COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Placing Things in Perspective




33 comments:

  1. If I was NASA Czar, Hubble would be maintained until no longer possible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. OBAMA ‘WILL STAND WITH MUSLIMS SHOULD POLITICAL WINDS SHIFT IN UGLY DIRECTION’

    This is what Barack Obama said following 9/11:

    “In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

    Further, Obama sponsors Illinois Senate Bill 750 creating the “Halal Food Act,” providing for inspections by the Department of Agriculture to ensure that all food labeled Halal is prepared according to Islamic law per freedom’s enemies web site.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "The single most important picture ever taken by humanity."

    Really?

    ReplyDelete
  4. What Makes Obama Run Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn't need another career. But he's entering politics to get back to his true passion--community organization. (philanthropist?)

    "What we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities," he said. "We have moved beyond the clarion call stage that was needed during the civil rights movement. Now, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, we must move into a building stage. We must invest our energy and resources in a massive rebuilding effort and invent new mechanisms to strengthen and hasten this community-building effort.

    "We have no shortage of moral fervor," said Obama. "We have some wonderful preachers in town--preachers who continue to inspire me--preachers who are magnificent at articulating a vision of the world as it should be. In every church on Sunday in the African-American community we have this moral fervor; we have energy to burn.

    "But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. We must find ways to channel all this energy into community building. The biggest failure of the civil rights movement was in failing to translate this energy, this moral fervor, into creating lasting institutions and organizational structures."

    ReplyDelete
  5. "The single most important picture ever taken by humanity."

    Really?


    I'm thinking more along the lines of this one.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Doug: “In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

    I presume by posting this you are faulting Obama for standing with Americans, which is what we should have done in 1942 when Japanese-Americans were sent to concentration camps. Maybe you can get McCain to talk about dividing Americans up too. That should be a winner in November.

    ReplyDelete
  7. James Webb Space Telescope

    Named after a NASA administrator.

    James Webb Space Telescope

    James Webb Space Telescope

    If I could find my book on Blake this morning I'd post some stuff putting the stars in their proper perspective from that poet's point of view.

    Pascal said when he looked at the stars be became fearful.

    Carlyle (I think it was) said something like, if they're inhabited, what a scope for folly, if not, what a lot of wasted space.

    Bob would like to be able to just get the excess cash to buy a decent scope of his own, to take some pictures. I met a guy in a mall parking lot one time, selling pictures. Said he'd paid about 6k for a telescope that would track, and could take galaxies out to x? light years. Said he could look into small craters on the moon. Really nice pictures.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I can't stand people who want to organize everything.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Busybodies, always wanting to tell everybody else how to live. Leave it to some good basic laws, says I.

    ReplyDelete
  10. You know the reasoning is burdened by an undeniable expediency.

    First, Fukuyama tells us that History is Ending. It’s all over folks. Go home.

    Then the 2008 Democratic policy wonks tell us that terrorist threat will always be with us - always and forever - amen. Not going away. God have mercy. Man the gates and secure the ports. Go Home … and pray.

    Which is it?

    Are we making progress or doomed to spin in circles?

    Or is that too binary a question?

    Oh I get it - it’s both - it’s all things to all people - the zen approach to analytical thought - it‘s all one and it’s all good - distinctions being nothing but illusions manifest as bias - the reality of shadows on the wall - which means no matter what we do we’re fucked because we can’t make a decision so there is no rational solution which means …

    Well I’m right and you’re just wrong.

    Now go home …

    You’d better believe the Left will be shining their light of many colors for a long long time.

    And you thought just five minutes of explanation would do it.

    Cantor set theory proves that some infinities are larger than others.

    Well I guess he’s just right.

    ReplyDelete
  11. The War on Terror demands writs of habeas corpus. The crime committed was an Act of War. Etc...

    If we win we'll be the first dyslexic nation to do so.

    Dyslexia occurs at all levels of intelligence.[2]

    The word dyslexia comes from the Greek words δυσ- dys- ("impaired") and λέξις lexis ("word"). People with dyslexia are called dyslexic or dyslectic.

    ReplyDelete
  12. But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates.

    Some of these churches, black and white seem to have forgotten about a day of rest when the Lord is said to have sat back and contemplated his works. If all the other days of the week are going to be like some of these Sundays, head for the hills.

    ReplyDelete
  13. His was a little bigger than that, said he bought it used on the internet, 5 or 6k. Locked on to the object, take a time exposure.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Bobal: Some of these churches, black and white seem to have forgotten about a day of rest when the Lord is said to have sat back and contemplated his works.

    I do take a day of rest on Sunday, in case God is Jesus. In the event that God is Yahweh, I take Saturday off as a day of rest too. And to cover my bets with Allah, I take half of my Fridays off, because I accumilate 4 hours of vacation time every week.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Told you we had a hell of a winter.

    High Country Still Buried In Snow

    AP-- If yu want to travel the Magruder Corridor or the Lolo Motorway this weekend you better have a snowmobile, dogsled or cross country skis and a healthy pair of lungs.

    Both primitive roads remain covered in snow, as do many of the higher elevation areas of the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests.

    In fact, the water measured in the snowpack of the Clearwater Basin is 400 percent of the average this time of year...At the 6,000 foot Crater Meadows Snotel site in the upper North Fork of the Clearwater River basin there is still 57 inches of snow...

    ReplyDelete
  16. I do the same lil, adding in Thursday for Thor. Ah, the three day work week, even France can't beat. And then, there are snow days too. And in the summer, often it's just too hot to work.

    ReplyDelete
  17. At the Republican state convention, a booth hosted by Republicanmarket was selling a pin Saturday that says: If Obama is President will we still call it the White House?

    ReplyDelete
  18. "Press one for English, press two for deportion"--well I kinda like that, but the other is offensive.

    If Obama is elected I'll call it the Den of Audacity.

    ReplyDelete
  19. two for deportation

    three for prison

    ReplyDelete
  20. Over a hundred thousand German POW's were on US Soil, I believe:
    Did they all get habeus?
    Miranda?
    Taxpayer paid lawyers?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Follower of the the faith of AlGore:
    Warmon
    Practices Warmonism

    (Miller Caller)

    ReplyDelete
  22. Audacidon.

    Audaci-con is better.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Warmite.

    Like an obnoxious heat maddened flea.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Slade said...
    Bobal: He's that cat in the box.

    That reference is so good that it is worth elaborating since it might not have fully resonated as Schrodingers Cat

    The pun was good too.


    6/21/2008 12:48:00 PM

    Doug said...

    You give Sheik al-Bob too much credit:
    It was scat box humor.

    ReplyDelete
  25. And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour.

    Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue.

    He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa.
    He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing.

    In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works.

    In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee.

    In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

    ReplyDelete

  26. The Obama Bargain -


    How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

    The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

    This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.
    ---

    Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

    How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

    What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

    But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

    No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

    ReplyDelete
  27. "And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?"

    That people can overlook this is what has amazed me most from the outset.

    ...as if one would get a pass doing the same thing with their kids in a KKK oriented "Church"

    ReplyDelete
  28. Doug, you must have been reading my mind. see the next post. I was busy doing the art work!

    ReplyDelete