Choppers Overhead

Peter Schiff weighs in at Taki's mag on Helicopter Ben keeping his job, and what that means for all of us (aside from the vodka-valium-cafe-mocha-latte the news calls for.)

QUOTE Real ‘change we can believe in’ would be a return to our roots in the rule of law and a system of sound money–but it’s hard to stay grounded when you’re throwing money from helicopters.UNQUOTE

Added bonus: one of the best images (above, right) in the entire blogosphere since Papa Ben's Organically Developed Novus Ordo 2.0 "now with 50% Less Bugnini!" Hah!

DJY

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Taki's Take on Things

Taki on Madoff, Dubya and more...I love the gregarious golden Greek mainly because he comes up with sentences like the following...

"There is more greed in Wall Street than there are Holocaust deniers in Riyadh, but Daphne sort of forgot to mention her burly slob of a brother. Almost, that is. In one sentence which I shall always treasure she wrote, “A sibling of mine had business dealings with Madoff.” Which, a reader replied, was the equivalent of Milton Eisenhower saying he had a brother who participated in the Second World War."

Grin.

Go read it all.

Throw the Bums Out by Taki Theodoracopulos

The Southern Avenger on US DEBT and Generational Treason

Photo credit: Taki's Magazine

Jack Hunter at Taki's Mag ~ writing as the "Southern Avenger" ~ calls a spade a spade in this insightful editorial piece posted to YouTube.

"War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results." -- Joseph Sobran

I would add to Sobran's laundry list the characteristic of a severe restriction of that fluid which makes good societies run well, the milk of human kindness. Compassion is in short supply under war conditions.

I am so tired of the old political game of good Republican/Bad Democrat - Good Democrat/Bad Republican. Whenever authorities play good cop/bad cop the people usually wind up getting screwed. The most unholy alliance of the past 50 years has been the marriage of totalitarian communist ideologue society (China) with international mega-corporations. Caveat emptor.

The Unvarnished Truth

Without further ado, please go read the golden Greek, Taki Theodoracopulos' sizing up of the situation in Gaza. The unvarnished truth.

QUOTE So where is Obama on this one? I’ll tell you where—trying to stay out of the way of AIPAC and the Israel lobby that dictates American foreign policy in the Middle East.
I’ve never been a friend of Islam; however, it’s always been perfectly clear to me that the Israelis are the ones sowing terror and the Palestinians are the ones besieged. The American people have been so brainwashed, they have it the other way round. UNQUOTE
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Blessed Are the Thrifty...

Thrift (also known by its broader name, Temperance)as a virtue ~ a notion familiar to the ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Catholics ~ an idea whose time has returned. That idea is a real hard-sell in post Great Depression era America. A 55 year old boomer, I have watched over my entire life as the buy-now-pay-later hucksters have quietly seized, gagged and bound our entire economy. I've watched people abuse credit card debt, bankruptcy laws and their fellow man at an ever-increasing rate, to the point that a fellow of my acquaintance who shall remain nameless, astounded our entire family and many of his friends and former colleagues and clients, by filing for bankruptcy over his credit card bills. He had the wherewithal to pay them having both an income in the high 60K range and having come into some money near the 200K range. But he chose not to. He made a calculated and more or less rational decision to leave the credit card company holding the bag and his fellow Americans making up the difference in increased interest rates, or fees, or however the credit companies figure such things. Billions upon billions in "bailout" cash, hot off the presses, and Ponzi schemes as a Wall Street fact of life based on pure greed and the fable of "something for nothing", all point like a smoking crater to a meteor crash site to the absolute requisite return of thrift and temperance.

Be sure and click on over and read the whole thing ~

From John Zmirak at Taki's magazine:
QUOTE People say that the best cure for a hangover is a hair of the dog that bit you. The people who say that are typically alcoholics. They’re using the logic of an addict, whose reason has been fried by a short-circuit in the pleasure-centers of the brain. Such people think it’s funny when they fall down at a parish Christmas party (even if they’re the Monsignor), when they puke on your champagne colored carpet (“Good thing that’s what I was drinking!”), when they shout some slur that gets you into a fight with numerous ethnic strangers—and they’ll probably think it’s funny when, one morning in the shower, their liver slides out of their ass.

And that, boys and girls, is what happened to our economy. As it lies there on the porcelain, we want to pick it up and put it back but we’re scared it might just dissolve. Anyway, the process would probably hurt. Do we really need it?

But that’s really what it means, when the Magi of either party discuss the need for an “economic stimulus,” or financial journalists worry about the decline in consumer spending—by consumers who are losing their jobs. Just to break things down: This winter our country crashed into a wall because of our addiction to spending money we haven’t got for stuff we don’t need. We overdosed, ran through our stash, and now we’re thrashing around in a cold turkey withdrawal—but here comes that nice man with the methadone…. UNQUOTE

Stewart & Zmirak Deconstruct GOP VP Nominee

From John Zmirak in Taki's Magazine (see yesterday's post on this "Read of the Week")

QUOTE
While Palin’s talk took some delightful shots at the inflatable Superman balloon that is Obama, her positive program boiled down to little more than the following:

Support our troops.
Defeatists, go home to Hanoi.
I love my kids.
My husband is a real man.
Harry Truman was unqualified, too.
I may be much hotter than your wife, but I can be just as scary.
USA! USA! USA! USA!
Small town good, big town bad.
Power corrupts, so give some to me.
Who needs beaches or seafood? Let’s drill for some oil, baby!
The Iranians are holding our people hostage.
The Russians are coming.
Barak Obama blathers on and on about himself. I blather about my children.
Obama is skinny, pale, and weak. He went to Harvard, for crying out loud.
America doesn’t negotiate with foreigners.
It isn’t just Republicans who can’t stand John McCain. Some Democrats hate him, too.
Only veterans and torture victims can really be trusted.
So let’s draft half the country, and send the rest to Gitmo.

I wasn’t entirely swayed by this analysis.

UNQUOTE

Me either.

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On the Rez With Zmirak

God is good, he has writers like John Zmirak over at Taki's Magazine who still have wit and a sense of what is right. God bless you, Mister Zmirak.

I feel you, man, truly I do. Yeppers.

I know I always say this, but really, really, be sure and click over to read it all. You'll be glad you did. Me Vote Pretty This Time is the read of the week.

QUOTE I also forgot to watch either party’s national convention. Just plain missed ‘em. Perhaps I have been in denial, avoiding the fact that our nation’s choices boil down to a Chicago “community activist” (i.e., ghetto shakedown artist who mau-maus Whitey for handouts) and a crackbrained Deer Hunter nostalgist whose vision of America is one vast and well-policed Navy base… where we all march in formation, pick up cigarette butts when ordered, and ask our commanders for “liberty”—which they’ll grant us one weekend per month.

Yes, the outcome of the primaries left me feeling… disenfranchised. To the point where I’ve found myself checking on my passport, to make sure I’m still an American—and wondering if I won’t someday end up on a reservation for white, blue-collar Catholics. Where, of course, we will offer bingo. UNQUOTE
a a a

America's Moral Authority

There was a time not too long ago (WWII and Revolutionary War eras especially) when America spoke with a sense of moral authority – not only because the world believed the rhetoric and the script, but because Americans did. Thus, America received the benefit of the doubt – even when self-interest was evidently mixed with a just cause. However, has America lost legitimacy? If so, then how did this happen and does it even matter?
Does political power really need legitimacy? If so, then can the situation be reversed?
And in any case, why should we care? The Bush administration's shredding of The Magna Carta and The Constitution draws what response from you, gentle reader? Numbness? Fear? Revulsion? Apathy?

Take a gander at Taki Mag's Authority Issues: Is There Sovereignty Beyond the State? by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and relish a decent treatment of this, the "forbidden subject".

QUOTE We need government to uphold the norms of morality, I am told by people who specialize in the unintentionally funny. If the moral condition of society has reached a level at which we would look for relief to the kind of men who can succeed in a political system like ours, then the patient is terminal. On the other hand, had the churches not turned their attention these past 45 years to lettuce boycotts and excited pronouncements about the wondrous prospects of the modern world, they might have done more to arrest the moral decline for which we are now told we need the state. UNQUOTE

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None of Our Beeswax

Washington has a bad habit of making murky, contradictory statements that can lead to unnecessary unpleasantness that can last for decades. From Taki's Mag by John Zmirak, who also notes that it is the Eastern Orthodox who are energetically offing each other in Georgia.

QUOTE It’s tragic to see Orthodox Christians killing each other, especially in a region where they were once jointly persecuted by an atheist dictatorship. We should all pray for peace in Georgia. That said, it’s satisfying to see Vladimir Putin resist the irresponsible--indeed, insane--attempt by West to encircle his country with client states--with the goal of joining them all, through NATO, to the U.S. in a war alliance. Make no mistake, if American interventionists had gotten their way and already incorporated Georgia into NATO, we would now be at war with a nuclear-armed Russia. UNQUOTE

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Georgia On My Mind

Whatever happened to the US speaking softly and carrying a big stick? Whatever happened to
friendship with all, entangling alliances with none? Whatever happened to minding our own business and taking care of our own? I don't like this one little bit.

From Taki's Magazine, by Richard Spencer, be sure and click on over to read it all:

Excerpt:

QUOTE In response to the movement of Russian troops into Georgia this morning, State Department spokesperson Amanda Harper announced to the German press: “We support Georgia’s territorial integrity and we call for an immediate ceasefire.” Senator McCain was even more forceful, demanding, “Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory.”
Both statements are not only reckless but they reveal the total obliviousness of most American foreign-policy makers to the consequences of Washington’s actions since the end of the Cold War—a characterization that holds equally well for the supposed diplomats and realists in Foggy Bottom as for the neocons rallying to McCain. UNQUOTE
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Quote of the Week

ON Phil Gramm's resignation from the McCain team, where he held the position of economic adviser, at least until he hissed that the current economic sludge pond is a mental one, and called his suffering fellow Americans "whiners." From Taki's Magazine, formerly Taki's Top Drawer which had more cachet IMHO, author Tom Piatak. Click on over & read the rest.

Quote of the Week:

(Of course, it’s easy to view worries about the economy as “whining” from the commanding heights of a Swiss bank).

Two Roads Diverged: Ron Paul & The Libertarians

In a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

and looked down one as far as I could

to where it bent in the undergrowth

From Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

Just kidding, I only warm up to one of the possible branches in this road. The "True Conservative anti-war pro-life" fork.

This is bit of a long read, but a worthwhile one. Justin Raimondo at TakiMag explores in depth what the Ron Paul Revolution means to the libertarian movement. I was, previous to the RP phenomenon, adverse to the libertarians since I only knew the "free-for-all/confusion of liberty with license" mindset found in a certain elite wing of the Liberts ~ but now I find myself actually very sympathetic to the Ron Paul "revolution".

DJY

QUOTE That war breeds tyranny and subverts republican forms of government; that we were fighting national socialism overseas only to witness its triumph on the home front; and, central to it all, an acute consciousness of America’s tragic destiny as an (anti-)imperial power, doomed, like all the others, to degenerate into a parody of itself. UNQUOTE