Equanimity

Noun

Mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, esp. in a difficult situation

These are difficult times for a lot of people to be sure, and this is an excellent article that I recommend highly. Suicides are up, stress is up, rancor is up, unemployment is up, etc., etc., – these are trying times, but then again, “fundamental transformation” of anything can be difficult. The sad thing is, we didn’t need any fundamental transformation, and the current unsettled societal environment is exactly what Obama needs to continue the decline. This is not by accident. Obama plays on the emotions of every one at every opportunity, and that is by design. But that being said, I want to make an appeal to the common sense on both sides, those on the right and the left, to dial down the rhetoric and just stop and think for a moment.

For those on the left – Obama is playing you. He wants you to think that corporations are evil, that the rich are evil, that America is a misogynistic, racist, imperialistic society, and that white Christian men are paranoid about the changing ethnic landscape. His fundamental transformation of America into a European style socialist country with a more powerful central authority requires that you reject capitalism, that you reject Faith, and that you question the traditional family role. And this distorted belief he needs you to embrace started with your schooling via the ultra liberal educational system in our country, led by 1960’s style radicals that largely failed in that very capitalist system they need you to reject. But I believe you are better than that. I believe that most of you understand that our capitalist system is responsible for creating the most powerful economic engine in the world, for providing the highest average standard of living, and for lifting more people out of poverty than any other economic platform hands down. That our Constitutional model of government is responsible for providing more civil and human rights to more people, and for giving more autonomy to more people than any other country, and there really isn’t even a close second. So my question is, why would you, as part of the “proletariat” want to change that dynamic, and restrict not only your freedoms, but your voice as well?

For those on the right – Obama wants you to become irrational. He wants you to “hate”, to shout, and to become visibly angry. He also wants to divide conservatives, to have the social conservatives battle the fiscal conservatives, and to polarize. That plays right into his hand. He can then better play on everyone’s emotions if we are all at each other’s throats. So why do this? Are we not able to oppose his agenda from an intelligent perspective? Are we incapable of convincing people that the Constitutional model of governance on a capitalist economic platform is best for everyone? Because if we are, and all we can do is shout and call people names, then we have truly lost. We are better than this, and America is stronger than this. We need to begin to appeal to a broad spectrum of people on our terms, and not on just opposition to what Obama is doing. We need to appeal to their common sense, to their intelligence, and to their core belief that America is the beacon of liberty, justice and opportunity. If we stop playing into the hands of the left, dial down the rancor, and show people what we stand for, and not just what we stand against – then we can begin to turn the tide. And that will require a conviction of Faith and composure of the heart and the mind. Equanimity, if you will.

Same Sex Marriage at the Court

Allahpundit has a nice run down of early tea-leaf-reading regarding what the Court may do – some are arguing that the Court will just side-step the issue (which would have the effect of invalidating Prop 8 in California but not asserting a constitutional right to same sex marriage – a half victory and half loss for both sides), while others are still pretty certain that Roberts will ensure the Court comes down on the side of same sex marriage on the Ruling Class theory that its inevitable and thus the Court better not find itself in a Plessy situation.  This is the view I hold – while three of the Justices (Thomas, Scalia and Alito) actually understand the Constitution and law and other such trivialities, the other six to a greater or lesser degree are more influenced by what is fashionable and so will go with what they perceive elite opinion desires (yes, we may get on this – as we have on other issues – a ruling which merely ensures that a Justice won’t have to be embarrassed when asked a question at a DC cocktail party).  While there cannot be a right to marry – because marriage requires the voluntary consent of at least two people – I believe we’ll have a 6/3 ruling in favor of a constitutionally protected “right” to marry, which means all laws prohibiting same-sex marriage will be invalidated.  The people have voted and voted and voted and made their views clear – and 6 Justices will soon ignore all that and just do what the Ruling Class wants…and they’ll do it without even for a moment thinking of the ramifications of their action (two or three years from now we will start getting the cases where a man is suing to be able to marry his brother, etc).

But, what of it?  Its a Phyrrhic victory by a dying Ruling Class.  Yesterday I came across a quote attributed to the Prime Minister of Luxembourg regarding the ongoing financial crisis in Europe – in effect, the man was quoted as saying that of course everyone knows what to do, but none of them know how to get re-elected after they do it.  In other words, with the failure of the system already apparent and everyone already knowing what needs to be done, they still won’t do it because they don’t want to be booted out of office at the next election and lose their pathetic, little place at the public trough.  These are the people who are in charge all around the world – and they are finished.  Clinging to power like Bourbons or Romanovs, they will soon be swept away.  Here and everywhere around the world.

Why gay marriage?  Not because the people want it – their votes show otherwise.  Not because even most gay people want it.  No, its only wanted because it allows the twits who run our society to continue to view themselves as brave, advanced people who are taking on the corrupt Powers…namely, the Christian Church, which hasn’t had any real power in centuries.  Of course, none of these brave souls in favor of gay marriage will actually go out and try to stop Muslims from murdering gays…because that would take some genuine guts.   100 or so years from now, no one will be marrying people of the same sex – because only an irrational, dying society would allow such a thing…and by 100 years from now, this irrational society will be dead, and its replacement, being rational, won’t go in for such nonsense.

UPDATE:  Bit of a humorous note on the cowardly Senate Democrats who are “evolving” on gay marriage now that they don’t have to face their voters for 6 more years.  The first two were firm against it, back last fall when it could have cost them re-election…

UPDATE II:  And if we can get 10,000 people to march in favor of marriage when gay marriage is allegedly popular, then just wait and see what happens if the SC rams it down our throats…in a few years, we’ll get a million…

Ah, But We Do Forget

That song was done by the Boomtown Rats and was made in response to the school shooting carried out by Brenda Ann Spencer on January 29th, 1979 in San Diego, California. I admit that I had mentally lost track of it, but it always has been floating around in my head, re-emerging from time to time.  I was 14 years old and living in San Diego at the time.  The shooter was 16.  When asked why she had done it, she answered, “I don’t like Mondays”.

Two people were killed, and 9 injured, including 8 children.  It was a horrifically shocking event which, I’m sure, everyone at the time said they’d never forget.  Ok, so how many of you who were 14 or older in 1979 remember?  How many of you have heard that Boomtown Rats song and never knew what it was about?

We forget and we forget and we forget – and then comes the next massacre and we wring our hands and swear we won’t forget.  But, we do – and then repeat the process.  If we want it to stop, then we have to remember….and keep remembering and start thinking about how it happened.  How is it that prior to 1979 we never had someone pick up a gun and randomly shoot at a school for no identifiable reason?  To be sure, you can find long lists of people who were murdered at schools over the ages – but in each case there was an identifiable cause; some grievance against the school, or the school authorities, or some of the students.  Something you could logically connect to the crime…not because a bored person decided they didn’t like Mondays.

We’ve lost our morals, my friends – that is it.  Only a people increasingly lacking in basic, human decency can breed people who will just kill for no reason.  Until we get back to basic, human decency we won’t get anywhere.  Just more massacres and more memorial services and more (empty) pledges to never forget.

UPDATE:  Rush gets it:

I said, “Twenty-five years ago we were warning about what was going to happen if X kept happening and Y kept happening and if we didn’t stop Z.”  Well, now, we’re there.  We’re no longer talking about what will happen unless we do something about it.  We’re living it.  We’re living the collapse.  We’re living the implosion of our culture and our society.  Politically, morally, religiously, you name it, and it all stems from the fact that no one is allowed to have values.  Values are judgmental.  You have no right to impose values on people.

The death of our civilization is proceeding precisely as predicted in decades past – stodgy, boring, old conservatives (and a few wise liberals) pointed it out and pointed it out and explained with charts and diagrams that all this would happen if we didn’t change course.  We didn’t change course.  We just doubled down on doing it wrong – and now people pretend to be all shocked about it?  Astounding.

Get ready to start imposing the old morality (and, of course, all of us must start by imposing it on ourselves) or get ready for death.  Pick one.  There are no other choices.

Thoughts on the “Black Friday Strike”

A lot of people are getting fed up with the way America’s retailers are forever pushing back the start of “black Friday” – that Friday after Thanksgiving which represents the largest retail sales day of the year.  Starting some years ago, retailers started opening up earlier and earlier on Friday morning, offering “door buster” deals for those people willing to get there at the crack of dawn.  Trouble is, each retailer tried to out-do the other – and now we have a lot of major retailers who are planning on opening on Thanksgiving Day, itself.

I’m not quite sure where this bright idea came from – given that I work in corporate America, my guess is a second-level corporate exec managed to produce some numbers which alleged that opening up an hour earlier you can grab some tiny percentage more of consumer’s disposable income – income which might be spent at other retailers if everyone opened up at the same time.  I highly doubt that this opening up earlier and earlier actually increases sales – more than likely it just spreads the sales out over a longer period of time.  At any rate, the corporate execs who thought it up are, likely, the  products of business schools who are rising to the top not based on skill or ability but simply on the fact that when they first were inserted in to junior management post-college they were befriended by someone a step higher on the corporate ladder and just rose along with them year by year (with only those entirely screwing up along the way losing their place on the ladder).  Essentially, they are just “managers” who don’t actually know what it is their troops do for a living (anyone who has worked long in corporate America is continually astounded by how executive decisions bear little connection to reality – but before any of you liberals out there consider this an indictment of the private sector, I point out that the level of senior obtuseness is vastly higher in government); most importantly, the corporate executives who are commanding their troops to give up their holiday for the sake of a 0.01% increase in gross sales won’t be there while the troops are at work – for the most part, they’ll be home with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving.

Memo to Pro-Life Republicans

If you believe there should not be a  rape exception for abortion and you get asked the question, “do you believe there should be a rape exception for abortion?” then your answer is as follows:

I believe all of us desire that we should be just and merciful in our actions and I just can’t see how justice or mercy are served by executing a child because her father is a rapist.

Thank you for your time and attention to this message.

Can Democracy Survive?

First we begin with a bit of a quote:

…There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man…
- G. K. Chesterton, “What I Saw in America”, 1922

There are some words to infuriate our liberals – and even some of our libertarians:  “dogma” and “divine”!  Did he really just say that if we want to have democracy we must have divine dogmas?  You bet I did, because it is true.

When it comes down to it – as Thomas Jefferson, Deist though he was, clearly saw – if our rights are not given to us by God then they are not rights.  If we are not all created equal then there is no justification for democracy because democracy’s justification is the moral equivalence of all people.  It is the only equality there is or can be – because it is obvious that we are not physically and mentally equal to each other.

It there were nothing but blind evolution which accounts for our being here – if there is no God, that is – then any assertion of an absolute human right is absurd.  It will fall victim to the first person who comes along and says “I don’t agree” and who has the power to enforce it.  If you want to be free the first thing you must do – hard as it will be for many – is believe in God.  Don’t believe in God and, eventually, you won’t be free simply because you’ll have no defense against someone who doesn’t want freedom to exist for whatever reason.  Whether it is a national socialist who wants to base  things upon race or an international socialist who wants to base things upon class is a matter of perfect indifference:  you cannot say that the national or international socialist (and they come in all sorts of different guises) is wrong unless you have an absolute truth – God – to point to.

That right there is enough to stick in any liberal (and most libertarian) craw – but I’m about to get much worse about it.

What America Really Needs: An Anti-Stupidity Movement

While running through the Facebook thread, I came across the following quote:

To be beautiful means to be yourself.  You don’t need to be accepted by others, you need to accept yourself. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich, as it turns out, is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has gained some vogue in the West – probably initially from the fact that he was one of those dimwits during the Vietnam War who figured that if the United States would just leave and the war just “end” then everything would be just swell.  How anyone by the 1960′s could think that a communist regime would (a) seek cooperation with non-communists or (b) be anything less than hideously brutal once triumphant is beyond my understanding.  But, of course, Thich wasn’t alone – around the world literal tens of millions thought the same way.  In other words, they thought stupidly.  But no one ever called them that.  Reading the quote listed above, though, got me thinking that we who refuse to be stupid have to be a bit more forceful lest stupidity overwhelm us.

Because someone would only post a quote like that if they thought it wasn’t stupid.  You only post something like that if you think it wise.  But, my goodness, what a vapid bunch of pantheist nonsense is wrapped up in that short quote!  To be beautiful means to be be yourself?  What if yourself is a drug addict?  Or a thief?  Or a lazy bum?  It is, indeed, true that you don’t need to be accepted by others but before you go accepting yourself isn’t it rather important to determine if  yourself is worthy of respect?  Suppose you’re a hooker or a con artist – are you supposed to accept that yourself?

Gay Rights Activist: Dissenters Not Welcome in Chicago

That is the only way to read this – from the Chicago Tribune:

…Ald.Proco “Joe” Moreno announced this week that he will block Chick-fil-A’s effort to build its second Chicago store, which would be in the Logan Square neighborhood, following company President Dan Cathy’s remarks last week that he was “guilty as charged” for supporting the biblical definition of marriage as between a man and woman.

“If you are discriminating against a segment of the community, I don’t want you in the 1st Ward,” Moreno told the Tribune on Tuesday…

Thing is, Christians, orthodox Jews…even Muslims…are also “guilty as charged” in supporting the biblical definition of marriage.  If the standard for being allowed in to Chicago is “be in favor of gay marriage” then Chicago has just said that millions of people – especially believers in traditional religions – are not allowed in Chicago.  Want to build a new church in Chicago?  Don’t bother – you’re not welcome as you don’t fit in with Chicago values…which, I guess, revolve around gay marriage, political corruption and an amazingly high murder rate.

I’ve never eaten at  Chick-fil-A, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I will as soon as I can.  This is just a disgusting, fascist attempt to suppress people for merely dissenting.  You don’t see people on our side trying to stop a gay rights group from opening an office – even in heavily Christian areas.  Free speech is free speech – everyone is allowed to speak their mind and there’s no call for anyone to deny a person or group the right to operate simply because they have views one disagrees with.  But that is not how our liberal fascists operate:  so filled with hatred they demand that anyone who disagrees shut up and go away.

And they wonder why we don’t like them…wonder why we are working hard in 2012 to utterly crush liberalism at the polls.  We’re doing it to save America…if these fascist twits get their way, we’re all doomed.

UPDATE:  I edited this blog entry because I don’t want the argument to become about what is a Christian.  This case is a matter of a fascist attempt to suppress people for dissenting.

War on Poverty, Fail

From the AP:

…The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965…

The AP, being an MSM outfit, naturally puts part of the blame on a “fraying social safety net”, totally ignoring the fact that in real dollar terms we are spending vastly more on social programs than we ever did before.

Be that as it may, this is the final proof that Big Government welfare programs don’t work.  Of course, this has been easily demonstrable for several decades, now, but I don’t see how liberals can escape (save by flat out lying) the bald fact that their programs have failed.  This is it.  Its done.  Welfare doesn’t work.  No argument can be made that people would actually be worse off if we never started the War on Poverty, while plenty of arguments can still be made that we will be better off once we start dismantling this Big Government monstrosity.

Massacre, Redux

A little later today the President of the United States will give a speech a little like this one or, perhaps, like that one.  The point is that the President will express his shock and grief over the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.

For the next few days we’ll have all sorts of reports about the massacre – we’ll learn about the shooter and about the least details of his sorry life.  We’ll learn if this was just some sort of crazed attack or (less likely) some sort of terrorist attack.  If it was a terrorist attack then it will be swiftly played down by government and MSM because confronting actual terrorism is forbidden right now (too busy with electoral matters – if it was some sort of terrorist attack, the reaction will be akin to the reaction to the Cole incident in 2000).  More than likely, though, this massacre is just another crazed attack in a long line of them – both in the United States and around the world.  Zero Hedge put together a handy list of the major mass shootings of the past 20 years.  Makes for depressing reading – but not so much because of the shootings, but because of our blindness on what it all means.

Even if the attack turns out to be terrorism, the list is still depressing and still so because of our unwillingness to confront reality.  Once upon a time, there weren’t mass shootings.  Not that there were fewer:  there were none.  Crazed lunatics with access to repeating rifles did not go on murderous rampages in the 1880′s.  Crazed lunatics with access to the Thompson sub-machine gun (a fully automatic weapon firing a murderous .45 ACP round at 600 rounds per minute…and anyone could buy it in the 20′s or 30′s…didn’t even need a permit) did not go on murderous rampages in the 1930′s.  Crazed lunatics who have to jump through government hoops to obtain semi-automatic weapons do go on murderous rampages, today.  What has changed?  I mean, other than the fact that it is harder to obtain less effective murder weapons than were available in the 1930′s?

Morality has changed.

Back in the past we didn’t have a society where the family was half collapsed.  We didn’t have a society where lies were officially designated as “politically correct” and thus not to be questioned.  Where the government nanny-State has replaced men in a quarter of all households.  Where violence is glorified in “cool” movies, television shows and video games.  Where obscene and/or anti-social behavior is not a matter for concern (until, that is, the obscene or anti-social person picks up a gun and starts shooting).   The problem we have – the reason people go on shooting rampages – is because we are an immoral society.  Until we become, once again, a moral society this will not change – all you’ll get is ever more shootings and, likely, ever worse shootings.

Until we brace ourselves to the task of rebuilding the family, denouncing the politically correct lies, dismantling the welfare State and start censoring what goes on in our popular culture, none of this will improve.  It will, indeed, only get worse.  Carp and complain about what I just wrote all you want – shriek to high heaven about how I just advocated censorship…but if you don’t agree with me, then you are part of the problem.  Your head is stuck firmly in the sand (though a much more vulgar suggestion of where it is would be more accurate).  You are ignoring reality in favor of one politically correct lie or another.   This is what it is – our collapse in morality leads to mass shootings.  Just as our collapse in morality has led to increased illegitimacy, divorce, cross-generational government dependence, rape, adultery/fornication, child abuse/neglect/abandonment, massively widespread sexually transmitted disease, increased child poverty, crime of all sorts, decayed cities…

Want to end all that?  Then start insisting upon the enforcement of morality.  If you don’t then nothing else you do will work and you’ll just see more and more of this…

UPDATE:  Roger L. Simon gets on the right track:

From Oliver Stone to Quentin Tarantino to Clint Eastwood, many of our best known filmmakers have trafficked in extreme, sometimes even gratuitous, violence. It has long been their contention, and those of others, that violence in film does not beget violence in life.

As the mass murder in Colorado has shown, they were wrong. Yes, normal people are able to separate illusion from reality, but for the criminally insane like James Holmes, it is quite clear that ultra-violent films can act as an inspiration for unspeakable acts.

Given the horrifying death toll, rare as the likes of Holmes may be, we have to account for the similarly deranged and aberrant. We owe that to the dead of Colorado and elsewhere. Moreover, we should not encourage these events, wittingly or unwittingly. And by we I mean the people who make films (which includes me)…

But he doesn’t go far enough – he eschews censorship.  But censorship of films, television, radio and video games (especially) is a necessary act in bringing to an end these horrendous massacres.  It is simple calculation:  what is more important, human lives of the ability of entertainment people to make an easy buck?  It is my view that because we have allowed popular culture to become a cesspit that it has not only become soaked in violence and sex but that it has also become lousy – actors are worse, direction is worse, writing is worse than it was in the glory days of Hollywood.  This is because acting in the manner of Spencer Tracy, directing in the manner of John Ford and writing with the style and grace of Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, The King and I, etc.) takes hard work as well as talent – much easier to just grind out movies with spectacular special effects, a few flashed boobs, some cuss words and a couple catch-phrases.

Do not, I pray you, try to sell me the utter garbage that censoring violence and sex out of popular culture attacks freedom.  Men and women did not fight and die for the “freedom” to put out disgusting filth and charge $8 to see it.  The heroes of America’s past fought and died so that we could worship God, speak our minds and live our lives without let or hindrance from others.  If the only way you can feel free is when your watching someone be disemboweled in an action flick, then you are a complete slave, so pound sand and get out of this debate and allow the adults to take over.

UPDATE II:  Naturally, the left is trying to blame the TEA Party and the larger conservative movement for this.  They’ll never take aim at the purveyors of popular filth.  Oh, no – that would mean a drying up of invites to the cool parties as well as a drop off in donations…

UPDATE III:  Its not just me thinking along these lines.