RedStateEclectic

Freedom River

Excellent parable narrated by Orson Welles.  I think the date is 1971, but it is even more relevant today.

Demagogic Obama - Spokesman of Ignorance-based Meddling

I never understood the endlessly regurgitated claim that Obama is "brilliant."

The appearance of his "brilliance" is the flip-side of democratically empowered obtuseness. He is just an opportunity to celebrate the narrow-mindedness that his adulators have been conditioned to invest their unconsidered instincts and emotions in by the ubiquitous state institutions and their derivative, (large parts of) the media.

Obama's popularity is a reflection of the worst habits of meddlesomeness that the populace has been enlisted to practice under the silly notion that hundreds of millions of people can or ought to be ruling regarding any number of specific matters, rather than uphold their liberty by judging a government's ability to defend the rule of law, i.e. the most sensibly generalisable rules and hence the most essential principles that a people can possibly be prepared to commit itself to, meaningfully, consistently and lastingly.

(The Rick Santelli protest and its considerable support by the public encourages one to think that the point of my post is not lost on millions of Americans.)

Don Boudreaux nails it thus:

Here's a letter that I sent a few days ago to the Washington Post:

Dear Editor:

Today's cackling by politicians and pundits about how the auto industry should be restructured, the health-care industry overhauled, and the banking industry reorganized is deafening.  Surely I'm not alone in being horrified that so many people with no experience in these industries - and with no skin in any of these games - fancy themselves qualified to pontificate about matters on which their knowledge can't possibly be more than superficial.

This cascade of instructions from the inexperienced calls to mind a passage from Gogol's Dead Souls: "He talks about everything, touches lightly on everything, he says everything he has filched out of books brightly and picturesquely, but he hasn't got any of it in his head; and you see afterwards that a talk with a humble merchant who knows nothing but his own business but does know that thoroughly and by experience, is better than all these chatterboxes."*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

The Most Dangerous Man in America

Bernie Quigley has a new post at "The Hill's Pundit Blog" describing Ron Paul as "the most dangerous man in America."  It's also up on his personal blog (which I will add to the blogroll).  Here's just a bit of the essay, but be sure to click over and read the rest (and if you click over to his personal blog, be sure to scroll down--there's a lot of good stuff there!

And suddenly, only two weeks later, 31 states have initiated state sovereignty clauses in their legislatures.

This is all because of one man; the most dangerous man in America today: Ron Paul. In hindsight, his arrival is worth review because it helps explain the Kentucky Resolutions and it helps explain Jefferson.

At the beginning, our continent took two paths and was led by two visions; the one, the expansive, globalist vision of Alexander Hamilton of the Empire State, who saw a strong and singular central (world) government enabling a world of capital and corporations. The second was a vision of unique states and regions and peoples, loosely connecting the one to the other, growing over time, rich in character and each with its own identity and personality. These would be peoples whole in their own communities; people close to the earth and close to their experience of God. This was the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian. The Jeffersonian vision was sent into exile in 1865. Ron Paul has brought it back.

I've been doing some reading on Jefferson--specifically on his political thought--lately.  I hope to be able to share some thoughts on that myself, soon.

LLE

Ron Paul Takes Twitter Questions

On CNN yesterday:

Dr. Paul at CPAC

Geez, what's with all the flags?!?  Whenever I see that kind of thing, I think of the pictures I've seen of various past totalitarian states ... flags everywhere - not a drop of freedom, though.

The Pledge at P.A.L.

Our homeschool has a name. I don't know why they asked us to give it one, but they said it must have one. So we named it the Parks Academy of Learning or PAL, for short. My two boys have been busy studying all kinds of things, including the memorization of a segment of a certain document which I think we just might use as an unofficial school pledge of sorts to be said from time to time (As for the pledge of allegiance, well, they can decide to whom they give their allegiances when they're older).

I'm sure you've guessed the popular words by now:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Darn proud of my students.

More German Humour...

...with a little help from our Muslim friends.

Off and on, we have been joking at RedStateEclectic about German humour (presumably to get something funny out of it).

The below clip is from a German comedian, Kaya Yanar, who, to my taste, has improved German humour genuinely. He is one of millions of Muslims, mainly Turks, in Germany. Kaya Yanar is a "türkischer Mitbürger" (Turkish compatriot), as the phrase goes. He makes fun as a Turk of Turks, as a Turk of Germans, as a German of Turks, as a German of Germans. His humour has helped relax social discourse in this country. It is now possible to make fun of ethnic minorities and indeed of Germans, to get a valid point across or just to crack a joke, and no one will feel offended, instead all will laugh. People who have the ability to laugh unstressed about each other (including themselves) are friends.

The clip is in German, but you should be able to get the gist of it.

The couple in the car pretends to hardly speak German. At the end of the clip, when the police officer has fled in despair, the couple starts to speak perfect German: "Boy, this was a close one," says the woman. Her husband replies: "I'll have to keep putting on that show until I've got my driver's license back."

Some hints on the dialog: "sich ausweisen" means "to identify oneself (as by passport), but "jemanden ausweisen" means to "expel someone," as in "ausweisen aus Deutschland" (expel from Germany).

"Führerschein" is "driver's license".

"NA, SIE wissen schon" is "WELL, YOU know what I mean."

"Ausrasten" is a colloquial term for "to flip out" - in the clip it is made to sound like "rassistisch" (racist).

"Gas geben" is a colloquial phrase meaning "to accelerate" or "to drive fast".

Indian Paper Offers Superb Analysis of Our Economic Nightmare

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,

When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

                              – Yip Harburg, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (1931).

So begins an article in India's leading English language newspaper, Frontline.The author is quite savvy about just what the hell's going on in, for example, the manipulation of government-provided statistics about economic matters in order to make things look less dire than they are.

How fascinating that the largely Indian audience of this magazine is being treated to this sort of unfliching analysis - I have yet to see anything quite this honest in our media here.

Here's an excerpt, but be sure and read the whole thing.

QUOTE  Statistician John Williams (whose newsletter is available at www.shadowstats.com) reanalyses the government numbers using the pre-Clinton era methodology. He finds that the current unemployment rate hovers between 13.5 per cent and 18 per cent(using two different data sets and formulae). As Williams lifts the statistical camouflage off the faked numbers, the situation seems more drastic. As columnist Alexander Cockburn put it, “the air is whistling out of the American economy”. It is this deflating balloon that worries even those within the inner circle of American power. Obama’s leading economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, recently said that the government must “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral”. The people who have lost their jobs have no cushion to maintain their lifestyles. The social security nets have been eviscerated, and of these, unemployment benefits are minuscule (indeed, because employers are penalised when their former workers go on unemployment, there have been many cases of workers being fired so that their departure does not increase the unemployment insurance that a firm must pay). Additionally, since the 1980s, the saving rate has plummeted. UNQUOTE

~~~~~

 

 

 

Ron Paul Unplugged

If you haven't seen it already...

 

 

Watch CBS Videos Online

Cookie Time

Ah, the big day is here in our little corner of the world: the Girl Scout cookies are arriving!  For me, today, that means that as a Girl Scout leader/Troop Cookie Manager, I get to go and collect 120 cases (1404 boxes) of assorted cookies, and then distribute them to 15 girls in my troop.  They are to arrive around 1:30, with the order for the rest of our area (I have no idea how many hundreds of cases that might be--but probably at least 500)--I've volunteered to help sort orders (my back will be sore tomorrow), so I'll probably be "off the grid" until evening.