We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
If you look at methods alone, there isn't a huge difference between the Wall Street protests and the Tea Party protests. They have very different values, different demands, and different bases of support. But both utilize the First Amendment as a means of making their point.
The Wall Streeters are more rowdy, and as a result have seen quite a bit of police involvement. There have been far fewer arrests at individual Tea Party events. Some of the Wall Street arrests and the overly physical nature of the police are unnecessary. But there is little doubt the Wall Streeters are far more provocative and looking to antagonize the police, given the nature of the agitators involved. We've seen them before. They know the best way to get on TV is to create a scene, and they are good at doing it. Is it a surprise so much of the 'police violence' is being caught on video? They are planning to get this on video by initiating events which will lead to the use of violence, even at moments when the police probably should show more restraint.
So why does Obama view one set of protestors an "expression of frustration", while the other is "misidentifying sort of who the culprits are"? Both are viable protests, seeking to make points and be heard. From that standpoint, both are worthy of having Obama's full attention. But no, one has been formally rejected by the "vast majority" of Americans.
To be clear, there is no reason to prevent either group from gathering, protesting, or speaking. It's unfair to say one is more legitimate than the other. But for our country's leader to recognize one as more valid than the other is absurd. Particularly when the group which he considers more valid has not made its agenda clear, is only advocating a never ending list of grievances without valid solutions, and is provoking violent activity (some of it, but not all, unwarranted) on the part of the police. Tea Partiers, whether you support or oppose them, have tended to gather peacefully and have made their agenda clear. They support smaller government, lower taxes and they oppose crony capitalism. What's interesting is the two groups share that final point. Where they differ is on solutions.
The Tea Party solves crony capitalism by shrinking government and getting it out of the way. The Wall Street protestors don't have a clear solution, but it's clear increasing the role of government is part of their solution. Increasing that role with politicians 'who care'. In other words, people like them.
The Wall Streeters' world is like Orwell's "Animal Farm", where some people are more equal than others. Their solution, unfortunately, is to keep it that way, but change the people who are more equal.
Few economists, and even fewer politicians, have dared utter the word 'Depression'. It's making a comeback, though. Are we in one? My guess is, no not yet. We've been close, and the economy isn't exactly moving in a direction that makes one think there's tremendous upside.
But we haven't been in anything more than a prolonged, deep recession.
Given the state of affairs surrounding debt, political inertia, crony capitalism, manufacturing, foreign exchange and unstable currency, it won't take much to force the U.S. into a much deeper downturn which would be labeled a Depression.
"They may have stopped another 'Great' depression but not a depression and what for many was the most profound lesson of economic history may turn out to be wrong," he said, adding the fact that government debts and obligations were already so high before the crisis pump priming meant they now risked backfiring.
I think that most sane people have spent the past three years of the Obama administration exerting their tolerance because, after all, he is the President. That tolerance has been extended as it would to a toddler trying to figure out how to use a screwdriver, or a teenager who thinks Liquid Wrench is a joke. But President Obama is an adult. He just can't be such a screw-up as he appears. He just can't be such a leftist extremist. By now, believing their eyes, most (as polls attest) are through with shredded tolerance. He's an ossified 60s radical who never grew up or learned anything.
For a time I thought all such talk was cynical politics, offered up to bond with the “rubes” in America who might be convinced that only the liberal pols have their interests at heart. Now I think that in moments of high stress (imagine how one feels as the presidency and historic legacy melt away), the president’s unvarnished beliefs come through. It’s a crude sort of populism fueled by conspiracy theories, the kind you expect on college campuses — or on the streets of lower Manhattan of late.
This is a pol who tells us we should increase the public sector, dictate to the private sector and then excoriate business for trying to maximize profits. (It’s almost like they think that’s their primary obligation, or something.) At one level it is embarrassing that the president of the United States has economic views that approximate those of a dim college freshman. But actually it’s petrifying. For nearly three years this has been the mentality behind an economic vision that has failed miserably. It’s remarkable the economy isn’t in worse shape.
And he wants four more years. One can hardly imagine what he’d do if he got them.
I commented to Mrs. BD last night that one of the things I hate to hear people talk about is the usefulness of religion to society. I think O'Reilly was saying something like that on the tee vee in an interview with the atheism proselytizer Dawkins.
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.
Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”
Elites like Warren believe that we benighted masses cannot really handle freedom. What we really cannot handle is excessive government meddling in our lives.
In praising the source of ancient Athens’s greatness, Pericles most of all lauded Athenians’ “sense of duty”. The weakness of this sense of duty is what characterizes the contemporary American political debate. The left sees a duty to care for the sick and needy, but fails to temper that with attention to the affordability of that care. The right praises those who take up the duty of national defense, but rejects the notion that paying for soldiers’ salaries and weapons through taxes is also a patriotic duty. Instead, the “me generation” rules, demanding that the conservatives give “me” a tax cut, that the liberals give “me” government benefits, and if something must be sacrificed, let it be duty to future generations.
This climate will leave the U.S. with two grand strategic options. The first is to attempt to maintain existing commitments with declining resources at increasingly higher risk against rising challengers. This approach would be an exact parallel to recent fiscal policy, but when it was tried in the Pacific in the early 1940s, its costs were measured in blood and destruction as well as money. The alternative is to retrench from some overseas commitments, following blueprints like the Cato Institute’s plan for a strategy of “military restraint” that would be sustainable at 3 percent of GDP. Such a grand strategic retrenchment may seem attractive, and it is certainly better than overextension. While it may lead to political instability and even increased wars abroad, it saves money and does not cost American lives if the U.S. does not to intervene. On the other hand, retrenchment is foolhardy if the result is likely to be increased terrorism and piracy, wars in which the U.S. must intervene, or lost diplomatic leverage that yields closing commercial opportunities and defeat for American ideals.
It would be useful to have the debate on the tradeoffs before the retrenchment becomes reality, but if the consensus of left and right is on the absence of a national will to pay for primacy, the decision may already have been made.
When government pays the health care bills, they can then use that as an excuse to micro-regulate our every behavior. Because it's no longer an individual choice, it effects public costs.
Buddy wanted y'all to hear this sociopathic one about blaming others: Crisis Site 13 (wait for the metal intro to end). "I can kill you and never go to jail, cuz I'm 13 and I'm cute and I hope you die."
That's interesting, but this is Terry Allen Country:
Apparently, most of the protesters are white, middle class kids who somehow got the idea that the world owes them something because they had the remarkable privilege of attending college.
Quite the opposite: they owe us something in return for all they have been indulged. Surber says Occupy Wall Street? Grow up. He lived in a trailer when a young adult. What's wrong with that? Everybody should have to.
I lived in one room over a grocery shop, on beans, macaroni and cheese, cheap beer, and no-brand cigarettes when I got out of college, and I felt independent and happy despite having a go-fer job at a slowly-dying country newspaper, for minimum wage. Boo hoo. It took me 6 years of farting around while broke to make a good plan for my life.
And here's a good idea, children: Go march on Washington - It’s the real author of our woes. Protest Obama! Oh, almost forgot - MoveOn is providing financial support to these losers so they can't protest the government. So why not Evil Big Corporations instead? Yeah, they're the bad guys this time.
As best I can tell, these kids want fun jobs with no heavy lifting - and they also want money - my money. I guess they didn't get the memo that their Obama's economy is not generating jobs and investment. If they had any sense, they'd be out there trying to figure out how to start a business or to make themselves useful to somebody.
I am half-disgusted with myself for giving these spoiled brats any of our precious bandwidth since it's really a media-ginned-up story, but I had to get it off my chest. As a New Yorker, I can report that these people are having essentially zero impact on our vibrant life in Manhattan except when they walk on a bridge and mess up the traffic from Brooklyn. It might get a little more amusing and colorful when the union thugs join the stoners and losers. Perfect together!
Almost forgot one item: the cops are getting good OT for the babysitting. It's good for their incomes, so there is some benefit for the good guys.
Sow Bugs, Woodlice - they have lots of names, and there are over 3000 species of these little guys. I think I sacrifice a few of them to the gods every time I toss a log on the fire.
They are arthropods, in the subgroup of the usually-aquatic Crustaceans. They look like tiny Trilobites.
I am always happy to see these little bugs under logs and rocks. Arthropods own the world, even though we don't give them a vote.
The Wall Street protesters want to be biggees benefiting from being above the law of the US and the laws of economics.
The Wall Street protesters and the Tea Party protesters have something in common, a revolt against the biggees each see as taking unfair advantages. The primary difference is that the Tea Party is opposed to the extra-constitutionality of liberal politicians in league with crony capitalists profiting each other at the expense of taxpayers, while the Wall Street protesters base is for more extra-constitutionality to expropriate for themselves the advantages garnered by all those profiting from free enterprise.
Tea Partiers want to keep the products of their labor and earnings, while the Wall Street protesters want government to redirect the products of others’ labor and earnings to themselves and causes of their allies.
Demographically, the Tea Partiers come from the middle-class who have more practical experience of the world, while the Wall Street protesters come almost entirely from the privileged white young people with relatively little real world experience.
Musically, the Tea Partiers have popular anthems of patriotism to enliven the reach of their cultural message, while the Wall Street protesters lack popular music with political themes. (This is a distinct and telling difference from the 1960s.)
Politically, the Tea Partiers have protested peacefully and within the law, while the Wall Street protests break laws and inconveniencethe public. This alienates rather than enlists support.
PRwise, the Tea Partiers had to overcome major media’s reluctance to provide them coverage and its trumpeting of false charges from the left, while the mostly liberal major media have almost instantly favorablyor neutrally headlined the Wall Street protesters.
The question is whether the tilt of the major media facing the alternative media will succeed in hiding these differences from most Americans. I doubt it. The liberal-tilting major media is itself seen as an out-of-touch and fading biggee. The support from public-employee unions with privileges above those in private business, the usual few extreme-leftist members of Congress, and from the usual rich far-left Hollywood celebrities just reinforces the perception of the usual leftist biggees wanting to lord it over taxpaying Americans. The Wall Street protesters and their leftist allies in media like to call themselves the 99%, kiddee columnist Ezra Klein sophistically asserting they want to see “the fundamental bargain of our economy – work hard, play by the rules, get ahead -- … restored.” Instead, they are the small minority who are or who want to be the 1%, exhibit little respect for the “rules” or virtues and rewards of free enterprise, demanding to “get ahead” with government-provided privileges.
We are blessed with all of our thoughtful, brainy, and often amusing commenters, but new commenter "Ten" (near the bottom of the comments) took the time to give our Maggie's Farmer fishing pro Capt. Tom a good whuppin' on the topic of space exploration.
Happily, Capt. Tom took it with good humor. Like most us here, he is a just plain happy fellow.
But can you give some to your cat? And can you drink your goat's milk? Or do you need government permission for that too? And what about home-made cheese from your cow's milk? Is this what our founding father farmers risked their lives for?
Why Are Women More Promiscuous Than Ever? And why are men taking advantage of it by withholding commitment? Is it time to take the power back? (h/t Insty)
The ladies are becoming as horny and predatory as the men. From what I hear, they are like animals, dragging innocent lads off the street for their selfish sensual pleasure.
"...the liberals in Washington will not back off, even when they see that they are crippling the economy. FDR’s policies were similarly destructive, but the more economic havoc he created, the more he was able to expand his power."
All those people who thought they were going to walk away from those houses and give them back to the banks? The banks are going to figure out the difference between the mortgage and what the house is sold for, which will be huge, sell those debts to lawyers --who'll make the mafia or a first wife look reasonable -- and they'll use the court system as their own private strong-arm collectors, and hound those people to kingdom come.
Even death is not an escape from a debt because they go after your estate. Bankruptcy is an escape, but it isn't pretty.
Is Maggie's Farm a "Conservative Website"? I guess not, because, if we were, we'd be ranked 122 on that Alexa list, going by Alexa stats. Anyway, we're a Centrist, eclectic website, with only an interest in politics insofar as the gummint gets in our way. We only want a very few things from gummint. Does that make us Conservative, or Libertarian, or just cranky Yankee-minded people who want to be left alone to construct our own lives as we think best? We all came here (well, our ancestors did) to get away from gummit oppression.
There is no political messiah, and never will be. America doesn't work like that, and I do not need, or want, a tingle from a politician. From a cute girl, yes.
I am for Romney-Rubio. For now, anyway. Have at me - tell me why I am wrong.
On the collective scale, choice is nearly irrelevant. Only people with power have choices. The idea that the man waiting in the alley with a knife has a choice is a heresy because he is not a man with a knife, he is a collection of social statistics which assign him an automatic level of responsibility based on his race, gender, socioeconomic status and all the other variables. Whether or not he stabs someone with a knife, is not up to him, it's up to how society treats him.
Similarly financial troubles are not personal, they are social. Whether you can pay your bills has nothing to do with you, but with your race and class. If you succeed when the statistics say that you should fail, then you are an outlier. A rogue exception that only goes to prove the rule. Likewise if you fail when the statistics say that you should succeed. Individual actions can never disprove the collective snapshot of how society is.
If every person is wired into society like a giant bank of servers, then every individual malfunction is actually a social malfunction. If a man kills, then it's because his connection with society was bad. To understand why it was bad, the left examines the nature of the connection. If it was a privileged connection, then he was warped by his excessive access to the innate racism, sexism, classism and all the other bad "isms" of the society. If it was an underprivileged connection, then he was warped by his lack of access to the benefits that society had to offer him and being marginalized, he went off the reservation.
Blame-shifting is always fun, isn't it? Maggie's has been hot on this topic recently. "It's the hippies' fault." It's Bush's fault." It's my genes' fault." "It's my husband's fault." "It's society's fault." "It's my parents' fault." "It's my boss' fault."
But if things go well, it's to my credit, right?
While people make their decisions, plans, and choices for all sorts of reasons, it is a necessary premise in a free society that an individual is responsible for every one of his actions. In some cases, perhaps, a necessary fiction.
The bar mitzvah (a modern innovation, as I just learned) has it: "Today I am a man" and thus responsible for all of my actions.
The delicious pleasures of blame-shifting have never been permitted in the Bliss household.
Obama's 'solution' for what ails us is to utilize two common political treatments for recessions. First, the standard Monetarist 'Easy Money' solution by lowering interest rates. Second, the Keynesian 'Stimulus'. The unfortunate situation we face is really only getting worse because he cannot do the second without the first — there simply isn't enough money interested in supporting more debt. The solution? Print more money, a concept I discussed in an earlier post.
The printing of money allows banks to purchase Treasury Debt, which funds the deficit, which they then sell back to the Fed in order to keep their reserves intact.
Europe has taken a remarkably different approach. The Eurozone wants to emerge from its difficulties in economically healthy fashion, rather than saddled with massive debt. Some European nations have such huge debt that the only sensible track to follow for other Euro nations that are growing modestly is to manage with restraint. They've been backed into a corner, but it's a good corner to be backed into.
Some are not shy about telling Obama why he's wrong.
If Obama was the head of a sports league having economic struggles, BALCO would still be in business. His steroid policy would put individual players at risk in order to keep interest in the league high based on new records. Like Barry Bonds' records, people will soon wonder how things got to this point. Will Congress review Obama's steroid policy and chart a new course?
At Camp Ripley, Minnesota, there was a recent Welcome Home for Vietnam veterans. This video highlights the speeches given. Veterans Day is on November 11. It's worth listening to the speeches, the lasting legacy, and preparing yourself for what you will do on Veterans Day.
the nature of the agitators involved. We've seen them before. They know the best way to get on TV is to create a scene, and they are good at doing it. Is it a surprise so much of the 'police violence' is being caught on video? They are planning to get this on video by initiating events which will lead to the use of violence, even at moments when the police probably should show more restraint.
I commented to Mrs. BD last night that one of the things I hate to hear people talk about is the usefulness of religion to society. I think O'Reilly was saying something like that on the tee vee in an interview with the atheism proselytizer Dawkins. 
OK, we all agree that Sargent Pepper was a stunning George Martin production but, that aside, what is your favorite? 
Depressed brains may 
Apparently, most of the protesters are white, middle class kids who somehow got the idea that the world owes them something because they had the remarkable privilege of attending college.
Sow Bugs, Woodlice - 
