The Lasso of Truth

Nooooooooo!

No amount of disinfectant will cleanse my vision of the sight of Perez Hilton as Bettie Page.

Click if you're a masochist.

The Other McCain is responsible for leading me to this visual assault on my long-time girl crush.

A pox on both your houses.

Obama vs. Aliens?

Okay, now we're just getting stupid.

Analyzing Obamaspeak

And an interesting comparison of official opinion on waterboarding and abortion.

Nuance and complexity, indeed.

Murdering Incentive

Good question...

If raising the tax on cigarettes, alcohol and petrol is assumed to reduce smoking, drinking and driving, shouldn’t we consider the possibility that a 50% tax rate will also affect behaviour? And given the possible negative fallout of this 50% rate and the subsequent reduction of enterprise and tax revenue, it isn’t clear how all of this “social justice” will be paid for once the wealthy have been demoralised, exiled or taxed to buggery.

Don't be silly now.  Everybody knows that coercive redistribution of wealth never has negative consequences.

The flaw of a socialistic democracy

An interesting observation...

Across the developing world, from Russia to Venezuela to Mexico, as democracy faces new threats -- elected leaders who disdain its institutions, rising corruption, and nationalistic economic plans -- middle classes, once the vanguard of democracy, have increasingly turned against it. For the first time in decades, democracy activists are beginning to wonder whether building a strong middle class solidifies or threatens freedom's global spread. Yet because the middle-class-equals-democracy theory has become so entrenched, if it is proven wrong, activists, democracy-promotion groups, and world leaders will not know how to replace it. In other words, they won't have a clue about how to actually build democracy.

For years, political theorists have argued that developing a healthy middle class is the key to any country's democratization. To paraphrase the late political scientist Samuel Huntington: Economic growth and industrialization usually lead to the creation of a middle class. As its members become wealthier and more educated, the middle class turns increasingly vocal, demanding more rights to protect its economic gains.

But over the past decade, the antidemocratic behavior of the middle class in many countries has threatened to undermine this conventional wisdom. Although many developing countries have created trappings of democracy, such as regular elections, they often failed to build strong institutions, including independent courts, impartial election monitoring, and a truly free press and civil society.

The middle class's newfound disdain for democracy is counterintuitive. After all, as political and economic freedoms increase, its members often prosper because they are allowed more freedom to do business. But, paradoxically, as democracy gets stronger and the middle class grows richer, it can realize it has more to lose than gain from a real enfranchisement of society.

Is democracy under threat from those who benefit from it the most?  Maybe.  But the important question is not whether democracy really works, but rather whether we recognize that we are practicing the wrong kind of democracy.

The rift, as observed here, is one which widens as each successive generation of poor gets wealthier.  But the division between rich and poor is not the problem.  The manner by which you lessen the gap between is what creates an environment where the very democratic system which allowed for the enrichment of society's poor, becomes the threat to their newly acquired wealth.  This happens when a poor person makes the transition from tax-taker to tax-payer.

Poverty advocates are constantly agitating for more benefits to help raise society's poor from their hovels.  They tell those who suffer from poverty, that the fault of their circumstances lies at the feet of the rich who exploit them or the government who ignores them or select corporate interest groups who disenfranchise them in various ways.  They tell them that taking from the victimizers and redistributing among the afflicted is the only fair way to lift all boats on a rising tide.  Of course, people who envision themselves as victims will happily take back what they believe to have been stolen from them and will feel entitled to perpetuate the cycle of redistribution, for as long as the tax refund cheques keep coming in every year.

And then the unthinkable happens.

A small bout of hard work or good fortune lifts a family out of poverty and into the coveted middle class and suddenly a bill for income taxes comes in, on top of the hefty sum already pilfered from their paycheques throughout the year, and they realize that the so-called exploiters -- whose pockets they picked to get where they are --  were not exploiters at all.  They were average, hard working families, struggling to get by under the constantly growing burden of the social programs that -- contrary to their stated goal -- only serve to impoverish everybody while bloating the bureaucracy and breeding resentment among classes.

The democratic nature of our society -- the one that allows for freedom of movement, association and press; free and responsible elections; and an innovative and dynamic economy for the creation of wealth -- has no room to breed an environment where greed and resentment turns to disaffection with the democratic system.  It is only when we stray from the democratic formula, to impose an unfair burden on some while others undeservedly benefit from the hard work of their neighbours; when we stoke the resentment of the impoverished class by offering scapegoats and excuses to steal, instead of incentives to succeed; when we enlist the government to play Robin Hood with our fellow citizens; only then does the environment become one in which encroaching on freedom to preserve wealth and power is acceptable.  In fact, in such a system, curtailing the freedoms of societys wealthiest becomes the only way to preserve it.

It brings to mind the old cliche "be careful what you wish for, you just may get it".  A poor man becomes less poor and realizes that being mugged and villainized by his own government, for the sake of his clutching and grasping neighbours, is not such a fair system after all.

From Above

Human Landscapes

Imitation is the highest form of flattery

Then again, it is bound to happen when for the most part you're both reading from the same script.

h/t

Just tryin' to mind our own business

While traffic remains blocked in the heart of Canada's largest city for the third day, some of us taxpayers (who are expected to foot the bill for this show of civil disobedience) are wondering why so many members of the largest ex-pat Tamil constituency don't have jobs they need to be at, for three days running.

Of course, I'm sure it's racist of me to ask...

Quote of the year

On Mohammad vs. Jesus:

Well, I know one thing: When Jesus brought a little girl on her deathbed back to life, He said, "Wake up," not "Move over..."

And where Jesus used the term "sheep" as a metaphor, Mohammad used it in a more carnal sense.

An Inconvenient Photo-Op

And the Presidency of supreme sensitivity...

A jumbo jet being chased by a F-16 fighter jets buzzed Lower Manhattan this morning, panicking New Yorkers, many of whom were forced to evacuate their office buildings.

It was not a terrorist attack, however, but a photo opportunity for Air Force One, sources told the Post.

President Obama was in Washington at the time, but the low-flying 747 circling the Statue of Liberty was one of the planes used as Air Force One, sources said.

The NYPD and the city were notified of the planned flight, but did not share that information with Mayor Bloomberg and other New Yorkers, many of whom said they were terrified.

Das Kapital: The Musical

You think I'm joking.

For realism, they may want to consider including a score of music made from the wailing and moaning of abject misery...

A Chinese director is planning to stage a musical based on the founding text of communism, Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

The plot will revolve around a group of office employees who find out they are being exploited by their boss

There will be singing and dancing in this stage version of the classic communist treatise, which is due to open in Shanghai next year.

"We will bring [Marx's] economic theories to life in a trendy, interesting and educational play, which will be fun to watch,"

Brazilian Pinup

This weekend's pinup comes with a slightly South American flavor.  For years, the crime-ridden jungles of the lower continent have been held up as bastions of political perfection on the cusp of Utopia at the hands of countless "revolutionaries" and "Great Leapers".  Take a close look at those lush basket-cases.  Under Obama and his crew, the northern half of the hemisphere is rapidly cruising down the same pitted and pothole-riddled road...

~ I wonder which blue eyed white people Lula will blame for the corrupted mess he's made of his own backyard.  To level ignorant criticisms about the economic stewardship of other countries, when you can't even keep your own house in order is just, well I guess it's now just simply South American.

~ From the same states that brought us Che Guevera, the cocaine trade, drug wars and "nationalization" of industry on a grand scale, we now have the War on Capitalism.  A war where squeamishness about using the word "terrorist" will be long forgotten in reporting stories about bankers and taxpayers.  Not to be left out, Team Obama has already spent more in blood and treasure to wage this one in the last 100 days, than Chimpy McBusHitler spent in 6 years of the Iraq War.  That's priorities.

~ Via David Thompson, another glimpse into the end result of the policies being promulgated by the thugs in South America and espoused by the new fellow-traveler-in-chief, in the White House.  Not really a land of no smiles...just a land where the smiles are reserved for the privileged few who get to prosper from the avails of their unfortunate charges.  For more, revisit the stunning gallery of photos I pointed to here.

~ And on a completely unrelated matter...some people will do it anywhere.

p.s...I don't recommend doing a Google image search for the word "brazilian" with the safe search turned off.  TRUST ME.

Slaves to Gaia

In a country where we balk at the notion of forcing convicts to earn their keep by picking up trash from the roadside, schools and companies all over are compelling their charges to scour the ditches with gloves and plastic bags.

Not that I have an objection to cleaning up the neighbourhood.  I do it myself every spring.  I just think it's funny, is all.

I've never been poor

...but I once made a movie about it!

From here...

To here...

To this...

It is often said that we live in the golden age of the documentary film. To the extent that this is true, the gold gleams brightest for the drama quotient of recent documentaries. The quality of their social analysis, for those that claim this to be their purpose, has generally been much dimmer. The latest contribution to the genre, The End of Poverty, from filmmaker and scriptwriter Philippe Diaz, is even dimmer than the norm. It devotes 106 minutes to the causes of poverty, but delivers neither drama nor good analysis. The core message is plain: The global South is poor because the developed countries made it that way and wish to keep it that way; free trade is bad and Western corporations are bad; the West is rich because the South is poor.

If I were to judge The End of Poverty as an Entertainment Weekly reviewer I could give it no more than a C-plus. The cinematography and production values are good: The costumes from Bolivia are colorful, the Brazilian accents are romantic and the media-trained talking heads have lovely artworks behind them. It all feels appropriately serious, if somewhat soporific. As a movie, however, it offers no suspense, plot twist or character development. It is didactic in a respectable, old-fashioned way, and that means the movie cannot justify itself as entertainment. It has none of the interesting self-subverting features of a movie like Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 I Am Cuba, an ostensible critique of capitalist exploitation that was banned from Cuba and the Soviet Union in part for making capitalism look too glamorous.

And so, in assessing The End of Poverty we must treat it as a true documentary, as an unfortunate captive audience might watch it in a high school class. That means we have to turn to the facts, and that is where the film gets not just dim, but downright ugly.

[..]

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not.

RTWT

From the dirt of his shallow and well-deserved grave...

Watchoo talkin' 'bout Willis..?!

Fidel Castro says President Barack Obama "misinterpreted" his brother Raul's remarks regarding the United States and bristled at the suggestion that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on dollars people send to the island.

[..]

The former president appeared to be throwing a dose of cold water on growing expectations for improved bilateral relations -- suggesting Obama had no right to dare suggest that Cuba make even small concessions. He also seemed to suggest too much was being made of Raul's comments about discussing "everything" with U.S. authorities.

And one for the rank hypocrisy file...

The ex-president has previously expressed admiration for Obama, but this time he blasted the new U.S. president for showing signs of "superficiality," and called on him to wait no longer before lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

"We are living in a new era. Changes are unavoidable. Leaders just pass through; peoples prevail," Castro wrote.

I've been waiting for this one to "pass through" for almost 50 years.  Like chronic constipation, nothing seems to loosen the stool.

h/t

A new niche for Hustler magazine

Obama porn means never having to use your right hand...

Yesterday while strolling through the aisles of my local Barnes & Noble I was assaulted by fourteen magazines with Obama spread across their covers, all in differing poses, two included his wife in close embrace. In the history section forced upon my eyes in plain sight were 23 hardcover books with this political porn star upon it. Michelle Obama even had two books of her own, one a biography, and the other, I believe, was about her fashion sense. I didn’t open the book, I’m not that sort of guy, but I think it had something to do with “going sleeveless.”

[..]

Obama porn can be so addictive that it can lead large groups of people into an orgasmic state, one that bypasses all reason and moves them to follow this political porn star to the ends of the earth, all in the hopes of one more fix from this Dr. Feel Good. It’s everywhere and it’s dangerous. If you’re an addicted to Obama porn I suggest you take the lead from AA and start a local chapter of OPA, Obama Porn Anonymous. Turn it over to a higher power; just make sure that power is higher than, “The One.”

Yet some embrace it and are glad it’s here. To quote Angela Lambert, “Pornography is literature designed to be read with one hand.” With Obama porn the left has finally been given the load of literature they’ve been dreaming. You’ll know Obama porn when you see it, and now that I’ve brought it to your attention, you’ll see it everywhere.

Holy crappers!

Quite literally...

I suppose if you're lonely and it's empty...and you're so inclined... this could serve multiple functions.

No protection for the most vulnerable

To call it disgraceful or outrageous just doesn't seem to cover it anymore.

An 8-month-old baby girl is literally tossed, face down, into the concrete stairwell of an outdoor parking structure, in -14 degree temperatures, and left to die...

By what can only be a miracle, the baby is found before the elements take their toll, and committed to a loving foster home...

And where nature intervened to prevent tragedy, the Canadian justice system worked quickly to even the score...

The parents of the abandoned infant dubbed "Baby Angelica" have pleaded guilty but will receive no jail time.

The father, who pleaded guilty to abandoning a child and three counts of failing to provide the necessities of life, was sentenced to time served. His actual time in jail was 11 months, but he received two-for-one credit, totalling 22 months, Toronto police confirmed yesterday.

The child's mother was found guilty under the Ontario Child and Family Services Act, provincial legislation that protects children from mistreatment by their parents.

The woman, who was not convicted criminally, was ordered to pay a $300 fine.

Just in case you had any question about the value of a baby's life in this city, if these people had tossed a bag of trash into the stairwell, the fine for illegal dumping in the City of Toronto is $360.

Weekend Pinup

~ Janeane Garofalo offers demonstrable proof that "there is no shortage of the natural resources of ignorance, apathy, hate, fear".  What the hell has this woman been doing since her last starring role as a psychopath with "bowling" as a superpower, in a lame b-movie 10 years ago?  Sniffing glue...that's what I think.  Then again, thinking makes my limbic brain swell against my frontal lobe and then my hair just doesn't part right...

~ But in response to intellectual giants like Jan, Wendy says "You're going to have to kill me because you're sure as hell not going to shut me up."  Sadly, such is the pathology of most serious leftards, this is likely a deal they'd be happy to make.

~ On the topic of culling the herd..."Britain's leading moral philosopher" muses about euthanizing the elderly..."I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die."  What is left ambiguous is the implication of what would happen should the state or family decide grandpa is too much of a burden and whether or not anyone will care to ask grandpa his opinion by then.

~ Speaking of elderly and senile...When did Hillary Clinton go from Secretary of State to Minister of Cultural Performance and Interpretive Dance?  And did anyone think that maybe...just maybe the Big O didn't refute Ortega's gratuitous anti-American screed because he agrees with him?  I wouldn't be surprised if Ortega had cribbed parts of his speech from Michelle's university thesis.

Revisiting Ronald Reagan

A new book "The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan" ignites a flurry of discussion at Foreign Policy...

From the book:

It was Reagan's second-term policies, his decision to do business with Gorbachev, that set the course for the end of the Cold War. If Reagan had not been responsive, then events might have taken a different course during the crucial period from 1985 to 1989. Gorbachev's critics at home could have succeeded in resisting change by warning that American policy remained a continuing danger and that Gorbachev was failing to obtain any alteration of the Soviet Union's relationship with the United States.

Grover Norquist:

The bitter enders of the revisionist Left wisely skipped over the  economic history of the 1980s and 1990s (deciding to avoid embarrassing conversations about GDP, employment, inflation, growth rates) and on foreign policy credited Michael Gorbachev with agreeably ending the cold war and dismantling the Soviet Union on purpose. Reagan was just standing there when the nice Soviet Leader fixed the world.

Peter Baker:

Just how sharply Reagan tacked against the prevailing winds in Washington comes to life in Mann's account. In relentlessly pursuing accord with Gorbachev on arms control, Reagan the old Cold Warrior defied his conservative base, many in his own State Department and White House, and even Richard Nixon, the architect of détente. Although everyone told him that Gorbachev was faking his commitment to reform in order to strengthen the Soviet Union, Reagan believed his counterpart was the real deal.

William Inboden:

Mann makes a persuasive case for Reagan's singular vision and idiosyncratic genius in several ways. First, Reagan conceived of the Cold War as an ideological contest between two worldviews and values systems, one of which was superior and the other of which was destined to fail. The latter point is especially salient, as it rejected the prevailing consensus and put Reagan in an adversarial posture against the prominent "realists" in his own party -- such as Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and even at times his own Vice President George H.W. Bush. All of whom instead saw the Cold War as a static power contest between two rival states that was destined to continue in perpetuity and thus could only be managed, not won. As realism today seems to be enjoying a popular and not entirely unwarranted resurgence, Reagan's Cold War doctrine is also a helpful reminder of realism's limits and past errors.

Michael Tomasky (who is happy to credit the fall of the Soviet Empire on anyone but the Americans):

Mann's Reagan is not an intellectual, but a person with pretty shrewd instincts. I decided at some point while reading this book that perhaps the way to describe Reagan is this: He knew what he didn't know. He hadn't read a lot of history or stacks of policy papers, and for the most part he wasn't going to be bothered. But at least, unlike a certain recent White House occupant, he understood that there were lots of things he didn't know and he seemed to try to keep that in mind and compensate for it. I say all this as one who was not and is not a fan of Reagan, especially on the domestic side, where I think his legacy is for the most part cankerous; and as a believer in the general principle that one ought to bother knowing.

All in all, it sounds like a good read.

Canada is nobody's whore

Charles Adler on the bitter pill of blood and treasure being spent for the sake of legalized rape and the stoning of women...

I don't want the women of Afghanistan to be thought of as whores unless they cover up, shut up and submit to the cave dwellers. I don't want my country to be treated like a whore by some charlatans who want our blood and our treasure, but not our most cherished value of all, the right of a human being to be treated like a human being. That's not right wing. That's not imperialist or colonialist. That's simply the difference between human and beast. And when I see the headline, “Afghan women stoned by men,” and I know and you know that not one of the stoners is going to do one day of prison and that not one of the rapists will pay for raping his prisoner, a.k.a wife, we understand perfectly well what we are dealing with here, and it doesn't feel like a society that will be inhospitable to Bin Laden's boys.

I support every one of our men and women in uniform. But the people of Afghanistan need to know that Canada is nobody's whore, and we will never support our country being turned into a whore by the pimps of the Stone Age.

Amen to that. RTWT

Reclaimed by the jungle

Rooftop gardens on a mass scale?

Not that I object to growing salad makings in any available space, but this is clearly the brainchild of someone who has never seen the kind of damage tree roots and water can do to concrete...

You've come a long way, baby!

From this...

To this...

Allahu akbar!

Don't you know how to multi-task?

"It's hard to talk when you're teabagging."

I would have characterized the President's economic plan as more of a sound buggering, but we all have our kinks, I guess.

With a hubby like Howlin' Willy...

...I guess you can't blame the gal for being all for contraception!

But it still somehow seems unsavory...

Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award, named after the founder of the American Birth Control League, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood in the 1940s.

In her remarks, Clinton singled out the namesake of the award for praise:

Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision ... And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.

Clinton lamented that "Margaret Sanger's work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done."

Here at home, there are still too many women who are denied their rights because of income, because of opposition, because of attitudes that they harbor. But around the world, too many women are denied even the opportunity to know about how to plan and space their families. They’re denied the power to do anything about the most intimate of decisions.

Mrs. Sanger, of course, wasn't the benevolent advocate for human rights that Clinton's remarks make her out to be. In fact, Sanger's "vision" for birth control seems to be united to a eugenic vision. In the October 1921 issue of The Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote that "the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aim of Eugenics."

Must be something in the water

...in Russia.

First this.

Now this...

Two sick cannibals have told how they feasted on the remains of their brother for six months as they tried to hide his murder.

[..]

"We decided to eat him. I did not want to go back behind bars so we cut off his head and buried it and cut up the body parts and kept them in a refrigerator," Timur told police.

"We have been cooking and eating his meat for six months," he added.

They have nukes.  Just think about that.

And I bet it wasn't registered, either...

Another kid with a gun (and an extensive record), in a school which insists there is no need to post a full time police office on campus.

Nice neighbourhood.

Then again, maybe the little thug can just claim that carrying a gun is part of his religion.  Judging by the mindset of some of the families in and around CW Jefferys, I'd almost buy that argument.

No hate to be had here...

We went, we saw and we listened.  Mikey, myself and my eldest boy who (I am proud to say) is beginning to take an avid interest in a subject that most people twice his age take for granted and never spare a thought for.

Aside from the treat of adding two more books to my collection of things I'm dying to read -- and have no time for -- I also had the pleasure of putting faces to a few names I have bumped into over the years, and never had the pleasure of meeting.

Brian picked me out of the crowd first, followed by Wendy, who actually recognized Mikey first!  After the forum, Dr. Roy pulled me aside to prove that there is in fact a more rabid Wonder Woman fan than I...I am humbled ;)  Winston, who i have heard so much about from Wendy, was also there.  Of course, I had to finagle a picture with Ezra!

It really was a pleasure.

The subject at hand was The Human Rights Commissions and whether or not they have outlived their usefulness.  The most interesting avenue of discussion centered on the assertion that a government bureaucracy, who's sole purpose is to police human interaction, is not necessarily a bad thing but that this particular bureaucracy has gotten out of hand.

But I agree with Kathy's stance that the very premise of having an agency with a mandate to enforce equality, is a tangible example of an oxymoron in practical terms.  How can you enforce equality for one, without infringing on the equality rights of another?  A person who is not treated equally cannot take equality from someone who is unwilling to give it.  When they try, by means of state-sponsored force, it does not make them equal but instead, it makes them reviled and marginalized more.  And when the mission statement of this equality enforcement agency outlines specific groups as deserving of more equality than others, that marginalization and stigmatization extends not just to each person who utilizes the enforcers, but to the entire group of the affected they claim to advocate on behalf of.

That is why the very concept behind the Human Rights Commission is antithetical to it's own stated purpose.  It is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled and as contradictions go, Ayn Rand said it best...

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

ROAD TRIP!

I hope they have a parking space for the invisible jet!

Aiding the CYA Administration

If George Bush's second cousin's next-door-neighbor's dog had so much as nipped a passerby, we'd still be hearing about it and what implications it had on his credibility.

But the half brother of the Anointed One assaults a 13-year-old girl, provides false information to authorities and lies on a visa application, and nary a word in the news world can be heard.

Caught on the way to his brother's inauguration, no less.  One can only speculate how he planned to celebrate.

These folks are sounding more and more like the Kennedys every day.

h/t reader Scott