A quick post and moderator privilege, since we ordinarily don't repost blog entries from elsewhere: MoveOn has scrubbed their website of the original "General Betray-us" ad, which was there as recently as a few days ago. Weasel Zippers has all the details, and a hat tip to Instapundit. This is one that should be circulated far and wide.
MoveOn has no credibility. But then, we knew that.
AoS
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/23/2010 17:22 ||
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Jonah Goldberg, "The Corner" @ National Review On the effect of zombies on political theories of international relations:
...It is fundamental to all zombie scenarios that efforts to "weaponize" zombies fail almost immediately. To be sure, governments would try to use zombies for their own nefarious ends, but these efforts would only hasten the advance of the zombie menace....
I will have more to say about this. But let me just throw it out there: a true zombie invasion will trump traditional international theory (never mind farm subsidies!). The computer modeling of zombie proliferation alone would convince realists, neocons, even the vast majority pacifists to either liquidate the zombies at all costs or to bunker down for their own protection. Zombies, quite simply, would be a game-changer. I'm not too sure of that.
I can easily envision the talking heads on the teevee discussing the "Myth of the Zombie Threat."
There will be those who point out that zombie attacks have only effected 24 percent of the population, and not all of them have been fatal. You actually have a better chance of getting the flu than you do of having your brain devoured by a zombie, so what's the fuss?
The DNC will point out the unfairness of losing one's right to vote as soon as decomposition sets in.
The Berkeley City Council will establish the city as a Zombie Amnesty zone, where the walking dead will be safe from fascist police repression.
The civil rights establishment will pore over the figures for zombies that have been blown away by shotguns, carefully tabulating how many were what color.
There will be street demonstrations in Seattle and New York demanding justice for zombies, who are after all no different from you and me except for being dead and wanting to eat brains.
At least one major fashion house will incorporate shrouds into its fall line...
Posted by: Mike ||
06/23/2010 10:45 ||
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#1
The zombie pic is great, but how about something more subtle, like alec baldwin?
#2
I've been reading "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" recently. The premise of the story is that slavery is not only backed by the southern slave-owners but also vampires, who view slavery as a means to raise and harvest easily disposable victims. All this, of course, leading to the Civil War. Great for some lighter summer reading!
Posted by: Dar ||
06/23/2010 12:55 Comments ||
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#3
Check out World War Z by Max Brooks. It is the oral history of our war against the zombies. Picture a cross between Studs Terkel's The Good War and Night of the Living Dead.
Posted by: Formerly Dan ||
06/23/2010 13:23 Comments ||
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#4
I'm picturing two al-Qaeda middle managers discussing how to get the zombies to yell "Allah Akbar" instead of "brains!" before blowing being blown up by remote control.
In Chicago, they would just lock the zombies in steel boxes until it was time to bring them out to vote, and probably register voters for ACORN, as well. Otherwise, their official jobs would be as public school janitors.
In Arizona, they would just herd the zombies down to the border for all you can eat Mexican food.
You do not have to go all the way in supporting the English Democrats party, whose silly proposal for an English parliament would add another superfluous layer to already excessive government, to raise a glass to Peter Davies, the party's elected Mayor of Doncaster. Davies, the father of Tory MP Philip Davies, is one of just 11 directly elected mayors and he is enjoying increasing media exposure because of his outrageous agenda which, against all the tenets of consensual British politics, consists of doing what the public wants.
In his first week in office he cut his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, which is putting one's money where one's mouth is. He also scrapped the mayoral limousine. He is ending Doncaster's twinning with five towns around the world, an arrangement which he describes as "just for people to fly off and have a binge at the council's expense". He intends now to reduce (that's right, reduce) council tax by 3 per cent this year.
The "diversity" portfolio has been abolished from the council's cabinet. From next year no more funding will be given to the town's "Gay Pride" event, on the grounds that people do not need to parade their sexuality, whatever it may be, at taxpayers' expense. Black History Month, International Women's Day and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month are similarly destined to become history.
Council funding of translation services for immigrants has been scrapped because he believes incomers should take the trouble to learn English. Officials have been ordered to abandon bureaucratic gobbledegook language. Davies is saving the taxpayers £80,000 by disaffiliating from the pointless Local Government Association and the Local Government Information Unit. He aims to abolish all non-jobs on the council, as epitomised by "community cohesion officers". He is taking advice from the Taxpayers' Alliance and the Campaign Against Political Correctness.
Davies's views are calculated to put Harriet Harridan into intensive care for six months. He disregards all "green claptrap", is creating more parking spaces to encourage traffic in the town for the benefit of business ("I'm not green and I'm not conned by global warming"). He has asked the Electoral Commission to reduce the number of Doncaster's councillors from 63 to 21 ("If Pittsburgh can manage with nine councillors, why do we need 63?").
You may be feeling disorientated, overcome by a surreal sensation, on hearing such extraordinary, unprecedented views. They are the almost forgotten, forcibly extinguished voice of sanity which most people had thought forever excised from British politics. These policies are common sense, which is something we have not experienced in any council chamber, still less the House of Commons, in decades. The establishment is moving heaven and earth to discredit and obstruct Davies. He is that ultimate embarrassment: the boy who reveals that the Emperor has no clothes.
If it is good enough for Doncaster, it is good enough for Britain. Our effete, corrupt, politically correct politicians must be compelled to follow suit. Once upon a time, such policies would have been axiomatic in the Tory Party. In the Cameron-occupied Conservative Party of today they are regarded as anathema. There has to be an inflexible public will to enforce the country's wishes on the political class under pain of ejection from public life. That is the sole agenda for the next general election. The mainstream parties, as currently constituted, are no longer electable.
#1
Damn, it almost reads like a tale from another planet! Or a planet I was on some 30 years ago and then someone flipped a switch and I found myself on this wacky, insane rock.
#3
Once upon a time, such policies would have been axiomatic in the Tory Party. In the Cameron-occupied Conservative Party of today they are regarded as anathema.
#5
A stake should have been driven in the heart of "political correctness" long ago. As has been said PC is the revenge of Marixm. It has also been said that it is Communism in disguise.
no more funding will be given to the town's "Gay Pride" event, on the grounds that people do not need to parade their sexuality, whatever it may be, at taxpayers' expense. Black History Month, International Women's Day and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month are similarly destined to become history. Incomers should take the trouble to learn English. saving the taxpayers £80,000 . reduce tax by 3 per cent. He aims to abolish all non-jobs on the council, as epitomised by "community cohesion officers". "I'm not green and I'm not conned by global warming"
Liberty still flickers in England.
Irony - its the English Democrats party
Posted by: No I am The Other Beldar ||
06/23/2010 11:08 Comments ||
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In an interview with one of the handful of serious newspapers that every informed person should read, Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told the (paywall-protected) Financial Times that Brazil would no longer seek a lead role in the diplomatic dispute between Iran and the United States. We got our fingers burned,' Amorim told the FT. The Daily News, an English-language Turkish newspaper published by the Hurriyet group, tried to cast doubt on the story, saying that there were conflicting' reports about the Brazilian position. As the smoke cleared this morning, however, both the AP and Reuters confirmed the FT account.
Brazil's defection from the axis of fixers leaves Turkey in an uncomfortable place. Limited Israeli concessions on the Gaza blockade have won praise from both the US and Tony Blair without bringing the blockade, including the naval blockade, to an end. The Security Council sanctions against Iran sailed through despite Turkish opposition and, led by the US Treasury Department and the Congress, it is likely that in both the US and the EU new, tougher sanctions will build on what the Security Council laid down.
Posted by: Grunter in Sydney ||
06/23/2010 00:37 ||
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#1
One shouuld stick towhat one does best:Samba, Soccer & Coffee!
_________________
Add to that a thriving small arms industry producing some damn good weaponry...
Yesterday, there was a bad link. Here it is, in full.
When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.
"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.
In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.
The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.
Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.
But our government is supposed to be "a government of laws and not of men." Meaning everyone follows the same laws and not The One, whether he be socialist or Nazi.
If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion -- or $50 billion or $100 billion -- then so be it. Didn't the government set the cap at $75 million?
But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law." Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.
With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution. Ask General Motors.
If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in constitutional government.
And, without constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a "crisis" -- which, as the president's chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to "go to waste" as an opportunity to expand the government's power.
That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money. At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people."
That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people -- indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.
If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.
The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.
Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power -- vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom -- are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/23/2010 06:27 ||
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#1
Useful idiots were not Nazis. Jeez, this writer is an idiot.
#3
grom, I think the point Mr Sowell was trying to make is that the Nazis would never have gotten into power without the "useful idiots" who didn't want to think too hard about what really caused Germany's problems. The Nazis gave them a convenient, time-tested scapegoat, and a lot of the population (including those who should have known better) jumped at the chance to support an evil crew.
I don't think that Oblahblah and crew are that blatantly evil, but they sure have invoked the old "class warfare" argument to ram through whatever they want....and there's a core 30% or so that still thinks eventually someone will get socialism right (or at least they'll finally be in their "rightful" place, lording it over the rest of the great unwashed, which also would be ok even if it didn't work this time, either).
For a dozen years, leftist organizations styling themselves as proponents of international humanitarian law have campaigned to undermine the laws prohibiting material support to terrorism. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally swept aside this challenge, forcefully upholding one of our nation's most crucial counterterrorism tools.
Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the 6--3 majority in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is a smashing victory for the rationale of material-support laws, which bar various forms of aid to formally designated "foreign terrorist organizations" (FTOs) on the ground that any meaningful assistance -- however ostensibly innocent or virtuous -- strengthens these groups. (I have been writing about the Humanitarian Law litigation here at NRO for a number of years -- see here, here, and here -- and joined an amicus brief supporting the constitutionality of the material-support laws, both in my individual capacity and as co-chairman of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism, a joint project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the National Review Institute.)
The principle operating here is that terrorism is barbaric, contravening both international law's imperative to protect civilians and the civilized international norms that promote resolution of political disputes by negotiation, not assassination. Therefore, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the two terrorist organizations at issue in the epic Humanitarian Law litigation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, or PKK), must be treated as pariahs, ostracized and suffocated until they either are annihilated or convincingly abandon terrorism as a method.
This would seem to be common sense. Yet transnational progressives, under the auspices of "humanitarian law," have hitched their wagons to the terrorists' stars. Their aim is to promote their post-sovereign agenda, the subordination of national-security concerns to the "engagement" of terrorists in multilateral processes. The Humanitarian Law Project contended that the material-support laws' ban on providing training, expert advice, services, or personnel to FTOs stymied their desire to, example, train terrorists "to use humanitarian and international law to peacefully resolve disputes," to teach them "how to petition various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief," to conduct political advocacy on the terrorists' behalf, to offer their legal expertise to help the terrorists negotiate peace agreements, to show the Tamil Tigers how to "present claims for tsunami relief to mediators and international bodies," and so on.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/23/2010 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Jonah Goldberg, "The Corner" @ National Review
