The consistent aspect of American socialists I've noted is that they are sublimely ignorant of the realities of socialism. That might be because of the Paris Hilton syndrome--a life so removed from the ordinary that its possible to make a mildly amusing reality television series about encounters with the peasants. It might be because they profit or hope to profit from the political economy socialism represents, or they could simply be people who've never been anywhere or seen anything.

Having lived in a number of socialist countries, the prevailing mood appears to be despair, envy and desperation. The things you think would be solved with socialism--aren't. You can see a doctor, but you can't necessarily get treated, and even if you do get treated, there is no guarantee that the treatment will be effective. A market economy is about value--results. A political economy is about optics--political cover.

All the things socialist complain about in this country--rich people, homeless, etc... None of that changes with socialism, and sometimes it gets worse.

In this hell-hole we call the U.S.A., its notable that obesity is associated with poverty. Calories are no problem even for the very poor. Even the homeless get enough to eat.

No so much in France.

I bet they wish they had socialized medicine. Oh wait...

It's 1am in London and I can hear a police helicopter hovering around Tower Bridge to monitor any G20 malarkey. The protests so far are trivial, incentivised and amplified 100x by the media; a couple of broken windows in a bank and some City-workers mocking the protesters by waving banknotes from windows. If there were proportionate coverage, there'd be almost no aggro. There's symbiosis between the statists who want to use the Credit Crunch as a vehicle to get them to socialism and the pot-pourri of useful idiots who provide the media images. It's laughable close-up and sinister as part of the bigger project to subordinate liberty to corporatists.

The view from above:

“These groups actually believe that we should promote their stuff for free. Do they not understand that we need funds to sustain our viability?”

So whines John Amato of Crooks and Liars blog, who joined other left-wing bloggers to complain that they aren't getting their share of the ad frevenue wealth from the national Democratic party and the big liberal 527s.

Don't you just love it when liberals act like liberals? Everyone fighting for a bigger piece of the pie instead of building the pie higher.

The guys are building a permanent progressive majority the way the UAW is building the American automobile industry...

Keep Rahm Emanuel's words in mind as your government provides "solutions" to this year's Swine Flu crisis.

As a side note, I remember the 1976 swine flu scare, though I was living outside the country at the time. Below is President Gerald Ford setting the example by getting a swine flu innoculation:

Turns out in '76 only one person died from the Swine flu but 30 people died from the vaccinations. 40 million people were innoculated before the program was shut down within three months of its inception.

(While I point out the above, note I'm not against immunizations - I get a flu shot annually - I just have developed a sceptical disposition towards taking any government pronouncement at face value.)

I write not to praise Ted Kennedy, but to bury him.

A man died today, like men die everyday, but the reason Kennedy will be all over the cable news channels bumping Michael Jackson retrospectives from the schedule, is because of the mythology the American media and the Kennedy millions created for the family.

Michael Jackson's name can't be spoken without the tagline, "King of Pop" attached to it these days, but those of us with actual memories recall that he and his publicity people invented the phrase and promoted it to a then critical music media. Think of that when you hear Ted Kennedy referred to endlessly as "The Lion of the Senate".

The original lion of the Senate was William Borah (R-ID) who served between 1907 and 1940. One imagines that the mantle was appropriated by Kennedy, but I can't find any reference to how and when that actually happened.

Reputation is however a powerful tool, and Kennedy's role as heir of Democrat aspirations made him a co-sponsor magnet for important legislation. If a Republican wanted legislation to pass, getting Kennedy as a co-sponsor was a serious leg up. Regardless of what else can be said of the man, for good or ill, he was an extraordinarily effective legislator. I find some irony in that--while many Senators look at their office as simply a stepping stone to the Presidency (including Jack and Bobby), Kennedy didn't look beyond the mark. He thought the Senate a good a place as any to merit his best efforts.

The second generation of Kennedys have not forged the link to the dream that never dies. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg grossly mishandled her bid to be appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, and effectively destroyed her political prospects--the latest in a conga line of failure for the grandchildren of Joe Kennedy. Nevertheless, generations of Kennedys yet unborn will trade on the name recognition to gain elective office and establish modest political careers.

Ultimately, Edward Kennedy's death with hold the most meaning for those personally close to him. His reputation will fade away as those who can still extract benefits from it, experience diminishing returns from rising generations who have no emotional connection to the myth of Camelot.

In spite of having been surrounded by the left since infancy, I've never really considered that I understood the mindset. As a young man, I espouses some left-wing ideas and programs, but only out of ignorance. As I became wiser and better informed, I put away childish things.

In my middle-age, seeing peers still supporting left-wing ideology, I was puzzled, and remained puzzled. In spite of my obvious outspokenness, I genuinely wonder if people who disagree with me know something I don't. I must admit that the thought that they might be idiots had occurred to me, but lacking proof, either way, I left the matter unresolved.

No longer.

The embarrassment and consternation among even the left-wing, over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to a U.S. president who has been in office slightly less than ten months, is a clear sign that we have left the arena of reasonable doubt and entered the emperor-has-no-clothes zone.

Those who ascribe to left-wing views are morons, fools, parasites, or some combination of all three.

The entire country of Norway should be enjoined from further breeding. Oh wait! They are already reproducing below the replacement rate. Nevermind then.

Its been clear to me, after living in a variety of socialist countries, that immigration has always been a political tool to engineer a social order the left can control and leverage for permanent political advantage. In Canada they even have a word for it--"natural governing party", which is ironic, because there is nothing natural about it. In western country after western country, the left has "imported" voters to undermine the democratic rights of its citizens to control their own destiny. Clearly the socialists all get together at international conspiracy parties to discuss tactics, because its a clear pattern all over Europe, Canada, Australia and now the U.S.A., but it rare to have one of their number admit it outright.

Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites has provoked a storm of outrage in the UK. It plays directly into the BNP narrative of invasion abetted by leftist treason. The Telegraph reported that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.” But it was manner in which the plan was sugar-coated which rankled the most. It was, if the leaks are to be believed, an ideological conspiracy sold as a plan to bolster the economy. It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to done.

The BNP is essentially the British version of Le Front National in France (Jean-Marie Le Pen's party), which itself is a clone of any number of European fascist parties--all of which arose as backlash against socialist immigration policies.

It all sounds so familiar, doesn't it?

I was just fascinated by this paragraph by John Aravosis in the left-wing Americablog.

As Joe noted the other day, the pre-existing conditions promise, for "all Americans," was the top item on the Obama transition's health care reform page. So, in an effort to appease the masses, they're now considering gutting the one provision that everyone likes, the one provision that defines the legislation.

...in an effort to appease the masses...

An amazing juxtaposition of implied concern for Americans caught in between a rock and a hard place and a flip side disdain for those same Americans in the voting aggregate.

I think they call this a Freudian slip...

Joe Klein is pretty much useless as a journalist except for the occasional rant which generates a bunch of traffic because of links like this one.

Time Magazine is apparently following the GM business model--suicide spiral into irrelevancy and insolvency.

Nevertheless, Klein still has some utility, if for nothing else but to give us insight into the far-left radical mind.

A kooky nutroots freelance operation gone wrong.

How to take a great idea...

A proposed law would require new homes, larger developments and some redevelopments in Los Angeles to capture and reuse runoff generated in rainstorms.

...and turn it into a ruinous mess.

Under the ordinance, builders would be required to use rainwater storage tanks, permeable pavement, infiltration swales or curb bump-outs to manage the water where it falls. Builders unable to manage 100% of a project's runoff on site would be required to pay a penalty of $13 a gallon of runoff not handled there -- a requirement the Building Industry Assn. has been fighting.

In an arid climate like St Thomas, VI, homes are always built with cisterns that capture rain water for in-home use. Its a great idea that if water costs were properly apportioned, would probably be de riguer in large swaths of the country. Instead we get situations like this:

Behind all the bloated propaganda about California's five year drought lies a rather interesting truism. Water has never been naturally plentiful in California, but neither has milk. In fact, milk is much more difficult to "naturally" acquire than water (you don't have to squeeze an animal to get water), but California has never had to ration milk or send out "Milk Police." Why the difference? We all use more water than milk, but this is irrelevant to the issue. The answer is that one product, milk, is provided by a relatively free market, but, the other product, water, is "managed" by a deeply entrenched, monopolistic, government bureaucracy. California doesn't need government rationing, it needs to get rid of its Soviet-style water management system, and water would be as plentiful as milk.

No point in feeling superior though--even a red state like Utah has a crazy water system that costs an order of magnitude more than it should and actually encourage prolifigate uses rather than conservation--this in the second driest state in the nation (after Arizona).

Of course, in Utah, inefficient system or not, the point is to get water to the consumer. In California, the point is to use environmentalist religious fervor to generate tax revenues to pay six figure salaries to unionized prison guards, who kick back political contributions to elected offiicials.

The reality of this nonsensical ordinance is that new construction will be throttled and more businesses will be looking outside of California for expansion opportunities. Meanwhile, the millions of gallons of polluted run-off will continue to find its way to the ocean.

A sigh for what might have been...

Christopher Hitchens:

Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

Get it? They are racist and nationalistic, therefore not socialist, which means of course that they are actually right-wing--you know, like the Tea Party people...

I frankly get a little surprised when apparently smart guys like Hitchens seem to get lost in clearly irrelevant and misleading terms like right-wing, left-wing. Let me provide some examples:

Democrats have engineered a permanent black underclass to create a self-perpetuating captive constituency. Martin Luther King, whose national holiday we just celebrated, wanted his children judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Democrats shook their heads and gave us affirmative action, thus enshrining the symbolism of racial equality while insuring a perpetuation of a stratified, racist society. Does this make Democrats right-wing? Well, yes, according to the strict definitions Brian Myers and eyelash-batting Christopher Hitchen are using.

Currently, the hottest politician in the nation is Sarah Palin, whose popularity stems from the identification ordinary Americans have for this anti-elitist mother of five, who attended an run-of-the-mill university rather than an ivy-league institution, and speaks a distinct provincial dialect. She is the ideal of a classless society, all men and women created equal. Taxonomically left-wing, as strange as that may seem.

The terms right and left wing actually come down to us from the French revolution, where supporters of the ancien regime were seated on the right while Republicans were seated on the left. Anyone familiar with the history of the French revolution will be aware of the increasing radicalization of the Republicans culminating in the the reign of terror by the left-wing Jacobins. I suppose some academic will have to set us straight on that--revising history so the Jacobins can be kissing cousins of 'extreme right-wing' Tea Party people.

No one should be too surprised. Red was always the color of the left, until U.S. networks decided to flip the political color scheme and make Republican states red states. In the early twentieth century, Democrats referred to themselves as Progressives until the term became so loaded with infamy that the simply traded it in for "liberal". Then they stunk up the liberal label so badly, they went back to 'progressive' figuring that not too many people are still around who remember Woodrow Wilson. I suspect they'll be needing a new label before long.

The language may be confusing--purposefully so, but no one is really confused. Democrats are elitist, anti-democratic, racists who use military aircraft to shuttle their grandchildren back and forth between San Francisco and Washington. Republicans drive trucks and wear barn coats, eat sloppy Joes and think NASCAR is cool, Jesus can save their souls and less government makes for a better country.

I know which side I think better reflects Liberte, Fraternite et Eqalite.

Simple answer: God is never wrong.

I've blogged on the uber-arrogance of liberals on more than one occasion, but then again, I'm not the Washington Post.

Its been interesting to read a number of stories and blog posts this week that imply a circling of the wagons by the left and the imposition of several forms of thought control to insure group cohesion.

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias, prophet of the church of self-deification and droits-du-Seigneur, responded to Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" is this fashion:

One thing that dimwitted and immoral people do when under pressure is decide that lashing out with a kind of dimwitted and immoral violence is going to help them. Consequently, they got the dimwitted and immoral idea that they ought to torture people with techniques they got out of techniques the US government has developed to train soldiers in torture-resistance.

'Stupid', 'torture', 'immoral' and 'violent' were repeated over and over through out a not overly-long blog post--like a chant, or 'thought-stopping' behavior. Thiessen and his book are so stupid, immoral and violent, that Yglesias didn't even need to read the book to write a review.

From "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" by Prof. Robert J. Lifton M.D.

Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group's ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also.

Hmmm. What we've been calling liberal condescension is actually a matter of self-preservation by a beleaguered and besieged cult of left-wing religion. If you leave the group, then you to will be stupid, immoral and violent--the 'worst person in the world'.

Well, no one want that.

Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga (Kos) recently commissioned a poll in support of his forthcoming book "American Taliban", which unsurprisingly, characterizes conservatives (more specifically--Republicans) as virtually indistinguishable from radical jihadists--you know--'violent'. The poll--also unsurprisingly, reveals that conservatives are well, 'stupid' and 'immoral'.

Name-calling and demonization has always been a feature of left-wing rhetoric, but this specific litany is a more recent phenomenon, and appears to be engineered.

If money is fuel for politics, anger must be its lubricant. The Democrat's current woes are due to having provoked American anger, and so naturally the response has to be stoking the boiler of left-wing anger to try and keep up.

Good luck with that.

Seen in Harlem-->

You've heard the kids say it. You undoubtedly said it yourself when you were a kid. Children operate by the philosophy that what's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs to. Most people grow out of this to become reasonable and generous adults, but those who don't seem to gravitate to the political extremes where promises of state (read adult...) intervention to redress the puerile view of injustice attracts them like flies to garbage.

Its why--without exception--that every devoted Marxist who comes to power makes the acquisition of a grand residence and a fleet of luxury sedans their first order of business.

I'm not telling you this so we can all feel smug in our moral superiority. Hypocrisy attends us all. However I think it is useful to understand that when it comes right down to it, politics comes down to a conflict between our collective natures and personal dysfunctions.

A case in point is this post from the Daily Kos.

But I have another bone to pick with these leaders that are unable to control their own citizens, provide security within their own countries, and demand US backing and support with both troops and huge amounts of money and materials. Our troops. Troops that die, daily. And, money. Money out of my pocket, and yours.

What fantasy allows anyone to posture that civilian deaths during a shooting war are "unjustifiable"? Civilians get caught in the cross fire. Civilians are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Civilians die. Yes, women and children, too. And pets, and farm animals, and rare and endangered species. Anything on a battle ground is in immediate danger of a bloody death.

Michelle Malkin is a Kos kid? Well, no--but its remarkable for one, that a diarist on the DK could write something completely indistinguishable from something Ann Coulter might have said a year or two ago. Perhaps even more remarkable that it would get pass through by the DK censors.

The difference of course is that the rhetorical gun is aimed at the head of the "Dear Leader" instead of evil George W. Bush. What was condemned, must now be defended.

Why was George Bush evil again? Oh yeah--he killed Iraqi civilians, tortured misunderstood terrorists and kept innocent Afghani farmers in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.

Honey, the children are quarreling again...

WELL, AT LEAST HE'S CONSISTENT: The 'other Mick' recalls this dynamic as it applied to Clinton's White House trysts and Jeffrey Toobin's book-length apologetic for risky sexual behavior by the famous and powerful. The married Toobin is being sued for child support by his his mistress

Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News tie all-time ratings low.

Surprisingly, there are still 4.5 million people who are watching her every evening on average. I caught a few minutes of Couric recently, and I was struck at how I couldn't really notice any difference between her delivery and that of any other cable news anchor babe, except of course that she is older and less attractive in comparison with her younger competitors.

Is it the credibility? Well, I'm not sure what credibility she every had for hard news. She had been occasionally confrontational on the Today show and I guess that gets confused with gravitas by network executives. There is no sense that she is operating from a larger insight the way Peter Jennings or Tim Russert did.

She appears to be a perfect liberal-left-wing icon; a loyal partisan whose lack of talent and style was supposed to have been hidden by manufactured praise (brilliant! sexy! smart!) that in the end, just can't hide the figure flaws of this naked Empress.

Sound familiar? I'd venture to say that the entire left-wing establishment is in the same boat these days. Minority leader John Boehner called for the resignations or firings of Obama's entire economic team, which of course won't happen, but highlighted a political reality.

Various senior Democrats insisted that Tim Geithner had to be confirmed in spite of his tax problems, because he was uniquely qualified to deal with the financial crisis, there being NO ONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY who could do the job....

Predictably, Geithner works alone these days for a simple reason--success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

Wheel barrels of praise, followed by epic failure, followed by embarrassment, followed by obscurity after they find some other poor sap to help them start the process all over again.

Are you listening General Petraeus?