Has Hillary Clinton Gone Full Cat-Lady?

Hillary Clinton is famous for the term “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” to “otherize” the conservative movement.

Yesterday she came out with the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy 2.0” — The Vast Vladimir Putin-led “Great Extreme Nationalist Conspiracy.”

Pardon me but...What the H*ll?!?

As Sundance over at The Last Refuge put it:

Secretary Hillary Clinton, campaigning to become President of the United States, actually gave a public speech claiming that Vladimir Putin was using mind-control to manipulate nationalist inhabitants of planet earth in a grand conspiracy against her campaign.

And if you don’t believe her, YOU are the conspiracy theorist.

Think about that for a few minutes.

Folks like Alex Jones at Infowars and Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart are delighted.  Hillary rewarded their troll-ish behavior with more eyes than they ever could have gotten themselves.

The first rule of the Internet is Do Not Feed the Energy Creatures.  It lets folks like Joseph Watson at Infowars post videos like this —

There is one more person that is thanking the All Mighty for Hillary’s speech…Donald Trump.

While Hillary’s campaign staff may have panned the speech as a way to duck a debate with Trump by painting him as “an extremist,”  it feeds the revived and remade by the Alt-Right  meme of the CRAZY CAT LADY.

The old CRAZY CAT LADY meme involved near senile old hags scaring small children at the edge of their picket fences.  This one has been around since Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

The Alt-Right CRAZY CAT LADY meme — which is borrowed from the pickup-artist/seduction  community — reshapes the old-hag meme to apply to college-graduate career women who have spend all their prime attractive years from 18 to 36 taking birth control and chasing bad-boy cads while leaving good but boring men behind.  Then discovering as they approach their ’40s there is no one out there for them to marry and settle down with, save for their cats.

Part and parcel  of that Alt-Right CRAZY CAT LADY meme is advertising scientific studies about the fact that hormonal birth control makes women act and smell different — act less sexy — during the most fertile days of their monthly cycle.

Making this study popular study is a huge indictment of feminism in general and first-generation feminists in particular.  It is intended as such.  Such offensive but hard-truth lines are intended as an opening move of a seduction routine for career women on the “cat lady track”.

That Hillary as a “first generation feminist” is parroted by Milo Yiannopoulos in a Presidential-candidate address citing that birth-control study shows that the Alt-Right is living in Hillary’s head rent-free.

It was Hillary’s Megyn Kelly moment.

That Trump, who Hillary accuses of being Alt-Right, recognizes that point goes without saying.

Trump is going to use this “Hillary the CRAZY CAT LADY” meme for all that is worth between now and election day.

Hillary Clinton’s Alinskyite Attacks on Pharma Companies

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” (Saul Alinsky)

Hillary is clever to go after individual companies. If she attacked the pharma industry as a whole, it could unite politically in response and perhaps gain political support from other industries that would reasonably see themselves as similarly vulnerable. But individual companies have no defenses against this kind of attack. By singling out one victim she discourages other industry players from doing anything in response, because any company or industry group that responds risks being targeted in the future.

She has done this kind of thing before. She will probably keep doing it because it’s politically effective. Her attack on Mylan destroyed a large amount of wealth, and probably not just for Mylan’s shareholders. Today Mylan’s CEO is groveling in the media. As with past political attacks by Hillary and others on vaccine manufacturers, yesterday’s attack on Mylan will discourage pharma companies from introducing valuable new products and will reduce the availability of current products. We will probably see more of this kind of extortionate behavior by the federal govt if she is elected, because that’s how the Clintons operate and because a Hillary administration would appoint more lefty judges and DOJ and regulatory officials who would go along with it.

The Rain it Raineth on the Just …

(And on the Unjust Fella … But mostly raineth on the Just, for the Unjust steals the Justs’ umbrella!)

Yes, it’s been raining here in South Texas for all of about this week. Not that we’re here in any danger of being washed away as they are in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and environs, although there have been reported a couple of high-water rescues on the local news. It’s just one of those things; kind of embarrassing, actually – that there are certain stretches of road (to include some lengths of interstate highway) and intersections within the city boundaries which, given a certain amount of rain, falling in a limited space of time – are guaranteed absolutely to flood out. Just one of those things. All of us locals know where these places are, since many of them are helpfully marked with bright yellow indicators, marked off in feet by the side of the road in low places so that one may judge – and others are just uncomfortably close to certain watercourses which usually only have flowing water in them when it rains. So the rain has fallen, to the tune of about ten inches in nearly as many days, according to the gage in my back yard, with not much effect here save pleasantly surprising everyone expecting August in Texas to be interminably hot, dry, and medium-crispy. The lawns and highway verges are all turned a lush green; mark us all down as relatively happy with this local result of Global Climate Change … or what used to be called “weather.”

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Why does George Soros try to destabilize the West ?

George Soros is a Hungarian born billionaire who seems to be funding a lot of malicious mischief around the world. Why ?

Soros was born in Hungary in 1930.

That Wiki article is very favorable to Soros and does not mention a few things.

There is considerable discussion of Soros’ role under the Nazis.

It has been alleged that he was a collaborator. Apparently, he did admit doing some things that could be criticized although the role of a 14 year old is pretty weak.

It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a — a very personal experience of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this [Christian] protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that’s — that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Mr. SOROS: Not — not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t — you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no — no problem at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No.

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Faustian Ambition (rerun)

A post on ambition at another blog (in 2010) , which included a range of quotations on the subject, inspired me to think that I might be able to write an interesting essay on the topic of ambition in Goethe’s Faust. This post is a stab at such an essay.

The word “Faustian” is frequently used in books, articles, blog posts, etc on all sorts of topics. I think the image that most people have of Faust is of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for dangerous knowledge: sort of a mad-scientist type. This may be true of earlier versions of the Faust legend, but I think it’s a misreading (or more likely a non-reading) of Goethe’s definitive version.

Faust, at the time when the devil first appears to him, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of knowledge–in many different scholarly disciplines–and is totally frustrated and in despair about the whole thing. It is precisely the desire to do something other than to pursue abstract knowledge that leads him to engage in his fateful bargain with Mephistopheles.

If it’s not the pursuit of abstract knowledge, then what ambition drives Faust to sell his soul? C S Lewis suggests that his motivations are entirely practical: he wants “gold and guns and girls.” This is partly true, but is by no means the whole story.

Certainly, Faust does like girls. Very early in the play, he encounters a young woman who strikes his fancy:

FAUST: My fair young lady, may I make free
To offer you my arm and company?
GRETCHEN: I’m neither fair nor lady, pray
Can unescorted find my way
FAUST: God, what a lovely child! I swear
I’ve never seen the like of her
She is so dutiful and pure
Yet not without a pert allure
Her rosy lip, her cheek aglow
I never shall forget, I know
Her glance’s timid downward dart
Is graven deeply in my heart!
But how she was so short with me–
That was consummate ecstasy!


Immediately following this meeting, Faust demands Mephisto’s magical assistance in the seduction of Gretchen. It’s noteworthy that he insists on this help despite the facts that (a)he brags to the devil that he is perfectly capable of seducing a girl like Gretchen on his own, without any diabolical assistance, and (b)a big part of Gretchen’s appeal is clearly that she seems so difficult to win–a difficulty that will be short-circuited by Mephisto’s help.

Mephisto, of course, complies with Faust’s demand…this devil honors his contracts…and Faust’s seduction of Gretchen leads directly to the deaths of her mother, her child by Faust, her brother, and to Gretchen’s own execution.

Diabolical magic also allows Faust to meet Helen of Troy (time and space are quite fluid in this play) whom he marries and impregnates, resulting in the birth of their child Euphorion.

So, per Lewis, yes, Faust is definitely motivated by the pursuit of women. But this is only a small part of the complex structure of ambition that Goethe has given his protagonist.

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