatives from pursuing academic careers. … We maintain that the relative absence of conservative, libertarian, and neoliberal thinkers and thought from the academy is in part caused by discriminatory academic personnel practices.

And read this passage from “A Crisis of Competence,” a 2012 report for the Regents of the University of California by the California Association of Scholars:

This report is concerned with the corruption of the University of California by activist politics. … The condition we investigate is now a well-documented pathology of the modern university. … According to a recent (2007) Zogby poll, a majority (58%) of the public now believes that the problem of faculty political bias is a very serious one.

These are the very institutions that were to promote freedom of speech. How were they taken control of in the first place, to the point where the documented intolerance could be permitted?

Professor David Gelernter’s new book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) addresses the history behind the transformation of many universities to a system biased in favor of liberal views. He describes how leftist intellectuals were brought into the universities, and how the previous guardians of conservatism in these places bowed out. Gelernter observes that such views spread elsewhere from their new home in the university, including to the mainstream media.

Gelernter believes that the old conservative guard voluntarily stepped aside:

Intellectuals didn’t conspire to make the cultural revolution happen. They could not have forced the Great Reform if they had tried, because the WASP elite colleges were private institutions in the age before massive federal grants let the government sink its teeth in permanently. The reform happened because the WASP elite stepped aside. It was a remarkable event — either a heroic, self-effacing embrace of justice for its own sake, or an act of exhaustion.

But perhaps he is being too kind to the intellectuals. Is it possible that indeed there was a mechanism by which leftists forced out those who didn’t agree with them?

I propose that there may indeed be such a mechanism, and will make this case beginning with a quote from Gelernter himself:

Among intellectuals, the left-liberal religious faithful are often not merely pious but zealous, even fanatic. To conservatives, they seem irrational and intellectually unserious, unable to hold their own in political argument, often unwilling even to try — all too apt, when pressed, to slouch off in a sulk or flare up like a burnt-out lightbulb with no more watts to spare on you. There is a frazzled flash, a silence, then “let’s talk about something else.” Many conservatives have had the experience.

Gelernter is, perhaps, understating the case. Many conservatives have found that expressing their political views around friends and family can lead to harsh insults, to loss of friendships, and even to a weakening of family ties.

Here are two recent examples from my own experience. I have an email list of 50 close friends and relatives that had previously been used by another member of the list (not myself) for expression of political views. I sent out some pro-conservative viewpoints to this list. One response came back from a dear, life-long friend:

I figure that, at best, this [a view I had expressed] reflects a desperate wish that the economy and life are that simple. A more damning explanation — intellectual laziness. Worse than that — willful intent to distort for political gain.

This friend later emailed me to make sure we continued on terms of strong friendship — and I replied that indeed we do. On Facebook I have posted a number of views critical of Obama but devoid of insulting language. A friend of more than a decade responded:

Your posts and commentary are literally making me sick.

He has since “unfriended” me and failed to reply to a recent sociable email I sent him on a non-political subject. I would gladly continue to be on good terms with him, and have reached out to him with a friendly email as noted. The behavior exemplified by these two events is not generally the behavior of conservatives: conservatives believe in a free exchange of views; conservatives believe in public debate. This Alinsky-style behavior appears to be primarily in use among liberals.

Take this kind of behavior that conservatives encounter so often in our daily lives, the sudden rudeness and hostility from friends and even family in response to an expression of conservative views, and imagine that in the context of academia or a media organization –won’t the effect be to drive out those who have conservative views?

Perhaps conservatives have failed to realize that this hostility of liberals is not limited to the sphere of public debate. Conservatives, believing in a free exchange of views and in public debate, welcomed liberals into the universities, the media, and into other organizations as well. Liberals, hostile to a free exchange of views and hostile to public debate, then drove conservatives out.

This appears to explain how our universities and media first became not merely inclusive of liberal views, but also subsequently exclusive of conservative views.

While conservatives have been treating liberals’ insults and hostility as a mere inconvenience to public debate, it has also been a tool used by liberals to drive conservatives out of their places of business, their chosen professions. As Professor Gelernter recently observed on Powerline:

While conservatives worry about debt and taxes and huge problems abroad, the left is busy pulling the whole country out from under them. While conservatives fiddle around on the roof, robbers are rifling the house and stealing the children.

The rightful goal of the media is to permit the public to be aware of all facts relevant to public debate, including facts supportive of liberal views, conservative views, and any and all other views. When things have reached the point where, as Roger L. Simon points out, reporters are afraid of being fired should they report facts supportive of conservative views, then we have a “Zombie Media,” one no longer serving its rightful function. It has been taken over by a hostile organization, shows merely the semblance of life, and is in fact supporting a purpose inimical to that which it is properly expected to perform.

If we now understand how our media and universities first became bigoted and biased against conservatives, we can at long last begin to consider steps intended to affect a turning of the tide.

_Collective Zombies of the Media, Academia, Etc.

Obama Misspoke: It's the Public Sector That's Doing Fine

President Obama recently claimed in the middle of a big press conference, that "the private sector is doing fine." Oddly, Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said exactly the same thing six months ago, when pressing to hire more unionised government workers. But really, just how would those two big-government diehards know whether the private sector was doing well? They are so deep up the government colon they wouldn't know a healthy private sector from an outer space alien invasion.

Obama and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid have it precisely backward: It’s the public sector that’s doing fine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for government workers last month was just 4.2 percent (up slightly from 3.9 percent a year ago). Compare that to private-sector industries such as construction (14.2 percent unemployment), leisure and hospitality services (9.7 percent), agriculture (9.5 percent), professional and business services (8.5 percent) and wholesale and retail trade (8.1 percent). As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute points out, the public-sector unemployment rate “is the lowest of any industry or class of worker, even including the growing energy industry.” If the rest of Americans enjoyed the same unemployment rate as government workers, Obama would be cruising to reelection.

Meanwhile, the private sector continues to struggle under the weight of Obamacare, the spiraling national debt, the $46 billion in annual costs of the new regulations imposed by Obama, and the looming threat of “taxmageddon” — when, come January 2013, the private economy will get hit with hundreds of billions in higher taxes.

The result? In the first quarter of this year, private-sector GDP grew by a meager 2.6 percent. That is certainly better than the pathetic 1.2 percent growth rate last year, but compared to previous recoveries, it is anemic. When Ronald Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, private-sector GDP grew by 6.5 percent — 2 1 / 2 times the current rate. That’s why Reagan was able to declare “It’s Morning in America again” while Obama can’t.

Obama and Reid may think 2.6 percent private-sector GDP growth is “just fine,” but the 23 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or have quit looking for work don’t share their complacency. Unless Obama wants to put them all in government jobs (which he might), the only way to help these Americans find work is to reduce barriers for job creators in the private sector. The election will likely hinge on who Americans better trust to do that.

That is why Obama’s gaffe is so damaging to his prospects for reelection. It feeds a growing public perception — which is being actively cultivated by the Romney campaign — that when it comes to the economy, Obama is out of his depth and hostile to private business. _WaPo Opinion

This mentality of government uber alles -- an amorphous and swelling general dependency upon government for more and more essentials while at the same time as government budgets are being destroyed by out of control government union pensions, pay, benefits, and double dipping -- is killing state and local governments. Of course, if these regional governments could print money -- as Obama's and Reid's central government can -- they might be able to hold out against the taxpayer revolt a little bit longer.

The following video provides a counter-point to this ruinous mentality of government dependency and unlimited government growth. Meet Emily O'Neill, of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (h/t Daniel Mitchell)



Some people believe it will take something on the order of a "civil war" to clean out the nests of vermin, vipers, and vultures out of all the regional governments.

At that point, it will be time to look to the central government. But before the central government can be reformed, Obama and his band of corrupt and merry radicals simply have to go.

The New Communism: Let's Kill 1 Billion People This Time Around

20th Century communism only killed 100 million people. But the new communism has set its sights much higher. As one of "New Communism's" leaders told an Occupy Wall Street crowd in Zucotti Park NYC: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Or put more accurately, "Fail bigger."

Occupy Zombies

The mainstream skankstream media would have you believe that the occupy zombie movement (OWS) originates in the grass roots of disaffected populations, particularly the young. But in truth, new communism movements such as OWS originate in the sinecured halls of unlimited hubris, academia. New communism is a denial of history and an elevation of an ever-malleable utopian fantasy as the proper standard of human effort and behaviour.

The communist idea or “hypothesis” is then placed beyond empirical refutation. “The eternal idea of the [Chinese] Cultural revolution survives its defeat in socio-historical reality,” insists Zizek, while for Badiou, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis.” Under scrutiny, it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a communist “hypothesis” at all—that would involve testing and the possibility of falsification—but rather a communist dogma, and the relation of the new communists to that dogma is fundamentally religious, marked by piety and faith, and not at all critical.

...the refusal to face up to the criminal record of actually existing communism as a social system, let alone stare into that abyss until one’s politics and theory are utterly reshaped by it, tells us that the new communism remains within the orbit of leftist totalitarianism. _NewCommunism

But the situation is far more dire than the author of the piece suggests. The movement is not a simple quasi-religious political dogma. New communism has merged with the faux environmental religion of Luddite greenism, to form a far deadlier real-world synthesis than would have been possible had the movement stuck to mere politics and political economy.

With the addition of greenism, new communism is now entrusted with the task of saving the world. Not the human world, but rather the natural world, without humans. Humans are expendable, disposable, in this new synthetic movement.

The largely unstated goal of the great green movement of the late 20th and early 21st century has always been a drastic pruning of the human tree. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is the happy face pasted over this ghoulish enterprise. According to VHEMT, it is the moral duty of humans to go extinct as a species, voluntarily.

Another website, Dieoff.org, portrays a great human dieoff as a fait accompli -- something that is inevitable and imminent. The basis of the human dieoff in this case is a catastrophic collapse of civilisation caused by resource depletion.

But it is carbon hysteria -- catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) -- which is the greatest ally of "the new communism" movement, by its very ubiquitous, state-sponsored nature. CAGW is everywhere, from K-12 to post-grad, from the tabloids to the science journals, from the White House to the UN. CAGW permeates modern societies like a malignant cancer. Not a real cancer, actually, but a hysterical, imaginary cancer that carries the force of reality like a voodoo zombie curse that kills.

Under the spell of carbon hysteria CAGW, governments are empowered to seize, regulate, and prohibit virtually anything that can be portrayed as an agent of climate change. Wielding the hammer of CAGW, nothing is out of reach of the state-sponsored zombies of collective mind clones.

So what is the bottom line? Does the new alliance -- the new communist faux environmental alliance -- really want to kill 1 billion people this time? No. The preferred number is between 6 billion and 6.9 billion humans, to be killed or otherwise made to disappear. Most hard-core lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy greens would like to see the global human population reduced to around 100 million, from the current number of about 7 billion. But there are some who would show mercy, and settle for a 90% reduction to about 700 million surviving humans.

We should not make the mistake of assuming that the new lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgy movement is simply the new enemy of right wing politics, or of the capitalist upper class. This movement-of-many-faces is the enemy of the human future. To these zombies, humans have had their chance and have failed. It is now a zombie world, to do with as the zombies choose.

Hope for the best. But prepare for the worst.

Make the Bad Lady Shut Up, Mommy! Make Her Shut UP!!!

IN an excellent demonstration of the motto of leftist higher education: "Free speech for me but not for thee," the Chronicle of Higher Education has fired a blogger who was paid to contribute a contrary viewpoint. She was fired, "logically enough," at least in the eyes of a leftist academic, for publishing a contrary viewpoint.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired our former editorial-page colleague, Naomi Schaefer Riley, for a blog posting on the Chronicle's website that offended 6,500 professors. Well, they're not all professors yet, but they are members of what calls itself the "higher-education community," for which the Chronicle is its trade paper. As best we can make out, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper's roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers. _WSJ

Ms. Schaefer Riley tells the story from her point of view:

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature." Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have "played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them."

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an "invitation to debate." But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: "We've heard you," she tells my critics. "And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley's blog posting did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles."

When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were "reviewing" the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well. _Naomi Schaefer Riley_in_WSJ

Are Leftists Total Moo-Ons on Money?

The chief problem with money, as Walter Russell Mead observes, is that the Blue Model is running out of it. Once upon a time the money was just out there. The dollars were mooing and lowing like the buffalo on the Great Plains. The only problem was divvying it up. But now that it’s getting harder to come by, a whole host of professions based on the dollar hunting and skinning business is becoming endangered. Mead describes the situation in his vivid prose:

The dream machines of the blue social engineers don’t sail serenely across the azure sky anymore. Think of the various carbon exchanges and environmental planetary schemes; think of high speed rail proposals like California’s $100 billion train to bankruptcy; think of Obamacare. These days the experts, “social entrepreneurs” and smart young blue twenty somethings fresh out of the Ivy League whomp up social programs with as much verve and dedication as their New Deal and Great Society predecessors, but the new Dreamliners don’t take off. At most they roll around the runway, emitting clouds of noxious smoke; wings fall off, windows pop out, turbines misfire and the tires go flat. (Source)

Al Sharpton, by contrast, was trying to climb out of a deep financial hole. “The left-wing National Action Network Inc., headquartered in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, owes at least $1,556,059 in federal taxes and $108,489 in New York taxes, according to the Nexis tax liens database. Tax agencies typically file tax liens only after taxes have become significantly overdue and other collection methods have failed.”

After Trayvon Martin was killed, the Chicago Tribune found the Reverend raising money for Trayvon’s cause. At a rally he shouted:

“I’m going to start off with $2,500,” Sharpton said, holding up a check. “Who’s next?”

Then Sharpton announced that television personality Judge Greg Mathis donated $10,000.

Several elected Florida officials were present, and each took a turn addressing the crowd before Sharpton was scheduled to speak. U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown was one of the first to address the crowd Thursday night. She rallied the crowd by yelling, “I want an arrest, I want a trial.”

The she asked the crowd: “What do you want?”

And the crowd responded, “We want an arrest!”

Doubtless Sharpton really wants an arrest. But given the parlous state of his finances, it would be understandable if he didn’t mind making a few bucks on the side as well. All across the board the Blue Model is experiencing what parliamentary systems call the loss of “supply.” Supply is a term used to describe money bills, either taxation and government spending, which is the lifeblood of politics. _BelmontClub

The article goes on about how leftists are having trouble raising money for political campaigns, for social activism, and so on.

But the place the money has really and truly run out -- where leftists badly wish to spend $trillions more which do not exist -- is in the US federal budget. Obama has had to borrow over $1 trillion every year in office -- an unprecedented and previously inconceivable breach of fiscal responsibility.

Contrary to leftist moo-ons, the largest portion of the US federal budget goes to entitlements, and the next largest is interest on the debt. Both segments of the debt are growing exponentially, as $trillion deficits are becoming commonplace under Obama.

So, will Americans drink the koolaid and re-elect Obama and his cronies? No one knows. But if so, the anchor of the global economy and global security will certainly begin to crumble. Slowly at first, then ever faster.

Leftists and money simply do not mix cleanly or sustainably. Leftists are moo-ons about money, particularly other people's money. And now, increasingly, the "other people's money" that they are spending will belong to generations that will not be born for several decades yet.

Feminist Whining Is Hurting the Cause of Women in Science

Female graduates see women scientists working very hard in what they feel are less fair conditions, and it puts them off.  __SciAm

Like the boy who cried wolf too often, academic and political feminists who complain about the state of women in science are causing unintended consequences. They are paradoxically making women avoid scientific careers.  Female students are indoctrinated by feminist whining to think that women are unfairly treated in science, math, and engineering -- which causes more of them to avoid those fields.

Difficulties in hiring and retaining women scientists and engineers are worrying universities. A study published in the February 17 issue of Science has tracked several thousand science and engineering faculty members over 19 years to unpick where the barriers lie and to provide evidence that can be used to develop policies to tackle the problem. Natasha Gilbert talks to Deborah Kaminski, an engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and co-author of the paper.

What did the study look at?

We tracked the careers of 2,966 science and engineering faculty members from 14 universities from the time they were hired to when they left the university over the period 1990-2009.

What did you find?

Overall, men and women are retained and promoted at the same rate. Of all staff hired as assistant professors, 64.2 percent are promoted to associate professors at the same institution. The median time spent in a job for both men and women is 11 years.

What does this show about academic careers for female scientists?

If we can hire women, we don't lose them. They are retained and advance as men do--they are equally likely to succeed. This is not where women leave the pipeline. The greatest losses of women tend to be at school and going into university and college.

Do women not tend to drop out after having children?

The women who come in to academic science careers tend to be so highly motivated that they stay. They limit the number of children they have. Other studies have shown that female academics have fewer children than other professional women, such as lawyers. Female graduates see women scientists working very hard in what they feel are less fair conditions, and it puts them off. Societal factors also make it harder for women to have such demanding careers--women tend to manage family problems, for example.

So where does the problem lie?

We are not hiring enough women. Only 27 percent of incoming academics are women, and at the rate we are going, this won't rise to 50 percent until 2050. Faculty careers are long, so it will take about 100 years to get a balance of the sexes in science departments. This is a problem. Our study shows us where we need to focus efforts. Attention is needed on hiring more women and on encouraging more women into science and engineering undergraduate and graduate courses, because if we can just hire them we can keep them.

What about quotas for hiring women?

Quotas would be hard to do. How can you have hiring quotas with so few individuals coming through and applying for jobs. I think it would be better to encourage more women to do PhDs--that would help. _SciAm

It is not news that leftist ideologues in academia, media, and politics tend to make things worse for everyone around them. This sad fact does not appear to bother these ideologues in the least, nor is it likely that an increased awareness of their adverse affect on society would lead to any changes of behaviour on their part.

That leaves it to the rest of us to do whatever needs to be done, to provide opportunities for those who wish to lead productive and satisfying lives. Consider it a challenge.

Celebrating Perversity: Rewarding Waste and Dissolution

Risk is a necessary part of life. Risk and scarcity are the challenges that cause animals to develop shrewd and wise strategies of survival.

You cannot remove risk from the world, but you can obscure it, or shift it from one person to another, or from one group to another. If you force persons of thrift and wisdom to bear the burdens of those who are prodigal and shortsighted, you will certainly grow a large new crop of fools and wastrels.

It almost seems as if modern public policy is designed to accomplish exactly that.

... the federal government has chosen to side with the wasteful, unprincipled and debauched who borrowed what they couldn't pay back, all at the expense of the good and moral. You can't make things like this up, and sadly this is not a dream. The federal government has sanctified promiscuous activity with the money of others through a $25 billion settlement foisted on banks that "will provide financial relief to an estimated one million at risk borrowers." The message: go heavily into debt, claim some lender abused you, then wait for the government (meaning all of us whose tax dollars support Leviathan) to compassionately save you.

The economic argument behind this most shameful of settlements predictably defies basic logic. Though economies work best when prices reflect market realities, housing to the political class is sacred such that a true correction whereby those who overextended themselves vacate their houses on the way to a market bottom won't be allowed to happen.

The broad economy will of course suffer this governmental error. For one, an investment in housing, quite unlike capital committed to technology or medicine, will not cure cancer or make us more efficient. A true bottom that releases investment capital from this dead money sector would on its own prove an economic positive.

Second, as evidenced by the inability of certain homeowners to make their mortgage payments, they're likely in many instances to live in depressed parts of the United States. Not only would putting their houses back on the market happily move the cost of housing down (that's the government's stated goal after all), it would also release these individuals from the ball-and-chain of quazi ownership such that they're free to pursue the best economic opportunities around the country irrespective of locale.

Third, if mortgage holders are to get relief, then someone, somewhere is by definition getting ripped off. Savers are society's ultimate benefactors for savings paying the freight for our economic advancement, but here savers will suffer a haircut so that the ghastly errors of borrowers can be excused. The message to savers is to not bother delaying consumption so that future innovators can access capital; instead, spend with abandon with an eye on borrowing excessively knowing full well that the government (again, meaning us) will underwrite your mistakes too.

Particularly offensive within this sad exercise is the notion that we must backstop the borrowing mistakes of the housing greedy because their mortgages are "underwater." Specifically, due to a shift in market sentiment that has made the mortgages for some more expensive than the house they're in, we're expected to cushion that blow. The next time investors in the stock market buy shares on the margin that plummet in value, will we cover those errors too? _RCM

Freedom Comes to the Indiana Workplace

Paint another state free and blue in the right-to-work category. The Indiana legislature approved a new right-to-work law, and the Indiana governor signed it into law. Now workers in Indiana are assured the right to choose whether to belong to a union or not, when they take a new job.

Right to Work States

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed legislation Wednesday afternoon making his state the 23rd right-to-work state in the nation and the first in the Manufacturing Belt. Under the legislation, unions and companies cannot negotiate contracts that force employees to financially support a union as a condition of employment.

Gov. Daniels put his signature on the measure shortly after the Indiana state Senate passed it Wednesday morning on a 28-22 vote. A similar measure in 2011 failed when Democratic lawmakers prevented the state House from holding session by leaving the state. Subsequent polling showed that strategy to be very unpopular with the voters. This year, the Democrats could only use delaying tactics and now the legislation has become Indiana law. _Source

This type of legislation is crucially important for the future of the economies of individual states. Several US states are approaching bankruptcy due to labour union negotiated contracts governing the pensions, pay, and benefits for public sector workers.

As the Obama recession continues taking its toll on the US economy as a whole, individual states will be forced to take action to save themselves from the general progressive decay caused by Obamaesque policies and concessions to extortionate and sometimse violent organisations such as labour unions, leftist activist groups, and big money organised faux environmental groups.

Slow Motion Collapse of the Welfare State from the US to the EU

Walter Russell Mead has written an important essay on the collapse of the welfare state, which he refers to as "the blue model." It is worth reading in its entirety at the link after the excerpts below:

The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.

...Demographic change is accelerating the crisis of the blue social model, as retirement and other social benefits come under increasing pressure. Social Security and Medicare are covering a steadily growing percentage of the population. Younger workers no longer believe these systems will be in place for their old age. They are at least partly right. Without major change, the current Medicare system cannot last. Beyond that, a general crisis of the pension system threatens to reduce the income of older people even as government is less able to take up the slack. Defined benefit retirement programs have largely disappeared in the private sector; state and municipal pensions threaten to bankrupt some cities and states, and they are forcing officials in others to choose between drastic service cuts and breaking pension commitments to retirees. _Walter Russell Mead American Interest

The welfare state contained the seeds of its own death, just as the Russian Soviet system did. As humans give up more and more of their autonomy to an ever-bloating bureaucratic system, more and more of the internal systems which made them human begin to decay and become vestigial. Eventually most citizens are unable to grow out of the dependency stage of childhood. Birth rates collapse along with family stability. The very future of the society fades away with the declining competence and courage of its citizens.

he real crisis today in the United States is the accelerating collapse of blue government, not blue private industry, which is a phenomenon largely behind us. We are witnessing a multi-dimensional meltdown that affects our lives and politics in many ways. Three elements of the blue government meltdown in particular are worth mentioning.

The first is the government’s role in providing the benefits associated with the blue system. When we talk about “runaway entitlement programs”, we are talking about commitments by the government to provide retirement and other social benefits that originated as part of the blue system social contract. Workers could retire as early as 62 with a combination of Social Security and private pensions. These costs are now exploding according to the immutable logic of demographic and actuarial facts, and it is clear that the government can’t pay them into the future.

The second crisis is that the government is now the last “true blue” employer in the country. Federal, state and local governments are often staffed by lifetime civil servants whose jobs are protected by law and by some of the last truly powerful unions in the country. All the Reagan Administration and like-minded state governments ever managed to do was to slow the growth of government, not reduce it; government at all levels today accounts for a larger share of U.S. gross national product than it did in 1981 (and that was when government did a lot more in regulating the economy). It has become incredibly expensive for governments to do anything at all, and they are poorly equipped to respond nimbly to the fast-changing conditions of America today. _American Interest WRM

Read (or at least carefully skim) the entire essay.

Having allowed governments to control the economy via monstrous budgets and central banks, the private sectors of western nations have become almost completely dependent upon government caprice. As the core populations which allowed these societies to advance slowly shrink away, so does any chance of ultimate recovery from the welfare state's collapse, when it comes.

Europe has gone through a similar process, and is somewhat advanced along the downward pathway:

Europe's demographics also aren't on the side of growth. Populations across the developed world are graying, but Europe's low productivity growth means that its future labor shortfall will be especially acute. It doesn't help that Europeans draw social security benefits earlier and more easily than their developed-world peers. Pension commitments will strain national budgets even if Angela Merkel gets her way on handcuffing euro-zone public debt.

Which brings Messrs. Gill and Raiser to the other serious drain on European growth. Big government, by their calculation, shaves about two percentage points off growth once public spending passes 40% of GDP. Some welfare states are better-run than others—think Sweden and Germany—but the World Bank report highlights a few important connections between the welfare state and growth.

Today, European governments spend more on social protection than the rest of the world combined, thereby entrenching powerful disincentives to work and enterprise. Social protections have also come at huge direct cost to taxpayers. _WSJ

And so we see European nations on the verge of economic collapse, one by one, like dominoes. The same thing is occurring in the US, but on the city and state level -- for exactly the same reasons.

The welfare state is dying, and defiantly threatening to take down the rest of the world with it. Is it any wonder that many of the less intelligent global economic analysts look to China and India as the last great hopes for the future of global civilisation?

Fragmentation is likely, widespread hardship is possible, and war is not out of the question. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

Obama and Clinton: Friends of Thugs and Killers?

President Bill Clinton's administration acquiesced in the Taliban's ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, fostered narco-terrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism.

...Now, U.S. policy is coming another full circle on the Taliban in its frantic search for a deal. This has been underscored by a series of secret U.S. meetings with the Taliban last year and the current moves to restart talks in Qatar by meeting the Taliban's demand for the release of five of its officials who are held at Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed Tayeb al-Agha, an aide to the one-eyed Taliban chief Mohammad Omar, has emerged as the Taliban's chief negotiator with Marc Grossman, America's Afghanistan-Pakistan (Afpak) envoy.

The Qatar-based negotiations serve as another reminder why the U.S. political leadership has refrained from decapitating the Taliban's top command-and-control. The U.S. military has had ample opportunities to eliminate the Taliban's Rahbari Shura, or leadership council...Yet, tellingly, the U.S. military has not carried out a single drone, air or ground strike against the shura. _JapanTimes

Obama's sympathies are rather unclear, whenever the Muslim world is involved. Anyone who has read the autobiographies of the former junior senator from Illinois can be forgiven for suspecting that Mr. Obama identifies more with a third world perspective, than with the perspective of a world order maintained by the first world -- specifically, by the US as the world's only superpower.

Since coming to office, President Barack Obama has pursued an Afghan war strategy summed up in just four words: "surge, bribe and run." The U.S.-led military mission has now entered the "run" part, or what euphemistically is being called the "transition to 2014" — the year Obama arbitrarily chose as the deadline to wind down all NATO combat operations....The central aim is to cut a deal with the Taliban — even if Afghanistan and the region pay a heavy price...

...Obama was right to seek an end to this protracted war. But he blundered by laying out his cards in public and emboldening the enemy....Within weeks of assuming office, Obama publicly declared his intent to exit Afghanistan, before he even asked his team to work out a strategy. _JapanTimes

Just as President Jimmy Carter facilitated the creation of the murderous Islamic government in Revolutionary Iran, and unbelievably destructive government of Robert Mugabe in the formerly prosperous nation of Zimbabwe, so did President Clinton oversee the creation of the terrorist Taliban regime of thugs and brutal fanatics in Afghanistan. One must naturally wonder what sort of bizarre and monstrous governmental abortions Mr. Obama is likely to midwife during his disastrous stay in office.

Who Needs Apocalypse When You Have Detroit?

Failure like this is not built overnight. Decades of corruption, sloth, bad hiring decisions, political cronyism and depraved indifference to the needs of the poor were required to bring things to such a pass. No doubt Detroit has a generous pension program for all the wastrels and incompetents whose combined efforts created this train wreck. These people somehow manage to protect themselves even as they blight the lives and hopes of the inner city kids they were hired to serve. _WalterRussellMead

Leftist crony policies of the US Democratic Party are on display in Detroit, Michigan. If this level of devastation were to occur almost anywhere else in the US, the place would be declared a state of emergency, placed under marshal law, and razed to the ground for reconstruction. But it is only business as usual in the poster child city of the true-blue Obamaesque world of the new US political triad: The Democratic Party, organised labour, and the mob.

It is hard to see how a city recovers when things have fallen this far. Detroit’s voters do not seem interested in good governance, either unwilling or unable to penalize incompetence at the polls; the political class spouts blue liberal slogans but appears to have the compassion and generosity of a pack of velociraptors; the city’s core institutions have been so corroded and degraded after decades of decline that there is little hope for improvement anytime soon. _WalterRussellMead

How do US Democratic Party-dominated governments respond when the going gets tough? They cut vital services.

Located [next to Detroit] in an area already plagued by high crime and widespread urban decay, Highland Park has essentially signed a proverbial death warrant by cutting public power. The city has already lost nearly half of its residents over the past two decades and is reportedly $58 million in debt -- but the elimination of its street lights basically ensures its continued downward spiral.

"How can you darken any city?" asked Victoria Dowdell, a resident of Highland Park who, along with her neighbors, must now deal with pitch-black public streets after dark. "I think that was a disgrace."

Detroit has also cut various city services over the years as it edges towards bankruptcy. Mike Shedlock from Business Insider wrote last December that "Motor City" has been headed towards financial insolvency for many years. An attempt to stave off collapse, city officials there have also cut major services like street repair, garbage collection, and police forces in some areas. _Michigan Third World America

As Michelle Obama so often tells her husband, referring to the ingrates who fail to worship the first couple of the US with sufficient adoration: let them eat cake -- if they can find it!

Okay, perhaps she only behaves as if she says such things, without actually saying them. At least in public.

Who needs apocalypse when you have Doombama?

More on turning out the lights in crime-ridden cities

More here

After the Collapse of Advanced Civilisations, Comes a Greater Die-Off

The idea of a coming great human die-off is gaining popularity among those of the lefty-Luddite green enviro persuasion. Whether the die-off will be triggered by resource scarcity, by a voluntary reduction of human fertility, or by more aggressive means, such a great die-off is being seen more as a positive event by the more trendy and green forces which have taken over most media outlets, Green NGOs, funding agencies, and large segments of academic institutions.

Advanced societies are considered "soft targets," because their populations have become so accustomed to things running relatively smoothly. Just a bit of disruption can go a long way toward upsetting such societies.

It is becoming easier for individuals and small groups to trigger events which can lead to momentous calamity in the advanced world. Increased networking of vital infrastructure is making it easier for hackers to commit cyber-terrorism:

Cyber Terrorism

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Government pressure to create "smart power grids" to replace traditional grids, provides malicious hackers with a wide range of new targets to attack, at various scales.

The threat of an EMP attack -- capable of taking out continental scale power grids -- is likewise increased, as nuclear proliferation proceeds across the Pakistan-Iran-N.Korea axis (aided by China and Russia). As many as 90% of an advanced society can be expected to die within 1 year as a result of a large-scale EMP attack.

Chemical terrorism is another way in which advanced cultures could be targeted specifically. Coordinated chemical attacks using various vectors could decapitate leadership and expertise in several vital areas, leading to widespread paralysis of normal infrastructure. Such a paralysing strike might well be a set-up for a more devastating followup attack.

Increasing sophistication of inexpensive tools for "bio-hacking" are also making it more likely that individuals or small groups will create novel microbial agents of mass contagion.

Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,” said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. “Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.” _WaPo

It is not necessary to target the third world, in order to achieve a high magnitude die-off such as is depicted in the chart above. The third world has become so dependent upon the technological infrastructures and products provided by more advanced societies, that if the advanced world goes, most of the third world will quickly follow.

The resulting world of much lower human population, will also be much less technologically capable than the world at present, in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, however, most of human technology will be saved in digital and book form. This means that within 1 to 2 centuries after the great die-off, the higher intelligence populations of the presently advanced world will grow to a large enough size to begin implementing modern technologies on a global scale once again.

In other words, if lefty-Luddite greens are engineering the great human die-off for purposes of saving the world -- or simply out of hatred for the human species -- their efforts will ultimately fail.

But that will be cold comfort for your children and grandchildren who will have to suffer through the bloody mess aftermath left to them by the possibly well-intentioned greens.

It is up to you to make sure that they survive that bloody mess. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Occupy Yourself! Zombies of Occupy Defecate on Everyone

Young persons who sense that there is something wrong with the world, and who have never been exposed to the boggling complexity of circular causation interwoven into the real world, may be attracted to the Occupy! movement, as a novelty. The movement appears to be "accomplishing something," as opposed to meekly taking it on the chin from an indifferent world ruled by wealthy narcissists. To such relative babes in the world, Occupy may seem to hold a promise of ultimate justice for all the wrongs done to the weak.

In the real world, Occupy is a herd of naive assholes being led by well-paid and cynical professional activists, who bring out the worst behaviour in everyone they influence.

Here's another point of view, from California Occupy! observers:

Last night, San Diego residents held a fundraiser for two street vendors whose carts were burglarized and vandalized, with blood and piss, by Occupy protesters. The protesters were angry that the vendors would not “donate” their wares to the movement. CBS Los Angeles reports that the vendors, one who sold hot dogs, and one who sold coffee, also received death threats for refusing to give away their goods.

At the Port of Oakland earlier this month, workers and observers could only enter—and more horrifying, leave—the port after the mob “voted” their permission. When one trucker tried to break through the blockade, his vehicle was attacked. The protester who did the attacking had this to say: "These people tried to kill us. I can't believe they are being that aggressive over a paycheck, over your own people fighting for you." (Savor the irony.) While people waited into the early morning hours for permission to see their families and do their jobs, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who gave the OK for Oakland Police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of Occupy Protesters, sat safely in a government building.

Even if we are to assume that the bulk of these crimes have been committed by members of Black Blocs—groups of anarchic nihilists who cover their faces in order to wreak meaningless havoc, yet are not really on board with the wider aims (whatever they may be) of the Occupy movement—and other minorities of the movement, there’s still no good explanation for why Occupy protesters on the whole are causing more harm to their local economies than they are to their government.

Show me an Occupy demand that can be met by destroying the livelihoods of people who are on the cusp of poverty (due to government regulations on food vendors), smashing the windows of a Men’s Warehouse and a coffee shop, trashing the bathroom of a Manhattan restaurant, pushing an old lady down a flight of D.C. stairs after imprisoning her and her fellow conservative conference attendees using a human chain, or "clobber[ing] a store manager with a credit-card reader." You can’t. That’s because the government holds the strings here, not the people who Occupy is hurting. The government gives away corporate welfare, controls cops, sends perverse signals to the market, drops bombs, exposes itself to regulatory capture, deals out special favors to big interests, operates drones, prohibits drugs, and destroys immigrant families through deportation. Hot dog vendors sell hot dogs, restaurants sell food, store managers manage stores, truck drivers drive trucks.

While disrupting local businesses is significantly easier than disrupting local and national government (Hot dog vendors don’t pack heat, the government—and sometimes, the NYT—does), screwing over the rest of the 99 percent simply because it's easier isn't going to accomplish Occupy's goals, unless of course triggering schadenfreude and alienating possible allies are agenda items on one of the dozen-or-so lists of demands floating around the web. _Reason

Occupy! will never go after the real source of all the problems they bemoan. Because that would mean going after their backers and their heroes. The naivete of the true believers in the camps is both heart-rending and sickening, as is the ease with which they are manipulated.

No one ever said that dumbing down entire societies would be without its repercussions.

Occupy Movement: Lord of the Flies for Modern Devolved Leftists?

The Occupy movement is becoming more and more surreal. At UC Berkeley and Harvard, students are clamouring to build occupy camps of their own, on campus. Expect this to become a growing trend at elite universities where children of the 1% are prepared to rule the world.

Here is a short list of one day's misadventures in the Occupy camps of the world:

If you have ever wondered what would happen in a society consisting entirely of liberals, the Occupier movement is providing the answer: devolution. It is almost impossible to keep up with the downward spiral, but here are some of the highlights of the last 24 hours:

* In Portland, an Occupier was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail down the stairwell of a building.

* In London, employees of St. Paul’s Cathedral have had to clean up human waste left by Occupiers inside the cathedral. (What is it with the Occupiers and toilet issues?)

* In Portland, another drug overdose.

* In Vermont, a man was shot to death at the Occupy Burlington encampment.

* At Occupy San Diego, a citizen journalist was violently assaulted.

* In Atlanta, tuberculosis has broken out among the Occupiers.

* In Salt Lake City, four were arrested after a melee broke out in the Occupy encampment.

* In San Francisco, police expressed concern about escalating violence among the Occupiers, following incidents including gun possession, assault on a city worker and trespassing on the new holiday ice rink.

And this is just a smattering of today’s headlines! The Occupiers are conducting a sort of experiment in the viability of left-wing ideas, and the results aren’t pretty.

_Powerline

Others have been shot and killed, raped, molested, robbed, assaulted, etc. in the immediate vicinity of Occupy camps. Business and properties have been badly vandalised. Public health and sanitation have flown out the window, with public hazards largely ignored by lawful authorities.

This is a movement subsidised by wealthy leftists, abetted by leftist government administrators, and populated by professional activists of the left. It is a useful phenomenon, as a test for idiocy. If one joins the "movement," one is clearly an idiot with nothing important to do.

Either that, or someone who is a peripheral "hanger-on." A curiosity seeker (with nothing important to do), or someone with darker motives.

It is certainly an entertaining circus, as long as you can keep your distance.

Occupy Sit-Ins: Nostalgia for the 60's, or Haven for Rape and Pedophilia?

According to Walter Russell Mead, the Occupy movement's sit-ins and demonstrations remind him a lot of similar leftist demonstration in the US 1960's.

The news that 175 people were arrested over the weekend in a Chicago OWS protest started me thinking about the ritualized nature of left demonstrations. The drums, the chants, the defiance, the arrests — and, sometimes, the glass smashing and the fire setting: it all unfolds according to a predictable pattern that in its modern form is essentially unchanged since the Vietnam War.

...Back in the day, when most workers in American industry had workweeks of seventy and eighty hours, had little or no formal education and lacked the money and the leisure to do much about politics as individuals, mass demonstrations really meant something. People were giving up all the leisure time they had in a week, they were risking being blacklisted — losing their jobs and being blocked from working in their field in a time with no unemployment insurance or social safety net — and they were walking into situations where “police brutality” meant getting killed or disabled, with no lawsuits or compensation.

...Those demonstrations were often the only way people had to show what was on their minds and how deeply they felt. These days, when the electorate is being constantly polled, and cable news channels are feverishly tracing every tiny tick in public opinion, demonstrations don’t really tell us anything. Nor do they change things much; if the Tea Party had stopped with rallies, it would have been forgotten very quickly. It was only when Tea Party activists stopped dressing up in those ridiculous three cornered hats and started organizing, fundraising and attending town halls that the movement had a substantive impact. _WalterRussellMead

He does have a point. The Occupy protestors are either professional activists, unemployed dropouts, or union agitators on the make -- with a few anarchists, pedophiles, and other career criminals to add diversity.

At the Cleveland Occupy sit-in, a young girl was raped -- and the organisers apparently tried to cover it up. At the Baltimore Occupy sit-ins, the cover-up machine is in full pre-emptive swing. At the Seattle Occupy sit-in, a pedophile was out exposing himself to young children. And how many other incidents are we not hearing about, because the politically correct clamp-down is in full effect. Remember: If it shows Obama and his supporters in a bad light, the skankstream media will simply ignore it.

It is instructive to look at the riots occurring on the tiny island of Mayotte. The native islanders -- largely unemployed and on the dole -- have gone on the rampage, demanding much more generous welfare benefits from the paternal French protectors of the island. How do these island riots -- and similar riots on French islands in the Caribbean -- relate to the Occupy movement?

It is quite simple. Persons who are largely outside the productive wealth-generating system of a society will often demand to be supported by the government apparatus of redistribution, once they feel they have the political power to make those demands. Rather than gaining the skills, competencies, and expertise to become part of the productive, wealth-generating segment of society themselves, they choose to use the threat of violence and civil disorder to extort redistributionist "tribute" from the state.

The Occupy sit-ins are not about justice in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, they are about moolah. They are about taking money from productive persons and transferring that money to layabouts, so that they can continue to pay their bills while laying about.

Readers who remember discussions here about psychological neoteny, the flight from childhood responsibility, and the lack of meaningful rites of passage in modern child-raising, will start to understand how movements such as Occupy can gain traction -- even in a modern society.

And You Thought There Was No Such Thing As Zombies!

We live in a time when zombies walk the Earth. This breed of zombie is proud of its lack of knowledge and its inability to think through complex issues. Simplifying the problems of societies to just a few emotion-laden issues is the most that these addle-brained zombies can handle.

This zombie movement is spurred by a global economic recession without apparent end. And the zombie contagion is spreading...

Thousands of people across the world railed against corporate power, grinding poverty and government cuts Saturday as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to the streets of Europe, Asia and Australia -- and took a particularly violent turn in Rome....

...Police said hundreds of anarchists in Rome moved in where peaceful demonstrators had gathered as part of the global Occupy movement. The anarchists -- some wearing ski masks and belonging to a group termed "Black Bloc" -- torched cars, broke windows and clashed with police.

...In London, protester Peter Vaughn, reflecting the mood of many in the crowd there, said people criticized financial institutions that have "gambled away our money."

...Europeans turned out amid debt troubles and austerity plans in Greece, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Germany.

United for Global Change -- the central site for the movement organizing worldwide protests -- said 951 cities in 82 countries were to take part in the demonstrations after online organizers called for a worldwide rally.

...Around the world, protesters marched, listened to speeches, and displayed banners reading anti-corporate slogans, including the now ubiquitous "we are the 99%," "Banks are cancer" and tax the rich 1%."

...Canadians turned out in Toronto, with placards jutting up from a crowd saying "Arrest the 1%" and "Stop ignoring the youth, we are your tomorrow." A sign on a dog said "99% against (corporate) fat cats."

...Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney joined rallies against "corporate greed" as protesters aligned themselves with the global movement.

...The worldwide movement is galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement started last month as a backlash against the economy and what demonstrators say is an out-of-touch corporate, financial and political elite.

Occupy Wall Street organizers say they are inspired by the Arab Spring that led to the toppling of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. _CNN

Similar worldwide zombie movements have led to bombings in New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Israel, and across the zombie lands from the near east to the far east. Zombies are single-minded in their hunger and violent compulsions. Whether obsessed with global warming and peak oil, the "greed of the 1%", doomsday comets, or the need to spread Islam to every nation, zombies have one-track minds. Should these different breeds of zombies somehow join together for just a short time into a truly global movement, the resulting devastation could be the tipping point into the Idiocracy.

It is not so far from the obsessive-compulsive "occupy zombies" or the "islamosupremacist zombies" to the blood-thirst zombies of legend and lore. Once societies let slip the autophagic forces of zombiehood, the fragile bonds that tie a society together are also "let slip."

Life in California: Not for the Easily Discouraged

I am including a long excerpt from Professor Victor Davis Hanson's latest PJ Media column. It details some of his struggles to survive in the face of a rampant parasitism settling over the "Golden State."

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,” and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos” — like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out.

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant, who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house — carting off the refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave. But why? Do these miscreants wish a civilization of the sort that all houses must seem occupied all the time, or are otherwise considered “communal property” for the taking? Don’t the appliance thieves have homes, and if so, do they have locks on the doors to protect their investments from the likes of themselves?

...Highly paid and pensioned California teachers and professors are resembling bishops, knights, or rooks surrounded by a host of part-time, temporary, one-year-contract pawns, lacking the salary, security, and benefits of the kingpins. Yet the liberal establishment in education cannot continue in such an apartheid world of unionized winners and exploited subordinate losers, or public fiefdoms propped up by private toilers. It is a contradiction in terms, and there is no money to pay for it, despite the fiscal logic of its exploitation.

...I went to the warehouse local food store the other day, soaked it all in, and wondered: if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps? We are nearing 50 million recipients. So what will come next? Food stamp A; food stamp category B? Super food stamps? Can 100 million receive them? 150?... _VDH

California is a preview of coming attractions for much of "blue state America." Greece is already there, and much of the rest of "entitlement minded" western Europe is well on the way.

As for the readers of this blog, it should not require stating that your decisions over the next few years are crucial. And I am not referring to your decisions while in the poll booth, although one should be aware of the ramifications of his actions in all circumstances. No, your response to the general demographic decline of your society will determine at what level the re-building can commence.

San Francisco is Doomed

The average city pension to SF retirees is $46,272, while the average per capita income of San Franciscans is $44,373. But as the private sector continues to flounder -- as more businesses choose to leave California entirely -- average private sector incomes are not likely to rise quickly. Government retirement income, on the other hand, is likely to sky-rocket as union negotiated payouts expand on a generously pre-programmed schedule. More from SFGate:

The average retiree from San Francisco city government earns an annual pension of $46,272, according to the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System. The average retiree who worked at least 30 years in city government earns an annual pension of $76,981.

The average pension for a retiree from the Fire Department is $108,552. From the Police Department? $95,016. And everybody else? $41,136.

The figures show most retirees aren't getting anywhere near the fat packages that outrage many city residents - like the $264,000 pension paid to former Police Chief Heather Fong last year. [ed.: This paragraph is disingenuous, as the upward trend for pension payouts is exploding upward, and out of control. Look at the trends -- where things are going. Not at where they have been.]

But city retirees are doing pretty well compared with working San Franciscans....Per capita income is $44,373.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi is gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot that would require city workers to pay far more of their salaries toward pensions. Currently, most pay 7.5 percent of their paychecks, but some highly paid employees would pay double that in bad economic years under Adachi's plan. _SFGate

San Francisco is a beautiful city, but it has been going downhill rapidly under a steady barrage of corrupt leftist city governments, in thrall to government employee unions.

But the same rapid decay is happening across the state of California, for largely the same reason. The same process of doom is ongoing in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and a number of other parts of the US which are committing ritualistic murder of taxpayers and private sectors in league with government unions.

Greece and much of western Europe are on the same decline plane, destined for financial ruin as a result of an excessive and pyramiding sense of entitlement and tax/regulation suppressed drive and enterprise.

Politically correct groupthink controls western media, governments, academia and popular culture. But reality has the final word.

Obama's America in Collapse from Within and Without

US President Obama's destructive influence on the American economy and on the US government's credibility around the world, appears to come from within the man and his circle of influence. From the moment of Obama's nomination as his party's candidate for presidential office, a milieu of confusion and uncertainty has grown over the direction and fate of the world's only superpower.

When Barack Obama took office, the official normal money supply of the United States was about $1.1-trillion. The $3-trillion in federal budget deficits that have been run up since then have largely, technically, escaped the money supply, though accretions have almost doubled the official total, an unheard of rate of growth (about 40% annualized) in a hard-currency country. About 70% of this debt has been paid by the issuance of bonds to the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the United States government. Whatever the balance sheets say, this has produced the effect of a money-supply increase, which has brought pump-priming to a level of over-achievement not seen since Noah felt the compulsion to build an ark. And the annual trillion-dollar deluge is forecast to continue for a decade.

The world’s reserve currency, the fabled vehicle of the “faith and credit of the United States,” is now virtual money — a symbol for all the other massive problems afflicting the U.S. economy. _NP

The incompetence of the Obama government is being felt internationally on all fronts -- from economic markets to the global balance of power. There are plenty of problems originating outside the US:

The world economy is losing strength halfway through the year as high oil prices and fallout from Japan’s natural disaster and Europe’s debt woes take their toll. _

, but any response that the Obama crew is able to scrape up is invariably inadequate and couterproductive.

Obama's expensive economic stimulus programs have been revealed as corrupt payback schemes to supporters. But the wealth transfer from the productive classes to the corrupt and non-productive classes -- friends and supporters of Obama -- seem to stretch out indefinitely into the future. Boss Tweed can only be Boss Tweed. He and his gang know no other way to govern but the way of corruption and thuggishness.

Meanwhile, in the heart of many of America's largest cities, the violence among Obama's most dedicated supporters only grows. Here are America's ten most deadly cities -- strongholds of Obama supporters:

1. Flint, Mich.

Population: 109,245
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 22
2010 Murders: 53
Median Income: $27,049 (46.1% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 11.8% (2.8% above national average)

The number of violent crimes committed in Flint increased for all categories considered for this list between 2009 and 2010. Perhaps most notably, the number of murders in the city increased from 36 to 53. This moves the city from having the seventh highest rate of homicide to the second highest. The number of aggravated assaults increased from 1,529 to 1,579, a rate of 14.6 assaults per 1,000 residents, placing the city in the No. 1 rank for rate of assaults. Flint police chief Alvern Lock stated late last year that he believed the city's violence stemmed from drugs and gangs. Flint has a relatively small median income of about $27,000 per household. The city also has a poverty rate of 36.2%.


2. Detroit

Population: 899,447
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 18.9
2010 Murders: 310
Median Income: $26,098 (48% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 12.7% (3.7% above national average)

The city crippled the most in America's post-industrial era is almost certainly Detroit. The Motor City has suffered from high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and crime. The city has one of the ten highest rates for three of the four types of violent crime identified by the FBI. Detroit has the sixth highest murder rate, the fifth highest robbery rate, and the second highest rate of aggravated assault. In 2005, a major reorganization of the city's police department took place after a federal investigation identified inefficiencies within the system. According to an article in The United Press, opponents of Detroit Mayor David Bing called for further intervention by the Justice Department in several shootings that occurred last year.


3. St. Louis

Population: 355,151
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 17.5
2010 Murders: 144
Median Income: $34,801 (30.7% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 9.3% (0.3% above national average)

Violent crime in St. Louis fell dramatically between 2009 and 2010, and has decreased since 2007. Despite this, crime rates remain extremely high compared with other cities. In 2010, the city's murder rate and rate of aggravated assault were each the third worst in the country. With regards to both violent and nonviolent crime, St. Louis was rated the most dangerous city based on FBI data released six months ago. As of December 2010, the murder rate in St. Louis was 6.3 times that of the state of Missouri. The city's gunshot murder rate for residents between 10 to 19 years old is also the second highest in the country, behind only New Orleans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


4. New Haven, Conn.

Population: 124,856
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 15.8
2010 Murders: 22
Median Income: $38,279 (23.8% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 9.6% (0.6% above national average)

New Haven has historically had the highest rate of violent crime on the east coast. The impoverished, crime-ridden parts of the city stand in stark contrast to affluent Fairfield county to the West, and elite Yale University, which is located within the city itself. The number of murders in the city doubled last year. New Haven has the eighth highest rate of robbery and the fourth highest rate of assault in the U.S. The New Haven Police Department is considering adding cameras at every intersection in one of the neighborhoods where shootings are the most common.


5. Memphis, Tenn.

Population: 673,650
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 15.4
2010 Murders: 89
Median Income: $34,203 (31.8% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 9.9% (0.9% above national average)

Memphis has high rates for all the violent crimes considered for 24/7 Wall St.'s rankings. It has the sixth highest rate in the country. Incidents of violent crime in the city dropped slightly less than 15% between 2009 and 2010 though. Memphis Mayor AC Wharton attributes this decrease to Operation Safe Community, a citywide plan developed in 2005. The plan consists of a number of strategies meant to increase crime prevention, through toughening punishments for criminals, and the effectiveness of the city's legal system, through changes such as expanding court programs so that they operate consistently and at full capacity.


6. Oakland, Calif.

Population: 409,723
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 15.3
2010 Murders: 90
Median Income: $51,473 (2.4% above national average)
Unemployment Rate: 11% (2% above national average)

Oakland's violent crime dropped about 5.5% between 2009 and 2010, from about 6,800 to 6,260. The city nevertheless has the tenth-highest rate of rape, the ninth-highest murder rate, and the second highest robbery rate in the country. In 2010, there were 7.12 robberies for every 1,000 Oakland residents. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mayor Jean Quan has attempted to combat break-ins and theft by creating programs to keep potential wrongdoers off the streets by starting late-night basketball programs. It it unclear if these policies have worked.


7. Little Rock, Ark.

Population: 192,922
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 15.2
2010 Murders: 25
Median Income: $38,992 (22.3% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 6.8% (2.2% below national average)

Little Rock has one of the highest rates of aggravated assault and forcible rape in the country. Since 2009, reported assaults has increased while reported forcible rapes have decreased. According to Lt. Terry Hastings of the Little Rock Police Department, quoted by local station FOX16, Little Rock was "down almost 12 percent across the board on crime" in 2010. This may be accurate for many crimes, and especially nonviolent crimes, however, according to FBI data, violent crime increased from 2009 to 2010.


8. Baltimore

Population: 639,929
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 14.6
2010 Murders: 223
Median Income: $38,772 (22.7% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 7.4% (1.6% below national average)

Baltimore had the eighth-highest rate of violent crime per capita in 2010 among cities with 100,000 or more residents, and the second-highest east of the Mississippi. The number of violent crimes has dropped slightly in the past year -- from 9,600 to 9,300 -- but the Maryland city has some of the worst rates of dangerous offenses in the country. This includes the tenth-worst aggravated assault rate -- and the fourth-worst murder rate in the country.


9. Rockford, Ill.

Population: 156,180
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 14.5
2010 Murders: 20
Median Income: $36,990 (26% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 13.3% (4.3% above national average)

Rockford has unusually high violent crime rates for a city of its size. Most notably, the city has the fourth highest rate of aggravated assault in the country, with 10.5 cases for every 1,000 citizens in 2010. During the same period, 20 murders occurred, almost double the number in 2000. Quoted by the Rockford Register Star in 2007, Winnebago County Sheriff Dick Meyers said that he believed the city's "location worked against [it,]" as Rockford receives traffic from the drug markets in Madison, Chicago, and Milwaukee, resulting in heightened rates of violence.


10. Stockton, Calif.

Population: 292,047
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 13.8
2010 Murders: 49
Median Income: $45,730 (8.9% below national average)
Unemployment Rate: 18.4% (9.4% above national average)

With a jobless rate of 18.4%, up from 18.1% a year ago, Stockton, California has one of the worst unemployment problems in the country. The huge percentage of unemployed residents may have contributed to horrible crime rates in the city, which is located 40 miles east of Oakland and San Francisco. Stockton was rated one of the most miserable cities to live in the country by Forbes in March, 2010. Violent crime was one of the chief measurements for its ranking. Of the 267 cities with populations over 100,000, Stockton has the 27th highest number of murders per 1,000 people and the 12th most aggravated assaults per 1,000. Last year, recognizing the crime problems in the city, the state temporarily diverted hundreds of California _MostDangerousUSCities

The rot begins at the very top, and spreads into most government bureaucracies, media offices, academic institutions, labour union centres, corporate personnel offices, courtrooms, law enforcement bureaus, and virtually every institution of the nation.

You may want to think about what would have to be done to bring positivity and productivity back to the productive classes of the US. Because when the US is strong, the rest of the world has some hope for improvement. With the US under Obama in danger of collapse in many areas, hope is becoming rather scarce. What do you do?

The Left is the New Inquisition: Escape is the Only Option

A person's politics and his religion are two aspects of his philosophy, which reflect his personality in many ways. If a person's philosophy borrows too heavily from the herd, or the "zeitgeist," it is likely the person is not worth knowing, since there is little original about him. The inquisition is the enforcement mechanism for a society's dominant memes -- the means for maintaining control. It is only the escapees from the inquisition who are worth knowing.

Concerning a recent escapee from the leftist asylum, playwrite David Mamet:

...[Mamet] agreed to write an essay on the play’s politics for the Village Voice. In the essay Mamet confessed that many of his previous political beliefs now struck him as reflexive and unthinking: The country that existed in his once-fevered liberal imagination—a dystopia crippled by crises that required the immediate deployment of the federal government—bore little resemblance to the country in which he actually lived, where people interacted smoothly in the marketplace to their mutual benefit. He had come to realize that corporations were good for providing the necessities of life. The “Big Bad Military” of his youthful fancy was, he discovered, an organization built on courage and honor.

For the moment, he told Voice readers, he was searching for “a human understanding of the political process .  .  . in which I believe I may be succeeding.”

Voice editors hyped Mamet’s piece with an attention getting headline, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’ ” The essay was much milder than its title. It was the work of a man in mid-conversion. _TWS

Mamet is different from his former leftist asylum inmates only in his honesty and willingness to see the world from different points of view -- as if testing them for how well the POVs fit the outside world. Most dogmatists and true believers are unable to step outside their own deepest beliefs in this way, and so they are doomed to remain mired within their own dysfunctional cage of beliefs.

One of Mamet’s favorite books has been Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, published during the First World War by the British social psychologist Wilfred Trotter, inventor of the term “herd instinct.”

“Trotter says the herd instinct in an animal is stronger even than the preservation of life,” Mamet said. “So I was watching the [2008] debates. My liberal friends would spit at the mention of Sarah Palin’s name. Or they would literally mime the act of vomiting. We’re watching the debates and one of my friends pretends to vomit and says, ‘I have to leave the room.’ I thought, oh my god, this is Trotter! This is the reaction of the herd instinct. When a sheep discovers a wolf in the fold, it vomits to ward off the attacker. It’s a sign that their position in the herd is threatened.”

Mamet runs into the herd instinct every day.

“I’ve given galleys of The Secret Knowledge to some friends. They say, ‘I’m scared to read it.’ I say, ‘Why should you be afraid to read something?’

“What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of losing their ability to stay in the herd. That’s what I found in myself. It can be wrenching when you start to think away from the herd.”

Mamet’s disdain for consensus, for received wisdom of any kind, has been evident in nearly every aspect of his career. _TWS

Clearly Mamet knows what he is talking about. The transition out of the herd is truly wrenching. And if one is compelled by one's profession to mix with the herd on a daily basis, the emotional threat one represents to the herd is often written on the faces of herd members.

Mamet's new book is called The Secret Knowledge.

Village Voice: Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal by David Mamet

It is unfortunate that Andrew Ferguson entitled his piece on Mamet, Converting Mamet, and refers in the piece to "the conversion" of Mamet. Conversion is too often no better than escaping from one prison into another. Rather the story should be about "the escape of Mamet." Freedom is quite different from true believerhood. No two free men think exactly alike, whereas the inquisition -- or Political Correctness, if you will -- is installed to guarantee that on important issues (the ever changing talking points), correct-thinking persons will think the same thoughts.