Tag: Brave New World

I’ve Already Addressed This Question

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Dan Miller at PJ Tatler asks Will the United States have another Civil War?  I addressed this question several years ago, and more than once.  In that first piece my response was:

Jefferson suggested a small armed rebellion every 20 years or so. We didn’t take his advice. Our last one ended in 1865, and it was so devastating I think it put us off rebellion entirely too long.

Government isn’t “us” and hasn’t been for a long, long time. It represents the people who run the Democrat and Republican Parties, and those who pay them the most. Government-run education has ensured that the end product coming out of our schools is uniformly ignorant of how the system is supposed to work, and it’s done a damned good job of indoctrinating our children in the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” philosophy, and the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy. Fifty-plus years of this has produced a very large, very ignorant, very apathetic population.

I think that “pressing the reset button” is going to happen, but all it’s going to get some of us is a tighter collar and a heavier chain.

In the second piece I wrote:

What prevents another Civil War here isn’t the Army or the fact that we hold a higher loyalty to our Nation than to our State of residence, it’s ignorance and apathy.

Well, we seem to be overcoming the apathy problem, but ignorance? Not so much.

In the third piece I returned to my original position:

I cannot help but wonder: Are we going to war again, against each other? And what form would that take?

I think the answer might very well be “YES,” and the form will be that of domestic terrorism.

Dan Miller, in a longer piece at his own blog expands on his take on the subject:

Although the persistent atrophy of states’ rights is among the causes of many problems from which discontent arises, that atrophy does not itself seem to concern great numbers of citizens. It is also a reason why a civil war is unlikely: states now are much weaker than were those that seceded in 1861. Then, the states were considered far more than now as sovereign countries. Before and during the war, many of the South considered “United States” to be a plural expression. Hence, it was often said that the United States “are,” rather than “is.” When the country was viewed as a consortium of separate and sovereign entities, the plural usage was grammatically correct. The plural form has fallen into disuse; I still use it as a reminder that the states retain the authority not delegated to the federal government even though they have forfeited much of the power to exercise it.

I’ve said the same myself. What we have isn’t people in different states clamoring to be released from the Federal yoke, it’s people in large cities wanting Federally-provided welfare versus suburban and rural populations that generally want benign neglect when it comes to Federal interference.

The States aren’t “red” or “blue,” they’re differing shades of purple, but the cities are “blue” and outside the cities are, on the whole, varying shades of “red.”

You’ll note, all of the rioting going on isn’t occurring in places like Lizard Lick or Henley-in-Arden or Arma, Greece.  It’s occurring in Philadelphia, London and Athens.

So no, we’re not going to see another iteration of “The War Between the States.”  But we very well might see our major cities burn.

May Victims of Communism Day

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Today is the third annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them.  “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  —  Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

—

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog.  This is the second time I have put it up.

UPDATE:  Sipsey Street Irregulars has a post to go along with this one.  STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Quote of the Day – “WORD!” Edition

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The purpose of the armed forces is to kill people and break their stuff. This isn’t the frickin’ Peace Corps we’re running here, it is a warfighting machine. Much like the Los Angeles Lakers, it doesn’t get its score at the end of the game graded on a curve based on how well it reflects “the racial, ethnic and gender mix” of America.

— Tam, commenting on the erroneous conclusion of a recent report on the current  ethnic mix of officers in the US military

Self-inflicted

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Yesterday’s QotD came from a comment left by the Geekwitha45 to a previous post.  That comment in its entirety goes:

The MSM isn’t broken.

It’s operating effectively, as designed and intended. Unfortunately, being a source of unbiased, deep information is not a design consideration.

What *is* broken is the electorate, which failed to detect that condition and correct for it.

This is why I no longer believe myself to have any duty of conscience to be chained to the outcomes of a broken electorate or electoral process.

Which sucks, because all I ever really wanted from my government was a vigorous defense of my natural rights, in a package that was safe enough to mostly ignore, instead of the ringside seats at the horror show.

Wheee.

One of my co-workers has a cartoon-a-day calendar of New Yorker cartoons.  This one is from a few days ago:
I’ve got a few thousand words to say on this topic that I just can’t get written down.  I hate when that happens, but I thought I’d share the picture with you and prompt you for your thoughts.  Maybe you’ll break my damned dam free.

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

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That’s from the Orange Catholic Bible from Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 SciFi novel Dune. (Which reminds me – it’s time to read it again.)

Back in 2008 I reported on the successful creation of the fourth fundamental electronic component.  To complement the inductor, resistor and capacitor, researchers at Hewlett-Packard had finally created the Memristor. The characteristic of the memristor is that its resistance changes based on the direction current flows through it.  In one direction the resistance goes up, in the other direction, down.  But the key characteristic is that after the current flow stops, the resistance of the device stops changing and remains fixed.  It is, in effect, a non-volatile memory device.

At the time the story was that several neuroscience and engineering labs were looking at the memristor as the key component for systems that emulate neural networks.

And they still are. Now the research is being funded by DARPA. If you’re at all interested in artificial intelligence, it’s a fascinating article.

And the Singularity grows nearer.

2012

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I’d like you to to read some pieces and then come back here for mine. There are four, and they are in large part repetitive, but I think they’re worth your time. They are:

The Decadence of Election 2010

WWIII ahead: Warfare defining human life by 2020

Hatred is killing your profits; new meltdown ahead

And, finally, America on the brink of a Second Revolution

The first piece is by Peter Morici – “a professor at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.” The last three are Market Watch op-eds by Paul B. Farrell – “the author of nine books on personal finance, economics and psychology, including The Millionaire Code, The Winning Portfolio, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing. Farrell was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley; executive vice president of the Financial News Network; executive vice president of Mercury Entertainment Corp; and associate editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He has a Juris Doctor and a Doctorate in Psychology.”

There are a lot of specifics in these three pieces that I disagree with, but the overall conclusions? I’m pessimistic enough to go along with most of those.

Peggy Noonan said it in her 2005 column, A Separate Peace: “tough history is coming.”

Though he explicitly states that the problem is bipartisan, Paul Farrell lays most of the blame for the coming chaos at the feet of the Right. I really don’t give a damn who’s to blame. I’m convinced that it’s the inevitable result of Thomas Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions.” I’m reminded of two quotations – Ambrose Bierce, who said “Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment,” and Arthur Koestler who said “Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.”

Koestler also said “The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.”

We’re a nation of pissed-off people in a world of pissed-off people. The “greatest generation” in Tom Brokaw’s analysis is the last one to have known true hardship. Each successive generation has been progressively (in all meanings of the term) infantilized. We’ve been promised free ice cream all of our lives, but that ice cream is running out. Still, as Farrell says, most of us are in denial, and will continue playing on the railroad tracks until the oncoming freight train runs us down.

As Billy Beck says, the Endarkenment cometh. We’re not voting our way out of this.

Yuri Bezmenov was Right

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Back in 2008 I posted a video of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov discussing the tactics of “ideological subversion” as executed against the West by agents and followers of communism. A bit of the transcript of that video:

Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people… the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

—

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years… actually, it’s over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. …he will refuse to believe it…. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

—

Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system train another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. United States is in a state of war; undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov of course – it’s the system. However, ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system, or the world Communist conspiracy. Whether I scare some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. If you’re not scared by now, nothing can scare you.

OK, got your tinfoil hats on nice and tight? Did you see this bit today?

Socialst “JournoListas”

The now closed down JournoList, has caused considerable controversy in recent weeks. According to its opponents, JournoList, teamed up some 400 prominent “progressive” journalists in an effort to smooth Barack Obama’s path to the White House.

There have been accusations that “Journolitstas”, deliberately sought to downplay Obama’s association with the marxist Rev. Jeremiah Wright and tried to smear conservatives, or opposing journalists as “racists”.

This post looks at 106 reported “Journolistas” to look for connections or common threads.

Of the known “Jounolistas” and organizations listed below, many can be linked back to two interrelated groups Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S.’s largest marxist based organization and D.S.A.’s “brain” the Washington DC based, far left “think tank” the Institute for Policy Studies

Between them. D.S.A. and the I.P.S. dominate or influence several organizations affiliated to JournoList

And then it goes on to list the members and their affiliations. With links.

Newsweek was pretty much right:

It’s been twenty-five years since Bezmenov delivered his warning, and his recommendation to escape what was coming:

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless… even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

Instead, we continued along the same path he warned against for another twenty-five years – another generation. Not all of us are Socialists now, but we have apparently reached the critical number of the ideologically subverted. Enough people have absorbed the “beautiful idea” that no external agents are required. We have a supersaturated solution that results in the spontaneous organization of the faithful.

After all, it’s for our own good!

And Bezmenov’s warning?

The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. (My emphasis.) And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ’68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’

This is what will happen in [the] United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind[s] of goodies and the paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put [a] Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. (My emphasis.)

Never mind. Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. Your Government-Issued unicorn will be delivered in the morning.

Unless there’s another “unexpected” downturn in the economy.

Phil B. Finds Another Gem

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Reader and UK expat Phil B. (now living in Middle Earth – aka: New Zealand) sent me a link to an interesting piece in the Daily Mail‘s online edition, from one Mary Ellen Synon, an Irish-American living in Brussels. Ms. Synon’s Mail-sponsored blog Euroseptic (catchy name, that) apparently serves the same function over there as Ann Coulter’s writings do here (there was a bit of a flap over Ms. Synon’s take on the Paralympics a while back, for example.)

Yesterday’s piece, Barack Hussein Obama and Indonesia: there’s no place like home, will, I’m assured, have certain parties over here coming unglued. A taste:

One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama’s childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.

What’s this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with ‘America’s first black president’ that they haven’t been able to see what he really is: America’s first Third World president.

If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner’s call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we’ve heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn’t mean anything.

Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.

Like that? Here’s a little more:

What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn’t yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America’s relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.

He believes that the US — yes, his own country — and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.

And Obama is America’s first Third World president.

Forget Obama’s Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image.

What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president’s personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.

Chicago is not Obama’s homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president’s world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.

You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president’s manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier.

Give it a read.

And then reflect on the fact that no American flags fly over the American disaster-relief facilities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Why?

The Obama administration says flying the flag could give Haiti the wrong idea.

“We are not here as an occupation force, but as an international partner committed to supporting the government of Haiti on the road to recovery,” the U.S. government’s Haiti Joint Information Center said in response to a query about the flag.

Hey, that’s change you can BELIEVE IN!

UPDATE: Gerard finds further evidence that Obama’s audacityofhopenchange is wearing thin with our allies.