A Nod To The Gods

Good lord how did this women get elected?

….yeah right.

 I think all politicians should have military service, the decisions made would at least be from the correct perspective, and we might be able to avoid the next community organizer.

An intellectual is a theory maker. Intellectuals sit on their front porches cutting, sewing, patching; mending theories… An intellectual substitutes for the intractable bloody mess called reality a seamless silken tapestry of pure ideas. 

All thinkers use abstraction and invent theories; inventing theories is thinking. But a theory must be transparent and flexible to be any good. When facts change or new facts emerge, the theory must be adjusted or, if need be, thrown out. An effective thinker cares passionately about theories and abstractions but is obsessed with reality, keeps his eye on the ball, never loses sight of the facts. 

More precisely: most intellectuals are intelligent, but their insistence on peering at the world through cotton-candy theories means that, smart as they might be, they are (unfortunately) predisposed to beliefs that are silly and false.

Thinkers, writers, scholars and scientists “hunger for concrete detail.” But to an intellectual, details are annoyances. The author uses the example of a theory that all roses are yellow and the responses of thinkers and intellectuals when shown a pink rose.  An effective thinker will say, “I conclude that my theory must be wrong.”  An intellectual will say, “I conclude that this isn’t a rose.” When confronted by a reality that refutes some elegant theory the intellectual finds a dodge.

Barack Obama and his generation of Airheads, the first ever coming of age after the cultural revolution, are unique in American history. All former leftist movements were driven by ideology. Obama’s is driven by ignorance…

He is important not because he is exceptional; he represents the post-cultural evolution of the PORGI elite…

Obama himself will go away like a bad cold, but there are many more where he comes from. Nowadays a new generation of Obamacrats enters the American bloodstream every year, in late spring, when fresh college graduates scatter like eager little birds or puffs of dandelion seed to deliver a new crop of Airhead left-wingery to the nation and the world…

That is why we take it for granted that any potential president just knows them. (Obama majored in political science.)   And that, in turn, is why it is so difficult to grasp the truth about Obama. But he has so often spoken and acted is if he doesn’t know what he is doing, hasn’t mastered the minimum job requirements that at last we have to face the truth. The man does not know enough to be president…

That conclusion points to another, even more alarming. Obama graduated from some of the best law schools in America: Columbia and Harvard Law.

He isn’t especially ignorant. He is only the leading citizen of an ignorant generation. What does that say about our schools? About America in general?             keep reading

The Washington Redskins have been in existence for 82 years. For about 80 of those years, virtually no one, including the vast majority of American Indians, was troubled by the name. Yet it is now of such importance to the American Left that the majority leader of the United States Senate has repeatedly demanded, from the floor of the Senate, that the team drop its name; 50 U.S. senators, all of them Democrats, have signed an open letter demanding the same; Sports Illustrated‘s Peter King no longer uses the name; other leading sportswriters have adopted the same practice; and the president of the United States has weighed in on the issue.

…First, there is a rule in life: Those who do not confront the greatest evils will confront much lesser evils or simply manufacture alleged evils that they then confront. This has been a dominant characteristic of the Left for at least half a century. keep reading

Apparently this decision was reversed, but they still ran it up the flagpole. Bastards all of ’em:
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Do they really think nobody is watching? This deserves a personal call to your congressman. With an approval rating in the toilet, this is a slap in the face of every American who concerns themselves with political corruption.

A member of Congress used to have to specifically report the details if they traveled on someone else’s dime. As of last week, that rule was lifted with no public announcement. National Journal reports:

The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings.

For a group of officials that considers an adjustment to their burrito order worthy of a press release and a television appearance, that this change was made literally behind closed doors tells us everything we need to know about it. Members of both parties reached across the aisle and kept their mouths shut about it.

These trips still must be reported to the Office of the Clerk and disclosed there, but the decades-old requirement for individual members to also disclose their particular activities  on their annual financial forms is now gone.

The fundamental reasoning behind these rules is that they make clear the relationships between the politician and any private group paying for trips. Trips, by the way, which occurred more last year than in recent history.

The implication is that if the public is aware, for example, that Representative Vandelay is taken via Gulfstream G5 to the Four Seasons Bora Bora for a week of “seminars” and it’s all paid for by the largest latex company in the country, then Vandelay’s votes benefiting the company can be understood to have been bought and paid for.

As the federal leviathan grows ever-larger and is more intricately involved in every teensy-tiny area of American life, the financial incentive for lobbyist to influence legislation to their clients benefit grows as well. A subtle change in a trade agreement, import duty, or regulation can mean millions of dollars to a firm.

It’s far easier to write a check to a Washington insider to get the field tilted in one’s direction, than to actually compete in the marketplace. And how better to get a politician’s attention than to provide them (and their significant other) with a lavish vacation or trip? This change just means it’s that much harder for us to find out about it. That is not good and should be changed back immediately.

Better yet, it’s time for the Federal government to get out of the business of picking business winners and losers, so the incentives for such behavior are eliminated altogether. We’ll not be holding our breath on this one… found here