Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble…

I’m trying to think how this picture could be snarkily enhanced through photo-shop or some such editing software but it’s really perfect as is.

Pulled right off  The Nancita’s website home page. She should really be more careful of the image she is projecting. Wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.

DEATH PANEL MOTEL…In 3-(D)CA, 8th District

I came across what appears to be a secretly taped film of Nancy Pelosi hawking the health care bill behind closed doors in the House chambers.

Us stoopid Conservative’s have a real hard time seeing what Obama, Reid, and Pelosi think we should see in this bill, so be sure and wear your government approved and tax payer supported 3-(D) glasses while viewing, or you will see everything in…one and a half (D)…like those evil Tea-Bagger’s.

Image of Nancy Dracustein courtesy of No Sheeples Here.

Laugh and the world will laugh with you…

In light of this short comment by Jonah Goldberg at the corner via instapundit (caution, link whoring in progress… please watch your step), I thought I would repost something from a few months ago. At the time, I assumed that anger would follow the laughter. On further reflection, laughter, and only laughter, is the best medicine.

Is it just me or are people starting to laugh at the claims made by Obama and the Dems, that in order to save our economy we must spend wheel barrow loads of borrowed money to adopt every pet leftist project to come down the pike in the last forty years. From the by now obviously mis-named “stimulus” package to the recent reticence of the Dems to follow their fearless leader into the neverland of socialized medicine, more and more people are starting to notice, and instead of getting upset they are shaking their heads and laughing derisively, realizing that again they have been had by a smooth talking pol.

It has been my experience that leaders can overcome many things in the course of their tenure. Laughter of the sort I’m starting to hear from independents and conservative democrat friends who cautiously supported Obama in the hope that he would bridge the differences between conservatives and liberals and usher in a new bi-partisan politics is not one of them however. This sort of self deprecating sour humor, the ” I can’t believe they screwed me again” attitude that I’m seeing will quickly enough turn to disgust and then anger. I would feel better about this phenomenon if I thought that the Republican party was in any position to take advantage of this so far small but growing populist backlash, but they are generally as corrupt as the party currently in power.

They say that power abhors a vacuum and will rush to fill it. If this backlash of center left and center right represents any significant amount of people then it will represent power. The run up to the 2010 midterms should be interesting indeed.

Personally, I Blame Bush

From SOTU:

“As we take the fight to al Qaeda, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.”

Is there anything more rodent like than taking credit for another’s accomplishments? OK… so a weasel is not technically a rodent, but vermin is as vermin does.

My Sixth Grade Science Project: By Albert Gore Jr.

 

Interesting project Junior. Perhaps you should concentrate your academic efforts to the Drama Dept. from here on out.

In this post at American Thinker, Andrew Thomas presents the theory of anthropogenic global warming as a sixth grade science fair project. As anyone who has been following the revelations regarding comically inadequate computer codes used to model “climate change”, manufactured and missing data at the IPCC, NASA, NOAA , and most recently outright fraud by the “scientists” pushing this theory, it should come as no surprise that young Albert’s project was not only presented with a failing grade, but with the realization that some people by their nature are just not suited to the serious realm of the hard sciences and that perhaps their true talent lies elsewhere.

Cheer up Albert. There is nothing wrong with the drama department. Acting is a perfectly honorable, though somewhat silly I must confess, profession for a man of your breeding and background. I know your father wanted you to be President but at some point you must follow your bliss and become what destiny has determined is your calling.

Chicks dig drama majors and who knows, there may even be an Academy Award in your future.

Image courtesy of photoshop sensei Carol at Mako Snark.

The Art of Salesmanship.

When new consumer protection laws ran guys like this out of business in the 70′s they didn’t go away, they simply learned how to lie more effectively and went into politics.

NSFW language but nobody’s got a job these days so WTF.

All I have to say is,

“For the first time in my life, (well…ok, in a year or so) I am proud of my country”.

A Wise Man

I could listen to this guy speak for hours. He is that rare bird who possesses an intellect of the highest order yet has the wisdom to understand its limitations. In a sane world we would turn to men like Thomas Sowell to help guide us through the shoals of  modern life, although I very much doubt he would presume to offer such guidance. “Seek the truth and then use your common sense as your guide” he would probably say. “You’ll likely do as well as I would”.

Thanks to Peter Robinson at Uncommon Knowledge.

On a related note, Dr. Bob at The Doctor Is In posted a very thought provoking essay a couple of weeks back that I thought worth reproducing here in full. When a free people turn their lives over to be run by “the experts”, experience tends to show that we’ll get just what we deserve, and get it good and hard.

 

Our Gnostic Masters

December 22nd, 2009 · 12 Comments

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason.
 
       – G.K. Chesterton –

We have become a nation of experts.

They are everywhere: on TV, advising us about raising our children or improving our sex life; in magazines and newspapers, lending a measure of weight to opinion pieces disguised as news; in business, promising to improve productivity and bolster profits through higher productivity, or slicker marketing, or yet another reorganization or “team-building” project. They are ubiquitous in government and politics, lending credence to the implausible and certainty to the unpredictable. Armed with statistics, and studies, and the ethereal proclamations of other unnamed experts like unto themselves, they saturate our psyche with innumerable “facts” and figures, that we may live perfect lives in an imperfect world. The chaos which swirls around us need not engender fear and hopelessness — there will always be an expert to hold your hand, lest you become lost and wander from life’s perfect path.

Intimidated by their credentials and self-assured certainty, we slowly relinquish the uneasy feeling that their advice and conclusions invariably run counter to our experience, and common sense, and the simple wisdom of life acquired through parents and parish, logic and lore. Theirs is a relentless battering of our natural defenses, made ever more potent by lives lived without margin, frantically running to and fro, pursuing the very goals our experts have set forth, while quietly dying to the insight gained by simplicity and satisfaction with life’s precious but fragile treasures. Their strident advocacy drowns out the the quiet wisdom whispered to the soul in contemplation and prayer, found only in reflection and the fertile soil of rich relationships.

The fecklessness of our experts is often utterly dispensable, if annoying, as our guilded guides waffle from truth to contradictory truth: “Take estrogen!” “Don’t take estrogen!” “All fats are bad!” “These fats are good!” “Sun causes cancer!” “Sun prevents cancer!” What is true today will be foolishness tomorrow — and nary a hint of humility will be heard from those who hustled us mere months before.

As our increasingly secular and superficial culture abandons the transcendent truths of faith and the tested wisdom of tradition, we search desperately for a lodestone upon which to ground our lives, and so trade trust and belief in transcendent and transformational absolutes for fear and the desperate desire to control the world which has become our enemy. We frantically cling to every proffered proof, no matter how foolish or feckless, seeking something upon which to ground and anchor our lives. As these sands shift dangerously beneath our feet, we lurch and stumble from fragile branch to broken rail, as we stagger along a path which leads ever downward.

Yet the allure of the experts can prove far more destructive than mere personal angst in a turbulent, fast-moving world: how many listened to the professionals who told us we could not lose in real estate? Leverage to the max, it can only go up! The consequences across the economy have been devastating — except for those who sold us this sage advice. These “experts” understood the game far better than the market, and walked away unscathed and wealthy, leaving only our wreckage in their wake.

Our dependence on the guidance of scientists, economists, educators, and technocrats proves especially toxic when their expertise becomes wedded to money and political influence. Under the guise of shielding us from the complexity of their disciplines, they evolve into closed guilds, guardians of a secret knowledge which we, in our harrowed and hectic lives, have no time and little interest in understanding. As our educational system — itself run by a closed guild — produces generations of students tutored in woman’s studies, postmodern deconstructionism, and the evils of the West, yet ignorant of logic, philosophy, and the rigors of the hard sciences, the problem is compounded. We increasingly are left with little recourse but to trust those who guard and disperse the hidden knowledge we no longer comprehend. Our gnostic masters dispense their wisdom; ours is but to nod, and obey.

Nowhere can this process better be seen than the unfolding drama surrounding the East Anglia email scandal. Centered on one of the three major centers for climate research and data in the world, the hacked emails and software code have ripped open the veil to show us the inner sanctum of science utterly corrupted and politicized. At issue is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — the theory that recent warming trends in global temperatures are caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide from human activity, fostered by industrialization. It has long been a theory which struggled to pass the sniff test, placing undo weight on a trivial component of so-called greenhouse gases, while ignoring the enormous (and obvious) impact of solar activity, water vapor, and cloud cover. Yet for years we have been told — in increasing shrill and strident tones — that this theory is “settled science,” and there is an imminent crisis at hand.

It has been fascinating to watch this ball of yarn unravel. In what may prove to be the greatest hoax mankind has ever witnessed — most certainly the one with almost unimaginable financial impact globally — we are watching the “settled science” of AGW disintegrate. We read how data was manipulated to hide declining global temperatures and make them appear to be rising sharply (”Mikes nature trick“). The peer review process made sure no contrary or skeptical opinions were published, and efforts were made to delegitimize journals which published such articles. Proxy data such as tree-rings were cherry-picked to ensure that the data conformed to the AGW philosophy. FOIA requests for data were met with stonewalling and destruction of raw data. The homogenization of temperature station data — making adjustments to the temperatures to reflect changes in the surrounding environment, such as urbanization — showed shows striking and arbitrary adjustments to demonstrate a sharp rise in temperatures when no such changes existed in the raw data. Other major climate research centers are similarly stonewalling raw data requests. The data problems just scratch the surface; the software used to generate reports and alarmist graphs was incompetently written by amateur programmers — and could not even reproduce the graphs from the original data without massive software hacks and fudge factors — by the programmer’s own admission.

The response of climate scientists to these devastating revelations? Denial and attack. The response of the UN Climate gurus and American and Western policy makers? Denial and attack. The response of the media to this massive global meltdown of AGW “settled science? Silence.

Amazing.

Whatever the role of human activity in global warning, one thing is abundantly evident: the current “science” of AGW is not really science at all, but more closely resembles a pernicious, cultic religion. Its priesthood holds the secret knowledge about “climate change,” and we the fools who question or challenge them engender naught but condemnation, ridicule, hatred and disdain. For the priesthood and the true believers who bow to them, the payoff for guarding their secrets are huge: for our scientist priests, millions in research grants, often at taxpayer expense; for the evangelists (Al Gore comes to mind), the ability to engender hysteria with wild, apocalyptic climate claims while raking in millions on carbon trading and investments in “green” technology; for the politicians, the opportunity to further extend the control and power of government into every aspect of its citizens lives while pocketing huge political contributions from environmental groups and green industries.

We have been lectured endlessly by our postmodern mentors that religion is naught but ignorance and superstition, while scientific “facts” are Truth. But “knowledge is power,” as the saying goes — especially when the knowledge can be hidden behind a veil of secrecy, manipulated at will to conform to unchallengeable presuppositions and philosophies, then relentlessly drilled into our collective consciences through compliant and complicit channels of media, education, and politics.

The climate scientists are hardly alone in such gnostic gambits; evolutionary biology — whose “scientists” seem to spend most of their efforts proving that God doesn’t exist rather than demonstrating that their tattered and threadbare theories of evolution have an actual basis in reproducible science and genetics, and a demonstrable and reliable predictive value (which all solid science must have) beyond the the pure speculation and projection that comprises most evolutionary science. Think I’m being a crazy fundamentalist creationist? Try, as a scientist, to demand that evolutionists satisfactorily answer any host of devastating challenges to their theories: the irreducible complexity of biological subsystems such as the eye, the cellular mitochondria and intracellular protein factories; the entropy problem (complex systems tend naturally to disorder and chaos, not more complexity); the Cambrian explosion; the impossibly long odds that all physical constants stood at precisely the correct values at the instant of the Big Bang; the enormous problem of free will, higher intellect, and purpose in the human animal which has no precursors in lesser beasts. Challenge these — even with understated, respectful, and serious questions — and watch how quickly the ad hominem attacks begin, how quickly you will be excluded from “peer reviewed” literature, ridiculed and ostracized, and labeled as an ignorant creationist fundamentalist, an enemy of science — or worse.

In our repudiation of a world based on absolutes and transcendency, our free fall into secularization has ironically left us clinging to science as our sole absolute, our foundation in a world which no longer makes sense, in which there are no true absolutes. Yet science cannot bear such weight alone, detached as it has become from notions of absolute truth and the true nature of the creation that is man and his universe. It has become instead a tool of power, and manipulation, and deception. The ship of knowledge no longer has an anchor, and drifts aimlessly toward the rocks of self-righteous deception and the shoals of arrogance.

G.K. Chesterton, writing nearly a century ago, mused that “this is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.” What was true then is ever more true today, as we relinquish our own convictions and the truths which come by faith and tradition for the perilous tyranny of rule by experts. True freedom requires absolute truth, with its liberating transparency and the humility of knowing we are not gods. Science detached from absolutes will not bring progress but peril, not truth but tyranny. In our quest for the Utopia which technology enticingly promises, to forget our foundational truths is to invite disaster and slavery.

Sadly, we are already well on our way.

 

May Rev. Robertson recieve a severe case of burning genital warts, forever and ever amen.

How is it that Pat Robertson manages to stay in the public eye instead of a padded cell? He is quite obviously shit house rat crazy. Here is yet another example of his brand of oh so compassionate Christian mercy. Tens of thousands dead and it’s all their own fault for their ancestors making a deal with the devil at the crossroads. This gigantic buffoon will have a lot of ‘splainin to do when he at long last meets his maker.

Hey! That reminds me of my all time favorite TV preacher, Dallas Texas’ own Robert Tilton. Take a look at that set. Now I know where Obama rented his inaugural address cardboard temple.

High Noon:

Management (that would be me) and my staff of writers (also me) are currently involved in a labor dispute. While we are in contract negotiations, here’s a repeat from season one.

A common theme in American folklore is that of the lonely man of principal willing to do what is necessary in confronting and defeating those who would prey on the innocent with no reward other than being able to look himself in the mirror in the morning. In films such as “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, and particularly Gary Cooper’s performance as Marshall Will Kane in High Noon, the flawed hero confronts what the timid and fearful townfolk are unwilling or unable to confront on their own. When high noon comes ’round, he alone faces the bad guys for no other reason than that his honor demands it. In the end, after having killed or driven the predators from his community, he finds himself unwelcome among the very people he has shielded from harm.

I have nothing left but to be mildly disgusted watching our two major political parties spin, obfuscate, and lie in attempting to fool the so called middle, the independant voter, the uninformed with no set political or life philosophy who decide our elections into believing that they represent anything other than raw political power. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have evolved under our current post modern culture into left and right rails on the same track leading to an all encompassing federal nanny state that seeks to relieve us of the responsibilities of citizenship. Whether progressive leftism or compassionate conservatism, they are both philosophies that seek to control the people by fooling us into trading freedom for comfort and security. Always for our own good of course.

It should be obvious to nearly everyone by this point in history that the classically liberal philosophy of the enlightenment which reached its zenith in our founding documents, a philosophy whose overriding concern was in limiting a government’s power over its citizens, is most conducive to human happiness and success. There is empirical evidence for this anywhere that the philosophy has been put to practice in the real world. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the human nature hardrive however that is causing us, the desendents of a people who were able to author such paradigm shifting documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and then use them to reach heights unimagined, to revert to our medieval default mode of feudal collectivism. Our  incumbent representatives safe in gerrymandered districts filling the role of titled royalty, taxing the peasants in ever increasing amounts while tossing back a scrap every now and then while we fight over it for their ammusement.

As I grow older, seasoned with the broken and bent promises of politicians of every stripe, I have come to believe that the libertarian ideal of individual responsibility and making ones way in life with a minimum of interferance, while the best system yet devised for the advancement of humankind, can only really thrive in a frontier environment. Before the civilizers and do-gooders take over. Anyone who tells you different is reaching for your wallet. A cold look at history and human nature will tell you that once a people become prosperous they will trade away anything to try and maintain that prosperity, including and especially the very means of it.

Men and women of real action and consequence are a rare commodity and as such tend to remind the “good people” in society of their own deficiencies. Once having served their purpose of  making that society possible they are driven from the temples of polite company to wonder the wilderness alone.

Until as it inevitably does, high noon comes ’round again.