Category Archives: Propaganda

The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy

Debt, Economy, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Taxation

Here’s an excerpt from “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy,” the current WND column. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down the page to sign-up for it.

“Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. ‘Alleged lunacy’ because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and ‘horrifying’ collective tumble down the thing called the ‘fiscal cliff.’

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, Dec. 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in D.C., who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, ‘deep, automatic cuts,’ by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

‘The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,’ estimates financier Peter Schiff. I’m inclined to think of this ‘budget sequestration’ Wikipedia describes as ‘broad and shallow’ as nothing more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing?” …

Read “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy” on WND. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down to sign-up for it.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

Private Property Day

History, Private Property, Propaganda

As convention has it, Thanksgiving is the day Americans give thanks that Native Americans taught them to plant corn.

The Native Americans felt compassion and sympathy for the Pilgrims, sharing their technology. With numerous settlers having died in the winter of 1620, none of the Pilgrims would have likely survived without the Wampanoag teaching them local customs of planting, gathering and preserving foods.

This is nothing but palliative history, a bit of myth-making.

The real story Behind Thanksgiving is the “celebration of the triumph of private property and individual initiative.” Writes Paul Schmidt at Freedomkeys.com:

William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony, founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” precept.
The results were disastrous. Communism didn’t work any better 400 years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious losses. Starvation was imminent.
Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early and farm as individuals, not collectively.
The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving — on August 9th.
Unfortunately, William Bradford’s diaries — in which he recorded the failure of the collectivist system and the triumph of private enterprise — were lost for many years. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the present November date was chosen. And the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was, alas, not made a part of the holiday.
Happily, Bradford’s diaries were later rediscovered. They’re available today in paperback. They tell the real story of Thanksgiving — how private property and individual initiative saved the Pilgrims.
This Thanksgiving season, one of the many things I’m thankful for is our free market system (imperfectly realized as it is). And I’m also grateful that there are increasing numbers of Americans who are learning the importance of free markets, and who are working to replace government coercion with marketplace cooperation here in America and around the world.

Juxtapose the truth with the official historical version of the Thanksgiving celebration.

It might pique your curiosity to know that Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Diablo himself, in 1863. Read more about “The Most Cynical and Hypocritical Speech Ever Delivered” on that holiday.

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

CNN Halloween Ghoul Gloria Borger: Can She Be Humanized?!

Ethics, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Objectivism, Propaganda, Reason

In anticipation of Mitt Romney’s last major speech delivered on Friday, in Iowa, the voter was expected to endure the analysis of one of the most banal brains on TV (and that takes an effort, given the competition):

Gloria Borger.

This bitch (and yes, I’ve not been mincing words lately) has not stopped maligning Romney’s character. As I’ve said repeatedly, Romney’s political philosophy is situated on a continuum of statism, and, as such, is of a piece with Obama’s.

But in his personal life, Mitt’s a lovely man. That is unless the stupid hos who monopolize discourse in the USA no loner like the silent, tall, capable, hard-working, over-achiever.

Romney’s funny too.

Yet Borger, a member of the Bitches for Obama Brigade at CNN, has not shut up about the need to “humanize” Mr. Romney, the premise of which it that the man is inhuman.

Romney’s public persona is a fictitious construct invented by the characters on the liberal cable news stations, with some acquiescence from Republican women. All agree about his stiffness.

Stiff? Sure, Romney is as rigid as the “Mad Man” Don Draper of the eponymous HBO period drama. The good type of rigid.

So here’s what Borger disgorged about the role, in particular, of Ann Romney in rehabilitating her rogue husband:

BALDWIN: “I want to bring back Gloria Borger, because here we are, strategy wise, 11 days left. We’re counting every day. The Romney camp, you know, seems to be featuring more of Mitt Romney, you know, Mitt Romney the man. And you’ve spent quite a bit of time with the woman who’s been instrumental in that, Ann Romney.”

BORGER: “Right.”

BALDWIN: “Tell me more about that.”

BORGER: “Well, Ann Romney has kind of become their secret weapon here. You know that Mitt Romney has a large problem with women voters. Ann Romney is out there now trying to appeal to women.
She’s also sort of been Mitt Romney’s character witness. Because his big problem has been that average voters say he doesn’t care about my problems. He doesn’t understand my problems. He’s too rich. He’s too out of touch. He doesn’t get it.
So Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him, open Mitt Romney up and kind of say to people, you know, actually he does care about you. She pushed for more of that. You heard a little bit more of that at the convention. You heard some of that in the debates.
So now his message is two-pronged. Yes, I can talk about the economy, but, yes, I also understand your problems. And we’ll see if more and more people believe that he does, because he runs substantially behind the president when it comes to economic empathy, if you will. And she’s part of that plan to get people to think that he does get it.”