Speeches

Book Review: Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein

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In William Golding’s 1955 novel ‘Lord of the Flies’, a group of students is stranded on an island–and they revert quickly to barbarism.   The book sold millions of copies and has become common assigned reading for high school classes.   Another book, published at about the same time, projects a very different view of human nature and society.

Heinlein’s future world in Tunnel in the Sky has been faced with a crisis of massive overpopulation…a common projected future in books of this period:

…the population of Terra had climbed well beyond that which its farm lands could support.   The hydrogen, germ, and nerve gas horrors that followed were not truly political.   The true meaning was more that of beggars fighting over a crust of bread…Life, all life, has the twin drives to survive and to reproduce.    

Release from the Malthusian Trap was ultimately gained through an invention that opened up new worlds for settlement:   a hyperfold device called a Gate allows people to transition instantly from earth to their new homes light-years away…and, unlike rockets, the Gate technology allows very large numbers of people to be transferred.   There’s a catch, though:   keeping a gate open requires huge amounts of energy, so when the migrants move to a new planet, the gate is relaxed and they are left on their own until such time as they can offer enough trade goods to be worth the energy of reconnecting them…which may be a long, long time.   Hence, old skills have again become relevant…the situation of the settlers:

…made horses more practical than helicopters, picks and shovels more useful than bulldozers.   Machinery gets out of order and requires a complex technology to keep it going–but good old “hayburners” keep right on breeding, cropping grass, and pulling loads.

The book’s protagonist, Rod Walker, is a high school senior who plans on a future as a pioneer and a colonist and hence is taking a course in Outlands Survival.   Final exam time has arrived: the students will be sent to a planet of which they know nothing–the test rules are ANY planet–ANY climate–ANY terrain and NO rules–ANY weapons–ALL equipment.   They will be left on their own for 1-2 weeks, then returned to earth.

The class (which includes girls as well as boys) has a final session with their instructor…Rod is asked to stay after the others and is advised that he would be wise drop the course and skip the test:

Rod, you’re a good boy…but sometimes that isn’t enough.   I think you are a romantic.   Now this is a very romantic age; it calls for practical men…You are way too emotional, too sentimental to be a real survivor type…I’m not sure that you can beware of the Truce of the Bear.

But Rod decides to go, despite the advice and despite the fact that the boy he had intended to team with decides at the last moment to drop the class.   After passing through the Gate and finding himself alone, he discovers one of his classmates–who has been killed.   By a predator?   Yes…but:

Yo’s proud Thunderbolt gun was no longer in sight…The only animal who would bother to steal a gun ran around on two legs.   Rod reminded himself that a Thunderbolt could kill at almost any line-of-sight range–and now somebody had it who obviously took advantage of the absence of law and order in a survival test area.

After surviving for several days, beginning to get oriented, and encountering various local animal species, Rod meets up with Jack, a member of a different class sent to the same survival area.   Over time, they encounter others, and a group begins to develop with Rod as the de facto leader.   Their recall at the end of the test period is delayed–at first, they think it is just a minor technical problem of some sort, but the feeling grows that something has gone very badly wrong, and they may be stuck on this planet for an indeterminate time–maybe forever.

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Trump’s “American Heritage Pheromone Fumigation” of The Federal Gov’t and The Coming Defenestration of The Deep State

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So what did you all  think of Pres Trump’s SOTU  “American Heritage Pheromone Fumigation” of the Congress?    Trump’s systemic use of American symbols and American success stories, in short American Patriotism, had political and media elites melting down.   The videos of the Democrats during and after Trump’s speech   certainly showed a lot of people who were acting like they were smelling week old road kill.

So what was Pres. Trump up too and what does the Nunes Memo have to do with it?

On the surface, Trump mentioned nothing about the FBI and Department of Justice civil rights abuses of his campaign and the spying on him during the first six months of his Administration, detailed in the Nunes Memo.   Despite the President reading and vetting it during his preparation for the State of The Union Address and executing plans against these scoff law internal security thugs.

Huge hint — It was part and parcel of Trump’s long term political strategy tree in setting up the Nunes Memo release last Friday (2 Feb 2018).   So far only Daniel Greenfield over at Frontpage understands anything at all of what Trump was doing.

See:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269181/trump-divides-americans-and-un-americans-daniel-greenfield

Understanding Trump’s Political Strategy Tree
Most Presidents are the head of a major political party faction who win the nomination as head of faction that unites the party for the general election. Then the party sells an agenda to the general public to govern in a wider governing political coalition.
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President Trump, in contrast, is building a governing coalition -AFTER- he was elected.    He was his own party  faction in the GOP and he is willing and messaging into existence  a resurgent, predominantly working class/suburban/rural “Heritage America” as his governing coalition.   This general public coalition is dragging existing GOP party factions to Pres. Trump to unite the GOP under his banner.
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The only DC politico that seems to understand what is going on is Texas Tea Party-elected U.S. Senator Ted Cruz with his talk of nuking the filibuster.
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The Senate filibuster now is about retaining  the “Uniparty” elites last real  hold on elective  power in DC.   The GOPe Senators who want to keep the filibuster want to use it against political factions in their own party, not the Democrats.   The Senate   filibuster’s destruction will mark the full blossom of Trump’s populist hostile take over of the Federal government.
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And carefully note, those pro-filibuster GOP senators are mostly #NeverTrump, open borders,   tools of the Deep State, and they start throwing accusations off racism, sexism, Alt-Right white nationalism etc when ever Trump uses his  “American Heritage Pheromone” shtick.
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To Save the Union

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Before the Civil War, the two sides often read different authors, saw different newspapers, read different novels. Some northern works were not easily available in the south and the levels of literacy differed. Of course, today, all is open. We choose to narrow our options: a Fox listener is likely to be a Wall Street Journal reader who begins surfing with Instapundit. A CNN listener is more likely to read the NYTimes and check out HuffPost.

So, we can speak to each other, but anyone listening to the rhythms of Obama and those of Trump, the voices of the average humanities teacher and of the dirty jobs guy, may well wonder if they would understand. (Though, of course, it is a perspective rather than position Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson, as academically credentialed as they come, understand each other thoroughly.)

Listening to Trump’s speech on Charlotte, I heard something reporters didn’t mention. The speech’s rhythms came from an emphasis we’ve heard before: in Trump’s inaugural, in Lincoln’s second inaugural and blended them in Trump’s less rhythmical, less evocative but direct and emotion-driven voice. It lacks the distance and gravitas of Lincoln, but its purpose is similar.

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Jordan Peterson: 12 Principles for a 21st Century Conservatism

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If you are not familiar with the videos of Dr. Jordan Peterson, you should acquaint yourself with them, and him, forthwith.

This one is a good introduction to the style and substance of the man.

Peterson starts talking about 18 minutes in, after a lengthy and rambling introduction which you should skip.

If two hours is too much here are shorter snippets:

The consequence of trying to build imaginary utopias out of real human beings.

Stop saying things that make you weak.

Proven differences between men and women.

Go out and make something of yourself.

The temptation of victim identity.

Clean your room.

Peterson on starting an online humanities university.

The twelve principles from the video are as follows:

1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.

Is Obama Losing It ?

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France Obama Climate Countdown

Barack Obama is the least accomplished person to be elected president in American History. His “accomplishments” in office include spending trillions of dollars on worthless energy boondoggles and introducing a health plan that is collapsing under its own contradictions. The plan was sold, sort of, to the American people with lies like, “If you like your health plan you can keep it” and others similar in misdirection.

His initiatives in foreign policy included a “Reset” with Russia, now long gone. He supported a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt after removing support for a long term US ally in Mubarek. He has presided over a ridiculous nuclear proliferation plan with US enemy Iran that is already collapsing. He abandoned Iraq only to see the appearance and growth of ISIS, a worse manifestation of the Sunni revolt ended by George Bush with the Surge.

The list of Obama’s failures is long and distinguished. The question now is, is he losing his mind ?

Is it now time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment?

Has our president officially lost his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office?

Anyone who listened to President Obama speak to reporters in Paris on Tuesday would reasonably conclude it is high time to start drawing up the papers to transmit to Congress for his removal.

If you are one of the millions and millions of literate Americans out there who have simply tuned this president out the past three or four years, that is certainly understandable. But if you tuned in to the long, rambling, empty press conference, you would have been truly alarmed.

Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”

I tried to find an embeddable video of that speech but there is not one available.

It took the doddering president 47 minutes and over 5,000 words to answer just six questions. And by “answer,” I simply mean he unspooled a torrent of disjointed words and broken sentences.

Part of the looniness of it all stemmed from the giant scam he and other world leaders are trying to put over on advanced countries, punishing them for their industriousness by redistributing billions and billions of dollars from hardworking American taxpayers and handing it over to tin-pot dictators in disheveled Third World countries.

“You go down to Miami, and when it’s flooding at high tide on a sunny day fish are swimming through the middle of the streets,” he said at one point. As if this were some kind of evidence that high tides or flooding are somehow caused by global warming.

Never mind that a) the argument makes no sense; and b) local media refuted the canard.

But President Obama’s fevers went well beyond global warming hysteria.

Asked about the “mass shooting” where a nut job shot three people at a Colorado abortion clinic, President Obama once again became exasperated with the American people.

“I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

He actually said this. In Paris. Not three weeks after gunmen mowed down 129 people enjoying freedom in the French capital.

What is going on ?

I think Al Gore went psychotic after losing the 2000 election. Before the election, I considered him approximately the equal of George Bush, who I was not that impressed with. I supported McCain in 2000. After the election, Gore got weird, not just in his fixation on climate “change” which predated the election and seemed a relatively harmless delusion shared by many. Until the revelations of the UEA emails and computer comments, I was just skeptical. Gore’s wife left him and he just got more and more strange.

Narcissistic personalities need feeding with some semblance of success. Looking at Donald Trump and his wild boasting shows one example but he has made billions in real estate and that must support his self love.

What is happening with Obama ? He came from nowhere and was given almost everything he accomplished with little effort on his own part. He did not even work to pass legislation that he is credited with.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

None of this was his doing. It was handed to him.

Objections to his policies are met with accusations of racism by his supporters. I see very few examples of serious debate on his policy.

Now everything is collapsing. His “Climate” initiative is a fake and almost everyone knows it.

What next ? It is worrisome.