UPDATED: Football Frenzy (The Ravens And 49ers)

Aesthetics, America, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pop-Culture, Sport, The Zeitgeist

Piers Morgan, who is warring against a quintessential and meaningful American tradition—self-defense—has declared his affinity for another: the Superbowl.

MORGAN: “Listen, I know what this game means to America. It’s going to be a hell of a day on Sunday. I shall be glued to it, as always. I love the whole entertainment. I love the commercials. I love the football. I love the fact that it’s such a huge part of American culture. And may the best team win.”

The truth is that we foreigners do not get it—and will never get it. Also true: One can never really be an American unless one talks the talk about the game and the scene.

Oh well. Not belonging to the cool kids’ fraternity has never bothered me terribly. And at least one great American agrees about the obscenity of the whole scene.

“I don’t pay much attention to it, replied Ron Paul to a Piers Morgan question, in February of last year, during the 2012 campaign.

My sentiments exactly.

… the American football scene is obscene, starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down.

The ads are always a big point of contention. Thus, in 2012 too, Freedom Watch’s “J-Nap” (a coinage by Jack Kerwick for Judge Andrew Napolitano) struck a blow for “liberty” by calling on a middle-aged Madonna to challenge The Censor and repeat the feat of another peer, Janet Jackson. (Yes, “Libertarianism Lite” carries the day.)

The apparition the Judge wished upon us was described, in 2004 (“JANET’S SACK OF SILICONE & OTHER SYMBOLISM”), as a “sack of silicone-filled skin, awkwardly positioned on Janet Jackson’s chest. Few will forget how pop singer Justin Timberlake released The Thing from Jackson’s bustier during the Super Bowl halftime show.”

Add the effects of age and gravity to a surgically over-stuffed breast, and you end up with a veiny mass, mounted inorganically on the breastbone. Take my word: This is not something you’d want to wave about. It looks like a stretched-to-the-limits Bota Bag (also known as a wine skin), only not nearly as inviting. The photograph also captures the gaze on Justin Tinkerbelle’s girlie features. The reviewers, mostly groovy hip-hop heads, described the sequence as “a sex-charged duet.” Justin, Jackson’s partner in the “stunt,” looks as turned on as a surgeon removing a suture. The “sensuality” was, er, a bust.

Contra “J-Nap,” I was comforted to learn that a quaint Old-World, quintessentially American gentleman like Ron Paul was baffled by America’s annual football frenzy. (And is guaranteed to find the commercials as off-putting as the frenzy.)

UPDATE: I’m one of you. Hear me talk Ravens And 49ers.

The two coaches are brothers. One quarterback has been a starter for barely half a season. The sport itself is under a microscope for its violence, and the setting, New Orleans, is where the home team found itself recently caught up in a so-called bounty scandal — bounty — excuse me — scandal.
The spectacle and the game, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Ravens and 49ers, it’s all set for Sunday, with an expected worldwide audience of more than 160 million.

MORE at PBS.org. I won’t be reading this. It’s for you.

A Confetti Of Funny-Money & Confidence In Confidence Men

Business, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Big media (BM) is making a big noise about the stock-market rally, which the same BM attribute to King Tut’s animal spirits. Reports Bloomberg.com: “U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000 for the first time in five years, as data on the labor market and manufacturing boosted confidence in the world’s biggest economy.”

The “market’s” confidence in confidence men, notwithstanding, how are these “Big Gains” possible in “a debt-fueled economy”?

Easily: The consequence of Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus is a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. But an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in it value.

“Markets are now driven by stimulus, not fundamentals,” notes investor Peter Schiff, who also expects “deficits to approach $2 trillion annually before Obama leaves office.” (His is a reasonable assumption based in evidence.)

“Monetary and fiscal stimulus [are] pushing up stock and bond prices.”

…it is important to look at the nature of the rally. Most significantly we would bring investors’ attention to the increase in gold and oil and other assets that are expected to outperform in an inflationary economy.

UPDATED: Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution

Democrats, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Republicans, Welfare

“Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution” is the current column, now on RT. Here’s and excerpt:

“On the heels of Barack Obama’s Las Vegas run-on ramble on the necessity of immigration ‘reform,’ this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he too had “evolved” overnight on the issue. ‘I’m … open-minded enough to say that it is an issue that we do need to evolve on,’ the senator vaporized.

Paul is a Johnny-come-lately to his party’s devolution on immigration. The country was still surveying the debris left by the “D-Bomb” (where “D” stands for demographics), dropped on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012—when, one-by-one, key Republicans began to defect, pledging their commitment to an ‘overhaul of the immigration system’; to ‘reform’; to ‘a comprehensive solution’; to ‘fixing a broken system,’ all well-recognized euphemisms for amnesty.

A tipping point in the demographic shift in the US population had returned Barack Obama to power for a second term. A moratorium on mass immigration, buttressed by strong secessionist and states’ rights movements, might just help delay another such bomb from detonating . But the Republicans were having none of it.

House Speaker John Boehner was soon leading the party of turncoats to the promised (la-la) land, pledging that ‘a comprehensive approach’ was ‘long overdue.’ ‘I’m confident,’ Boehner promised, ‘that the president, myself [and] others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.’

In short succession, our wily pitch men were joined by Republican media mouths who had also ‘evolved’ overnight. Thus, in a career-clinching bid—presumably, to continue playing a part in national politics—Sean Hannity, an influential Fox-News personality, declared that he too had found religion on immigration and now supported a ‘pathway to citizenship.’

Another mantra mouthed by brother-believer Charles Krauthammer and echoed by Sen. Paul was that, ‘The GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanic voters.’ Yes, ‘Inside each Latin American immigrant there’s a Republican waiting to get out,’ mocked Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Mockery for this pie-in-the-sky is warranted. However dispiriting, the reason 71 percent of Hispanic voters broke for Obama is not because Republicans are mean to them—John McCain and George Bush demonstrated that they would wrestle a crocodile for any Hispanic convert, legal, illegal and criminal. This identity group’s political preference is because 60 percent of them live in or near poverty and ‘fully 57 percent use at least one welfare program.’

In his irrational ramble, the president waxed about legalizing the ’11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,’ while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great ‘businesses like Google and Yahoo.’

Fantasies about the future founders of companies like Google and Yahoo, aside—their highly educated corporeal founders are from Russia (Sergey Brin) and Taiwan (Jerry Yang). …”

Read the complete column, “Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution,” now on RT.

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.”

UPDATE: More of a reality check from Pat Buchanan:

Hispanics are not small-government people. They believe in and benefit disproportionately from Big Government.
Some 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, and 52 percent of Hispanic families are headed by single women.
Big Government provides their kids with Head Start before school, free K-through-12 schooling, Pell Grants and student loans for college, and two or three free meals a day at school for the kids.
Big Government provides food stamps, welfare for mom and earned income tax credit checks should she work. Big Government subsidizes her housing and provides free health care for the family through Medicaid.
A Pew Hispanic poll found that by 3-to-1, Hispanics would favor a big government with more services to a small government with fewer services.
Why would these folks vote for a Republican Party that promises to downsize the Big Government upon which they depend for sustenance, security and survival? Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut capital gains, income and inheritance taxes they don’t pay?

David Mamet Packs Heat, Sheds Light

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Constitution, Government, GUNS, Hollywood, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Race, Republicans, The State

In “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm,*” the talented Hollywood playwright, author, director, and producer David Mamet motivates for his individual right to defend life, liberty and property.

As a conventional conservative or Republican, Mamet’s positions are often pat, lacking philosophical depth. For example: He fingers The Bureaucracy as ineffectual because lacking in compassion and common sense. However, like most members of the right-leaning establishment, Mamet is incapable of explaining the underlying dynamic or structure that accounts for the inversion of economic incentives in the bureaucracy, irrespective of the good intentions and good character of the bureaucrats.

Mamet also mouths the conventional conservative talking points about affirmative action: that it is based in the mistaken premise that “black people have fewer abilities than white people,” a notion Mamert calls “monstrous.”

The “I love blacks, so I want to make them compete on an equal footing” mantra is as prevalent a platitude among conservatives as it is stupid. Affirmative action is based on the immutable fact of blacks’ lower aggregate scores in academia and in other fields. The “monstrous” part of it is that quotas treat all individual blacks as part of an underachieving, oppressed cohort. As does it lump all whites—the poor, the underprivileged and the victimized too—in a group that needs to suffer for the sake of black upliftment.

Also lackluster or absent is Mamet’s defense of a natural right that predates the constitutional right to bear arms. But Mamet should be appreciated for writing very well, and for being a lone voice for reason and rights in Hollywood, writing that,

…there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.

[SNIP]

* Chelm: From Mamet’s reference to Chelm, I concluded that he is probably Jewish (and well-educated, of course, which he is).