Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Invoking the Precautionary Principle While Disavowing Knowledge of It

Understanding the Implacable Enemy Within the West (part 2)

This a follow-up to my Christmas commentary: Understanding the Implacable Enemy Within the West.

Just in case you start asking around about the Precautionary Principle, and are answered with the Senatorial Denial such as this: "No, I haven't heard of it. But it sounds interesting. Why don't you send that information to my office and my staff will review it."

Well, our legislators and policy makers sure know how to invoke it despite Senator Knownothing.

When invoking the Precautionary Principle our rulers tend to go whole hog and use it to their benefit as they hide behind the facade that they are protecting us. "This [insert latest fright] crisis is too great, the threat to the public too dire, for our government to be limited in its actions by anything so old fashioned as the US Constitution." Or, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, "Never let a crisis go to waste."

Here's the opening paragraph from a 2007 essay warning of those who know the Precautionary Principle well enough to make use of it to benefit their cronies while ignoring the side effects.

The United States employs a version of the precautionary principle when it confronts threats to national security. We spend vast amounts on defenses against threats unlikely to affect Americans. Experts, defense officials, and politicians justify the expenditures by saying they are necessary to protect the public from worst case dangers. Those claims ignore what is probable and what defenses cost. They exaggerate the danger our enemies pose and strip resources from more probable dangers, making us less safe. -- Benjamin H. Friedman, "The terrible 'ifs': U.S. defense policy makers have adopted the precautionary principle."
My point is, any US government legislator or office seeker who denies they know of the Precautionary Principle so that they don't have to answer hard questions about its use are either liars or too stupid to be running for office.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Merry Christmas

 Understanding the Implacable Enemy Within the West (part 1)

The most joyous time of the year in America has always been Christmas. Cherish it my friends, whatever your beliefs. The forces in power are not to be trusted to permit this to continue. Indeed, they've been actively whittling away at it.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Blaming the TEA Party for Not Owning the Media

The news cycles have been relentlessly blaming a handful of Republicans in the House for days now.

This INCLUDES at least one "conservative" talk station, 870 KRLA, which is a major (if not flagship) station of Salem Broadcasting. Salem also owns TownHall.com. Simply corrupt.

What do we call this working overtime for the other side? Quisling seems too far. Mole doesn't fit when they own the place. Termites tend to be bureaucratic. RINO is an old epithet that I've repeatedly complained of as being too kind. The corruption is so palpable.

Guy S' SKUNCs, even though I like it, is simply not angering enough as far as I can say personally.

I don't know what else to say. Even Og is no help here. The best he can do is tell me "like you expected something different?"  YES. Why have so many on the Right given up?

Is Ace corrupted? Most days I think so.

Even I must be corrupted in that I constantly feel the urge to just give up.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

What Say You?

"We are not voting ourselves out of this" is the line I am repeatedly reading.

So what sort of solution do I think offers us any non-confrontational relief?

We wind up voting The Bummer out. Eschewing any support for a third party will accomplish that.

Then we get very active, and let the TEA Party sentiment be the generally accepted rule and fly in the face of all efforts by the propaganda mills.

This time will be unlike how most of us behaved under GWBush. Much more like how we vocally objected to Harriet Myers and the Dubai ports trial balloons, and very less how we responded to his failure to push tort reform, put teeth into the Beck decision, or use his veto pen even before we remained silent on his growing government.

We daily fight to hold the GOP Prez to what is American and not European/Collectivist/Statist/Globalist.

I am just free wheeling here. Brainstorming. What say you?

Comment at JWF

My instant reaction to "Chavez Calls Obama a Clown" was to think of how Orwell viewed hostilities of communist nations in his last novel.

That in turn prompted me to to imagine The Bummer's response to Chavez.
We are at war with Columbia. We have always been at war with Colubia.
We are at war with Venezuela. We have always been at war with Venezuela.”
— Barack Obama without apologies to George Orwell
Just in time for reelection campaign season too!
Icon found on and quickly removed from the streets of Hollywood.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Fill the Gap In Talk Radio

Every "conservative" talk radio station I tune in during the day has some MSM Agency of Lies "news" on the hour and half hour. Invariably they report only Obama or some other Left leaning person in the news making their best points without airing any contradictions to those statements.  This gets repeated throughout the day. Imagine what the stations that are all Left-leaning all the time are doing, and it is little wonder that the public thinks that the Left-leaning words are not only dominant, they are winning.

On one hand, I find it demoralizing simply to hear these things without their counter-arguments being aired. But it also makes me feel guilty for not doing more. Rarely have I the time, let alone the dedication, to make recordings of these short segments. And how about listeners in their cars? Offended listener ranting could easily be the cause of accidents. Who can remember the details and retain the anger long enough to later write a post about it?

Now for the sake of argument, let's say I did decide to dedicate a month or two to capturing the news reports on these stations. And then I could write a new column about each of those imbalances and provide my own balance for my readers.  

But let's face facts. At this point in my blogging efforts, I know hardly anybody would read it. Not only that, even if this was done by one of the bigger blogs, they could not provide the immediate relief to the half-truth news report that talk radio hosts could were they so dedicated.


Were this is the first time I've mentioned this sort of event (and I don't think it is), it is assuredly not the first time I've felt let down by talk radio. If my reaction is any indication, there is a market out there hungering for more balance in these news segments. So where is it?

Apparently nobody on the talk shows, the host or staff, ever listens to the news segments during the breaks. Why not? It's filled with news that is a constant source of irritation to the average listener. So why not  lambaste those one-sided "news" items and their commentators right then and there? Seek to refresh me rather than demoralize me as they do now. Maybe they won't succeed, but at least I'd feel they were really trying.


Again, if my reaction is any indication, there is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Providing more balance in these news segments would fill it. Taking the opportunity to get in a dig at our tormentors would be the icing on the cake. Rush Limbaugh made a mint by being the first talker to broadcast the sort of comments that had previously never been given a full airing. The sort of comments, after being sent to letters-to-the-editor, wound up tossed into the circular file. And American listeners responded very favorably to hearing their common-sense ideas finally get some hearing on the airwaves, and Rush and Roger Ailes are now multimillionaires.

So be the next Rush by offering instant fill-in and rebuttal to the hourly spots that now only deliver Statist propaganda. Go out young man and make some money! 

Sunday, December 04, 2011

They've Disguised Ugly Passions with Sophistic Reasoning

Here is a meme worth discussing if you want to pull the West back from the brink, or at least provide its survivors a clue as to how it was destroyed. 

The hiding of many ugly human passions by giving them the appearance of reasoning.

  • Envy and covetousness have been hidden with the reasoning of "social" justice.
  • Attacks on property ownership has been hidden with the reasoning of "environmental" justice.
The passions hidden here while given full rein are
  • the inclination to steal; 
  • the inclinations to force others to do your will.
By giving passions the guise of reason, people in power keep the illusion of calm while they upset the rest of us.

Each of these can be stopped through reason by exposing the sophistry at work.

There are other hidden passions that have been granted cover through sophistry. One of these most conservatives know from being on the receiving end: bigotry. How? Tell me the ways.

Cross-posted at Crusader Rabbit

Friday, December 02, 2011

Destroying Western Civ from Within

While responding to Seneca III at Crusader Rabbit a couple of day ago, I expressed some relatively mild criticism of John Stuart Mill when pointing Seneca to an informative commentary by Mike Gray over at The American Culture. In retrospect, I imagine even mild criticism of such a "Progressive" icon hits someone who thinks himself progressive with terrible cognitive dissonance.

Well, commenter “Jon”  responded to me with defensive condescension and pointed me to the first in a string of Mr Cropper video lectures about the famous Mill essay "On Liberty".


Because he left a phony email address, I could not inform "Jon" that the video series to which he sent me actually reinforces what real conservatives ought rightly fear about those who have long hidden behind JS Mill's "open mind" apologetic to shield them in their attacks on Western civilization.

Better even is what I discovered in the first four minutes of part 13. (Mr Cropper really gets cranked when discussing consequences between 4 and 7 minutes).


Partial transcript from first 4 minutes in the next 8 paragraphs:
"It is desirable, in short, that in things that do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. If it were felt that free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being, there would be no danger that liberty would be undervalued." -- J.S. Mill.

If we could get to people that understand that individual freedoms are important for all of us to have the nice things we have -- like enough food to eat, houses to live in, freedom from war and poverty and whatever. If people understood that individuality as such, the freedom of the individual, is essential to bringing us the good life, then everybody would understand why we have to leave the individual free.

That is a lovely thought, and it's tempting, but it's not true. Today you can tell them that. You can say "Now look. We need the individual to act as he pleases as long as he doesn't hurt others." [And gives a list.]

And there is a group that responds: "To Hell with all that. I want trees and..." [gives a list of primitive, pristine land, untouched by humanity "forest primeval" sort of wishes.] "To Hell with mankind's good. To Hell the well-being" as John Stuart Mill says. "I want Nature to be better off."

There are even some crackpot idiots who rather not see us go to the Moon and other planets. Here are these balls of rock and dust floating through space. They hate mankind so much, they don't even want us to go there and disturb the rocks and dust. It is a sick, sick person who prefers mankind just disappear or reduce their numbers, or something, just so rocks and trees and fish can live. To remove this drive to go to Mars and the Moon is just -- is diabolical.

I wish he [Mill] were right about this. If we understood that it's freedom that leads to our well-being, we would all be in favor of freedom. As a matter of fact, if you think that freedom leads to our well-being, there are these people who will say
"OK. Freedom is obviously a bad thing then. We need to have state controls on stuff. We need to stop the building of new power plants; we need to stop new highways; and stop new housing; we need population controls on people; and the number of new babies being born; and reduce the population."
You cannot get passed them. It's called environmentalism. It's a new cult, a new religion. They don't even profess to be scientific; at least the communists were scientific about their nonsense, or claims to be.  These people just claim morality is all they're after. And that humans are immoral; destroying trees is immoral. So you can't convince them Freedom is good -- it leads to SUVs.  That's why they're pissed.
Mr Cropper is demonstrating the kind of thinking that leads to my complete overview of why Western Civ is being destroyed from within. He is one step removed from asking this question,
“If our “leaders” are so humanitarian, how is it that we never hear them direct a harsh word at the Malthusian, Utilitarian and Green nutcases?”
for which the plausible answers are not comforting for individuals and any desire they have for their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
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