The Cargo Cult O The MacGuffinized Feather

Obama and the magic feather: "There have been some interesting attempts to explain the curious psychology of the Obama years, in which an executive office that was already too powerful seized incredible new powers, while conducting an unprecedented semi-nationalization of an entire industry... but the President himself is held completely innocent and blameless for everything that happens.  There's a stunning cognitive dissonance between the nearly religious belief of Barack Obama's followers that he's a superior, elevated being, the smartest man ever to hold the Oval Office - a belief he happily encourages while nourishing a cult of personality, and occasionally remarking that he's better qualified to do every job in the Administration than whoever currently holds it - and the absolute refusal to hold him responsible.  "

RTWT.

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The Hidden Agenda

Ace of Spades HQ: "And whatever other topics the fetid swamps of your minds can imagine."

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Equality Today

Drug tests for welfare recipients: "I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes & the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck, in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem). What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test. So, here is my question: Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?"

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Whoops!

Father of Modern Finance Warns US, Europe: 'None of Their Debt Is Credible,' Recession in 2014: "One of the fathers of modern finance and a winner of this year's Nobel prize for economics said the bloated deficits of the United States and European nations may lead to a worldwide recession.

Eugene Fama, whoe "shared the economics prize for research into market prices and asset bubbles" with Robert Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen, told Reuters on Saturday that the markets may not find the debts of European nations and the United States to be credible."

Thank god he's just another mean Republican dimwit so we don't have to listen...

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Pearl Harbor Becomes Caught In The Memory hOle

Sultan Knish: A Date That Will Live Forever in Infamy: "Early copies of President Roosevelt's upcoming speech to Congress likewise warn the American public of the dangers of overreaction.

"We are not at war with Japan," it says. "We are at war with a tiny handful of extremists who are attempting to drag the Japanese people into a conflict. But we must keep a cool head and not allow them to win by provoking a war. We will defeat this enemy, but we will do it by not fighting them.""

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The "Crackers" Are Not Extinct

Is Black Underperformance A Result Of The Welfare State? - Investors.com: "Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so.

But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.

The Nov. 9-15 issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60% of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50% of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30% of the time.

"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough."

You can find the decoder ring to my title here in the sixth para.

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A Tale O WikiLaws

Obama paves the path to removing Obamacare « Hot Air: "The President delayed some portions of the bill. He claimed that he wouldn’t enforce others imposed on the health insurance companies. HHS is now proposing to make new changes to alter a provision of Obamacare known as the “risk corridors” program, channeling more money to insurers who no longer think they can pull a rabbit out of this particular hat. And all of these actions are making changes – either directly or in de facto enforcement – to a piece of legislation passed through Congress and signed by his own hand.

In the old days, you needed to go back to the well and make changes through the legislative process. By Klein’s reckoning, those days are past. Getting the bill through once is sufficient, and after that the Executive Office can just tailor things as needed. Such tailoring could obviously include directing the appropriate offices and functions to simply ignore the whole thing, no? It sort of takes the idea of presidential signing statements to a whole new level. And who would have guessed that Barack Obama would solve this puzzle himself?"

Hmm...

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Heh

Denier land: How deniers view global warming | Watts Up With That?: "Thanks to Skeptical Science and ScienceFrontier for making this video possible. We can now see the error of our ways."

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Hey Amazon

Instapundit » Blog Archive » SEEN ON FACEBOOK: …: "SEEN ON FACEBOOK:" 

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Witch! Witch!

The NSA’s Witch Hunt | Hoover Institution: "Why do I think there are only 100 terrorists in the country? Consider the Transportation Security Administration. In the TSA’s own tests, TSA employees caught 40 percent of the bombs present on passengers and in luggage (for a 40 percent sensitivity). Astute readers will notice that the lousy success rate for the TSA’s screening combined with the lack of airplane hijackings over the past decade can mean only one thing: There just aren’t that many motivated terrorists in our society.

If we consider that there have been two attempted hijackings in the post-9/11—and present TSA—era, then we can assume that two potential hijackers were caught beforehand. In other words, four tried and half were caught, leaving two who successfully entered their planes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. Interestingly, there have been exactly zero successful attempts, primarily due to passenger activism. The TSA is not the only bulwark against in-air terrorist activities; we must include flight crews and motivated passengers. It appears, therefore, that the TSA’s actions and all those security lines we have endured over the years have likely prevented zero or close to zero hijackings."

Do you float in water? That person just drowned. Wait -- were they a witch or not?

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Memory hOle In The Won

ACLJ: Obama was one of the 'outraged' before he wasn't | The Daily Caller: "“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama added days later when he announced the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, due to the controversy, days later.

Thursday night however, Obama was more frustrated with the people who expressed outrage at the targeting during an interview with MSNBC host Chris Matthews. (Related: ‘Suddenly Everybody’s Outraged’ Obama dismisses IRS targeting of conservatives, which he called ‘outrageous’ in May)

“If, on the other hand, you’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that — I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged,” Obama said, going on to express dismay that even “so-called progressives” were “outraged at the possibility” of targeting."

What firing of the IRS director? Well, because he was about to retire anyway and it was all for show.

The one talent I have to credit Obama with is keeping all these lies organized with a straight face.  He is a truly talented psychopath.

And he has the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect powerfully on his side for those few non-Deltas in the population. Which leaves all seven of us to watch and marvel at the panem et circenses.

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MacGuffins Lost

Ace of Spades HQ: "And this isn't a new phenomenon, either. Since the beginning of this movie, the fanbois have cared very little for MacGuffins (notice they don't care how many thousands of Americans have died in Afghanistan), but have been intensely interested in the Hero's emotional response to it all.

You root for the Hero to win because you like the Hero -- not because you're particularly invested in the Hero's actual goals. And you despise the Villains simply because they're standing in the way of the Hero's triumph.

Chris Matthews sums up, neatly, his only genuine interest in American politics for the past five years:

“We have real people in this country with real power and status who have used that status of power to hurt the country so they could hurt the president.”

Only the Hero matters. The MacGuffin never does.

The Hero is our hopes and dreams. And the Hero has come to us; he has come amongst us."

RTWT ... Did I forget to mention you should RTWT?

UPDATE: And then I found this which has just appeared from Bill Whittle.  What a powerful compare and contrast exercise:

It seems that virtually every culture has independently invented, on their own from the depths of the Collective Unconscious (which is likely hard-wired into the human brain) the same exact story -- the same myth – told again and again and again.

It’s The Journey of the Hero, and it is amazing to me how perfectly it is retold and re-invented and yet remains exactly the same, because the Journey of the Hero speaks to the deepest heart in each of us.

Also RTWT of course.  And let me guess, you haven't read Le Bon's "Psychology of Crowds" yet have you?

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Forecasting Future Ignoring

“What prevents the president from ignoring election laws?” [Darleen Click] | protein wisdom: "Wow."

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Perfect

Instapundit » Blog Archive » COMPARE AND CONTRAST: “Obama has a web site that doesn’t work and drones that kill people. Amazon h…: "COMPARE AND CONTRAST: “Obama has a web site that doesn’t work and drones that kill people. Amazon has a functioning web site and drones that deliver gifts.”

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 9:50 pm"

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Sonder

This Powerful Video Explains Individualism in a Way That Most Liberals Can Understand | Independent Journal Review: "The author of this video John Koenig coined the term “sonder” to describe “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” It is a fascinating bit of film.

As an additional comment, this is why many people are individualists: they believe each person is unique and has the right to live his or her own life free from the coercion of others. When someone forces others to do things against their will, they are stealing a part of their lives, and destroying their ultimate capability. And yet that is what today’s elites propose to do for hundreds of millions of people. Just a thought, feel free to draw your own conclusions."

Nicely done.

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Another Example Of Putting "Broke" In Perspective

Know a Liberal in Denial of How Bad Our National Deficit Is? Show Them This. | Independent Journal Review: "This was originally posted in 2012, but it still does a great job of explaining the national deficit. SHARE this simple video with anyone who is in denial of just how bad our government’s spending has gotten."

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Heinlein On Obamadeath

Robert A. Heinlein - Wikiquote: "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

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Bad Luck (Periodic Reprise)

Robert A. Heinlein - Wikiquote: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.""

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COTD: It All Makes Sense Now!

Belmont Club » Accidental Hero:
"Kinuachdrach

It all makes sense now!

Barry wanted that deal with Iran so that Iranian oil could flood the global oil market, driving the price down, and bankrupting all those evil American entrepreneuers who had outwitted his bureaucrats and found ways to frac for oil in the US. And if Iran ends up nuking Israel as a side effect ... well, Barry's view is that will just show all those Jews who voted for him who really is boss."

There's more...

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Silicon Chasm: The New Feudalism

Silicon Chasm: "While I was driving with Berkey around Atherton, Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Great Stagnation (2011), published a new book, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. There, Cowen bluntly predicted what he called “wage polarization.” The increasing ability of computers to perform ordinary tasks will inexorably transform America into an income oligarchy in which the top 15 percent of people—with skills “that are a complement to the computer”—will enjoy “cheery” labor-market prospects and soaring incomes, while the bottom 85 percent, that is to say, 267 million out of America’s 315 million people, will be lucky to find Walmart-level jobs or scrape together marginal “freelance” livings running $25-a-pop errands for their betters via TaskRabbit (say, picking up and delivering a pair of designer shoes from Nordstrom) or renting out their spare bedrooms (if they have any) to overnight lodgers via Airbnb. That is, if they’ll be working at all. “There are many other historical periods, including medieval times, where inequality is high, upward mobility is fairly low, and the social order is fairly stable, even if we as moderns find some aspects of that order objectionable,” Cowen writes in his new book.

In other words, what is coming is the “new feudalism,” a phrase coined by Chapman University urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, a prolific media presence whose New Geography website is an outlet for the trend’s most vocal critics. “It’s a weird Upstairs, Downstairs world in which there’s the gentry, and the role for everybody else is to be their servants,” Kotkin said in a telephone interview. “The agenda of the gentry is to force the working class to live in apartments for the rest of their lives and be serfs. But there’s a weird cognitive dissonance. Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses.”"

In case you are still under the sway of the propagandists: RTWT.

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