Face to face with the worst economic crisis confronting our nation in decades, our dedicated public servants are hard at work on our behalf.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is busy launching an online petition for readers to express their outrage at conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. This, coming on the heels of triumphant Democrats confirming a tax cheat as our new Treasury Secretary, which came on the heels of giddy Democrats spearheading a new
bill through Congress that would require camera phones to make a sound when taking a picture.

Six Democrats were busy
enjoying a Caribbean junketsponsored by Citigroup after Congress obligingly approved the $700 billion bailout of financial services firms in October, while others were hard at work crafting a $819 billion spending package under the guise of stimulating the economy.

What spending millions of bucks on sexually transmitted diseases and giving billions of our tax dollars to corrupt left-wing groups like ACORN has to do with stimulation has yet to be explained. Instead, we're urged to look at 'the larger picture'.

The 'larger picture' that immediately comes to my mind is Father Earth, Algore, testifying before Congress, warning of the imminent demise of the human species because of global warming, while the storm of the century rages across 1,400 miles of the U.S. I digress...

President Obama meanwhile, continues his honeymoon, bravely shrugging off the arrest of his half-brother for dope and his aunt's illegal status.

In response to news that Iran now has the ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon this year, Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo and changed the rules governing interrogation of terrorists, in order to assure these prisoners not be made "uncomfortable." No mention was made of the 61 Gitmo inmates that had already been released and found, once again, engaged in jihad.

Obama then followed up by asking the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon's budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent -- about $55 billion.

Obama reacted to Republican Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra's comment "There's no way and no chance to stop the Iranian nuclear program," by penning a Dear Achmadinejad letter to Iran, legitimizing the rogue regime by agreeing to direct talks, something Bush had refused to do.

Iran promptly responded, claiming that Obama's offer signaled that America's policy of "domination" has failed.

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Iran gleefully retorted.

No fool, he, Obama had already pre-empted Iran by appointing Gary Samore as our new Weapons of Mass Destruction Czar, allowing him to continue focusing on his plan to do away with the military's 'Don't ask, Don't tell' policy regarding gays in the military.

Anticipating this new policy, Army Secretary Pete Geren has approved adding legal personnel to help combat sexual assault among soldiers, which he deemed "repugnant to the core values" of the Army.


Meanwhile, our dedicated public servants on the state level are just as busy. New York's Mayor Bloomberg, facing shrinking tax revenues that have turned the $1.3 billion November budget hole into a now $4 billion chasm, took to the microphones and declared a war on - salt. I'm not making this stuff up.

In California, the state wasunable to give the taxpayers their tax refunds because, oops, there's no money left. Not to worry, California is counting...

Page 2: https://www.rightbias.com/News/020109gov.aspx

Nancyv: Don't forget all the committees that they are creating to study all these problems.... A bailout committee to see where the bailout money went, a Middle Class committee to study the middle class & etc....Remember libs are completely helpless without creating larger bureaurocracies and lots of red tape!!

And we have to just accept all this. This is surreal

Robot wrote:Remember libs are completely helpless without creating larger bureaurocracies and lots of red tape!!

That's because their education is in essentially useless things. They have fetishized meetings and paperwork, mistaking them for knowledge and wisdom.

You will accept it or be sent off to be reeducatedrehabilitated...!

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php? ... geId=87757

[off]Isn't this where someone's supposed to say, "I love it when a plan comes together"[/off]

Father Joe would be proud comrades.

nancyv wrote:And we have to just accept all this. This is surreal

Yah, I'm going through all my post apocalyptic sci fi novels now to figure out which authors will wind up being considered prophets of the future... :p

Commissar Theo wrote:

[HIGHLIGHT=#ffff00]They have fetishized meetings and paperwork, mistaking them for knowledge and wisdom.
[/HIGHLIGHT]

Comrade Theo: Will you please refrain from futher divulging any more closely guarded Party secrets to the general masses?! I hope that we can implement damage control measures soon enough to contain your wanton indiscretion!

I of course do not need to explain to a high ranking party official such as yourself the importance of Committee Meetings^TM These extremely valuable Party tools superfically give the appearence that something is being accomplished. These Committee Meetings^TM are now the very backbone on which the lowly stinking masses of Proles hang their newly acquired Hope^TM that they (laughably) think will generate Change^TM

We of the Inner Ciricle realize that it is all a mere illusion. The Meetings by their very nature create an endless redundancy of fact-finding missions, employee educational programs and implementation meetings. These Meetings are very costly and burn much of the monies funded toward the entire project as a whole. They then by necessity require additional funding as well as extensions on various time tables, all the while accomplishing nothing!

The Meetings themselves are designed to be poorly run as we have staffed them with people who have no knowledge or experience in the areas in question. When an occasional truism is accidentally discovered it will be incongruent with our Party Members preconceived biases and thus rejected. The Meetings are then reduced to "Mental Masturbation Sessions" which of course accomplish nothing that they were set out to do. (genius wouldn't you say??)

Sadly, there are times when the "other side" has experienced people in charge of these meetings. This represents a different type of challange to the Party, however the obstacle is not insurmountable. By placing even less knowledgable people within the committe they will create an obstructionist approach to things that will slow the entire process down considerably as well as making experienced person feel like "the pivot man in a circle jerk."

Let us then all stick to the Party Line and continue our undying support of Committee Meetings^TM

Ah, Robot, I do apologize for my slip in politesse. I plead that I had just seen the movie about dear Comrade Che, and was so moved by the story of this lying, murdering, Commie bastard too evil for hell faithful party comrade that I was as given to labile dementia as a forty-year-old woman who spends half her income on Precious Moments figurines and who is currently in love with the nearest serial killer in a prison.

<i>Of course</i> the meetings are utterly important, in and of themselves. What they do is unimportant. A good Progressive meeting is like getting into a car without an engine but with a loud stereo making "Vroom! Vroom!" noises.

[quote="Comrade7.62"][quote="nancyv"]And we have to just accept all this. This is surreal[/quote][/quote]

Yah, I'm going through all my post apocalyptic sci fi novels now to figure out which authors will wind up being considered prophets of the future... :p[/quote]

Its all laid out in Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'

Philip K. Dick. Robert A. Heinlein.

Rah, rah, R.A.H.! Cut my teeth on Heinlein.

I was at solo and ensemble contest (musical competition) in the 8th grade in Midland, Texas, while the evil W was there, and read <i>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress</i> sitting in the bus. One of those days which sticks out in my mind with lapidary precision. Must have read it a dozen times since then. By far his best. Later on his extended-family books got a bit silly--after all, once you have the deus ex machina of unlimited space and time travel, then it just turns into a romance.

Harsh Mistress has aged very well, though--at that time, which was about the same time that Clarke wrote <i>2001</i>, people underestimated the difficulty of machine intelligence. Well, that's fine. Recall when Mike, the computer, was asked if he had spare storage. He has a new memory bank of a hundred million bits, which would be more than enough to save all his conversations. My iPhone has 640 times that much storage. But then only five years after that the computer we had my freshman year at Rice was $20M in today's money and had 1/4000 the memory of my iPhone. And lovely as my iPhone is it is not smart enough to run yelping from an appearance of Comradette Nansky.

I quite like his junior-high fiction: <i>Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Starman Jones</i>, and one of the very best, <i>Citizen of the Galaxy</i>.

I recall though in junior high (7th and 8th grades here), being somewhat scandalized by the behavior of his characters, who smoke, drank, and <i>fornicated</i>. I was no doubt shocked because I simply couldn't imagine doing that with those people. But that was of course for different reasons.

Recall when Mike, the computer, was asked if he had spare storage. He has a new memory bank of a hundred million bits, which would be more than enough to save all his conversations. My iPhone has 640 times that much storage.

There was a line in the novella "If This Goes On..." (the one about a second American Revolution against "The Prophet Incarnate") during the mechanized assault on New Jerusalem that made me snort. The hero was in charge of communications, which went well until the bad guys analyzed their frequency and sent a feedback wave that "blew every tube in the radio."

But this goes along with a thread on Big Hollywood about special effects in movies (bemoaning the fact that while CGI has become miraculous, the story lines haven't retained the wonderful intensity of the years of yore) and I think in the same vein. Nolte (I think was the BH author) maintained that the special effects can truly suck if the story is good. Yeah, the Grand Old Man couldn't know everything that was going to develop in the next few decades that would make some of his lines laughable, but the story was so well crafted that the gaffe didn't detract.

Yes, it was the story. Have your read his history? He went from the left to the right/libertarian as he saw the world. As he surrendered to the experience of his senses as interpreted by his mind. That is not a liberal position.

I've often thought that technology works against art. Jane Austen is, to my mind, the finest novelist ever. And her work was done in longhand, and the letters to the publisher were in longhand. And horses carried the manuscripts. She <i>had</i> to be careful of her work for the difficulty made editing important.

The net is the biggest vanity press ever, and the ease of publication means that anyone can publish and rant--after all, would we be doing this if it weren't easy? Look at the moonbats over at the Kos Cave. If they didn't have the net, they'd be in their mothers' basements picking their pimples or abusing their privates. All of the time.

<i>2001</i> is a much greater movie than <i>Star Wars</i>, but Kubrick had only a fraction of the effects that Lucas had. It took Kubrick's vision, with Clarke's vision, to make a truly great movie. I just got the Blu-ray of it and loved it even more. But has anyone really wanted to revisit the Lucas oeuvre? Wonderfully done and very good for what they are, but the story just isn't nearly as good.

My brother says that there are two reasons for a movie: special effects and comedy. That's a step too far; some indie movies don't shriek me-too liberalism. But if you want special effects without the bother of a plot, you can get DVDs of computer animations--things like <i>Gateway to the Mind</i> or things like that, out of print, which mean nothing but are lovely. Too bad I don't have any acid to enjoy them with.

Commissar Theocritus wrote:

Robot wrote:Remember libs are completely helpless without creating larger bureaurocracies and lots of red tape!!

That's because their education is in essentially useless things. They have fetishized meetings and paperwork, mistaking them for knowledge and wisdom.

Enter the Pointy-haired Boss from the comic cartoon Dilbert.

[excised by Theocritus for being as full of himself as a true progressive.]

All of these people are lost in their own worlds. How many people do you know who listen? Listening means a form of surrender, the willingness to have your views changed by outside information.

I saw Penn and Teller at the Rio in Las Vegas over the summer. The book has essays, one on the other. Penn says that Teller is the hardest person on earth to argue with. You present an argument and if you're right, he says, "You're right," and that settles it.

Notice the humility, and the strength of character. They're libertarians, by the way.

Hubris is the fall of humanity.

As was noted by, inter alia, Aristophanes.

Not to mention all the Greek tragedies.

I cannot claim to be au courrant in all the Greek tragedies but I thought that the one most concerned with hubris was Aristophanes.

Commissar Theocritus wrote:I cannot claim to be au courrant in all the Greek tragedies but I thought that the one most concerned with hubris was Aristophanes.

I suppose it's all a toss up, because I can give you a lot of books/other forms of media where hubris was the lesson in downfall. For example, Paradise Lost, Lucifer's downfall was due to hubris, Adam and Eve's downfall was hubris. In Oedepus, his Father's downfall was hubris, and even him poking his eyes out was due to hubris.

The list goes on, as you know. I'll say it again though, it's a toss up who was the most concerned with pride, but as my 12th grade humanities teacher always noted, hubris is always the underlying problem.

It also is the underpinning of the central tenet of the left: that policy makes culture.

I like what you, if I remember right it was you, said "The Right sees the world as it is. the Left sees the world as it should be." So yes, the idea of policy makes culture is true.

Yes. And we can also change human nature. Completely. There were twin boys who were circumcised. The machine burned off the pecker of one. The doctors shrugged, cut off his balls and gave him female hormones. No sweat, they thought--raise him as a girl. He refused to take the hormones and eventually killed himself.

He should have just tried harder, damn it, to prove that mankind, or humankind, is a complete construct. That's the leftist way.

Yes it is.

Now I for one wasn't born gay. I was born a ravening heterosexual. But I couldn't afford an interior decorator. So guess what I had to do?

Commissar Theocritus wrote:Now I for one wasn't born gay. I was born a ravening heterosexual. But I couldn't afford an interior decorator. So guess what I had to do?

I know the answer to this, but I'm not going to write it.

Elliott, I had to <i>turn</i> gay! That's the answer. It was a choice that I made.

Oh wait. That's what Jerry Falwell says. I'm so confused...

And now I'm funcosed(confused)

Isn't this glorious! It reminds me of the great revolution in the Russia that brought about the single most wonderful country to have ever existed, the USSR. I remember purging those bourgeois scum with Comrade Lenin. It was great fun. I can't wait to do it here, too.

Comrade Joe,
Welcome to the Cube. Please report to the nearest railroad station for Party processing. One of us Commissars/Kommissars will be more than happy to process you. A comradly reminder, bring warm cloths.

Commissar_Elliott,
The Commissar with yet a title in his name.

Commissar Elliott,
Thank you for the welcome. There will, however, be no need for me to report for Party processing. You see, I already went and the Comrade there appointed me to a low position, so I "redistributed" some of my bullets into his head in gratitude and "redistributed" his processing job to myself in return.

Tricky, tricky, tricky. . . I'll have my eye on you.

Commissar_Elliott wrote:Tricky, tricky, tricky. . . I'll have my eye on you.

Then I'll redistribute your eye to myself and redistribute a lit stick of dynamite to you in return.

Comrades! Let us leave aside these petty squabbles. The enemy is not within. The enemy is the Rethuglicans and the Libertarians. The enemy is anyone who believes in accountability.