I agree, there’s nothing weird about going to strip clubs, particularly if you’re on the outs with the girlfriend (though I’m probably weird in that I’ve only done so once in my life, dragged there by some other guys), but thinking that Lady Gaga is hot pegs the weirdometer for me. As he says, she may be quite attractive if you toss her in a shower and get all the paint off her, but I don’t know who she’s trying to appeal to with her public persona.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Credit Downgrade
…isn’t the Tea Party’s fault — it’s a symptom of the Marxist disease:
It is time to call a spade a spade — this is Marxism we are talking about, pure and simple.
This bubonic plague of the last century killed tens of millions in the Soviet empire alone, but a young generation of Americans who know little about its destructive power decided to give it a new lease on life. In November 2008 the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and soon after that the United States began being changed from a country belonging to “We the People” into one managed by a kind of Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power.
This new American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, just as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” the leader of the nomenkatura in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, once told the media. That was a first in U.S. history. It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, auto-makers, and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans objected to the cloak of secrecy under which all this was taking place, the same Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. That was exactly what all post-WWII Marxist nomenklaturas called their opponents.
This is why Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” after the Cold War was so nonsensical. One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that while it defies human nature, it is in fact human nature to believe its tenets, and so the lesson must be relearned with each generation.
Britain’s Failure
There is no longer a rule of law.
An Ad Campaign
…by and for stupid people.
Hey, maybe the Obama campaign can hire them. It would be at least as smart as keeping Plouffe and Axelrod.
A Disarmed Society
…is a violent society.
The Soviet Socialist Republic
…of Widener Law School.
I think this should be a capital offense (i.e., the school should go out of business).
Happy Tenth Bloggiversary
Mine will be coming up this fall (though I’m not sure of the exact date, because my very earliest posts were lost in one of my blogging software updates).
The Massive Failure
…of the Great Society, and the taboo on discussion of race when it’s politically incorrect.
Next Stop, Space
This underwater hotel in Fiji looks pretty neat. I think that a lot of its clientele would love a room with an earth view.
One thing I see missing, though — no (obvious) curtains on the windows. I’ve heard that there have been problems with underwater hotels in the past, because the dolphins liked to voyeuristically look in the window and watch couples engaged in amorous activities.
Bam’s Glam
…is gone. Thoughts on the loss of the president’s glamour, from the glamour expert:
What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”
This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states … and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”
There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous — powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.
What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.
Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”
It was pretty obvious to me what he was from the get go. His faux pas with Joe the Plumber was a big tell.
[Update a while later]
Isn’t it time we grew up?
I want to underscore the fact that it is not just Barack Obama who is living in la-la land. It’s the whole apparat. The suits in Washington have ingested and then regurgitated the neo-Keynesian socialist pabulum that mesmerized elite opinion some time in the 1960s and has never let go.
But we are letting go. By “we” I mean the people who these fools and scoundrels in Washington have misled. They couldn’t help it. They don’t know any better. How cruel it is going to be when the mentally-challenged Joe Biden is exposed as the Grecian formula empty shell that he is. And Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.
On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.
It is deeply ironic that so many in the media have referred to the president as “the adult in the room.”