Monday, June 15, 2009

Green

Whereistheirvote

Support the Tehran "Tea Party"!

UPDATE: The Manifesto:

1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader because he doesn't qualify as a fair supreme leader

2. Remove Ahmadinejad from president because he took it forcefully and unlawfully

3. Put Ayatollah Montazeri as supreme leader until a review group for the ghanooneh asasi ( "constitution" ) is set up

4. Recognize Mousavi as the official president

5. A goverment by Mousavi and start a reform of the constitution

6. Free all political prisoners without any ifs ands or buts, right away

7. Call off any secret organization such as "gasht ershad"

UPDATED AGAIN: Good stuff from Ledeen:
There are reports of members of the Revolutionary Guards defecting to the dissidents. There is this report from an Iranian website (the only place i’ve seen it) according to which 16 senior Revolutionary Guards officials have been arrested:
“These commanders have been in contact with members of the Iranian army to join the people’s movement. Three of the commanders are veterans of Iran-Iraq war. They have been moved to an undisclosed location in East Tehran.”
If true, it’s very important, but, as I have often noted, the regime has distrusted them for some time. The young Islamic revolutionaries of the late 1970s are now middle aged, and do not wish to slaughter their neighbors. That is why the mullahs have imported killers from abroad: the five thousand or so Hezbollahis who, according to Der Spiegel, have been brought in from Lebanon and Syria. Dissidents on Twitter report clashes with security forces who do not speak Farsi, and there are even some rumors suggesting that Chavez has sent some of his toughs from Venezuela. Who knows?
Pray for them.

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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Huxley's Dictatorship O The Now

I'm betting you've never seen this interview with Aldous Huxley. If you ever needed a wake-up call to turn off American Idol and start paying closer attention to your world, this is it. You should not only watch the whole thing but follow the YouTube links to watch the other two segments of the interview.

Then you need to put it together with this choice little bit from David Ramsey Steele's "The Mystery Of Fascism":
The leadership theme was reinforced by the theoretical writings of, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, especially Pareto's theory of the Circulation of Elites. All these arguments emphasized the vital role of active minorities and the futility of expecting that the masses would ever, left to themselves, accomplish anything. Further corroboration came from Le Bon's sensational best-seller of 1895--it would remain perpetually in print in a dozen languages--The Psychology of Crowds, which analyzed the "irrational" behavior of humans in groups and drew attention to the group's proclivity to place itself in the hands of a strong leader, who could control the group as long as he appealed to certain primitive or basic beliefs. (30)

The initiators of Fascism saw anti-rationalism as high-tech. It went with their fast cars and airplanes. Fascist anti-rationalism, like psychoanalysis, conceives of itself as a practical science which can channel elemental human drives in a useful direction.
O Ooof. Useful direction for whom? Raise your hand if you think your fellow citizens have been sheared like sheep.

But I digress ... What is the latest with Britney Spears today? And is Michelle still lifting weights?

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The Road Trip

Problem? What problem?

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

On Protest (Iranian "Election" Update)

Today we had a Flag Day Eve Tea Party protest march in downtown Fort Collins. Thanks to Ray Harvey for organizing it and to all who attended! I would give it five stars for being an extraordinarily well behaved crowd. Because that's who we are of course.

But it should be noted that in Iran things are a wee bit more serious. These people deserve our sincerest sympathy -- and support. They are fighting the same sort of personality cult tyranny that O Duce is assaulting us with. But it's rather more advanced of course. Over there, sham elections have become a kabuki dance art form. Over here they just began in national form with the last one. Wrong headed as public financing is and noting the fact that McCain was a kabuki distraction, did you notice how effortlessly O Duce broke his pledge to use public financing and how big money and foreigners bought the election almost completely unreported by our state run media?

Anyway, watch this video and ponder. When our fellow citizens finally have their TVs turned off because of unemployment, runaway inflation and power shortages, it might start to look like this here.

They’re chanting “Death to this liar government.” Sobering.

UPDATE: Wow. Iran is on fire. Literally.
Even if you're not religious, you need to pray for their success. The implications of a revolution even vaguely directed toward freedom in Iran are absolutely enormous. The two sites you should be watching are Michael Totten and Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen points out that with no more hope an American president might help them any more they might finally take matters in their own hands for good:
Stalin would be proud. But even his Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas cannisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards. It is usually a matter of numbers in these cases: if a million people gather in front of the Supreme Leader’s palace and demand freedom, while half that number make the same demand in front of the government buildings in Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Mashad, they might win.

Until quite recently, the Iranians did not believe they could do such a thing on their own. They believed they needed outside support, above all American support, in order to succeed. They thought that Bushitlercheney would provide that support, and they were bitterly disappointed. But nobody believes that Obama will help them, and they must know that they are on their own.
And here's an electrifying status report passed on by Totten:
"My next door neighbor is an Iranian immigrant who came here in 1977. He just received a SAT phone call from his brother in Tehran who reports that the rooftops of nighttime Tehran are filled with people shouting 'Allah O Akbar' in protest of the government and election results. The last time he remembers this happening is in 1979 during the Revolution. Says the sound of tens of thousands on the rooftops is deafening right now." It's almost four in the morning in Iran.
And my young sons were complaining about how far they had to walk today. They've come a long way but I have much to teach them yet. And I pray the most difficult of the lessons to come won't be learned the hard way.

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Stopped Clock Watch

You wouldn't necessarily expect Jon Stewart to let Peter Schiff get his message out fairly including questioning the One and the Fed -- but here you have it.

UPDATE: OK. The stopped clock comment was overly optimistic. Stewart has to do something to torpedo getting the message out widely. This video has been disabled by YouTube at Daily Show request. If I find one that stays up I'll add it back in. In the mean time, I have other excellent Schiff vids on the blog. Check out the one at the bottom of this post for instance.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm not seeing anything stay up on YouTube with decent quality (I changed to a really crappy one that is up for now) but you can download the (much better but still not great) MP4 video file from here for at least a month. It's worth the trouble. This got Peter some broad exposure and he has noted elsewhere that it pumped up his book sales.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The Sham Deal

Well, that pretty much looks like it for the "legal system" in our newly minted banana republic supporting the difference between ... oh, nothing fundamental ... like oh, say, between stock holders and bond holders.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Chrysler's sale to Fiat, turning down a last-ditch bid by opponents of the deal.

The court said late Tuesday it had rejected a plea to block the sale of most of Chrysler's assets to the Italian automaker. Chrysler, Fiat and the Obama administration had warned that the high court's intervention could have scuttled the sale.

A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until Monday afternoon to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ordered a temporary delay just before a 4 p.m. deadline on Monday.

Now the court has freed the automakers to complete their deal.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
Luckily, this will have no impact whatsoever on investor's decision making processes going forward. Lada. Nada.

Did I forget to mention that one of the very few things I can think of that doesn't make me want to wretch when I think of the Raw New Deal is that the practice of equity receiverships and "sham sales" was eliminated:
The use of a sham sale of the sort the New Dealers thought they had forever eliminated will cause mischief in future bankruptcy cases.

The Obama administration has closely patterned itself on the famous opening year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. But the plans the administration has rolled out for Chrysler and is now cheering on in the bankruptcy court would make a true New Dealer turn over in his grave.

In the early 20th century, large troubled corporations did not file for Chapter 11 like they do today. They used a process known as “equity receivership,” which involved an artificial “sale” of the company to a new entity set up by the debtor and the investment banks who represented its bondholders and stockholders. The new entity was the only bidder at the sale, and creditors who were unhappy with the terms of the reorganization had very little opportunity to interfere.

New Dealers hated the process, which they saw as opaque and designed to foist a deal crafted by the insiders on everyone else. Jerome Frank, a lawyer who later headed an important New Deal agency and became a federal judge, complained in 1933 that the judicial sale in these cases “was a mockery and a sham.” He said, “A sale at which there can be only one bidder, is a sale in name only.” In 1938, thanks to the handiwork of another prominent New Dealer, future Supreme Court Justice and then-SEC Chairman William Douglas, Congress dramatically altered the bankruptcy laws, eliminating the former practice.
Welcome to the New Sham Deal.

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Finally -- A Hockey Stick We Can Believe In (Bumped)

Last month, we had a post on Innocent Bystanders' chart of the monthly unemployment percentage numbers superimposed on the (now obviously) garbage projections of how O Duce's porkulus bill was going to make things better than would happen otherwise.

Now we get another monthly update that adds May -- so how's innumeracy working out for everyone?

Stimulus-vs-unemployment-may
Not so peachy. Many more months of this and even O Duce's absurd "created or saved" nonsense won't save him from ridicule. It's going to take a minor miracle not to shoot into double digits here folks. Watch for a timely update of how they calculate the unemployment numbers to try to wriggle out of this one.

The title of this post comes courtesy of one of Innocent Bystanders obviously astute commenters with a dry riff on the AGW alarmists ridiculous historical temperature chart: "Finally–a hockey stick we can believe in."

UPDATE: You might take a gander at this for what the geography of this disaster looks like.

UPDATED AGAIN: Now with video!

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Sunday, June 7, 2009

No Gordon, It's Not "Obama Beach"

This is what it is -- not "Obama Beach". I think Rudy would approve. And no politicians allowed to stink it up.

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Monday, June 1, 2009

You May Have Been Wondering...

... where Iowahawk predicts the auto industry bailout will lead. If you weren't, now you know you should have been.

Simultaneously a work of pure genius and utter predictability.

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

The Whimper Of The Sheeple

I was just about to post about this Pravda opinion piece when Rudy sent it out to the WeWillNotFall Meetup Group and beat me to it.  We need to take this with a grain of salt as Pravda these days has maybe become more or less the National Enquirer of Russia. 

However, it mostly aligns very well with what all who still have eyes can see.

Speaking of "eyes", in case you were wondering about that blank look in your neighbors eyes when you suggest Barack may not actually be Jesus and Lord, did you know that there were 77M+ Prozac and equivalent Rx's written in the U.S. in 2007? -- and more research is needed but I'm afraid to know how much Ritalin.

Anyway, here's a taste of the start:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

RTWT.  It's a two pager -- click at the top to get to the second page including reference to the recent Putin quote scolding us to avoid the path to Marxism.  I remember catching him say that a few months ago and thinking both that it's true and wondering what he would have to gain by saying it.  It would seem more likely that he would be cheering O Duce on.

So the NYeT has now come to actually out-do Pravda as a collectivist house organ.  The NYeT trend line was easy to see -- Pravda's trend is a bit more of a surprise but the locals certainly have the (literal) scars to back up their opinions.

I should also note that Russia Today has interviewed Peter Schiff as well.  While the interviewer lets slip some hints of Barack worship, Peter is still given full reign to get his message out which is much better than (even still) happens on the (dumbed down of course) American networks (except Glenn Beck has re-awakened and had Peter on last Thursday).
More related thoughts to come...

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Monday, May 25, 2009

A Tom Woods Must See On Book TV

Tom Woods was recently on Book TV giving a 40ish minute talk on his new book "Meltdown". Somewhat updated from the recent link I posted of his interview on Financial Sense -- although you should listen to that one too.

I can't recommend strongly enough that you click over and watch it. If you pay only even moderate attention, you'll come away understanding why F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics back in 1974 and why it couldn't be more relevant to properly resolving the current disaster.

And if you want a real education, you might click over to Hayek's Nobel lecture on what he called "Scientism": "The Pretense of Knowledge". Yes, it turns out that an eminent academic actually understands the insanity of his fellows. Here's a taste:

The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.

This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.
1974. Oh, and Hayek was of the Austrian school of Economics -- one of the founders actually. And not only did the Austrians predict the current crises, but the Great Depression also.

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Unlike Our CinC, Rudy Knows What Memorial Day Is All About...


And has created a fitting tribute to remind all of us.

Thank you Rudy.

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Remember

Please take a moment this Memorial Day to remember those who have fallen that you may be free.

As you may have noticed lately, perhaps you may find a voice inside of you nagging that perhaps you too may need to make some difficult choices to keep the -- now rapidly diminishing -- freedoms that you have.

We need to start listening to those voices -- and acting upon them in a principled way -- before it's too late.

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Deep Junk

Well, you can't come up with a much more pithy encapsulation of our disaster and it's masters than this (stolen in full from Instapundit):
UH OH: S&P cuts New York Times rating deeper into junk status. Remember, the people who are running the Times are the people who think Obama is doing a good job running the country. . . .

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Run Over To Ray's! (Bumped)

Check out Raymond Harvey's new "Tea Party Of Northern Colorado" site including his blog. Remember this recent post by Ray on "Oil Shortages And Government Intervention"? Look for more head-shaking wisdom at his new site! Go Ray!

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Another Ugly Chart ...

... that they really, really, really don't want you to see.  Expect a revision in the way unemployment is calculated soon.  Never mind that it's already ridiculously tilted in favor of making politicians look good.

In case there's any confusion, the lines on the chart were the projections that Ogabe's "economists" used to sell their "stimulus" package -- the darker one being how much better (lower) unemployment would be if the "stimulus" were passed.  The red triangles are markers for the last two months of unemployment data which is of course coming in worse than their projection of what things would be like without the "stimulus" plan.
So once again, let’s see how the actual unemployment numbers compare to what Obama’s own economists predicted:

Stimulus-vs-unemployment-april

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Saturday, May 9, 2009

The Chart ...

... that they desperately don't want you to see.




The dollar has lost 94% of its value since we went off the gold standard.  A shocker I know.

And how are the prospects for a turnaround looking now that we have Ogabe and his ridiculous $17B of "cuts" to save the day?  That would be a "cut" of 0.5% of the completely and totally unsustainable "budget" for those few citizens -- mostly Tea Party attendees I suspect -- that are not completely innumerate.  Don't hold your breath.

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Thursday, May 7, 2009

With Thunderous Appalause…

Remember this?

The Emperor in his speech to the Senate: "In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years."

(Next you hear thunderous applause from the gallery...)

Senator Padmé comments: "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."

from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

And so this is how our country is going to destroy itself. Our administration wants to “REMAKE” America, when what we need is to RESTORE America. Our smooth-talking, teleprompter reliant President will feed us whatever his writers have been fed by those who are really in control. Soros, Pelosi, Reid, et al. He will assure us safety, when in fact what he desires is control in the biggest power-grab known to mankind. And it will all be done because an asleep citizen body of this country is lapping up every word from the anointed one as if it were gospel, and he were the messiah.

Wake up America! We are going down a path that I assure you we don’t want to go.

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Saturday, May 2, 2009

A Take-Down For The Ages

This is another run, don't walk alert. This time over to PJTV and Bill Whittle's spectacular take-down of Jon Stewart. Go see it now.

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Friday, May 1, 2009

The Executive Office Hasn't Called Them Yet And Made Threats To Them

Welcome to Fascism. And I do mean with a capital "F":




Powerline has a "Banana Republic" update:
I drew the same analogy to organized crime loan sharking in my "banana republic" post. Sadly, I'm afraid it is apposite. Once again, the Obama administration has steered us into uncharted waters: we have no experience with this lack of respect for the rule of law.

By the way: does anyone doubt that Barack Obama can mobilize, as he threatened, the "full force of the White House press corps" against any political opponent? No doubt there would be an honorable exception or two, but the threat is obviously credible.

UPDATE: The Obama administration denies making the threats alleged by Lauria. The denial, however, is merely a bald assertion. Lauria is the head of the bankruptcy group at White & Case, and a Democrat who contributed $10,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2008. In that sense, you could say that he helped to bring about the corrupt regime that is now bullying his clients. But his credibility vastly exceeds that of an administration spokesman who, having no knowledge of the facts, is sent out to issue a blanket denial.

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