Tag: Leviathan

More Truth in Fiction

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This time from Ian Banks’ Matter:

“Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince,” she said, sounding sad, “but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lesson that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”

“To do nothing is always easy.” Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”

I was reminded by this passage of a quote from an earlier piece, I Guess I’m Not… HUMAN. Former Representative Adam Putnam has said,

Government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact.

In current times government has been likened to a parent to the people, with the Republicans being the “daddy party” and the Democrats being the “mommy party,” but as someone else said:

This guy is our uncle and that’s as close as I want the fucker.

I don’t need the government to be my big brother, my parent, my nanny, or my caretaker. It needs to maintain public services (roads, etc.), maintain foreign relations and the military, keep the states from squabbling, and stay the fuck out of my life.

Perhaps someday our putative “leaders” will learn enough to do nothing, rather than overreact.

(Who am I kidding?)

True Believers and the Machinery of Freedom and Oppression

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From David Horowitz’s Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, part I:

Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that in my experience conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives are altogether too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initial stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. They assume that radicals can’t really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky’s first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

This is why ACORN activists, for example, have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit election fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn’t believe in God’s kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don’t believe in the democratic system. To them it is itself a fraud — an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, of the Haves. If the electoral system doesn’t serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud is justified because it is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots — social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly what drives radicals and how dishonest they are — dishonest in their core — it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end — creating a new heaven on earth — justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth, would he not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?

From Part II

Obama/ACORN strategy guru Saul Alinsky began his manual for leftists by dedicating it to Satan, “the first radical known to man” who “rebelled against the establishment, and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” We noted that the kingdom Alinsky thought was some kind of achievement to inspire other radicals was in fact hell. Here, in a nutshell, is why conservatives are conservative and why radicals are dangerous. Because conservatives pay attention to the consequences of actions, including their own, and radicals don’t.

And there’s a reason for that. What they are trying to do is not to improve the lot of all of us or even some of us, but to fill up a cosmic emptiness, an emptiness they feel in their core. As Alinsky himself puts it, they are seeking to answer the question “Why am I here?” — a question which traditional religions attempt to answer but whose answers radicals scorn. Modern radicalism is a secular religion, and its hunger for meaning and hope and change cannot be satisfied by anything less than grandiose, totalizing schemes to transform the world. To bring up their failures, the enormities they are guilty of, the crimes committed in the name of their religion, is to strike a blow at hope itself, which is why they cannot and will not hear it.

From Part III:

Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals the war is real. That is why partisans of the left set out to destroy their opponents, not just refute their arguments. It is also why they never speak the truth. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war that is designed to eliminate their opponents.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is first of all a broadside against the New Left. What Alinsky attacks about the New Left is its honesty — something I’ve always regarded as its only redeeming feature. While American Communists — the Old Left — pretended to be Jeffersonian Democrats and “progressives” and formed “popular fronts” with liberals to “defend democracy,” we in the New Left disdained their deception and regarded it as weakness. To distinguish ourselves from these Old Leftists, we said we were revolutionaries and proud of it.
“Up against the wall motherfucker” was a typical New Left slogan, telegraphing exactly how we felt about people who opposed us. The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is, lie to your opponents and potential opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates, liberals. This has been the most potent weapon of the left since the end of the Sixties. Racists like Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright posing as civil rights activists, radicals like Henry Waxman and Barney Frank posing as liberals. The mark of their success is how conservatives collude in the deception.

—

Alinsky’s manual is designed to teach radicals how to manipulate the public into thinking they’re harmless, in order to accumulate enough power to achieve the radical agenda — to burn the system down and replace it with a socialist gulag.

From part IV:

For Alinsky and his Machiavellian radicals, politics is war. No matter what they say publicly or pretend to be, they are at war. They are at war even though no other factions in the political arena are at war, because everyone else embraces the System which commits all parties to compromise and peaceful resolutions of conflicts. For tactical reasons, the radicals will also make compromises, but their entire mentality and approach to politics is based on their dedication to conducting a war against the System itself. Don’t forget it (although if history is any indication, Republicans almost invariably will).

Because radicals see politics as a war, they perceive opponents of their causes as enemies on a battlefield and set out to destroy them by demonizing and discrediting them. Personally. Particularly dangerous in their eyes are opponents who are wise to their deceptions and realize what their agendas are; who understand that they are not the innocents they pretend to be but are actors whose reality is masked. (It is no coincidence that the pod people in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers were inspired by radicals in the Communist era). Thus it is precisely because Glenn Beck is on a mission to ferret them out, that they are determined to silence him and have organized a boycott to drive him off the air. Sarah Palin is another conservative they consider extremely dangerous and therefore have set out to destroy, personally. The list is as long as there are conservative leaders. This is because when you are in a war — when you think of yourself as being in a war — there is no middle ground.

A war by definition is a fight to the finish. It is waged against enemies who can’t be negotiated with but must be eliminated — either totally defeated or effectively destroyed. Conservatives don’t really have such an enemy and therefore are not mentally in the war at all, which is why they often seem so defenseless or willing to throw their fellow conservatives over the side when they are attacked.

From American Digest today, in Gerard’s post Rage Against the Machine, a snippet from a speech by Mario Savio at a December, 1964 UC Berkley sit-in:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!

From my own 2005 post True Believers (and other people’s words even then):

Glenn Wishard, in a post at Canis Iratus last year entitled A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century wrote:

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.

I think Glenn’s declaration that the 20th Century “neatly contains” the rise and fall of “the Marxist ideal” is a bit premature, but I fully concur with his conclusion that “politicism” has neatly divided societies in the manner described….

And also, from my essay March of the Lemmings, quoting The Geek with a .45:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.
We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.
We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

—

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.
Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”
Some, to be certain, see these things, and perceive the danger. Many of these, their minds and judgments clouded, act as if they had appeared new and pristine, and proceed to lay all of the blame, 100% of it, at the feet of the current administration, judges and legislators, not stopping to think that such malignity does not appear de-novo, and all at once.
It is human, after all, to assign blame for such things as the evidence of ill intention and malign design, and sometimes it is just to do so. We remind ourselves though, that it isn’t always the case, and that evil can also emerge unbidden from the sum of vectors, rather than the charting of a course.
Such sickness as this grows over time, years and decades. It accretes in lightless corners and in broad daylight in places where self-deception, man’s oldest enemy carries the day.
Alone, and in small groups, we sit in the shade and think, to find clarity. Some of the forms we see are plain as day, and others are ambiguous. We know that it is human nature to see patterns in the stars, to connect the dots. Often, the patterns we see are real, and sometimes, they are just constellations. We pause and check each bit of history, one at a time. We know that we cannot afford to be wrong.
The original machine designers warned us of this. They knew that the temptation would always be there, and they sternly warned us that assembling such machines, even with the best of intention was to court a cascading disaster.

And from a link in Gerard’s piece to Daniel Greenfield’s post Winning the System:

Choosing between the tyranny of a tyrant and the tyranny of a system is not a very pleasant choice and it should be an alien one. Unfortunately as the tyranny of a system has grown, so has the search for the perfect tyrant. But no matter whom we elect, the tyranny of the system will keep growing. Hoping that a one man wrecking ball will collide with the system is not an impossible dream, but neither is it all that promising. It doesn’t mean that we should stop trying, but it does mean that we need to think bigger.
Our struggle is not with Obama or Reid or Pelosi, it is with the system that they advance. A system of unrestricted power that mandates absolute dominance over all human affairs backed by an ideology that treats all human activity as political and in need of control in the name of the greater good. Getting them all out is a plus, but it’s a battle, not the war.

—

Things aren’t the way they are because one wrong man got in, but because a million wrong men and women got in. And that number is a modest understatement. An election may slow them down, it may reverse them a little, but it will not stop them. We are fighting and losing a war for control of the system that runs our lives. Our choices are to take control of the machine, live outside the machine or stop the machine.
The left faced those same choices in the early 20th century. It chose a slow conquest from within. To repeat their achievement, we would have to do what they did. Train generations to take control of entire sectors and then institutions. Take control of the educational system and then the political system. Transform the entire discourse, turn their conventional morality inside out and tie them down. Is it doable? Yes. Are we likely to embark on such a project? Probably not. It would take too long, require a level of ideological coordination that does not currently exist on the right and by then the country will not be salvageable.
Living outside the machine is not an option either. ObamaCare is a reminder that the goal of the machine is absolute control of every aspect of human life. There is no off the grid when the grid is everywhere. There is no off the grid when every geographical area has its administrative bureaucracy charged with monitoring and bringing into compliance all persons living within that area. There is no off the grid when the use of off the grid technologies without a special permit is outlawed. Living like a rat within the walls of the state, or the forests, isn’t completely impossible, but in the long run it’s futile. It’s survival, not much else.
All that’s left is stopping the machine. That doesn’t mean violent revolution, it means determined political change. The Tea Party was the first step of that change. It was extraordinary because for the first time in a long time, outrage at the operation of the machine brought massive numbers of people together around the country. Their principled stand was doomed to be muffled because the system has no interest in shifting power away from its institutions and toward the people. But it’s only the beginning.
The system grinds on because it maintains the illusion of consensus. The Tea Party rallies badly shook that consensus. Long before there were crowds in Cairo, there were crowds in cities all across the country. Their message was that the machine has to stop.
In the face of the protests, the media turned into desperate pro-government outlets, and when the polls were done, the government took one of the worst political blows in history. Elections come and go, but this was more than that. A giant was slowly waking.
The task of the left is to complete its machine before the giant wakes. Our task is to wake the giant and point him at the machine. In that way the last three years have helped us more than they have helped the left, which could have made the same gains if it had waited and taken it more slowly. They put a face on the machine and that was their mistake. Now they’re trying to take it back by putting Wall Street’s face on the machine.

We will fight the good fight this election, and with the help of G-d may we win it, but it’s the machine that is the real war.

First, I find it interesting that the metaphors remain so consistent over time. The quote from the Geek and the one from Glenn Wishard both date back to 2004, David Horowitz’s essay to 2009, Mario Savio’s speech to 1964.

Second, we’re in a war. We’re just beginning to wake up to it. There is a machine out there, and it’s been under reconstruction for over a century to convert it from a machine of liberty to one of oppression. Some of us understand that the machine must be stopped while others understand that their only hope is to finish it before it can be stopped.

Maybe the Mayans were on to something with that “calendar ends in 2012” thing after all.

Weird? No. Not Even Unexpected, Really.

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Tucson has its own alt.weekly, The Tucson Weekly, which offers Tucsonans of a Leftist bent an even more “progressive” outlet for their information needs, and allows those of us to the right of Genghis Khan the ability to keep tabs on them a bit.

One of the features of the Weekly is an excerpt from News of the Weird, six or so stories the editors find particularly interesting each week.  Here are three that were selected for this week’s edition that I, too, found particularly interesting.  First, in local government:

Catch-22: NYPD officer James Seiferheld, 47, still receives his $52,365 annual disability pay despite relentless efforts of the department to fire him. He had retired in 2004 on disability, but was ordered back to work when investigators found him doing physical work inconsistent with “disability.” However, Seiferheld could not return to work because he repeatedly failed drug screening (for cocaine). Meanwhile, his appeal of the disability denial went to the state Court of Appeals, which found a procedural error and ordered that Seiferheld’s “disability” benefits continue (even though the city has proven both that he is physically able and a substance-abuser). [New York Post, 7-12-2011]

Then in Federal government:

Once hired, almost no federal employee ever leaves. Turnover is so slight that, among the typical causes for workers leaving, “death by natural causes” is more likely the reason than “fired for poor job performance.” According to a July USA Today report, the federal rate of termination for poor performance is less than one-fifth the private sector’s, and the annual retention rate for all federal employees was 99.4 percent (and for white collar and upper-income workers, more than 99.8 percent). Government defenders said the numbers reflect excellence in initial recruitment. [USA Today, 7-20-2011]

Apparently this inability to relieve someone for cause extends from municipalities all the way up to at least the Federal Bench:

Of the 1,500 judges who referee disputes as to whether someone qualifies for Social Security disability benefits, David Daugherty of West Virginia is the current soft-touch champion, finding for the claimant about 99 percent of the time (compared to judges’ overall rate of 60 percent). As The Wall Street Journal reported in May, Daugherty decided many of the cases without hearings or with the briefest of questioning, including batches of cases brought by the same lawyer. He criticized his less lenient colleagues, who “act like it’s their own damn money we’re giving away.” (A week after the Journal report, Judge Daugherty was placed on leave, pending an investigation.) [Wall Street Journal, 5-19-2011, 5-27-2011]

And, oh hell, let me throw in one more example of .gov employees giving away other people’s money:

Gee, What Do We Do With All This Stimulus Money? The Omaha (Neb.) Public School system spent $130,000 of its stimulus grant recently just to buy 8,000 copies of the book “The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change” (Two stars on Amazon.  By all means, read the reviews.)  — that is, one copy for every single employee, from principals to building custodians. Alarmingly, wrote an Omaha World-Herald columnist, the book is “riddled with gobbledygook,” “endless graphs,” and such tedium as the “cultural proficiency continuum” and discussion of the “disequilibrium” arising “due to the struggle to disengage with past actions associated with unhealthy perspectives.” [Omaha World-Herald, 7-11-2011]

Those four examples came from one single week of News of the Weird.

Weird, (adj) – of strange or extraordinary character

But none of these items are “of strange or extraordinary character” today. They’re just Standard Operating Procedure for our government, be it municipal, county, state or federal.  The entire system is occupied by people who share an overwhelmingly similar worldview, a worldview not shared at all by the overwhelming majority of the people they supposedly “serve.”  That’s one reason why we won’t be voting our way out of this mess.  It goes way beyond the people who get elected and the ones whom they appoint.  I mean, it’s not like it’s their money they’re wasting.

Screw it.  I’m going to Reno.

Quote of the Day – More Mark Steyn

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From a little earlier in the book than yesterday’s, and a bit longer:

In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose title came to sum up the relationship between the English and the French in Canada:  Two Solitudes.  They live in the same nation, sometimes in the same town, sometimes share the same workspace.  But they inhabit different psychologies.  In 2008, David Warren, a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen, argued that the concept has headed south:

In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautologically by the notion of “two solitudes” itself.  The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.

John Edwards, yesterday’s coming man, had an oft retailed stump speech about “the two Americas,” a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the mawkish drool of a Depression-era sob-sister:  one America was a wasteland of shuttered mills and shivering “coatless girls,” while in the other America Dick Cheney and his Halliburton fat cats were sitting ’round the pool swigging crude straight from the well and toasting their war profits all day long.  Edwards was right about the “two Americas,” but not about the division:  in one America, those who subscribe to the ruling ideology can access a world of tenured security lubricated by government and without creating a dime of wealth for the overall economy; in the other America, millions of people go to work every day to try to support their families and build up businesses and improve themselves, and the harder they work the more they’re penalized to support the government class in its privileges.  Traditionally, he who paid the piper called the tune.  But not anymore.  Flownover Country pays the piper, very generously, in salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks.  But Conformicrat America calls the tune, the same unending single-note dirge.  David Warren regards these as “two basically irreconcilable views of reality”:  “Only in America are they so equally balanced.  Elsewhere in the west, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.”

Increasingly, America’s divide is about the nature of the state itself — about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate?  As someone once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  The Flownover Country’s champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party.  But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage.  Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats, or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing he liberals to set the parameters of the debate — on health care, immigration, education, Social Security — and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats’ terms.  If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches.  If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it’s insufficient.

The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them.  It’s less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats — and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.

This excerpt echos much of what I’ve written here over the last several years. I attribute the “Two Solitudes” to the differing principles explored by Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions, which I wrote about at length in What We Got Here is…Failure to Communicate – two basically irreconcilable fundamentally opposed worldviews in conflict. The “American idea”? I wrote about that in That Sumbitch ain’t been BORN!

Steyn indicates here that the solution is to stop paying the mortgage, at least until we can seize control of the checkbook back – and the only way to do that is to stop direct-depositing into the joint account. Currently the Congress is making Kabuki-theater of “budget cuts” that anyone with any familiarity with Washington knows aren’t going to happen. But the possibility that they might frightens the almighty hell out of the Conformicrats on both sides of the aisle. Nothing else explains the visceral hatred for the Tea Party movement – it’s a bone-deep fear of losing that tenured security and its generous salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks.

I predict that the 2012 election season will be the ugliest, dirtiest, nastiest thing anyone living has ever seen.

Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition

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This is why there are professional pundits.  From Mark Steyn’s most recent jeremiad, After America:  Get Ready for Armageddon

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it all because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.

Ain’t that the truth?

I’m only about 100 pages into it, but so far the entire book is filled with bits like this.

Footnoted.

“Get Ready for Armageddon” indeed.

Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition

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I picked up a copy of Mark Steyn’s After America the other day.  I haven’t had time to read it yet, but it’s next on my list.  (That stack never seems to get any shorter – stuff just keeps getting piled on top.)

Anyway, I found an interview of Steyn by John Hawkins of Right Wing News that contains today’s QotD:

Yes, this is a 50/50 nation. This is a House divided and as I said in the book, it’s a House divided in really the most fundamental way of all because it’s not about rich versus poor, it’s not about black versus white, it’s not about any of that. It’s about the division about the nature of the state itself which is, I think, the most irreconcilable in a way. One side has to win and one side has to lose. We can’t compromise on this. They are two incompatible visions. One vision is broadly consonant with the American idea as it has existed since its founding. The other, which is that we can live as a large Sweden is an utter delusion. So one of these sides has to win and one has to lose. It’s not clear which is going to come out on top in that 51/49 battle.

But that’s the good news, that there is still something to play for. That puts us ahead of Portugal and Greece and a lot of these other places. The bad news is that if the wrong side wins, it will be a totally different scale of disaster from anything that’s likely to happen to Portugal or Iceland. So in other words, if we win, we win big, but if we lose, we lose big.

Here’s the kicker, though:

I noticed Bermuda already has had a lot of wealthy Americans coming in and buying up old estates and things. But, there is not going to be any place to flee. In the end, they’ll come for Bermuda, in the end they’ll come for Monte Carlo, and in the end you’ll be in Switzerland and they’ll come for you there because America is the order maker on the planet and when America goes, eventually as agreeable as Bermuda is, it slides in, and it takes Bermuda down in its wake. So this is the hill to die on.

One of the greatest lines I get told by so-called moderate Republicans about almost anything you talk about is always, “This isn’t the hill to die on. This isn’t the hill to die on, this isn’t the hill to die on.” You have this conversation with them for two hours and you realize you’re already 15 hills back from where you were. This, America, is the hill to die on. If you cannot defend and save a half millennium of western liberty and progress and prosperity on this hill, there is no other hill to die on anywhere on the planet.

Echos from the depths of 1985:

Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. [The] 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 are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.

But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. Unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility. — Yuri Bezmenov.

Yes, Bezmenov again. Just because he gave an interview to a Bircher does not mean that he was wrong about the endgame.

Quote of the Day – Atlas is Pissed Edition

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From Tam, today:

I swear to Mises, if Ayn Rand had put a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the federal environmental cops were raiding musical instrument manufacturers because they weren’t complying with federal wood-labeling laws, critics would have howled with derision at the fanciful and unrealistic scenarios she was making up to ham-handedly hammer her point home.

This is the part where I am grabbing you by your lapels, shaking you and yelling “Now will you people listen?

Claire Wolfe was wrong. It’s not too early, it’s too late.

And I quoted that so I could quote this:

To be raided, let alone arrested, tried and convicted, for possessing a wood product secondary to the Lacey Act would mean war. Not simply self-defense, but war on as many as could be reached.

Not because it is only wood. Because it is such an egregiously insane and tyrannical use of senseless legislation to manipulate and punish anyone a particular bureaucrat or US Attorney would choose to harass. This is the stuff clock towers were made for, but should actually be saved for accurate targeting of principals, not the senseless killing of innocents. — “Reg T” in a comment at Silicon Graybeard.

Instapundit has updates.

Quote of the Day

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From a comment to Victor Davis Hanson’s Atlas is Sorta Shrugging:

I can tell you for a fact that major portions of the country – particularly urban areas on the coasts, but not just those – are diametrically opposed to absolutely every single thing you stand for. Their stance may be extremely hypocritical, unconstructive, contradictory and irrational, but they will not acknowledge it, even in the face of the most objective and logical arguments. In fact, they will look upon you as borderline criminal for rejecting their creed.

What the Obama presidency has revealed is that America is not whole anymore, but is fractured among at least two major fault lines of political, economic and social thought, and this president not only thrives on that rift, but has done everything in his awesome power to expand and deepen it.

This is not the same america I was born into over 4 decades ago. You must prepare yourselves for the real possibility that, if a great crisis breaks upon the nation, that it will not survive intact.

And don’t count on either dominant political party to rectify the situation. Both have proven without any doubt that they are concerned only and specifically with what is in their short term interest as a party and as individual politicians, and they will sacrifice EVERYTHING, no matter how sacred, to pursue their goals, protect their status and enhance their position.

As I said, there will be no repeat of the war-between-the-states, but our major cities may very well burn.