... (the ability to keep his mouth shut about what he is), a quality Barack Obama has so much of.
Sometimes he does have that ability, but often he doesn't. Such as calling Kanye West an "asshat" or the Cambridege, MA police "stupid". Both he and his wife are lacking well-rounded personality and character. They seem unable to fathom how their words reflect on the speaker more than on the target.
This past week has seen two great victories for liberty. The first, as you point out, is the resignation of Van Jones, but the second, and probably more important victory came in two parts. First the Administration breaking ties with ACORN and its involvement in the US Census, and then yesterday's astonishing 83-7 vote in the Senate cutting off all Federal funds to ACORN.
And the best part is that the MSM had to explain to its customers who Van Jones is, what he'd done to prompt his resignation and why it didn't matter. Then within a week they had to explain why a Democrat dominated Senate had voted to cut off ACORN over what the MSM had characterized as slanders from a Fox News rabble rouser, and under pressure from 'a few thousand racist haters' who'd marched down the Mall.
Anyone who got his news from the NYT must be wondering what such right wing Senators as Kerry, Franken, Boxer and the like were playing at.
And of course the blogosphere played a huge part in all these factors via the likes of Gateway Pundit, Big Hollywood, (who did some real investigative journalism in the ACORN 'brothels' affair) and the liberty loving 'sphere in general and it's part in the Tea Party movement and organising Saturday's march.
Maybe O'Keefe and Giles are the blogosphere's Woodward and Bernstein. (Though on second thoughts, I hope not as the latter two did not do journalism any favours in the long term.)
I have to say that, if we were to be marked out of 100 for our success hitherto in defending liberty actively and visibly against the Gramscomovement-scumbags, then we would score about 2.
Yep.
(1) The Berlin Wall got taken down.
(2) And Thatcher told Gorbachev to put his gun on the table and walk slowly backwards, so that she would then help him.
And that was about it. And then Taki had a grand party to celebrate the End of History, and we all got drunk and went to bed.
The present situation is our fault and we know it. We should have been Gramscianly-quick-off-the-mark, in, oh, about August 1987 when everything was going swmimmingly, Thatcher and Reagan were still "in power", ordinary people turned up in thousands to the Cenotaph on 11/11/11, even wearing trilbies and Barbours and brogues, and even Mandelson was on the run and of "no fixed political address". Of Tony Blair, the "project-contractor-assassinator", nobody had ever heard.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of bureaucrats should simply have been locked out of their offices, possibly at gunpoint, their 286-workstations malleted along with their collections of floppies, their comdoms and jaffa-cakes hoovered out of their desk-drawers into binliners (if we had these then) and just put on the street.
I have to go 'coz my wife is hystericalising about a
The statists and the liberty crowd operate on different principles and different strategies, tools, and tactics will work for them. Imitating them is not going to work just as statists trying to find the 'left wing Limbaugh' has ever worked for them.
If you've got a herd of cats, empower the cats to become tigers. don't imagine you can turn them into lemmings. What's needed is a toolshop to provide empowering tools and a set of courses to educate in how to use those tools. Right now we're doing better on the education front than the tools front.
One point never made about all the ppe and social science grads running the show is their complete ignorance of science and technology. Most of these techo peasants would have difficulty figuring out what the business end of a hammer is and therein lies their true weakness.
Most of these techo peasants would have difficulty figuring out what the business end of a hammer is and therein lies their true weakness.Problem is that somehow the hammer always lands on someone else's finger:-)
"...therein lies their true weakness."
Millie Woods: Just what are you talking about?
There are commercial solutions to countless problems of State control over resources, for example with water and energy - IIRC there was some buzz a few years back about the use of radioisotope power systems in residential energy generation. Rinnai were supposedly interested at one stage.
Yet these sorts of things, as promising as they may be with regard to making the world a better place and all that, still do not directly address the problem of State sanctioned theft and destruction of productivity.
I fail to see how ppe graduates not understanding science has anything to do with how we might kick them out of the ruling political structures. Please enlighten me.
Mike, I can't speak for Millie, but the sense I got from the comment was that not only don't they understand science, (or people or much else), they haven't a clue about their own ignorance.*
Thus when things come up and bite them, they are totally lost. Unfortunately, by the time they realise that they're floundering around without a clue what to do and with a world view that's based on complete nonsense, they've done a fair bit of damage.
*Hence their total befuddlement at Cheney's 'unknown unknowns' remark.
Mike, I'm talking about my fellow academics in the social sciences who actually believe that they can get all the answers they need to cover the gaps in their knowledge from the "experts". When asked how they can evaluate what the "experts" tell them they tend to get shirty. They equate flow charts and "models" with reality which is bad enough but worst of all is that they "know" and alas they are running the show.
Alright I see - "weakness" as in simply how pathetic they are, not "weakness" as in how to remove them.
Yet that is the important question here: how to save as much as possible before, as Paul Marks says "...economic law (the nature of reality itself)..." starts to have its way with them and everyone else.
Technological solutions to particular resource distribution problems, e.g. nano-scale water filtration, that happen to reduce the dependency of individuals on State-controlled systems are a potentially massive help in cushioning the blows to come.
As an aside, I would caution against these general broadsides to the social sciences from you physics types - the social sciences have been taken over by stupid and/or evil people, but that does not mean that all social sciences themselves are inherently stupid or evil.
Mike, I would certainly not condemn the social sciences per se . After all Stephen Leacock great Canadian humourist and amateur historian, was a professor at my own university. I'm condemning the pseudo stuff like women's studies courses where students are introduced to the work of such great thinkers as Eve Ensler et al. I feel for the poor deluded parents who have to cough up the cash to pay for this sort of nonsense.
"...I feel for the poor deluded parents who have to cough up the cash to pay for this sort of nonsense."
Millie: Ahem, why do they "have to" pay for it? And isn't the answer itself a substantial part of the problem?
As for Canadians and humour - I'm still waiting for the exceptions to a disturbing pattern, which is that the Canadians I have known tend to find things like this funny, but things like this not funny. I know - I'm a humour chauvinist.
Have you, Alisa?
I very briefly scanned the wikiquotes entry for Leacock but... :-(