Cease Fire, Anyone?

Another Facebook conversation.

C:  If Hillary Clinton were president we would not be in this place. We would have plenty of tests and things would have been handled properly by the Pandemic Response Team that Trump fired in 2018. Just saying.

P:  What are you smoking??

Me:  Reality.

C:  Trump is in over his head! This crisis is his fault! He fired the Pandemic Response Team, waited weeks before responding, then said it was a hoax and try to blame the democrats. That the kind of leadership trumpsters have not problems with. That's why we are in this mess. Electing a 6 time bankrupt, reality TV personality, with not idea what the hell he is doing!        

R (to P):  Do you really want to embarrass yourself here?  Stop it please

P:  Talking about embarrassment...

is the best you have is Sleepy Joe...Hilary is going to jail..

Me:  Is Gandalf going to put her there or will he leave that pleasure to Luke Skywalker?

C:  Enjoy these next 8 months, because your Great Leader the orange baboon, won't be around after this year. Thank God! He is such embarrassment, only people who have their head in the sand think this morally bankrupt, draft dodger is anything but a joke! I'm watching him at this morning briefing, he is so embarrassing! 

K (to P):   I'm sorry that you've been duped into thinking our government's actions are for YOUR benefit. Especially our president. It's especially evident now, pouring money into an invisible market, when our people need comprehensive pandemic protocols, but instead get lies and false information that we're ok, when the world death toll is clearly rising exponentially. You seem like a nice, fun person, honestly, and I'm not trying to cut you down or start anything. Just please, try to remember that our government is supposed to work for US. Not that we're supposed to just assume that what theyre doing is for our benefit (it's not)

R (to P):  it is obvious you need to stay in your trailer park. You are not able to navigate the world without getting on your knees to service drumpf.  You can not comprehend a policy nuance to have a respectful conversation so get ready for abuse here when the best you can offer is the typical Fox News crap.  We are about to enter one of the most difficult times in the country’s history and your pleasure is to troll people who have a different perspective than you. Why? Your pleasure? Go back to the hate filled world you most enjoy please.

Skip some comments here.

P:  Good luck with that...you'll be crying with Joe and Nancy..lol

Me:     %Tell me lies, tell me lies, those political lies...🎼. Watch a lot of Fox news? 

You know what,  let’s wait and see. Remember that when the Mueller report came out you were declaring loudly that thousands of Democrats were going to be instantly arrested, only none were, were they? I wonder if you’re a Q anon follower? Seems possible.

Have fun in your living nightmare fantasy world you’ve created for yourself.

R (to P):   

Do you ever read the BBC, English versions world news, lectures at LCC , MSU, WSU, or UM?  So far the entire world knows that drumpf  is an idiot except the most radicalized Fox News zealots.  I suggest you start preparing your homeboys for the blue wave.  Moreover, Your home work is to analyze the record setting vote taking place now.  Fox News has not told you what that implies. Life outside of the bubble is different.

P:  Be sure to cash his check...enjoy.

M:  If you seriously think Trump is sending us a check you need to look again. All Trump said us that he will not veto the bill which Congress is authorizing to pay us back some of our money. That’s spelled CONGRESS. It is not spelled TRUMP.

R: lol- the guy is. Russian troll or bot. I am certain that even the lowest IQ MAGMA  lovers are embarrassed  by his inability to articulate simple issues when questioned. He was amusing but isn’t time to silence him  my brotha? 

There’s more but I had to edit some out as it was such a long series of posts. It’s an interesting view of the two sides of the division in our country today. Maybe P is a Russian agent or maybe he is a bot. But I have heard Trumpsters that I know as actual, real, living people whom I have known for years saying exactly the same things. In fact some of them are saying even more radical and extreme things.

As I said in another post, it is very sad that there is no vaccine against cults.

American Horror Story

I was planning a rather lengthy post for this particular topic but I’m unable to actually create it. The reason is explained at the very end of this truncated version. It all started with a Facebook conversation.

A friend who has fallen down the rabbit hole into the very deep depths of Trumpsterism posted an advertisement for actors to aid in a disaster simulation. This is a perfectly normal event which happens in various places around the country on a regular basis. Later on in the conversation, I pointed this out to someone who was refusing to believe that the advertisement was anything but a recruitment for people to fake a mass shooting at the Virginia gun rally so that the government could once again blame poor, pitiful and totally nice gun owners who were actually innocent.  The specific point I made was that we had drills of this type once a year at my school. It was to train first responders, our staff, yes and even the children, to be ready in case a disaster actually did occur.  It also tested our response systems and allowed for us to improve them.

Another poster commented with a montage composed of actual mass shootings with Sandy Hook right in the center. The point was that these were all faked by some evil cabal of who knows what?

I responded by declaring that those who attacked murdered children and their grieving parents, that is, people like her, were so morally disgusting,so repugnant, that she literally made me sick to my stomach.

Several hours later I decided that I would make this into a post in the manner in which I usually do. That is, I would simply copy everyone’s comments and post them with my own additional commentary. As always, I would protect both the innocent and the guilty by using only a single initial to identify them.

However, when I tried to look at the post, I could see only the beginning of her comment, “And you can crawl…”

This was followed by the declaration:

The comment may have expired or it may only be visible to an audience you’re not in. 

I would like to have seen what comment she made. I’m curious as ro exactly where she wants me to crawl. Unfortunately I have no access to the post, not even other parts of it.  In fact, I did crawl into bed shortly after I made my post. That’s because I wasn’t joking. She literally made me sick. I’m so upset at these moral degenerates who insist that mass shootings are all somehow staged events, including the horrors at Sandy Hook, that my blood pressure shot up high enough to trigger a vertigo attack. Thankfully, I was able to sleep for three hours and feel a bit better now. Naturally, that’s not the end of it. Once I have an actual serious vertigo attack,  I remain extra sensitive to them for a week thereafter. So I need to be careful and not deal with the most despicable of the conspiracy theorists for that time period. I suppose that means it’s a good thing I got blocked.

I also suppose it would give her a lot of satisfaction to know that her hateful attack on murdered children and their grieving parents actually succeeded in making me sick. Then again, the fact that it was my moral revulsion at her which sent my blood pressure soaring might have given her pause. No. I seriously doubt that she would stop her self degradation at any level.

In conclusion let me say, 🤮

Profile In Infamy

Again this post is very short but it should be extremely provocative and thus I think is worthy of repeating here in my blog.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-a-profile-in-courage-11579220188

The impeachment was not partisan. Johnson was a vile, hateful, racist, bigot. He undid much of the benefits gained with the deaths 600,000 Americans. He returned Blacks to a kind of non-citizenship in the South, the consequences which we are still suffering today. The man was justly and properly impeached and John F. Kennedy was a fool to consider the despicable acts of Sen. Edmund G. Ross  a profile in courage.  It was a profile in racism. A profile in infamy.

Bloodletters Unite!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2019/12/28/the-end-of-education-reform-or-a-new-beginning/amp/

I don’t agree with every point in this article but I do agree with most. It was obvious the moment the great “reforms” were proposed that they would fail miserably and only make things worse. So why did all the experts think the plan was so great? In fact, why are many of them still praising them? Because so many of the experts have never taught a child anything in a classroom. They display high degrees and endless hours of studying about how to do things which they have never actually done. Imagine if, in World War II, instead of pulling our aces out of combat and taking them back to train new pilots we had those recruits trained by experts had never actually flown a plane but had studied and studied how to do so and knew all the theories of how to do it right.

I’m on record as saying and I will repeat again, these modern educational experts with their endless testing and competition theories are the exact equivalent of you going to a doctor with the flu and he declares, “Thyne humors art in imbalance. I shall bleed thee!”

Absolutism In Science

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

So what has been touted as absolute proof that free will can’t possibly exist appears very likely to simply be an artifact of the way the data was analyzed. In other words, evidence of nothing at all, except the foolishness of jumping to conclusions and of predetermining the outcomes of scientific data.

> ...neuroscientists barged in like an elephant into a china shop and claimed to have solved it in one fell swoop... <

It should be noted that even if it had been confirmed, it could only show that under extremely limited circumstance requiring virtually no rational thought, or decision-making, or exercise of free will, the brain predecides a response without conscious input. Had this been correct (and now appears to be incorrect) it still would not have warranted the conclusion that therefore every single decision ever made by every human being can only be made in this particular non-conscious manner. Such an overreach is simply unwarranted. It reminds me of BF Skinner’s conclusion that since some learning takes place as a conditioned response, all learning must take place in that manner. This is the equivalent of saying that since some people get from place to place on a skateboard, the only way human beings can ever transport themselves from place to place is on a skateboard. Thus, there are no such things as automobiles, cars, trains, rollerskates, or human feet.

This inevitably reminds me of a supposed absolute truth that free will can’t exist which is based in classical physics. For decades it was declared as an absolute that since every single cause has a single effect and every single particle must react to the previously existing conditions in an exactly predictable manner, there was no room for free will or choice. Every thought was ultimately produced by the motions and interactions of atoms and molecules and since these were moved in an exactly predictable manner from one existing state into the next existing state, there was no such thing as original thought or free will. Everything, including our thoughts and our choices were always predetermined.

Then came quantum physics. Suddenly the very same individuals who were loudly (very, very loudly) declaring free will is impossible because of this absolutely perfect proof were insisting that the destruction of their beloved proof was totally meaningless and had no effect on the debate whatsoever. Ultimately, it seems, the perfect and irrefutable argument was composed entirely of sour grapes.

In fairness, we must be remember that scientists are, inevitably, human beings. The public image of scientists as cold calculating individuals who lack emotion or are at least are uniquely objective is nonsense. More than anything else, at the most basic level, a scientist is a human being; and as with all human beings this class of individuals is subject to the same emotional prejudices, confusions, and errors that are inherent to our entire species.

The classical physics argument that all particles follow a rigid and invariable pattern and therefore there can be no such thing as free will since we are completely, including our brains, composed of those particles so that everything is already predetermined was as deeply offensive to me in high school as it is today. Like it’s theological cousin, the Calvinist theory of predestination, the belief that human beings have no control of their own fate was anathema to me. I didn’t know where the fault lay in this particular theory, it seemed to be a perfect proof. Yet I had a deep conviction (one could argue a faith) that it was wrong.

Now that its flaws have become manifest, I feel deeply vindicated, even while those who once swore that classical physics theory was the absolute proof of their correctness now discard it as never having been relevant to the discussion. It should be noted that in the area of quantum physics there are still those who advocate for a theory referred to as the “hidden variables” interpretation. This suggests that there are variables which adhere to the classical physics model which are unknown to us at this time and which will eventually prove (when they are discovered) that classical physics was correct all along. The number of scientists believing this shrinks every year. As an old adage by Max Plank indicates, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

FYI: it was Max Planck’s work on the blackbody problem that caused him to introduce a new concept, that of the quanta. When he first introduced it to resolve that problem, he regarded it as a mathematical fiction, but it grew into a new reality, indeed, into an entirely new physics.

This leaves the questions of, what is conscious, what is free will, unanswered. While we continue to seek the truth, we must wonder if it will ever be found. A very interesting article suggests that a single ultimate answer may not be possible. It presents a very interesting concept. One, I think, especially in the context of this post, is well worth consideration. See the link below.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pluralism-beyond-the-one-and-only-truth/

Self-destruction: An Overview

From The Atlantic.  This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

I hope people will find the bits I have quoted from this article sufficiently intriguing and provoking to go to the source and read it in its entirety.   It is well worth the time for both right and left wingers.   

Unlike the author of this article, I loved 1984 much more than Brave New World from the beginning.  I have always realized that the answer to the question, “How did he know?” lies in an error in the question itself. It’s not how did he know what would happen in politics, it’s how did he know the nature of human beings.   There is so much that is so very obvious if you step outside of your culture and your society for even a moment or two. But doing so is profoundly difficult for the vast majority of people.  >“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote.<

Today it doesn’t take much to make either the right or the left surrender their freedom and even their intelligence.  Rationality is not a valued commodity under any circumstances and in today’s fetid atmosphere of passions it has almost entirely vanished from public discourse. >Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.<

>Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”<

While the right wing’s abandonment of sanity is based almost entirely on fear and the resultant rage and so is easy to understand, the left wing’s movement in this direction is rooted in the desire for a perfect utopian justice. >Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value.<

The articles author points out that today >...intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police<

Finally,  I must agree with his conclusion that >Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. ...Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

Again, I suggest you read the original article, Conservative or Liberal, it is well worth your time.  As for me, to quote an old and rather silly parody song about the days of the Troubles in Ireland, “Me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.”

Note: my apologies for the poor proofreading. My health is really not good at the moment and I’m just not up to the effort.

Notes: On Victims And Self Victimization

https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/take-it-from-someone-who-has-suffered-real-physical-abuse-words-arent-violence/

While I do grow tired of Quillett's excessively repetitious nature, every now and then there's an article worth reading which is why I continue keeping an eye on the site.  This article is an excellent one. It points out that the difference between being a lifelong victim and being a person who was once victimized lies in the way you see yourself afterwards.  The victim is for ever being victimized and can never escape, while the individual who was once a victim takes responsibility for their own healing and adaptation.

> Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom.  We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender. <

Notes: Extremism And the Left

Quillette Is doing well this week! Here's another article I found compelling and interesting. The first point of the article makes it I found most in need of sharing Is that the extreme left is growing and, unless it is reigned in, will become as extreme and anti-intellectual as the extreme right.

>Those on the right once were the main enemies of evolutionary theory, but today, as Colin Wright argues, those on the extreme left are the “new evolution deniers.”<

And in answer to all those extremist you choose to throw science into the garbage can:

 > But science should be in the business of advancing knowledge of the world and its inhabitants rather than advancing certain groups or sides over others. Like any discipline of science, evolutionary psychology has not been untouched by prejudice and ridiculous theories. But most of them were either unfalsifiable and thus unscientific or were falsifiable and subsequently refuted by experimental tests. <

Not Guilty! OK, Maybe Partly Guilty

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/prescriptive-racialism-and-racial-exclusion

While this article makes an interesting point, It also makes a grievous intellectual error. I'm reposting this article because of the following comment:

> The Islamic philosopher Al Ghazali did the same when he railed against the Greek pagan influence during the Islamic Golden Age, and in doing so he extinguished the brilliant flame of scientific thought of his era. The Middle East has been dark ever since. <

In fairness to the author of this article, it has been a common belief, almost a universal belief, among philosophic scholars that her statement is accurate. But a look at Al Ghazal's actual philosophy and his statements indicate  a somewhat contrary reality.

While his positions are very complex, on the issue of scripture verses objective reality he clearly stated that there can be no such contradiction. Reality is reality whether observed through a religious or an empirical lens.  When a contradiction does appear, he insists that objective reality must be accepted as real and that religious scholars must then acknowledge that the Koran cannot be taken literally on that particular issue, but must instead be interpreted as symbolically true, not literally accurate.

This is the declaration of an individual who strongly supports science and its empirical, objective base. A  fair-minded person must acknowledge that Al Ghazali is not only innocent of the supposed offense but in fact is an exemplar of  the opposite position.  But equally in fairness, we can not ignore the fact that Al Ghazali was a religious extremist who also caused a great deal of harm to his culture and society.

In other words, he's not single-handedly guilty of destroying Islamic science but he did support and increase religious extremism. Which is to say he was a very mixed bag, like so many other human beings who tend to be regarded as exemplars of one particular trait but who are actually complex characters displaying both good and bad sides.

So who can be accused of single-handedly bringing down his own civilization? While it is very popular in the Middle East to blame the Crusades, there's no question it was an internal rot, a form of intellectual and spiritual cancer, which caused the destruction of the most highly advanced technological civilization on the planet, leaving it a desperately poor Third World entity to this day.

No one person was actually guilty of this offense, but one of the greatest contributors was Nizam al-Mulk. As visier, He established a highly influential set of madrasahs which firmly established the Islamic position of higher education as one of extreme religious fundamentalism.

These two highly influential men, living at the same time, did cause a great deal of harm and damage to their own society and civilization.  Still, I feel compelled to point out that Al Ghazali did not rail against science. Although he did contribute to the dominance of religious extremism and fundamentalism which led to the fall of the Islamic empire, he most certainly did not do it single-handedly nor did he do so by attacking science or objective reality. 

 Let me now note that I have previously stated over a period of decades that the anti-science movement founded in American religious fundamentalism constitutes an existential danger to our society. China was destroyed by turning inward into religious fundamentalism and away from science and objectivity, as was the great Islamic empire, as we will be if we do not reign in it's extremist excesses.

Dancin' The Hypocrite Rag

The oh so very Christian Republicans adore the teachings of Ayn Rand. They say "Jesus" endlessly while doing the work of the implacably atheist Rand.

-- Think of it like a vegetarian opening a steak house. --

Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."

But the Republicans sure try hard!

(Oh, on a side note, Ayn Rand died poor living off Social Security. So much for opposing big government programs and rallying for “personal responsibility.”) Jesus Christ believed in helping the poor; feeding the hungry; opposing greed; believed in acceptance; taught to provide for the needy, all while preaching love and generosity. Ayn Rand believed that we should only worry about ourselves, that the “self” is the only thing that matters and essentially charity was stupid. - See more at: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/republicans-trying-mix-ideologies-jesus-christ-atheist-doesnt-make-sense/#sthash.7LGSTLGZ.dpuf

Definitions

Congress has also declared: Money equals speech. Peace equals war. Facts are whatever makes Congress feel good. Reality isn't real, and if reality was real, it wouldn't matter anyway. Being a good Christian means doing the opposite of whatever Christ said. Patriotic Americans do everything they can to support international corporations while destroying American jobs. Rich people who make money by manipulating financial markets and stealing other people's money are "job creators".

Oh well. What's the point? You get the picture.

A Fantasy Curriculum in Hobbiton

I made a Facebook response to a Fox News claim that in the past every school had a curriculum which included gun safety and gun usage. The response I made was that I had never encountered such a lesson in my years in school, cleaning schools, teaching in school, or running a school.

Someone responded, "They should've said except in California."

I then noted that I had attended school in: Mississippi, Oklahoma, Connecticut, and the Department of Defense school system. A friend added that she had attended school in Massachusetts and didn't notice any of the supposed gun curriculum either.

Heil, Stalin! Aka, Vodka vs Bourbon

Watching C-SPAN's book TV, as I do every weekend, I found an interesting presentation by a man named Ronald Radosh. I had never heard of him before, but found his presentation amusing and interesting. He was talking about his new book, "Commie". His presentation, in a bright and witty fashion, demolished the bizarre, idiotic and even insane pretensions of the radical left. I knew as I listened to him that I would need to report on this in my blog because he so deeply reflects why I have nothing but contempt for extreme liberals and will not call myself even a moderate liberal.

I found little or nothing to which I could object in regard to any of the points he made, in fact I find them exactly in agreement with the points I make about the radical left. However, being a skeptic born, I found myself wondering if, since he was presenting himself as a reformed addict, he was actually reformed, or if he had instead, as I so greatly feared, merely substituted an equally poisonous, equally mindless, equally bigoted, right-wing extremism.

It didn't take long during the question-and-answer period to determine that he had done exactly that. Mister Radosh, who is so proud of having finally freed himself from the poisonous ideology of extreme left-wing liberalism in which he was raised, has merely substituted the almost identical poisonous ideology of extreme right-wing conservatism.

To put it succinctly, he is so incredibly proud that he is now a reformed vodka drinking alcoholic, but somehow misses the fact that all he has accomplished is to change into an active bourbon drinking alcoholic.

In other words, he has only exchanged one addiction for another. He is just as mindless, just as bigoted, just as determined to refuse to face any facts or realities which contradict him as he ever was. There really is no difference in his condition. He remains as sick as ever. He is the same person he always was. He is a sad, unfortunate, and helpless man. What he is helpless to do is to think clearly. What he is helpless to resist is his own mindless, extremist way of thinking. He is a slave to his own hysterical emotions. He poisons his own intellect.

To use a different analogy, let us go to extreme focus. There was a time in European and American history when people were presented with a forced choice/false dichotomy. Either you were a Nazi because you were anti-Stalinist or you were a Stalinist because you were anti-Nazi. Obviously, there was actually a huge middle ground between these two extremes, but many refused to see it. It has been noted many times by historians there is little difference between a Stalinist and a Nazi in terms of how they treat their citizens or run their countries. The only difference is in the ideologies which provide the justification for their brutal, extremist actions.

It is so sad to see what is clearly a brilliant mind poisoned by ideology. However, I also find this to be quite normal. We find ultra liberals who say they have freed themselves from ultra conservatism as often as vice versa. The real problem never lay in the ideology which this person once believed was so true. The flaw lay in the fact that they were always what Hoffer referred to as True Believers. That is, deeply flawed personality types that are incapable of facing reality and prefer to live in their warped dystopian fantasies.

Perhaps Hoffer should have referred to them as true followers. Although many of them have the intellectual capacity to lead, all too often they lack the emotional security and confidence which is required to understand and think independently. They prefer to surround themselves with the mass of their fellow apes in the troop. Let someone else be the leader. They are only content to follow, securely surrounded by their fellow travelers.

Jesus vs. the GOP

Jesus said  we must feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The Republican Party says don't feed the hungry and don't clothe the naked, it will just make them dependent. Then these Republicans promptly add, "Aren't I a good Christian?" The answer is, "No, you are not."

Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist, recently stated, "If you came into this for years ago with a Keynesian point of view, you said things that were regarded as outrageous in this town. You said government borrowing won't send interest rates skyrocketing. The Fed printing money won't cause inflation. And by the way, austerity policies will tank the economies that adopt them.  And all of that has come true.  So, you know, you have a theory that works ."

Hayekian predictions include the belief that Clinton's raising of taxes on the rich would destroy the economy. Note:  That's the economy which bloomed. The European Union, under the leadership of Germany, has adopted Hayekian principles and they're doing very poorly compared to us. We adopted a mild Keynesian stimulus and we have gained a mild recovery.

Even the Wall Street Journal reported that United Kingdom's austerity policy produced a second recession.  Krugman points out that when Cameron came into power, Conservatives in America were delighted. They knew that he would adopt the correct procedures to end to all economic problems in Britain. Well, he did take all those correct procedures, at least correct according to the Conservatives.  They were excited because they were certain his austerity programs would show how effectively austerity programs work. Instead, Britain has experienced a second recession.   We should take notice that that the Keynesian economists in America said that Cameron's policies would cause a second recession, as it did.

Krugman also pointed out that Sweden, arguably the greatest welfare state in the world, has done quite well during this time. This is the exact opposite of the Conservative Hayekian predictions of the fate of socialist economies.

Finally, Krugman points out that Iceland, where much of this economic crisis originated, was expected to completely self-destruct, especially because they adopted very Keynesian policies with a lot of government controls as a temporary measure to fix the problem. Actual result:  Right now they're doing better than we are.

This leads only one possible conclusion.  The reason American and European Conservatives  continue to believe in the economic theories of Hayek is that they are convinced that since no man can be perfect and since Hayek has a record of being perfectly wrong, he's overdue to be right. At least they hope so.

Donkeys and the GOP

Breaking news from the right wing. The blogosphere, reaching all the way to at least one English newspaper, has declared an attempted desecration by Obama. What is he going to desecrate?

The facts: The University of Chicago is planning on demolishing an old apartment building in which Ronald Reagan, as a child, lived for less than one year. They're doing this to increase their student parking space. That's it. Those are the facts.

So what has the right wing screaming atrocity? Well, it turns out that the University of Chicago might be considered as one of the places where Obama could possibly build his library sometime in the unknown future.

If this is the site chosen, and if someone comes to visit that library, and if that person parks in this particular parking space which is normally reserved for students, then the University could conceivably be interpreted as having demolished Ronald Reagan's childhood home to create a parking lot for Obama's library. Could be so interpreted. If you're a real dumbass.

(Panic not, that's ass as in donkey.)

Let's be clear, even if the University of Chicago site is chosen for Obama's future library, the library will have its own parking lots. This will not be a parking lot for the library. It would just be a parking lot in which someone was visiting the library might choose to park. And then again, it is more likely they would park in the parking lot for the library which would be close to the library. Still, maybe someone wants a lot of exercise and prefers to park farther away and then walk to the library.

Please forgive the simplicity of the paragraphs above with their many word repetitions, but it is apparently necessary to make things clear to those experiencing a panic attack about this non-event.

It occurs to me that if Republicans could just learn to laugh at themselves then they wouldn't make such fools of themselves all the time. I suppose that's just asking too much.

I see why Bobby Jindal refers to his own party as, "the stupid party".

St. Ronald of Reagan

The difference between Ronald Reagan and today's Reaganites is that Ronald Reagan, although an ideologue, also recognized that reality is real and must be dealt with. In other words, when the facts finally forced him into a position where he either denied reality and got a divorce from it or changed his ideology; he changed his ideology. This means the extreme right wing of today who lionize and idolize Ronald Reagan are Reaganites in Name Only a.k.a. RINOs.

The situation is so extreme, that Reagan would be called a liberal, pr even spcialist, today by those who claim to be his disciples.  This is remarkably like their attitude toward Jesus.  They worship him, but consistently do the opposite of what he told them they must do to earn salvation.  They are CHINOs.  

No, not the pants!  Christians in Name Only.