Sk8 Punk

2010-03-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

Feeling like he has a grip on Health Care Reform, President Obama now wants to legalize millions of illegal aliens. The abject stupidity of such a notion is beyond belief. The only way he could hope to make social medicine affordable is to kick out all illegal immigrants. All of those wonderful social systems in Europe and to the north of us have draconian immigration policies that keep third world immigrants from driving up the cost of socialized medicine. But trying to legalize 12-20 million Latin Americans is like pouring gasoline all over your house and then sitting down for a cigarette afterwards.

It is a mix that we cannot afford. But the president is so clueless about Latin America and Mexico specifically that he has chosen to push this now- right after ensuring every illegal that they will get free AMERICAN health care if they choose to rush the border. It is almost as if he wants to destroy the American economy. No, I don't go in for conspiracy theory and that's not what I believe. He is sincere and means well- he's also just incredibly naive and ignorant.

Love the Government

2010-03-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

The main reason i am against government run health care isn't that it's inefficient- which it is. it isn't that it will cost way more than they tell us- which it will.

The real problem is that the government long ago stopped remembering that it served the people. Instead they act and function as if we exist for them. The state of New York has stopped sending out tax refunds. California did this last year. Actually California sent out a sort of IOU. I told my friend who still lives in that dark corner of the earth he should have asked them what kind of interest and late penalty payment would be involved... He actually did, but they hung up on him. It's a legitimate question because you know that while both states default on the people (giving them what is rightfully theirs) and don't pay interest or late penalties, they are at the same time chasing down citizens who "owe the state." AND charging them late penalties and interest, while holding out on those citizens who did pay their taxes.

Is there anyone who can't see this happening with Health Care? Because it has... in Canada, England, France, Greece, Masachusetts, the list goes on.

We lost another future professor

2010-02-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

If Joe Stack was a leftist bomber in the tradition of Bill Ayers he could have reasonably expected to obtain a well paying tenured position some 20 years later- had he survived. If he was a leftist he could have expected his story to die down rather quickly like Amy Bishop. But since he might be a right wing nut job, we can expect his story to dominate media- at least until evidence turns up that he's not a right- winger, at which point we can expect the story to suffer sudden death.

Does anybody even care anymore? Major Hasan can run around killing more people than Joe shouting "Allahu Akbar" and the establishment will have poignant moments wondering as to what the source of his murderous hate... hmm, pre-traumatic stress syndrome sounds nice. Couldn't have anything to do with those Muslim extremist he associated with. Amy Bishop goes berserk and the story is dead before it hits the air. Bill Ayers is reformed. But some nut job flies a plane into the IRS and leaves what may be a right wing suicide note, and we've got a serious problem! This Newsweek blog entry is hilarious. Does anyone even know how many acts of domestic terrorism environmental extremists commit each year? In 1985 alone over 11,000 trees were spiked just in British Colombia. Even the book I linked to argues that tree spiking is relatively benign because environmentalists always let lumber companies know where they have spiked... sure. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" But we really have to worry about 1 lone deranged lunatic even though environmental extremists demonstrate the organization and intellectual committment more often associated with the term "terrorism." Finding any date about environmental extremism is next to impossible because the Media and Academia don't care how people get killed by them. The western establishment shows no signs of returning to reality any time soon, and I am more and more conviced that they will not no matter what happens. They would rather see the West die and a Global Caliphate enacted than give up their precious ideologies.

Boston makes history... again

2010-01-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, so maybe Boston didn't play as big of role is this revolution as it did for the one back in 1776, but there is definitely something beautiful and appropriate about seeing the state of Massachusetts be the first state to send an overwhelming message to those leaders who would fundamentally change the country that was born in Boston, Massachusetts.

Socially and culturally America has been steadily leaving its intellectual and philosophical roots since Woodrow Wilson's presidency. But this evolution got fasttracked in the sixties and has culminated in the presidency of the first post-American president, Barack Obama. By post-American I mean a president whose rejection of the Founding Fathers beliefs is conscious and deliberate. All of Obama's influences and favorite books listed in both his autobiographies are writers and thinkers who have rejected the Founder's ideas for a more progressive, socialist notion of human governance and society. Fair enough. They may be right.

Unfortunately, the dissolution of these ideas has been subversive and dishonest, rather than forthright and open. Leftists and radicals began the slow process of commandeering our educational institutions for their own purposes back in the mid-twentieth century. Instead of pursuing the classical liberal approach of western thought their approach the education was solidly Marxist and totalitarian. Progressive education reformer John Dewey noted, " Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society where everyone is interdependent." Dewey and the rest of the progressive left envision a society of good distinctly and in many foundational ways, antithetical to the society of independence and liberty the Founders wanted.

But rather than carry this debate openly and honestly, they followed a policy that subverted the values of the Founders slowly and in such a way that the average American was never given the chance for independent thought. Simply think of the average college leftist radical to understand how the counter American revolution worked its way into the minds and hearts of the average American. In the college leftist we see plainly what we don't see as plainly in the every day American who has been conditioned to think of "health care" as a right by the establishment institutions around them.

It would be wonderful if the left has actually jumped the gun and awakened enough Americans who remember an education that was classical and can actually begin telling younger Americans that there are other ways of thinking about themselves and their society than just standard leftist orthodoxy. Unfortunately, all of the energy and excitement surrounding the Scott Brown election shows no sign of being transferred to the longer and more arduous battle of reforming our educational institutions. But that is ground zero in the battle for America's soul.

Sixth Sense tech makes sci fi real

2010-01-19T07:44:00.000-08:00

Tech World Still Ripe for Conservative Thinking

2010-01-04T15:29:00.000-08:00

The greatest failure to date of conservatives and center right thinkers is their unwillingness and inability to see how easily they could make deep inroads into the traditionally liberal bastion of the tech community.

Because the tech community is NOT fooled by politics as usual and is not willing to put up with the phoniness and corruption that other traditional liberal voting blocs have become used to. Techdirt has a great article on the failure of the Obama administration to live up to one of its many campaign promises. What's truly important here is that they are cutting at the core of the Obama image and campaign: Change you can believe in. In essence, Techdirt knows the Change has not come, and they are not willing to accept business as usual.

This is critically important, but when you add this sense of disullusion to the natural free market instincts of the tech community as demonstrated here, you have a real recipe for major social and political change. Too bad it probably wont happen.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

2009-12-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

I had no idea what to title this post. It is too funny, sad, pathetic, and above all- STOOPID! This is the first time in the history of rap music that rap has actually saved the lives of cops! it reminds me a scene in a Punisher comic where the Punisher gets caught undergunned by a bunch of thugs, but wins anyway. The final pane in the scene is a close up of the barrel of the Punisher's .45 held corrrectly as he tells the last thug to get killed, "They put the sights on the top for a reason."

A simple fact that went unnoticed by this idiot who jammed his Mac 10 knock-off by shooting it sideways. Man's gotta look good when he's getting gunned down.

Signs of Leadership are starting to develop

2009-12-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

I have listened and read a lot of different opinions about the President's speech and Afghan strategy last night, but so far noe of them have mentioned explicitly that this was the first real sign of leadership and sacrifive we have seen from him. For me at least, he started earning back some of the respect that he had completely lost by June.

Because it was very gutsy and showed that he does have the ability to make the type of hard, unpopular decisions Bush made. For that I give him credit and hope to see more of this spine and backbone in the future. Yes, it took too long to make, but he has already been criticized by his most ardent supporters for giving in and doing it in the presence of "the enemy." Chris Matthews has somehow managed to suddenly leave Olberman in the dust...

But I digress. Obama actually did the right thing and listened to his generals rather than to his base. This is the first real bipartisan moment of his presidency. Yes, he made the strategic blunder Chris Matthews rightly identified of telling the REAL enemy (get a clue Chris) when they can expect us to pack up and leave. But Obama also left the door open to staying.

The worst criticism came from Der Spiegel (I thought Obama was popular in Europe?). To be sure, Gabor Steingart delivers the beatdown in a way the would make Krauthammer proud. But most of the substantial criticism is strategic and realpolitik stuff I agree with. There is also the incredible dishonesty of blaming Bush, shifting blame, and then implementing the same Bush surge that he voted against! Talk about low and despicable... But at least he is doing it. For 18 months. The student body president made his first baby steps towards being the real President.

Stoopid, Very Stoopid

2009-11-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

Well now we know gamers and lawyers have something in common! What kind of idiot sues WoW?

Climate Research Unit scandal getting worse

2009-11-29T20:23:00.000-08:00

Because I am not a scientist I don't like weighing in on the "scandal" surrounding the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia. Primarily because a number of the explanations provided by the pro Global Warming crowd seemed reasonable. But that was until someone who follows and believes in Global Warming as a significant threat made a rare assessment of how damning the hacked emails actually are. Yes, he still affirms his core beliefs and attacks skeptics, but he admits that the emails are very dangerous and distressing. I would love to know what he would say now that the story had become even uglier, as the CRU has admitted all the original data its research was based on was destroyed, so we can't scientifically verify their conclusions. Unfrikkin believable.

Disconnect between Elite and People in Europe too?

2009-11-29T20:20:00.000-08:00

This is a fascinating article because it suggests that Europeans- at least the nonelite ones- are facing a similar disconnect between them and their leaders.

Too Funny not to Post

2009-11-27T08:15:00.000-08:00

The Language is a bit spicy, but this little incident is hilarious:

more Signs of Cultural Upheaval

2009-11-19T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Video Game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has broken every sales record for an entertainment property. We are not talking about video games only, but movies, music, and everything else in the entertainment world. A video game has blown away the competition during a global recession.

This little fact will go largely undigested in mainstream culture. This is after games sales fell dramatically last October from the previous year. Now I have managed to squeeze in a few hours on Modern Warfare 2 between work, the immanent birth of my first child, skating, and applying for a doctoral program. In a nutshell: It Rocks. And pushes the envelope in a way no other game has. The crude ethical problems of games like Grand Theft Auto have nothing on the Russian Airport scene. Discussing it with my hardcore gamer students have resulted in similar impressions. All of us were a bit disturbed by playing an undercover CIA character who has to massacre innocent civilians in an airport in order to protect his cover. Some of us even tried to figure out ways around it, to no avail.

This is extremely disturbing. So disturbing that the developers actually allow you to set up campaign mode with a bypass of the airport massacre. But it got me thinking. More than any other game this game can break long held double standards of our culture just as easily as it breaks sales records.

Why is it ok for actors, and movie makers, writers, and musicians to engage is such flights of fancy, but not the rest of us? In western culture we have long allowed certain exceptions for "artists" because there is a purpose to their work. That's why a child rapist like Polanski should not be prosecuted. Yet he will sneer down at us plebeians for engaging in even a virtual version of violent and unethical behavior. As I walked through the airport slowly killing civilians in a scene perfectly orchestrated to highlight the terror and horror such an event would surely create, coolly shooting down a desperate civilian crawling for safety (the scene even has slow mo moments perfectly copied from Hollywood) it occurred to me that this truly is unhealthy for society and is probably one of the psychological sources of the extreme degrees of privilege and hypocrisy in Hollywood and the Entertainment industry. Actors go one step beyond what I was doing and actually point a real gun and shoot blanks and other live people who reenact these same types of scenes every year for "art." I don't think I will ever play the level again, unless its necessary for the Ethics class we are trying to embed the game in...

But Hollywood is better, more humanitarian. I mean, for gosh sakes, they bleed compassion. They are more human than the rest of us and so its ok for them. One of Tom Friedman's only good ideas in The World is Flat was the equalizing effect technology has on society. Look, we know its not his idea, but its still true. And Modern Warfare 2 is taking this equalizing into its next natural step. Now we can all engage in the same kind of visceral play acting movie stars call "avant garde." How much you wanna bet Rock Star is going to incorporate rape, or something equally ugly into the next iteration of Grand Theft? Because if its ok for Hollywood to simulate rape and other heinous acts then its certainly ok for the rest of us.

Oh Brave new world that has such people in it.

Jedi mind Tricks

2009-11-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

So far in all the justifiable outrage over our Establishment's total failure to recognize the Fort Hood killer as nothing more than an Islamic extremist no one has brought up the case of Scott Roeder who killed abortion doctor George Tiller less than a year ago. Remember that incident? Our courageous leaders in the Media were willing to talk religion then. Because, you know, since Roe V Wade became law Christians have killed less people than one Islamic extremist managed to kill in one day at Ft Hood.

There were no discussions about how Scott Roeder's worldview (religion) taught him that since abortion became legal America has seen a holocaust of millions of innocent deaths. Imagine what Major Hasan would do if that were floating around in his mind. He might want to build a nuclear weapon and wipe out his enemies... Nah. Remember the IEA told us two years ago the Iranians weren't trying to build a bomb. Whoops. Little oversight there.

The most perverse aspect of human nature is its ability to lie to itself. When the Jedi mind trick is on yourself, you are sick.

Ereaders are taking over fast

2009-10-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

No better proof that ereaders will soon be as ubiquitous as video games than how many are in development. Even tire maker Goodyear is working on one.

Funny

2009-10-07T08:16:00.001-07:00

Scary stuff

2009-09-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

This is really scary. Especially because there are no solutions offered anywhere. make sure you run AdAware at least once a week, and have something like Avast that will get rid of Trojans quick. At least its not happening in the states. Maybe people really will start burying their money in the backyard again...

Pirates reach new shores

2009-09-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Pirate Party is almost ready to board Australia! Gotta admire their tenacity and energy.

Journalistic Bias from a tech's perspective

2009-09-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

I have written at length about the disconnect between conservative thinking and the tech community and how much opportunity there is for conservative thinking to engage the tech community. This post from techdirt perfectly illustrates the ambiguity techies have about journalism and bias.

One one hand it easy to dismiss the writer as clueless- I mean, why not come out and just admit that bias is journalism and it's all about supporting leftist ideology. The writer never does. He even suggests that it's ok for journalist to have an opinion, which almost seems to come off in the typical lefty apologist approach, but if you have been reading techdirt for any length of time you know that their writers are extremely sceptical of establishment thinking and journalism. They are simply coming at it from a different angle than conservative activists, journalist, and intellectuals.

Which is why conservatives should be reaching out on an intellectual level to the tech community. They have far more in common with them than they would imagine, and our foundational principles are more often than not the same.

Imagine (no apologies to Lennon)

2009-09-20T17:37:00.000-07:00

Imagine the following scenario: A couple of young leftwing activists travel the country visiting NRA offices pretending to be illegal weapons dealers looking to start shipping illegal guns from Mexico into the city and need some help figuring out the logistics. What the NRA offices don't know is that they are phonies and everything is being taped with hidden cameras and will systematically be exposed to the public once the investigation is complete.

Imagine what would happen if those videos showed NRA staff members offering to help with those illegal activities. Imagine how those two young activist journalists would have their careers made at this point. Imagine them all over the cable and network shows, the interviews, book opportunities, movie offers. Careers made, right?

Imagine.

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one.

Racism concept map (Click to enlarge)

2009-09-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

Now we can all see if we are racists with this handy concept map!

John Stewart on Acorn

2009-09-16T16:40:00.001-07:00

John Stewart has become hit and miss for me, but this one is actually funny.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Audacity of Hos

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

Some fun stuff

2009-09-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

Some of my students have been kicking around the idea of doing a skate clip centered on bails and hi-fives. Here it is:

Kraut- Hammer!

2009-09-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Charles "Martel" Kraut-hammer just threw down the best hammer of the year. Read it and weep.

Calling all technophobes and Monty Python fans

2009-09-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

Aside from the obvious hazards an IT company in South Africa has proved that it's faster to use a carrier pigeon for data transfer than IP providers in South Africa.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Of course the only really important question is was it an African or European pigeon?

eBooks

2009-09-09T06:47:00.001-07:00

This is a huge issue right now. As a librarian and dedicated bibliophile I thought I would not really like ebooks, but I have found that they are great for light reading. Currently I am using the Sony touch screen (great features, grainier screen) and a Kindle. I was shocked by how much I like both and how they solved many of my classic problems. As a professor, I no longer have to carry 6 or 7 books around- I can load thousands on one device, which also solves a classic traveling problem for me.

Most digital books even allow you to annotate them and write notes. Very nice, and I am a definite convert, even though I will always prefer a "real" book. But I have realized that ebooks will probably take over in the next 10 years because they are so functional and easy- and cheaper.

The real issue are these power plays the article I linked to discusses. Everyone with money and power wants to ensure that they get to keep. The one exception has been Sony, which is actually making their devices more functional and interactive with other formats. Exactly the opposite of Amazon's Apple approach: proprietary and controlled. These issues have huge implications for the future control of knowledge and dissemination of information. We have already seen a massive sell out of America's truth corps, the press, when it comes to putting facts and relevant information before the people. Most people think that the Internet will open the door in ways that people with power cannot close it, but don't believe. There are other ways of controlling information. The Obama administration has already backed down from a plan that would have given the president the legal freedom to shut down the Internet in emergency situations, but there are plenty of other alternatives.

It's critical that conservatives and libertarians pay attention to these developments and fight for free markets and freedom of information.

That's what I'm talking about!

2009-09-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

This is rad. Some republican is finally getting a clue

Pirate Party

2009-09-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

I have written about this numerous times and hope conservatives start figuring out how important these issues are to young voters- and how naturally its fits with conservatism. The Pirate Party has won an EU seat. They are rapidly becoming a serious movement in Europe and are attracting new converts all the time.

Mainstream, older generations think the Pirates are not serious- I mean they were a spontaneous reaction the a legal ruling against a torrent tracker from Sweden right?! But then think about how the Establishment has been treating the Tea Parties and townhall protestors stateside and you start realizing that there may be a lot of similiarities here.

Pirate Christian Engstrom sounds an awful lot like a traditional conservative. He just doesn't know it and neither does most of the tech world or youth because conservatives are not reaching out and communicating. Get with it people. Time to run up the Jolly Roger!

How Corrupt is America?

2009-09-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

Ted Kennedy's public life from beginning to end was defined by corruption and abuse of privilege. It's that simple. His entire career and life are gross contradictions to everything America is supposed to stand for, yet he is still being celebrated and lionized by the same corrupt establishment that allowed him to exist in the first place.

Kennedy's corruption and disdain for the average American is like book ends for his life. He began it by walking away from an average American, leaving her to die, and he ended it pretty much the same way- boldly trying to change a law he created so the democrats can keep power. He does it because he can get away with it. Like a bad child our politicians just keep testing their boundaries, pushing the people's limit. Kennedy was the ring leader, but don't think it ends with him. President Obama has been rolling Kennedy style since he was first elected by getting his opponents thrown off the ballot on technicalities. The Obama presidency is not a repudiation of abuse of power and privilege, but rather the coming of Age for Kennedy style corruption. No one has benefitied more from the privilege of the wealthy and powerful to have their dirty laundry hidden or excused that President Obama. From the Media's blackout on his voting record and past to his thuggish behavior to hedge fund managers or lawyers fighting corruption (of Obama's friends), no one has utilized the Kennedy style better and to more effect than Barack Obama.

It would seem that the American people are finally beginning to tire of this behavior and are demanding some accountability and integrity from our elected officials. But we seem to be acting like bad parents who have let their children push their limits and are suddenly "getting tough" pretending that we are really good parents who let their children develop some bad habits. You have all seen those kinds of parents who suddenly pretend that they actually care about their child's behavior, but it won't last that long and pretty soon the kids will be up to the same old thing.

It's because our culture is corrupt too. We as Americans are concerned more with comfort and entertainment than virtue. Making sacrificies is not easy, for our elected officials or on the personal level. We love to decry our politicians, but they still represent us. After all, the people of Massachusetts kept electing Teddy year after year, no matter how despicable or open his corruption was. Maybe we deserve these leaders, because they reflect our own failures as parents, citizens and people.

Hopefully, Kennedy's death will remind us that we once produced men like Washington and Lincoln, and that we can return to those virtues, those values and that America.

Run, Mitt, Run!

2009-08-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

The democrats gross abuse of power in Massachusetts has provided as perfect a set up for former governor Romney as any politician could ever get.

1. He is still (it seems) interested in running for president.
2. He is burdened by the recent exposure of Massachusett's failed Health Care system he helped create.
3. The democrats power in the Senate hangs on Kennedy's seat.
4. The nation is in an uproar over Health Care Reform.

Answer: Romney to the rescue. Everything fits perfectly. The people of Massachusetts are just now learning what a failure their socialized Health Care system is, but the democrats locally and nationally are out of sync with the people. There is no better time for a high profile republican to finally win the seat in a special election where Health Care is the biggest issue on people's minds. Romney can achieve two critical goals: rid himself of the albatross by admitting it's failure, and then frame his campaign as a sort of redemptive quest to save the rest of the country from the danger he knows so well! He launches himself into national fame by being the man who was elected at the last hour and saved the nation from looming disaster. He would then launch his presidential campaign as a former senator and governor, and the man who stopped the very thing Americans feared most.

His state is perfectly poised to elect him. First, they already have done so in the past, and second even Massachusetts must be ready for a change. The gross democratic corruption and abuse of power brewing right now over Senator Kennedy replacement is the perfect platform for a campaign launch. Mitt can co-opt the Obama message of Hope and Change and ask the people if they have had enough of democrat shenanigans.

Please Mitt, run for senator, and earn your spot in American history.

Why do we trust politicians with our money?

2009-08-25T07:29:00.001-07:00

Remember back in June when the administration criticized the nonpartisan congressional budget office for having too high of a deficit based on their budget? It's a familiar story, because the democrats, the press, and Obama, have been doing the same thing over health care, arguing the the CBO is wrong and that their plan will actually save money. Well, Obamatuer just admitted that the CBO was right about the budget deficit and admitted that the 10 year deficit with Obama's budget is really more in the range of 9 trillion dollars rather than 7. How in God's name do you miss 2 trillion dollars?!

Is there anyone out there who wants to bet who is right about the cost of health care reform? Obama or the CBO? We put private sector people in jail for the kind of reckless behavior that seems to be standard practice for politicians.

If the people lead....

2009-08-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

One of my neighbors seems to be a pretty standard Boulder hippie bourgeois liberal. She drives a subaru outback and has an "I Love Barack" sticker on it. Recently it was joined by the rather tired cliche "If the People Lead, the Leaders will Follow." I think we have all come to realize that this, along with another classic "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" have implied clarifiers "if the people leading are Leftists... if the dissent is Leftist." But thinking about the disdain and shameless lies about the dissent over Health Care reform I have come to realize that the Leaders also don't like the "people."

Ken Gladney is of the people, Henry Gates is not- neither is Barack Obama. I am not a Sarah Palin fan, but she resonates deeply with me, because unlike Barack Obama she is the first politician on the national stage to represent the people on an experiential and personal level. Even when they are out of touch, our leaders still represent us, but none of them know us like she does. Can you name any major leader who went to a state college? Who worked with their hands? Whose ability to wield a hammer went beyond photo shoots and actually helped her husband build their home? More than any politician since, well Lincoln, she truly represents the people. She is one of us. But we never got to know her, because the media created a caricature of her that is just like the one they are making of us now: dumb, ignorant peasants.

I heard, and hear, my students make all kinds of dismissive comments about her. The most recent was that she is a dumb B!*%h because she said Africa was a country. I asked my student if that made president Obama a dumb bastard because he said there were 57 states in America... He was lost and didnt know what to say. I then asked him the same rhetorical questions above and asked him who really knows his world and understands his life- who has actually lived it? Only Palin. She represents him, she represents the people and if the Establishment doesn't like her it's because she reminds them of the great unwashed "people."

Americans did not get to see the real Palin, because the Establishment cannot know her anymore than they know us. The leaders don't want the people to lead. We had a chance and they crucified the people. They call the people a mob, nazis, and other assorted epithets. Bill Ayers actually killed people, and does not regret it, but he is one of the Establishment- definitely not of the people, so he gets a pass. Sarah Palin suggests that socializing medicine may lead to "death panels" and she gets ridiculed. The irony is that her statements are no more inflammatory or idiotic than the stuff spoken by college professors across America on a daily basis. Churchill and Ayers are not the exception. But then they are not the "people" either. Sarah Palin is, and therefore must be crushed.

Looks like another Beer Summit is coming...

2009-08-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Too bad Kenneth Gladney (he doesn't get mentioned until about halfway through the article) is not an oppressed faculty member at an elite Ivy League university. But since he is a black man who was actually attacked for expressing his views (not in the refined and intellectually sound ways Dr Gates did of course), we should be expecting a national furor over this hate crime right? Beer Summit anyone?

If Gladney was only a professor or a trust fund hippie maybe his story would get the national coverage it deserves...

At least Dogs get good care

2009-08-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Theodore Dalrymple is a British doctor who is also a pundit. Funny article in the Journal comparing health care in Britain for dogs and humans. Dogs are privatized still...

Good for a few laughs at least

2009-08-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

Grandma got run over by Obamacare. Listen, laugh, cry.

Warms the Cockles of my Heart

2009-08-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

While America seems to be dying all around us, there are still some shining moments of genuine American beauty:

What's so hilarious is the obvious difficulty the open minded, culturally sensitive journalist seems to having understanding that anyone could think differently than her.

Politics before Science

2009-07-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

Global Warming is the best example of politics before science. Not creationism, not stem cell research, not even health care- Global Warming wins hands down. Check out the EPAs shenanigans in suppressing their own report. Now I am assuming that their reasons are political, but it seems pretty safe given the content of the report.

Health Care will be the new Sub Prime Lending debacle

2009-07-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

This is why I don't want the government running health care. Americans have got to have the shortest memory in modern history. Here we are suffering through a serious recession. A recession that we all remember being exposed- just last year- as primarily a result of unsound lending practices in the housing market. Practices that came from the Feds pet mortgage monsters, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now the same congressman who denied any responsibility for the subsequent housing price implosion is back pushing his old stuff. Like the corner dope pusher who cleared out last week, he's back this week pushing the same junk.

The Federal government is responsible for our recession, primarily it seems through trying to control the housing market and automobile production (think Unions here). Now they are telling us that they can work the same magic with our health care system! Then they wonder why we're not celebrating like the Browns won the Super Bowl. Maybe it's because we know the Browns will win the Super Bowl before the Feds get something this large and important right- never gonna happen.

The Circus couldn't do better

2009-07-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Check out this guy lying about the Health Care Package, Congressman Russ Carnahan, D-Mo.:

Saberi released

2009-07-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

Imprisoned Iranian/American journalist Roxana Saberi is going to be released in exchange for 5 terrorists. While we can rejoice that Obama pulled this off, it also feels like he is getting played by the Iranians. These guys have killed hundreds of American soldiers, and they are only part of the price Obama is paying for Saberi's release. This probably why the Iranians think they have already won the nuclear debate with America. Obama is perceived as weak and easily manipulated; an inexperienced and naive leader.

We are losing ground faster than ever before.

Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights?

2009-07-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

This is amazing. It is difficult to imagine anything further from the Founding Fathers intention than this: limiting the rights of Christian groups on campuses because of their position on homosexuality. It would be nice to think that this is really an attempt by Leftists to engage a very tricky and difficult question, but one only has to consider that those very same civil rights advocates will quietly lower their eyes when Muslim student groups do the same thing. The hypocrisy is astounding. If Christian student groups were smart they would simply get Muslims involved. It would shut down the multicultists immediately.

Absentee Fathers and Absentee Leaders

2009-06-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

As an anti-establishment minority living deep in the heart of establishment America, I have often felt deep sympathy for the president. Not because I agree with him about many things, but because he is a victim. Not in the sense that the establishment thinks of victimhood, but rather in the sense that he is a victim of the low expectations produced by multiculturalism and our hyper racial culture.

You see, minorities have low expectations. We are taught that we are always victims, people without power. Without power we cannot be expected to perform the same way white Americans do, we cannot be expected to achieve the same results. We are taught that responsibility belongs to someone else. This is why black fathers are absent in the home. I have been nagged for years now wondering why absenteeism was not as prevalent in generations prior to the sixties but that as multiculturalism and leftist racial theory spread so too did absenteeism. It's worse in black culture than anywhere, because they have been the focus of leftist cultural theory.

It's not black Americans fault. They are only at fault in giving in to a deceptively attractive theory about their victimhood and responsibility. Sadly, in the past they were victims of racism, today they are victims of racialism. Even worse, President Obama is steeped in that very racialism and multiculturalism that has so deeply damaged black culture. Raised by caucasians, schooled in private schools Obama went through a very obvious identity crisis. The same one many minorities (myself included) go through as a result of our society's obsession with skin color. The president had to consciously find "blackness", because he had been so separated from black America most of his life.

Where did he find it? In college, In Franz Fanon and other hyper racialists. Both his books detail a very clear and focused exploration and acceptance of leftist racial theories. Ironically, Academia is the source of all the worst and most damaging theories to minorities these past 20 years. I can remember the pressure to conform to some "authentic" form of Latino, or Native American culture. "Authentic" as defined, of course, by the leftist establishment. I remember the racial guilt forced on white friends and the rest of the absurdities that president Obama accepted and supported in his understandable quest for identity.

We all know the story. Europeans are responsible for the world's evil. Imperialism, slavery, and oppression. The rest of us are powerless victims. The problem is that we have become powerless in too many ways. We abrogate responsibility for our lives, actions, and decisions. It's all the white man's fault, racism, etc. So we lack those fundamental character building experiences that made past black Americans so noble and dignified. Suffering can produce dignity and strength or it can produce brittle decay. Just compare Louis Armstrong and 50 Cent. It all depends on the attitude and mentality of the sufferer. Fighting against the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" has always refined men and brought out the best in us, regardless of race, creed, or class. This is why the Iranian protesters resonate so deeply in us. The Founding Fathers were right about certain universal human needs, and we are drawn to the courage and heroism of our Iranian friends, because they refuse victimhood and have shown us the better angels of our nature. Their suffering has produced courage long lacking in American youth and culture. It has produced clear minded leadership in the face of unimaginable evil and impossible odds.

So where is our leader? The same place he was when Russia invaded Georgia: confused and sidelined, because his formative years were insulated by years of well intentioned racialism. He never had the chance to develop the requisite character to stand with the Iranian people. Academia also insulated him from the other way of developing his character, because academia has been deconstructing nobility and dignity as virtues since the sixties. Sophisticated postmoderns have mocked our traditional understanding of "virtue" and consciously attempted to undermine all judeo-christian, western ethics, leaving us with little more than cynicism. Remeber how our intellectuals mocked former president Bush's naive "axis of evil"? Youth especially are deeply sceptical of anything smacking of universal truth. Global Warming gets them more animated than images of their fellow man heroically resisting a brutal and evil regime. And Obama is their president. So it seems the president does not have the intellectual, ethical, or cultural foundation to "see" real challenges, much less lead us through them. He has failed so far on every major challenge, and I would guess that most Americans feel as unled as I do.

President Obama is an absentee leader, a victim of the well intentioned racialism of the left wing establishment. By removing all challenges and barriers for him the left has left his character unprepared for the real challenges of life just as they have done to so many black males who abrogate their responsibilities as fathers. It is no coincidence that black Americans have the highest absentee rate, while being ground zero for the forces of multiculturalism. It is no coincidence that our first black president is an absentee leader.

It is a tragedy, because while I disagree with the president, I want him to succeed and lead us, even if it is not where I want to be led. Moreover, I believe he actually has somewhere inside of him many nascent qualities so many great leaders had. But he has never been through the fire needed to develop those qualities. The sick and twisted reality is that his fawning and adoring media are- again- insulating him from the very experiences he needs. By turning everything he does into some kind of genius, some great triumph too sublime for us commoners to comprehend, they keep him from developing the character and virtue he needs to meet the challenges America now faces. They cement his absentee role all the more, and insulate him from that greatest teacher Failure.

Government Efficiency

2009-06-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

I recently got back from a short vacation to Estes Park CO. On the way up there we had to take route co-66, which had road work being performed on it for a couple of miles at least. Get this- I stopped counting the number of people holding "Slow" signs at 10. Think about that. 10 people whose entire job is holding a sign for 8 hours.

How much do you think that costs Colorado taxpayers? The irony is that the entire stretch of road had large cones and safety tape. Why do you need 10 people holding signs when those signs could simply be mounted in the cones? Let's say the average hourly wage for them is $20/hr. 10 people working 8 hours gives us 80 hours times $20 for a grand total of $1600 in government salary that produced absolutely nothing for the entire day. The government will of course say that "safety" is a product, but couldn't that product be achieved much more efficiently? On that one stretch of road wre spending 8k a week, 32k a month. Multiply that out times the number of other public works project being done and you are looking at probably a loss in the hundreds of thousands.

These people are producing nothing and getting paid more than anyone else in the industry to do it. We the people are losing on every side, because they could be doing something else, moved to another project, working on this one, creating real results. So we lose on the front end and the back end. Any politician worth the name reformer would get on this, but even the republicans have become somewhat accustomed to massive amounts of waste- at our expense.

The Real Reason not to buy GM

2009-06-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

Amid all of the reasons pundits and critics have been offering for not buying GM the most obvious reason has been omitted and overlooked. The reason for this is simple: most of them are fairly well off and don't know what its like for the rest of us. None of them however have been as succinct and clear as a blue collar restaurant manager I overheard last week. She was probably in her fifties and had lived a pretty rough life judging by her looks and language. But while she was sitting there talking to some elderly customers who were obviously regulars she made the simple and most profound statement about GM I have heard to date.

She simply said, "I don't wanna buy one of them things now, because I'd be paying for it twice, and you sure as hell know they aint gonna give you a 60% discount on the price even though we're paying for the damn thing." With that simple observation she really hit the heart of the matter and identified the common man's real problem with buying a Chevy. In the most simple sense we are getting screwed because we are already paying for 60% of the car before it ever hits the lot. I can just see the campaign adds now... My taxes are now going to 60% of every Chevy going even though I will never benefit from em.

Video Games will take over the world

2009-06-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

Here are some interesting comments from Nintendo COO Reggie Fils-Aime: The video games industry is not just at the center of the entertainment industry, but is driving the entertainment industry, not only economically, but from a cultural impact standpoint.

He's absolutely right. By an accident of Fate video games are poised to take over our lives, culture, and society in ways that few revolutions before them have. I am currently writing an article to be published for game developers and designers advocating an even bigger picture than they can imagine. In 10 years video games should replace textbooks. Yes, textbooks, and a host of other things. All because video games have focused on interaction and dynamic environments since their earliest days. Even games like Pong were relatively unpredictable because they incorporated human intelligence into game play, which meant that no two games, even on Pong, were ever the same.

As an educator, it is this aspect of gaming that has captured my imagination. Because a healthy, lively classroom is constantly moving. New questions, new ideas, are always present, and to date no textbook, no DVD, no program has been able to adapt to the dynamic nature of 30 engaged human minds. Until now. Games offer a level of dynamism I have never seen before, and once developers start realizing this its Game Over.

Heroes and Villians

2009-06-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

The only real difference between heroes and villains in today's America is their politics. Time Magazine already has a story on the murder of abortion doctor George Tillman asking the question how will the murder affect the abortion debate? My questions is "What?!" How stupid do we have to be? One lunatic kills a guy and he represents just exactly what? Every movement has its extremists and radicals. Che Geuvera personally carried out his own executions of political dissidents. Che personally killed more people than the entire antiabortion movement since Roe V Wade became law, but he gets to be a hero and icon, because the people he shot disagreed with the Left, whereas the eight abortion doctors killed in the past 20 years were represent leftist ideology.

If Scott Roeder was a left wing murderer instead of a right wing murderer, he could reasonably expect to become... a professor, a celebrity author, and quite well off. Just ask Bill Ayers, Mumia abu Jamal, and all those other left wing radicals. Environmental extremists can spike trees in the Pacific Northwest, set up trip lines in the Southwest, firebomb, and more, but they aren't dangerous. Time had to go all the way back to 1996 and 1994 to find more such murder. Hell, an Islamic extremists would feel like he wasn't hitting his stride if he hadn't killed four people by noon prayer, but Islam is a religion of peace. Janet Napolitano wants us to worry about those crazy right wing radicals with Pro Life bumper stickers because eight abortion doctors have been killed in the past 20 years! Does Homeland Security know about this? Well, according to that famous report they do...

Nothing represents the moral and intellectual decay of the Establishment more than this. Muslims and environmentalists, commies and crazies, can kill, kill, kill- BUT it's those law abiding right wingers we really have to worry about. The only difference between psychos is their politics. The blood of their victims still runs red. But the only Red the Establishment wants to stop is the political kind. Thank you Homeland Security and Secretary Napolitano. Yes, this does prove your report correct. In another 10 years we may have another crazy right winger kill another doctor.

Update: what about the muslim convert who attacks an army base the day after?

Obanomics

2009-05-20T07:16:00.001-07:00

Evil Establishment Capitalists or Endangered Species?

2009-05-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of the hilarious side effects of the rush to declare conservatism and republicans extinct is that it highlights more than ever the lie that Leftists and the democrats are anti-establishment. Everyone should be calling the Mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, et al on this obvious disconnect. I mean, if the republicans are dead how can they be the evil, corporate puppet masters pulling the strings from behind the scene?

In their giddy rush to triumphalism establishment leftists have left their flank wide open for a sustained broadside that should significantly alter the cultural landscape and rebrand Left and Right for years to come- provided the Right takes advantage of the opportunity. You can't be on the cusp of cultural insignificance as so many democrats and mainstream pundits have been arguing and evil capitalist puppet masters at the same time. So which is it?

Best article on Obama presidency to date

2009-05-17T16:02:00.001-07:00

It's no a surprise that classicist and all around butt kicker Victor Davis Hanson has written the best article on Obama to date.

Conservatives need to communicate fast

2009-05-04T10:32:00.001-07:00

Techdirt has another post whose foundational argument is more conservative than the author probably knows. The problem is that conservatives don't know and won't figure out how to communicate fast enough to help the tech community realize that they fit better in the conservative camp than the leftist camp.

The post is about the health care industry and even though the author doesn't explicitly use the fact that Merck helped Elsevier create a fake peer-reviewed journal to argue for socialized medicine the argument is implicit, because the author has leftism built in as a default mechanism. Like PCs forced to run Vista, the tech community doesn't realize that there are other alternatives.

Here are the key sentences:

"Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that you can do when everything is locked up and proprietary, rather than open (emphasis added). There's almost no way to confirm or check the data or information to make sure it's legit, so people tend to assume it is."

The author has no idea that he just made a central conservative argument. Sounds like a post from National Review, right? Wrong, the author has no options for following through on his conservative thought. Instead, the author will default to a leftist interpretation that doesn't fit the author's deepest help notions and beliefs. This is where conservatives should be stepping in- but aren't because they are too busy talking to themselves about how tech savvy they need to be...

Konami shelves Six Days in Fallujah

2009-04-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not a gamer but follow the culture closely and enjoy gaming, so this post about a game based on the Battle of Fallujah in 2004 is important on a number of levels. First, there is the requisite shock that video games would deal with the subject in the first place, which is why the project has been cancelled. But as an advocate of free markets and a defender of gaming in general I found myself wondering why? Hasn't Hollywood already done this? Why can't video games deal with the war?

The first answer is obvious. Video games are still going through the process of cultural evolution. They have not yet entered mainstream culture or circulated enough for them to be a comfortable reality like movies. The same colleagues who have no problems using movies as instructional aids are balking at using video games instead. I imagine professors back in the 70s and 80s probably reacted the same way when videos were first used in the classroom. At this point gaming has not had enough time as a major player in our culture so it is still foreign and alien. We maintain irrational double standards for gaming and Hollywood, but they will eventually disappear.

However, games are different than any other entertainment medium before them on one critical level. They are immersive and interactive. Even the most powerful and engaging movie does not require the level of active participation a video game requires. Therein lies the question. What does this active participation in violence, sexism, and gore do? Many cultural conservatives would say this is a moot point. It's the violence idiot. Remember Columbine? But I would throw that back at them and remind them that high schools used to have shooting teams and kids would bring rifles to school on a daily basis for practice. Similarly, my grandfather carried an illegal gun all his life, and got into daily fights as a youth, but never woud have dreamed of killing someone except in self defense. I would throw it back at the cultural conservatives and say that they failed to do their jobs and preserve those elements of pre-sixties culture we obviously still need. The question is a complex one, and one that has no obvious answer yet. But I would advise you not to run off blaming video games or be outraged at the concept of an Iraq War video game. We will just have to wait and see.

Please no!

2009-04-21T13:56:00.001-07:00

It seems inevitable. The government wants our money so they can take care of us better. The Right could gain a lot of traction with youth, geeks, and techies on this, but don't hold your breathe. On the heels of nationwide tea parties the media ridiculed because the government is "lowering" taxes on most Americans. Maybe they will lower them, but adding new ones is exactly what the protesters were protesting. We're the government and we're here to help.

Comeback or Uncle Rico moment?

2009-04-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

Back in 82 I used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile... Nothing represent the mainstreaming of formerly rebel punk skate culture than the relaunch of legendary 80s brands like the Bones Brigade.

The question is: is it cool or pathetic? Peralta has been off playing in Hollywood making cutting edge documentaries on actions sports (and getting rich too...), but he's ready to come back to skateboarding now that Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Kohls, and ESPN are involved. I loved the Bones Brigade and love seeing the interest today's kids have in skate history, but sometimes I wonder if we spend too much time looking for that time machine with uncle Rico?

And people called Bush stubborn...

2009-04-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious and scary at the same time. It's also very dangerous if true. It would indicate that the new president is just as blindly committed to certain pet projects regardless of facts as the former president was supposed to be.

Damn the Scurvy Dogs!

2009-04-20T08:49:00.000-07:00

Even though it was inevitable in today's world it still hurts to see those irascible punks at Pirate Bay go down. You knew that those open minded, champions of free expression and radicalism in Hollywood would not tolerate free roving pirates with no respect for sovereign waters and kilobytes.

They may have lost the battle and even the war (at least in their lifetime) but the boys of Pirate Bay are cult heroes and icons of the Digital Age. The money grubbing establishment may think they are winning, but someone else will take up the mantle, and the crew of Pirate Bay has already decided to appeal. More power to you. These Pirates are true antiheroes for all Digital Rebels.

A Real Test

2009-04-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

As I argued in a post last week, President Obama's involvement in the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips proves nothing about the young president's leadership or talent as a president. Dealing with four primitive Somali pirates is nothing to get excited about. Obama did what anyone in that position would have done: more or less authorize the use of deadly force. The result was what you would expect when the world's most talented, best equipped military goes up against four primitives armed with AKs.

But the imprisonment of Roxana Saberi provides exactly the kind of test Joe Biden mentioned during the campaign. A real opportunity to see what the young president is made of. Iran is a banana republic, but that is where the comparison with Somalia ends. They have international support from Russia, potentially France, and offer the kind of complexities not present in the pirate kidnapping affair. Saberi is an American citizen, and her kangaroo trial was probably more of a set-up than anything. She was picked because she is an American and the Iranians are confident they can back Obama down in ways they never could have with Bush. I have argued this for a long time. Anyone from a masculine culture, anyone from a background less genteel instintively senses weakness in Obama, because he represents the new man of the Left, one who consciously eschews the "male" image of the past. Again, as I argued before, this is not inherently bad. Indeed there are many good things about the new man, but there are great potential dangers and pitfalls when such a man comes into contact with distinctly different cultures where strength is the only way to get respect. Obama is not imposing, and he lacks the depth or experience to not make dangerous blunders like his deferential bow to King Abdullah.

As I understand Middle Eastern and Persian cultures the "bow" indicates subservience, a tacit and conscious admission of inferiority. I would guess that Obama's bow was the impetus to Iran's decision to find a way to test the waters. Seeing the president make such a cultural blunder encouraged the Iranians to find a way to embarrass the president further, deligitimize him in the Islamic world, and continue positioning in the Intenational game of politics and power. Saberi was picked not because she is a journalist, not because she is a woman, not because she is a spy, but because she has American citizenship. The Iranians want to force president Obama into a situation that really tests him. There is almost no way they can lose, as it seems unlikely that Obama will find an easy way out of this situation. We hope that he will surprise them and begin building the respect he desperately needs in the Islamic world, but it seems far less possible. The Iranians timed it perfectly. Worrying that Obama may gain some respect by association with the successful rescue of Captain Phillips they immediately put him on the defensive and deflect attention away from his success with Phillips. They are in essence, trying to bolster the inferior image the president unconsciously created with his bow to King Abdullah. The show of strength and superiority over the Somali pirates is no longer on the radar and Obama gains little, in the Islamic world at least, through it. Instead he now faces a far more complex and dangerous situation, but one he should deal with, as Saberi is an American citizen and deserves our defense and aid.

The ball is in his court and he must play. But this is a far more difficult game, and while we all want to see him back down the Iranian thugs it will not be so easy. The Russians and the French may not feel like helping, and Obama may be in a lose-lose situation. The Iranians have too many options and even releasing Saberi can be, if manipulated correctly, done from a position of power and authority, the way a king would grant a boon to an inferior. Good luck president Obama, and good luck Roxana Saberi.

Cool Article from Wired

2009-04-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

If you don't read Wired or subscribe to its blog you don't know what you are missing. Read this killer article. Wired covers more ground and more topics than anyone.

Techies getting a clue

2009-04-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

It's been funny watching the tech community deal with the Obama administration's unenlightened approach to many issues near and dear to our hearts. There have been more posts and worries in the first three months of the Obama administration about net neutrality, freedom of information, free association, filtering, transparency, and the like than in the last year of Bush.

Obama made great promises, but techies are slow to realize that the core Leftist principles stand in direct contrast to free markets, individualism, and the free association that is the core of the tech world. Techies are instinctively laissez-faire and free market, because that is the way their culture has evolved and that is the way their culture thrives. Some few bloggers that I follow have begun to consciously realize the disconnect between them and the party they have been trained and programmed to associate with. But techies for the most part, like the rest of their generation, came of age in a culture that bombards them with messages in every medium, messages whose basic meaning is "think, vote, leftist." They could not go to high school, listen to the radio, buy music, watch tv, go to a movie, get a degree without the left wing establishment socializing them, so they vote Obama and democrat. Leftists have been running the cultural equivalent of the Microsoft monopoly for the past 20 years, so it is no wonder if every "machine" out there only works with leftist programs and apps.

Posts and articles like these are sadly lacking analysis and thought- not because the writers are incapable, but because reality is hitting them with a process their hard drives do not recognize. Even the wordier posts cannot really do more than display the data, no processing, no analysis, nothing.

Conservatives and republicans could be utilizing these opportunities to gain market share, but unfortunately, they are lacking the RAM, processor, and broadband capacity to do so. They are Apple of 1990 rather than 2000. Does not compute.

Smart enough to get in out of the rain... eventually

2009-04-13T05:31:00.000-07:00

The story behind Captain Richard Phillips' rescue remains somewhat murky, but the story behind the Media's ability to spin anything and everything remains predictable and consistent. Take Chris Cillizza's analysis of the story for the Washington Post. He spins it as a great triumph of the Obama administration's grit, resolve, savvy, focus, determination... well you get the idea. It takes Cillizza six short paragraphs to also do the requisite "contrast" to Former President Bush's "inept" leadership and failure. Of course Cillizza has to compare four Somali pirates armed with AKs floating in a raft surrounded and cornered by the world's most powerful navy to a natural disaster like Katrina to make Obama's "competence" and "leadership" contrast with Bush's, but hey, we have come to expect this. Even Cillizza tacitly admits it took Obama 2 days to authorize "potential emergency actions" to deal with the pirates, which should of course exonerate Bush, but then Bush was dealing with a natural disaster the size of a small country in a state run by corrupt and incompetent politicians who happen to be in the same party as Obama.

What's incredible is how low the standards have become for President Obama. I am not as harsh in condemning the president for taking 4 days to deal with the issue, because it seems like there could be a lot of extenuating facts. You know, if I was a journalist I would be busy covering the Obama's first puppy, the choice of a church, the fact that they are kicking poor black children out of the same school they send their children to(wait, scratch that one). Heck, the teleprompter may have been in the shop for those first two days, right? But seriously, there is simply not enough info and this was such a small incident compared to natural disasters like Katrina that no conclusions, positive or negative, should be made about the president in this incident. Yes, it seems that he did take way too long to approve the use of deadly force, but we have no way of knowing how complicated such a thing could be. Moreover, if over the next few years this becomes a pattern of successful actions it could in fact become evidence of Obama's leadership and savvy. But right now there are just not enough facts and this is too minor of an incident to stand on its own as proof of anything regarding the president, in spite of the press and his fans desire to turn it into a victory for the president. What is sad is how the standards have been lowered for the first black president the same way they are lowered for minorities in college admissions.

Essentially Cillizza and the rest of Obama's fan club in the press are praising the president for being smart enough to get in out of the rain- after two days. Approving the use of deadly force is a no brainer. If Obama would have waited a few more days then we could be critical, but personally I think there are enough variables and enough distractions in a nation where the economy is circling the drain to give the president the benefit of the doubt. What disgusts me is the way the press, and Cillizza is a great example of this, dumb down the first minority president. Cillizza offers no evidence for his narrative of Obama, which is probably why he has to jump into a comparison with the former "incompentent" president so quickly. But even there he has to compare Obama dealing with something as simple as eating breakfast- Yes, approving the use of deadly force against four untrained, poorly armed, primitives from a nation with no international backing or clout is as simple as pouring a bowl of Cheerios- to something as complex and huge as a hurricane. Soft bigotry anyone? The first black president has authorized deadly force against four Somali pirates and the best military in the world did their thing. This is really a nonstory in terms of the president. And Obama has rightly treated it that way.

But Obama has had so few victories since his election his fans have to make this one for him. Pathetic. Maybe it's not soft bigotry, maybe it's just partisans desperately looking for something other than the string of incompetence and defeat Obama has thus far delivered. But as a minority who has lived with the soft bigotry of lower expectations my whole life I am starting to wonder if the Left wing establishment is beginning to act on their natural inclinations to lower the standards for minorities and treat things as simple as getting in out of the rain as a major victory for our first minority President.

Mainstreaming the Lunatic Fringe

2009-04-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

One of my biggest frustrations about the current culture war is the unbalanced rules of engagement. The Left can call the Right racist, bigot, homophobe, sexist, war-monger, and a host of other well worn epithets; the Right gets to (sort of) suggest that the Left is unpatriotic. We tend to blame this on the unfair nature of the news media, but that is only partly correct. The other half of the equation is that the Right needs to start calling a spade a spade.

For example, leftists have become even bolder this past week and are blaming the recent shootings in America on conservatives everywhere. Rick Sanchez's "journalism" makes no bones about it. Everyone on the Right who supports gun rights has blood on their hands, and he helps his viewers out by naming a few names. Sir Harold Evans does the same thing. There are two immediate observations to be made. First, how in the world did our culture ever become this unhealthy and delusional? The lack of intelligence and seriousness boggles the mind.

But there is another observation that is just as important. The Right rarely does this. When Harry Reid said the war was lost a few years back his comments were on Al-Jazeera within 24 hours. Is there any doubt that the enemy was encouraged by this? That some jihadists and insurgents whose morale may have been low were suddenly encouraged to go out and kill more American soldiers? Yet, he was never called out on this and none of the democrats were. Don't they have soldiers blood on their hands for all the support and encouragement idiotic and uniformed statements like Reid, Murtha, and Kerry made? But America has come to expect and now tolerate such undignified and reprehensible behavior from the Left. So what if Ward Churchill is an unqualified psycho? Let him teach at one of our elite universities. If we get rid of him that would mean we would have to get rid of lots of professors, and so instead of recognizing the problem and dealing with it, we make the problem normal. This is the classic, "But mom, everyone else is doing it" rationalization.

The Right needs to stand up and begin calling the Left out on these things. Harry Reid should have been called out. Yes, it will open up a Pandora's box, because this sickness has been allowed to spread far and wide. Stupidity and insanity are no longer a fringe element, because the Left wing establishment has spent the past 20 years sanitizing their fringe the same way Barack Obama did with Jeremiah Wright. The crazy but harmless uncle card needs to be called out for it has dome more damage to our culture than anything else over the past 20 years. Obama and the mainstream media did the same thing with Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers position as an education professor is proof of the decay and intellectual depravity of academia. Instead, Obama and the media argued the opposite. In their eyes his professorship, provides him with mainstream respectibility. If lunatic fringe thinking had not been allowed to be treated as the harmless but cute pet projects of otherwise mainstream people our universities, our media, our schools, and both political parties would be far healthier than they are. This would also solve some of the core problems in our culture as our perspectives have become so warped due to the mainstreaming of fringe radicals that we cannot even begin to assess our problems much less solve them. Take Michael Moore for example. There is no better example of the destructive nature of this norming of dangerous and irrational radicals than Michael Moore's triumphant position in our society. In any healthy society such a fringe lunatic would get the John Brown treatment. Instead, his poison and lies pervade out society and we have been immunized to think of him as simply a passionate advocate. USA Today made him a regular contributor during a presidential election and nobody blinked.

What does this do to our youth? It destroys their ability to have any perspective on any issue, because perspective has been so warped from reality. They have no idea what or where the middle is, because extremism is prime time. They hear it on their radios, see it on TV, and hear the Senate leader of the democratic party make statements that contributed to the deaths on their countrymen and never stopped to question why. They have been anesthatized by years of gradual doses of extremist poison, and are no longer capable of feeling or seeing the danger they are in. I am reminded of Martin Luther King's impassioned pleas to not take the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism." He was right. America needed to draw out the poison of racism and segregation quickly and painfully. For millions of Americans then , and now, had simply become accustomed to things, and were unaware of just how cancer ridden their society was. We desperately need a similar awakening today.

Impossible Today

2009-04-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

A reader suggested I read some of Eric Hoffer's work based on what she thought of my thinking and writing. Much appreciation. He's a great read and almost prophetic in some places. At other times I find the scenarios he describes next to impossible. Take the chapter on Bernal Heights from his book In Our Time. Hoffer served for two years on the San Francisco Art Commission, a task he found dreary and boring. Except for one amazing incident:

There was a crowd of people in the back of the room when I arrived... The crowd came from Bernal Heights, a workingman's neighborhood, where people of different ethinic backgrounds live side by side. There were whites, blacks, Chicanos, Samoans, Indians, and some Chinese. The neighborhood had its share of loud-mouthed sekf-appointed spokesmen for minorities, but judging by what the crowd has to say, the militants were without a following. The people of Bernal Heights, most of them members of minorities, did not want to be minoritists. They wanted to be full blown Americans, members of one nation indivisible, and to symbolize this common aspiration they had decided to paint their schoolhouse, situated on the top of a hill, red, white, and blue. To do so they had to have the permission of the art commission, but our expert had vetoed the color scheme as garish. The crowd had come to put the case before the members of the commission and call for a vote.

They were well prepared. Their speakers spoke clearly and forcefully. The principal of the school spoke last. He was a middle aged, gray haired, neatly dressed, passionate Chicano, with a stars and stripes bow tie. He spoke of America the way a man speaks of the woman he loves. he had discovered America all by himself. It occurred to me as I listened to him that America is only appreciated by people who discover it. Some of us discovered America in the prison barracks of North Vietnam.

The commission voted unaminously to let the people of Bernal Heights paint their schoolhouse red, white, and blue.

Try imagining that happening in San Francisco today... Impossible right? Why? Because leftists are no longer liberal. Our culture has changed. As I have argued elsewhere, leftists are being perfectly rational and consistent when they eschew patriotism. There is no rational basis in their worldview for such a thing. In today's San Francisco no school principal of any color, religion, or sexual orientation would want to paint the school house red, white, and blue. Any flag except the American flag is welcome. On one level this is because their cultures and values have changed. They are no longer "liberals." They are postmodern leftists. The other reason they would not feel such urges as those minorities did is because they take America for granted as Hoffer suggests. If you do not discover America, you tend to take it for granted. I have always found the most patriotic Americans in my postmodern world to be immigrants who understand just how amazing America is, because they have something to compare it to. Everyone else just keeps expecting more from their country. Free health care, mortgage payments, more education...

The Left has managed to radically shift our culture from its original values. So much so that most youth don't even know what the original America was.

So it Begins

2009-03-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

I have never heard of preemptive apologists, but this WAPO editorial comes as close as possible to a preemptive defense of what will surely be another Obama defeat. The editorial seeks to address the president's promise to "reset" relations with Russia, arguing in its subtitle that "Mr Obama isn't contemplating change solely on the part of the United States." This goes back to the problem I documented twice already: Obama is perceived by everyone around him, including his admirers, as weak and vulnerable. Or as David Broder put it, "unimposing." The Russians are strong, dangerous, and corrupt. President Obama has about as much chance of getting anything from the Russians as Elton John would have of solving the Latin American drug war if Obama appointed him Drug Czar. Although Sir Elton would probably have less scandal in his background than the rest of the President's appointments... The chorus of one of his most famous songs is prescient considering Obama's situation:

And i think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think i am at home
Oh no no no i'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Take the Training Wheels Off Please!

2009-03-26T15:45:00.001-07:00

At this point in the Obama administration I have actually had a few dark moments wondering whether Obama really thought there are 58 states in the union. Given the astounding ignorance the powerline boys have documented so well, I find myself wondering...

Here's why. You can forgive some offhand failures: 58 states, mispronouncing Orion, and stuff like that. Even though at some point you do look at little gaffes and make conclusions. But the president has gone far beyond simple verbal ticks and made some impossibly stupid and illiterate comments. For example, no one thinks the Kennedy Kruschev meetings were successful. Historians rarely agree, but there is no debate on this. Kennedy knew it was a failure and historians don't debate this one. Yet Obama went beyond a goofy slip of the tongue and made a substantial argument based on his..."belief"?... that the meetings were a success. This goes far beyond the everyday misstatements we all make. It is substantial and real. Similarly, Obama justified his position on giving terrorists civilian trials by saying that we basically did the same thing at Nuremberg. Again, he could not be more wrong. No competent lawyer with any knowledge of the Nuremberg trials would make such a claim. Because those trials were not civilian trials. They were international military tribunals. This goes way beyond mistaking oranges for apples, or cats for dogs. It is more like saying a cat is a fish, or even an orange is a fish. Only someone with colossal ignorance would make such a claim. There is far more evidence for his ignorance as well. Add that to his weekly blunders, and teleprompt addiction and it seems reasonable to start asking questions we never thought we would ask the Elegant One.

For me there are other more personal reasons to question his intellectual depth. I too am a minority in academia. I have read both Obama's books, and I know the sum of his education. The thinkers and intellectuals he refers to identify his intellectual foundations very clearly: a faithful postmodern leftist. Now this is where we start wandering from clear factual evidence building into more speculation. I know from experience that at least half of the grad students who simply believe what they are told by the establishment (and Obama is one of these) are blissfully ignorant of history and ideologies that were not part of the assigned reading. Academic leftists have turned academia into activism and diluted the intellectualism. This is why unqualified people like Ward Churchill become chairs of major departments at prestigious universities with only an MA, no Phd. This is why the most prestigious award in the discipline of American history was rescinded for the first time in its history at Columbia. Bellesile made the establishment argument and the Bancroft panel was very uncritical in reading his hopelessly fallacious book. This is why Duke lacrosse happened. This is why Sokal got his hilarious satire, "Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" published as a serious work. This is why my best friend got his fictitious story published in the school newspaper. I actually had to explain to an award winning Stanford professor whose expertise was the Enlightenment what basic and nonbasic beliefs were in epistemology! This is like a basketball player or pundit not knowing who Michael Jordan is. I could go on, but the examples are legion and well documented elsewhere. The point is that intellectualism takes a backseat to partisanship, activism, and laziness.

How does this relate to Obama? Well, if the amazing failures above slid through without ever being caught, how many grad students are inadvertently encouraged to intellectual laziness? Another Mexican and myself experimented with this over and over, getting more and more daring every time, because we consistently found that if we simply said something acceptable to the leftwing establishment you get an automatic B+. A's were not that much more difficult. Now many students were willing to find alternative voices, but even if they tried it was hard to find, because academia has become such a vacuum. Black Americans and Native Americans are the worst victims of this bizarre situation. They can skate through any school and come out as ignorant and less capable of critical thinking than when they entered.

Which is why I find myself wondering about the president. He probably never took an astronomy class and may never have heard of Orion. And the history he learned was postmodern. Strong on theory, which we know from his bios he loved, but very weak on facts and classical historicism. So he may have never encountered simple facts like the number of states enough times for it to become part of his basic knowledge. Obama's ignorance is not all that shocking in light of a report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He truly is the president of the youth vote! Obama's academic career was full of ethnic studies types of academia, which are the weakest of all disciplines, and even though he still gets called a "constitutional scholar" he has never produced the publications or depth that typically goes with that accolade. The only class he taught, as far as I can tell, was, not surprisingly, Race and Gender in the Constitution- or something along those lines. Again, another piece of circumstantial evidence that makes someone who understands just how bad academia has become wonder.

What can Obama do to prove himself? Take off the training wheels. Even his admirers are admitting he is the most teleprompt dependent president in history. We know this is because he tends to fall hard without the training wheels. His gaffes are growing at an exponential rate it seems. I remember when I was young and I would pretend I was Magic guiding the Lakers to glory on my local court. The beauty of such immature fantasies are that you can always find a way to win no matter how many bricks you throw up. Because you are in your fantasy land, and eventually you make a shot and that is the one that sets the crowd roaring. Unfortunately, Obama has lived in such a fantasy bubble his entire life, and now finds himself unable to make the shot even when there is no competition. Let's be perfectly honest here. How many presidents get such a perfect start? Control of Congress, astronomical approval ratings (higher than Ore-ee-on?), and a bumbling, demoralized, and completely routed opposition? To borrow a hockey analogy it's like every guy on the opposing team has five for fighting and yet Obama still can't get the puck in the goal. The media even tries moving the goal to catch his errant shots, but can't make it happen! This is because he is still playing teeball in the major league. Note to the president, you're out after three strikes, no more tee. No more training wheels. Prove yourself please.

I always liked the circus but...

2009-03-21T19:05:00.000-07:00

At this point in the New New Deal we can stop talking about ideological differences and start talking about simple competency. If the Obamateur,as Mark Steyn refers to him, was referring to his Congress and his administration when he made his Special Olympics comment he might have had a point... The media does treat democrats as if they were "special." Rush that stimulus through at the urging of the president and forget that AIG lobbyist, er senator, Dodd added that "special" language to it that you didn't read Mr President? That's ok, here's a cookie and a couple more adoring biographies. Be incompetent enough to give Gordon Brown a DVD set encoded for North America? Don't worry, we know, you're special. Did your big wig economist say that the fundamentals of the economy are "sound"- almost exactly what you ridiculed Senator McCain for a few months back? Well, we understand that you struggle with the similarities between the words "strong" and "sound."

The only problem is that real "special" people are genuinely likable and decent people. Like many kids growing up I was a little unnerved by people with Downs Syndrome, but my best friend had an aunt with Downs and through him and her I learned first to be comfortable, and then to enjoy people with Downs. They are some of the most likable and beautiful people you will ever meet. Not so our with our "special" leaders. They run our country like carnival hucksters taking our cash at the door and leaving town when we realize they painted stripes on a donkey and called it a zebra. You can put lipstick on a pig, but its stilla pig right? So why aren't we enjoying this circus? Because we aint getting our money's worth. These clowns aren't funny.

David Freddoso Kills it

2009-03-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

I only heard of David Freddoso during this past election, but he has been on a killing spree. This article goes into great detail about the phony outrage and hypocrisy of the democrats over the AIG bonuses. He goes beyond the soundbites from Dodd everyone is hearing and really digs into the depth of the democratic corruption and hypocrisy. The democrats voted for it, even after various republicans had pointed out the errors , arguing that this very thing could happen! Absolutely amazing. Please read the article. The democrats should be getting hammered for this- but don't hold your breath. Establishment corruption at its best. Welcome to Chicago.

God Bless the French

2009-03-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

I have been an unabashed Francophile since becoming good friends with a frenchman upon whom I and the rest of the Socal skate/surf crew bestowed the coveted title of "Bro". So I celebrate with France Bernard D'Espagnat's Templeton Prize. His arguments justifying the rationality of the supernatural and even God are good and worth reading.

Or what, You gonna slap me? revisited

2009-03-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

Obama supporter David Broder officially announced the end of the honeymoon for President Obama in a piece that has created a lot of discussion. Unfortunately the most important line he wrote is a throw away that has gotten zero attention. Toward the end he admitted, "Despite his popularity, Obama is not an intimidating figure and so he can expect to be tested time and again." I wrote about this in a January post Or What? You gonna Slap me? Because this by far the most critical and dangerous aspect of President Obama.

I grew up on the other side of the tracks in a heavily masculine, Mexican culture. A culture where "weak" men got no respect. Coming from this background one of my first solid impressions of the young president was that he was a pushover. As I wrote then, this is the kind of black man you see coming down the street... and cross to say hello. So what is going to happen when Obama runs into the clear and present dangers on the international scene? How is he going to impress the still Red Chinese? Ahmadinijab? The Dear Leader of North Korea? Boris "KGB" Yeltsin? Heck, Sarkozy has more moxy than the President and he's the president of France. The snubbed Gordon Brown has far more dignity and elegance (sorry Sean Penn) than teleprompt dependent Obama. I would guess that millions of blue collar and rough around the edges Americans with backgrounds similar to mine are already developing the same gut level lack of "intimidation" Broder so aptly identifies. What does that mean for the truly dangerous men? They are not so favorably disposed to President Obama as Broder and the elegance lover Penn. It's safe to say they see him with disdain, and will respond accordingly.

Huff and Puff and Blow their House Down!

2009-03-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

It's rich to see a bunch of politicians who voted themselves a raise during a recession, and President Obama whose earmarks back to Chicago got his wife a 200k raise (but whose "important" job has now been mothballed since she's in Washington) complaining about the AIG bonuses. Methinks the lady doth protest too much... Or as one Kentucky good old boy once told me, "Throw a rock into a pack of dogs and the one that gets hit is the one that barks the loudest."

Today the almighty tele says...

2009-03-16T04:43:00.001-07:00

It's like Russian roulette waiting to see what Obama's teleprompter will say this week. Last week it was full of optimism:

"We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before." — Tuesday's address to Congress.

Previously it had been all doom and gloom. Who knows what it will say next?! "The Browns will win the Superbowl" or maybe even "Eulalie!"

As we hit another Monday there's no way of knowing. It's like we have returned to some primitive moment in prehistory gathering around the altar waiting for our idol to dispense wisdom and knowledge. All hail President Obama, chief interpreter and Holy Man for the great and mighty Teleprompter.

I want my MTV

2009-03-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Many moons ago a sharp cat named Karl observed that religion was "the opiate of the masses." While being religious, I find that I can still agree with him on many levels. Religion does have a sedative or relieving effect for the believer. It offers a sense of hope beyond the tragedies of history. I have always thought that this explained one of the main differences between Leftists and conservatives. For even conservatives who are atheist still maintain many of the epistemological assumptions about certain transcendent realities that will exist regardless of tragedy or personal failure. Leftists on the other hand acknowledge no secure knowledge of anything transcendent and thus, find themselves forced to create heaven here on earth. This is why their activists are so much more passionate and religious about their politics- it's all they have.

But I digress. Sometime during the 20th century a new opiate made its way to the center of western civilization. An opiate even more numbing and desensitizing than previous ones: Hollywood. It has often occurred to me that the Right is wrong in thinking that the Left has no plan for defeating Radical Islam. The Left has the greatest and most culturally devastating weapon of mass destruction produced in the 20th Century. George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Brangelina, and company can wreak more havoc on an indigenous culture than any Special Forces operation. Just let em loose and you have complete and total cultural decay faster than a Sean Penn oscar acceptance speech. Sex, drugs, and rock n roll, baby. It's all you need to bring a culture down.

"Money for nothing and chicks for free." There is no greater opiate, no stronger narcotic than Hollywood. Millions of Americans care less about the recent election than they do about seeing the Dark Knight catch the Joker. Timothy Leary would be proud of our current culture with its ability turn on, tune in, and drop out. It also explains why so many Americans would vote for a man with no experience and little more than an astounding ability to read from a teleprompter. He is a new politician. He is Hollywood. Welcome to the new opiate of the masses. As long as they keep us entertained they can do whatever they want, consequences be damned. Because of this "celebrity politics" Obama may not be held accountable just like the rest of his colleagues in Hollywood. He can make or break any promises provided he just keeps us entertained. In essence, Obama is more Hollywood than Reagan or Schwarz. He lives in the same elite bubble and channels the same celebrity indulgences. We can forgive him everything as long as he keeps us entertained. Welcome the new opiate of the masses. Rock on.

No Solid Leadership on the Right

2009-03-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

It's hard not to like Michael Steele. As a conservative Mexican, I can relate to him on a very deep level. I know how much the establishment hates us, and fights to undermine and demonize us. I am listening to him host Bill Bennett's radio show, and again I find myself liking the man. But I also liked what used to seem like a genuine honesty and sincerity in Barack Obama. But Obama's numerous lies and broken promises revealed (to me at least) the Chicago politician I now believe Obama to be. Michael Steel's first big blunder happened this week when he made his caustic remarks about Rush (a guy I am ambivalent about myself). So far the episode reveals more about Steele's ability to lead than any real rift between him and Rush. Where he goes from here is critical. So far he has not shown the flexibility, verbal skill, and quick wittedness necessary for the position of leading the republican party or even rebranding the party.

Listening to him I do feel like he could become that man- he just needs to learn to anticipate his opponents better. A few years in academia would have helped, as he could have learned to see and understand the Left better, which would have enable him to have better responses that reveal the weaknesses and hypocrisies of the Left. He is eloquent and comes off as a very genuine and likable man. Obama used to have the same effect on me, but his dishonesty has destroyed the charm. Steele needs to demonstrate that the Rush incident was a one time thing, and that he is not just another phony politician like Obama. It's up to him. Right now, the only real conclusions we have on the Right is that we have a vacuum in leadership.

One question settled...

2009-03-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

To all those lunatic fringe conspiracy theorists who think President Obama is a Muslim: We now know beyond the shadow of any doubt that he is not, cannot, shall not, be a Muslim. He likes pork way too much...

A Tale of Two Mexicans

2009-03-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

Both of my grandfathers were proud Tejano (Texas Mexicans) Catholics. Each came to the states for different reasons, but they both loved America and were grateful to live here. They were also on opposite ends of the political spectrum. One was a democrat and the other was a republican. Back then that didn't matter much though, because they were fundamentally the same. This is because they had broader cultural connections through their ethnicity and their religion. Essentially they had shared values and beliefs in spite of their political differences.

In their simple, patriotic lives they encapsulate everything that has changed since the 60s. Prior to the 60s republicans and democrats were from the same culture, shared the same values. But the 60s brought a radical shift to "liberals" as they stopped being liberals and became Leftists. Millions of Americans have yet to understand this, and our current dialog does not help as we tend to use the word "liberal" instead of the more accurate "leftist." Why is this important? Well, for one thing millions of Americans still think of the democrats as liberals when in fact they are leftists. Why is this important?

Because a leftist is radically different from a liberal. I have written about this in my post "If 6 was 9" analyzing the fundamental dissonance between "liberals" who adore a Marxist thug like Che Guevera and liberals like JFK who would have opposed Che. This difference is extremely critical on an intellectual level because it explains the activism that has replaced scholarship in our universities. Leftists built a brave new world on a foundation laid by a number of important 20th century scholars like Thomas Kuhn, Michele Foucalt and a number of other important thinkers we can label under the broad term "postmodern." Bear with me because this obscure academic discussion has world changing implications for America and American culture.

Kuhn argued that even science was biased because it was filtered through subjective human beings. Complementing this argument Foucalt argued that things like "knowledge" and "truth" don't exist and all that really matters is power, and who has power. Think Nietsche. Truth does not matter, power does. This philosophy led to Stanley Fish and deconstructionism, which argues that meaning and truth are "deconstructed" into every text and every situation by a person's cultural norms and beliefs, but that those deconstructed interpretations have no real validity. Enter all these new fields of scholarship like ethnic studies, women's studies, and a host of other "disciplines" that function more like religions than disciplines.

In essence, truth becomes relative to the observer or the culture. So who cares? Well, how does one be a "patriot" in such a mindset? How can one country, one culture, one way of thinking be worthy of anything we call patriotism? On an intellectual level Leftists have no reason for such a thing as patriotism because it is an irrational concept within their frame of mind. There is no good reason to decry a leftists lack of patriotism, because they are being rationally consistent and intellectual honest. The "truth" behind patriotism is nonexistent. This explains why revisionism of western history is so important, because western culture must be proven to be no morally or culturally better than any other culture if Leftists assumptions are correct. In spite of the fact that major developments in the history of human rights, let alone the concept of "human rights" itself, came out of western culture. Such things must be proven to be accidents of history and not a result of the intellectual foundation of Greek and Judeo-Christian thought.

This is why we have abandoned Martin Luther King's ideas. His core principles were founded on western thought, western thinking and Christianity. Our government and our schools honor him once a year, and then spend the rest of the year actively undermining everything he valued in their focus on skin color and culture rather than character and ethics. We can even imagine a time when he will no longer be read in American schools because of the religious content of his
thought and arguments. This is why our high schools no longer teach "history" and instead teach something called "social studies." Social studies falls in line with postmodern thinking about ethnicity and history- less facts, more theory.

Ultimately, this is why our cultural institutions have abandoned the Founding Fathers. They do not agree with them. Their understanding of justice, and government are distinctly different because they are based on a completely different worldview than the Fathers. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, they could be right, but they are also extremely deceptive about these differences because they know that the vast majority of Americans still agree with the Fathers and not them. The answer for those with power, the postmodernists, is to undermine American culture before they discover the bait and switch that has been played. Don't teach history while simultaneously revising it to create an America and that is dirty, ugly, and imperialistic.

Ironically, my conservative grandfather sensed this years ago. He had a sixth grade Mexican education, but read a lot, and rose through the ranks before the days of slobbering multicultural obeisance to actually help draft real estate law and teach real estate at Texas Universities. Maybe that is where he sensed the inherent imperialism and deception of postmodern leftists. I can remember being fairly young and hearing him warm me about the deception of the new white man. I never really understood what he was talking about at the time, but his vivid descriptions of the Faustian deals he saw postmodern leftists striking with minorities across America eventually came back to memory when I saw them being enacted out in college.

My other grandfather, a committed FDR democrat never saw this and continued to vote for FDR well into the 90s in spite of the fact that the only similarity between democrats today and FDR is their love of failed government spending programs... Why is this important? Well, think of Rome, which failed not so much because of external defeat, but because of internal cultural decay. but more importantly, a democracy needs real transparency and honesty for the people to make informed decisions. Instead we find ourselves voting for a man who on one side of the country goes bowling and has a beer with the common folk before jetting off to a champagne San Francisco fund raiser and mocks those little people for clinging to their thundersticks and sky god. The same man who channeled voters frustration with Bush's spending, and then promptly spent more than Bush in his first two months in office.

Those are the immediate issues. But those are not the most important. What really matters are the long term cultural affects of such a situation. For a democracy to be healthy the people, the voters, need to be in the loop. Democrats and republicans no longer come to the table with the same culture and values. The broader and deeper connections my grandfathers had no longer exists, as the Left has adopted an entirely new and fresh way of thinking about humanity, the world, government and culture. Ironically, they are the preachers of multiculturalism and tolerance, but fail to act this out every time they call people on the Right intolerant, racist, bigot, homophobe, sexist, etc. Much of their cultural power relies on not acknowledging the cultural differences between them and the Right, because once they do, they have to be genuinely tolerant. In academia I have found this argument to be ab extremely successful wedge issue, because most honest Leftists will admit that we should think of the Left and Right as separate cultures, which has immediate implications about the incredible lack of real diversity on campus among other things... Maybe we can also learn to understand and dialogue about those differences better when we consciously accept the cultural differences. My students have told me that this revelation really made it easier to understand the other side of the political spectrum and not immediately dismiss the other side. We need to expand this to ther rest of the nation.

Both of my grandfathers liked each other and even went on hunting and fishing trips together, but that was because they were still from the same culture. Such is not the case anymore. Political difference amount to much more than a simple difference in preference- I like Coke but you like Pepsi kind of difference. They now reflect something more like the difference between an atheist and a theist. They are vast and huge and we need to explore them for the sake of the democracy.

Nation of Cowards

2009-02-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

Eric Holder was right, but it took a chimp to prove it. No, I am not calling Holder a chimp. Because of the "cowards" running our social and cultural institutions no one can say anything that could be remotely construed as racial. Travis the now cold dead, Xanax (the owner now denies giving him Xanax) popping chimp didn't exactly choose to go all gansta in order to garner publicity as some of his other colleagues in Hollywood often do in order to salvage a lagging career. No, his Hollywood rage-athon seems to have come quite naturally.

Thus, some clever cartoonist sees an opportunity to mock a stimulus package most of the nation dislikes, and the cowards come out in droves. I thought we were post racialist? Can't someone make jokes about chimps running the country? Heck, in California they would probably be better off letting the inhabitants of the Sacramento Zoo run the state. At least chimps understand the fiscal impact of a banana shortage... You can't really blame Al Sharpton. At this point in his life his responses are completely pavlovian and involuntary. Someone puts blackened catfish on the menu and old Al is on the case.

This highlights a generational problem. For Al, racism really was peeking around every corner. For today's youth, it isn't. But the cowards are running the zoo, and keep promoting the Ward Churchills of the world to positions of power. The cowardice stems from our elites inability to see that they actually won the battle and can move on. Instead, dozens of faculty members at Duke sign their name to a full page newspaper ad condemning the Lacrosse team before the police have finished the investigation. The New York Times removes their first reporter on the case because his investigations aren't getting the a priori Jayson Blair storyline. Well, put someone in who will write the story we know must be true. Facts?! We dont need no stinking facts!

Holder was right. Academia is a place of abject racial cowardice. So too is the media, the entertainment industry, the publishing industry, and every other cultural center of power. No matter how many times they are wrong, they keep the same race baiting game going because their power over us, and over minorities in particular, depends on it. Travis- the racial martyr. All hail post-racial America.

backfilp on a tricycle

2009-02-18T14:32:00.001-08:00

Gotta love action sports:

Washington and Obama

2009-02-17T17:52:00.000-08:00

I remember years ago reading an essay by an old school journalist about how the 60s and the Vietnam War changed journalism. It was a very thought provoking article, because I had never seen the kind of respectful, patriotic journalism he was talking about, but I knew enough history to know that he was right. I also remember Robert Novak (I think it was him) talking about how back then you didn't print all the salacious details about politicians private lives. There were open secrets for example about the JFK, but there was a different code of journalism then.

I love to use this in class as it prompts some fascinating discussions, and we can watch old Hollywood War Movies and compare them to movies today and talk about how even though the Iraq War has had less casualties than D Day we are still trained to be instinctively against it. There is only one war the establishment still allows us to support: The Civil War. Although we remain blissfully ignorant of its many defeats and bumbling leadership... Lincoln's near defeat for re-election etc...

But I digress. It seems that currently we have returned to that previous state of journalism in regards to President Obama. Going back to the early days of campaigning the press showed a deep reluctance to dig into any of the more embarrassing histories and associations of Obama. Moreover, they treat him with a sort of reverence and awe that can only be compared to the treatment our first president received. Indeed, only George Washington was treated with more respect and honor than President Obama. Unfortunately, there is no doubt as to where this newfound respect and deference originate, and we cannot hope to see the return of a time when the media had some kind of standards... It is less from respect for the office, the country, and more a result of anatomical "thrills" as Chris Matthews would put it. But then you could call George Washington a "community leader" too!

Nirbama?

2009-02-13T12:20:00.000-08:00

Utopianism has long been a hope and dream of western civilization. Primarily a vision of the Left, I think it is safe to ask ourselves if many of our fellow Americans have finally reached that final stage of Enlightenment and entered Nirbama.

Let us recap. The new president has had more than his fair share of self- induced problems. We can only hope his ever changing cabinet may finally settle down in the next couple of years... probably just in time for the taped phone conversations between Rahm Immanuel and Hot Rod Blago to go live. His deer in the headlights "trade war?! What's a trade war" moment kicked us off towards the reconciliation and global respect we lost during the Bush years, and his unconstitutional power grab for the census has yet to shake the faithful. The New Republic has declared conservatism dead, presumably slain by St Barack. Bushitler's Secretary of War obviously was redeemed from his evil master, presumably in private medition with The One. Why else would he remain close to The One? Even though The One keeps his secrets we know it must be for our great good.

This is because he has indeed led huge numbers of the nation into a new stage of enlightenment: Nirbama is Now. Medical professionals and mystics have discovered a causal relation between Bush Derangement Syndrome and Nirbama; the stronger the case of BDS the quicker the transition into Nirbama. What is Nirbama? A unique and highly enlightened state of mind. No less an authority than Gautama Buddha himself declared that the origin of suffering is ignorance. The greatest ignorance is not knowing the true nature of reality and entering a stage of self detachment from what we westerners would call reality. It seems that followers of The One Dalaibama have discovered a unique form of detachment from reality.

Remember the Buddha's teaching:

Anicca (Sanskrit: anitya): That all things are impermanent.
Anatta (Sanskrit: anātman): That the perception of a constant "self" is an illusion.
Dukkha (Sanskrit: duḥkha): That all beings suffer from all situations due to unclear mind.

Clearly "facts" are part of the impermanent. No longer ignorant to passing fancies called "facts" those who have entered Nirbama suffer from no unclear thoughts.Free from illusion they can follow The One in spite of the tyranny called Reality. Enter Nirbama and drink from the waters of Understanding.

Free your Mind

2009-02-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating realities of human nature is our blind faith in individualism and human autonomy. The truth is we tend to make very few decisions based on facts, knowledge, and critical thinking. I was talking about this with a student/friend who has been slowly awakened the reality that he lives in a Left wing establishment in spite of all the anti-establishment talk and posturing from that same establishment. This has been slow for him because young Americans especially have a hard time "seeing" or realizing the reality they live in and continue to think exactly what our cultural establishment "tells" them to think.

In this regard, they are no different from their elders, because this is human nature. This is why people on the Left who vote democrat continue to insist in spite of the mountain of evidence against them that the republicans are more corrupt than the democrats. Why multiculturalism is good even though it is destroying Black America and now Hispanic America. In order to break out of this, they need to have an "ah ha!" moment that forces them to see something as it really is and forces them to understand their own humanity a little better.

I have discovered that a great way to get students and people turning this direction is to have them think about racism or slavery in American history. In my lectures on ontology and critical thinking I ask students to think about how many people were racists before the Civil Rights Movement. We talk about how a majority of people simply believed or ignored the truth of segregation and racism even though it was right in front of them every day of their lives. Rather than move on to the typical and predictable discussion 12 years of Establishment Left Wing Education has prepared them for, I then force them to confront their own humanity: "Given this reality, looking around the room of 20-30 people in it, our friends, fellow students, professor, is it not reasonable to conclude that if we were to time warp all of us back to the 50s that a majority of us would in fact be racists?" I then ask them if there is any way they can deny this. It ignites a great discussion and a lot of productive thinking. I ask them if there is any way any of them can guarantee that they would not have simply believed what their culture taught them to believe? No one ever raises their hand because the doubt is too clear, too obvious.

This is a great lecture, because it forces them to relate themselves to their "racists ancestors" in a way that is totally unpredicted and way too uncomfortable. It forces them to see just how easily deceived they can be by the cultural establishment. They realize that one of the great sorrows of human evil is that very often it is not intentional, it's just that we don't like seeing it, so we reinterpret it and create straw men to attack instead. It's Bush's fault, or it's a reaction to years of colonial imperialism. Some clever students even begin relating it to their immediate culture. "Are you saying that we have most of our values and beliefs installed in our minds in such way that we never know about it" Very disturbing and very enlightening. I have asked many of my students what this means for the world around them. Are they being fair when they interpret radical Muslims as neo-marxists who will suddenly not hate us when we give them their lands back and recognize their humanity? If it's understandable that the Palestinians hate and kill Israelis because Israel took their land would it be understandable if Native Americans suddenly started a terrorist campaign right here and now? (I have Native blood). How about if I decided to kill them? What if the Jews started blowing up targets all across Europe in response to thousands of years of anti-semitism? And here is the kicker- this was our last lecture last semester- what if the Iraq War turns Iraq into a stable democracy and and in turn destablizes Islamic radicalism and Arab despotism? One of my students who is a hard leftist, but has been thinking very honestly and openly, laughed. He said it would be traumatic, because Bush would end up being a great leader and visionary. He said what seems amazing is that it seems very possible...

There are a million directions such enlightening moments can take. I would advise letting the person take it where they need to take it. Because if real critical thinking has happened they are suddenly open to "seeing" reality for the first time. This can be painful and deeply disturbing as many of my students have told me. Doubt sets in on all sides. And that is good. Because the Left Wing Establishment has made it impossible for an open mind not to see their hypocrisy and corruption. Moreoever, the last thing we want to do is make the same failures my left wing colleagues have made and inadvertently indoctrinate our students and friends. If we are right, and people learn to think honestly, then as their minds are pried open they should begin to turn Right. If not, well, then they can help us correct our thinking. Free minds- that's what I aim for. it may seem contradictory given my opening argument, but I am not arguing for Utopia, just a little awareness. Those moments do happen. The Civil Rights Movement proves it.

Clinton 2.d'oh! redux

2009-02-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

President Obama continues his upgraded, broadband, overclocked, reboot of the Clinton presidency. The 2.d'oh! revolution continues. No president in history degraded the White House and the position of president quite as effectively as Bill Clinton. I had this debate with a colleague just this week. I asked what she thought of an older man in a position of great power who used that power to have sex with a young woman barely a few years older than his daughter. Well, in that decontextualized way you can imagine what she said about the sexist and degrading behavior of such a man. Then I mentioned Clinton. Her defense: Well, she came onto him. Me: So if one of my students comes onto me that makes it ok? Well, no. But you people are always so judgemental. It was a private act! That is the line I always wait for, because it offers me my best chance to co-opt the progressive "if the People lead, the Leaders will" follow attitude of the Left: The Oval Office is not a private office. It's the office of the people, la gente (it's very effective to throw a few highly accented Spanish phrases into the mix, even if you grew up speaking English first and have no accent).

I have about a 50% success rate with that basic fact. My colleague is a decent women who simply cannot let go of her faith in the Democratic party, but when she realized this fact she did admit that there was something destructive and degrading about what President Clinton did. The other half of President Clinton's story is that he got away with it. In doing both he degraded the office in a way it never had been. Now President Obama has not done anything like that, and probably won't but he has broken a long standing tradition of presidents and started blaming the previous President. In his press conference yesterday he got a little cranky (missed nap time?) and reminded his audience that he inherited this economy.

Now this is shameful and degrading on so many levels. First, it infers that the economy is only the fault of Bush and republicans, a childish and dishonest look at how we got here. But there is a much deeper and disturbing character flaw suggested by such a statement. It almost seems easier to "understand" Clinton's failure because it is such an old and common one for men. When an adult male starts whining and blaming other people, we should have an instinctive revulsion to such behavior. It is not mature, and it is certainly not what great leaders do. Did Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Churchill ever do anything even close?! Clinton at least waited a few years before foisting his indignity on the office of President. Obama couldn't wait a few weeks.

Have no illusions here. This is a very serious issue. President Bush had every opportunity to blame shift. After all, it was the Clinton administration who failed to act about terrorism. But Bush never even came close to blaming Clinton. Bush could have blamed the democrats for the economy, but no (maybe he should have tried to be a little more vocal here). Bush never even called out the democrats for their irresponsible, Al-Jazeera evening newsbite comments like, "The War is Lost" (Harry Reid before the surge he voted for had been implemented). Even though those irresponsible statements by democrats functioned as "one for the Gipper" moments in terrorists camps Bush still never called out or blamed his democratic colleagues. Yet here we have the leader of America and the free world almost whining as he suddenly realizes maybe I don't want to play ball with the big kids after all. They don't put the ball on a tee after I couldn't hit it!

This is very painful to watch. And write. While disagreeing with President Obama, I do not want to see him fail or be mocked. Growing up in a rough and lower class world, my first instinct is to mock Obama a whole lot more than I have done here. But something restrains me and even nags at me about the things I have already written. You know what that is? The dignity and respect surrounding the Office of President of the United States. But president Obama, like Clinton before him, has done great damage to the nobility and honor of the office. I would still die for President Obama, but it would now be only the "President" and not "Obama" I would die for. He has degraded the office of President in a way no president before him has ever done. No, he didn't sound like a whiny child, but it doesn't matter. No president has ever played that blame game, because it is undignified and not worthy of the office. Presidents don't behave like that. Great Leaders don't behave like that. Children and rank immature, partisans behave like that. Bloggers and journalists can behave like that. But presidents NEVER behave like that. Or at least they never have before. You have sullied and tarnished the office, Mr. President. Please stop.

Gay Horse Poetry?

2009-02-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

Academia has been down the rabbit hole for a really long time. In their feverish hysteria to be transgressive and avante garde they continue to sink further and further into abject stupidity. We are currently in a stage of infinite regress ever seeking some new low. And no matter how many Churchills, Bellesiles, Duke scandals, et al we have we only pretend that there is no iceberg below the water. Like Christian Scientists or hyper pentecostals we refuse to let reality intrude.

Gay horse poetry you may ask? The phrase comes from a friend (the same guy who wrote the story) and an English class he was in. The class was writing short fiction and a girl wrote a vivid description of currying her horse. He and another guy saw a great opportunity for a new genre, hence the sobriquet "gay horse poetry." They were mocking their professor and posited the question what if horses were gay and felt repressed and marginalized? Maybe they too need an outlet, a voice, a stage, an audience to sympathize? The phrase embodies both the tendency on the left to hyperventilate if any minority group is under represented, and their less than rational knee jerk response to blame failure on racism and bigotry. Since then the phrase has become a sort of catch all for anything insanely stupid the Left wing Establishment throws out there. "Sounds like gay horse poetry to me."

Since I work in academia I find myself in a lot of gay horse poetry moments. We talk ad nauseum about diversity and multiculturalism, but everything on campus always ends up coming from a western leftist perspective. Years ago someone noticed that black students weren't getting high enough grades to get into elite universities. So... let's lower the standards and call it affirmative action. The result? Black college students weren't able to perform and compete in those elite unversities and had a high drop out rate. Let's create disciplines called ethnic studies! The result? No one is hiring black graduates, because no one knows what an ethnic studies major does. But it must be institutionalized racism again. Couldn't be the fact that we never went back and asked black high schoolers to learn reading, writing, and arithmatic... Of course black students are worse off than before, but that's not our fault! Gay Horse Poetry policy in action. The word "committee" has become an institutionalized Gay Horse Poetry moment in and of itself. One of my favorites Gay Horse Poetry events is "conflict resolution training." In Mexico we call that cock fighting, but then academia is not quite diverse enough for that aspect of Mexican culture. Bad little brown brother.

Open Source Push

2009-02-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

This is exciting- at least if you're into tech and care about free markets. His comments about capitalism are thought provoking too.

Clinton 2.d'oh!

2009-02-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

"I've got to own up to my mistake which is that ultimately it's important for this administration to send a message that there aren't two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes." (Cited Here. Video not yet available.)

Thus, President Obama washes his hands and stills the raging waters once again. Like Jesus, he arises, speaks a few calm words and stills the storm. And his disciples were sore amazed saying among themselves "Who is this man that even journalists and lobbyists obey him?" One of the best article titles on the latest Obama debacle comes from AP writer Calvin Woodward "Obama comes under sharp criticism from himself" ?! If you're not smiling you should be. That one was hilarious. Read the article, it's even funnier. Disciple Woodward manages to turn the whole thing into a victory for Obama who ends up being so much different than that Bush guy who could not criticize himself.

Ordinary Americans should be shrugging their shoulders as this proves even more that Obama is nothing more than Clinton 2.0: more charming, quick witted, and socially interactive. For those of you that don't know, web 2.0 refers to things like Facebook and Delicious that allow the user to "personalize." They are "dynamic" environments where things "change" constantly. Sound familiar? It should. Obama "changes" much faster and far more dynamically than Clinton ever did. He is even more adept at "personalizing" the average American's pain right? I mean the price of arugula has skyrocketed causing us to cling to our boom sticks and sky spirit...

But any honest American would have asked President Obama the questions Williams, Couric, and the rest of America's Truth Squad somehow missed, "If there aren't two sets of rules for prominent people then why does Geithner get to stay?" "Why does Eric Holder, who pardoned a prominent rich man because another prominent rich man received a payoff from the first rich man's wife, get to stay?" Two sets of rules anyone? As one famous ordinary American would say, "D'oh!"

Google Shutdown

2009-02-02T08:31:00.001-08:00

Dont know if you noticed the Google failure Saturday, but it has generated a lot of discussion in the tech world. One of the general fears is a type of Matrix centralization of control and power. Ironically, Google is the company aiming for that. Rumor has it they are anticipating a future where every computer is linked to a fulltime global internet. Not a far fetched idea. Google's response to that is to think of their system, their apps, as your one stop shop. They envision a completely online Operating System, document management system etc. No hard drive needed because nothing is stored locally. They have it all. Your computer operates through their servers, apps, and software.

Tech people tend to be instinctive leftists- primarily for reasons I have covered in other posts. But they also have a strong commitment to the free market, especially competition, because they have so much positive experience with competition producing better products. What we all worry about is a web monoculture that emulates Microsoft's 90s dominance of the software market- generally considered a bad time for innovation. But what happens if someone hacks that network or if it shuts down? Y2k all over again or nothing to worry about?

True Story of the Multicult

2009-02-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

One of the best illustrations of the the level of abject stupidity that exists in our culture comes from my first semester as a grad student. My best friend decided to write an article for the school newspaper about a fictitious trip he took over Spring Break to South America to do humanitarian work with a primitive tribe. Except for some minor details the following is absolutely true.

He wrote a fairly typical description of humanitarian relief work that happened through the first few days of the trip: water purification type stuff followed by evenings filled with amazing cultural experiences that somehow always ended up placing western culture and America in a bad light. The real kicker, though, came when he described an ancient tribal ritual they were allowed to watch toward the end of the trip. He described a small glen or meadow with a fallen tree trunk placed at the far end of the clearing under a tall cliff. The trunk had obviously been there for years and was stained with a deep dark brownish tint that did not look like the wood's natural color. He was soon to find out why... But first a youth of the village was tied completely nude, face up to the tree. To his surprise, and the total consternation of the rest of his group, the women of the village proceeded to have "rape like" sex with the youth over and over again. My friend vividly described his gut level reactions and all the confusion he experienced watching this event, but he was able to overcome his first instinctive judgementalism and accept the "Other" (a loaded term on the Left. From Edward Said). In the article he wrote that he now sees that this is because he had been privy to such an inclusive and tolerant education.

But the real shock of the event came when another group of young women brought their newborn babies to the tree trunk and proceeded, one at a time, to beat their children to death on the very same tree trunk. My friend vividly described the disparate reactions between him and his fellow westerners. Because of his education he was able to see the deep cultural significance of the ritual, obviously some sort of fertility ritual indicating the circular nature of life. But friends and fellow westerners were appalled and horrified by the barbarous nature of these "savages."

Well- you get the picture. Some of the details may be off. This was at least 8 years ago, but the essential facts about a "rape" and "murder" being understood as something significant due to his multicultural education are absolutely true. When I first read it I told him there was no way the newspaper would publish it- they would see through it.

Guess again. They published it and loved it. As did a number of professors. My friend was stopped in hallways time and again and congratulated on his sensitivity. What was more amazing was that when he told the truth a few weeks later, not one of those open minded members of the multicult examined their beliefs for one iota. They were mad at him and that was it! Not even a small ray of doubt disturbed their comfortable righteousness.

Brave new world that has such people in it.

Johhny Ramone on True Punk

2009-01-31T21:26:00.002-08:00

Johhny Ramone:
JOHNNY: Yeah, that’s all hippies. Same thing as was going on in the late sixties. To me, I think punk should be right wing. That’s how I see it. The left wing is trying to destroy America by giving handouts to everyone and making everyone dependent on them. They only care about the voter base. They don’t really care about anything else. They don’t care about anyone. If they can get illegal aliens to become able to vote by motor registration, they will. They’re illegal aliens! They don’t even belong in the country, let alone voting. It’s just to keep their base of voters. Is it best for America? It’s not best for America.
Original interview here. Politics start towards the bottom.
Hat Tip to Joe Lima at Big Hollywood for posting the original link from this great post.

This is the essence of the punk movement and why I started this blog. Punk as a culture and a philosophy is skeptical, to say the least, of grandiose promises. Johhny's conservatism just as easily sees the con in televangelists and messianic Leftists. I only wish he were alive today to see Obama's impossible promises and cult like popularity. Johhny cuts to the chase: it's all about voting- meaning, it's all about Power. This is the essence of the punk movement, speaking truth to power and identifying the corrupt nature of government and humanity. Punk and conservatism both lack the starry eyed idealism and faith in humanity that has become so popular and cliche in western society, which is why neither wants the government to have so much power. We know they will abuse it.

God Bless you Johhny
RIP

Art as Religion

2009-01-31T11:04:00.000-08:00

As one of the great mass of unwashed "heathen" out there, I am never surprised by the highly moralistic and preachy nature of contemporary art. Since the 90s we seem to have entered a new Medieval period where art for art's sake is forgotten in lieu of art for the sake of the cause, the oppressed, the marginalized, the hungry, black left-handed midgets, vertically challenged basketball players, et al. Historically, there is nothing wrong with this as primitive art was undeniably a method of communicating and reaffirming primitive culture and identity, usually in the form of religion. Art has always, to some extent, served this purpose. But that was in a culture that was relatively static and void of real diversity.

Fast forward to the present and you find something quite different. Art and the Arts continue to be dominated and ruled by a small group of likeminded elitists who all share the same values, beliefs, and culture. But the rest of the world has grown far more diverse. Neandertal man lived in a relatively static universe. When he encountered "the Other" it was usually in the form of a saber tooth or a mastedon. And therer was usually little doubt as to what their intentions were... But today we have Buddhists, atheists, Mormons, Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, Asians and more all mixing- each with their own unique universe based on their culture.

However, anytime "accepted" art depicts diversity or the Other it is stale and predictable. This came up recently talking with one of my students about art and why I dont care for it anymore. He volunteers at the local Museam of Contemporary Art and was telling me how he finally discovered what a certain piece "meant." Predictably the piece, which is beautiful in a technical and mechanical level, was about environmental degradation. Really? Am I supposed to be surprised. My student was surprised when I told him that I knew that already, because art is so boring and cliche, because it is enslaved to the leftwing establishment. He was mystified and perplexed, because art is so avante garde and transgressive!

Really? You mean you can't tell the whole story the second you know that the protagonist is gay, black, Muslim? We talked about it and he started seeing the Con pretty quickly. We talked about how Art has become church for the secular Left. It is a place to go and have all your values and beliefs reaffirmed. Theatre and concert goers hear predictable and stale messages about the same things over and over again. The music and cinematography may be beautiful and arresting, but far too often, the message is not. If you strip it away, there really ins't much difference between modern art and televangelists. One Con is just a little more slick than the other. but they are both soaking their gullible audiences for millions of dollars to present the same canned, boring message.

Given the wealth of western society, it is invariable that with so many "artists" out there that we should still have some great art, incredible music, and beautiful movies being crafted every year. And there are still some artists, even in the establishment, who give reign to their artistic nature more than their politics, but that is only because there are so many. The less practicioners of any art and the more you will notice its decay. Take theater and poetry for example. The drastic decline in these two art forms is due less to the barbarian appetites of the dirty masses who cannot appreciate the sublime intricacies of the current offerings. Rather it is that there are just so many "artists" whose work has all the depth and sensitivity of a jackhammer that the great ones like Billy Collins can't make up for all the really bad egocentric melodrama out there. These are the bad preachers who still attract followings, but lack the mass appeal that their more restrained colleagues offer.

More importantly, art has devolved into mere technical tricks and developments. The medium and the message are less important because the Art establishment has placed the same limitations on art as the Medieval Church. Iconography produced some beautiful works, in spite of the same predictable message much like our Arts today. But this situation does not allow Art to flourish as it should. We need another reformation.

Art should be free. And it has had some pretty amazing moments in the past. But right now it is enslaved to hypermoralism. A bad thing, especially in so diverse a culture.

If 6 was 9

2009-01-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Jimi Hendrix's poetical bent ran head on into the coffee shop pseudo-philosophers of the 60s when he gave such a mysterious title to another guitar masterpiece that ends up simply being a reference to the song's 6/9 chords. Heavy Man. Millions of drug supported "deep" debates about the consequences of 6 being 9 were inspired by a guitarist with a poetical bent. I remember some hippie friends at Humboldt arguing that 6 must be 6 because otherwise the entire world of numbers would be deceived! Well, how about if liberal were leftist? We tend to think of them as the same thing when we should separate them. What's the difference? Well, think of war, lower taxes, and nationalism. All three were easily supported by liberal presidents of the past without any betrayal of their party or its ideals. But liberals today have serious philosophical problems with all three. The liberals and democrats of the past were still nationalists. Today, they are globalists. Yesterday, they believed in assimilation. Today, multiculturalism. Two completely different animals. If 6 was 9...

Why is it important? Because millions of people are like my grandfather, who kept on voting for FDR well into the nineties. He thought leftwing progressivism was the liberal progressivism of the past. But the left today is postmodern instead of classical liberal, socialist instead of big government. Leftists today have made a hero out of communist revolutionary Che Guevera, a man liberal heroes like Kennedy and Roosevelt would have opposed. The difference is profound and we need to clarify it and drag it out into the light so Americans can begin to see for themselves the dissonance and hypocrisies of the ruling elite. It is important because younger generations have zero understanding of America's founding values. They do believe that Health Care is a right, but can't explain why. They believe that Global Warming is a serious threat, but have never immersed their minds in Washington's farewell address. It is important for the same reason it is important to know and identify the enemy in the War on Terror. By facing reality we can at least discuss and think about it honestly.

Russell Kirk famously declared that he was a conservative because he was a liberal. The tragedy is that this poignant observation of American society was lost to all but a few intellectuals when it needed to enter into the popular mind. If this happens our new generations will at least be able to question where their ideas come from and see that there are alternatives. As things stand, they are all becoming "liberals" because 6 is 9.

Diversity Anyone?

2009-01-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

I was talking to an evangelical Christian colleague the other day (there are a few in hiding in academia). The conversation turned towards politics, and my approach to her was, "I assume you are somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum." Now why would I say something like that? We all know that evangelicals are robots who do whatever James Dobson tells them, right?

Not exactly. First, last time I checked evangelicals are far more politically diverse than say, academics. Second, academia is so predictable and boring that I never believe a professor or colleague believes anything other than standard left wing orthodoxy. No matter how conservative or classical liberal they may sound it is always best to assume an academic is a leftist democrat. The most conservative (voted for W in 2000) prof I ever personally knew was a Marxist. No kidding. A Marxist evangelical to be exact.

Guess what? My colleague voted for Obama. Big surprise. Beyond the complete lack of diversity here, we are talking about a serious problem. Like Al Gore's famous hockey stick graph the level of intellectual and political diversity has declined at roughly the same rate that our diversity in our broader culture has increased. The person on the street could be a Buddhist, environmental conservative cross stitcher. But the academic... well, you know everything about them before they open their mouth. This makes for a very boring Academy.

On a more serious level, it is the elephant in the room. It is the reason unqualified idiots like Ward Churchill become Department Chairs at major universities. The reason impossibly flawed and just plain wrong books like Bellesile's Arming America win major academic rewards. The reason dozens of profs at Duke can condemn the lacrosse team before the police have investigated. In short, it is destroying true intellectualism and scholarship.

Open Source Software

2009-01-26T05:31:00.001-08:00

For those of you who don't know "Open Source" means free software. It's stuff you can download off the Internet and install for free. Up until a few years ago most of this stuff was small, support type stuff. But now we have Operating Systems and major software bundles out there. In fact there is so much great stuff out there that I am currently designing a class for my grad students based entirely on open source software.

This has become important in light of the failures of Windows Vista and Apple's proprietary business model. The best and most user friendly OS out there is Ubuntu. Free and relatively easy to install. An added bonus is the Linux code its built on- way less viruses. An advanced user could even partition their hard drive and run Ubuntu as their primary OS, and keep Vista for things that only run with Vista- an oxymoron, since even basic Microsoft apps have bizarre issues with Vista. The other major software my students will be using is Open Office, which basically mirrors Microsoft Office and is even "supported" by Office, so to speak. I have been showing many students this suite and they have loved it. For anyone this side of an advanced user, Open Office is all they really need. It runs beautifully and its free!

Skateboarding then and now

2009-01-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

Skateboarding has paralleled broader American culture in many ways. When it first went "big" in the late 80s it was still small and guys who rode were still considered misfits and outcasts, definitely anti-establishment. Like the greater establishment culture of today they still project an image of rebel outcast while making millions of dollars telling the rest of the culture to be just like them. Bam Margera presents the rebel image on MTV, but he dutifully believes and absorbs whatever the establishment tells him. In essence, it's all an act, and American youth are buying it big time. The dissonance can be hilarious and perfectly reflects the discontinuity of broader American culture. All of the entertainment industry supported Obama and they won big, but in their minds they still like to think of themselves as hip anti-establishment types fighting against the entrenched ruling order of America. Which would be... middle class Christians from Kansas? Skateboarders supported Obama with the same type of goofy "fight the power" attitude, even though a majority of youth wear their clothes, buy their shoes, worship at their altar. Skateboarding is the fastest growing sport in America and a billion dollar industry. The two videos I have posted below perfectly mirror this change.

Disclaimer: I may be nostalgic, and I am posting a "legendary" video of Ray Barbee, one of my favorite skaters in the world. But I believe even with my preferences the diference between the two is obvious. The first is a work of art in its simplicity. Both in filming and videography. The whole thing was probably filmed over the course of a few days in Los Angeles. He is wearing the same clothes in the entire video. Nothing fancy, just a guy skateboarding. In contrast, the second video of Chris Cole, took at least 6 months to film, and was shot all over the world: China, Barcelona, etc... Yet if you analyze the "image" and "attitude" presented in both you get a stronger sense of rebel punk from Cole's video, even if he is anything but that. Barbee's outfit was intentionally crafted to not have logos and brands prominently displayed, but Cole's entire ensemble, from the torn jeans, to the tattoos and wrist bands is a carefully crafted image designed to sell product and a lifestyle. In fact, when he first broke into the scene the manager and owner of his company had a quiet sit down with him to explain that his image wouldn't work. Skaters today, in spite of the rebel image, are actually meek peddlers of merchandise. When a skater gets sponsored they are not allowed to wear any clothing but their sponsors'. You only need to watch a few minutes of each video to see the contrast. The amazing irony is that skateboarding has built a corporate empire peddling its anti-corporate, anti-establishment roots.
Just like the rest of the entertainment big business fat cats, skaters live in a alternate reality where they protest the corruption of "big business." It's an elaborate mythology grown out of 60s counterculture that has yet to be honest with itself.

Or what? You gonna slap me?

2009-01-24T09:46:00.000-08:00

One of my most visceral memories of the new president was an interview where he was "getting tough" on all those unjust critics of his wife. He was really playing the part well, but I remember my gut level reaction being, "Or what- you gonna slap me?" As he continued to present what he thought was toughness I started laughing. Because to anyone who grew up on the other side of the tracks Obama is not tough. He's an emasculated metrosexual academic. A Whole Foods guy. This was really clear to me when I read his description of rebellion from his college days. "We ground our cigarettes into the carpet and played our music loud..." (probably not an exact quote). I found those passages of his book, and there were lots of them, hilarious. Because from my real world lower class, barrio perspective, rich private school guys like Obama are rarely rebellious tough guys. Oh, wait, he tried Coke too. Wow. Never been threatened by gangs, never got into a real brawl, or went down to Watts or South Central to see what real tough guys were like. I always imagined him and his friends thinking a real "daring adventure" would be going to the kind of Mexican dive I grew up in and associating with all the"people." You can just imagine them sitting there looking around them at all the "diversity" and feeling really hip and cool. Just one of la gente ( the people). Or I imagine him hanging out at Whole Foods smoking herbal cigarettes making suggestive, but PC comments to all the ladies, "Did I ever tell you that you have a beautiful mind. Bet you're gonna brake the glass ceiling huh?" "Wanna experience totally equitable passion?" You get the picture.

Maybe I am not completely fair here, but I am closer to the truth than many would like to admit. The guy went to private schools his whole life and tried way too hard to rebel, but always in a politically correct, establishment approved way. This is the kind of black man you cross the street... and say hi to. Which is not all bad. let's face it. Barack Obama is a likeable man with some real sincerity, despite his political heredity of dirty Chicago. Neither is there anything inherently wrong with the "New Man" of the left. Like any image or persona, it has strengths and weaknesses. The New Man was obviously a reaction to some of the failures of the old masculine warrior type of the past. But like the masculine hard-edged cowboy type, the New Man has his inherent problems too. Specifically, he is not capable of instilling immediate respect or even fear in men who come from a more masculine culture like hispanic, or- and here's the kicker- Islamic culture. The gut level response from a male culture to a man like our new president is an instinctive awareness and probing for weakness. Obama's western, postmodern male is perceived as inherently weak and easily controlled.

So what does the hyper-masculine world of Islamists thinks about the New Boss? Definitely not the same as the Old Boss. He is not the kind of guy who takes you out to the wood shed. He's the new male, sensitive and thoughtful, attuned to his emotions, let's sit and talk about this, which is exactly what he has committed to do, unconditionally, with the world's most dangerous men. How do you think they are going to respond? How about, "Or what- you gonna slap me?"

Context is More Important than the Medium or the Message

2009-01-21T18:09:00.000-08:00

One of the most maddening issues on the right is their obsession with technology and youth. That's all they have been talking about- but they obviously know little about the subject. I teach technology and work closely with college kids as a professor and academic librarian. Kids don't care. One day after the inauguration and they are already "over it." But a post by Michael Powell at New Majority (David Frum's new website) warns:
The Party has failed to fully comprehend how the young interact and communicate in an era transformed by the digital revolution. We do not yet appreciate their passions and their fears, nor pause to look at the world through their eyes. Battling to be a voice of technology and innovation is vital. In the world of youth, you must first “get it” before you are listened to.

Hugh Hewitt has been talking about the same thing and the enormous amounts of information youth are comfortable with, but if you read any academic journals or library journals, or secondary ed stuff you will hear teachers complaining about how kids only use the first few hits from Google and the wikipedia entry. Now I am one of those few academics who really likes Wikipedia, but I have to agree. These kids dont process enormous amounts of info and their technical skills are surprisingly minimal. They only learn what they need for the moment and rarely move beyond that.

Now Hewitt and Powell and the rest are absolutely right about the need for a conservative presence on the web. But even more important than that is establishing the context. I have discovered that it is possible to defuse the inevitable leftward tilt simply by stimulating youth to think about who the establishment is. As a lover of classical liberalism I abhor the Orwellian approach my colleagues take to education. I don't want my students to think the way I do, but rather "to think." One of the best ways to do this is to get them thinking about who really has power in our country. Who controls all the things that create and monitor our sense of self and identity. The Left has made this pretty easy by turning "tolerance" and "diversity" into laughable double standards. The greatest irony of contemporary society is that the current cultural establishment still pretends to be anti-establishment. When my kids realize that they can predict and even make their professors arguments (insert movie star, rock star, journalist, etc for professor) beforehand they start to "smell a rat" as Jack White would put it. They may even start to think.

Advertising professionals are discovering that Youth, especially millennials are jaded to coercion because they receive more advertisements and messages than any generation before them. They tend to turn off most of it except at the most subliminal levels, which is why their gut level instincts are leftist- they are saturated in those values even if they have not consciously thought about it. There are two answers to this challenge that advertisers developed. One is imaging. Think Apple and ipods. Now I think that many aspects of Apple computers are superior to Windows- especially Vista- but like many in the tech world I can't stand the whole Itunes philosophy and approach. But Apple has imaged themselves as the mp3 player to have just as the Left and the democrats have imaged themselves as anti-establishment, pro poor, pro environment, pro education, uncorrupt, and generally the party of the cool and the hip. When I ask my kids why they think ipods (or democrats) are better they never have any substantial answers. They have simply been trained to think that way, because those are the cultural myths that make of the foundation of our society.

The other things advertisers try to do is create grassroots movements that have a life of their own. The Cloverfield movie promotions were a good example. My favorite was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails genius viral marketing scheme (must read). These movements are founded on a web 2.0 platform and philosophy. Make it interactive and make it communal.

I have used the second approach in revitalizing my dead library. And it was dead when I took over 3 years ago. But due to the fact that I embraced youth culture and used their modes of communication to rebrand and reimage the library we are one of the most popular places on campus.

Now reimaging the conservative movement is a thousand times more difficult because the fight is fixed. The ref is against us, the bookies are against us, the organizers are against us. Everyone who controls the game and its rules is pretty much against us. The left gets to start on our 20 yard line, but we start on our own goal line and only get 3 plays. You get the picture. Very discouraging. But this context is also the key to a comeback. Americans- and our next generation is no different here- hate a fixed game. They love the underdogs. We all cheered when the Giants beat the Patriots, and even people like me who don't like baseball root against the Yankees because they try to buy their way out of everything.

By pointing out what should be obvious, but isn't- namely that the left is now and has been for a number of years the establishment, I completely reorient students way of thinking about the entire situation. It's like suddenly discovering that the game is fixed. All this without even beginning to discuss "free market economies," "limited government," etc. The beauty of the approach is that the Left has made it too easy for us- not even my most ardent and radical leftists students have ever denied that every professor and teacher teaches the same thing. From there, it is a challenging but manageable jump to identifying who controls the rest of our culture. I like to use Rage Against the Machine's ( a radical Left band) chorus from "Killing in the Name", "Now you do what they told you, Now you do what they told YOU!" When students recognize the deep irony, even hypocrisy of the song, they have begun to think. It is hard to turn that off, and it sets them up to begin questioning authority in a meaningful way.

Finally, levity is good. I like to cover my mouth, breathe deeply and give em the old, "Luke, I am your Father." Image is critical. Darth Vader is cool, because he represents the new type of hero- a bad guy who earns redemption. The subliminal suggestion is that conservatism is edgy and dark- like Batman. Even though in all reality we are actually the "rebel scum."- The point is not that we need to get on Twitter, Facebook, and be cool. Youth can see that goofiness, and because we are not the establishment we can't get away with obvious pandering like President Obama did with his," Been to Whole Foods and seen the price of arugula?" cluelessness. Don't be cool. We don't have to be, because we are the ones who question authority, we are the anti-establishment. Get out there Sith Lords!

Who is the establishment

2009-01-21T16:50:00.000-08:00

Growing up in the Southern California 80s skate culture I was keenly aware of the anti-establishment. Everything was about being against the establishment, questioning authority etc. Back then we knew who the establishment. It was the same establishment the 60s rebelled against. But a lot of things changed in the 90s. Ironically, this perfectly mirrors the current dissonance in skateboard culture. In the 80s we really were anti-establishment, even the pros weren't making that much money and skateboarding was countercultural. But now they are rock stars making millions of dollars peddling the illusion of being counterculture when they are in fact card carrying members of the establishment culture. The irony is rich, and so are they. And like all rich people who make money for nothing (thank you Dire Straits) their values and politics are predictably leftist.

The real issue though is how they are able to maintain the illusion of being counterculture rebels when they are in fact now the ones with power. Power and money go together and you can see that the new establishment is totally of the Left. The dissonance is that they still pretend to be anti-establishment when in fact they are the establishment. They own academia, k12, the news media, the publishing industry, every aspect of the entertainment industry. Every cultural center of power has less intellectual and political diversity than the average evangelical church.

Americans desperately need to make the paradigm shift and realize that times have changed. Power and money go together: hence, the new Establishment.