when a leftist picks your wallet it's for good(and not "for the good", as he likes to claim)- moi
As for the climate, you could take every dollar spent on "global warming" and blow it on internet porn, and the Earth's climate in 2050 will be pretty much what it would be anyway. Mark Steyn
It's sad though that we have to receive our entertainment from an industry(Hollywood) that has more in common and has more support for Fidel Castro's Cuba (see Sicko and many others) than America. Greg, a commentator at this debate.
Arguing with them(Chomsky defenders) seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig. Brad DeLong
If Yemen cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will empty out. If Britain cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will move in. (Mark Steyn)
My articles at DESICRITICS
I also write at DESICRITICS under the pseudonym "Libertarian Dog"
How free are you?
Write up all the things you are not allowed to do or can do only at the pleasure of others under severe restrictions, things that hurt no one, violate nobody's rights, concern no one, but still you cannot do them, and you could still be writing after a long, long time.
You are tied- in the name of the greater good, the national interest, communal harmony, the environment, the customs, the traditions, religious sentiments,the welfare of the poor, orphans , the kittens and a million other reasons and causes.
Whatever the cause, one thing is constant- you are tied. You are expected, joyously, to sacrifice yourself for the good of the others. Maybe someday this human sacrifice and slavery will end.
One of the biggest transformations going from Bush to Obama has been the trashing of human rights by the new team in power. They are leftists, after all, freedom and human rights has never been the Left's forte.
A most heart-rending struggle of current times is the desperate struggle of Iranians against their brutal fanatic regime - a regime which does this:
A girl is walking away and a riot guard stops her, she is all alone against the big metal gate, defenseless and not bothering anyone, but an anti-riot guard decides to lash her across the sheens a couple of times with his truncheon. But there is worse to come, another girl is pulled over and this time she is smacked in the face with the truncheon, she is knocked out and when a young man comes to her aid, he too is pulled away and kneed in the face before more women come to their rescue. Also notice the security agent with the camera who is filming the protesters. This is what they do in public, just imagine what they do behind the prisons.
For Obama the protestors have been irritants in his set-in-stone policy of talking to the mullahs. He even cut off funding for center documenting Iranian human rights violations to suck up to the regime. The protestors are now trying to shame Obama into doing the right thing-
The New York Times reports that opposition protesters in Iran, in between beatings and tear-gassing from riot police and the regime’s hired thugs, have started a new chant: “Obama, Obama -- either you’re with them or you’re with us.”
In case you were wondering what the answer might be, the statement yesterday from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said it all. Gibbs declared that Obama administration officials were following reports of the unrest and “hope greatly that violence will not spread.” This was a great moment in the annals of diplo-speak. No mention of who might be committing the violence, or who might be its victims. Violence, it seems, has the capacity to spread without any human involvement.
Unpleasant as it may be for the president to hear, his policy is objectively aiding the Tehran regime and harming the opposition in their ongoing struggle.
The chanters are right. The United States can either be with them or against them. Right now, President Obama is against them. But it’s not too late for him to switch sides.
I hate to say it - but the most powerful man in the world has his moral compass pointing in the wrong direction
.
Hergé drew a delightful series of comic strips on a couple of urchins named Quick & Flupke which were later published in form of 12 albums.
Going through one of these albums,Two of a Kind, this one story made me wonder -was Hergé making a veiled statement on the dangers of climate change? Or was he making fun of all those global warming alarmists that have now proliferated more extensively than rabbits?
(click for larger image)
Observe - the climate change in the comic is 'cooling'. The stories were published in the 1930's and 40's. Till 1940 the planet is supposed to have warmed(a time when CO2 emissions were low). It then cooled till early 1970's (even though the CO2 emissions were rising rapidly) then warmed again and then has cooled ever since 2001 forcing even the BBC(the Pravda of Global Warmingism) to sit up and take notice.
We The Living was made during World War II in Mussolini’s Italy, of all places. The government warily allowed it to be filmed as a propaganda vehicle against the Soviet Union. But when Mussolini realized the movie was a critique not only of communism but of all forms of statism, he banned it from theatres, where it was a smash hit.
The government rounded up and destroyed all copies of the film – save one, the original negative, which was secreted away. As we are informed by the fascinating documentary (included among the DVD extras), the film’s reels languished unseen for decades until Rand’s attorneys went hunting for it among the Italian film community.
Duncan Scott, who produced the DVD release, explains how as a young editor he talked his way into recutting and subtitling the film alongside Ayn Rand herself. WTL had originally been released as two separate films. They combined them, trimmed away some of the excess, and removed or redubbed pro-fascist propaganda speeches inserted at the insistence of the authorities.
The issue of re-dubbing is intriguing -
Scott tells how in the original version, Andrei delivered a heated diatribe against the evils of capitalism. Needless to say, this speech didn’t exactly belong. Not content merely to change the subtitles, Scott actually hired a sound-a-like Italian actor so he could redub the voice track in Italian to match the new subtitles.
Unfortunately the digital transfer was done in 1987, and the cost of a high-definition remastering was prohibitive for this DVD release, so the picture quality isn’t quite as crisp as one might wish. Nevertheless, it is completely watchable.
Glenn Kenny quotes J.Hoberman's description of the film -
"Shot mainly in close-up and entirely in the studio, We the Living evokes an atmosphere of total, demoralized corruption. As directed by...Alessandrini, a filmmaker with some Hollywood experience, the movie does not lack for mise-en-scéne. The grim sets are scrawled with hammer-and-sickle graffiti and Cyrillic exhortations, emblazoned with menacing posters of proletarian ape-men and encephalitic Lenins. That everyone is always layered with clothing adds to the sense of unpleasant crowding, just as the already high fog quotient is significantly augmented by a constant sucking on cigarettes. The atmosphere is as gray as the dialogue is purple."
If anybody gets a hand on the DVD, you know where to contact me.
Socialism kills, as does it's cousin -the welfare state.The huge state apparatus that allegedly exists for the common good inevitably becomes a supremely arrogant and brutal self-serving monster.Just visit any government office as an ordinary citizen -and you'll know(as if you didn't)how much the public 'servants' are really public 'masters'.
We are just chattel -we are forced to pay taxes to feed this monster, we must vote to legitimize the beast, we exist to bow before the powerful politicians and their goons, to grovel and bribe at the endless number of departments to get something done, we are there to serve...the public servants.
This monstrous reality is perfectly encapsulated in what is state murder in all but name-
A 32-yr-old patient lost his life outside the Post Graduate Institute for Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) hospital, Chandigarh, after he was stopped from entering the hospital due to security reasons. The Prime Minister was visiting the hospital. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has said that the Prime Minister is saddened by the incident and that it has demanded a full report on the incident.
Video from Times Now
(if the video does not play, here is the direct link)
The patient Sumit Prakash was reportedly shunted from gate to gate for almost two hours which allegedly led to his death. The deceased was from Ambala and was suffering from acute kidney problems that required him to visit the Inderjit hospital in Chandigarh on a monthly basis.
Today, he also developed respiratory problems which led Inderjit hospital to send him to the PGI in order to get oxygen. It was outside the PGI that he was refused entry as the Prime Minister was addressing a convocation there.
Did Manmohan Singh not know that his visit to the hospital would put patients' access to doctors in severe jeopardy? Is he so clueless? Or just plain vanilla callous like the rest of the political class to which he belongs?
Shouldn't he be prosecuted for knowingly putting patients at risk -finally killing one?(But which official has the balls to start such a line of inquiry -let alone a prosecution?)
At minimum, the hospitals need to be declared 'Prime Minister-free' zones.
Politics, they say, is a killer. For us chattel, it is.
But hey, he is 'saddened' .
Texas has usurped the leadership position that, decades ago, belonged to California. Today California is in decline, likely irreversibly so. William Voegeli draws the sad but instructive comparison in the Los Angeles Times:
In America's federal system, some states, such as California, offer residents a "package deal" that bundles numerous and ambitious public benefits with the high taxes needed to pay for them. Other states, such as Texas, offer packages combining modest benefits and low taxes. These alternatives, of course, define the basic argument between liberals and conservatives over what it means to get the size and scope of government right. ...
California and Texas are not perfect representatives of the alternative deals, but they come close. Overall, the Census Bureau's latest data show that state and local government expenditures for all purposes in 2005-06 were 46.8% higher in California than in Texas: $10,070 per person compared with $6,858. ...
Confronted with a stark choice between government dominance and freedom, Americans are voting with their feet:
One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.
So are higher taxes and greater public expenditure in California worth it?-
But those higher taxes in California must be going somewhere. Why aren't they benefiting those many thousands of citizens who are leaving the state for greener pastures?
In what respects, then, does California "excel"? California's state and local government employees were the best compensated in America, according to the Census Bureau data for 2006. And the latest posting on the website of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility shows 9,223 former civil servants and educators receiving pensions worth more than $100,000 a year from California's public retirement funds. The "dues" paid by taxpayers in order to belong to Club California purchase benefits that, increasingly, are enjoyed by the staff instead of the members.
I'm afraid the dynamic 2-in-1 do-badan-ek-jaan* superhero team of Chacha Manmohan S.Gandhi(as Sauvik Chakraverti so wonderfully likes to put it) is rushing India towards the failed California model -a numerous high-caste of sumptuously paid and pampered inefficient and corrupt public employees, large-scale(rather, huge-scale) spending on 'social' sectors in the name of the poor, higher taxes whether directly or indirectly(see all the goverment controlled charges increasing all around you -from transport to vegetables to electricity).The 2-in-1 team likes the 2-step tango -massive amount of spending(as if it is their baap's* money) and massive amount of debt(which we and our children's and our grandchildren's baaps will have to pay off).
We have only just begun to nibble on the fruit of partial liberalisation of the Indian economy. The 2-in-1 team is poisoning the fruit with it's 'social' obsessions.
Only it will be much worse in India because-
the size of Indian babudom is much larger and their predatory grasp much stronger,
their level of corruption and venality cannot be matched (not even close) by the Californian babus,
all of India will be California and there is no Texas to escape to.
(emphasis mine)
*The colorful Indian language translator- do-badan-ek-jaan - two bodies but one mind
Foreign policy realists question whether any effort in Afghanistan can succeed. Possibly they are right. The interventionists, if I may call them that, suggest the realists are being unrealistic -- that Afghanistan matters and it matters much more than Iraq or, before that, Vietnam ever did and that we can prevail. Possibly they are right.
But the ultimate in realism is for the president to gauge himself and who he is: Does he have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to continue to be an unpopular war? Will he send additional troops, but hedge by not sending enough -- so that the dying will be in vain? What does he believe, and will he ask Americans to die for it? Only he knows the answers to these questions. But based on his zigzagging so far and the suggestion from the Copenhagen trip that the somber seriousness of the presidency has yet to sink in, we have reason to wonder.
At last,somebody discovered a government program that actually worked!
That is like fulfilling the supreme quest of alchemy to transmute lead into gold. Deserves at least a dozen Nobel awards all at once. From the fertile brain field of BHO and the Democrats came this wonderful piece of goodness for the economy and the environment -Cash for clunkers. Wise man Joe Biden called the program “an unqualified success”.
But hold on to those Nobels yet-
Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.
Now can anybody name any government program that works?
The Central England Temperature (CET) record, starting in 1659 and maintained by the UK Met Office, is the longest unbroken temperature record in the world. Temperature data is averaged for a number of weather stations regarded as being representative of Central England rather than measuring temperature at one arbitrary geographical point identified as the centre of England.
A Scottish statistician, Wilson Flood, has collected and analysed the 351 year CET record. Here is the comparison of the 18th Century with the 20th Century:
Wilson Flood comments:
“Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously.”
The Soviet journalists at least had an excuse -they had a perpetual gun held to theirs and their families' heads.
What excuse do the journalists and editors of the still free world have?
New York Times scrubs quotes that are embarrassing to Obama.
Deleted quotes include-
And the prospect of winning was too irresistible. After all, Mr. Obama has already envisioned the day when he could welcome the world to his hometown, never mind that small matter of reelection. “In 2016, I’ll be wrapping up my second term as president,” he told a rally in Chicago in June 2008. “So I can’t think of a better way than to be marching into Washington Park ... as president of the United States and announcing to the world: Let the Games begin!”
and-
“They shouldn’t try to make politics of this,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a Chicagoan himself, told ABC News. “I think they should take some pride in the U.S.’s win, and you know, we’ll make sure they get some good seats once Chicago does host the games.”
Right out of Stalin's time -airbrushing embarrassments to the Dear Leader out of history.
These passages — demonstrating as they do the glaringly unfounded arrogance of Obama’s administration — have been conveniently removed from view.
And you know in your bones that, were it Bush who had gloated so, we would hear nothing else from Big Media for a week.
What made them turn into bootlickers of Obama? They viciously destroy Sarah Palin and zealously cover up Obama's mess(and there is a lot of it strewn all over the road).
Why?
Bump - oops! 'Pravada' in the title changed to 'Pravda'. Slippery fingers, impatient mind -that's me!
When I read this in Narayani Gupta's book Delhi Between Two Empires,pg 9, I knew it stank (or as we say in India, mera maatha thanka!) -
Ghalib, like others, realized that the British had come to stay, and shrewdly thought that a qasida to the Queen would be a useful investment. But he went that far and no further. When Thomson, the provincial Secretary, treated him boorishly, Ghalib sacrificed the offer of an appointment at Delhi College, though he desperately needed a steady income to cushion him against his extravagances and his gambling debts.
And sure enough. William Dalrymple describes the incident in greater detail in the Last Mughal, pg 129-130 -
Ghalib, like many writers before and since, suffered from the potentially combustible combination of expensive tastes, a keen sense of his own worth and insufficient financial resources to support either. Always precarious, his finances had become especially troubled after his sense of personal honour compelled him to turn down the lucrative chance to become the Persian Professor at Delhi College. Ghalib had arrived at Delhi College in his palanquin having being invited to apply for the new post. But after reaching the college gate, he refused to enter until Mr Thomason, the secretary, came and welcomed him, as he insisted his aristocratic status dictated. After a long stand-off, Mr Thomason came out personally and explained that a formal welcome was appropriate when he attended the Governor's durbar, but not in the present case, when he came as a candidate for employment.
Ghalib replied, 'I contemplated taking a government appointment in the expectation that this would bring me greater honour than I now receive, not a reduction in those already accorded to me .' The secretary replied, 'I am bound by regulations.' 'Then I hope you will excuse me,' Ghalib said, and came away.
What a difference in the two narrartives! And I don't mean the detail.
Ms.Gupta leaves an impression of Ghalib being a victim of colonial arrogance - you know, those racist, rude British that pepper our films and stories and official histories.The truth, as in the account of Dalrymple, appears just the opposite. It is Ghalib who in his aristocratic loftiness and vanity did himself much harm while Mr.Thomson(or Thomason) was politely correct and rule bound.
Mr. Thomson has long left this earth, of course but I hope that Ms.Gupta would do the departed soul justice and correct her description of the events.
Update - an amusing twitter exchange in the linked post:
@brooksbayne: "If Roman Polanski were a Duke lax player he would have been hunted down and disemboweled."
@andylevy: If Polanski were a Duke lax player he wouldn't be guilty of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.
@gpollowitz: If Roman Polanski were a Duke lax player, Duke would really suck at lacrosse.
“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”
Yes, Roman, we sure do.
By "young girls" he probably means unwilling 13 year olds and by "fucking" he means rape.
No wonder he has been put on a pedestal by the cultural left.They all want to do it - and Polanski has!
Amazing!
Whoopi Goldberg, who defended child-rapist Romnan Polanski -in her universe something called "rape-rape" is a milder, gentler and perhaps a benevolent form of rape- is a Toys"R"Us spokesperson!
Watch out kiddo, Whoopi has invented "rape-rape", junior edition
There are occasions when something horrid and unhinged,something usually lurking just below the surface, breaks out of the fog and bog in a dramatic way -and we can see clearly the face of the beast.
Such a clarifying event has been the recent arrest of Roman Polanski.For those who care to see -and even through the moral haze of our times this issue is stark and glaring- the profound sickness in and at the heart of the elites now lies bare.
Let's keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl(Samantha Geimer) a Quaalude(a sedative) and champagne................let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.
Samantha Geimer in 1978
Now look at all the outpourings of sympathy from the highly decadent and decaying priests of media,arts,culture and politics-
From French ministers and the government-
France has appealed to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 76-year-old director's immediate release from a Swiss jail as he faces extradition charges from Switzerland to the U.S. Polanski is a French citizen.
Hollywood moguls are pressuring California lawmakers to do what they can to stop the extradition of Roman Polanski, aiming to prevent the Oscar-winning director from being forcibly returned to the U.S. to do time for raping a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s.
Arty-sharty elites in Europe-
Organizers of the Cannes film fest compiled a petition, whose signatures include fest prexy Gilles Jacob, fest director Thierry Fremaux, helmer Wong Kar Wai and thesp Monica Bellucci, to lobby for Polanski.
On has to wonder -what kind of people are these, these whom we idealize and idolize and go crazy over(I don't but many do)? What kind of sick bubble they live in when they come out in support of a child-rapist?
Here they are-
“We demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski,” urges the petition. “Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision… It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him.”
You mean film festivals are sovereign territory where favored criminals can receive peer adulation and protection from the law?
Needless to say, this reminds me of the left’s umbrage at conservatives daring to bring up Chappaquiddick after Teddy died. Yeah, he left a woman to drown and then made jokes about it afterwards; he was for universal health care, though, wasn’t he? Same with Polanski: Dare we deny the man who made “Chinatown” an occasional drugging and raping of a child? Sure, a kid gets traumatized for life, but on the other side of the scale: “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’d be sweet if the left could come up with some sort of mathematical formula by which we could tell whether an artist or liberal politician has exceeded his quotient of moral indulgence. I’m assuming “Chinatown” wasn’t so awesome that Polanski would be excused for shooting a kid in the head at point-blank range, so evidently the film’s “worth” less than that but more than a child-rape. Let’s figure out just how much of a liberal hero you have to be to get away with certain crimes.
Apparently the real victim was not the 13 year old but Polanski who accomplished so much over the past three decades despite not being able to travel to the United States to make his movies.
These shocked 100, maybe more by now, signed a self righteous petition protesting the "astonishing news" of Polanski's arrest. So shocked were they, that they confused the reason for his arrest as a mere matter of free speech. Because superior filmmakers can ignore common morality laws designed for mere mortals and do as they please ..............................................................After all, what has the 13 year old victim accomplished in the past 30 years?
Now we see and understand the much tomtommed compassion of the cultural elites -their precious geniuses are allowed a free rape pass.
Can we now officially declare that leftism is a sickness of mind?
for the part of the post after 'Read More' to become visible. However if you still cannot access the full post, just click on the post title to go to the full post page.
BAN SHEILA DIXIT, NOT PLASTIC BAGS
This is an appeal to save one the most helpful entities on this planet- the plastic bag which has become a endangered species thanks to the predatory practices of environmentalists and politicians. Mother earth and the humanity are now belaboring under the reckless overpopulation of these two hegemonic groups who will not let the rest of us live in peace without their overbearing meddling.
So let's - BAN SHEILA DIXIT, NOT PLASTIC BAGS BAN SUNITA NARAIN, NOT PLASTIC BAGS
If you agree with me then please leave a comment here
Monckton vs. Littlemore Debate audio
The audio of much anticipated debate between Lord Monckton, a prominent global warming skeptic and Richard Littlemore, a well-knownglobal warming alarmist
Rajendra Pachauri gets the 1st LNC Green Hypocrite prize
Search pro-freedom sites -over 130 sites and counting!
