Category Archives: Celebrity

Dreaming Of The Dreams Of Our Founding Fathers

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, Race

Who thronged to hear black America’s president speak today, at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall? See for yourself. A sea of people from which the majority is almost entirely absent. At least as evinced from this picture:

As to MLK, he has a day; our founding father don’t. Even MLK’s speeches have their own dedicated commemorative days in the nation’s calender.

I’ve heard just about enough about MLK. And at least one lady would have agreed with me wholeheartedly: “the nation’s most engaging first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.”

On the day “marking the exact time that Martin Luther King spoke on 28 August 1963,” I too “have a dream.” It is that the dreams of our Founding Fathers be restored—and certainly not stigmatized and criminalized, as they have been by the traitors and haters that festoon our governments (Dem and Republican).

So I’ll excuse myself from the charade to dream of the dreams of America’s Founding Fathers.

UPDATE II: Oprah’s An Idiot (Hatred Imbibed With Mother’s Milk)

Celebrity, Crime, Law, Media, Race, Racism, Reason

Oprah Winfrey, who has been silent about the shooting of Sherry West’s 13-month old baby—and all of the other most common hate crimes (for, “In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white”)—was vocal in comparing the slaying, in self-defense, of Treyvon Martin (black) by George Zimmerman (Hispanic) to the grisly murder of Emmett Till by whites in Mississippi, over half a century ago (1955).

Let Professor Jonathan Turley, a liberal civil libertarian, tutor Oprah in the facts of the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman.

• While many have criticized Zimmerman for following Martin, citizens are allowed to follow people in their neighborhood.
• It was also lawful for Zimmerman to be armed.
• The question comes down to who started the fight and whether Zimmerman was acting in self-defense.
• Various witnesses said Martin was on top of Zimmerman and said they believed that he was the man calling for help. Zimmerman had injuries. Not serious injuries but injuries from the struggle. …
• A juror could not simply assume Zimmerman was the aggressor. After 38 prosecution witnesses, there was nothing more than a call for the jury to assume the worst facts against Zimmerman without any objective piece of evidence. That is the opposite of the standard of a presumption of innocence in a criminal trial.

Above all, Travyon Martin was not tortured. Rather, as overwhelming evidence showed, Martin might have been planning on doing the torturing himself.

A MUST READ: “Oprah and Five Racial Double Standards” By Jack Kerwick.

UPDATE I: FACEBOOK THREAD: Oprah didn’t trivialize the death of ET; she was wrong on the facts and the logic, ergo an idiot. People just love feeling good about themselves by weeping forever over crimes that happened decades ago and have no relevance today, other than to keep alive the racial “grievance industry.”

UPDATE II (8/27): Hatred Imbibed With Mother’s Milk. (Via Robert Glisson on Facebook.)

Question: What mother trusts her baby to this lot? One raised by your typical, white, liberal-minded American, who believes that because she harbors no racial animus; others feel the same. Fine. Be stupid. But why toy with your tot?

John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2)

Britain, Capitalism, Celebrity, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, History, Inflation

The following is an excerpt from “John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2),” the conclusion of my conversation with Benn Steil. (Read part 1. ) Dr. Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is “The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.”

ILANA MERCER: After reading a negative review of your book in The Times Literary Supplement, I decided to go cold turkey on what had been a guilty pleasure for over a decade. I did not renew my TLS subscription. The TLS had stupidly assigned the review to one Eric Rauchway, a left-coast history teacher. Rauchway would not let an argument favorable to the gold standard—yours—stand. Your case against the Bretton Woods system of “managed currencies” he turned on its head. Rauchway credited Harry Dexter White, one of Bretton Woods’ architects, with helping to lift the “cross of gold” from the shoulders of the world’s working classes. Since White was also a Soviet spy, Rauchway quickly concluded that the Soviets saved capitalism (an “unknown ideal” for a very long time). Sound money is suspect, but a Soviet spy is capitalism’s savior. How do you unpack that!?

BENN STEIL: You can’t get blood from a stone, and you can’t get logic from Rauchway’s review, just gobs of nonsense and libel (as I documented on on my blog ). The review’s title, “How the Soviets saved capitalism,” is so inane that the only explanation for it is that Rauchway, or his TLS editors, fell in love with the sheer childish cheekiness of it. It certainly bears no relation to Rauchway’s account of Bretton Woods, nor that of anyone who can actually claim to know anything about it.
Rauchway would no doubt mock the economist who wrote the following of the 19th century classical gold standard: “[t]he various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages.”

Unless, that is, Rauchway knew who it was – none other than J. M. Keynes.

MERCER: We can both agree that John Maynard Keynes’ opposition to WWI and his “bitterness over the terms of the peace” were admirable. Priceless too was John Maynard Keynes description of President Woodrow Wilson as “slowminded and bewildered”; a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” (pages 70-71) On the other hand, also quite admirable was the following unflattering description of Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” It comes courtesy not of Keynes, but of our author: “It is only slightly outlandish to liken the book to the Bible: powerful in its message, full of memorable, mellifluous passages; at times obscure, tedious, tendentious, and contradictory; a work of passion driven by intuition, with tenuous logic and observation offered as placeholders until disciples could be summoned to supply the proofs.” (page 88) Have Keynes’ disciples really delivered? It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory.

STEIL: Yes, if the economy sinks, then Paul Krugman was right about the need for massive stimulus; if it recovers in the face of plunging deficits, from spending cuts and tax increases, then Krugman was right that deficits were not a problem. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

MERCER: Keynes assessed Karl Marx’s “economic value” as “nil… apart from occasional flashes of insight.” (page 87) I would venture that in the United States, Marxism has been far less destructive to free-market capitalism than Keynesianism. Marxists honestly wish for capitalism’s demise and say as much. We can fight such an enemy. Conversely, Keynesians have redefined capitalism and banished our definition therefrom. The Keynesians then proceeded to cripple capitalism so as to ostensibly save it. Positively Orwellian.

STEIL:

The conclusion of the Steil-Mercer conversation about Keynes is now on WND. Read “John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2).”

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‘Rock Star Preaches Capitalism,’ Or, Rather, Emerges From Retardation

Capitalism, Celebrity, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Intelligence

Bono, a chap who fronts a three-chord band of unimpressive droners, has emerged from retardation to preach capitalism.

Said BONO (via EPJ): “Commerce—entrepreneurial capitalism—takes more people out of poverty than aid, of course.”

Free-market capitalism, baby.

This was not always the case. Read “BONO AND HIS BAND OF BANDITS” and “FOREIGN AIDS,” which tells how Bono joined professional confiscators and colossi of ignorance like the Clintons to “claim that human misfortune is a result of external contingencies that can be fixed by social planners like themselves. They hammered home the wicked lie that the wealthy—individuals and nations—thrive at the expense of the poor and essentially deserve to be relieved of their possessions.”

In the not-so-distant past Bono used to point “an accusing—and untalented—finger at the West [for AIDS in Africa]. At the same time, the self-righteous activist used to reserve only praise for Africans for being a ‘rare and spirited people,’ concealing that if the spirit didn’t move them in some pretty wild ways, rates of infection in Southern Africa would not have reached 20 to 33.7 percent of the adult population.”

Now that Bono has emerged from a coma, he should brief that bimbo Charlize Theron, who just the other day complained about her adopted country’s abysmal contribution to foreign aid coffers. In fact, America’s generosity in response to “disasters all over the world makes USAID and other ‘compassionate’ state pickpockets as unnecessary as they are unethical.”

MORE.

U2’s Bono Speaks at GU Global Social Enterprise Event from Values & Capitalism on Vimeo.