Category Archives: Politics

UPDATED: Engorged Organisms & The Porn Aestehtic

Aesthetics, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The genus Rep. Anthony Weiner, an “engorged organism” indigenous to DC, has an exotic-looking, ravishing mate. (Full image posted below.) But men—at least American men—prefer what I’ve termed (in “Sluts Galore”) the porn aestehtic:

Ideas about feminine beauty are bust. The sublime 1350 B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti showcases her fine cheekbones and graceful neck. Her Western contemporary look-a-like, down to the perfectly shaped dainty face, was Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve embodied the French ideal of female beauty, immortalized in the bust of Marianne.
But forget these regal beauties; they, apparently, have nothing on the double-chinned, large, flat expanses that make up Britney Spears’ crude mug. Nefertiti, Hepburn, Deneuve—your patrician pulchritude no longer excites the “porn generation”; the sly, weasel-like looks of a Paris Hilton do.
The culture’s aesthetic preferences are now shaped by the basest of instincts. I call it the porn aesthetic, another example of which is Hue Hefner’s harem of hos. The three kept creatures are currently starring in a reality show called “The Girls Next Door” …

MORE…

UPDATE: The addiction excuse is just that: an excuse and an error. (Read “Evil, Not Ill.”) The liberal establishment—it includes Republicans and Democrats—has accepted that all bad behavior is a disease. From lying to murder: every bit of human nastiness is said to be a biological-based disorder. The premise for this conceit is the Rousseauist notion that humans are all equally good and would remain pristine if not for external agents, namely biological or societal forces. The problem is, as I have shown in my writing, and Dr. Thomas Szasz has done over the course of half a century: there is no basis for this claim—not in biology, much less in morality.

I quote from “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.

UPDATE II: Right Response to Legalized Sexual Assault (Revenge Searches)

Constitution, Fascism, Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, Politics

HOWL is what this woman does with all the indignation and outrage she can muster, after her breasts were “touched” by the TSA. The woman’s heroic son films the event. All the while he is threatened by the Kapos—Kameradschaftspolizei, “comrade police force”—of Sky Harbor International in Phoenix and ignored by the sheeple shuffling by. I would be very afraid at Sky Harbor. It’s where “The Homeland Security State” came together in all its brutality to extinguish the life of the fragile Carol Anne Gotbaum. And look how brazen they are.

‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’ advised travelers “to name and shame the perpetrators. fliers who’re frisked should document the name of the particular TSA perp who pawed them, and expose him on the Internet. Footage of the victims is everywhere, but the agents—the stars in these horror films—remain nameless and faceless. Name, shame, and dissociate from them.”

NEXT, and before anything else—the debt-ceiling pseudo-debate can wait—our overlords who art in DC must stop this. The Tea-Party “freshmen” are getting stale. They’ve done nothing to make the TSA cease and desist. They must forthwith.

UPDATE I (June 6): Via Shelly Roche: “Congress strikes down body scanners”: “Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman Robert Aderholt’s (R-AL) proposed legislation, the Fiscal Year 2012 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, denies the $76 million that US President Barack Obama requested to be used toward the scanners. As per Obama’s request, the funds would provide for nearly 300 additional body scanners being deployed across US airports, as well as the employment of a staff of over 500 needed to operate them. …”

The Politburo and its piecemeal tokenism. A “nuisance and slow”: That’s the stale, utilitarian reason one Tea party freshman uses to motivate against the state’s new meat irradiation program.

Via Shelly Roche: MORE.

UPDATE II (June 7): REVENGE SEARCHES. I made the point that in certain places along the traveler’s US route, he encounters racial revenge. I certainly did. I analyzed it in “Congress: Call Off Your TSA Attack Dogs!”:

America’s airports are ugly, militarized places. As I write, malicious assaults on person and property are underway there, carried out by the detritus of humanity, and with federal imprimatur. The TSA workforce manning crucial sections of the air terminals reflects the federal government’s legislated preference for angry minorities. Each one of these workers seems singularly intent on exacting revenge upon his or her perceived oppressors. The alternative media (Anderson Cooper and his ilk are excluded) must insist that these perpetrators be tagged, collared, and impounded.

Picture Los Angeles, and hundreds of British seniors, who still have some British character left—that typical linguistic acerbic bite included—being molested for hours-on-end in the heat.

[W]hen a handful of the [tourists] questioned whether the lengthy security checks at the port were strictly necessary for a group of largely elderly travellers officials were not amused.
Although they had already been given advance clearance for multiple entries to the country during their trip, all 2,000 passengers were made to go through full security checks in a process which took seven hours to complete.

As tourists and American travelers are assaulted, this country’s Idiocracy continues to entertain Palin’s roving circus, as well as busy itself with the measly contents of Weasel Weiner’s trousers.

Debunking The Debt-Default Hoax

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Politics, Reason

David Henderson of EconLog, for the Library of Economics and Liberty, debunks the nonsensical (and irrational) notion that not raising the debt-ceiling will result in the US defaulting on its debt. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner might be as gormless as his boss, since he has confused “debt obligations” with “other expenditures.”

As U.S. Senator Pat Toomey explained, in a January 19 Wall Street Journal op/ed, “the amount of money required to continue to make payments on all the U.S. government debt is a small fraction of the amount of revenue the U.S. government raises.”

Henderson again: “On car payments and student loan and credit card payments, Geithner is right. But on insurance premiums and utility payments, he’s wrong. Those are not typically debt obligations. Geithner is effectively saying that if the government wants to spend x and has only enough money to spend 0.67x, then not spending on the other 0.33x is a failure to keep an obligation. In a political sense, that might be: the government has made a lot of spending promises to a lot of people. But in an economic sense, it’s not. On the narrow issue of whether failure to raise the debt limit would necessarily mean U.S. government default on its debt, Toomey is right and Geithner is wrong.”

UPDATED: Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions

Democrats, Education, Government, Labor, Political Economy, Politics, Private Property

The following is excerpted from “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” my new WND.COM column:

“For evidence of the power of the teachers unions acting out on the streets of Madison, Wis., look no further than your property taxes. Almost 50 percent of mine are garnished for ‘Local School Support.’ ‘Port, Fire, Hospital, Library’ constitute a miniscule 5 percent of the property-tax bill. Law enforcement is not even itemized. Other states confiscate even higher percentages from their propertied taxpayers in the service of government-employed teachers.

Yes, do use the term ‘government unions,’ won’t you, as ‘public sector’ or ‘public servants’ implies, incorrectly, that these people serve the public. Besides, have you seen these slackers? In his path-breaking book, ‘The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,’ Peter Brimelow left us with a lasting mental image of our children’s over-sated role models, attending one of the National Education Association’s annual meetings. The same apparition is everywhere apparent in Madison, as teachers ‘wobble and waddle through the teeming crowds of [supporters] … thighs like tree trunks, bellies billowing, jowls jiggling.’

Over and above the property tax – the federal income tax claims from those who pay it more monies for the educational oink sector. Whether the taxpayer has children in the system or doesn’t, whether he chooses to homeschool his offspring or pays for a private school, whether he approves of the job government pedagogues are doing or doesn’t – he has to pay them, even go into hock for them.

To compound it all, America has a most progressive tax code. According to USA Today, the number of Americans who owe no federal income taxes, and do not share in the cost of government, stood at 47 percent in 2009, and is increasing. What has come to pass John C. Calhoun predicted in ‘A Disquisition on Government,’ where he described the devolution of a democracy in which all private property is, eventually, subjected to the vagaries of majority rule. …”

The complete column, “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” is now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (Feb. 26): Tom DiLorenzo points out the power of the monopoly that is the government union:

The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their “demands,” it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction. They are the beneficiaries of a particular form of taxation without representation (not that taxation with representation is much better). This is why some states have laws prohibiting strikes by government-employee unions. (The unions often strike anyway.)
Politicians are caught in a political bind by government-employee unions: if they cave in to their wage demands and raise taxes to finance them, then they increase the chances of being kicked out of office themselves in the next election. The “solution” to this dilemma has been to offer government-employee unions moderate wage increases but spectacular pension promises. This allows politicians to pander to the unions but defer the costs to the future, long after the panderers are retired from politics.
As taxpayers in California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and many other states are realizing, the future has arrived. The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local governments in the United States currently have $3.5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. They must either raise taxes dramatically to fund these liabilities, as some have already done, or drastically cut back or eliminate government-employee pensions.