My thoughts on Obama and Socialism

Obama's Neo-soviet poster lampooned...

my little satire on Socialism:

Our Father who is in the democrat party,
Protect us from the great Ecopalypse of the prophet Gore (he who hath a private jet and many mansions).
And stop the rising of the seas with your charm and presence,
Cleanse us of our sins of Wealth and Success
of Clean streets and Mc Donalds
of low infant mortality
and opportunity to improve ourselves and rise from the gutter

Pray, let us all be equal in mediocrity and low pay
in underachievement and simmering resentment of those who remain still richer,
more gifted or hard-working than us
And lead us not into wealth or self-love
Help us surrender to our enemies,
domestic and international
And flagellate ourselves for being imperfect
and bow before wonderfully sordid and cruel dictators
who have the courage of our lack of convictions.

And let us not liberate nations from cruel despots,
but let us celebrate them as examples of diversity,
cruelty and death,
misogyny, feudalism and hatred.
and lead us not into light and truth and joy
but into murkiness and relativism and cynisism
And may our death-wish be realised
and all of us be equal
in an amorphous mass of misery for All !
Amen

If you consider yourself a socialist, don't take this personally - I differentiate between people and ideas. I attack the idea, not the person. Feel free to shoot down the free-market - I can take it.

It's a bit strange that Obama is blaming the Financial crisis on the Bush administration, when in fact Bush and others warned about Fannie & Freddie undercapitalization back in 2003; And it was groups such as Obama's ACORN which pressured banks into dangerous lending. He's a smooth talker and at times a blatant liar (eg above) ...

If he ever does realize his dream of being the New Messiah (says Oprah) and changing murdering dictators into reasonable and civilized people by sheer force of his charm and divinity over a cup of tea and a biscuit;

They will take him for a fool (just as Hitler took Chamberlain for a fool and was emboldened to invade Poland, and Stalin deceived FDRoosevelt) and run circles around him. Diplomacy is more about leverage (military power and the will to use it) than empty talk and charm. most of the world is rather less civilized than a Chicago coffee shop or a Harvard debate.

An electrician, supermarket executive or similar would be better suited to the job of presidency given the haughty narcissism and ethereal ungrounded naivete of the Harvard crowd (and sadly, most of Academia these days).
he is also an messianic idol, worshipped by pagans who are filling a need they have for the Divine, which they have thrown out with the bathwater in their Brave New Secular anti-Jesus World. Problem is, he is beholden to no superior divine power – he is a God unto himself (We are the change we’ve been waiting for – goes the motto of his followers).

A bit like in France where the State has replaced God and is supposed to be all-wise and infallible, when in fact French technocrats know bugger-all about market economics and big state firms regularly go bankrupt.

Change ? tax and spend Socialism isn’t change – it’s a well-established social and economic failure, compared to low tax and regulations states, everywhere it’s been established. And the more “pure” it is, the worse the results (see Zimbabwe for the result of redistributing properties to the poor and Mugabe’s friends).

If he does get in, I hope he's a fast learner, and that not too many countries have to be invaded by ambitious dictators before he realises the true rough and tumble nature of world politics.

May he apply his socialism to the full so that it fails dismally, so that we can be rid of the idea once and for all (until the next group amnesia), that state-coerced utopianism and state-driven economies have anything to offer us.

Sub-prime Mortgages foisted on banks by Clinton

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was pushed hard by Bill Clinton, although it originated under Jimmy Carter. Asked about it the other day on one of the morning TV talk shows, Clinton said times back then were different. Fannie and Freddie had lots of money and he (in his infinite wisdom) decided that the money should not go to share holders or to executive compensation, but should be used to put the poor into homes.

As you can imagine, wonderful things happen when the government strong arms corporations as to how they should spend their money and, better yet, how they should assess the qualifications of home buyers. So the country's biggest buyers of mortgages were pressured into lowering the qualifications of applicants, in order to increase the percentage of poor that got mortgages. By 2006, 30% of all mortgages went to people who in any other circumstances wouldn't qualify.

The Bush administration in 2003 tried to change the system, to no avail. Congressman Barney Frank, (D, MA ) was in the forefront of stopping the Bush proposal to take control out of Fannie and Freddie and put it into a third overseeing organization. Frank too has emerged in the current crisis as one of the major critics of the administration.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continued to raise the alarm over Fannie's and Freddie's weak capitalization. His concerns were ignored.

The best thing that can emerge from the current financial crisis is the realization that the government needs to stop directing economic decision making. In a sense, the government is putting out a fire it started when it both created the CRA and assessed lending institutions by how well they were doing in response to the program. When Clinton decided, in his usual arrogance, that he knew better than the market how banks should lend money, the seeds were sown for the current financial disaster.

full article here

Europe the Sinking Titanic V. Putin the Poisoner

I post these things in the hope that my drop in the ocean may contribute to the waking up of Europeans... and those who naively wish to Europeanise Australia or their own country. massive welfare, no guiding moral compass and no understanding of the dangerousness of the world (Putin, Saddam etc) is a recipe for suicide.
As it was in the 1930s when Hitler rose to power confronted with pacifist European nations.

Those of you who live in Europe (you know who you are) be warned - if drastic attitude changes are not made, the future of Europe in a decade will be about as attractive as the present of Beirut.
I would advise those who can to immigrate, en masse... maybe this will wake up the Elites and useful idiots like John Le Carre and Chirac. But I doubt it. They will continue with the same tired old slogans "war is not the answer", "all cultures are equal" , "If the US unilaterally withdraws from (fill the gap -south Korea, Irak, supporting Israel, protecting international sea lanes, protecting Taiwan and the rest of free asia and Australasia...) then the opposition will drop their arms and walk home" . And Rome will burn while they play their violins.

All of former Soviet colonies are under barrel of the gun again, and they can feel that old familiar chill going up their spines. The peoples of Poland, the Ukraine and Georgia are not looking to France, Germany or Britain for help. There is no help to be found there. They are just looking to the United States. Europe's failure to grow up as a responsible power, able and willing to protect its own Eastern neighbors, is a profound betrayal of its own best values, not to mention its own self-destructive history.

President Saakashvili of Georgia said it: "Who else can stand up for liberty in the world?" He was talking about the United States. But that's giving Europe a pass they don't deserve. Europe has all the means to stand up for liberty in the world. What they lack is the guts, the crucial will to defend themselves and their fellow members of the European Union. The welfare state has siphoned off the money needed for a working European military. It has also sapped the will to survive. Britain's supine surrender to Iran's kidnapping of half a dozen sailors under the very guns of a British warship tells the whole story. Queen Victoria would be rightly ashamed. (...)

Now Putin is a classic bully, who keeps testing the limits of his power. So he started with killing his domestic opponents, assassinating journalists, nationalizing industries, and chilling the Russian media. Small stuff. Then he proceeded to poison KGB traitors in London and Ireland, trying to kill the Ukraine's President Yushchenko, and invading Georgia. Those are only the high points; behind the scenes you can bet there's a lot more.

After every Russian shove Europe backs down. Worse than that, it let itself to be bought off. The worst example is our friend former Chancellor Herr Gerhardt Schroeder, who got himself a top job with Russia's Gazprom energy company right after he passed a sell-out energy treaty through the German parliament. That'll teach Putin how to deal with Europe. ( I thought it was Bush who was after money - silly me).

Whatever Europe does it does partly out of fear, partly out of calculation, and partly out of vanity. The vanity part burst out at the United States after the Cold War --- which, remember, crunched all those imperial egos in Paris and Berlin, London, Stockholm and Brussels. European capitals have been the center of an empire; they cherish an imperial past and indulge in sheer self-puffery. Moscow, London, Berlin, Paris -- Europe's grandiosity is amazing. So they secretly hated being dominated by the dumb Americans for the whole Cold War, even if it saved their necks. If you doubt it, just read British spy novelists like Graham Greene and John Le Carre, both seething leftie America-haters who used to work in the Brit government.

Our media and Democrats may not remember this, but seven years ago the United States was attacked by Islamofascist terrorists, who killed nearly 3,000 people in NYC and DC. NATO is a mutual defense pact, which translates as "we help you and you help us." NATO has kept Europe secure for sixty years. But it's all been one-way -- we've defended them with the Berlin Airlift, by building up European armies, in proxy wars in the Middle East, Korea and Vietnam, and in finally by getting the Soviets to let go of their European colonies, when Ronald Reagan gently pushed them into a nervous breakdown. We've done our share. What did Europe do after 9/11? Other than raging at the victim?

Well, here's an honest European's opinion, Matthias Doepfner, the CEO of the Axel-Springer publishing group:

"These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewellery when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbour's house. Appeasement? That is just the start of it. Europe, thy name is Cowardice."

source for these extracts.

Links between Nazism, Marxism and Islam

posters:

1: dutch NAzi poster: " with Germany against Capitalism"

2: The British Nazi Mosley, talking about "peace"... ie surrender to fascist Germany ... mmmm - reminds me of the current "peace" protesters who are against the fight against islamo-fascism.

NAZI party:
National Socialist German Workers' Party

note the use of "Socialist" - also present in Stalin's hellhole USSR, Fidel Castro's failed utopia,
and recently, Saddam Hussein's Bath party - the nazis of the middle east.

Could this explain the sympathy of leftists with Saddam ? ... Socialism, by other means...

I wonder how many greens and left wingers today realise how close their ideas are to that of the Nazis ?....most would be horrified to see that they have many points in common.

The greens in particular have several points in common with Nazism: hatred of the USA, anti-capitalism, a desire to use eugenics to kill of "undesirables", a pagan worshipping of nature, a desire to impose utopian collectivism , by force if necessary; a belief in top-down totalitarian control imposed by a so-called "elite" (ie not democracy).

The last quality is becomming evident in Europe, with the attempt to impose the "EUSSR" (a book exists comparing the EU to the USSR).

The recent moral alliance of islamic terrorists and leftists around the world, against their common enemy, the USA and normal societies everywhere, says a lot about left-wingers these days. There was a time they were humanitarian (Truman, JFK) not anymore. The party of death, I call them.

Although Hitler and the other Nazis waged relentless war on Christianity, required that members of the SS formally renounce their Christian faith, mocked not just the tenets of Christianity but Jesus himself, Hitler and the Nazis had no problem with Islam. Hitler said in 1943 that Nazis could be Moslems and could be Nazis.

Himmler hated Christianity but he liked Islam. He met and liked the Grand Mufti. Hitler met that Moslem leader as well. Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger boasted: “A link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East.” When Hitler came to power, Jajj Amin el-Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem called for jihad to eliminate all the Jews in Palestine. Moslems were recruited and volunteered to serve in the SS Handzar Division. Moslems even helped run the ghastly Jasenovac concentration camp, where over 10,000 Jews and over 40,000 Christians were murdered by the Nazis and their Islamic allies. Persian Shiite Moslems speculated that Hitler might be the Twelfth Prophet of Islam.

(...)

The Nazis viewed Islam with sympathy but viewed Christianity and Judaism with hatred. The Nazi attitude was the totalitarian attitude of other evil empires. Leninist Russia and later Stalinist Russia did not view Islam so much as a religion as a liberating revolutionary political movement. While the Cheka, OGPU and odious descendants (KGB) raided, harassed and closed churches and synagogues, these secret police organs left mosques alone.

read more here.

Technocracy versus "blossoming of many Flowers"

Virginia Postrel has an interesting book - above.
She argues that the old "left" and "right" politcal divisions are becoming divisions between "stasists" and "Dynamists". Ie the greens, anti-free traders etc versus people (like me) who see great benefits from unregulated spontaneous experimentation and creation, with the market (ie the aggregate decisions of the public) deciding which methods, companies and products stay and which are discarded.

Examples of technocracy: The minitel in France - govmt organized. Quickly overtaken by the superior unplanned Internet and WWW.
Also : France's "plan informatique" in the 90s to subsidies local computer manufacturers versus
Toshiba - launching dozens of laptops and keeping on manufacturing the ones that were successful.

French style technocratic planning sucks, big time. Nothing exciting or groundbreaking has ever come from it, that I know of.

Imagine having a technocrat deciding for you which slimming diet was "best", or which laptop design was "best". How pompous, elitist and unrealistic.

That we are stuck with bad public education is not surprising given the massive centralization of that effort.

True to its Progressive Era origins, the pure technocratic vision combines the frisson of futurism—a combination of excitement and fear—with the reassurance that some authority will make everything turn out right. In 1984, amid the personal computer revolution, Newt Gingrich marveled at its creativity, but he worried that such uncoordinated enterprise lacked the focus necessary for national greatness. "These developments are individually striking," he wrote. "Taken together, they form a kaleidoscope that is difficult to develop into a coherent picture. Yet it is by sweeping dreams that societies shape themselves."

For technocrats, a kaleidoscope of trial-and-error innovation is not enough; decentralized experiments lack coherence. "Today, we have an opportunity to shape technology," wrote Gingrich in classic technocratic style (emphasis added). His message was that computer technology is too important to be left to hackers, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and computer buyers. "We" must shape it into a "coherent picture." That is the technocratic notion of progress: Decide on the one best way, make a plan, and stick to it. Looking for a model, Gingrich had kind words for the French Minitel system of terminals run by the state phone company—a centrally administered system whose rigidity has stifled Internet development in France.

In recent years, Gingrich has become more skeptical—and so has the rest of the country. In 1984, he expressed his enthusiasm for space exploration in demands for new heroic technocratic programs like the moon landing. By 1995, he was musing about the great things that could happen "if we got the government out of the business of designing space shuttles and space stations....The challenge for us is to get government and bureaucracy out of the way and put scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers back into the business of exploration and discovery." Far from creating a promising future, technocracy had stifled its spontaneous evolution.

full article:

http://www.dynamist.com/tfaie/index-excerptB.html

"Irak the model" on Nuclear weapons

From "Irak the Model" - a blog by an Iraki dentist - an inside view into Irak from an educated Iraki:

Irakis comment on the idea of an arab country acquiring Nuclear weapons:

"Besides the fact that nuclear programs place a heavy burden on the weak economies of Arab countries, harming the poor day in and day out…I indeed do not feel safe when I know that an Arab regime possesses such weapons because these weapons would be commanded by the desires and impulses of rulers who have been proven incompetent in anything except for repressing and impoverishing their peoples.Mo'ammar Qaddafi has been sitting on the chest of his people for 40 years, so can you imagine figure what it's going to be like when he acquires nuclear bombs? Not to mention our horrible experience with Saddam Hussein who used WMDs against his own people."Lateef Baghdadi. Baghdad/Iraq

"I wish from all my heart that Arabs get to build nuclear weapons because they will use them against one another and against their peoples-what Saddam did is the best example. Consequently this would lead to the extinction of Arabs and by that Arabs would be giving a free service to the civilized western world by ridding the world of themselves and their terror. The world will become safer."Ammar Rahmatallah. Baghdad"

,
My name is Haider Mousawi from Arabic Basra. I absolutely refuse that Arabs acquire nuclear weapons, at least for the time being, for several reasons. First, it's dangerous for them before others, as Arab rulers are not wise and might use them against one another or against themselves (just like the former rulers of my country did to their people and the region's peoples). Second, nuclear weapons could not save super powers like the USSR from collapse. Third, they are very expensive, so it's better to [spend money] fighting poverty and unemployment. Fourth, those weapons are going to be a burden on their producers in the future and fifth, a peaceful program makes more sense."Haider Mousawi. Basra,

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

Czech president on Marxist Greenies

I love nature and National Parks, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that Environmentalism today is "Marxism by other means".

And Marxism sucks death - just ask any Pole, Czech, Cuban, Vietnamese etc who has actually lived under Marxist rule, rather than played with it's ideas in a Chicago coffee-shop.

In his book, the Czech president Vaclav Klaus argues that environmentalism seeks to restrict human activities no matter the cost:

The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism,'' Klaus writes. ``It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.

He has written a book on the subject (click to see Amazon website on the book):

Blue Planet in Green Shackles