The existence of businessman/comedian Ed Brayton has only twice come to my attention. Last year I referred to him as "some fat guy from Michigan" and, despite that being an accurate description, it apparently caused some heartburn in our Ed. I note however that he has recently referred to some university student conservatives as "larvae" -- implying that they are loathsome insects. So it looks like I was too objective in my earlier description. I should, perhaps, have called him a "fat grub". Have a look at his picture and see if you think that fits. For a man in his early 40s he is looking very lush -- and that is probably an old photo.
I don't however have any strong objections to his recent attack on my writings. He presents a set of fairly reasonable excerpts from my various notes about the similarities between Obama and the Fascists of the 1930s. I am glad that he has exposed my contentions to his Leftist audience. Some intelligent Clintonista (if there is one) might note them and use them! I am pretty sure no Clintonistas read this blog!
Brayton thinks it is self-evident that my comparison is absurd -- and he would not be alone in that: Fascists are nasty and evil and Obama is nice. Sadly, the Leftist control of the education system has almost completely blanked out how Hitler was seen in his time. I guess it is hard for a survivor of a modern education to accept but Hitler too was seen as "nice" in his day -- as a caring father figure for all Germans in fact. He was even seen as devoted to peace! I include some documentation of that in my monograph on Hitler.
And Obama and the Fascists have lots of policy in common too -- government control of just about everything, in fact. And I pointed out recently on my Obama blog that Obama is not at all averse to military adventures abroad.
And the public adulation Obama receives is eerily reminiscent of how Hitler was received by vast numbers of Germans. But you have to know history to realize that. Brayton should stick to comedy. He probably knows something about that.
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An interesting excerpt about McCain
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn't. Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots-professional warriors and volunteers that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes.
In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.
In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness.
Henry Kissinger, we should remember, was himself a soldier in the American army. He was an intelligence officer (quel surprise) and served in the Battle of the Bulge, staying behind at some personal risk after his unit bugged out to interrogate captured German soldiers. Point is, he probably understood what John McCain the prisoner would want without having to be told.
John McCain's military service and "sacrifice" does not, ipso facto, qualify him to be president. It does, however, tell us a great deal about the things he values most when he has to make decisions under extremely adverse conditions, and that is certainly useful for voters to know.
More here
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ELSEWHERE
There is an appalling story here about how the British authorities have barred a conservative Israeli from visiting Britain -- while at the same time allowing into Britain a well-known Muslim preacher of hate and Jihad.
Both Fausta and Atlas have derisive posts about the poisonous "Elders" (including Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter) who are going to the Middle East to bring about peace (Translation: Blame Israel for everything).
The next Scots-Irish president : "What do Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Barack Obama have in common, besides wanting to be the next commander in chief? They are all of Scots-Irish descent, an ethnic and cultural lineage that has produced more presidents and military leaders than any other. "Fascinating, but not surprising," says U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. The former naval secretary and decorated Marine should know: He catalogued the migration and cultural influence of the Scots-Irish in America in his book Born Fighting. So, who are these mystery leaders and influential voters? Dr. Joyce Alexander, secretary of the national Scotch-Irish Society in Philadelphia, traces their roots to a mass migration from northern Ireland in the 1700s. The "Ulster Scots," who had been tossed to Ireland two centuries earlier, grew tired of fighting England's battle against Irish Catholics, so they left. A group of their clans settled in New Hampshire, then spread to Maine and Vermont. "Eventually, most of them settled south of New England," Alexander explains"
I had to laugh at this: "The seven deadly sins have grown to at least 14 after the Vatican updated its 1400-year-old list of the worst moral failures to reflect the modern world. The new deadly sins that may lead to eternal damnation are polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice, The Times newspaper has reported. Quoting from Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, The Times reported that certain actions were so unholy that they needed to be deemed as "mortal sins" - not the less serious "venial sins". The man in charge of examining confessions and indulgences for the Vatican, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, told the Vatican newspaper that priests should be aware of the "new" sins".
Amazing! British bureaucrats fall on their swords: "Most of the officials at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) who were directly responsible for the flawed supervision of Northern Rock have quit, The Times has learnt. Of the seven FSA supervisors working closely on the bank before its implosion last August, five have left, the FSA has admitted, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from this newspaper. The FSA, the body responsible for ensuring that UK banks have strong-enough balance sheets and sufficient liquidity, has come under fire for failing to spot the fatal flaw in Northern Rock's business model. The FSA is expected to admit to shortcomings in its supervision of the Rock in a report this month. Hector Sants, the chief executive, has already admitted to MPs that the FSA's performance was unacceptable and that there were failings. Northern Rock's extreme dependence on the wholesale money markets, rather than on depositors, for its funding proved a catastrophic weakness when the credit crunch hit last summer, leading to the first run on a British bank for more than a century."
For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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1 comment:
[Wow, I was ignored/moderated, or maybe, in good faith just not added to the comment queue yet, but that's bullsh*t since 29 hours is 29 hours, but I defended you in the complex sense, but tonight, a midnight later, my simple comment is NOT there among about a dozen comments. Weird jerk indeed, that fat man who doesn't read nutrition books, or eat bacon or wallaby marrow. Even though you *indirectly* called him a slug, which was not civil since you got mad and used soily words indeed, which in my opinion temporarily reduced your influence on swing voters. But just like the Art World, your comment was ignored, as was mine. That's a posture/status play on their part, like a Monty Python skit about sexuality. But Google will fix that (my girl works for Google, and they are NEUTRAL except for link algorithims), so if links to those who think dominate, then they will show up first.
So I will publish my comment here. I didn't want to play the role of middle-grounder, but my hippie history (Whole Earth Catalog / Timothy Leary / William Burroughs/ Etc.) and my sense of not giving a crap about being "hated on" makes me at least want to be RECORDED, instead of discarded via cheap moderation, in what took me two hours to write, due to research diligence.
I still can't believe that my most erudite and balanced comment was moderated away on that carbohydrate-addicted fat guy's blog. I severely criticized you, not thinking you'd see it, so I was free to brainstorm.
Yet it really does start to feel righteous to call MORBIDLY OBESE people STUPID since the scientific information about how to eat well is only a secret to factual bigots, meaning those who do not see the world clearly enough to even figure out what to eat, such as lamb, as your recipe blog details.]
COMMENT NOT PUBLISHED:
Obama says we must cut CO2 emissions by 90% within two decades, about the time he's retiring from politics, yet offers no other energy sources than coil and oil, or what we do today, which is purchase 30% of our energy from abroad. Yet the earth is not warming. It was from 1840 to 1985, in linear fashion, utterly correlated with the sun's magnetic cycles, utterly uncorrelated with the 1940 on boom in CO2 output. Since 1985 it has been cooling. In fact, and here it gets confusing, most rural temperature stations, such as all those in Australia, have been cooling for since records began on average of a century ago.
Is not someone who subscribes to the "Sky is Falling" issue alone a rather dangerous guy to elect? One who wants to stop industry, like California now does with its rolling blackouts? I indeed prefer Obama to Clinton, just to get that era over with, and to elect a half-black guy, so to remove the LEFT'S "race card" for good. But this global warming thing is a classic attempt to establish a non-democratic world government by establishing converts to a doomsday cult religion.
Here is the temperature of the South Pole for over half a century:
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/amundsen.gif
Here is the correlation between CO2 and temperature, as in non-correlation vs. that of sun activity:
http://s68.photobucket.com/albums/i14/SnickSnack/GlobalWarming/?action=view¤t=SolarActivity.jpg
John Ray, being in Australia, only gets his news of the USA from the media and anti-media blogs, and indeed I agree that we in the USA can handle any "liberal fascist" tendencies Obama brings to office. But the book "Liberal Fascism" as well as the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" both have very good points, and they are not just "talking points" but historical facts about how tyranny has a way of sneaking up on societies through DEMOCRATIC means (pun intended).
The smugness of the comments here are worrying. It means your group of individuals are not very sophisticated in your view of history or of current politics, including the simple fact that many psychotic or sociopathic people seek power for the sake of power. This can be great for corporate CEOs, since they make fully logical decisions, caring not one wit about how it hurts people, yet this helps the company itself. But this is bad for politics, since government that cares about itself instead of its society is damaging to that society.
That people like John Ray are investigating this HISTORICALLY COMMON problem, and is a bit overly paranoid about it means he is doing a bit of good, not just being some jerk to be demonized or ridiculed. But if you mock him instead of confront his comments using honest and upfront debating points, you will be treated like children, or smugly privileged and thus hypocritical cocktail party liberals with limousines idling outside.
You might also want to realize that in *this* election, a LOT of Republicans are suddenly sway voters (!) due to their disdain of the very liberal McCain, and are likely to cast protest votes, and it wont be for Hillary. If Democratic activists thumb their noses at Republicans, then that protest vote will be of less force. For the record, I am a Libertarian, and I prefer Obama since he has politically stated that marijuana should be decriminalized, that being the beginning of the end of the Drug War that has put 1 in 100 of our population behind bars.
Since "Liberal Fascism" is the number one selling book in the nation, is it any surprise that the nation is poking around, looking for analogy, for clues as to whether given candidates have anti-democracy and anti-capitalistic tendencies? If you must know, since I do frequent "right wing" blogs, that there is more worry about McCain in this sense than there is about Obama. Why? Because McCain's known "liberal" hatred of productive multi-millionaires could result in actual laws being passed to cut them down a notch or two, whereas Obama would have to fight Republican opposition to, say, punitive tax levels that the Laffer Curve indicates would hurt the economy, especially the poorest members of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
"He joined various Nazi groups in Australia (in addition to having joined various Communist groups) for what he says are research purposes. In the article he wrote about this he spends the whole time saying that Nazis are right-wing and what not and that he didn't find it hard to fit in because of his conservatism. This is kind of odds with his praise for J. Goldberg arguing that liberals are fascists."
Does not PUBLISHING ACADEMIC PAPERS ABOUT THESE GROUPS *validate* his claim of doing this for RESEARCH purposes?! Amongst his over 200 academic publications (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20060526-0000/jonjayray.tripod.com/allrefs.html) we find at least one about this exact issue, namely antisemitic neo-Nazi groups in Australia:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20060526-0000/jonjayray.tripod.com/antisem.html
"THIS is a study of some present-day Australian Nazis. The data I have derived by the increasingly respectable method (among scientific sociologists) of participant observation [1]. Over the last seven years I have joined Nazi organizations and "collected" people of Nazi sympathies. As a young WASP of basically conservative political views, I found this relatively easy to do -- provided I paid my tax of an occasional antisemitic utterance."
Having read the somewhat boring 10 page article, I find at the end that although he did indeed (35 years ago) refer to neo-Nazis as "Right Wing" that he properly qualifies this term at the end by saying:
"What I have said above in using the terminology of "the extreme Right" must not be taken as implying that I believe the Nazi simply to be a conservative who is more extreme in his views. Shils [16] long ago pointed out that there are some things that Nazis and Communists have in common that in turn distinguish them from Liberals and Conservatives taken together. At its simplest Nazi and Communist are both totalitarian ideologies and Liberal and Conservative are both democratic ideologies."
And remember, modern "liberalism" has now been severely criticized for having abandoned Classic Liberalism (which was essentially Libertarian) and taken on many aspects of Big Government nanny statism. It also looks to me that his views have changed a bit in 35 years as it often does in those who have dedicated their lives to the study of political psychology.
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