Carcasse

Derbyshire on Anthony Weiner.  Weiner is a typical professional politician (not unlike Obama):

Weiner had never had any working life outside politics, a thing that always raises my suspicions of a candidate’s character. If you have no other way to support yourself than by chasing votes, who knows what you won’t say or do to stay in the arena? Weiner had never shoveled concrete for a living, or stocked warehouse shelves, or sold haberdashery over a counter, or taught a roomful of fidgeting kids, or proofed newspaper copy, or programmed computers. Having done all those things, and being inclined to self-righteous smugness about my breadwinning versatility, I looked down on the guy as a loser.

It turns out Weiner has brought in close to half a million dollars since Weinergate, for "consulting" "work".

Conservatives behave as though we have a country, America, which is full of citizens, Americans, who share a common heritage and values, and who care about the welfare and future of the country.  Conservatives see themselves, individually, as part of a stream: ancestors are downstream, and descendants are upstream.  This is true whether you're talking about an individual family or, a church, or one's city, or the country as a whole.  Conservatives act on the assumption that all other Americans share their understanding that the proper and natural attitude towards the world, therefore, should be, and is "how do I seek my own advantage in such a way that I, my family, and my country may succeed now and in the future, how do I make my way in this world without making the world a worse place?"

We are ruled by a permanent governing caste including people like Anthony Weiner, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, John McCain, and the countless miniature versions of the same at local levels. 

The media and the government are one and the same.  Rush Limbaugh today detailed the incestuous relationship between Obama and the major MSM outlets:

CBS News president David Rhodes has a brother named Ben who is Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, especially concerning the Middle East. Ben Rhodes wrote Obama's infamous Cairo speech. His brother is the CBS News president. It speaks for itself. Now we know that Ben Rhodes was a key player in revising the Benghazi talking points last September. So does it make perfect sense that his brother would carry the agenda of his brother? His brother at CBS News? 

No brother wants to harm another brother. If your brother's writing Obama's speeches, if your brother is moderating, monitoring and altering the talking points, and you're at CBS News, what you are gonna do, you gonna expose the talking points as fraudulent? No way. Journalism has many more problems than getting it wrong. Because, as I say, honest mistakes can be corrected, like that, I mean, instantly, you can fix it instantly. That's not the problem.  

Try this. The president of ABC News's sister also works for Obama. Ben Sherwood, ABC News president, sister Elizabeth Sherwood Randall, special assistant to Barack Obama. She's also a specialist on the Middle East. CNN's deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Hillary Clinton's former deputy Tom Nides. Tom Nides was Hillary's deputy secretary of state for management and resources. So it's no wonder that Benghazi, along with every other Obama scandal has been soft peddled by CBS, ABC, and CNN. And of course Obama's close relationship with NBC goes without saying.

The MSM and government are one big interrelated tyrannical entity, working remorselessly against our rights.

If you are favored by the rulers life can be made pretty sweet, and our rulers have shown a willingness and ability to make life miserable for those who oppose the whole corrupt, evil racket.

Look to Sarah Palin to see what happens when a real human being tries to get involved.  (To be sure, Republican handlers get their share of blame for not grasping that her appeal lay precisely in the fact that she was a real person, an advantage they promptly cancelled out by politicianizing her.  And she gets her own share of blame for not being saavy enough to see this was happening and put her foot down to stop it -- indeed, Palin was probably drunk on the same fame and power that Weiner and all the rest live for, so she willingly submitted to the extreme makeover).

What makes the monster tick?  For most, like Weiner, it's purely power.  Gone are the days where being a government employee means you earn a humble paycheck and live modestly, where your attitude is one of gratitude to your employer, the people of the country.  And that's just the millions-strong legion of government employee support staff and professional-level drones who shuffle into their Bureau of Whatever at 10 am, do meetings, have lunch, email memos, plan the holiday party, attend seminars, and shuffle home at 5 pm, and produce nothing.  This vast patronage army depends on Weiner and company, and keeps them in power.

Government dependents -- not just traditional welfare cases, but all those who draw government checks for their livelihood -- passed the tipping point.  We are beyond the point of course correction, because these people will continue voting for checks for themselves.  Weiner and company will continue their end of the bargain, and will live out their lifetimes like viceroys in British India.

Obama, unlike Weiner, is a notable exception, not in it just for personal gain -- although to be sure, Obama's coming to power will give him and his children and grandchildren unlimited access to vast kingly wealth.  Obama is a genuine leftist, who would probably give his life for what he believes in, which is the undoing of the United States as founded and its transformation into something else, in accordance with the marxist and socialist vision that Obama has lived and breathed his whole life.

For the large majority of the rest, it's pure power.  The best way to a good life these days is through government.  Be an employee at even a low level, and it's very hard to get fired, and you make in the high 5 figures or even 6 figures for shuffling in and out of your Bureau of Whatever.  It's even sweeter for the higher ups with the ability to dole out government jobs and distribute to your allies the money stolen at the point of a gun from the productive sector of the country.

That is what conservatives don't get.  "How do I seek my own advantage in such a way that I, my family, and my country may succeed now and in the future, how do I make my way in this world without making the world a worse place?" is from Leave it to Beaver days.  The worldview Mitt Romney grew up living and breathing is an anachronism.

When Democrats and most Republicans mouth words which seem to reflect they believe in the Romney ethos, it's bullshit.  The ruling class does not believe in it, nor do those among the government dependent class who are unable to lie to themselves about the worth of their own "work."

What does a government employee do when they come face to face with the truth that they produce nothing, and in fact are a parasite whose livelihood depends on the blood sucked from the country they authentically care about?  They maybe develop a leftist ideology so they can continue happily raking in the spoils:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives

Or, he maybe quits his job and says "fuck it, I'll rise or fall on my own merits doing something that actually doesn't contribute, in its own small way, to the downfall of civilization, and bear the consequences."  More likely, the realization never takes place.

Do conservatives not see that our rulers, along with a wide swath of their fellow Americans, have no concern whatsoever for the future of the country, but rather are simply engaged in scrambling to devour what they can of it's carcass?

Carcasse.

Why is there something, rather than nothing? Are moral values relative?  What sets Man apart from the animal kingdom?  What is the purpose of life?  What is beauty? What makes life meaningful?  Is there a God?  In the absence of God is there a moral order? 

Mark of the Beast

Via Drudge, Student in Texas loses lawsuit seeking injunction allowing her to remain in her school without wearing tracking device as required by school.  Her objection: "the badge was the "mark of the beast", as described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation in the Bible."  Did her lawsuit assert religious freedom grounds I wonder?

My take: the device is not the "mark of the beast," but it's not acceptable that the government forces people to go to public school in the first place.  It's too bad the objection to the practice in this instance was enunciated in cukoo language, that can only provide fodder for shameless and unprincipled slayers of straw men.

The big news today is the pending dismantling of the 2nd Amendment.  Those who hold that the exercise of a constitutional right requires pleading and justification and the license of those who have come to political power are apt to set their sights on two particular scarecrows: the 2nd Amendment either contemplates hunting ("No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer!") or -- yes, really -- the potential overthrow of the government!  This last one just kills me.  Look, the point about sovereignty is simply this: in a society in which the government gets its legitimacy from consent of the governed, individual citizens have a basic inalienable right to sovereignty over their persons.  That means, e.g., the state cannot grab people off the street and tie them up and draw their blood without a search warrant or other emergency; it also means that people have the right to defend themselves from evildoers.  To assert that individuals do not have the right to self defense when attacked, and must wait for police to arrive or else just lay down and be a good little victim is to dismantle the fundamental building block of popular sovereignty.  Soverignty lies with the individual.  It's too bad the founders did not state this more explicitly, although to be fair it's impossible to anticipate all the penumbras and emanations scoundrels will discover in their attempt to undo this noble experiment in self-government.  Should Madison have put a footnote to the fourth amendment, for example, saying "Notably, the protection from "unreasonable search and seizure" shall not be construed as providing the right to abort a fetus".  No, there's no reason he should have anticipated that.  So, they did about as well as can be expected with "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".  It's certainly not that the petty tyrants don't understand the words, and it may not even be that they actually believe in the straw men they set up to attack or that they don't grasp the notion of individual sovereignty, but the problem is simply that these enemies of freedom disagree with individual soverignty as a first principle, and they know they can get away with their dishonest and cynical reworkings of our society thanks to a compliant lap dog media that agrees with their statist vision, and thanks to a people that has been both thumped into submission by 1000 little indignities and intrusions, and dismantled as a people through the deliberate political project of replacing legacy Americans with foreigners who do not share historic American values, and who are not assimilated into those values, now that the ideal of the "melting pot" has been tossed out in favor of "multiculturalism".

Fuck you, Obama, come get them.

Trained Seals

From NRO, a WaPo story on Ed Kennedy, a WWII war correspondent now posthumously being championed by media types for a pulitzer, for defying a US military order delaying the news of Germany's surrender.

In headier days, Ed Kennedy personified the hard-drinking, hard-charging war correspondent of another era. The first time his future wife saw him, he was sidled up to a hotel bar in Paris with none other than Ernest Hemingway, both of them so “dead drunk” they could hardly stand. 

***

On May 6, 1945, U.S. military officials ushered Kennedy and 16 other correspondents onto a plane in Paris. The plane was airborne before they learned the purpose of the trip: They were flying to Reims, France, to witness the signing of surrender documents ending the largest conflict in world history.

Kennedy chafed at being controlled. The reporters on the plane were “seventeen trained seals,” he observed acidly in a memoir, “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, & the Associated Press,” that was published this spring, nearly a half-century after his death.

Their military handlers insisted that news of the signing be kept secret for several hours. But after they returned to Paris, the embargo was extended. Not for security reasons, which might have been an acceptable rationale, but for political reasons, Kennedy learned. It turned out that Russia’s leader, Joseph Stalin, wanted to stage a signing ceremony of his own to claim partial credit for the surrender, and U.S. officials were interested in helping him have his moment of glory.

Kennedy got word that news of the surrender was already out on German radio, so he went ahead and broke the story, and was subsequently fired.

My take: first, wonderful to have a glimpse at the type of man the US used to produce, the type of guy you feel like you've met before, in any number of black and white films.  This type of story that gives me a happy break in the day for a nostalgic daydream for the country we had.  It truly was great.  Second, it's purely ironic that current trained seal media are championing Kennedy, which I chalk up to their admiration of his defiance of the US military.  But, with a few notable exceptions like Catherine Herridge, what were today's media doing as the Benghazi incident/whitewash happened, other than perching on a slippery rock, slapping their flippers together and yelping "Mitt!  Mitt!"  The story of Benghazi has heroic SEALS, to be sure, but there was nothing heroic in the behavior of the Obama campaign propaganda army. 

New terminology is called for to differentiate the new type of permanent campaign presidency we've now got, and which is probably here to stay.  In the old days, first you had a campaign and politicians promised what they will do if elected or bragged about what they'd done already and promise more of it, and then after the campaign the president governed, then the cycle repeated.  Now we have a presidency totally melded with a permanent propaganda effort both to retain power and to push its aims.  How about the Obama "campinistration", or maybe the Obama "propigandancy"?

And how great is Catherine Herridge -- and Michelle Malkin, and Megyn Kelly, and a handful of others -- by the way?  Those are the type of headstrong dames who would fit right in at the bar with Kennedy and Hemminway, holding their own and trading snappy dialogue, or using their charm and press credentials to get past a roadblock in postwar Vienna to hand a manila envelope to a geezer in a trench coat.  Ah, when things were black and white.

Time for Government to Take ACTION!

I suppose there are cynics out there right about now, muttering things like: "How come when a tragedy makes national news politicians have no shame in jumping all over it and feasting like jackals on a corpse, or corpses as the case may be?  And how come the message they want us to take away always happens to be the message they advocated beforehand?  It's never like with the fictional Dick Cheney in that gay global warming movie from 2005 or whatever where after the world is covered in ice, he comes on TV and says he's sorry for waging evil wars for oil?  Can't these sleazy, shameless con artists at least have the dignity to not use tragedies as a chance to get the parasitic TV cameras turned on themselves yet again, summon some tears by recalling how the pet dog got served for dinner when they were a kid or whatever the trick is, and urge us to ACTION!  Our benevolent rulers deigning to fly out to podunkland with their million dollar retinue, using newly grieving families essentially as props in the new perma-campaign, well, what else can people of good faith say about this, it's just bad, it's icky and gross and I mean, what the hell is happening to the world." 

To which I would reply, oh you so-called cynics, going on watching the news still!  What do you expect to see, virtue and merit and real acheivement rewarded and things like that?  Yeah, let me turn on Katie Couric so she can do her duty as an impartial arbiter of objective facts and report to me what The Events Of The Day are, and then armed with that knowledge I'll be a good citizen and go vote, and our citizen/representatives will go to Washington like Mr. Smith and work to fix the problems I and my fellow citizens elected them in good faith to fix!  Pshaw, and you call yourself cynics.  Stop bothering me.  And besides, these politicians are totally right, if we're talking about the same thing.  This incident is so horrific and gnarled that clearly Government Must Do Something, To Make Sure Nothing Like This Ever Happens Again!  To be sure though, it certainly is an unsettling bit of news:

A 37-year-old Swedish woman with an admitted obsession with skeletons has been convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead for allegedly using human bones for sexual purposes. 

In issuing its ruling on Monday, the Gothenburg District Court also convicted the woman of weapons crimes, sentencing her to probation and ordering that she undergo treatment for addiction and psychiatric problems.

The woman has continually denied committing any crimes, telling the local Göteborgs Posten (GP) newspaper that she is an "odd bird" but that she is "not sexually interested in necrophilia". 

She had argued that she acquired the skeletons legally and that she handled the bones in a respectful manner and that her actions weren't covered by Sweden's laws against disturbing the peace of the dead.

But the woman was found to have kept some bones scattered on the floor in her home, stored skulls in plastic bags, and to have sold some bones to others.

"Criminal protection starts when a person dies, and the protection remains as long as there are remains of the deceased," the court wrote in a statement.

"The fact that the woman had moved bones constitutes a crime because she was unauthorized to do so, just as it's a crime to put together a skeleton and have it lying on the floor, to have bones in plastic bags, and to sell them."

According to the court, the 37-year-old handled the human bones "ignominiously", something which is prohibited by Sweden's laws against disturbing the peace of the dead.

The court added that the woman didn't need to be aware that her actions were criminal in order to be convicted.

"It's enough that she knew that she was handling human bones," the court said, explaining there was no doubt she was acting with intent.

However, the court threw out a charge stemming from allegations that she had stored human skulls in her freezer and used human bones for sexual purposes.

While the 37-year-old was facing up to two years in prison, the court ruled that her lack of criminal record and the nature of her crimes meant she should not be jailed, but instead be sentenced to probation.

The woman, who has continually denied any wrongdoing, was arrested in September when police arrived at her flat and found human skeletons and knives after responding to a call about gunfire coming from the apartment.

When femur-dildoes are outlawed, only outlaws will have femur-dildoes.

This reminds me of the film by German director Jorg Buttregeit, Nekromantic (1987).  I have seen it, I like it, I recommend it, and I've also seen and recommend his other film Der Todesking, which is about seven deaths in seven days.

Here's the photo gallery, so that readers may have a full and complete understanding of this incident in Sweden.  You decide!

Adaptation

Squirrel adopted by cat, will grow up thinking it's a cat:

American dynamism

From City Journal:

America’s economic might is rooted in an entrepreneurial culture and a passion for innovation and risk-taking, traits nourished by the nation’s commitment to the rule of law, property rights, and a predictable set of tax and regulatory policies. Policymakers have lost sight of these fundamental principles in recent years. The next era of American prosperity will be hastened when they return to them.

This may be a stupid question, but why is economic "growth" the thing people are always going on about?  Isn't the notion that an economy always should be growing and expanding (in order to... what?  In order to meet liabilities, like the interest on the US debt?) sort of unhealthy?  The definition of a bubble almost?  Is it possible to have an economy that maximizes value, GDP remains constant for a long period of time, and everybody lives quite nicely, using goods and services that are all produced within the economy, or at the very least that an economy is self sustaining and not dependent on imports?  Is it possible to do this on a macro scale?  Why growth, though, I wonder.  The way things stand now, "poor" people have it far better in their everyday life than did the upper echelon in the 1950s, with tons more gadgets and comforts.  What are we going for here?  The new America feels like a huge colossal bubble.  It was the greatest country on earth for specific cultural based reasons that fueled its dynamism.  The American ideals of freedom, rule of law, work ethic, etc., which drove its success are gone, as shown by our "Paper Tiger" responses to 9/11 and by the rise of Obama, particularly his reelection in 2012 once the cards were on the table (and, yes, while it's true that Obama would not have won had not our rulers have tinkered with our demographics over the last half century, it boils down to the same thing, because America's foundational and historical ideals were culturally rooted).  America is now just a geographic place on the map, with a government like any other, yet we have all these things, which were essentially dropped into our lap.  We cannot make them, haven't earned them, and won't fight for them.  A real reordering is called for in the lives of individuals, a reexamination of first principles.

Katy Perry Smurfette

Katy Perry's remarkable "Smurfette dress", from July 2011.  Slideshow here.