The fictional mass murderer Kevin is most often described as a psychopath and his mother Eva a sociopath in book and movie reviews, the latter defined the same as the former, but without the insanity defense, i.e., a physical brain disorder rather than a choice. President Biden isn’t suspected of any such brain disorder (although dementia has long been suspected, common for his age). But Bruce Cannon Gibney argues that Baby Boomers, those born between 1940 and 1964, are A Generation of Sociopaths (2017) based primarily on their over-consuming at the expense of future generations, a massive inter-generational injustice. He allows for exceptions, but not among the Baby Boom political leaders, of which Joe Biden was the first on the national scene.
Sociopaths are defined as narcissists with additional characteristics, among which are: superficial charm, glib, manipulative, self serving, grandiose, pathological lairs, without remorse, self-centered, untrustworthy, physically aggressive, impulsive, blaming others, lacking in empathy, break promises, an ability to avoid persecution for illegal acts, and a belief they deserve to rule the world. As a result of the Obama/Biden “Good War” over half the current population of Afghanistan was born under American protection. These and thousands of those who assisted the American occupation and their families have been left behind by Joe to meet repression, and, for many, death at the hands of his captors and other Islamic radicals. His press conferences revealed almost all these sociopathic tendencies, leaving no doubt as to the applicability of Gibney’s diagnosis.
Like Kevin, Joe is competitive among his sociopathic political peers. For sheer narcissism it would be difficult to top former President Trump, and the Clintons are unlikely to ever be surpassed in the team sociopath competition. But Joe Biden, whose first attempt to rule the world over three decades ago was thwarted by a plagiarism scandal, seeks to exceed FDR, the record holder by size of Mall Monument, as a world leader not on his foreign policy experience, but by spending his way to a risky “fundamental transformation” of the US economy and society. Should we trust in Joe, or is he the “Borax Man” (a soap salesman)?
Lost in Translation: Accountability
The Biden Administration has already passed a $1 trillion “COVID Relief Bill mostly for extending unemployment, and the independent estimates for the “human infrastructure and environment” bill is another $5 trillion including a down payment on the $100 trillion Green New Deal. The current intention is to push the entire $6 trillion through the reconciliation loophole, “reconciling” a $6 trillion Democratic 10 Year Plan (budget) with $0 Republican support). Opponents of this “go for broke” agenda argue that it is evidence of Baby Boomer sociopathy on steroids, as the next generation will certainly go broke trying to pay for it. Proponents make two counter arguments: 1. that wealth redistribution and environmental spending is compensation for prior social, racial and inter-generational economic sociopathic behavior, and 2. that opponents are anti-government laissez faire ideologues.
I’ve addressed the flaws in the arguments for economic, social and racial justice elsewhere. Gibney’s charge of massive inter-generational injustice is true but incomplete. The pay-as-you-go (pay-go) programs passed by progressives of the prior generation were better than nothing but worse than funded plans in which mandatory retirement and insurance contributions were productively invested by professional insurance companies and pension asset managers as boomers required for their own public pensions. By partially shielding themselves from the consequences of pay-go, the Baby Boom generation postponed the failure to the next generation. As with the 2008 financial system meltdown, postponing failure builds up the loss to systemic proportions. But rather than mitigate this inter-generational injustice, the Biden Plan of $6 trillion in consumption spending with payment deferred through debt and taxes doubles down.
Laissez faire reflects the 17th century advice of the French Finance Minister against helping French merchants (“let it be”), the 20th Century American equivalent of crony capitalism. While America’s Founding Fathers were aware of their contemporary Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” were they libertarian ideologues they would have proscribed government intervention at all levels, rather than just the federal government. The Constitution was established in part to fund federal infrastructure, but accountability was problematic even for its limited needs.
The genius of the original American system, is illustrated currently in the debate over ongoing unemployment subsidies. The ten states with the lowest unemployment rate are all run by Republicans who didn’t extend, the ten highest by Democrats that did. People are free to move among the states (or leave the country) to improve their circumstances. About 90% of the bi-partisan infrastructure bill funds the states, emulating the Soviet Oblast top-down funding system precisely to avoid accountability and facilitate corrupt crony capitalist spending.
The real purpose of these top down spending plans is to bail out the spendthrift technically insolvent states. States can and do go bankrupt, they just can’t legally declare it to reduce or eliminate debts, instead instituting closures (most politically popular first), lay-offs (of the non-unionized), expenditure cuts, etc. Prior to the Civil War, the Democratic Party was on the losing end of this inter-state transfer. The inadvertent reliance on the duty tax on the fruits of southern exports produced with slave labor to fund the crony capitalist “infrastructure” expenses of the North was the immediate cause of the Civil War (emancipation being a consequence).
The progressive approach is to inflate needs into a crisis, then propose a cure that is worse than the disease, this suppressed with overly simplistic and internally inconsistent “model simulations.”
The Green New Deal: Not Green, Not New, and Not Good
Societies have degraded their environment since the advent of man(person)kind. Sometimes they cleaned up, sometimes they adopted new technologies, but mostly they just moved on or died out. While we are currently exploring the ability to live on the moon or other planets, moving on isn’t a feasible solution to the problems predicted as a consequence of man-made global warming.
Environmental activists are on first blush strange bedfellows with the social and racial justice activists. But progressives which includes the UN – pick the worst case to identify an immediate “crisis” they claim to have had nothing to do with making that needs their immediate action – i.e., they “never let a crisis go to waste.” There are as many model predictions for climate change as there are environmental scientists, but thus far it has saved twice as many people (from freezing) as have died (from warming). Baby boomers haven’t done much other than virtue signal and fund crony capitalists, with little and some cases perverse net environmental effect.
When the Obama Administration defined carbon as a pollutant the progressive response was essentially to require an all powerful supra-governmental organization not seen since the Communist International to both orchestrate and enforce an agreement on the elimination of fossil fuels as a source of energy. The current approach starts with an unenforceable international suicide pact, shutting down carbon energy without a viable alternative. The countries who commit to go late rarely take their promises seriously, with every intention of reneging. Crony capitalist from birth VP Al Gore arranged the Kyoto Protocol, unanimously voted down in 1998 by the U.S. Congress. Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry produced the Paris Accords that faced a similar fate. Unapproved, it represented only virtue signaling (insincere, as evidenced by Kerry jetting in for Obama’s 60th birthday bash.)
More taxes and spending on solar panels and windmills and subsidies to electric cars, many of which run on coal, only feed the crony capitalist machine. Defrocked New York Governor Cuomo closed the Indian Point nuclear plant and California’s Governor Newsom has promised to close his state’s last nuclear plant (unless he’s recalled). Thousands of dams have been removed, partly due to environmental opposition. The Democrats, like the Soviets, have only a hammer, so the response to every crisis is a nail. Eliminating carbon based fuel while destroying dams and shuttering nuclear plants would reduce American per-capita energy consumption to 19th Century levels.
The Biden environmental agenda saddles future generations of Americans, already burdened with excessive personal debt and taxation, with an unpayable international debt. The resulting domestic repression, already underway in finance and free speech, will exacerbate today’s anarchy in the streets to levels last seen in all socialist countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left behind environmental devastation. In the wake of their environmental catastrophe, Democrats will claim “nobody could have seen this coming!’ From Afghanistan to climate change, different “crises,” same totalitarian response, same disaster, same denial.
This isn’t necessary. Carbon, solar, hydro, wind, wave, etc. are all derivatives of the sun’s nuclear energy. The US has the science, technology and manufacturing capacity to build safe, sound, environmentally pure nuclear energy for centuries to come. (Fuel may be a bit scarce as a large share of the US uranium stock was transferred to Russia per Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in return for kickbacks to the Clinton Foundation.)
Germany shuttered its entire nuclear capacity under environmental pressure, resorting to importing coal from carbon rich Russia, which has been rapidly expanding its nuclear capacity by implementing new technologies. Germany and others will follow. Policies to push carbon down where it belongs rather than up while nuclear power is phased in allow fossil fuels to be safely phased out, perhaps accelerated with a carbon tax.
Resisters to Joe’s suicidal American central plan are accused of being “climate deniers” reminiscent of cult leader Jim Jones’s admonition to his flock to drink the kool-aid. Should the U.S. follow the science or the cult leader?
The obstacle to a clean nuclear energy future is the crony capitalist control of the environmental, progressive and bureaucratic lobbies. Eisenhower, a man of character and an outstanding leader before entering the political arena, who as President opposed the military-industrial-
Kevin Villani
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Kevin Villani, Chief Economist at Freddie Mac from 1982 to 1985, has held senior government positions, has been affiliated with ten universities, and served as CFO and director of several companies. He recently published Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue on the political origins of the sub-prime lending bubble and aftermath.
You want to blame just one generation…? Really?
Some Boomers were narcissistic sociopaths–Just like any generation. Some were also selfless servants, doing as their elders instructed them to do, going and fighting for the nation in Vietnam without question. Then, when they came back from that fight to meet betrayal, they steadfastly did not rebel the way they probably should have.
So, you can’t say an entire generation is sociopathic–Especially since that leaves out the one previous that raised that generation. What responsibility do they have for creating/enabling those sociopaths in the first damn place?
Not to mention, most of what we blame the Boomers for actually got started under the Greatest Generation (supposedly…) dating back to before WWII. FDR, anyone? Who elected him, and approved his insane policies, again? The Boomers weren’t even born… Who got us into Vietnam, again…? JFK and LBJ, wasn’t it…?
You can’t premise your whole argument on fault spread out across an entire generation. That’s automatically specious on the face of it. Not to mention, it smacks of passing the buck.
There are a lot of Boomer-generation things I don’t like, but let’s be honest: Most of those aren’t generational in origin or cause. You want to blame anything, blame the actual people that did these things, not the entire generation they were born in. Lots and lots of Boomers went to war willingly and did what they were supposed to do–Are we to write them off because of their sorry-ass slacker peers?
Not to mention–1964? WTF? How is that the end date for the Boomers? If you were born in ’64, there was no way you were even of age to serve until some seven years after Vietnam was over; how the hell do you lump that age cohort in with the one who fought there from ’63 forward? Not to mention–Who, exactly, was running that war? Men who were 18 in ’63 sure as hell weren’t in a position to make much more than the middle management grades in the military before it was all over with but the recriminations, so how are they responsible for Vietnam? Wouldn’t that be on their elders, the last remnants of the so-called Greatest Generation? Didn’t JFK fight in WWII? LBJ was in Congress, if I remember right, and did not serve–But, we’re gonna blame the kids they sent off to war for losing it? How the hell is that reasonable?
Shaking my damn head at this stupidity… If the rest of what this guy has to say is equally well-reasoned, he’s well worth ignoring as an idiot.
The problem isn’t Slow Joe anymore than the USSR’s problem in the early 80s was Chernenko–the problem is a system that shoves such walking corpses to the top of the heap…
Yep.
The machine scraped the bottom of the barrel for Joe and Kamala both, and we have what we have.
What I would like to know is this: What comes after Joe? He’s the best they can do? Who comes next? It won’t be Cuomo or DeBlasio; Newsom? Equally unlikely.
I can’t think of a single figure in the Democratic Party with national gravitas, right now. Even if they push Joe out, I don’t think Kamala is going to finish his term or win re-election, so who do they throw up in opposition come 2024?
Assuming, of course, that there is a 2024 election. I would not rule out a game-breaker between now and then…
LBJ was a LTCMDR USNR long enough to be awarded a Silver Star for being in an airplane that flew close to a Japanese-occupied island in 1942 or ’43. IIRC MacArthur had a lot to do with it, knowing a useful DC tool when he saw one.
JFK swam more than he fought in WWII. He was a genuine hero for saving some of his crew after being a genuine putz in the hours before, putting his superiors in the position of choosing between court-martial and lionization.
Anyway, I’m 68, a classic mid-boomer and historian, and it seems to me there’s a lot of criticism of previous generations and their choices and not much appreciation for the worlds they inherited and the tasks they faced.
Whippersnappers.
“By partially shielding themselves from the consequences of pay-go, the Baby Boom generation postponed the failure to the next generation.”
I wonder how many people in the US — of any generation — understand that the politicians they voted for have made commitments that cannot be fulfilled (Social Security, Medicare, pensions) and have run up Federal, State, City debts that will never be repaid? Those problems are obvious to anyone who looks — just as it is obvious that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is unsupportable unscientific nonsense — but it seems that most people choose not to look.
There is plenty of blame to go round — enough for all of us, regardless of when we were born.
@Cousin Eddie,
The generational thing has always struck me as being an attempt to whip up conflict, more than anything else. The generations are a reflection of the times they live in, not the cause of the things that happen in those periods.
If you ever look at the way the media portrays the issue, you’ll note a lot of hypocrisy and the same sort of BS where the last Republican was a saint, while the current one is Adolf Hitler–The so-called “greatest generation” was excoriated for being square fuddy-duddys back in the day when the Boomers were the “youth generation”, and everyone’s wunderkind favorites. Now that they’re shuffling off into the sunset, the Boomers are the bad guys.
It’s all deliberately divisive, and entirely a means of diverting attention. If people are arguing about who to blame for it all, it becomes a lot easier for the Pelosi-types to make off with the boodle.
@Gavin,
I think everyone understands that it’s unsustainable; the problem is, what the hell do you do about it? I’ve never voted for any of this bullshit, but the asshole politicians keep enacting it, never consulting me about any of it. I do not recall ever having acquiesced to any of this, at all–There were never any plebiscites, no consultations with the electorate. They just did it. Same way the Labor governments in the UK signed up for unlimited immigration and the EU–Nobody ever asked the British public about any of that, and when they finally did, they got a set of answers they didn’t like and tried their best to ignore.
The politicians have an awful lot to answer for. I’d love to see forensic accounting done on the Pelosi family, along with the rest of the usual suspects. As I’ve often said, what’s going on in this country today looks an awful lot like a Mob bust-out gone national in scale.
“For sheer narcissism it would be difficult to top former President Trump,”
“It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
Dizzy Dean
What follows is the line of succession to the presidency. Which, if any, of the rogues gallery would make a decent interim president, if a righteous God struck down Joe and the first 3?
Yellin is the highest ranked one who is not a lunatic loser. Vilsack and Raimondo were decent governors.
No. Office[3] Incumbent Party
1 Vice President Kamala Harris
2 Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi
3 President pro tempore of the Senate Patrick Leahy
4 Secretary of State Antony Blinken
5 Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen
6 Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
7 Attorney General Merrick Garland
8 Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
9 Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
10 Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo
11 Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh
12 Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra
13 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge
14 Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg
–[A] Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm
15 Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
16 Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough
–[A] Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
[A] Naturalized citizen, ineligible to be President.
I’ve seen this generational argument many times. It’s nonsense. 65+ age voters voted 52% for Trump. Likewise the 50-64 age cohort. 18-24 year olds voted only 31% for Trump. People generally get more conservative as they age. The younger generations vote for all the spending not the boomers.
The generational crap is about as sensible as astrology, TBH. You can’t apply broad generalizations like that and have it make any sense in the real world–But, it does serve to create and build up resentments and division between generations that should not necessarily be at odds with each other.
I actually think it got going because someone rightly pointed out that the politicians were spending money that future citizens were going to have to pay back, and that led to the realization that they could manipulate public sentiment by introducing this idea and weaponizing it. The reality is, just as many Boomers are going to suffer the ill effects as the younger age cohorts, because who the hell will be able to afford to buy their homes and assets for them to retire into care facilities if the economy tanks? By introducing the “generation war”, it makes it a lot easier for them to obfuscate what is going on and introduce partisan politics where it doesn’t serve any purpose but to hide their activities and the effects of those actions…
When you think about it, it’s actually a really nutty conceit, to say that someone born in the immediate aftermath of WWII has a damn thing in common with the life experience of someone born in the early 1960s. Not to mention, what about cases like my own, where I took most of my primary cultural input from my grandmother, who was born in 1898? Am I a boomer, when I don’t share any of their values or mores? I’ve never considered myself such, and never will. Were it not for the family situation we were in, my mother should have been born sometime around the end of WWI, grown up in the 1920s, and I should have been born around the beginning of WWII. As it was, finances and family situation led to her being the one born just prior to WWII, and me being born in the early 1960s, so…?
I think the whole generational thing trivializes a lot of the history, and it’s a lot like saying “Oh, you’re a Taurus… You must be aggressive and mean!”. The entire proposition is specious, and based on purely subjective crap that I’m not sure really exists in generational terms. Sure, you may have been born during the period, but were you and your family doing the same things that the mainstream was, and which all those fantasy-land “generational traits” were based on?
Struck me, a few moments ago, that the real problem here isn’t Joe Biden. He’s a symptom, not a cause.
The real problem we need to talk about is the credulous Biden voter. They’re the ones that actually created this situation, and put these people into power again and again. There can’t be anyone in Delaware who doesn’t know what and who Joe Biden is, but he keeps right on going back into office, election after election, starting back in the early 1970s. The man has never done anything, anything at all besides politics, and most of what he’s done as a legislator and elected government official has been self-serving and just plain wrong.
You don’t need an audit to figure that out. Look at the way he lives, and what he’s worth today–Biden’s family background does not come from considerable wealth, yet he’s got a net worth of just under 10 million, so far as anyone can tell. Then, there’s the wealth his family members have just “stumbled into”, which we don’t even know about.
There is no way you do that on a government salary.
So, they keep electing him. Again, and again.
They see the gaffes, the crooked unethical nature of the plagiarizing beast, and they keep electing him. To higher and higher office.
No, the problem isn’t Joe Biden. It’s the Biden voter. I was telling people last fall that his administration was going to be a shitshow, showed them the evidence of this man’s actions and behavior, and they still voted for him. Now, they’re in denial, blaming anyone but Biden–It’s Trump, it’s the generals, it’s anything but their choice as President.
I don’t know how you fix that. You can show people the evidence, and no matter what you have to support the facts, they won’t listen. And, what’s worse? When presented with the evidentiary failure of this cretin, they won’t admit that what they’re seeing is either failure or his fault; they’ve got zero responsibility for it, either. Biden was, in their words, betrayed by the generals and Trump.
Mind-boggling. We have a nation where these people actually exist, who vote, and who are apparently making up a swath of the population that can win elections. What do you do about that?
Kirk: “The real problem we need to talk about is the credulous Biden voter.”
How about all those good Democrats who kept on sending Teddie Kennedy back to the Senate — even after he killed a woman!
Or how about those Republican Primary voters who thought that Johnnie McCain would make a good president?
The issue is ‘universal suffrage’ — giving people who have little stake in the system (except as Takers) and even less common sense the privilege of voting. Democracy worked in Ancient Athens when the citizens who voted for war then went down to the docks, climbed on board ship, and rowed to their destiny. Democracy kinda-sorta works today in a Swiss Canton. But the only way to make democracy work effectively is to make sure that everyone who is entitled to vote has serious skin in the game; and counting everyone who chooses not to vote as a deliberate vote for “None of the Above”. Purple fingers too.
I look forward to Oliver Cromwell bringing common sense back to our form of government.
There is a poison lose on the land.
That poison is leftism. Leftism is like a turd, there’s no clean end to pick it up by.
No leftist idea is healthy or decent or workable without violating somebody’s individual rights and committing civilizational suicide.
What we have today is much worse than anarchy. No, I’m not an anarchist, at all.
But if puppet bideT and his handlers are the alternative then it is better to close it all and see what gives.
A coin toss would be better than this.
The poison of leftism makes it so that those in charge not only would be incompetent if they tried to do things right by America or its remains.
The poison of leftism makes it so that those in charge want to do harm to America and Americans.
We are being governed by our worst enemies: leftists.
Leftists don’t like America and they hate Americans.
They think with a deeply felt religious fervor that America should go away and Americans should be humbled by living like today’s Venezuelans.
What we have is like we had lost WW2 and had a nomenklatura of japs and nazis ruling the country like feudal lords.
That is our current situation.
We are being governed by our enemies that want the worst for us and they are getting away with it by our misguided benevolence and tolerance.
We are playing by the rules.
They are trying to murder us.
When Mordor on the Potomac needs to make a decision they ask themselves what is the worse for America and Americans and they go with that.
Until we understand these basic concepts and act accordingly there’s no hope for us.
It’s time to call a spade a spade and a leftist the poisonous maggots that they are.
What do you do about that?
A list of the central problems might include: the educational system, elite institutions, social media, and the current large population sizes of Congressional districts. It’s difficult to imagine how our political system generates successful reforms in these areas without making things worse.
What do you do about that?
1776.
Large population sizes of congressional districts- when the present Constitution was adopted, there were roughly 4 million people in the country, with about 90 representatives and 28 senators.
Today there are 310+ million people, with 435 representatives and 100 senators.
That alone may well be enough to doom the present system, regardless of everything else.
Scale definitely allows the scum to get away with things that they normally couldn’t, were they operating at the level of a town.
I think at least one issue could be solved simply by doing two things: Inserting a regional-scale level of government into the federal system, and removing major cities from the states, making them separate entities with their own set of representation and management. The idea that a major urban area gets to play 800lb-gorilla to an entire state with totally different conditions than the urban area possesses…? Yeah; no. That does not work.
We’re going to undergo some severe shocks and changes in the near future. I don’t see any way out of that at this point. Maybe if Trump had won, we’d have muddled through a few more years, but with this current shitshow we have going on…? Nope; not going to happen. Muddling is off the table.
Although, TBH… Thinking about the apathy and lack of attention locals pay to the things our nearest town “authorities” get up to…? I’m really not sure that the problem is entirely one of scale. People have just gotten disconnected from government participation, because… Hell, I don’t know. I just know that every time the town tries something stupid, everyone acts surprised, and the reality is that the latest minor little fiddle was discussed for months a year ago, and nobody gave a damn until they actually put in the parking meters.
I’ve really got nothing, in terms of a solution. Maybe there isn’t one, and we’re doomed to dwell in a dystopia made of apathy because nobody can be bothered to pay attention to this stuff when its going on.
I think Congresscretins should have to live and work in their districts. No moving to DC and going full swamp. Instead of being wined and dined by lobbyists, they should eat dinner in the same places as their constituents, drive the same streets, shop the same stores, etc., so they’re surrounded by normal people, not the psychopaths who are attracted to power in DC.
Would it be sufficient to turn things around? No, there’s a lot more that should be done, but it could be step one to breaking up DC.
“I’m really not sure that the problem is entirely one of scale. People have just gotten disconnected from government participation, because”¦ Hell, I don’t know”
Because most local governments don’t actually do anything, and people know it. My small town is a ward of the state. The majority of its funding, the majority of the school funding, etc., aren’t locally based, they come from up above somewhere, where we have zero control over. So why should anyone bother to vote for an unopposed position that is just rubber stamping spending priorities that are dictated by the state or feds?
This will all be solved in the near future as the government becomes insolvent and can’t rain money down to lower levels anymore, and localities will have to either support themselves or disappear.
Roy Lofquist
August 30, 2021 at 4:38 am
“For sheer narcissism it would be difficult to top former President Trump,”
“It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
Dizzy Dean
Beat me to it.
The trouble we are in began with Johnson. You could make arguments that it was Wilson or Roosevelt but Johnson really got the cart rolling downhill. It is an education to read Robert Caro’s biography of Johnson. First, he was a physical coward. Second, he lived for political power. He even stole an election in college. Kennedy got us into Vietnam but Johnson really made a mess of it. The Nixon Coup was the successful model for what they tried to do to Trump. Trump has to be the most honest guy ever in business. Maybe he was naive and bumptious but I’m not sure I could survive the witch hunt he survived.
The people who go into politics are quickly corrupted by power, even in a local office. I learned that in a small city in Orange County, The experience was an education. Maybe I’ll tell the story one day.
The problem really lays in the way we look at organizing ourselves. Every problem defaults to “Set up an institution”, and then the institution takes on a life of its own. Once it exists, there’s power and influence to be had in the hierarchy of said institution, and that then attracts the feral sort of sociopath like the scent of blood in the water to sharks. Once they’re in, embedded in the system? It’s all downhill, from there.
Sometimes, those institutions are even set up from the beginning by the sociopaths. I can think of several local government agencies that got going that way, and they’ve never changed.
We really need to find a better way to organize ourselves, and cease investing power and authority in these edifices of ego and power. How do people like Fauci happen? It’s pretty simple; we made him. If people didn’t rely on some impersonal distant agency like the CDC to do the things its supposed to do, then we’d not have Fauci; he’d be some failed general practitioner out there in the countryside, not the head of a multi-billion dollar agency, wined and dined by his fellow sociopathic power-mongers. Same thing with all of them.
To my way of thinking, it’s a lot like the young men I had coming into the recruiting station that wanted to be Military Police. In Illinois, at that time, you could not be a sworn officer with badge and gun until you were 21, so a lot of kids got the idea that they’d join the Army, be an MP, and then slide right in to law enforcement. Without exception that I can remember, none of those little twerps struck me as anyone I’d entrust with a badge or a gun and power of arrest. They were all hungry little power-trippers, eager to rule over others.
Some jobs, merely wanting them should be a disqualifier. I think politics is like that–We’d likely do better having it run by lottery.
Much of the spending over the past 6 decades has been justified as ‘investment’ (just as the Biden/Harris/Pelosi spending plans are being justified), and, although the political proponents of these plans were largely motivated by *power* (their own), I’m sure that a lot of the people who voted for them, and the ‘experts’ who endorsed them, genuinely believed that they would more than pay for themselves.
Education, for example, has long been considered a good investment in America. Circa the late 1960s, it surely didn’t seem improbable that new spending on education (at all levels) would improve economic productivity, reduce crime by reducing unemployment, etc. It also didn’t seem improbable that money transfers to the poor would help future generations by reducing hunger, etc. The frequently-toxic effects of single-parent families weren’t as well researched or understood as they are today.
It is instructive to watch the various arguments, as your rather special capitalistic system, destroys your country.
And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is? Do you Mr Jones? ;)
“Much of the spending over the past 6 decades has been justified as ‘investment’”
Well, an awful lot was justified by “fairness”, which has absolutely poisoned so much of our world. So the state government says, well, School A over here has more money from local property taxes than School B over there, so to be “fair” we’ll give School B some money. Then people in School A get mad and say that’s not fair, so the government gives them some money too (since they’re more politically influential because they are a wealthier area), and gives B some more to be even more “fair”, and before you know it, neither School A or B is locally controlled anymore, but get most of their money from the state, and he who pays the piper calls the tune…
There are lots of good, practical ideas for how to reform government. But all of them would disadvantage the Scum currently in power — the very people who would have to vote for those reforms. Thus, the only way that real reform happens is when power is clawed out of their cold dead fingers.
And, let’s face it, any real reform is going to have to deal with the unrepayable National Debt and all those unpayable commitments like Social Security. Lots of debt would have to be written off, hurting the people for whom that government debt was their asset (like your pension fund).
Stormy weather ahead. Seriously, maybe this is the time to be a grasshopper instead of an ant — eat, drink, be merry! Go & see the pyramids while we still can — provided we have had multiple doses of the treatment.
It is instructive to watch the various arguments, as your rather special capitalistic system, destroys your country.
The troll thinks Canada would survive without us.
Some reasonable proposals here. Kirk’s idea for different territorial arrangements makes me think of two things.
1. The French Revolution and the creation of the department system.
2. C. Etzel Pearcy’s “38 State Solution.”
Pearcy’s proposal would actually center the metropolises more firmly rather than reduce their influence. But other than that . . .
As for where the buck$ come from, I happened upon an interview with Donald Rumsfeld of cursed memory. He was recounting his frustrating and unsuccessful stewardship of one of the Great Society programs that Nixon took up an handed to Rummy after LBJ ran away.
Anyway, as he explained, what happened starting in the late 60s was that the Feds were pumping money directly to “communities.” Community Development Block Grants etc.
The whole intent was to bypass the lower levels of authority (local, city, county, state) and make them realize that if they wanted in they would have to dance to the Fed tune.
It worked very well in Federalizing the political culture, as others have noted.
The powers that be couldn’t even pretend to give a sh!t for a single American even if their lives depended on it.
So, asking them nicely would be like explaining calculus to a sloth and expecting to make any progress..
Voting would seem to be out of the question since the last one went something else than regular and there’s little reason to think excluding a spectacular change of circumstances, somewhat unlikely as things go by, any next one will be any different.
So, very modestly, how about we stop talking bull and face the simple fact there’s an elephant in the room?
In 1776 it was the Britons. Today it is the lefto-pukes.
For those that may be working themselves into a frenzy of the “three wise monkeys”, we are filthy with lefto-pukes. Millions of them. Many a man will have to face the very sad fact that his own children are lefto-pukes and irrecoverable. I don’t envy them. Having to send you own child back is a task for better men than we have today.
Still the only question worth entertaining for Americans is the very same than in 1776: are we gonna do something about our only real problem or what?
Don’t kid yourself no matter how long you have trained yourself to do that because it feels better than facing reality.
The system is rotten to the core. There ain’t no fixing it. None. Don’t ask Dracula to stop liking to suck blood. That’s stupid. Don’t be stupid. There’s no time for that.
And if you think that taking your chances to survive the gulag they will send you to is better than girding your loins and doing what doing is needed you are kidding yourself, once again. They aim to kill you. Give them a chance and they will.
And playing possum won’t do, either. If lefto-pukes are good at something that is detecting those that are not of their ilk or willing to submit.
You guys do know that 2 + 2 = 4, do you?
If apathy, passivity, indolence, pusillanimousness and the normalcy bias would make smoke we would live in darkness.
Commenter “Time to end it” posts from the anonymity of an Argentinean IP address to urge Americans to violence. Perhaps he is an agent provocateur?
“are we gonna do something about our only real problem or what?”
Tell-tale sign of a glowie, lol…
Jonathon: “Perhaps he is an agent provocateur?”
You mean he is an FBI agent?
One remembers some men way better than me “urging Americans to violence” (like it was a bad thing) some 245 years ago.
Were they wrong?
Mind you, I would be hardly fit to be in their company. But I would.
“I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea ”” a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”
OK. Put out there one simple viable idea besides violence.
The time will come when many that are working very hard not to, are going to have to face the truth.
There is only one way out of here.
Don’t mind the messenger.
That’s just a way to try and derail the subject.
There are bigger problems out there.
And making up BS to NOT deal with those problems will only make them worse.
That is EXACTLY how we got here.
Say I am a gestapo provocateur.
How does that help you? Except as an excuse. ANOTHER one.
“Oooohhhh! . . . well . . . mmmhhh . . . YOU ARE UGLY!!!”
Good one. Our problems are solved.
One . . . . . . . . simple . . . . . . . . viable . . . . . . . . idea . . . . . . . . besides . . . . . . . . violence.
There is a fine line between what Islam terms the House of War and the House of Peace. You step over that line before it becomes the general sense of the people, and you’re a dangerous armed revolutionary terrorist. Do it at or after that consensus is reached, and you’re one of the elect, a hero of the new order.
Figuring out where that line is, when it is reached, and when to either get the ball rolling or join in after someone else does? That’s a younger man’s game, and I’m not playing. Y’all made your damn bed, now lie in it.
‘s funny how nobody talking revolution wanted to do anything at all when this was still peacefully salvageable. All it would have taken was to pay attention to the Tea Party types, and join in with the decent people who wanted change. Instead, apathy ruled the day, and here we are… Much profit and joy may you have of it all.
They come by my door looking for someone to “get militant”? I’m gonna be telling them I gave at the office, 40 or more years ago, and I did it religiously for 25 years. I no longer have faith in the good sense of my fellow citizens, and I’m just gonna keep on looking out for my own, now. Y’all made this mess; you can clean it up.
Speaking in general terms to the general public. Frankly, after two terms each of Clinton and Obama, now Biden? Y’all deserve what you have coming, good and hard. And, you’re going to get it.
If you find yourself in a group of people who want to “do something” you can be sure that half to three-quarters of your “friends” are feds.
There’s not a single domestic “terrorist”/”extremist” “attack” or “plan” of the past 30 years that isn’t known to be a fed operation, or that you couldn’t very easily convince me was.
Why do you think the “leader” of the Proud Boys was kept out of DC on January 6? I mean, come on, people.
We conservatives like to reference that Solzhenitsyn quote about those in the camps thinking they could have changed things if only they had had guns and/or the courage to use them, that that would have stopped the police state, but that’s just delusional.
The FBI has a great scam going–they tell conservatives that they’re needed to fight pedophiles and drug dealers, and they tell liberals that they’re needed to fight conservatives.
Revolutions never happen from the bottom. Never. They’re always due to a faction of the elites wanting more power for themselves. If you’re fantastically lucky, then what they want will produce something good for the average person, but that is incredibly rare. America is almost a unique case. So what we have to do is wait until some of our elite want to upend things and hope it produces something positive. Right now they’re completely content with the way things are, the whole filthy crooked lot of them
The FBI agent hiding behind “Time to end it”: “Say I am a gestapo provocateur.”
OK, you are an FBI provocateur. From the time of your post, it looks like you are in the DC Swamp. Are you working from home these days?
Something we all know is that FedGov has the ability to identify anyone on the internet. That is why it is so childish for people to hide behind names like “Time to end it” instead of standing up like men and using their real names.
Well, Stalin used a false name too. But I doubt you are a Stalin — a man of steel — Mr. FBI agent. What is really annoying, “Time to end it”, is that I am paying your inflated FBI salary so that you can try to stir up trouble. If you want to do something constructive, “Time to end it”, why not use your position in the FBI to publicize the corruption all around you in the Swamp? Sure, FedGov would squash you — but revolutions need brave men willing to enter the arena.
This guy gets it.
https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1432489238147190789
Censorship of newspapers & individuals. Banks locking out conservative activists. Major politicians encouraging riots. Yearlong church closures. Forced vaccinations.
Things accelerated very quickly and conservatives are just hiding because there is ZERO leadership from the GOP.
I have far less respect for the Republicans than for Democrats. Democrats are like rabid hyenas who make demands and threaten to burn down your city if you don’t comply. Fine. At least you know what you’re dealing with. To deal with that, Republicans have this guy: (picture of Kevin McCarthy)
The only reason to put a guy like Kevin McCarthy in charge of your party is to signal to the other side that you’re not a threat. It’s the only reason. With the Democrats on a rampage, the GOP just wants to avoid provoking them while they continue to run their side-grifts.
@Gavin, Brian,
It all works until it doesn’t. I told this to the law enforcement acquaintances I had, about the way they were poisoning the well of public trust with their conduct. None of them took me seriously, always telling me that I was wrong, I just didn’t understand…
Met one of them the other day, after not having run into him for some time. He had the strangest expression on his face, seeing me. I asked him why he was looking at me like that, and he basically said that he found it hard to see me, because he now understood what I was getting at, and that after witnessing what happened in Minnesota, he’s now in agreement with me that there’s been a change, and he doesn’t know how to cope with it or do anything about it.
One day, you come home from work, and everything is the same. The next day, you get up, and on the way in, you pass a burning patrol car, overturned on its roof, with the occupants still inside it, and there’s a crowd dancing around the flames. In what was once a “nice neighborhood” where “everyone supported the police”. That’s how it happens: A cusp is reached, a crossroad on the way to an entirely new and unknown world where you no longer have the consent of the public, and you have the sudden realization that there are far more of “them” than there ever will be of “you”–And, “they” not only dislike you, they actively, positively hate you, enough to dance around your burning police cruiser as you desperately try to breath flame.
The thing that our idiot class fails to comprehend is that that moment can come, or that they’re actively making it come, for all of them. This isn’t the hereditarily cowed nation of slaves that was Imperial Russia, with a long history of tyranny dating back to the Golden Horde. This is a nation of outliers, the assholes, thieves, and pirates that were run out of every other country on the planet. You think you can control that sort of population without a paramilitary cop on every corner, outside every door? LOL… You can’t recruit enough of them to play that game, and you’re really not going to like what happens when those cops realize that they’re not locked in with you, but locked out here with the rest of us and vulnerable. Just how many times do you think it’s going to take, where someone leaves their job in at the grinding away of civil liberties, coming home to find that the neighbors took a consensus, and decided that they needn’t bother calling the fire department when the house fire started? Nor try to pull the wife and kids out from the burning wreckage?
You only govern or police a country like the US with the full and willing consent of the governed, and woe betide the fools who think that they can safely make it obvious that nobody in the government or police actually gives a fuck about that consent.
Oh, and for any apparatchik monitoring? I’m not “fomenting”, here–I’m pointing out things that you really should have already figured out for yourself. I won’t be at the head of any mobs coming for anyone, but I will be sitting here on the edge of it all, watching the inevitable effect of your incendiary actions. The people who will be in those mobs? They’re watching you, now that the capos aren’t bothering to hide their intent or malice. Apparatchiks should note that very, very few of the actual movers and shakers behind either the Nazis or the Communists went to the gallows; it was all the low-level flunkies that the mobs could get at. Precisely none of the Nazi officials that got the most out of the regime and who didn’t die in the war were hounded into their graves the way they went after the camp guards and other peons. Y’all might want to remember that point.
Of course, nobody bothers to really teach or read history, these days. Too bad–Lots of instructive tales, there.
All it would have taken was to pay attention to the Tea Party types, and join in with the decent people who wanted change. Instead, apathy ruled the day, and here we are”¦
The Tea Party was squashed by two forces. One was Obama and his IRS, OSHA, etc. The other was Republican pols who took over and milked the movement. Dick Armey was one example. POlitics corrupts everyone., That’s why Trump was so attractive. Also , he had made his money out in the open.
Revolutions generally start with a disaffected elite faction, true. But the energies that make revolution generally come from people lower down the chain.
As far as reading and teaching history, I’m still doing both and have no intention of stopping.
FWIW I doubt even our overfunded and corrupt Organs would bother trying to provoke the commenters at CB to rash actions. But I could be wrong.
“TIme to end it” ain’t wrong about violence, whoever he/she/xe may be.
“The inadvertent reliance on the duty tax – on the fruits of southern exports produced with slave labor – to fund the crony capitalist “infrastructure” expenses of the North was the immediate cause of the Civil War…”
There was no tax, duty, or tariff on goods exported from the United States. The revenue of the Federal government came almost entirely from tariffs on imported goods.
Federal spending on “internal improvements”, i.e. “infrastructure”, had been a policy of the Whig Party: part of the “American System” of Lincoln’s political mentor, Henry Clay (along with a high protective tariff). In 1844, Clay, running for President on that platform, carried two future “Confederate” states, and drew over 45% of the vote in three more. Five pre-“Confederate” states elected Whig Senators and Representatives.
In 1860, Lincoln, whose position on these issues was the same as Clay’s, got no votes in any pre-“Confederate” state except Virginia (a few thousand from the Wheeling area in the far north).
This shows clearly that southerners rejected Lincoln for other reasons. So does the language of the “declarations of causes” issued by several states: they said they declared secession because Lincoln was anti-slavery.
All claims to the contrary are post-facto rationalizations (or crank libertarianism).
(Furthermore: the Morrill Act, which raised tariffs in 1861, passed only after seven states had declared secession and withdrawn from Congress, and could not have passed otherwise.)
@Cousin Eddie,
What happened to the Tea Party was that it got killed by the Uniparty. The Republican grifters and “helpers” were just one prong of the attack on it all.
The trouble is, the actual groundswell of pressure building up that the Tea Party represented was still there, still growing. That’s how we got Donald Trump. The powers-that-be basically jammed the pressure-relief valve, and now we’re well on our way to a boiler explosion. They think they got rid of Trump, and that dealt with the things that created the Trump voter, while that’s the furthest thing from the truth. All they really managed was to highlight their own malfeasance and piss off even more people, people who can no longer avoid observing what’s going on around them.
At some point, those people will act. How? I dunno… I really don’t.
I will point out a couple of assholes who got theirs, historically: Lon Nil, Johan And Cornelis De Witt, Samuel Doe… There are lists out there, and our lords and masters might want to contemplate them.
The world model that most of these idiots have does not include the realities of the American makeup, or the fact that just because the electorate has historically been pretty compliant and complaisant, that it can’t snap the way I did, the other day. One minute, I’m the same old person, retired military veteran, proud of nation and service. The next, I realized that that unfamiliar feeling in the gut that I’ve had lately? That is shame, for both nation and the armed forces I served in. That realization snuck up on me, and I’m still trying to process it. I do not know what it means for my future, but I would really not want to lay long odds on my ability to remain affable and friendly towards avowed Biden voters or other suchlike leftoid scum. Inclusive of immediate family members, I am afraid. I suddenly understand how people could ostracize family during the Civil War, and it feels… Right.
@Rich Rostrom,
As you point out, the evidence that the Civil War was over anything other than slavery is pretty hard to ignore.
Same people, same cause, making up the Democratic Party today. Just coincidentally…
I don’t know where it goes, Kirk. And don’t kick yourself for trusting those in charge–I thought I was a cynic until I saw what happened after 2016, when I learned that I wasn’t half cynical enough.
And thanks, Rich Rostrum. I tired of correcting secession-justifiers long ago and was hoping someone else would jump in.
The secessionist themselves made it very clear why they were leaving; the tariff dodge is just wailing and flailing for some respectable cover.