President Obama supports the rights of gun owners as guaranteed under the Second Amendment, and believes that the Constitution guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms.
President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.
The president is putting his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms. Contrast that with what the Constitution says: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Now read the full weight quote again. This president is violating his oath of office as much as if he said he were putting his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on free speech.
“I’m going to be putting forward a package and I’m going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”
Disarming the innocent does nothing to change anything. But again, this isn’t about guns, it’s ultimately about control.
But he has also called on Congress to move quickly to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines.
I’ve addressed “Why High Capacity Magazines” just recently, but to touch on it in the shortest way possible, would you end up the victim of a home invasion robbery by five guys, would you rather have 6 rounds, 10 rounds, or 30 rounds?
“I’ve been very clear that an assault-rifle ban, banning these high capacity clips, background checks, that there are a set of issues that I have historically supported and will continue to support,” the president said.
And banning handguns, and all guns that don’t belong to his government. Yeah, we know. “Shall not be infringed” means “a ban, banning these other things, background checks to exercise a right are all things I have historically supported.” Yes, his oath of office is as meaningless now as it was when he was an Illinois senator.
“I’d like to get it done in the first year. I will put forward a very specific proposal based on the recommendations that Joe Biden’s task force is putting together as we speak. And so this is not something that I will be putting off.”
Translation: “I have to do this before people catch on to it and realize it’s a feel-good measure that does nothing but expand government power. I put Joe Biden in charge because he’s a mindless ideologue who doesn’t care about facts, and doesn’t listen to the other side, and can be trusted to ram this crap through and f*** the citizen back into the serf they should be.”
“I am not going to prejudge the recommendations that are given to me. I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem,” he said.
We joke sometimes about how Malia’s getting to the age now, and boys start calling and, you know, sort of, I always talk about how one of the main incentives for running again was continuing Secret Service protection to have men with guns around at all times
It’s not really a joke, though.
And the president who sent thousands of guns to narcoterrorist cartels to kill our Mexican neighbors then goes on:
“I think there are a vast majority of responsible gun owners out there who recognize that we can’t have a situation in which somebody with severe psychological problems is able to get the kind of high-capacity weapons that this individual in Newtown obtained and gun down our kids,” Obama said.
“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools,” Obama said. “And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem.”
Because now, as it was for the thousands of years of human civilization before the American experiment began, laws are once again for you, not for the elites. Welcome back to serfdom.
During the presidential debates, Romney took a stance against Obama’s Apology Tour. Obama denied it, but as is expected of his administration, if it’s worth denying or covering up, it’s probably doubly true. Consider this piece from Commentary Magazine complete with quotes from top Obama advisors Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter:
Power wrote that America’s record in world affairs had been so harmful to the freedoms of people around the world that the United States could remedy the problem only through profound self-criticism and the wholesale adoption of new policies. Acknowledging that President Bush was correct in saying that “some America-bashers” hate the American people’s freedoms, Ms. Power stated that much anti-Americanism derives from the role that U.S. power “has played in denying such freedoms to others” and concluded:
U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling….Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When [then German Chancellor] Willie [sic] Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?
Thus, even at the beginning of the Bush presidency, Power saw Brandt’s apology for the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry as the model for an American leader to seek pardon for the sins of U.S. foreign policy.
These are the advisors who went and pushed the World Apology Tour.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, of Princeton University, whom President Obama would later appoint as the State Department’s head of policy planning, likewise exhorted whomever would succeed President Bush to apologize for America’s role in the world. In a February 2008 article in Commonweal entitled “Good Reasons to be Humble,” she wrote:
[I]t will be time for a new president to show humility rather than just talk about it. The president must ask Americans to acknowledge to ourselves and to the world that we have made serious, even tragic, mistakes in the aftermath of September 11—in invading Iraq, in condoning torture and flouting international law, and in denying the very existence of global warming until a hurricane destroyed one of our most beloved cities….
[W]e should make clear that our hubris, as in the old Greek myths, has diminished us and led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
All this helps explain the remorseful tone of the Cairo speech. It also sheds light on Obama’s determination to set precedents and create institutional and legal constraints on the ability of the United States to take international action assertively, independently, and in its own particular interests. Without reference to this severely jaundiced view of American history, one cannot make any sense of the hesitation and meekness, the extreme deference to the Security Council and shyness about encouraging opponents of hostile dictators that have characterized the Obama administration’s policy toward Libya—and, for that matter, toward the anti-Assad-regime upheaval in Syria and, in 2009, toward the Green Movement anti-regime demonstrations in Iran.
Short short version: “America’s bad, m’kay.”
The blame-America first crowd has been writing American foreign policy. They soundly believe in their self-flagellating leftist egocentrism that not only does the world revolve around them, and the US, but that the US is the cause of all the world’s problems.
…humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn’t until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.
Unsurprisingly, a Harvard professor is ignorant of the outside world, and ignores that there are fruits and melons and berries and even vegetables of the squash family that are quite sweet. There are many that have been more refined and developed through agriculture, but there were plenty of them around in nature beforehand.
The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can’t control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource.
The constant cry that there is an evil villain out to ruin The People, the constant drum beat that The People are weak, unable to control their urges, and must be controlled are all present. This is going to be very predictable.
What should we do? One option is to do nothing, while hoping that scientists find better cures for obesity-related diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. I’m not holding my breath for such cures, and the costs of inaction, already staggering, would continue to mushroom.
Mr. Lieberman opens his piece by saying that criticisms “most worthy of attention” are the libertarian arguments that this is bad. That’s Lieberman’s way of ignoring them. His questions are based on false premises. His question of “what should we do?” is really – “what should the government do to The People?” He, being an elite Harvard professor, is clearly a ruler of men, an intellectual powerhouse whose huge brain means that he is of course exempt from being lumped in with The People – but the “we” he speaks of is that of the Ruling Class.
The “do nothing” argument is flawed. If the government does nothing, individual citizens will make their own decisions. Off the top of my head, I can think of two writers here who’ve lost double-digit weight in the last year because they got sick of being heavy. Nature solves its own problems. Nobody wants to be at an unhealthy weight. Modern individuals, with modern, sedentary jobs balance the costs of health issues against those of other pressing matters in their daily life. If they have families they need to spend time with, that time at the gym may become less important. If to maintain their standard of living, they need to work more in a sedentary job and there’s a health cost, that’s a decision they make. If they recognize that their weight (whether that be too big or too small) is effecting their quality of life, then they work to change it.
The relative availability of modern foodstuffs is not an issue in their weight. Their decision to eat and drink the amounts that they do is. This goes to Lieberman’s second flawed point. Everyone knows what makes you fat. Everyone.
A more popular option is to enhance public education to help us make better decisions about what to eat and how to be active. This is crucial but has so far yielded only modest improvements.
A team led by obesity expert Prof Fredrik Karpe made the discovery by asking volunteers to eat fatty foods containing traceable carbon isotopes.
They tracked the fat’s path from the gut, which they assumed would be taken around the body by the blood to be ‘burned off’ by the muscles, with the excess slowly adding to our girth over time.
Instead, they found the first fat from a meal entered the bloodstream about an hour after it was eaten by the volunteers.
‘By the time three to four hours have passed, most of it has been incorporated into our adipose tissue, mostly in the shorter term fat stores around our waists,’ Prof Karpe said. Fat around the waist is used only for short-term storage, and can be burned off when people need energy.
Your body tells you you’re fat. You feel it. Education isn’t that difficult. Calories in > calories out, you get fat. Calories out > calories in, you lose weight. Calories in = calories out, you stay at your present weight. You intake calories with food, burn them with activity. Millions of pages have been written about this, but ultimately, it’s not that complicated. Most of those millions of pages are spent trying to balance lifestyle and eating habits and the best ways for each individual, which government cannot do anyway.
The final option that Lieberman comes up with is, as usual, that of all other final answers to problems that the state has deemed worth destroying. Of course the “final option” is the one he states that he laments by listing last. He then notes that the paternalistic state is really a good thing, and by introducing coercion to mimic the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence of primitive man, we will finally have the best solution to fighting obesity.
The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat and salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day. Mr. Bloomberg’s paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of our environment.
For all the academic twisting here, no, the government’s function is not to reduce us to animals. Lieberman’s graphic represents what they think of the public – mindless apes:
And the solution is sitting in the ad bar, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Lieberman continues, justifying his desire for control of The People’s bodies:
Though his big-soda ban would apply to all New Yorkers, I think we should focus paternalistic laws on children. Youngsters can’t make rational, informed decisions about their bodies, and our society agrees that parents don’t have the right to make disastrous decisions on their behalf. Accordingly, we require parents to enroll their children in school, have them immunized and make them wear seat belts. We require physical education in school, and we don’t let children buy alcohol or cigarettes. If these are acceptable forms of coercion, how is restricting unhealthy doses of sugary drinks that slowly contribute to disease any different?
Paternalistic laws have only propagated in the last few decades because the state has sought to replace the parent. Youngsters don’t have to make rational, informed decisions because that’s their parent’s jobs. Society doesn’t agree at all with Lieberman. Government bureaucrats and the Ruling Class have decided to instituted controls regardless of what society thinks. Paternalistic laws now try to change adults into children, all of whom “need” controlling by the state.
Lieberman’s arguments are founded on a basis of overreach that has never been part of the American tradition – those aren’t acceptable, either. Taking parental authority from the parent and placing it in the hands of the state is part of Lieberman’s academic ruling class society – it is not part of greater American society. Mandatory education laws often force children into crappy schools run by governmental bureaucrats – in comparison, home-schooled children often do better because their parents have a personal vested interest in the well-being of their own child. The parent of a child will almost invariably be more interested in the well-being of their child moreso than the most enlightened, wonderful schoolteacher attempting to teach a hundred in a day.
Requiring immunizations has taken place as part of disease-reduction initiatives, but you can catch mumps or rubella. You don’t walk by a fat person and suddenly gain 40 pounds. There are also plenty of arguments against mandatory vaccinations, some of which come from Hollywood kooks, and some of which come from folks who really don’t like that medical industries can simply force people to buy their products through government mandates. If there were benefits to it, people would choose to do it. Flu vaccinations are pushed, but not mandatory, and people volunteer for them.
Children drinking and smoking were stopped by their parents, not by the state. The push for control over drinking is what begat Prohibition, wherein the moral busybodies in the Temperance Movement declared that people were too drunk and stupid to be trusted with their freedoms. That resulted in the entire nation rebelling against it. It also resulted in the state murdering its citizens for their own good.
As for seat belts:
Seat belt laws are part of the same problem. They assume that individuals can’t make good decisions, and that people must be forced into those decisions. For years, there were no seat belts in automobiles. Individual manufacturers came up with ways to make cars safer, some of them being far ahead of the curve, and as individuals saw safety features, they chose to buy them. Notably, Volvo owes much of its reputation in the US to numerous safety features. With the exception of seat belts where a person could become a projectile and impact another person, seat belt laws do infringe on personal freedom.
The children in the truck bed above are not going to be violently flung out of the truck. The driver, knowing he has a load of precious cargo, is going to drive safely and slowly. If he does, the children won’t ride with him again – their parents won’t let them. Or, even without seatbelt laws, a law enforcement officer could stop the truck and deal with the driver as necessary for endangering his passengers.
Back to Lieberman:
Along these lines, we should ban all unhealthy food in school — soda, pizza, French fries — and insist that schools provide adequate daily physical education, which many fail to do.
The state is not the parent. If parents tell the schools to stop serving foods they deem unhealthy, then the school – which is employed by the parent-taxpayers, must respond. To do otherwise is a failure of the school to live up to the contract is has with the parents. Of course, in Lieberman’s world, the school, as a function of the state, is superior to the parent. As such, the school can dictate how they will raise children.
The assumption that rich foods are a cause of childhood obesity is also contingent on portions served. 100 calories of pizza, with bread crust, a layer of cheese, a pretend piece of meat, is the same as 100 calories of sandwich, with a slice of cheese, a bread crust, and a pretend piece of meat. The decisions to eliminate soda, pizza, and french fries are based on Lieberman’s Ruling Class notion of “what is good for you”, not on what actually is. As noted in his own article, these rich foods are incredibly good for you if you’re in a state of constant activity. So their elimination not only restricts the freedom of individuals to choose their own foods, but also assumes that children aren’t engaged in any activities, and penalizes the active for the sake of the inactive.
I note that it restricts individuals freedoms, and not just those of children, because parents who send their children to school have already had lunches confiscated. The parents’ authority to feed their own children is stomped on by the state. This isn’t some case of child abuse or neglect (aside from in the minds of fascistic nanny-staters), this is a case of the state dictating how you shall live.
Adults need help, too, and we should do more to regulate companies that exploit our deeply rooted appetites for sugar and other unhealthy foods. The mayor was right to ban trans fats, but we should also make the food industry honest about portion sizes. Like cigarettes, mass-marketed junk food should come with prominent health warning labels. It should be illegal to advertise highly fattening food as “fat free.” People have the right to be unhealthy, but we should make that choice more onerous and expensive by imposing taxes on soda and junk food.
And here we get to the “nudging”. Make choices so onerous and difficult that people will be forced into what the dictator desires. The iron fist of an authoritarian state is wearing a velvet glove.
Adults who face the consequences of their own decisions will make choices. No one wants to be a bloated fatass. The mayor was wrong to tell people what they can and can’t put in their bodies, but he’s a tyrant across the board, and his only redeeming quality is that he’s a wonderful example of one.
The food industry doesn’t need to be more honest about portion sizes. Individuals need to be responsible for their own actions. Saying “people have the right to be unhealthy, but…” is another excuse justifying dictatorial control. These taxes and impositions aren’t about health, they’re about control. Individuals who eat foods in moderation can eat what they like and have no issues. Those individuals are being denied choice foods by their own government because other individuals make poor decisions. None of this is the province of government.
Individuals then don’t have the right, with onerous taxes and impositions, they might have the priviledge of being unhealthy. It will be restricted to those who can afford it. The wealthy and powerful will be able to afford one lifestyle, while those who are relatively poorer will no longer be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. The reason the term “fat cat” came about is because previous to the last few decades, the only people whose labor had ceased to be vigorous manual labor and who could afford enough food to be fat were the very wealthy. Today, thanks to advances in technology and agriculture, everyone can afford the bounties of those foods. Lieberman is desirous of price controls and taxes to socially return us to a time where only the wealthy and privileged could enjoy dining as they see fit.
This would hardly be progress, and does not improve the life of the individual.
Additionally, labeling doesn’t work. A study I’ll link to as soon as I can find it again brought up that people who guess calorie amounts of foods usually get them fairly close, or overestimate. If you’re looking at this breakfast:
You know there are a LOT of calories in it. You don’t need a chart to see that it will make you full, it will keep you powered for most of your day, and you can eat a light lunch, because you had a massive breakfast.
With regards to Lieberman’s absurd statement that food makers shouldn’t be allowed to say “fat free” if a food can make you fat, that’s just stupid. Fat is a substance. If the substance is in the food, it’s has fat, it has lipids. If it doesn’t have fat, it’s fat free. Anything eaten in excess can make a person fat.
Finally, Lieberman sums up with this cry for tyranny:
We humans did not evolve to eat healthily and go to the gym; until recently, we didn’t have to make such choices. But we did evolve to cooperate to help one another survive and thrive. Circumstances have changed, but we still need one another’s help as much as we ever did. For this reason, we need government on our side, not on the side of those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them. We have evolved to need coercion.
We did evolve to eat healthily. We evolved to eat what our bodies need. We didn’t evolve to go to the gym, we evolved to live at the gym. Modern workplaces and modern conveniences mean we’re enjoying a sedentary life. The key word there is that we are ENJOYING. Millenia of our ancestors as poor dirt farmers working their way up from misery have allowed us modern luxuries. It’s up to us as individuals to do something with them.
We didn’t evolve to cooperate, we cooperated to survive. The individual’s survival first, and the enhancement to individual survival that a group provides is why we got together in groups. Here Lieberman’s thinking is exposed in such a short sentence. He shows a collectivist mindset, that there is “the people” and not the individual. We banded together to aid each other, not to coerce each other. We as individuals found that survival strategies worked better when we formed voluntary bonds. The government, as it was intended, is a voluntary cooperative that exists as a construct of the Constitution. It follows the orders of We The People – each individual – it is there to provide for our security and defense that we as individuals might live freer lives. We established our government to provide for our rights to live free of the rule of a king or dictator, that we might exercise our inalienable rights as bestowed by our Creator.
Lieberman’s cry for the government to crush the free market is that of a Marxist useful idiot. “Those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them” are the usual class-enemy capitalists, and his desired government is one that will crush capitalism. His desire is for tyranny. He makes a plea for coercion, and through his warped world-view, demands that the state protect us from ourselves. The people are stupid, unreasoning, mindless apes who are still trapped by their weak bodies and weak minds, fooled by the decadent capitalist exploiter! Thus we need the government to beat us, to crush our freedoms, he reasons. He demands a government that will coerce us in order to free us from our exploiters, trading in someone who offers you what you want for someone who tells you what you are allowed.
This is the very heart of tyranny.
And it’s complete bullshit.
Circumstances have changed, and we have one another’s help. Lieberman views us as unreasoning apes, and it’s not much surprise that his apes are black, seeing as how demeaning races tends to be a theme for Harvard academics. The very page that Lieberman posted his desperate cry for government to oppress and crush the freedoms of individuals refutes his own idiotic claims.
Look to the right of his misanthropic screed and you’ll see the solution.
We have one another’s help in voluntary cooperation. It’s called freedom.
In the form of the free market, CocoaVia there is introducing a product that fulfills that desire for sweet foods. Interestingly CocoaVia links to Mars Botanical, which links to Mars, as in M&M Mars, who make all kinds of candies and food products, for humans and our animal friends.
The very same “those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them”, as though profit, money, and desires of free individuals are all dirty things, are here to provide us with options we want. If our sedentary lifestyles result in us getting fat, we’ll change to diet soda. If we still want candy, but we as individuals know that a king size Snickers is going to be a lot of calories, then we swich and try something like “CocoaVia” and enjoy the taste without the calories.
Stoking our cravings and profiting from them is why we aren’t Lieberman’s ideal of a caveman. Our cravings for food, water, shelter, sex, and the rest of Maslow’s Hierarchy has driven us to the point where we can communicate these ideas through the digital realm instantly across the entire planet, and for some ideas, even beam them around the planet and off into space. Our desires are what drives us. To squelch these desires, to have them crushed beneath the boot of a tyrannical government that knows what’s best, is the dream of a power-hungry fool. Lieberman is an idiot of the most educated, highest caliber. Lieberman views us as the sum only of our nature, and not of our minds. He sees the people as a mass of idiot cavemen who must be controlled and coerced – forced by government into doing what he has decided they should. If he includes himself among the cavemen, it is only in a self-flagellating gesture of his own misery; but he still views himself as more intelligent than the foolish fat cavemen around him, viewing them as Cass Sunstein’s ideal of the average American as Homer Simpson, an idiot roaming through life who needs government to control him.
Freedom itself refutes the needs that ostensibly cause demand for tyranny. Freedom itself, as shown above, has generated a response to the demand for healthier alternatives. People don’t want to be bloated fatasses. People want to be thin – and there are plenty of people who want, through voluntary cooperation, to help their fellow man. There are a myriad of programs available, and there have been for years. There have been people selling or giving away fitness advice for years from Jack LaLanne to Richard Simmons to Billy Blanks to Jillian Michaels to Suzanne Somers to Zuzana:
There have been groups of free individuals who voluntarily cooperate in order to help themselves, and others, be healthy. The luxuries afforded by millenia of slow standard of living improvements have made it so.
To demand that a ruthless government oppressor force people into being healthy is at best a pathetic indictment of the character of the person demanding it, and at worst a sniveling plea to allow the egghead arguing for it to become a greater power in the dictatorial Ruling Class.
While doing research for this piece, I stumbled over some supporters of these measures. Most fall in line with Cass Sunstein’s idea that people, as opposed to individuals, are dumb Homer Simpsons, too stupid to live, and need to be controlled. A few even indict themselves for the same traits, as here:
What is going on here?
I know you think I’m going to come down on the “food police” banning cupcakes in schools. But as an adult constantly struggling with my weight who was a fat kid, I have to say that schools being forced to serve healthier food could literally be a lifesaver.
There are a few who want to be treated like Private Pyle because they can’t take care of themselves. You want to eat how you like, you pay the price in your own life. You want to budget some fat into your life because you enjoy chow? That’s the prerogative of the invidividual.
Lieberman and the “Serious Eats” fatbody, however, want everyone to be treated like the platoon because a few people are fat. They want everyone to pay for one individual’s decisions. Notably, the world of the military exists through voluntary cooperation, through voluntarily subordinating the will of a free man to that of a state forged on a Constitution made by free men to protect the rights of men to be free. The US military swears an oath to a piece of paper that protects the right of the individual to eat those jelly donuts, while they themselves go without. There is actually a purpose for it there. In free society, there is not.
Lieberman and the “Serious Eats” no-self-control fatbody begin to fall into a subset of that leftist mindset of the “Moral Equivalent of War”, wherein they believe the state should use force against its citizens – for their own good. These fools believe it is moral to hurt one’s own people; it is moral for the state, which exists at the behest of the individuals, to oppress the people, because it’s what they’d really want. They want free men outside the realm of that squad bay to be treated like recruits becuase it’s “for the people’s own good”.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- CS Lewis
Lieberman, you are demanding force be used against free individuals, free men. You view us as rapacious, mindless black apes; you dismiss the individual’s will and wish to control men as a collective. Yesterday was the anniversary of D-Day, where we fought against your kind of ideas. You want us all to suffer and couch it in your pseudo-science belief that people are in biological need of control.
Mr. Obama actually did bare his soul unintentionally today (perhaps the Biden disease is catching) with his astonishing characterization of American fighting men and women, whom he referred to as “those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf.”
Really? Most Americans thought they were fighting for the country, not on Barack Obama’s behalf. Slip of the tongue, to be sure, but can one think of another president who’d have made it? They are fighting under his command, under his orders, to be sure, but this particular locution is offensive and solipsistic.
Me, me, I, I.
Yes, those soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines and Corpse-men are out there for you, Dear Leader.
Yup. Not really news, just yet another confirmation of the arrogant, dictatorial, progressive-bubble leftist character we already know.
Children of the Revolution
China’s ‘princelings,’ the offspring of the communist party elite, are embracing the trappings of wealth and privilege—raising uncomfortable questions for their elders.
By JEREMY PAGE
One evening early this year, a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China’s top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo.
Bo Guagua, 23, was expected. He had a dinner appointment with a daughter of the then-ambassador, Jon Huntsman.
The car, though, was a surprise. The driver’s father, Bo Xilai, was in the midst of a controversial campaign to revive the spirit of Mao Zedong through mass renditions of old revolutionary anthems, known as “red singing.” He had ordered students and officials to work stints on farms to reconnect with the countryside. His son, meanwhile, was driving a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and as red as the Chinese flag, in a country where the average household income last year was about $3,300.
The episode, related by several people familiar with it, is symptomatic of a challenge facing the Chinese Communist Party as it tries to maintain its legitimacy in an increasingly diverse, well-informed and demanding society. The offspring of party leaders, often called “princelings,” are becoming more conspicuous, through both their expanding business interests and their evident appetite for luxury, at a time when public anger is rising over reports of official corruption and abuse of power.
State-controlled media portray China’s leaders as living by the austere Communist values they publicly espouse. But as scions of the political aristocracy carve out lucrative roles in business and embrace the trappings of wealth, their increasingly high profile is raising uncomfortable questions for a party that justifies its monopoly on power by pointing to its origins as a movement of workers and peasants.
SiriusXM conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow has a phrase that he uses that applies quite well here:
Socialism is for the people, not the socialist.
What it means is that the socialist who rules will live how he likes, enjoying the trappings of being the ruling class (since he is), and that the people will have their wealth redistributed. Of course the socialist will have to take the people’s money in order to finance his own way of life, and no cost is too high, as the socialist is there to serve the people – and the people would of course want the socialist to have anything he wishes at their expense, so he can keep providing them with the glorious utopia he promises.
Rife’s rearry rough at the top for those tasked with running sociarist workers’ paradises, no matter if they’re Chinese, American, or North Korean.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Drew Griffin can’t figure out how to carry water for the Obama administration here. They desperately want to, but can’t figure out a way that Gunwalker/F&F makes any sense. With the revelation that the ATF bought guns to give to cartels, CNN finds their bucket full of holes.
Move to 5:29 to hear Drew Griffin discuss “wild conspiracy theories” when Anderson Cooper asks “why did the ATF buy these weapons?”
Anderson Cooper:
“So, again, clarify why the ATF would purchase these weapons.”
Drew Griffin:
“The operation makes no sense, according to every law enforcement authority I’ve talked with. And that includes many ATF agents themselves. You don’t ever let a gun “walk”, as they say in this business, Anderson. Especially without any way to know where it is going.
So what’s the real purpose? The lack of sense, the apparent coverup, has opened the door for these conspiracy theorists – and you gotta follow this – they believe that this was part of a convoluted plan for the Obama administration and the attorney general to actually increase the level of violence on the Mexican border with assault weapons purchased in the US in an apparent attempt to rekindle interest in an assault weapons ban.
As wacky as that may sound, I must tell you that it is gaining traction not just among the Second Amendment crowd because this operation makes no other sense.”
The elitism is thick here. May as well be this:
As wacky as that may sound, I must tell you that this conspiracy theorist convoluted wacky plan – and you gotta follow what these wacky retarded wingnuts in this crowd of weirdos and crazies are saying – that Obama and the AG want to increase the level of violence – in an effort to ban something that Obama and Holder don’t think should be legal, since it represents citizens resisting their rule! Can you believe it? I can’t believe these wacky stupid guntoting racist redneck homophobe bitter clingers! Anderson, these people are just morons, but I gotta tell you this because it’s so damned hilarious what these hillbillies think!
It’s not like the government hasn’t engaged in criminal activities before. That’s why Ben Franklin said he left us a republic, if we could keep it. If it weren’t for the new media, Sharyl Attkisson being the only reporter left at CBS, and FOX news, this story would find itself relegated to just the hard-core gun subculture, like Ruby Ridge – which upon reading the aftermath and facts, doesn’t jive with the presentation given on the news at the time. There’s a good, solid reason why a lot of people were mad – the facts dispute the spin given by the media. (And screw HS Precision.)
Fast & Furious, to a modern urban progressive, is purely unthinkable, and to be disregarded as a “wacky conspiracy theory”, and people who bring it up are deserving of scorn and condescencion. They’re hicks. But that same elitist urban crowd that views themselves as not part of the Bill of Rights crowd (because people in NYC, DC, etc., are forbidden by their government to enjoy their rights) writes their own reality. Popular media makes it disappear, or relegates it to the crazy worldview of bitter clingers – a view to be mocked, facts to be ignored, and something to be totally dismissed or rejected outright.
This won’t go away, no amount of media spin will work to change the facts, and ignoring it will only make it worse as people discover the facts through other sources and lose faith in media and government institutions. It’s also yet another divide between the Ruling Class and the Country Class. Government and big media, especially CNN here, are representing that Ruling Class mentality, and trying to project their worldview where it conflicts with reality. The Ruling Class Obama administration and Holder’s Ruling Class DOJ are trying to project their worldview where it conflicts with reality.
But the new media has some strong roots in the Country Class. And there are some government agencies well-represented by the Country Class.
According to Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters are now a part of an army that is in a direct position to give war to the Tea Party. My question is for what reason? For what purpose? Hear is a video with Mr. Hoffa’s exact words:
Ok, there you go, pretty straight forward I would think. An army, for Obama, against the Tea Party. Als,o for a very nice rundown and op-ed of Mr. Hoffa’s words I would direct you to The Conservative Crusader Blog. Are normal Americans ready for what is coming? The Leftist in the United States are poised for a final showdown. They want to collapse the system and put in place a “fundamentally changed” America, one where wealth redistribution, segregation by voting block, a command economy, cradle to grave welfare, and perpetual serfdom, for those of us who do work, will be the norm. Is that the type of country anyone is ready to live in?
Mr. Williams from the Conservation Crusader certainly believes that we are headed towards civil war. Taxpayers, Veterans, entrepreneurs versus, Unions, illegal aliens, class warfare indoctrinated minorities, as well as representatives of the federal government itself. Are you ready? They sure seems to be….
For the record, I belong to a private sector union, at least as private as can one be I suppose. Since democrats have been in power I can attest to the increase in Union power and all forms of social justice that the leftist preach. For instance a “safety” bill was signed into law in 2008 which prohibits a man from working for then 6 days at a time for “safety reasons.” In practice it forced my industry to hire more workers they wouldn’t other wise need to cover shortfalls in manpower, it also forces me to miss two days of work without any type of compensation. So in turn, the union receives more dues for more workers because the industry is forced to hire more people, at the same time it makes me two, possibly 3 days less pay in any given pay period. So this is another example of how elements of the leftist movement in the United States work. Legislative efforts made to force business to comply with law and regulation that is deemed necessary for safety reasons, but in practice reduces the actual pay of individuals, usually the lower level workers, while the union’s treasury feasts off the law. Which the union in turn gives some of that money back to Democrat election coffers.
It’s a never-ending cycle, wait a second it might be ending sooner than we all think if the policies in place today are allowed to continue too much farther into the future. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I’ll be on the side of those who stand for the Constitution.
In a bombshell accusation, the government watchdog group Judicial Watch announced today that the Obama administration used taxpayer money to help orchestrate an internet search engine manipulation campaign specifically promoting Obamacare.
Judicial Watch obtained 2,328 pages of records pursuant to a March 23, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The FOIA information included correspondence between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Ogilvy Group, the public relations fire hired by the White House to push Obamacare on the American people.
The Blaze has several highlight points from the report.
Or directly from Judicial Watch:
The Obama HHS launched a campaign to track Internet searches and to use online search engines such as Google and Yahoo to drive traffic to a government website promoting Obama’s healthcare overhaul. Using “pay-per-click” advertising tools, such as Google Adwords, HHS purposely targeted for influence people searching the term “Obamacare,” a word that has been described as “disparaging” by political agents of the president.
…
According to a budget summary prepared by Ogilvy, from October 2010 through February 2011, the Obama administration spent $1,435,009 on these online advertisements alone, including advertising campaigns with Google and Yahoo, almost $300,000 per month.
…
In previous documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, HHS describes in detail the key to success of the propaganda campaign in a “Statement of Work” accompanying the agency’s Acquisition Plan: “Health and program-related messages are processed by the target audience according to a particular reality, which he or she experiences. Attitudes, feelings, values, needs, desires, behaviors and beliefs all play a part in the individual’s decision to accept information and make a behavioral change.” [Emphasis added.] These documents suggest the total cost of the Obamacare propaganda campaign could reach as much as $200 million.
Nudge. The snake Cass Sunstein’s work. “Choice architecture”. “Make a behavioral change.”
This is not the province of government. It is the province of the Ruling Class, but we Country Class folks don’t take kindly to overlords in gummint.
Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.
Iraqi artists and architecture critics who shudder at each new pastel building blame a range of factors for Baghdad’s slide into tackiness: including corruption and government ineptitude, as well as everyday Iraqis who are trying to banish their grim past and are unaccustomed to having the freedom to choose any color they want.
“It’s happening because Iraqis want to get rid of the recent past,” said Caecilia Pieri, the author of “Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork 1920-1950.” “They see the colors as a way of expressing something new, but they don’t know which colors to use. The Arab mentality is that you have to be the owner of your building, and you do what you want with it. But there are no government regulations like in Paris or Rome. It’s anarchy of taste.”
So now, a bunch of snooty artists are telling Iraqis that their buildings are the wrong color and it’s so sad that Saddam’s gone, because they really need a dictator to force buildings to be the same.
“It’s something to feel ashamed of,” said Qasim Sabti, one of Iraq’s most famous artists. “It is the ugliest the city has ever been.”
For reference, this is a Qasim Sabti piece.
“We don’t have a strong enough deterrent to stop it,” said Najem al-Kinany, the official in the Baghdad mayor’s office in charge of design, who formed a public taste committee a year ago after receiving a flood of complaints about the city’s appearance. “Before 2003, the subject of public taste and choosing what was appropriate was much better than now.”
Artists are often accused of being elitist snots, but here, they go so far as to lament the loss of a murderous central power to dictate colors. So sad. Uniformity of color and pretty landscaping are more important than freedom. “The ugliest the city has ever been” wasn’t when people were being murdered under the Hussein regime. It’s when pink shows up on a government building.
“Right now, when I have an exhibition at my gallery nobody comes from the government, only the art students and other artists,” Mr. Sabti said. “Taking care of the look of the city has stopped because the people who have come to power were living in villages with animals. So how did they develop their taste?
“Saddam was also a villager,” he continued, “but he was smart enough to depend on the qualified and professional people who understood art.”
“Stupid rural villagers – at least the mass murderer was sophisticaed enough to recognize how smart artists are, and how our eye for color and appearance should rule them with an iron fist, drenched in the crimson blood of the tasteless.”
Now let’s go back and dissect this statement:
They see the colors as a way of expressing something new, but they don’t know which colors to use. The Arab mentality is that you have to be the owner of your building, and you do what you want with it. But there are no government regulations like in Paris or Rome. It’s anarchy of taste.
The colors are a way of expressing something new. The only moderately pretentious Pieri says “they” – the common peasants elevated to making important government decisions – don’t know which colors to use. No, Pieri, they do. They use the colors they chose. That’s the point.
Being the owner of your building and doing what you want with it is ownership, is property rights, and is personal. In the case of a new government in Iraq that actually is represented by their people, it’s the people who chose those colors – and they are doing what they want with it.
There are no regulations like Paris or Rome – because the people in Iraq are free from that bureaucracy. They are free from the tyranny of people who will tell them how and where to live, if they can live, what to do, what of theirs will be taken for the great leader, and even something so simple as what colors to make their buildings. That is preceisely the point.
It’s anarchy of taste? I’d say it’s exuberant freedom expressing itself. Tacky beats dour, impersonal, monolithic, or otherwise bureaucratic or dictatorial ugliness in my book.
Impersonal, uniform, ultimately statist buildings that represented Iraq before are being replaced and supplanted with at least something colorful. A new building may be tacky, it may be offend their artiste sensibilities, but so what? It’s made by the people.
And it represents the character of the people right now. Who can be thanked for that? The artist.
The officials also contend that many agency leaders, with money to spend on renovations and architectural face-lifts, are hiring the cheapest, most inept contractors and pocketing kickbacks and unspent funds.
But from just a couple paragraphs later: Mr. Khafaji said he routinely charged $1,000 for paintings worth only $100, because the officials did not understand art. “They don’t know the difference between a good and bad painting,” he said. “They don’t understand anything, so how can they understand art?”
So the crooked artist who’s charging ten times the rate of what his crap art is worth is now part of the group of artist dictator wannabes? He looks down on the people of Iraq, looks down on the representative government of Iraq and exploits them, and he and his artiste collaborators think they should be running things? Doesn’t he get that Iraqis are choosing this stuff to get rid of the dictatorial past – and he’s wishing for it back so he can embrace the class and dignity and aesthetic tastes of a mass murderer?
These artistes should be thankful they’re not getting government buildings that look like the Breastriary in Nippopolis. They should also be thankful that no one reminds them that Rome used to look even tackier. But this isn’t about the art. This is about people who are angry that Iraqis are free, and that the artists who held sway with the old dictatorial government have lost power. If they cared about their country, fellow countrymen, their land, their government, and their aesthetics, they wouldn’t be charging ten times the normal fees, and they would be using the persuasive aesthetics of their wonderful art rather than whining that they don’t have authority and force to make people do as they wish.
The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.
The plan is a part of the administration’s “Transportation Opportunities Act,” an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly.
The proposal for the tax is surfacing because people are driving more fuel-efficient vehicles, and driving less, and they’re using less fuel. Since there’s less fuel being used, there’s less revenue for government from fuel taxes. When the economy is in decline like it has been for the last few years, and when gas and diesel prices are absurdly high, people drive less. Businesses use less. Shipping companies use less. Thus, tax revenue is reduced due to lack of consumption.
The great social planners don’t actually care about the painful effects of this proposed tax – they consider them “good things”. They won’t get rid of the gas tax that already exists. It will simply add to the individual’s tax burden, but with the addition of tracking their every movement. Of course, to the planners in office – who also have an eco-dalek and social justice bent – this is a tool to redistribute wealth and punish humanity for its own good and to “save the planet” for the “greater good”. Things that you and I consider negatives, that hurt us average Americans, are what they are using to “nudge” us into the choices they’ve made for us.
It limits our actual economic freedom by limiting our income, it limits our movement by reducing the movement we can afford, and limits the freedom of our lives – everything we can afford, as more of our income is confiscated for taxation.
Gas is already getting ridiculously expensive, made so in no small part by the anti-energy policies of the US govt that are restricting offshore shallow-water drilling, that are restricting land drilling, and thus driving up prices. Of course, $7/gallon gas is considered a “good thing” to the elites.
ShortTimer
JBH
