Is the West Dead Yet?

Elites who are exempt by virtue of their money and influence from the consequences of living among millions of displaced Africans, Arabs, or Latin Americans berate ad nauseam their less-well-connected, supposedly illiberal fellow citizens. ==But note that no elite Westerner wants to face the cause of the malady: namely, that the failure in the Third World to adopt Western ideas of consensual government, equality between the sexes, free-market capitalism, individual liberty, and transparent meritocracy logically leads to mayhem and poverty.

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

...A 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled. Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

Read more at the Rutherford Institute
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

You have been fed a load of crap!

You're not supposed to be this well informed! If you agree, don't read this...
2012: The Progressive Elite vs. the American Hard Hat by By Larry Leonard, published by Oregon Magazine

April 21, 2012 — You have been fed a load of crap. It comes to you in two types. The first is in the form of a lie. Something is this, and the liars tell you that it is that. The second type of lie is more subtle, and is created by omitting information from a story. These are known as lies of co-mission and lies of omission. Used simultaneously, they throw a blanket of fantasy over reality. ✧ We’ll use energy as a model for this essay, but remember that the process works in education, campaign speeches, the presentation of history, economics — you name the topic and somewhere in each information pot you will find deception of the type described above.  

Energy and the American Economy - All this week, from all the news sources in America, you have been misinformed by both the liberal MSM and fair and balanced FOX. The MSM did it intentionally. FOX did it unintentionally. To set up this section, here’s something you’ve heard for weeks: “The president says that if he opened up government energy locations, it would not lower the price of gasoline.” ✧ That is a beautiful attempt to sidestep the key political issue today by way of what sounds like a reasonable lie about another, related subject. I’ve been waiting for weeks for FOX to pick it up. They haven’t, so it’s time Oregon Magazine did. Read more at OregonMag.com...

I particularly like Mr. Leonard's summation, "...Euro-socialism or a dynamic economic revival. It’s up to you." --bc Read More......

Stop Mocking the Tea Party

THE DAILY BEAST, 9/17/2010 by Kristen Powers - The media doesn’t get it, says Kirsten Powers. The Tea Party crowd is about to radically reshape the Republican Party on a scale not seen since Barry Goldwater in the 1960s.

It’s time to stop mocking the Tea Party. ∴ Whether they are loons, principled conservatives, or a mix of both, they are a potent force that won’t be intimidated off the national stage by snarky media coverage and clueless attacks from the establishment. Read more at The Daily Beast...

Note: Goldwater conservatism led to Reagan conservatism. --bc Read More......

What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls

RASMUSSEN REPORTS, 7/24/2010 - One of the key issues in the political debate now roiling the country is how big a part government should play in our lives. ∴ And on this topic there is a huge gap between the Political Class and the rest of the nation. ∴ Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters prefer free markets over a government-managed economy. But a plurality of the Political Class takes the opposite view. Read more at Rasmussen's... Read More......

American Spectator: America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

Important Article!
SPECTATOR.ORG, 7/16/2010 (July-August 2010 Issue of The American Spectator) by Angelo M. Codevilla (Hat tip: Gayna Flake) - As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one. Read more at American Spectator...

---

Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 presidential transition report on intelligence. He is the author of The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility.

Related articles:
Works & Days Pity the Postmodern Cultural Elite by Victor Davis Hanson Read More......

Equal to Ourselves

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu scolded Americans for acting “just like your teenage kids” who didn’t know how to take care of the planet he was merely engaging in another “teaching moment”. The WSJ blogs wrote:

The administration aims to teach them—literally. The Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on real children. Partnering with the Parent Teacher Organization, the agency earlier this month launched a cross-country tour of 6,000 schools to teach students about climate change and energy efficiency.

It has become fashionable for governments to treat people — even adults — like children: children who consume too much, obey too little and remain too fond their imaginary friends. And their betters take it upon themselves to guard their speech, take away their dangerous toys and curtail their choices because they are prone to make unwise ones. And most of all they see to it that we should expect no better our lives but a little welfare gruel and some end of life counseling. Once upon a time mankind saw it as their birthright to wander the fields, swim in the streams and see what was over the next hill. Today we live penned up in dark houses warded by sour matrons and bloodless didacts who are forever seeking to administer their “teaching moments”. Read more at the Belmont Club Read More......

Civilization, Barbarism, and the Classroom

Maimon Schwarzaschild at The Right Coast reviews Civilization, Barbarism, and the Classroom by Steven Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, and notes that "...civilization sometimes disarms itself intellectually, morally, and therefore militarily." Balch bucks current academic trends, hold today's academics accountable, labels the current climate destructive and suggests what changes need to occur within academia. Here are some excerpts from Mr. Balch's important piece:

Barbarian problems arise when peoples backward in wealth, culture, and technology, pose violent threats of a serious, even existential, character to societies far more advanced. The West hasn’t faced this kind of menace since the Middle Ages. Now, once more, it does.

Barbarism is a relative term. The Mongols who subdued the Sung Chinese were neither wholly unlettered nor uncouth. Kublai Khan’s mother was, in fact, a practicing Christian. Nor were the barbarians who swarmed over the Rhine in 406. Mongols and Germans were barbarians only by virtue of the gulf that separated their level of cultural attainment from those they defeated.

[Barbarism's] one chance rests on the intellectual flaws of the civilized - particularly their failure to appreciate their own worth.

Here then is the teachable moment... In order to suppress the new barbarism we should now be refocusing our classrooms on the serious and sympathetic study of civilization's nature, achievements, and progress- that is, on its moral reasons for being.

Our civilization's peculiar misfortune is to be under a double assault, physically by the undercivilized from without, and psychologically by those surfeited with it from within. And these last own the classroom.

Using fear to conquer has a long history. What's unprecedented is the current effort to employ shame to the same effect. At the heart of this project lies the construction of a "master narrative" belittling civilization's heritage and elevating its shortcomings, real or imagined, into transcening evils. This then sets the stage for the narrative's masters to proclaim themselves a new redemptive elite, charged with emancipating the benighted from their engrained racism, sexism, classism, chavinism, homophobia, speciesism, ecocide, etc.

It is hard to identify many other historical instances in which an intellectual class has aspired to boost itself to dominance, with fair prospects of success, almost entirely through the leveraging of shame...

What then is the answer? Clearly it must involve challenging the privileged position that shame's discourse now enjoys. Its premises are simpleminded, its arguments misleading, and its conclusions destructive.

Shame's purveyors have an inside lock on campus life. But... something ourside is beating against the gates.

Read the entire piece here

[Emphasis added] Read More......