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.
Liberals are not idiots. They’re just like you were when you first moved out of your parents’ house. It’s like their research is cryogenically frozen right before Google was invented. However, unlike extremist Muslims and Hasidic Jews, some of the things they believe are actually correct.
I am getting a kick out of this dumb Chick-Fil-A story. I suppose it's a good story for late July, for the entertainment value.
As I understand it (never seen one in NY or New England), it's an Atlanta-based, family-owned and very popular chain of fast-food chicken joints. Chicken sandwiches! I don't know whether the outlets are franchised or company-owned.
The founder is a traditional Christian who happens to hold a traditional view of marriage. Most Americans do, but that doesn't matter. President Dan Cathy had the temerity to say:
“We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit,” Cathy said. “We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”
I suspect good ol' Col. Sanders felt the same way. So do I. Politicians who desire to show their cultural leadership (who asked them to do that?) are now all about banning Chick-Fil-A from their burgs. You have to laugh. People want to eat these sandwiches.
I mean, like, you know, they aren't banning Catholic churches, are they? Or Baptist churches? Or Muslim mini-marts? Or mosques? Or businesses whose CEOs are Catholics? I suspect the folks at Chick-Fil-A HQ are just enjoying the free publicity, and wondering about this crazy world. They don't need the money. I think the family is still amazed by their popularity and the growth of their recently-tiny, simple business. Plain old fried redneck chicken on a hamburger bun.
When will the word get out that the owner of Subway is a married, never divorced and never-gay Roman Catholic? Funny thing about this dumb brouhaha is that it makes me hungry for a Chick-Fil-A. I've never thought about it before. They must be pretty darn tasty to deserve all of this attention.
Probably tastes like chicken.
(Almost forgot to mention that the family didn't build that family food business. The government did it. Let's nationalize Chick-Fil-A, and Subway too.)
That's what these fall elections boil down to, this year. A stark choice in attitudes towards the relationship between the individual and the state. A Parental State vs. a Servant State. The country votes roughly 50-50 on that, which, to my mind, is pathetic in a bold nation like this. Too many people looking for a caretaker instead of embracing opportunity.
Lots of people are embedding this Scott Brown ad. The strange, shrill anger in Harvard prof Warren's voice is disturbing. She needs to be reminded who pays for the roads - and for her salary. The angry condescension towards the free commerce which makes this nation alive always bugs me, especially from those who have never engaged in it:
Give him a chance. He can be pretty smart sometimes, if not all the time. Certainly nails the psychology: Media Desperately Trying To Tie Batman Shooting To Conservatives:
Is John trying to snag Gelernter as a contributor to his site? Who would not? We have been Gelernter fans since his first book. A quote:
...more surprising than his political super-buoyancy is the resurrection of big-government, 1930s-style economic thinking in the Democratic party long after it was taken out with the trash along with Jimmy Carter, and once more (for good measure) after Gingrich smashed Clinton in the ’94 midterms. The failure of central planning and state-managed economies is one of the big themes of the 20th century. But Obama’s handlers have yet to tell him.
His biggest asset is being black. People feel virtuous when they vote for him, or support him, or at least don’t trash him. We all like to feel virtuous...
He has a winning smile, too. And
While conservatives worry about debt and taxes and huge problems abroad, the left is busy pulling the whole country out from under them. While conservatives fiddle around on the roof, robbers are rifling the house and stealing the children. Conservatives might consider climbing down and having a look. Obama is only the first of a new breed.
You can try to rebuild buildings and ports, but buildings and ports are useless in what has become a feral, non-Western culture since the French abandoned it. In Haiti, guys with tire patches sit on the side of the road and throw nails onto the road to generate business. When people get a kid they don't want, they dump it off at the Catholic orphanages promising to return someday to pick the kid up if they get a bigger house. Many are oblivious to time and when they say next week they mean maybe next year. Haiti has two classes, the politicians and the rest. There are no oppressor Capitalists because there is no capital, so Socialism doesn't have a prayer.
Except that Haiti has tons of NGOs and GOs like AID with millions of dollars, and none of them make all that much difference. They seem to exist for purposes of moral vanity. The corrupt pols make deals with the NGOs. Foreign NGO administrators do stints there to earn their third-world stripes so they can earn a promotion while living in guarded NGO enclaves, then they get the heck out before they become clinically depressed or go postal from frustration. I've heard the stories from guys who have worked there for NGOs.
All you have to do is to compare the hell-hole of Haiti with the Dominican Republic on the other half of the island. The DR built itself and is now a major tourist, tobacco, and farming center. People in the DR work hard and worry like normal bourgeois people. Is that a good thing?
Culture is the ultimate infrastructure. You can quote me on that.
That's why it is so difficult to help Haiti get on a more solid footing, and why businesses are not eager to build plants there. Haiti's culture is dysfunctional from a Westerner's point of view but not necessarily from their point of view. They are fatalists ("Si Bondye testaman" is their key phrase), live day-to-day and there is lots of lying, cheating and stealing, bribery, and rape. That's why the NGOs so often fail in their efforts - except in providing the medical care which is entirely imported.
They are a happy, often amoral and hedonistic people, I am told, who don't bother with worrying the way we do. Go figure. OK, they are materially poor. They have a thriving black market in, I am told, extremely high-quality marijuana. The ports which receive donations are their cargo cults.
The Haitians will never become like New Hampshire Yankees, Germans, or Vietnamese no matter how much money people throw in there. If the West were truly multicultural, we would leave them alone to do their thing.
Just my amateur opinion. Debate, and better information, welcome.
Spain decided that liquor, games, and rudeness were acceptable because they brought in tax revenue. New Orleans needed this cash because its residents exhibited at least one all-American trait: they hated paying taxes. They did need expensive public infrastructure, though, to keep out the water and to rebuild when the water broke through. “Vice paid,” explains Powell. “Without the revenues it provided, government officials would have been hard-pressed to pay for maintaining the towns’ costly infrastructure.” Crown administrators likely would advise present-day Louisiana officials to build yet another casino or pleasure emporium to bring in jobs and cash.
Laura at Ace points out that most ventures fail, but the Warren-Obama theme has nothing to say about that. For example, photo below stolen from Gateway. It's the real Obama HQ for Maine:
Insty points out that much of the financial "inequality" in the US is due to the marriage gap. Wonder of wonders, even the NYT is finally willing to discuss the forbidden topic: Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’. It's not news. Sen. Pat Moynihan famously warned about this decades ago, but the subject was judged to be politically incorrect.
Why is it a forbidden topic? I can think of at least two reasons. One is fear of the racial aspect, although no race has a monopoly on single motherhood. My second reason is the knee-jerk refusal to judge based on bourgeois life style choices, or some such Marxist baloney.
Even with government functioning as a modest trust fund for many, having kids outside marriage is not a recipe for a good, orderly life (from my petit bourgeois standpoint, of course). It's not mostly about income - it's about functionality, support, structure, partnership, responsibility, committment, teamwork. This is not a secret. The income part is just an extra side-effect if two people have jobs.
As best I can tell, it takes at least two people to raise kids properly. Ideally, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and close family friends around too. Nannies or babysitters if you can afford them. Tribally, in extended family and in community. Income doesn't really matter much. Kids thrive on Cheerios, Wonder Bread and baloney, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, and Fluffernutter. I did. 6'2" and fairly strong.
The Associated Press reports: “President Barack Obama’s campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.” Think of it like the Confederacy’s artillery barrage on the third day of Gettysburg before Pickett’s charge — you have to in essence disable the other side before the charge begins or it's curtains.
Virtually all of the ads were viciously negative, and judging from the number of Pinocchios they’ve racked up, continually and materially false.
But it didn’t work. Romney and Obama are still deadlocked. (The AP quoted Republican operative Carl Forti: “I don’t think . . . [Obama’s] got a choice. He has to try to change the dynamic now, but the polling indicates it’s not working. He doesn’t appear to be making any headway in the polls.”)
"I'm rubber and you're glue..." Romney will never find his inner Christie, so how about Christie - "Governor Awesome"? As much as I favor Marco Rubio who is a possible future President, you are supposed to bring a large gun to a knife fight in a Chicago alley. Ex-prosecutors, rightly or wrongly, know how to take it to you. Plus people can relate to him for being a little on the heavy side. Most Americans struggle with weight.
The playbook is clear: A barrage of negative advertising to define your opponent before he can define himself; a stream of issues and events to mobilize your base; and a meticulous ground game to squeeze every last vote out of the base come November. As for the small number of voters who haven’t made up their minds already, you don’t try to argue that they’ve never had it better, but rather that the other guy is unacceptable. In the end, you win a narrow victory by default. Sure, you haven’t really confronted the country’s deepest problems. But there’ll be plenty of time to deal with them next year.
Even so, is Romney enough of an SOB to handle Chicago politics? Or are his gentlemanly instincts and moral constitution just too strong to play this already very dirty game? I suspect Romney already feels like a punching bag. He needs to remember that these people do not play by Queensberry Rules. They already said their intention was to kill him and, when it comes to Democrats, the media refuses to play their supposed role of Referee.
To mix sports metaphors, the MSM is running interference for Obama. Everybody knows that. Without websites and Krauthammer, there would be no truth to be had.
He hasn’t gotten the policy right, he’s told plenty of stories, he sounds like a patronizing jerk, and his self-knowledge is as thin as his self-regard is deep. How about a “second term”?
We have mentioned here many times that the EU was designed to evolve into a modern Holy Roman Empire, or maybe just a modern Roman Empire, or a thousand-year reich, or something. I thought imperialism was supposed to be a bad thing nowadays.
The process is moving always towards imperial government, making very clear that the opposite of nationhood is not Enlightenment but Empire. And only one thing stands opposed to this result, and that is the national sentiments of the European people.
I think I represent the Maggie's view when I advocate for decentralization of power. Nationalism doesn't "cause" wars any more than guns kill people. People cause wars. Furthermore, I think that the US over the past 160 years has "evolved" into a sort of empire of states, albeit a representative one (as is the hapless EU). Compare state and local power in 1850 compared to today. Centralized institutions aggregate power the way the sun aggregated planets. They always want more money, control, and power, and there's always a rationalization for it. We're supposed to think they mean well, but they are watching out for their careers, their pensions, and their egos.
The people I respect most are those who want no power or control over anyone or anything other than their own destiny. Exceptions: one's kids and one's livelihood.
Everybody's got free advice for the Republican candidate. Here's what I want to hear him say:
"Mr. Obama, I will ask you to quit with the smears and lies about me. The negativity is not dignified and it is not presidential. You promised a new kind of politics, but you have given us nothing but ugly and divisive Chicago-style politics. You have been President for three 1/2 years. Man up and try to defend your record instead of trying to smear a fellow citizen."
Update: I see that, as of today, they are branding Obama as a liar. Even so, I'd like to hear it as a sound bite.
The press will remain loyal because he's a Lefty and because he's a black dude, but he's been shooting foul shots for over three years and missing the basket. Had his chance for two years until he pissed off the nation and lost the House, and since then he's been blaming other people. Blaming others is not attractive in an adult.
The US, unlike Canada and (mostly) in the UK, will never criminalize private medicine because who could imagine the Lefty Hollywooders and the Lefty Wall Streeters waiting in lines in grungy government clinics or waiting six months for an MRI?
Not to mention the little-noticed detail that federal employees are exempt from Obamacare. I wonder why.
Also, What Life Was Like in 1776 - Americans had the highest per capita income in the civilized world, paid the lowest taxes—and were determined to keep it that way.
I used to think I could be important, and ordered my life accordingly. Now I realize I’m not and try my best to simply know, understand, and do my duty.
I am getting a kick out of this dumb Chick-Fil-A story. I suppose it's a good story for late July, for the entertainment value. 