Doctor Zero has a carefully thought out proposal on how to save America through mass democracy, through getting 50% of the voters plus one behind the measures necessary to save America, behind measures that are carefully pruned to be the minimum possible measures that could save the country, measures that are as “moderate” as possible, which is not very moderate at all.
No way Jose. Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both. (more…)
What academia means by “diversity” is people of all colors and all sexual preferences chanting their master’s words in unison.
Steve Sailer found an interesting paper on admissions policy. (more…)
While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.
This is an administration that almost employs more Goldman Sachs officials in financial and regulatory positions than Goldman Sachs itself does. One of the first acts of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to hire a BP executive to serve as a deputy administrator for land and minerals management. And now they’ve just hired to implement the new healthcare law someone who was just recently in charge of the lobbying and government activities of the nation’s largest private insurer.
If someone genuinely opposed big business, he would opposed all government regulation and all taxes.
Roissy links to an insightful article on the growing divide between rulers and ruled
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
It is in the nature of government to grow, and so it swallows up everything. The parasite eventually destroys the host. Government has seized upon a multitude of justifications, the most recent justification being the welfare state, the coming justification being saving the earth. Insolvency approaches. Trees do not grow to the sky. That which cannot continue, will stop.
The left is astroturf, it is the voice of the state. But we have already reached the point where persuading people to vote for more government, or interpreting their vote as a vote for more government no matter how they vote has become ineffectual, depriving the left of any reason for existence, depriving democracy itself of the reason for its existence.
The politics of Hit-Girl
For a long time the left has controlled the gates for movies, books, and comics, in part because of the government control of television. Lately, however, I have been seeing more and more politically incorrect stuff.
As you probably figured out if you watched the movie Kick Ass, Hit-Girl is a conservative, what with being home schooled and all
It is a great movie.
In the comic book, her politics is more overtly conservative than in the movie, not that she is pacifist hippie in the movie. Here are some political scenes from the comics: (more…)
The Washington post complains about unethical science in China.
Zhao is turning his attention to a topic Western researchers have shied away from because of ethical worries: Zhao plans to study the genes of 1,000 of his best-performing classmates at a top high school in Beijing and compare them, he said, “with 1,000 normal kids.”
Politically incorrect science is “unethical”
Today western science is stagnant for the same reasons as it was stagnant from 1293 to 1648 – because it has been subordinated to religion.
So far, when the Republican establishment has endorsed a republican in a primary, and Palin has endorsed a different candidate, Palin’s candidate wins. Looks like Republican party activists listen to Palin, and rank and file republicans listen to party activists. The next test of Palin’s power is Lisa Murkowski against Joe Miller. The party establishment are not only way to the left of the party base, they are also incompetent, corrupt, politically clumsy, and astonishingly stupid, the kind of stupid that only years of teaching in an elite university can induce.
The future is certain, it is the past that changes.
Moveon had a web page demonizing General Petraeus as General Betray Us
Obama appoints General Petraeus in charge of Afghanistan, whereupon the page not only instantly disappears from Moveon.org, but also instantly disappears from Google’s cache. When the past changes, Google’s spiders are quicker of the mark than they are for normal updates, suggesting human intervention to correct the past lickety-spit.
General Petraeus is infinitesimally to the right of the fired General McChrystal.
The policy that should be followed in Afghanistan is not that of General Petraeus, General McChrystal, President Obama, or President Bush, all of which are following infinitesimally different variations of the same lunatic extreme left policy: COIN.
The correct policy would be that of Lord Cromer, who brought peace, prosperity, and freedom to Egypt with only five thousand men. Unfortunately that policy was already politically incorrect in 1907.
The biggest story of the last few days has been Israel’s interception of peace activist ship to Gaza, in which they killed nine peace activists.
Here is a picture of some peace activists holding down a soldier at knifepoint, with what appears to be a pool of blood on the bulkheads.
When the the picture gets carried at all in the mainstream media, the knife and the blood gets cropped. Even Fox news has not shown the picture at all.
The Muslim press, however, are showing these photos as they are – which is not the first time the Muslim press in totalitarian terror states has shown itself to be more free than in the west – I guess Muslims get more slack than Dhimmi.
Only the future is certain. The past is always changing.
The Congo was the poster child for the dreadful evils of colonialism. We were supposed to look at how cruelly the Belgians treat the poor natives, look at how many natives colonialism has murdered to maintain its savage rule. In 1961, it got independence. The whites fled rape and murder. Two or three weeks after independence, the Congo became a savage hell hole, and has remained that way ever since, Zimbabwe in fast forward. The whites fled the Congo faster than they have fled Zimbabwe, so the descent into savagery was faster. Yet now, the outcome of decolonization has been forgotten, and the Congo is back to being the poster child of the evils of colonialism, and we repeat the same disaster over and over again: Haiti foreshadowed the Congo, the Congo foreshadowed Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Until the Soviets collapsed, 99% of Academia enthusiastically agreed that the Soviet Union’s command economy was growing much faster than the US’s old fashioned semi market economy, and the remaining 1% agreed that it was growing at least as fast – or at least that is what they said when anyone was listening. Since the general consensus outside of Academia was that the Soviet Union was a festering economic basket case whose central plan existed only on paper, collapsing into disorderly pillage in actual practice, one wonders what happened to any academic inclined to say that the Soviet Union was a festering economic basket case, whose plans and statistics were utterly disconnected from the chaotic and destructive reality.
Before 1972, every historian of science agreed that Darwin’s big idea was natural selection, and those of them that addressed the issue of Lamarck and common descent agreed that Lamarck proposed common descent.
Natural selection, however tends to lead to disturbing thoughts and disturbing words, for example “Once the superiority of races with a prevailing aversion to incest had been established by their survival …” Superior races! Oh the horror, the horror. Natural selection suggests endangered species have it coming to them, that women are not naturally equal to men, that genocide is, if regrettable, nonetheless natural and in the long run frequently inevitable, and lots of similarly horrifying stuff like that, and I have left out the really shocking stuff to avoid offending the readers too much. So it was progressively de-emphasized to students in the textbooks. But if you de-emphasize natural selection, this leaves a mysterious gap. What was Darwin famous for?
So in 1972, history was corrected, Winston Smith style. Darwin got common descent to fill the gap left by the de-emphasis of natural selection, just as Winston Smith invented comrade Ogilvy to replace the vaporized unperson Comrade Withers, and common descent was taken away from Lamarck. The textbook “Biology today” page 638
… in the Origin of Species. The central claim of that book can be fairly simply stated. According to the Darwinian theory, any natural group of similar species-all the mammal species, for instance-owe their common mammalian characteristics to a common descent from a single ancestral mammalian species.
And as for Lamarck, he got the shaft. Page 641
Lamarck’s theory is not a hypothesis of common descent, which ascribes the common characteristics of a particular species to their common descent from a single species. … He claims that … although all mammals are descended from reptiles, they are not descended from the same reptiles
Somehow, after 1972, no one in Academia was able to mention that before 1972 everyone thought that Lamarckism is the doctrine “that all plants and animals are descended from a common primitive form of life.” (Century Cyclopedia)
Just as one wonders what happened to academics before 1980 who were inclined to doubt the great success of central planning, one wonders what happens to academics after 1972 who remember that before 1972, the history of science was different.
We have always been at war with Eastasia
Someone in Academia received an order like that given to Comrade Winston Smith, and all of Academia fell into line, and remains in line to this day, a thousand megaphones attached to one microphone.
The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in The Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
…
… Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed. …
… To-day he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.