O Promises Usual Marxist Maneuvers

Barack Obama, Economy, Taxation

“I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.”

That was magician Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union Address. Tomorrow is his sixth State of the Union address. Like those that came before, it’ll be written at an eighth-grade level, “as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test,” and showcase the man’s utter economic illiteracy.

This year, like yesteryear, Zero is treating us to a Marxist maneuver: promising to move money around, from those who make it to those who take it.

” … during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, [Obama] will call for raising the capital gains rate on top income earners and eliminating a tax break on inheritances. The revenue generated by those changes would fund new tax credits and other cost-saving measures for middle-class taxpayers, officials said.” (Business Insider)

I’m copying from a 2010 column mocking this moron for his obfuscations with respect to tax cuts vs. tax credits.

Obama’s “tax credits” are not tax cuts. Ask Wikipedia, the left-leaning online encyclopedia, according to which tax credits are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”
A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Then there is the “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility,” which is how John Derbyshire described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (MORE: “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

Academic Disintegration From Homer To Homo

Affirmative Action, Education

By Myron Robert Pauli

President Obama has proposed making college education free for everybody. It used to be considered that college education was for people with IQ in excess of 110 – e.g. 20% of the population; however, the solution to that problem is, of course, to dumb down college. Apparently, college reading levels are now at the 7th grade level [1]. It is interesting to see what was required for completion of 8th grade in “lowly” Kentucky with the modern curriculum [2]. I would hardly be surprised if Masters Students were reading “Run Spot Run” in 2015.

There are still a few isolated spots of higher education left. I have admiration for serious students of “fine arts” who wish to be next Vladimir Horowitz or Enrico Caruso. Aside from the Church of Global Warming, political correctness has often left the hard sciences and engineering alone. Here is a sample of the 61 graduate students studying Materials Science at Columbia University [3]: Cao, Chang, Chen, Chen, Chen, Chuang, Duan, Gao, …, Li, Li, Li, Liang, Liao, Lin, Lin, 3 Lius! , Lu, Lu, Luan, … ,7 Wangs!, Wong, Xu, Xu, Yang, Yang, Ye, Yue, Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Zhen, Zhen, Zheng, Zhong, Zhou. Those damn Xu’s are running things! Affirmative action means that for every 2 students from Shanghai, one is chosen from Beijing!

Arguably, many of our enlightenment-era leaders such as Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton received a thorough “liberal arts” education which included history, philosophy, the sciences, geography, logic, and literature classics such as Homer and Shakespeare. But a few blocks away from the Chens and Wangs working on understanding nature and producing products, Columbia is also teaching English [4]. Check out the link to find that in our “top 10 University”, the kids/parents/taxpayers shelling out over $200,000 are paying for courses in LGBT Lit (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), “Clarissa”, “Frankenstein”, “Postmodern Poetries”, and “Medieval Women Adventurers” (and G-d knows what junk is even in the normal-sounding offerings?).

Remember that the English Department is a “classical” department. How about Ivy League University of Pennsylvania’s course offerings in the “Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies [5]? I guess you can first earn a Bachelors in Bitchery and rise higher with a Masters in Male-Hating and a Doctorate of Dyking.

Here is what passes for advanced Social Sciences “Research” at elite Cornell University: “Network Evolution and the Beauty Advantage”, “Innovation Through Imitation”, and “Failing to See or Failing to Seize Opportunities to Build Social Capital? The Role of Neuroticism” [6]. I’m NOT making phony Ivy League websites!!!! No sense picking on the “second rate” schools who merely follow in the footsteps of the elite.

Recently, there was an academic “scandal” involving the football and basketball players at the (30th ranked nationally) University of North Carolina [7]. The “scandal” is that talented players like Julius Peppers did not actually “attend the classes” of moronic phony parasitical blowhards like faux-Injun Ward Churchill [8]. In other words, guys like Michael Jordan did not sit and watch Lone Ranger and Tonto re-runs. Can anyone seriously tell me that ATTENDING seminars in “White People Really Really Suck” is a productive use of anyone’s time? Failing to attend is a “scandal”?!!

Sure, send EVERYONE to college [9]! Why not??! Here is a one minute advanced look at an elite American university education in the 22nd Century. When I was 11, I read “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boule mistaking it for fiction instead of prophesy. And I am talking about white Americans also – they are merely following in the politically correct footsteps as their minority brothers and sisters.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19867-education-expert-says-college-freshmen-read-at-7th-grade-level
[2] http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
[3] http://matsci.columbia.edu/materials-science-engineering-graduate-students_6653
[4] http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/Spring%202015%20Course%20Distribution%20Vrs%202.4.pdf
[5] http://www.sas.upenn.edu/gsws/pc/term/2015A/GSWS
[6] http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/acc/2012/12/20/north-carolina-basketball-football-julius-peppers/1782113/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Goes_to_College

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATE II: The ‘Selma’ Or ‘Sniper’ No-Brainer

Affirmative Action, Film, History, Hollywood, Just War, Military, Race

“Sniper” Or “Selma”? Which flick would you rather see? I will pass on both. However, if forced to choose between a 2-hour long, historically inaccurate guilt trip, laid on thick by the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever), and an action movie about an all-American “son, husband, father, and, most of all, decorated military man”; I can see why “American Sniper” is a box office sensation, while “Selma” circles the drain. “Sniper” grossed $105.3 Million on the week-end of its release; “Selma” $11.5 million.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the subject of the “Clint Eastwood’s biopic,” in my opinion, squandered his talents as an assassin for Uncle Sam. Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling, is that he “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”

As I wrote at the time the SEAL passed away, “live by the sword, die by the sword. Or in hippie speak: Kyle had bad karma.”

I’m quite comfortable stating that poor Kyle was not in the business of defending American liberties, as the mouths on neoconservative media insist. That the war over in Iraq saved lives stateside is a dubious proposition at best. To the contrary, there is more proof of the opposite; that picking off women and children and other invaded species, “when he [thought it] necessary,” increased the danger to Americans stateside from the victims’ community. (Unfriend and unfollow me all you like; that doesn’t change this immutable truth.)

Still, if “American Sniper” is an apolitical rendition, a human story about a controversial, conflicted assassin for the state—much like “The Hurt Locker” was—I can see the appeal.

UPDATE I: A day after I wrote “Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword” (02.03.13), Ron Paul tweeted out the same (02.4.13). He was denounced, of course.

UPDATE II: Writes pat Buchanan, in “Selma, 50 years on”: … “The era of marching for civil rights was over, and the era of Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and The Black Panthers eclipsing King, had begun.”

UPDATED: Cameron On Criminal Culpability (Vs. Obama)

Britain, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised: This is how progressives have been depicting the Muslim murderers in their midst. Progressives, after all, come from the school of “thought” whereby crime is caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

According to this pervasive, widely accepted, therapeutic worldview—rapidly colonizing conservative thought, too—the poor barbarians of France’s burbs were driven to do their diabolic deeds.

Feelings are what count in the progressive perspective, for progressivism does not follow logic or a systematic thought process, as Jim Ostrowski points out in his book on the topic.

Likewise do libertarians, for their part, reduce immoral conduct to the fault of the state. Thus the state is said to have driven the barbarians of the burbs into a death cult that counsels killing.

Under the heading “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION, the column “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” exposes this libertarian logical contradiction—for if one holds that human beings have free will, thinking of human beings as determined entirely by forces beyond their control doesn’t fit.

From “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION:

For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state. In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s “the-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual- and aggregate group dysfunction.

In other words, Muslims have the capacity and freedom of conscience and will to decide how to respond to events that enrage and are indeed unjust: US foreign policy.

That’s my own political philosophy.

It’s therefore encouraging to see that British Prime Minister David Cameron does not give credit to the-state-made-me-do-it argumentation about the Islam-inspired killing of innocent Europeans. Flanking progressive Barack Obama—who does saddle society with blame for the erupting burbs of France, and contra Ray McGovern—Camerson said:

You can have, tragically, people who have had all the advantages of integration, who’ve had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer, who still get seduced by this poisonous, radical, death cult of a narrative.”

UPDATE: “Obama: Europe needs to better integrate Muslim communities…”

Obama the progressive feels (for he does not think) that Islam-inspired crime is the fault of the French. They did not dish out sufficient freebies and fraternité.

“Our biggest advantage … is that our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans and there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition,” he said.

“There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case… it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.”

MORE moron.