Ghettotainment

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything.  The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.  P.J. O’Rourke 

Obama's open borders policies at ICE have Los Angeles looking just like what he and his progressive cohorts want it to resemble.  Violent gang amorality and lawlessness are not merely revered and glorified, they have been legitimized.  They call it Ghettotainment.  Little wonder that civilized people are abandoning California in droves.

In "The Day I Left the Left," LA expat Jim Goad reveals some of the epiphanies that helped to transform him into a rational, enlightened cynic from an idealistic, indoctrinated crusader.  Journalism degree in tow, [he] set about to right historical wrongs.  Working for a now defunct alternate news weekly magazine, he wrote an article about the Hicks Boys, a group of drug dealing, longhaired Mexican metalheads from East Los Angeles.  They rejected local gang customs in favor of muerte obsessions, Satan worship, and generally aimless nihilism, and Goad identified with them at the time.

He found that he had to defend the significance of his article about them to his boss, a sniffy, retentive type, by pointing out that they had grown up in East LA housing projects where police-chopper lights glared into their windows every night and shirtless, machete-wielding cholos terrorized the barrio.  Armed with the certainty that he would be safe there because they recognized his empathy for them, Goad returned to their neighborhood to buy some pot.  What he encountered took him aback.

Rather than thinking of him as a kindred spirit, the Boys wanted to beat him to death for accurately depicting them, their lives, and their neighborhood.

His personal philosophy then was a half-digested buzzing meme-hive of left-leaning pop culture and far-left academic indoctrination.  Although taught to question authority, he had never questioned the authority of the major media or academic consensus [believing they were] objective scientists rather than evangelical ideologues.  Conditioned to this thought process by the Democrat controlled and operated national education collective, he believed that there was something noble in losing rather than winning.

This collective publishes endless treatises on deconstruction without making a peep about how to reconstruct everything after destroying it.  Theirs is a Gospel of innate cognitive and physical equality among all social groups [not] an equality of character.  White people generally [are] depicted as morally defective.  Goad writes that he appointed himself as an advocacy journalist who would defend the poor against the rich and the weak against the strong, without realizing that often he would be defending the stupid against the smart.

His disillusionment followed the realization that he lacked the inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias that most leftists seem to possess, a capacity that drives them to defend the amoral against the moral, the cunning against the courageous, and predators against their prey.  He considered his research into Orange County’s Vietnamese gangs and how he was continually impressed with how war-shattered Asians had come here penniless but owned businesses and mansions within a decade.  The author could not reconcile this reality with his belief that blacks, Mexicans, and Vietnamese were all equals.  Goad realized that the idea of equality had substituted for religion as a modern opiate of the masses.

Taught that capitalism oppresses minorities, he also reflected upon his countless interviews with dumb-as-dirt rappers whom he remembered posing for album covers fanning themselves with $100 bills and heavily laden with gold chains.  He thought about the claims of some minorities that they had absolutely nothing to do with the mess that they made of their own lives, and he pondered those who have succeeded handsomely despite language, cultural, and economic barriers.  He concluded that there are good reasons that the third world came in third.

May your gods be with you.

Hopenchange: Postmodern Perfidy

Finally, if nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion.  Aristotle

Advocate research is foundational to postmodernism.  It is the cubic zirconia of research because it is research in name only.  This is how it works.  Individuals who are of one political bent engage in ersatz research by parading personal opinions as empirical evidence.  Research poseur A offers vagaries in support of some brand of ism and refers to the published personal opinions of fellow ideologue B.  B then refers to ism specialist C who, in turn, refers to A’s unsupported opinions.  Then, a group of their ideological and ethical soul mates pretends to analyze and evaluate this collection of arbitrary and subjective opinions, emotional appeals, and sophistry; afterward, they rubber-stamp it as a body of research.  Sycophants cobble groups of these fabrications into an ideology that deserves Study. Marginally employed professors of hyphenated-ismstudies use postmodernism’s disinformation and propaganda to hide that taxpayers pay them for not doing anything useful.

Clearly, postmodernism and deception are synonymous.  Paul Jacobsen writes that postmodernists have been busy for decades quietly worming their way into American life from top to bottom, including not just politics, but education at all levels, entertainment, journalism, corporations, foundations, even churches.  Postmodernism is much more than a philosophy; it is today's foundational cultural driver.  Thanks to the Bartaverse for this article.

Public schools and mainstream media are the primary carriers of postmodernism’s message of statism and progressivism.  They claim that objectivity and rationality are tools of oppression.  Truth and morals are inventions; any group’s version of these phenomena is as equally worthy and valid as any other.  Apparently, Asian infanticide to weed out firstborn females, shabby treatment of women under Sharia law, and the Muslim practice of female genital modification are proper under postmodernism's doctrines of cultural and moral relativism.  That might trouble postmodern feminists, except for their aversion to rationality.

Postmodern arguments that pre-literate cultures have contributed equally to Western medical advances that combat breast and cervical cancer, to agricultural improvements boosting nutrition, or to environmental knowledge derived from space exploration are specious, if not foolish.  Postmodernism is the language of progressivism; it is an outrageous fraud cleverly covered up by a fog of arcane gibberish and deceitful, euphemistic code words that permit its adherents to imagine that they are members of a superior, elite gnostic coterie.  Those beliefs are delusional, and their actions prove it.

Because they cannot create factually accurate plausible arguments by rationally deliberating issues, they reply to reasoned, linear arguments with boilerplate and logical fallacies.  When those arguments fail, they resort to speaking louder and faster with both validity and intellectual acuity present in those arguments in inverse proportion to the decibel level of their claims.  Finally, they resort to swearing and ad hominem attacks.  They believe that louder is righter. 

At this point, they have become like children sticking fingers in their ears and shouting to avoid hearing inconvenient information.  In public discourse, they use bullhorns to shout down opponents, engage in sloganeering, chanting, rhythmic hand clapping, hooting, howling, and all manner of noisemaking to prevent the public from hearing logically persuasive arguments from their opponents.  They are bullies who cringe if they are treated as they would like to treat others.

Robert A. Hall offers The Statist Dictionary in which Civility in Discourse [means that] No one may speak harshly of a Statist.  Statists may, however, call their critics terrorists, racists, homophobes, sexists, Islamophobes, hostage-takers, or "son of a bitches" who must be "taken out."  Since Statists are, by definition, morally superior to you, they may say any nasty thing about you without being uncivil.  You may not reply.

Democrat.  A person who opposes those foundations of democracy such as the secret ballot or measures to eliminate fraudulent voting.

Economic Stimulus.  Money borrowed from your grandkids to reward public employees and other interest groups for supporting Statists.

Everyone must chip in.  In this case, Everyone means the 5% of the people who already pay 60% of the federal income taxes, who must chip in even more to allow the Statists to buy more votes from the 47% of the public who pay no federal income taxes.

The rhetoric of postmodern, progressive statists is comprised of propaganda and disinformation.  It is employed by people who try to determine how other people live and covet their legal, social, economic, and political resources.  They cannot bear to be treated as they want to treat others and refuse to acknowledge the inconvenient truth.  For progressives, words only mean what they mean when it is convenient.   It is little wonder that they attack the meaning of language to hide their activities.

May your gods be with you.

Rats, Snitches and Sons of...expletive deleted

There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics.  I regard them as Quislings, as traitors...I mean it.  Margaret Thatcher

In early 2009 when Democrats held the White House, the House of Representatives, and controlled the Senate with a filibuster-proof 60 seats, they were thumbing their collective nose at everyone who objected to them plundering the nation.  The President and his progressive handlers were arrogantly waging war against God-d**n America.  Consensus politics be hanged, was their battle cry.  Obama, Pelosi, and Reid were preening and strutting about for the fawning media like streetwalkers at a convention of sex and approval addicts.  That was before the Night of the Long Knives in November 2010. 

Lately, they feign humility—this servile act sticks in Obama’s arrogant craw—and Barack calls for nonpartisan consensus for the good of the nation.  Even casual observers can recognize that this transparently fictitious supplication is mere perfidy.  As he calls for cooperation, his proposed American Jobs Act, or Son of Stimulus, is merely more of the same partisan pandering to Democrat constituents.  He wants to raise taxes and funnel the money into education unions, construction unions, and other public sector union supporters.  However, the public’s eye is on Obama, and Democrats desperately need to divert attention away from the results of their greed and fecklessness.  Hence, Son of Stimulus has a twin, Sister Snitch, aka AttackWatch.      

AttackWatch is not Obama’s first snitch ‘n bitch site.  Back in August of 2009, Team Obama launched flag@whitehouse to recruit busybody tattletales to report on anyone who criticized or exposed his insincere rhetoric.  Half-truths, lies, and innuendoes are Obama-type progressives’ rhetorical stock and trade; however, when they are subjected to the sort of treatment that they have handed out to others, they quail.

They need help from weasels, turncoats, and informers, and one of their important patrons is practiced at the arts of deception and treachery.  A significant part of the funding for Obama’s re-election campaign comes from one of history’s most traitorous informers, self-admitted Nazi collaborator George Soros.  With him as a benefactor, political operative, and tactical advisor, the Obama crowd should soon be churning out volumes of propaganda and disinformation from information provided by AttackWatch.

Nonetheless, even for the seemingly Teflon-coated Obama, actions beget consequences, and consequences demand accountability.  The national mess that we currently endure is the direct result of anti-American activities conducted by members of the Democratic Party.  Maybe their need for snitch sites indicates that their political supporters are waning.  Perhaps, the loss of the Anthony Weiner’s House seat to a Republican indicates that Jews, once reliable Democratic voters, are beginning to recognize the connection between Obama’s blatant anti-Israel stance and the huge amount of support that the prez has received from Soros. 

May your gods be with you.

Augustus, Where Art Thou?

Morals are to shame what whole beans are to coffee.  The former is the essence from which the latter is derived.  Without morals, shame cannot exist; too often, what constrains behavior is embarrassment driven by self-conscious vanity.  People who are moral are moral when no one is watching, not merely reluctant to expose their depravity to public view.  Given the visible portion of America’s child sexualization and exploitation industry, it seems sensible to wonder what sort of sociopathy lurks behind its tawdry exterior.

In “Little Girls Gone Wild,” author Katherine Mieszkowski reveals that sex worker outfits are available for preschoolers, sexually suggestive pint-size products from pole-dancing kits sold in the toy section to ‘Hooters Girl (in training)’ T-shirts for toddlers to padded bras for 6-year-olds.  One might wonder what a 6-year old has that requires padding.

The practice is widespread.  Recently, Vogue published an article featuring a 10-year old, scantily clad model that would have earned a PG-13 rating on American television.  Hardly any of media’s champions of women’s rights expressed interest, much less condemnation.  This is but one more example of Political Rule #1.  If deviance thrives, the rich and powerful are facilitating it, supporting it, and benefitting from it.

This tacit approval of child abuse is a conspiracy of silence, a link between Hollywood pedophiles, the complicit mainstream media, and their progressive amorality.  Sadly, the mothers and fathers of these pre-pubescent sex workers are responsible for their children’s exploitation.  Under the guise of talent or dance contests, girls between four and ten years old are being dressed like Bratz Dolls and sent onstage to perform hoochie-coochie dances in what must be a pedophile’s paradise.

The Daily Mail’s article “Far too Much, Far too Young” describes a collection of photos that some consider pornographic.  Wearing heavy make-up and gold stilettos, Thylane Blondeau sprawls seductively on leopard print bed covers.  The provocative pose might seem like nothing unusual for a Vogue fashion shoot – except that Miss Blondeau is just ten years old.  At this age, she is unable to understand the consequences of what is happening to her.

Thylane cannot be blamed; however, her parents deserve condemnation for furthering the cause of public acceptance of child sexual exploitation.  Unfortunately, mothers who harm their children usually do so with legal impunity.  Psychologists and other people who are making money from medicalizing deviance claim that mothers who brutalize their children to bask in the attention of martyring themselves for the children whom they torture need treatment rather than incarceration.  What a surprise that the people who treat them for payment consider injuring and killing infants to be a medical condition, not a criminal act.

Our schools reflect Hollywood and media amorality.  Mothers pimp their daughters to live out unrealized fantasies.  They send them out to perform pelvis pumping, hip wiggling, simulated-sex dance routines that are better suited for strip clubs than audiences of elementary school children.  We are unable to pay our bills and must import food to feed the domestic population.  We are perpetually embroiled in unwinnable wars that squander our youth, deplete our treasury, and erode our political resolve.  We allow our enemies to cross our borders with impunity.  This is how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire.

May your gods be with you.

Obama's Empty Quiver

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.  Alexis de Tocqueville

Victor Davis Hanson observes what many economists already realize: when it comes to spurring investment, boosting business expansion, and creating the jobs needed to resurrect the economy, Obama’s quiver is empty of arrows.  There is now a collective “Been there, done that” any time Barack Obama walks up to the podium to give yet another teleprompted speech [claiming that his adversaries] would expose children to mercury, neglect roads and bridges, and finally dissolve government altogether.  His propaganda claims that the eight-month-old Republican-controlled Congress has foiled Obama’s legislative agenda for three years.

What Thomas Sowell wants from government concerning the economy is to leave it alone.  History shows that a laissez faire approach allowing American entrepreneurs to do what they do best, create wealth, is most likely to succeed.  The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s.  What most people are unaware of is that there was no Great Depression until after politicians started intervening in the economy.

After the 1929 market crash, unemployment was briefly at 9%.  It declined to 6.3% in June, 1930, when Congress passed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.  Soon, unemployment hit double digits, staying that way until 1940, including a 35-month period when it was over 20%.  Obama’s schemes are like FDR’s, he smothered business with regulations and spent borrowed money hand-over-fist.  Roosevelt turned a mild and short-lived recession into the Great Depression; Obama seems poised to do the same.

The crash of 1987 caused media demands for federal intervention, but President Reagan stayed the course.  The market rebounded, and 20 years of low inflation, high employment, and prosperity followed.  Intervention hurts the nation economically, but it is popular politically; FDR was elected four times, twice when unemployment was at today’s levels.

IBD’s view is that Obama’s so-called jobs plan is to increase taxes and spending; it is 100% politics.  In typically devious fashion, President Obama kept it to himself that he was planning a full-frontal assault on tax deductions to "pay for" nearly $450 billion in new stimulus.  He is attacking the very people and businesses that are vital to new job creation.  Obama sees entrepreneurs as targets for revenue increases rather than essential elements in economic recovery.  His plans for the oil and gas industries will reduce domestic oil production by 400,000 barrels a day, destroy 170,000 American jobs and lose $128 billion in government revenues.

UPI offers this bleak assessment.  U.S. policy needs a complete overhaul to save the economy from a second Great Recession but instead U.S. President Barack Obama promises more of the same policies that have failed -- stimulus spending, higher taxes and onerous, ineffective business regulations and healthcare costs.

Rather than to address problems directly, Obama's jobs plan fails to increase domestic demand and will burden the economy with higher taxes and superfluous bureaucracy.

Obama is leading us on a downward economic gyre.  Businesses cannot afford to expand or hire.  Food and energy prices have skyrocketed due to quantitative easing.  Apparently, this is all according to plan.  In 2012, will we heed the Red Queen’s demand, “Off with his head,” or will we commit national suicide with Obama’s poisoned Kool Aid?

May your gods be with you.

Ending the American Experiment

The gentle government that promises to hold your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side.  ~Theodore Forstmann

Economic malaise aggravated by unsustainable fiscal imprudence helped usher Adolph Hitler into power.  Similarly, in 2008 when political moderates joined progressive statists to scapegoat the very people who had warned that the welfare housing bubble would burst, a modern fascist emerged.  Ignore, if possible, that Barack Obama has melanin positive skin; he is merely a newer brand of fascist in the model of the black power movement circa 1965.  

Fascism is fascism.  Fascists need a hated other to vilify and to focus the public’s rage and resentment upon as the cause of all current ills.  For Obama, it is successful white business people; for Hitler it was gypsies, gays, and Jews; for Spain’s Franco, it was communists; for Pol Pot, it was Western tainted Cambodians.  Fascists hire hooligans to intimidate and brutalize opponents.  Hitler had his brownshirts, Benito Mussolini had his black shirts, Mao Tse-tung used Red Brigades, and Obama has his public and private sector union goons, flash mobs, NBPP street scum, and the US Department of Justice.

Totalitarianism is essential to fascism.  The rulers seize all resources and dispense legal, social, economic, and political opportunities to the governed on an hierarchal basis, by race, creed, religion, gender, national origin, and the like.  Aryans succeeded under Hitler’s final solution, Russian elites benefited from Stalin’s pogroms, and welfare recipients, jihadists, drug dealers, and nanny staters prosper under Obama.  Thanks to Team Obama, we are in the throes of economic malaise compounded by fiscal imprudence that appears to presage totalitarian takeover through martial law.

The feds are nearly finished nationalizing the banks.  Their not-too-subtly-engineered economic collapse through exponentially bloating the welfare state will justify seizing all private retirement funds.  Goodwin Liu-type quislings are gaining control of the judicial branch of government.  The police are no longer constitutionally constrained. 

Under martial law, warrantless searches and seizures will be the norm; individual ownership of weapons and land will be federally banned.  Failure to confess to a crime will continue to constitute the crime of obstruction of justice.  Mere accusation of wrongdoing will be construed as proof of guilt.  We will soon have to choose between living on our knees or dying on our feet.

“Prepare to be Assaulted,” warns that we should take heed of the coming reign of authoritarianism. While tyrannical behavior by this government is already evident, it can get much worse.  We are not far away from patrolling drones watching our every move, if in fact that is not already a policy in place or being planned.  We are not far away from a global war, one that would expediently assure Obama’s re-election.  As this government continues to spiral out of control, these things become more possible, and more probable.

What a surprise it will be for fourth generation lifetime welfare recipients to learn that they are superfluous to the coming government and it no longer needs to bother with buying their votes with others’ resources.  What a shock it will be for effete pseudointellectual academics to find themselves in the same circumstances as Cambodian academics under the Khmer Rouge.  It will be equally shocking when we learn that our intransigence, greed, apathy, and mindless obedience to authority have led us to the sort of life described here.

Voltaire observed that it dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. 

May your gods be with you.

Forever Remember Eleven September

Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.  Benjamin Franklin

The Congressional response to Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, was the Patriot Act.  On this day, we stepped onto a slippery slope leading toward what we claim to abhor.  Once, wiretapping required advance approval from a federal judge; now, it requires only that the President sign a National Security Letter.  What is frightening about this is that the president is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. 

The Constitutional separation of federal powers was intended to act as a counterweight to keep any branch of the federal government from becoming so powerful that it could avoid public scrutiny and accountability.  US legal tradition was that Congressional and Judicial oversight prevented secret, heavy-handed, and unconstitutional law enforcement from taking away our liberties.  This is how things were done in Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

In the former Soviet Union, a written summons from the KGB or GRU gave Soviets laundry problems.  Here at home, a National Security Letter produces similar results.  The letters carry with them gag orders that criminalize discussing the matter with anyone.  These letters, served on communications service providers like phone companies and ISPs, allow the FBI to secretly demand data about ordinary American citizens' private communications and Internet activity without any meaningful oversight or prior judicial review.

Without such oversight and review, the First Amendment’s guaranty of free speech is countermanded without the public authorizing a Constitutional amendment.  The Act’s provision that authorizes federal agents to seize any tangible thing such as emails, browsing histories, or library records effectively eliminates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable and warrantless seizures of our persons, houses, papers, and effects.

Libertarians worried that the PA’s nearly unlimited surveillance authority would lead to unlawful abuses by federal officials.  It did, and it was used to investigate non-terrorists' political dissent.  A 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department found 'widespread and serious abuse' of authority by the F.B.I. under the Patriot Act.  Many of those F.B.I. cases involved people with no clear connection to terrorism.

Prior to the Act’s re-authorization, some Senators proposed amending it so that the FBI would have to prove in advance—requiring authorities to establish probable cause—showing that their intended seizure is directly connected to terrorism.  However, Obama did not demand these protections on condition of signing it.  Conversely, Senator Ron Wyden reports that he has been secretly reinterpreting public laws and statutes to allow him to hide how the Act is currently interpreted.

Wyden wants to repeal the Act’s business-records provision because there is stark difference between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.  Libertarians embrace a healthy mistrust of government that could be assuaged with transparency.  We recognize that something is amiss when government hides its activities from the governed.

As long as the Patriot Act remains focused on ordinary Americans rather than suspected terrorists, the terrorists -- if you’ll forgive the truism -- have indeed won.

It would be disrespectful to the thousands who died that sad September day to allow memories of that tragic event to justify refashioning the land of liberty into a corrupt totalitarian state.  The victims and their heirs deserve better, and so do we.

Forever remember eleven September.