Tag: Tough History Coming

This Sounds Familiar

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From that WSJ page mentioned in the previous post:

The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington, explains Eric Cantor, are too far apart for anything more than an armistice.

That sounds remarkably like Anarchangel’s quote from a while back:

There can be no useful debate between two people with different first principles, except on those principles themselves.

I quoted that in What We Got Here . . . is Failure to Communicate.  Also Thomas Sowell, from an Uncommon Knowledge interview:

Peter Robinson: If you had a sentence or two to say to the Cabinet assembled around President Obama, and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another, if you could beseech them to conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they leave office, what would you say?


Thomas Sowell: Actually, I would say only one word: Goodbye. Because I know there’s no point talking to them.

Sounds like Eric Cantor finally figured it out.

Three Things

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One, from CNBC:

Markets could rebound after Thursday’s global market sell-off, but investors should see any bounce as a selling opportunity, as the world economy rolls towards total collapse, Mark Faber, editor and publisher of the Boom, Doom and Gloom Report, told CNBC Friday.

“The trouble is that governments can default in two ways. Either they just stop paying the interest and there is a debt restructuring, like Argentina went through; or they just pay the interest and the principle eventually, in a worthless currency. That’s the way the U.S. will likely do it.”

“By printing money, problems are not solved, but they can be postponed, and they become larger. It’s like the recession in 2001. Had there not been massive money printing, it would have been steeper than what we had, but equally, we would have avoided probably the financial crash in 2008.”

The next crisis will be far bigger, according to Faber.

“The next time we have a global economic crisis, it will be much worse than 2008. Before this happens there will be money printing and there will be war. The whole system will collapse,” he said.

The second from Victor Davis Hanson:

The so-called tough debt ceiling deal still ups the borrowing to $16 trillion, or over 100% of annual GDP. So why are we rejoicing about curbing, rather than stopping, the borrowing? We are not discussing paying back the massive sums that we owe. And we talk not of cutting the baseline expenditures, but only about the rate of increase in entitlements — reminding us that revolutions start not with the impoverished, but with threatened cuts of subsidies to the middle class. Its appetites increase faster than the state can satisfy them, as most judge their well-being not in having at last more than the poor but in always having less than the affluent.

And, finally, the incomparable Bill Whittle:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4]

There are people out there that would rather tear up $100,000 than bear to see everyone else get more.

Truth.

Scary, isn’t it?

Edited to add one more, from Weird and Pissed Off from the post Going Galt:

All you Leftists ask yourselves a question: What will you do when the folks who provide the things you need…all quit? How will you survive when you’ve strangled the last doctor, dentist and power company?

I know the answer, even if you’ve never considered the question. You don’t care. You hate humanity, and you hate yourselves for being human. You’d rather die than see mankind prosper. That’s why you embrace the suicidal insanity of Leftist policies. Your subconscious has followed them to their logical conclusion, and you know, deep down, that what I’m saying is true.

A Repeat

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This is all I’ve got to say about the current budget / debt ceiling debate, and it was already said in February.  Remember this?

Well, Chris Muir took the the meme and ran with it:

Really, it’s not an unreasonable question: If Obama actually was intent on the destruction of the Republic, how could you tell the difference?

I’m wondering if I should cash in my 401(k) that has finally recovered to what it was in 2001 before that crash.  The kleptocrats in Washington will be coming after that pot-o’cash soon, I’m sure.  You know, in the interest of “fairness.”

“We could try liberty.”

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Jerry Pournelle points out what we all know:

Budget Cuts: we will increase spending, but we will reduce the rate of increase. We just spent $9 Trillion we didn’t have, but we will make a $1.1 Trillion cut – over ten years. Which is to say we will cut $100 Billion a year, having spent $9 Trillion. The deficit will continue to grow. So the only choice is to raise taxes or the nation is finished, the elderly will not get their Social Security checks, the Veterans will not get their benefits. Inspectors in the Department of Agriculture will continue to get “cost of living” raises and step increases in their civil service ratings. Department of Education SWAT teams will get their raises including full health and pensions. The deficit will grow, and there will be another financial crisis. The EPA will continue to impose regulations, the courts will continue to accept lawsuits to harass anyone who intends to open a mine, drill an oil well, or create a business.

The only remedy will be to raise taxes. We must have shared sacrifices so that the Washington elites can go about business as usual. Washington public schools will continue to deteriorate but none of the elites will send their children to those public schools so that won’t be a problem.

In other words, the Dance goes on, and we are being played.

The Geek with a .45 said it best some time back:

“Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.”

The raving hasn’t really started yet, but it’s coming.  The wheels are coming off the trolley, and the trolley off the tracks, and We the People are powerless to stop it.

Where’s my soma?

IOUSA

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This morning, while making biscuits and sausage for breakfast, I watched the 2008 documentary I.O.U.S.A. on Netflix. It tells the story of the national debt up through 2008, noting that in 2000 that debt was about $5.6 trillion. By 2008 it had rocketed to just over $10 trillion.  We’re now arguing about raising the debt ceiling above its current limit of $14.294 trillion, because if we don’t, the government will “run out of money” on August 2 of this year.

The projected national debt for 2012 is in excess of $16 trillion dollars – 100% of the GDP.

In the eight years of the Bush (43) administration, our government managed to not quite double the national debt, adding nearly $5 trillion.

In less than three years of the Obama administration, our government has added over four trillion dollars more.

It’s an exponential, unsustainable curve.

Tam is quite right, Obama is “the biggest threat to American civil liberties since… since George W. Bush!”

The documentary is available for viewing on YouTube and BlipTV. An updated 2010 YouTube version, IOUSA Solutions, is also available – and rings the warning bells even louder.

Here’s the first piece of that later update:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5dT2uwj5jA?rel=0]

Hiatus

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I’m going to take some time off blogging. It seems that pretty much everything I read and everything I want to write about just makes me more bummed-out and pissed off. It’s time for a break.

The free ice cream machine is unplugged for a bit.

Quote of the Day – Do It Your Own Damned Self Edition

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I like Palin insofar as she makes the right people’s heads explode. She’s playing the MSM like a fiddle and they’re dancing to her tune every single time. The woman can give the talking heads on TV the vapors by just ordering a value meal from McDonalds. When she was running as the VP, I read a lot into her tenure as Alaska’s Governor and her record was fairly decent. She had faults and failures which meant she was human, but overall it did appear she ran a much more conservative governorship than anything I’ve ever seen. But, I don’t really see her as some sort of American Savior.
That job falls to the Americans.
We need to stop letting these idiots who can’t even keep their privates off of the Internet run our country into the ground. We need to stop bending over with each new unconstitutional law they pass and start ignoring them. The key word there is WE, not some politician (and make no bones about it, Sarah Palin is still a politician) who will come in with a magic wand and make all the bad things go away. It’s that false belief in ‘Hope & Change’ that got us here today, and I’m not just talking about Obama.
YOU do it. Don’t want for someone else. That’s the problem.

Robb Allen, Sharp as a Marble, One of the Reasons I Have Very Little Hope for the Future

Can I get an “AMEN!“?

Nuke the Site from Orbit

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It’s the only way to be sure.  I’ve said that repeatedly.

I took a couple of Quotes of the Day from Zombie’s five-part piece Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids, and now he has a follow-on that caused two readers to send me emails alerting me to its existence.

But I want to take a little different tack on Zombie’s latest, How a Teacher’s Rally Made Me Anti-Education.

I have stated over the life of this blog that I believe that the education system has been suborned by “true believers” in socialism, Leftism, “progressivism,” Marxism, communism, call it what you will. I have stated that these people, without a need of a vast Red conspiracy with monthly planning meetings, naturally gravitate to media and education to spread their faith because they believe they know the truth and it is their self-imposed mission to spread the Gospel. Education and media provide the best path for their evangelism, and while I harp on Antonio Gramsci, I doubt seriously that most of these people have heard of him. Gramsci just wrote about the need to undermine Western culture so that socialism could triumph. He was hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. It didn’t take the Frankfurt School to make people spontaneously choose to do the undermining, that group just provided, with Germanic efficiency, an organized agenda for those who were willing to do a little research.

But the amateurs have done very well all on their own.

No, what Zombie’s latest photo-essay illustrates is precisely that fact – that de-moralizing indoctrination is very much alive and well in the public education system, far beyond any honest person’s ability to deny. Go, look at the pictures. Read the protest signs. Tell me that Marxist ideology has faded away with the fall of the Soviet Union.

No, it still survives in academia. It may very well be taught in your child’s school today. It has been going on for so long that for many parents it’s the very definition of “right-thinking.” Some teachers understand what’s been going on, but I believe many if not most of them are among the group that just believe there’s no other “right” way to think.

Regardless of whether the effort was coordinated or not, the end result (coming two decades too late for the Soviet Union) is the same – a country at the brink of catastrophe.

Should we, as Zombie says, “destroy education in order to save it”?

I’m afraid it’s too late.