Quotulatiousness

June 18, 2022

Do you remember Julia from 2012?

Filed under: Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you don’t remember the amazing life story of Julia Faceless, here’s Chris Bray to refresh your memory:

In 2012, the Obama campaign released a cartoon depiction of the choice America was facing, boiled down to a single figure: The Life of Julia.

Julia was actually, literally faceless, and entirely alone, traveling through life without family, friends, or colleagues. But ahh, like the story about the guy who asks God about the two sets of footprints, Julia wasn’t alone alone: She was supported, at all times, by the endless beneficence of the centralized state, our one true parent and deity, the very lifesource. She was able to begin learning as a child because Barack Obama gave her a HeadStart program; she was able to start a business as an adult because Barack Obama gave her an SBA loan. The God-Patriarch Barack walked with her always, enabling her to live, giving her the substance of her life.

That’s how it works, of course: You need programs so you can do stuff. How can a human being possibly reproduce without government programs to support and subsidize reproduction? It’s a biological impossibility — as is well known, the uterus isn’t even activated until the first government check arrives. You can’t do things on your own, and you certainly can’t do things with the informal support of family, friends, or community. Life requires the empowerment that comes with formalized systems of dependency.

Chris then follows up an earlier post on the administration’s muscular deconstruction of student-led activities and organizations at Stanford with some further evidence that even at the college campus level, deliberate infantilization of adults continues at an ever-increasing pace. Adulting is hard, man!

That’s way beyond you, poor debilitated child. Why don’t you try something that’s within your range of ability, like going for a walk around campus? You know, we have a formal organization that can support you in the attempt. To take a walk. Here. On campus.

The message of stories like this, and the message of the administrative actions they describe, is a message of weakness, fearfulness, debilitation, and dependency: You can’t. Imagine telling a healthy twenty year-old that he shouldn’t try to go camping in the mountains, ’cause it’s probably just way too hard for him. See, Stanford’s student life administrators are helping.

What you’re doing in your late teens and early twenties, whether you go to college or not, is learning adulthood — acquiring habits of independence and resourcefulness that you’ll carry for the rest of your life. (Ideally your parents will already deliver you to legal adulthood with a big part of this training already in place.) The message, don’t try to take a trip to the mountains, it’s too hard for you, is a knife in the heart of that journey. It’s a disgusting and shameful thing to communicate to young adults.

July 16, 2021

Do US intelligence agencies only work on domestic surveillance these days?

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi discusses the (recent?) US intelligence agencies’ apparent concentration on domestic “enemies” like Republicans, Jewish organizations, conservative broadcasters, and US Presidents and their appointed officials:

The scene was perfectly representative of what the erstwhile “liberal” press has become: collections of current and former enforcement types, masquerading as journalists, engaged in patriotic denunciations of critics and rote recitals of quasi-official statements.

Not that it matters to [Fox TV host Tucker] Carlson’s critics, but odds favor the NSA scandal being true. An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically-directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story.

It’s admitted. Go back to December, 2015, and you’ll find a Wall Street Journal story by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron quoting senior government officials copping to the fact that the Obama White House reviewed intercepts of conversations between “U.S lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

The White House in that case was anxious to know what congressional opponents to Obama’s Iran deal were thinking, and peeked in the electronic cookie jar to get an advance preview at such “incidentally” collected info. This prompted what one official called an “Oh, shit” moment, when they realized that what they’d done might result in “the executive branch being accused of spying.”

After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.

These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”

October 29, 2020

QotD: The art of the politician

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Politics, it has been said (by me, I think), is the art of the hardly possible. One demands, or promises, things that cannot be delivered in this world, and that no one could want if they thought through the consequences. The successful politician does not lie, except when cornered. Rather, he fantasizes, “dreams,” and seeks a constituency that will dream with him. To my mind, Barack Obama was near to the perfect politician, and while lacking his class and cunning, Canada’s child prime minister, “Justine” (see the 4,000-page novel by the Marquis de Sade), has attempted to offer the same billboard attractions. It is what all modern capitalism has aspired to: nothing, in a very spiffy package; a triumph of pure advertising.

The perfect politician, as the perfect salesman, sells this “vision” — dwarfing any specific programme with its stated assumptions and checkable facts. Details, details; to the uninitiated, these are always boring, and the voting masses will never be initiated. The people, especially in this Age of Netflix, want entertainment, and what they call “leadership.” A leader is a person who does your thinking for you. In politics, he has a rôle like that of film director, in a movie where he will be the principal star. We must go through the movie emotionally on his side; grieve his little setbacks, feel that we participate when he wins. Black hats, white hats: his opponents are clearly marked and can be seen at every moment to be deplorable.

David Warren, “Now playing”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-07-13.

July 28, 2020

A rosy hypothetical about the US 2020 elections

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren‘s not committed to this scenario being accurate, although elements of it are clearly based in reality:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Arguably, the American people have a handle on this. Their strategy is to support Biden and the Democrats publicly, to save their jobs, discourage doxing, and avoid vicious attacks from “friends” on Facebook. Then come November, they vote for a Republican supermajority, including a Trump sweep of the Electoral College, and a GOP landslide in the House of Representatives. Thanks to the secret ballot, they can say they voted for Biden afterwards, if he is still alive. (Has anyone checked on the dear old guy in his basement?)

That Trump will lose badly will be obvious to everyone until the election results come in. The younger constituency has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the radicals who captured schools and universities, but will, as usual, rarely turn up to vote. There will be a huge volume of fraudulent mail-in ballots — nine-tenths of them Democrat — but the Natted States Postal Service will fail to deliver them on time. Desperate efforts by Antifa and BLM to keep the riots going will substantially reduce the urban leftie vote. The meltdown of the meejah talking heads, on the night of November 3rd, will be even more amusing than their meltdown in 2016. Many will succumb to the Covid virus, by morning.

Not to be political, because I never am — but I did have a long history of correctly guessing election results when I was myself practising the demonic art. (Journalism.) I was, for instance, a polite “never Trumper” even after I’d been deleted by my newspaper employers (who felt they didn’t need “token conservatives” any more). But I did think, against all the odds, that Trump would win. This was because I try not to let my own prejudices interfere with my observations. My reasoning was simple. There were lots of people who loved Trump, and very few who loved Hillary Clinton. Therefore, the latter would lose. (This also explains how I predicted Obama’s victories.)

March 23, 2020

QotD: Men’s blindness toward women

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity. Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.

So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims”™ are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.

But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent — to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life — the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.

Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men. The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women. Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)

Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.

In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women — even the feminists who pretend otherwise — unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them. As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worse hell than what Obama is proposing.

Sarah Hoyt, “Toxic Femininity”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-18.

January 26, 2020

You, your new DeLorean, and the LVMVMA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Many people — not all of them rabid fans of the Back to the Future movies — would like to own a DeLorean and it is going to be possible … eventually:

Photo of a DeLorean by grayesun is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Basically, the legislation [the Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act of 2015], which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015, would allow companies to produce limited-run replica vehicles without being bound by certain safety and emissions standards. But after that administration ended, the law stalled because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn’t follow through with implementation.

“One problem, Espey explains, was that NHTSA hasn’t had a permanent administrator since the previous presidential election, and the acting administrator would not sign off on the regulations,” writes Hagerty. Thankfully, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) took matters into their own hands and filed a lawsuit, and now it looks like the law could take effect soon.

That means DMC is once again gearing up to sell new turnkey DeLoreans, and this time around they’ll have modern conveniences like power steering and cruise control (imagine that!) and potentially features like heated seats and smartphone integration (the future!).

While they’re not available to order just yet, interested buyers can fill out a non-binding pre-order form. Just don’t expect to hit 88 miles per hour in 2020; as Espey said, “There will be no cars produced under this legislation for at least a year, and that’s presuming the feds do their job this time and don’t drag it out for four more years.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

January 12, 2020

QotD: Progressive snobbery is part of the kink

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Do they really hate ordinary people that much?

Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.

At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer’s faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.

Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith. Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity. This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of “knowing more than others” is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little. Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it.

The left’s obsession with superior knowledge runs through its entire history. As Woodrow Wilson remarked, the “instrument” of political science “is insight. A nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” Lyndon B. Johnson thought “a president’s hardest task” is “to know what is right.” And the most hubristic of all is Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yes, we are wonderfully bright, and we’ve been waiting eons for ourselves to appear.

Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.

November 19, 2019

QotD: [Trump | Obama | Bush | Clinton] Derangement Syndrome

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Trump – or Obama or Scott Morrison or Hillary Clinton – saying that 2 + 2 = 4 makes you automatically deny the math because your bête noire simply cannot be correct, you might want to take a deep breath or two and reflect on your approach to life. You’re broken. Don’t be that person.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Denying the sky is blue because Orange Man Bad”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-10-18.

October 7, 2019

QotD: Politicians’ promises

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is said of Obama that his every promise had an expiration date. That way of phrasing it seems almost too kind – as if each promise once had value and then lost it after it expired. Some promises are only ever meant to be believed – they are never meant to be kept.

Niall Killmartin, “The promise that was never meant to be kept is now the hill they have chosen to die on”, The Great Realignment, 2019-09-04.

May 21, 2019

QotD: Measuring up to the presidency … or, perhaps, down

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… let’s just look at the presidents of my lifetime: JFK: Adulterer, drug user, made his brother (!) Attorney General, shady mafia connections, stole election. LBJ: Adulterer, much cruder than Trump, started Vietnam War. Nixon: Honestly, better than LBJ but the source of the term “Nixonian.” Ford: Nice guy, failed president. Carter: Nice guy, failed president. Reagan: The GOP gold standard, but a multiply-divorced Hollywood actor whose administration was marked by nearly as much scandal-drama as Trump’s. (Just look up Justice Gorsuch’s mother). George HW: Nice guy, but longtime adulterer and failed president. Bill Clinton: I mean, come on. George W. Bush: Personal rectitude in office, though he’s been a bit of a dick since Trump beat his brother. Iraq War thing didn’t turn out too well. Mediocre judicial appointments and little attention to domestic reforms. Gave us TSA. Obama: Far more scandals, and far more abuse of power, than Trump. And does French forget that Trump was running against Hillary?

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, “I LIKE DAVID FRENCH, BUT THIS IS AHISTORICAL BULLSHIT”, Instapundit, 2019-04-20.

May 2, 2019

QotD: The Global Pottersville

Filed under: France, History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.

Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.

The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.

But now the Johnny-on-the-spot American everyman is gone, and lots of things have filled the vacuum. An overwhelmed France nevertheless intervened in Mali to staunch Islamic extremism. It bombed Libya, and then discovered that the United States’ new policy of “lead from behind” meant that America was no more likely to clean up the ensuing post-Qaddafi mess than was France — especially given that the new Mogadishu-on-the-Mediterranean was not far from Marseilles, but an Atlantic Ocean away from New York and Washington.

[…]

The aim of Capra’s fable was to remind us that the easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos. In the movie, the guardian angel Clarence can make the dream go away and cure George Bailey of his suicidal melancholy, as normalcy returns with the old Bedford Falls. In our version, we will learn soon after November 2016 whether we awake from the temporary alternative universe of a new Pottersville or whether it proves to be a depressing and continuing reality.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Global Pottersville”, National Review, 2015-06-02.

October 27, 2017

The revival of the paranoid style in social media

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

During the Clinton presidency, the conspiracy theorists were limited to the reach of their printed-and-mailed newsletters and fringe radio to spread the word (because so relatively few people were online yet). By the time George W. Bush was president, the paranoia had gone digital but had switched sides … now it was the left’s turn to fret about shadowy quasi-governmental organizations amassing arms caches and plotting to throw everyone into prison camps. Then Obama was elected, and the far-right conspiracy theorists re-emerged, bringing in the racist fringe to spice up the crazy. Now Trump is president, and both left and right are free to get their total paranoia on. This is a wonderful example of the type:

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

October 18, 2017

“Obama is actually the most conservative President since World War II”

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dan Mitchell does some statistical legerdemain to calculate US government spending increases by presidential terms in office and discovers some surprising results:

I’ve learned that it’s more important to pay attention to hard numbers rather than political rhetoric. Republicans, for instance, love to beat their chests about spending restraint, but I never believe them without first checking the numbers. Likewise, Democrats have a reputation as big spenders, but we occasionally get some surprising results when they’re in charge.

President Obama was especially hard to categorize. Republicans automatically assume he was profligate because he started his tenure with a Keynesian spending binge and the Obamacare entitlement. But after a few years in office, some were arguing he was the most frugal president of modern times.

  • So I crunched the data in 2012 and discovered that he was either a big spender or a closet Reaganite depending on how the numbers were sliced.
  • I then re-calculated the budget numbers in 2013 and found that spending grew at a slower rate the longer Obama was in office.
  • And when I did the same exercise in 2014, using another year of data, Obama looked even more like a tight-fisted fiscal conservative.

Or, to be more accurate, what I basically discovered is that debt limit fights, sequestration, and government shutdowns were actually very effective. Indeed, the United States enjoyed a de facto spending freeze between 2009 and 2014, leading to the biggest five-year reduction in the burden of federal spending since the end of World War II. And it’s unclear that Obama deserves any of the credit since he was on the wrong side of those battles.

Anyhow, I’ve decided to update the numbers now that we have 8 years of data for Obama’s two terms.

But first, a brief digression on methodology: All the numbers you’re about to see have been adjusted for inflation, so these are apples-to-apples comparisons. Moreover, all my calculations are designed to show average annual increases. I also made sure that the “stimulus” spending that took place in the 2009 fiscal year was included in Obama’s totals, even though that fiscal year began (on October 1, 2008) while Bush was President.

Lots of links in the original post that I’m too lazy to re-link, so go read the whole thing. H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.

September 21, 2017

“Once Obama and his allies launched their domestic surveillance operation, they crossed the Rubicon”

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Daniel Greenfield explains why the recent news on wiretapping Trump associates might yet bring about a Watergate for the 21st century, only with Obama team members in the defendant roles:

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump. After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress.

Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office. The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance.

While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser. Kushner is a senior adviser. Those are exactly the people you spy on to get an insight into what your political opponents plan to do.

Now the latest CNN spin piece informs us that secret FISA orders were used to spy on the conversations of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The surveillance was discontinued for lack of evidence and then renewed under a new warrant. This is part of a pattern of FISA abuses by Obama Inc. which never allowed minor matters like lack of evidence to dissuade them from new FISA requests.

Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

If any of Trump’s people were talking to non-Americans, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could be used to spy on them. And then the redacted names of the Americans could be unmasked by Susan Rice, Samantha Power and other Obama allies. It was a technically legal Watergate.

If both CNN stories hold up, then Obama Inc. had spied on two Trump campaign leaders.

Furthermore the Obama espionage operation closely tracked Trump’s political progress. The first FISA request targeting Trump happened the month after he received the GOP nomination. The second one came through in October: the traditional month of political surprises meant to upend an election.

The spying ramped up after Trump’s win when the results could no longer be used to engineer a Hillary victory, but would instead have to be used to cripple and bring down President Trump. Headed out the door, Rice was still unmasking the names of Trump’s people while Obama was making it easier to pass around raw eavesdropped data to other agencies.

No matter how bad the information gets, I doubt that Trump will go after Obama personally — ex-Presidents have an unwritten constitutional privilege that way, I understand — but some of his former cabinet and sub-cabinet officers might well be sacrificed to minimize long-term damage to the Obama administration’s various legacies.

On the other hand, CNN hasn’t been having a lot of luck with their big breaking stories lately … this might be another one of those “lots of smoke, but no fire” situations. Democrats facing tough races in 2018 will be hoping that there’s no “smoking gun” there as far as criminal prosecutions are concerned.

June 24, 2017

QotD: Manipulation of public opinion using “optics”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Public business is now done this way in “democracy,” thanks to media that can capture emotional moments, usually posed and contrived. A successful politician, such as Barack Obama, exploits them with genius, and a cool confidence that the public has a very low attention span. They will only remember emotional moments. Angela Merkel herself usually does a better job, but nothing much can be done about an ambush. She did her best to diffuse it. She’s a pro: I’m sure she knew exactly what the game was; that she’d been set up. From working in the media, I have seen such set-ups many times: all the cameras flashing on cue. Tricks of editing and camera angle are used to enhance the “teachable moment”; to condense the narrative into a hard rock of emotion, aimed directly at the boogeyperson’s head. For the media people are pros, too. They know how to adjust the “optics.” Pretty young woman crying: that will sway everyone except the tiny minority who know something about the subject. And they are now tarred with the same brush.

Huge changes in public life can be effected with big money, careful organization, and ruthless attention to “optics.”

David Warren, “Authority”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-07-17.

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