Tag: Painful Truths

https://twitter.com/StayPuft/status/384889994038366208

GUAM HAS TIPPED OVER. GUAM HAS TIPPED OVER. #shutdown

— ¡El SooperMexican! ن c137 🦬 (@SooperMexican) October 1, 2013

We will rebuild! #shutnado http://t.co/IBp5wNpJTf

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 1, 2013

I HAD TO. pic.twitter.com/7T2oOaIAdP

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) October 1, 2013

https://twitter.com/jimmiebjr/status/384903765029306368

If the government actually shut down, the American taxpayer would have saved $958,998,348.66 by now.

— ¡El SooperMexican! ن c137 🦬 (@SooperMexican) October 1, 2013

#governmentshutdown imagine if democrats passed a new tax but exempted themselves and corporate buddies from it ..oh wait they did #tcot

— The People's Cube (@ThePeoplesCube) October 1, 2013

Ace hits the nail square with the hammer here, as only he can phrase it:

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we’re rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. “We” — and by we I mean Americans, not “we” meaning us here right now — increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

Why boycott Barilla? Do we really support a world in which every utterance, act, thought, belief, or gesture must be pre-cleared with the 100-million-strong leftist Committee of the Whole before we dare it?

Nicely put. Now I think I’ll go watch some anime and play some Final Fantasy XIV.

Meow.

via @CraigRWhitworth

 

Maetenloch at AoS points to an insightful reminder from William Jacobson that the solution to tyranny is not “go along, let it collapse on its own, let it burn”:

As Sharansky was being led to the airplane that would take him from the Soviet Union to East Germany for the exchange, the Soviets confiscated his book of psalms. It would have been easy for Sharansky simply to keep walking towards the plane and freedom. But Sharansky understood that the Soviets confiscated his book of psalms not because they wanted the book, but because they wanted to show that even in this last moment, they were in control.

In front of reporters covering his departure, Sharansky sat in the snow refusing to move unless the Soviets gave him back his book of psalms. Here was this diminutive man, after 10 years in prison, on the verge of freedom, refusing to budge unless one of the world’s two superpowers gave him back his book. And give him back his book of psalms they did.

Do any of us still have the stones to just refuse? Refuse to go along with a travesty? Will we sit in the snow with freedom beckoning 100 yards away?

Sometimes it is interesting to get a perspective from ‘across the pond’- in this case, Gates of Vienna:

“Gun Control” is nothing new. In fact, it’s been around for much longer than guns have existed. It’s been a universal phenomenon amongst human societies. And it’s never been about public safety. It has been, and always will be, an act of caste stratification and population control.

In ancient Feudal societies all around the world, notably China and Japan and many parts of Europe and the Middle-East, peasants and plebeians were prohibited from owning weapons. When the ruling aristocrats and feudal land-owners required a military force, their trusted retainers would issue arms to conscripted peasant-levies, and send them into battle as vanguards of the main force. After battle finished and the troops had looted the field, the retainers would retrieve these weapons and send the serfs back to work. Why were the commoners prohibited from possession of weapons?

Simple.

To prevent uprisings.

Folks over here should keep this in mind when they hear the mindless cries to ‘outlaw those awful guns’. They’re the only thing that truly keeps you free.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Via Ace of Spades:

Some random clicking led me to this NPR piece on red light cameras which was interesting.

What’s the point of a red-light camera — to make intersections safer or to generate revenue? That’s the question prompted by researchers at the University of Tennessee, who say the cameras are sometimes used in ways that are more likely to make money than to improve safety.

Real shocker that something sold to the public for “safety” would be perverted into a revenue maker that might actually compromise safety, right?

OK, you’re done rolling your eyes now I suppose…moving on…

In other news, water is wet, sun rises in east, and progs are batshite crazy.

A touching reminder of those who gave all. The amount of volunteers brought tears to my eyes.

… and Charles C. W. Cooke does. A brilliant explanation of America’s love/hate of the ‘black rifle’.

Sometimes an idea is both so jaw-droppingly brilliant and obvious at the same time it must be the product of a superior intellect. Ladies and Germs, I present The Blogfather:

With the obvious politicization of the bureaucracy, which probably isn’t limited to the IRS, what to do about the civil service, which is overwhelmingly Democratic? My advice: Flood them with interns. And as part of their training, the interns should be told: “If you see anything funny, talk to us (the intern program office) about it.” Result: Thousands of eyes and ears everywhere.

As the IRS scandal (ongoing) has made perfectly clear, the problem is not the politicians; they can eventually be ousted one way or another. The problem is the lifers in ‘Civil Service’- they’re “dug in deeper than an Alabama tick” to use my homie’s vernacular.

Into the breach, younguns…

What Ken said.

I cannot add to it.

Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal about the current state of the civil rights establishment today, and unlike most of what I’ve read in the past week he states his case with both dispassion and compassion:

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

 

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.

And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment’s mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

The plain fact is this- white folk were rightly expected to do something about the Bull Connors and the Lester Maddoxes and the George Wallaces in our midst- and we did. It was a long, painful process, and not entirely successful. Human nature is what it is.

But they no longer have any power to go with their bigotry.

I was raised in the Fifties and Sixties to never judge a man by his ethnicity, but by his character. So were most of my peers- and I grew up in a small North Georgia town.

Now it is time for the black folk to do the same to the haters and civil rights profiteers, the Al Sharptons and the Jesse Jacksons and the Reverend Wrights in their community. This is not an unfair or an unreasonable request. The plain fact is the black folks have to tend to their own business- they have to make the change. Otherwise we’ll continue down this bad road to a worse end.

Us creepy-ass crackers can’t do it for you, and rightly so. You need to clean your own house, and own the results.

Else, you really are going to own the results.