142 Comments

1. starling:

One of the things most interesting about the financial crisis is how far it lies out of my area of expertise and realm of experience. Having a Ph.D. in organization theory prepares one to speak competently to some aspects of business and management, but by no means all. Opinions I have aplenty, but in situations like this I find my line of thinking drawn to individuals and philosophies that I have come trust in other situations and domains closer to my area of competence.

In this case, Simon fits the bill well. I’ve known him for about 18 years both as faculty (while I was a student) and as a colleague. So not only does he say things that resonate with me intellectually, he’s also someone I know well and much like. I mention this because I recognize the obvious (though not necessarily fatal) flaw in this approach. But again, I also recognize the limits of my knowledge and expertise in this particular area. Speaking of which, I’d be very appreciative of links to any sources that provide a common sense and non-technical explanation of what has unfolded in the last 12-18 months in the financial sector. I confess that I am still scratching my head in this regard.

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:02 am 2. ADE:

I didn’t understand the first few minutes either, but I think I got the last bit…

Anybody who is too big to fail is too big to exist.

Has the ring of truth, a party slogan even, GOP?

ADE

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:09 am 3. Lifeofthemind:

Comments closed on the last thread just as I was hitting submit on my final effort. Seconds count in life.
So I am offering it here.

CPT. Charles,
(who had a link on Honduran computer ballot stuffing)
First they Ignore it, then they try to kill it. If, and it is a very big if, this story of pre stuffed election results gets out I expect a serious debunking exercise complete with chin pulling on The News Hour. Obama is personally invested in the Honduran Zelaya. That makes the nascent Honduran dictatorship officially To Big To Fail. Once the cheap suit of BHO’s credibility starts to unravel we will see increasingly desperate efforts to shore him up. He is like Michael Jackson’s nose writ large.

JFSanders031,
(who wondered what the fate of CIT meant to GE)
Lehman Brothers so far is the only company truly sent to the wall. Everything else has been used as fodder to pay off favored allies of the DNC. The theft of GM and Chrysler must not be allowed to stand.

Dave,
(who expects deflation)
To me it looks like we are heading for a swan dive. First we fly up and then we head down. Oh look, someone took the water out of the pool.

M. Simon,
(who commented on Russia’s problems)
The condition of the fleet, the expiring lease in Crimea, the economic and demographic pressures, and all the other issues that others have raised that I commented on above, all point to the same conclusion. Putin and Obama are facing a closing window in which to act. The next three months may be a rolling crisis as the totalitarians get desperate. God helps those who help themselves but in his beneficence he might be offering us a second chance.

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:11 am 4. Lifeofthemind:

ADE,
2Big2Fail=2Big2B
The second wave of billboards and T-shirts should have iconic images for the words Big and Fail.

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:18 am 5. ADE:

LOTM
iconic images for the words Big and Fail

Do you mean T-shirts, with tits and guns (IMAGES, of course), respectively?

Are we talkin’ Sarah here?

ADE

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:38 am 6. JFSanders031:

I think Buddy’s link John Mauldin/ Europe on the brink.pdf deserves a carryover as well. This speaks directly to Wretchard’s post.

As we look into the abyss. The question being asked is are we still on the bus or have we gotten off in time? The need for 5 trillion to fend off the collapse of the eurozone has to come from somewhere. And it seems that the only countries that have debt ratios at or below one are those that are ruled by totalitarian regimes or some form of same.

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:39 am 7. M. Simon:

LOTM,

Yep. The Austrian Corporal says, “We must act now. The window is closing.”

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:46 am 8. Dave the Kapampangan:

Nanny Obananrama says: “Transparency is about giving people the power to make their own decisions. America doesn’t need transparency; it needs a regulative bureaucracy. You need to replace YOUR cronies with MY cronies and put them on government salary.”

“Who needs economic fundamentals, when my supporters need their cut? We promised lifetime entitlements and that promise is TOO BIG TO FAIL! The only way to grab big money from the gullible is to re-label the handouts, pork and speculative bubbles a stimulus. So don’t bother reading the d-mned legislation!”

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:16 am 9. JFSanders031:

For LotM:
Picture link from Alabamalawblog
Obama Fail

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:24 am 10. geoffb:

“if the foxes have taken over the henhouse”

They have, but our entire barnyard is armed and becoming aware.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:26 am 11. geoffb:

Another fox enters the henhouse.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:30 am 12. Lucy:

“one way to regard the Tea Party movement is as a protest movement against the transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to this new and immovable elite.”

Of course. It’s only those who support President Won who claim endlessly that it’s a feeble and misguided attempt to assemble with silly signs. Or it’s a mustering of “straight-up racists” as Janeane Garafalo termed the protests.

Tea Party is a phrase grabbed quickly because it echoed an earlier shriek/squeal/bellow coming from people also fully aware they were being mistreated at the hands of those governing them.

How’d that work out for you, King George?

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:41 am 13. James:

geoffb, I think you are too optimistic. We Americans are perfectly capable of being stupid sheep. Everybody knows Chicago’s corruption but nobody does anything–beyond sending in a prosecutor or two every now and then.
(Not that I’m disparaging the prosecutors, some of whom are brave and dedicated, but they can’t do more than pinprick the beast.)

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:01 am 14. Peter Boston:

I think that the purpose of Obama’s program ab initio was to shred the middle class by making it difficult to impossible to start and grow a small business, and to ensure that the wealthiest few get absolute control of the political machinery.

The biggest financial services corporations (Goldman Sachs, Citi, JP Morgan) are making record profits while even large regional banks and almost all small banks and financial service companies are struggling at break even.

I’d bet my left one that Goldman Sachs and GE wrote the Cap n Trade legislation, and my right one that Obama, Pelosi and Reid are on Goldie’s chairman’s speed dial. Cap n Trade is the framework which will determine who will have access to capital in the future and Goldman Sachs is guaranteed a primacy in those decisions.

In the 7th or 8th year of the Obama administration all the assets that were accumulated by government during the “crisis” will be privatized the same way they were in Russia. Probably only then will we know who the real winners were, and even then only if the veil of incestuous corporate relations can be penetrated – if there is anybody left willing and able to take on the task.

Octavian spent 40 years running a masterful continuous public relation campaign that kept the Romans believing they still lived in a republic. Obama has less time but he has more tools.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:10 am 15. steeple:

My tacit data point on what has changed:

Enron execs Lay, Skilling and Fastow were hauled in front of Congress and all met a just fate for the crimes they committed. Enron was a huge scam perpretrated on investors. And Lay was viewed to be a friend of the Republicans. Even though virtually all of the damage done at Enron happened well before Bush 43 came into office.

AIG and Fannie Mae were much bigger financial catastophes, and no less criminal from my perspective. Has anyone seen a tribunal coming for Franklin Raines or the guys who ran AIG? Or how clear has the discussion been about who benefitted (Goldman, Morgan, Euro banks) from the bailout of AIG?

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:12 am 16. Doug:

Why were the comments closed?
—
We took some wrong turns in Afghanistan, but it’s too early for despair. – By Christopher Hitchens –

LRB · Rory Stewart The Irresistible Illusion

Stewart recommends reducing troop numbers to 20,000.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:15 am 17. hdgreene:

Geez, last summer I was commenting that the Democrats will be creating a series of Government Controlled Cartels in the Financial Sector, the Energy Sector, The Automotive Sector, The Health Care Sector and the Insurance Sector. Cap and Trade is nothing more than a price fixing, production setting, “Restraint on Trade” that would make J.D. Rockefeller’s jaw drop — and the fact that his great-great grandkids are involved would make him beam with pride (even if they are politicians). How is the Obama Adminstration getting people on board with Health Care Reform (sometimes the most “unlikely” people)? They get to be part of a Price Fixing Cartel.

That’s the plan for the entire economy. They are divvying it up. That is why it cost trillions up front. They buy people off (using the money of their grandchildren) who should resist them and look out for the interest of stockholders or constituents.

But now they are all on the look out for something different: the slice of the power pie.

When President Obama took Nine billion Dollars from Chrysler Bond Holders, he then attacked the Hedge Fund Guys who enabled the “transaction.” At the time I thought: They are among his biggest supporters, why the harsh words? And the Democratic Party is among their biggest supporters (After all, Barney Frank kept the Subprime Mortgage “Fannie-Freddie” thing up and running).

These Wall Street guys wear the Democratic Party like a jockstrap: They would not be near as ballsy in their financial hijacks without that support. So I wondered: what’s going on? Then I remembered: it ain’t the hedge fund manager’s money the Democrats are taking. It is, in fact, the money of the investors. So the President, by attacking them publicly, gives them cover. Meanwhile, they will be feeding at the TARP Trough. I figure next election, you will see them back in the fold because, in truth, they never left the fold.

About a month ago I posted a comment here (http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/06/30/bearly-true/#comment-20) which I titled “The Emerging American Twitocracy,” by which I meant “rule by twits.” Unfortunately, that phrase gets confused with Twitter, whatever that is.

The point I tried to make was not that our rulers are twits, but that their behavior, looked at from the POV of much of the American Population, appears twit-like (re-inflating bubbles, in Simon Johnson’s video). But in reality, they are trying to make Twits of US All (Think “Health Care Gate Keeper” in ten years time). Twits are arrogantly foolish — and who is more arrogantly foolish than some twit who has to aggressively defend his tiny patch of turf?

Now I call the phenomena “The DC Power Circuit” (I may change the name any minute, so read quick). At the center of the “DC Power Circuit” is the Democrat Controlled Congress. But the “DC Power Circuit” controls the Democratic Party (and many Republicans), not the other way round. There is also the DC White House and the DC Bureaucracy. But Wall Street, Big Business, Big Media, Big Academia, Big NGO are also an important part of Big Power: The DC Power Circuit.

The purpose of the DC Power Circuit is for power and control to flow from the rest of the US and into the DC Power Beltway. What flows out are Spoils and Permission slips — with grovel knee pads becoming an important fashion accessory.

Of course there is always hope. I could be wrong.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:20 am 18. Doug:

Treasury’s “investment” programs are making hash of what was once comprehensible.

Did you miss the “good news” on May 12?

The Treasury Department, led by Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, retroactively reduced the deficit through March 31, the first six months of Uncle Sam’s fiscal year, by over $175 billion.

Here’s the evidence. March’s Monthly Treasury Statement showed a year-to-date deficit of $956.8 billion — but (voila!) April’s statement showed that the deficit through March was only $781.4 billion (items in red and October-March total box added by me):
—

What Treasury did in April was to convert the TARP “investments” it began making in October in the country’s financial institutions, General Motors, Chrysler, and who knows what else to NPV accounting. That accounting change reduced the previously reported March deficit by $175 billion.

As you might have noticed, Barack Obama and Tim Geithner are not done “investing.” There are hundreds of billions of dollars in outlays yet to come that I anticipate Geithner will handle using NPV, including additional TARP “investments,” the toxic asset program, and perhaps the ever-expanding mortgage relief efforts. At some point, Geithner might even decide that the tens of billions disbursed to prop up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac thus far also have “investment” value.

Mixing hundreds of billions of dollars of NPV into what has essentially been a cash flow report turns the Monthly Treasury Statement, and deficit reporting in general, into an exercise that will become not only become ever more difficult to comprehend, but one that will also be routinely subject to political manipulation.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:26 am 19. Doug:

buddy larsen said,

doug, that’s what they used to call “Enron accounting”, shuffling P&L and Balance Sheet items via that third instrument. Three Card Monte. Enron used subsidiary companies to hold certain liabilities and balanced those books with Enron stock –which worked as long as that stock valuation was high, whichy for a time it was, due to Enron’s P&L showing income from transactions between it and itself. Our gov’t third entity is the transaction between Treasury and Fed, and the dealers are, for the last few months since Goldman and Morgan were encouraged to become Bank Holding Companies rather than Broker/Dealers, not regulated by SEC but by –you guessed it –the Fed. Now you know why Bernanke is being set up for a fall –so that capo Summers gets the job and –voila –

BTW, Gary Gensler, O’s head regulator, helped design the Enron model, and help write the regulations which seemed to legalize the model (of course, it wasn’t as dirty in the beginning, before the left-open channels filled up). The target was then as it is now,, of course the prevention of ‘price discovery’.

Anyhoo, ‘quantitative easing” is the same principle, improved via being legal because it’s the gov’t doing it. The Fed balance ratios don’t change, the transaction just goes on both sides at once –the balance sheet doesn’t load up with liabilities, it simply expands. How can this be? because the Fed is pricing the collateral, and the price rule is, a dollar of liability equals a dollar of asset.

USA can do this awhile, so long as the military is globally dominant and also willing to follow orders from the executive branch.

Belmont Club » Gravity

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:26 am 20. JFSanders031:

19. Doug: “USA can do this awhile, so long as the military is globally dominant and also willing to follow orders from the executive branch.”

The U.S. won’t be globally dominant fairly soon. Not sure if Honduras is the coming model or Venezuela.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:52 am 21. RWE:

Let us return once more to the Design Margin concept.

Our current economic situation is the result of having the country’s Design Margin used up in so many ways over so many years. Not only was the available National Energy used up in so many new and useless ways, but one of these new ways was to figure out how actually to produce less National Energy.

So rather than this all being some Vast Imperial Plot it is explainable in the Design Margin being used up, followed by desperate attempts by the leadership to fix things. And a mark of poor leadership is gathering more and more power and making more and more decisions at the top levels. They have to do this because with any given aspect the Big Philosophy Ain’t Working. The brilliance of their philosophy self evident to themselves, so it must be that Those Idiots Down There At The Implementation Level Have Screwed Things Up Again.

Bill Clinton summed it up very well when he said back in 1994 about his tax increase “We could not let you keep your money because we could not be assure that you would spend it in the right way.” Obama has fixed that problem by taking the money away up front and then giving it back only in approved ways. You can’t buy gas to cut your lawn and the stupid EPA approved lawn mower won’t run more than 15 min anyway (which is true)? No problem! Stimulus Package XVII coming right up!

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:06 am 22. Aether:

“The biggest financial company you’ve never heard of”, essentially a subsidiary of the Fed…

“Follow the Money” indeed

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/biggest-financial-company-you-have.html

http://seekingalpha.com/article/98297-who-really-owns-your-money-part-i-the-dtcc

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:09 am 23. Mongoose:

I do not have the time to address it at the moment, but I wonder how the exporting of manufacturing to the China figures into this.

Of course, what is the most amazing thing about all of this is the elites of this country destroying it at its richest and highest moment. Is there an historical parallel to this?

They of course, cannot keep up the wealth at all. They must figure that there will be some sort of global rationalization of the economy and they will play their part. They certainly are not wealth producers. What do they offer the other international elites? Is it our destruction as a super power? What then when that is accomplished?

Our elites have turned their backs on their country, its entire history and its many great achievements. They seem hellbent on undoing it all, every bit of it.

Much evil is afoot. Very little of what has been done or will be done is caused by any historical necessity. It is a wholly self-created crisis.

It is worth noting that 8 years after Pearl Harbor we stood astride the world. 8 years after 911 we are spiraling into self-immolation.

Someone’s character has changed. Is it across the board or merely in our “elites”?

That is the question.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:13 am 24. Kingston53:

It is becoming clear that the Obama glow is starting to diminish. This is not because of something that happened this week or last. It is a growing recognition that the Obama administration is guilty of the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty as epitomized by the gross and corrupt stimulus bill. The urgent screams that this bloated and misdirected bill had to be passed Right Now or the world would come to an end have been shown to be nothing but the worst kind of manipulation. More and more people are recognizing that the real urgency for the administration was that if the people had had a few days to find out what was in the bill they would have certainly rejected it. Nearly a trillion dollars was wasted with less deliberation than most people would give to a home appliance purchase. This same manipulation was used to pass the Crap and Tax bill in the House and now they are going for the “three times is a charm” with the Nationalize and Destroy Healthcare bill. The administration is in a race against the clock.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:36 am 25. CPT. Charles:

hdgreene: Cap & Tax is fundamentally a ‘permission to commit economic activity’. Period.

At the risk of being ’simplistic’, what’s transpiring is ‘Corporatism’ [see Fascist Italy for further details...], abet Ver 2.0 ‘Chicago Style’.

[As an aside]

Last year, on one of comment threads concerning the election [and the democrat party], I labeled the Chicago Machine ‘The Dark Tower’. Admittedly, I was being a tad ‘tongue-in-cheek’.

I hate it when my version of ‘dark humor’ takes tangible form. I note with interest that Hibz ut-Tahrir surfaces with impunity, within sight of the Dark Tower after we’ve been blessed with Hope&Change. [AG Holder was unavailable for comment...]

This is only the beginning.

2010 will be THE pivot point for our Republic. I make that call, here and now, DHS be damned.

Sorry for the ‘comment and run’.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:46 am 26. AWH:

I think it’s pretty obvious where this administration wants to go in respect to the economy, and it’s not a direction that ends up with more freedom for the economy or for people in general.

There’s a much longer story about banking that needs to be told. For the life of me, I can’t understand why the “Enron” impolosion, for instance, woudl lead to the implementation of Mark-to-market accounting changes for banks. If anything, the lesson is just the opposite. Recognized, real cash flows mean more than a market interpretation of prices, especially in something like mortgage securities where the limited volume makes the market susceptible to wild swings and panics.

In the case of Enron, the tax lawyers got it right (IIRC, they didn’t pay any taxes for 4 of the last 5 years, not because they hid their profits, but because they didn’t have profits).

Eric Falkenstein of Falkenblog has a lot of good analysis around this subject and seems to believe that we had a back-door bank run, but didn’t recognize it:

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/gary-gorton-explains-crisis.html

I think that analysis is going in the right direction, but he doesn’t specifically discuss the role of the mark-to-mark accounting in this. I don’t think that the bank run can happen without the accounting changes.

Of course, as I and a couple of other people have also discussed, how is it that these rules were put in prior to the election (Nov. 2007), just in time to tank the banking system? Previously the only time we had such a rule was in the 30’s up until 1938 when Roosevelt finally got rid of it.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:06 am 27. erc rodson:

Doug @ 16:

Thank you for the links. Second one was pretty dry, but has some good stuff. Such as:

“It is tempting to assume that economic growth will not make Afghanistan into Obama’s terrorist haven or Brown’s strong democracy but rather into something more like its wealthier neighbours. Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at various points under the same Muslim empires. There are Persian, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik populations in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Pushtun are only arbitrarily divided by the Durand Line from their Pakistani kinsmen. The economies are linked and millions of Afghans have studied and worked in Iran or Pakistan. There are more reasons for Afghanistan to develop into a country like one of its neighbours than for it to collapse into Somalian civil war or solidify into Malaysian democracy. But Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan present a bewildering variety of states: an Islamist theocracy, a surreal mock-tribal autocracy, a repressive secular dictatorship, a country trembling on the edge of civil war, a military dictatorship cum democracy. And it will be many years before Afghanistan’s economy or its institutions draw level with those of its neighbours.

Pakistan, which is often portrayed as a ‘failed state’, has not only the nuclear bomb and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence but also the Friday Times and the National College of Arts. Progressive views are no longer confined to the wealthy Lahore elite: a mass commercial satellite television station championed a campaign to overturn the hudud ordinances, which conflated adultery and rape; 1500 women were released from jail as a result. There is no equivalent in Afghanistan of the Pakistani lawyers’ movement, which reinstated the chief justice after his dismissal by Musharraf.

Every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. The Communist government tried to tear down the old structures of mullah and khan; the anti-Soviet jihad set up new ones, bolstered with US and Saudi cash and weapons supplied from Pakistan. There is almost no economic activity in the country, aside from international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. The Afghan army cannot, like Pakistan’s, reject America’s attempt to define national security priorities; Afghan diplomats cannot mock our pronouncements. Karzai is widely criticised, but more than seven years after the invasion there is still no plausible alternative candidate; there aren’t even recognisable political parties.”

We don’t often get reminded of the diversity of peoples, languages and cultures in that part of the world. One author/blogger calls the area “Chaosistan”. Pretty accurate.

It would be nice if this administration could formulate and advance a clear rationale of what we want to do in the ’stan and why we should be doing it. (Nice if the previous adminstration had done this as well.) I believe a rational argument can be made, but I don’t see anyone in the government making it.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:25 am 28. CPT. Charles:

A quick aside: [as I have commented on other blogs...]

It’s to early too tell, but the ‘course change’ of Palin may be one the initial reactions to the current state of affairs. I may be projecting, but her ‘exposure’ to the Beltway Machine [via the election] may have been the catalyst that is now carrying her forward. Thankfully, she’s not the simpleton the Left makes her out to be.

We shall see what we shall see.

Stay safe, stay sane. Keep thinking.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:26 am 29. AWH:

#28, Charles

I agree. I may be projecting as well, but I do think she can be the game changer we need. The complete and utter lack of a free and open press is what made this Presidency possible. Not only are they far left, they are much further left than even the middle of a leftist Democratic party. Any candidate who would change the game needs to have the ability to reach people directly either by:

– talking directly to them in venues of 30 or 60 thousand at a time
– or by having the poularity that the mainstream media needs so that they can demand and receive live/uncut interviews and forums in which to speak.

Palin can do those things. Of course, the left makes her out to be a simpleton and some of the right hates her as well, but there are good reasons for that, and they don’t indicate that her career is over.. quite the contrary, in my opinion:

http://buanadha.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/do-your-own-analysis/

Also totally agree with Charles and Herb, 2010 is a big, BIG deal. I think that had a lot to do with Palin’s decision as well.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:41 am 30. Herb:

Im not so sure that the elite is limited to the financiers. hdgreene talks about a “DC Power Circuit” above. I think he’s onto something. But they are vulnerable.

I think its beginning to dawn on the public that they must pay attention to National politics. Nevada elected that creature Reid to the senate several times. Only when he became prominent and got noticed have they begun to pay attention to him. His numbers have tanked. (35% want anybody else) North Dakota noticed Tom Daschle (tax cheat) in the same manner. Back in the day there was Frank Church who gutted the CIA. Didnt last the next election.

We do “get it” after it get rubbed in our faces. The current regime is the most arrogant I have seen or read of. I think they are in the process of overreaching so far that they cause a backlash of huge proportions.

CPT Charles is right; 2010 will decide.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:41 am 31. Peter Boston:

Good get wretchard.

Augustus got Virgil. Barack gets comic books. And we get screwed.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:57 am 32. Ten:

will Hope and Change result in effort to break the power of the oligarchy (assuming it exists) or become a program to concentrate control in their hands?

The single most important piece of information needed to answer that question lies in the mechanism of money. If there is anything capable of driving the public to understand how they are literally enslaved to a relative handful in High Places, it is that.

Barack Obama operates in flagrant violation of the 2nd Article of the US Constitution. Money is why and we’d be advised to stop asking if and start answering because they can.

They can be cause we let them. And they repaid us with a degree of servitude what even if we paid them a million dollars a day, would take us a quarter million years to break them back to even. Of course, they want that control. There is no question.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:07 am 33. NahnCee:

2Big2Fail=2Big2B

Rather like the Presidency of the United States has become. But what would happen if Obama *is* allowed to fail? Even, pushed towards failure? Would that be his personal failure, or the ultimate failure of what the office of the President has become?

Regarding the economic oligarchy theory, this strikes me as the same sort of over-arching paranoia demonstrated by Hillary and Bill in their fuming about a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. I could see Bad Guys from overseas wanting to dip into the American taxpayers wallet, but I just cna’t imagine an “elite” made up of Wall Street Masters of the Universe, academic professors of Political Science and Black History, and Hollywood bleeding heart liberals coming together – in secret – to finagle such thing.

Although the MSM seem to have managed to agree upon *their* version of reality and how to manipulate it without it ever having been written down. But perhaps it would be helpful if someone would define just exactly who this “elite” is that we’re hypothesizing is taking over our economy and throwing out our Constitution.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:07 am 34. Ten:

You miss the point, NahnCee. The problem is systemic and it spans almost a hundred years. There’s no sudden back-room cabal of leftists, there’s the inherent corruption of power and the almost incomprehensible importance of how money works.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:26 am 35. AWH:

Good point, Ten.

the problem here isn’t a diabolical, wide-spread conspiracy, but rather is is a systemic problem that encompasses:

– useful idiots who’ve been prepared to support an anti-american agenda by a sub-standard educational system (maybe 30-40% of the population)
– corporate types who don’t analyze the situation carefully, and who mistakenly think they can influence government policy (people don’t always realize that big business is not in alignment with free market economics)
– a media that has become a propoganda arm for the left.

I don’t doubt that there are people who have potentially planned for this day and don’t doubt that Obama’s handlers thought that they could possibly be this successful, but I do not think that there is a massive conspiracy between business and the leftists to take over the country. rather, it is more like an alignment of idiots, misinformation and unfortunate circumstances.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:56 am 36. RicardoVerde:

Doug, by NPV accounting, are you referring to Net Present Value? I am financially illiterate and beg your further enlightenment. I think you explained it in your later comments, but I just wanted to be sure to understand what you are saying.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:03 am 37. buddy larsen:

Wretchard is hitting on a lot of cylinders lately –Simon Johnson is one of the two names mentioned by Patrick Byrne the other day on the Glenn Beck show. The other name was Matt Taibbi of –ready for this? –Rolling Stone magazine.

Seems to be a rash of little echo gremlins popping up –evrywhere, but just for two, Rolling Stone becoming relevant again & John Wayne showing up on BC and also in an essay on the weird, ennervating summer of 1979.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:12 am 38. Ten:

It gets even more interesting, buddy: FireDogLake — LiarBlogFake to us, it’s most vocal fans — joined Gleens Greenwald & camp in supporting Fed accountability this year. Can we spell Ron Paul’s very popular bill, HR 107?

Speaking of strange bedfellows, given that Obie is in bed up to his ears in Wall Street, this is something that frankly earns both of these stalwart regressive progg enclaves a round of applause.

Maybe a perfect storm of bipartisan fedupedness will yet save us. Or looking at it another way, with the US now utterly bankrupt, maybe there’s nothing worth saving and this is really the beginning of the second American revolution.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:23 am 39. buddy larsen:

Overstock dot com’s, and deep capture dot com’s, Patrick Byrne on the Glenn Beck Show a couple days ago, talkin’ that good ole time Oligarchy.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:26 am 40. buddy larsen:

ten, amen that ’strange bedfellows’ –i look for more and more of it –i think we all are. the word ‘flood’ comes to mind. left/right logjams breaking and stuff like that. “Fedupedness” is a perfect word in that it is what it is plus it’s a tonguetwister and kinda hurts the eyes (not to mention the brain).

As far as busted and nothing left to save –don’t forget our infrastructure ! It’s still damn good (the hills and valleys, rivers and harbors, amber waves of grain, lots of true folks yet), and can make us real again toot sweet, soon’s we clear out the corner offices. Clear ‘em out and wall the sonzabitches off.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:42 am 41. NahnCee:

The same infrastructure as the 12 million illegal Mexicans have been feeding off of for free the last upmpty-teen years? It’s not all that healthy in California, unless you’re referring to armed born-in-America citizens who still believe in the Constitution infrastructure.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:59 am 42. Mongoose:

Buddy, Eliminate corp taxes all together. Radically reduce indivudual taxes. Cut government at all levels down by 80% over a decade. Eliminate most of the New Deal Departments and what has come since=start with Education. Radically reduce regulation. Spend on the miltary and space. Put the crooks in jail. Drill, baby Drill.

(Oh, and do something about that commerce clause thingy.)

In 4 years we will be back on top. This is a created crisis; it can be undone but only by undoing government.

Someone has to get up there and actually “talk truth to power”.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:01 pm 43. buddy larsen:

oh, hell, here, have some more.

nahncee/41; imho, if we fix our bum ticker, the feeling will come back into our extremities. If we do it the other way around, we’re playing the enemy’s game and we’re done fer.

mongoose/42; right –until this goes too far and we get wrong-footed by some foreign or domestic enemy and fall flat on our faces, we’re just a leap of faith, an act of will, away from the high road. whatever happened between the summers of ‘69 and ‘79, in reverse. The Moon landing to the Malaise speech, in reverse.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:02 pm 44. bogie wheel:

“Fedupness” … how about the “Fed Up Party,” or, for short, the “F.U. Party”?

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:07 pm 45. bogie wheel:

I seem to remember during the oil bubble during the first several months of 2008, reading and hearing analysis that it (what the US — read, its taxpaying and buying-anything citizens — was paying to the oil-producing nations from whom we buy the bulk of our oil) was “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.”

Wretchard above mentions the response to the (possibly ginned up) financial crisis as (in the eyes of the Tea Partiers) “the transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to this new and immovable elite.”

What are the odds of the two “greatest transfer of wealth” events in the history of our nation, possibly in the history of humanity, happening at random within months of each other, right before a presidential election?

The really unfortunate thing is that financial bombs of this magnitude seem to do their worst work at removes, over time. Imagine if someone had driven up to our houses in September 2008 and ordered us out into the street with only the clothes on our backs, and if the next day we’d found out we no longer had jobs to go to, we would have realized the seriousness and depth of the robbery that had just taken place. But since today, most of us are still in our houses or apartments (for now), and still have jobs to go to (for now) … how are we supposed to grasp how to measure the robbery that has taken place?

And if people by the multi-tens of millions in this country *did* grasp the magnitude of it, and what this “transfer of wealth” (ours, to the pockets of the looters and their constituencies) means for us and our children and grandchildren, what would be the reaction?

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:19 pm 46. hdgreene:

Herb, I would agree that we do “get it” after having our faces rubbed “in it,” but we have to know what our faces are getting rubbed into. That is why the Left’s control of so much of the media is so important to them. I know there are now “alternatives” but most voters (even most live voters) just watch the evening news (if that much).

Most of entertainment programing plays a “reinforcing the message” role, even (or especially) the more iconoclastic shows. I watched The Supernatural on CW a few times (OK, I’ve now lost all credibility — but I combine it with reading Proust). I heard one of the Demon Slayers say, quite out of the blue, that “Joe the Plumber” was a douche. And I thought, imagine that: A Politically Correct Demon Slayer. The Demon, in this case, is the aspirational working class.

We may think much of what the media spreads is garbage. But those who control programming may see it differently. They may be “The Mental Hygienists to the Nation,” at least in their own minds: They remove bad attitudes and replace them with the appropriate ones.

I’d like to say that I hold no particular animus towards the folks who run our institutions. I think, for the most part, they are intelligent, capable and clever people. We see how sometimes their cleverness can bite them in the butt — as when they are clever with taxes or think they will get away with stupid behavior.

But now their cleverness threatens to bite us all in our collective butt. Because their cleverness allowed them to manipulate whatever micro-environments they came up through (obviously with much success), but now they are manipulating the world — and not just for their benefit, but for everyone’s. This offers much less prospect of success because the chain reactions from their policy choices are way more complicated than anyone can comprehend. Plus, these folks think of Data Swarms in the same way the military viewes smoke screens: as a way to conceal their maneuvers. And when you poke holes in one data swarm, they simply produce another. Information, please?

I now think Irony is a World Historical Force. We know what works and what doesn’t. But we want to do what doesn’t, because it offers immediate advantage. So knowledge of the results of past forays into “what doesn’t work” is suppressed, leading to unsatisfactory, if not outright devastating, results. On the numbers, I would say if a program to create 600,000 green jobs only increases unemployment by 3 million, we’ve gotten off easy. In this respect, the fact that President Obama holds up Spain as a model, when Spain has achieved 18 percent unemployment, says much. It certainly shows an ability to selectively appropriate data.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:26 pm 47. buddy larsen:

That link in #43, harken, that harmless little lady, with her vaporous mien and monotone, is the Inspector-General of The Federal Reserve Board.

She is whom you will encounter, once you’ve stormed, full of fury and high dudgeon, into the inner sanctum of the Winter Palace.

“May I help you, sir?”

***(related)
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/82038/

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:26 pm 48. Peter Boston:

I think it shortsighted to dismiss academia, the media and entertainment industries, and the urban professional class as the unsuspecting dupes of Dewey educationalism. The zeitgeist says that conservatives and libertarians are the weirdos. Books like “I Can’t Believe I Sat Next to a Republican” don’t get published otherwise.

Ideas matter and the only big ideas about how society should be ordered that make it into the political arena are from the Progressives, or worse. Our side doesn’t have the intellectual capital to call the Progressives’ bet, never mind raise them. Until that changes nothing else will. Obama doesn’t need a lot of support. He only needs soft opposition.

Whiskey’s take on feminism is on to more than we may want to admit. We can shout “what about individual liberty” all we want but there are few ears to hear it. Individual liberty might have meant something when King George was threatening to take half your corn crop but very little in an urban environment where people have no expectation of ever owning their jobs or even where they live.

A promised spot in the back of the bread line looks a whole lot better to a heck of a lot of people than having to go through what it takes to grow and make your own.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:41 pm 49. buddy larsen:

PB/48; a place in the breadline –true enough. “If i’m a freeman, i’m my own hungry liability; if i’m a slave, i’m someone’s valuable asset.” The calculus of no-confidence. But what about that confidence –where did it go? Did someone obliterate it? or was it just an illusion? The moving finger writes as we speak.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:50 pm 50. steeple:

PB 48, regarding your finishing comment, that is the biggest reason why I’m pessimistic that the Iranians will ever do what it takes to earn their liberty.

Pretty sad when we are comparing our lot in life to that of the average Iranian.

By the way, its good to have you back. I, for one, missed your posts while you were gone.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:54 pm 51. Salt Lick:

Our side doesn’t have the intellectual capital to call the Progressives’ bet, never mind raise them.

With respect, Mr. Boston, I’ll have to disagree. Having worked in academia for 20 years, what I saw was the Progs refusing to even seat our side at the table. Ever heard the expression, “Your money [intellectual capital] is no good in here?” And even where we’re allowed to play, the deck is rigged.

Which is not to whine. Just to say the winnings right now don’t reflect an honest game.

Jul 19, 2009 - 12:55 pm 52. Peter Boston:

the winnings right now don’t reflect an honest game

I agree, and that is the phenomenon I am trying to understand. I said in another post that the Enlightenment reached its apogee in 1776 and died somewhere in France in 1914. I don’t know where we are now. I look back to speakers of ancient wisdom to find the path but all they say is that we already have all the answers and there is nothing they can do if people choose to ignore them.

Jul 19, 2009 - 1:23 pm 53. Edgewise.Sigma:

Folks, a couple of minor items I’d like to share here, which may be useful in one way or another.

The first is a quote from G.K. Chesterton, regarding what he calls “the wisest thing in the world:

“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. **A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.**” [emphasis added]

Brings to mind a number of [recent] stories/issues/controversies, don’t it?

Anyhow, got it from here:
http://augustine.livejournal.com/91378.html#cutid1

The second item is this post on “Philokalia Republic”:
“On flattering and supporting one’s enemies”
by Kevin Jones, 7/18/09

http://kevinjjones.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-flattering-and-supporting-ones.html

Make of them what one will…

Jul 19, 2009 - 1:34 pm 54. Jay:

I have been a professor since 1963 starting at Carnegie Tech in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration. I have taught at Virginia Tech, Texas and Caltech and have given seminars at many universities in the US and Europe and Asia.
The Progs are in the “elite: universities where many of the students are legacies (like the Bushes and Kerry). They grow up to run Wall Street and the business end of the media. The new class of Internet types fancy themselves as equals but they are not.
Read Shamma’s history of the French Revolution, the Citizens. The lawyer class and the local elites that were losing out to the new capitalists led the revolt. The regime was seen by literate Frenchmen as corrupt and weak. But the changes for the better coupled with a wasteful system of tax farming and the Little Ice Age plus the ideas of the General Will rather than the ideas of the English thinkers like Hume and Locke were important components of the revolution. The French Revolution set back the French economy for over 25 years at least.
The Ivy League and Stanford business tycoons and lawyers are going to overplay their hands. Screwing the middle class is a recipe for social distaster.

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:09 pm 55. geoffb:

“Everybody knows Chicago’s corruption but nobody does anything–beyond sending in a prosecutor or two every now and then.”

Sorry to be so late James. Long day at church.

Corruption lays a cost of society. If the corrupt entity has some natural monopoly then they lay those costs off on others. Chicago is leaching off of the surrounding communities.

Corruption still hurts them as without it they would be a much more powerful city. However the relative power of the political class, without the corruption, would be less. That is the attraction, more power relative to others nearby. The big frog in a smaller pond.

Without some natural monopoly that can attract money from without, you end up with a large class in grinding poverty, and a small elite with fairly great wealth. That is the society the Left desires for everyone. They figure to be the elites.

Chicago can be that way because the price of walking away from the corruption is not high. Most, if they don’t like it, leave town. People from all over the world who don’t like that corrupt way, pay a heavier price, leave and come here.

There is no where to go to escape if the US becomes like those third world hell holes. We have to stay and fight. That is where my optimism comes from. In the end we are cornered. Flight isn’t possible.

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:19 pm 56. whiskey:

It isn’t feminism as much as the desire for a permanent nobility. SWPL status-mongering yuppies, who’s values are shaped by women, are one component, and a powerful one (because they run the Media, Entertainment, Law, and Politics) and reflect the innate, hard-wired desires by women for an aristocracy. Even a woman born in a prison, like say Actress Leigton Meester, can play stuffy, snobby NYC prep school aristos, and generate gobs of money and attention (even though viewership for Gossip Girl is in the 1.5 million range quite often for first-run episodes).

We are a nation that produces “Gossip Girl” as our defining TV show, even though hardly anyone watches it. [Gossip Girl generates about ten times more media coverage than the #1 scripted show, CSI.]

What does this all mean? It means that Obama’s desire to create a permanent class of aristocrats and nobility who have hereditary control over the economy has the support of most though not all women. His attempts, well known and understood, also have the support of Blacks and Hispanics, with the understanding that the nobility will cut them in line ahead of their hated White Male rivals. Gays also will get special privileges, and be able to bash White Men to their hearts content. Gays are not numerically important, but Women love them (because they wish most White guys would be turned into them) and gays punch above their demographic weight in culture and the media.

Most women know and are aware of Zelaya’s attempts to become President for Life of Honduras, and support that effort because he will do so “for the people” or rather, his aristocratic, hereditary rule will benefit the coalition of women and others that they want and see here in the US.

This is not anything new — most of Western history has been the tension between Aristocrats in whatever form, usually allied with women who for obvious reasons prefer hereditary rule (i.e. an attractive woman can be the mistress of a powerful noble, far more satisfying emotionally, monetarily, and otherwise than the poor wife of an average man), and that of average men clamoring for their piece of the pie.

Right now the ability of people to form aristocratic control over wealth is high, and women lacking any social constraint provide the bricks on the balance scale to tilt the forces towards Obama.

Obama could provide over ruined, nuked cities, a starving populace bereft of most economic growth, massive poverty, and as long as he provides an aristocratic control over wealth and power favoring SWPL Yuppies, Non-Whites, and Women, he’ll have 52% of the vote. That’s all he’ll get, and the 48% will be screaming mad, but he’ll have it.

Heck most women, per the WWII threads, would rather surrender to Islamic jihadis than fight back, even if it meant curtailment of their personal freedoms. They hate sharing political, social, and economic power with White men that much. This civil war in the West has been going on well, forever, but it’s flare-up now is probably back to the mid 1950’s and recovery from WWII. Which itself was horrific for aristos and would-be aristos — given the shift in power from aristos to the common man then.

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:21 pm 57. Doug:

Wise Latina:
Better to Laugh than cry.

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:51 pm 58. Doug:

I keep forgetting what I want on my tombstone, so I came up with this:

I FORGOT!

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:53 pm 59. Doug:

“This civil war in the West has been going on well, forever, but it’s flare-up now is probably back to the mid 1950’s and recovery from WWII. Which itself was horrific for aristos and would-be aristos — given the shift in power from aristos to the common man then. ”
—
How odd:
Our Golden Age

Who woulda thunk a bunch of Selfless, Heroic Vets might have more character than Barry, Timmy, and Co.?

I see Mongoose – # 23 – did

Jul 19, 2009 - 2:58 pm 60. Doug:

erc rodson @ 27

“It would be nice if this administration could formulate and advance a clear rationale of what we want to do in the ’stan and why we should be doing it. (Nice if the previous adminstration had done this as well.) I believe a rational argument can be made, but I don’t see anyone in the government making it.”

—

I think Cheney and Rummy had workable plans for both Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Both involved getting in and getting out quickly.)
Unfortunately, Powell, Condi, Bremmer and Co. had their say also.

Jul 19, 2009 - 3:17 pm 61. Doug:

“It isn’t feminism as much as the desire for a permanent nobility.”

They should rename Congress:

THE HALL OF THE ANCIENTS

(and what a haul it is)

Queen Michelle now has TWENTY TWO attendants!
…I figure @ somewhere North of 4 Million Dollars a year.
(not counting travel expenses)

Probly no contemporary Monarchy (Non Wahhabist) can match us.

Jul 19, 2009 - 3:22 pm 62. bogie wheel:

We are a nation that produces “Gossip Girl” as our defining TV show, even though hardly anyone watches it. [Gossip Girl generates about ten times more media coverage than the #1 scripted show, CSI.]

I think this is more a function of age than anything else … both age of the show, and age of the viewer demographics. And it has been thus for a long time.

CSI has been on the air since 2000, which makes it a creaky old geezer by TV standards. And the viewership of both the show (in its various iterations) and the network (CBS) skews older. When the show first hit the air and was a quick hit, it got a lot of press coverage (don’t have comparative statistics on hand, just remember the ubiquity of the cast on mag covers). But there is no “news factor” to it anymore.

So shows that are newer, whose viewership skews younger, and are seen as hipper and trendier, are far more likely to get more press than a show like CSI.

You see the exact same treatment over the years of shows similar to CSI — Diagnosis, Murder; Murder, She Wrote; JAG; NCIS — they command great popularity in viewers despite being virtually ignored by the entertainment press and completely ignored by status-making professional nods like the Emmys.

So I don’t know on what terms you would refer to “Gossip Girl” as being “our defining TV show.” Do a man-on-the-street survey and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the recognition factor for CSI is exponentially greater than that for Gossip Girl. How the latter can “define” anything for average Americans when most of them have never even heard of it is beyond me.

On the other hand, if you are talking about the inside-chatter of the entertainment press — the stuff by the Hollyweirdos, about the Hollyweirdos, for the Hollyweirdos — then, yeah, I guess GG could be seen as “defining” something. But in this case (GG) the opinions are about as relevant as an MLA presentation by a gender studies prof.

If you want to make a case of entertainment industry influence over the broad swath of the country, I think there are much better examples out there than Gossip Girl. How about Oprah? But you have already beaten that horse to death.

BTW, for comparison:

Hollywood box office revenue, 2008 – $9.78 billion

Hollywood DVD sales and rentals revenue, 2008 – $8.16 billion

2008 combined revenue of major pro sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) – $18.8 billion

Revenues, U.S. sporting goods manufacturers – $66.3 billion

Retail sporting equipment sales – $42 billion

2006 U.S. porn industry revenue (what gets declared, at any rate) – $13.33 billion

…… So if you want to compare what Americans spend on things that could be labeled as “leisure activities,” in terms of dollars and attention, sports and porn revenues are competitive with what Hollywood gets, and together they dwarf Hollywood. I defy anyone to demonstrate that sports & porn revenues are driven by female-consumer dollars.

Mars. Venus.

If you spend all your time studying Venus’ attitudes, you are missing half the picture. The American culture is not Hollywood. It is everything (or, put alternately, a jambalaya stew of all sorts of different things that make up the everything). And sports & pornography are not only part of that everything, they are a larger slice than even Hollywood.

How do we assess “the culture” and who has what sort of influence, once we include the sports and pornography industries?

To what extent do Mars and Venus even watch the same entertainment anymore … and what does that tell us about the culture?

Jul 19, 2009 - 3:52 pm 63. Doug:

Connected only by the character discussion here:
The Forgotten Man of Apollo 11, Michael Collins

Jul 19, 2009 - 3:56 pm 64. Doug:

Bogie:
California Dope Crop:
$ 18 Million
(and counting)

Jul 19, 2009 - 3:59 pm 65. Doug:

(I would argue there is a feminine component to Porn!)

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:00 pm 66. NahnCee:

If I were Whiskey’s fairy godmother, I’d be asking myself what is it, exactly, that he wants from me – what would his wish be if the genie were there to change things to what he says he wants them to be.

His continued drum-beating on certain daft ideas is either a symptom of mental illness (i.e., misogynistic woman-hatred) or – now I’m thinking – embedding propaganda nuggets in service of a larger meme.

What’s in it for Whiskey that he keeps blathering on and on and on about “what women love”?

Does he *seriously* think that the United States of America would be bigger, better and safer if women were stripped of the vote, and relegated back to a position of barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen 365/24/7? Like they are in Afghanistan, for example.

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:14 pm 67. Kinuachdrach:

“Is America being increasingly dominated by an economic oligarchy?”

Oligarchs? Let’s see — super-smart Khodorkovsky got very rich, and is now in jail. Putin, who put him there, presides over a country that can’t stomp on even tiny Georgia. The clever guys who ran GM drove it into the ground. And the able politicians who assisted them are reduced to glorifying the likes of Teddie Kennedy & Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile, the titans who run Microsoft gave us Windows Vista.

There is just too much incompetence out there to believe in an effective oligarchy operating in the shadows. There are bad things happening, of course, but we are not being manipulated by dark forces.

Everything that is going wrong is “our” fault — our fault for tolerating stupidity, incompetence, and worse. The people of Massachussets had lots of opportunities to say that a guy who could walk away & let a woman drown was not fit to be Senator. Yet they never did.

The fault is not in our stars, nor in our oligarchs, but in ourselves.

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:28 pm 68. AWH:

NahnCee,

I am sure that Whiskey can articulate it better than I, but I don’t believe he is trying to send women back to the early 1900s. Instead, he (and I) would like to see American society move to a place where it is acceptable for men to be men. Where:

– in education boys aren’t punished or drugged for acting like boys
– where activities of “alpha males” aren’t denigrated

What I see is that intellectual society and academia in the US have been fighting a battle against men for the past several decades. This battle in education and in the media has had profound negative effects on society. Some of which we are seeing in the disparity between unemployment in the current recession (e.g., more men than women out of work by a large amount).

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:30 pm 69. bogie wheel:

(I would argue there is a feminine component to Porn!)

Yah, one starts with the letter “T” .. and the other starts with the letter “A” ….

But seriously. Yes, Doug, there are female consumers of porn. But the consumer demographics are still overwhelmingly male.

I brought up the stats to try to expand the territory of the discussion.

I don’t dispute Whiskey’s observation that in much of the fare that comes out of Hollywood, men (esp. white men) are portrayed as either tyrants or morons.

But I don’t think that gives us a comprehensive picture of the culture, given the other industries I mentioned. How are women portrayed in sports & porn? Gee … look at the chick on the comic book cover that Wretchard includes above. She is but a tame version of what tens of millions of American men look at (whether they seek it out, or have it foisted upon them) regularly.

I think my point is that it is screed on both sides. Two camps shouting at each other across the abyss. Sluts & cavemen. Cavemen & sluts.

How is it again that we got here?

And can we please take the Viagra & Summer’s Eve ads somewhere other than prime-time TV? And why does there seem to be a male urinal scene in just about every other show I watch?

For pete’s sake.

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:32 pm 70. trangbang68:

Most women are aware of Zelaya’s perfidy and in favor of it is the sort of statement that discredits anything else you have to say, dude. It’s wrong on so many levels.
Whiskey does the same thing the left does in caricaturing conservatives. He turns real diverse flesh and blood people into two dimensional cartoon cutouts. People ain’t like that, homeboy. You need to get out more.
When someone constantly reads the same script, you wonder, as Nahncee muses, if they aren’t a creation of someone’s imagination. Jeff Goldstein’s blog, “Protein Wisdom” had a nasty little misanthrope named Thor who seemed too strange to be a genuine person.
What ever became of Cedarford? Did the continued existence of the Jewish state cause his carotid artery to explode?

Jul 19, 2009 - 4:39 pm 71. buddy larsen:

i figure Cedarford went to work for the new administration. Er, formally, that is.

Jul 19, 2009 - 5:58 pm 72. erc rodson:

Doug @ 60: I really liked Rummy and Cheney is a stand up guy. I think we were the victims of our own initial success in Iraq. We expected a protracted slugging match and, son of a gun!, the Iraqi army mostly di di mau’ed. So, there we were and some bright person said , “You know Saddam couldn’t make anything of this place, but we could really turn this place around”… hubris.

Well,we actually have turned it pretty much around. The Iraqi’s are the largely undeserving beneficiaries of our largess which, in fairness, they didn’t ask for.

I sure as hell don’t want another Viet Nam, which was my war, where we left a hell of a lot of the folks who worked with us hung out to dry. I even think that victory IS an exit strategy, but I think Afghanistan is going to take longer than Iraq. Too bad they don’t have oil.

A problem for our allies with trusting America is that we do change administrations. When we had the “foreign policy stops at the water’s edge” thing, that wasn’t such a big deal. Now, with the perpetual campaign, it is.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:14 pm 73. Lifeofthemind:

C4 gas been seen on other PJM blogs. If I run across him I will take a moment to introduce him to his new audience. It would be a pity if someone so shy and unassuming slipped his message by unnoticed.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:24 pm 74. no mo uro:

Much evil is afoot. Very little of what has been done or will be done is caused by any historical necessity. It is a wholly self-created crisis.

“It is worth noting that 8 years after Pearl Harbor we stood astride the world. 8 years after 911 we are spiraling into self-immolation.

Someone’s character has changed. Is it across the board or merely in our “elites”?

That is the question.”

I’ve always figured that in order for our Constitution to function, we needed a certain critical mass of the general public to be imbued with Judeo-Christian values, something over 90%.

However, at the same time, we needed a MUCH higher number of the cultural elite to posess those values, well over 95%.

FWIW.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:29 pm 75. Josh:

short answer – yes.

Clinton was totally in the pocket of anyone with a few bucks, viz the merger of oil and phone companies on his watch.

Middle class is being crushed by globalism, lower class is being given bread and circuses and total tax breaks, neither seems to have much interest in actually voting anymore, at least not on issues, not that any of the candidates makes any sense on the issues.

Anyway, the hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars the central government has been pulling out of their ass and giving to the big banks (even as they say they don’t want it, because of the strings attached), says it all. I mean, good grief.

Why doesn’t someone give me twenty billion dollars, I’ll accept a few strings.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:32 pm 76. narciso:

No, I’m seem Cedarford, posting on Ann
Althouse’s blog not so long ago, which doesn’t mean he’s not with the administration. Whiskey’s act gets old real soon, in the event of a really climactic events. all bets are off. However, that comic, sorry graphic novel, does illustrate
a point, almost inadvertently, the most resolute opponents of the incumbent are women:the soon to be ex Governor of Alaska, as the recent op ed on cap n trade shows, the
Congresswoman from Minnesota, and the blonde
polemical essayist. Which in itself is an ironic affirmation of the Gossip Girl ethos.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:42 pm 77. no mo uro:

#66 Nahncee

I generally like your posts but where do you get off asking what’s “in it for Whiskey”.

One could interpret you asking the question as the very proof for his theories.

That very question tells me a great deal about you than it does about him. Why does there have to be anything “in it” for him in order that he ask the questions he does?

And at what point did the guy ever even remotely ask for women to be barefoot and pregnant? Again, your immediate defensive words in this direction tell us a great deal more about your insecurites than his (not denying he has them).

Can you not admit that there is a society wide problem with women having no civilizational governor on their primate Darwinist influences and behavior? Is this not a subject worthy of discussion?

Can you not agree that in addition to us having problems with the male part of humanity, there are inherent problems the women might possess, taken as a statiscial whole?

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:42 pm 78. hdgreene:

Kinuachdrach comments:

There is just too much incompetence out there to believe in an effective oligarchy operating in the shadows. There are bad things happening, of course, but we are not being manipulated by dark forces.

I certainly do not think they are working in the shadows, Kinuachdrach — unless constant leaking to the New York Times is working in “the shadows.” OK, maybe now.

If there is an oligarchy, I would say it is emerging, rather than established. There is an old saying in Washington that where you stand is determined by where you sit. As more resources flow to Washington, there is a class of people who want to control — and enhance — these resources. But that does not mean their motives are bad. Rather, there is a class interest that works like gravity: it is always present but because it is always present it is seldom felt but always working. It is possible to overcome this for a time, but it requires an act of will. Otherwise, it pulls you down hill. Even David Brooks becomes a liberal.

I would not look for “dark forces” because it rather misses the point. These are good people, trying to do good. That is why they believe motive is important — because what they do often turns out bad.

This is why I identify Irony as a World Historical Force. You have good people, intelligent people — often quite accomplished and competent people — who reproduce failure. They think they can get the French Revolution right this time. Or that you can buy an “affordable home” that losses half its value in a year and it has nothing to do with their “affordable home” program. So they can now do “Affordable Health Care.” No irony there!

This is how I put it above:

We know what works and what doesn’t. But we want to do what doesn’t, because it offers immediate advantage. So knowledge of the results of past forays into “what doesn’t work” is suppressed, leading to unsatisfactory, if not outright devastating, results. On the numbers, I would say if a program to create 600,000 green jobs only increases unemployment by 3 million, we’ve gotten off easy. In this respect, the fact that President Obama holds up Spain as a model, when Spain has achieved 18 percent unemployment, says much. It certainly shows an ability to selectively appropriate data.

The reason I used the pronoun “we” is not because I think we are dealing with an evil cabal. The problem is that we cannot “disenthrall ourselves,” as Lincoln put it. Or, as another guy said: We are stuck on stupid.

The opposing forces that should check each other are now coming together to check the rest of us. Is that an Oligarchy? Perhaps not yet. But remember, when we say they are in bed together, you can often take that literally, these days.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:44 pm 79. buddy larsen:

LotM, i guess the new admin’s obvious animus towards the state of Israel has kinda unloaded C4’s guns. Or gun, that is. Nowadays, according to his theory, all should be peachy keen in this big ole happy world!

Some great links upthread.”zerohedge’ link leads to this hot little item –guess who has been, since the Oct ‘87 market meltdown, a leading expert on the Oct ‘87 market meltdown?

Help any to understand Larry Summers’ hook to the ‘Double Oughts’ (Obama Oligarchs)? Help to understand why Summers is always the first glazed-eye drooling firefighter on the scene of every global financial fire since the Clintons came to DC?

Since he’s so expert, when will he learn to warn ahead –that something that will strip the money/power out of entire national global regional booj-wah-zeez is heading their way?

What’s the purpose of all this knowledge if it’s always seemingly just to sweep up ashes?

Keep that ‘September Panic’ in mind. And the residue it left in the DTCC. What is being done about the phantom ‘naked short’ un-shares sitting in the DTCC? Deepcapture dot com has some ideas.

Re ‘what is a DTCC?”, think of a capacitor in an electrical circuit –it hid the gigantic buildup of CDS until the propitious political charge built up enought voltage to electrify a political moment.

So who runs the DTCC? Stand by. Gotta find the right link. But, heh, you already know, it’s Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and the Federal Reserve, don’t you.

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:55 pm 80. no mo uro:

“These are good people, trying to do good.”

“They think they can get the French Revolution right this time.”

Please, PLEASE provide for me the logical train here!

Jul 19, 2009 - 6:56 pm 81. erc rodson:

Once upon a time, I was very enthusiastic about the writings of Ayn Rand. Her intellectual consistency and absolutism was appealing, but eventually I figured out that it was not a program that would run. Ditto the Libertarians.

Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, inter alia, really did describe accurately the thought processes of the elites and their use of government to keep what they had and prevent upstarts from getting into the game. hd @ 78 is correct: good people, with all the sincerity in the world, can absolutely create a disaster because they misunderstand the nature of the problem.

Hubris is more the danger to the liberals than to the conservatives, since liberals believe that everything can be fixed with enough control by the anointed, while conservatives are more likely to remember that Murphy is not to be mocked.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:03 pm 82. buddy larsen:

This thing with CIT –upon which so much red state small biz –so many jobs and so many small regional unTARPed banks –depends for operating finance, and which a bailout fer would cost a few bill (as opposed to the hundreds upon hundreds of billions showered on every entity that could be forced into the O-O bed) is gonna be a big revelation for a lotta eyes.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:06 pm 83. Lifeofthemind:

buddy larsen,
Larry Summers has one trait that makes him invaluable. He has already been shot and left to bleed.
By rescuing him the Obamists have bought an operative with no internal brakes. He is like a Zombie now. Isn’t it interesting that the powerful coalition that ousted him from Harvard, cast him forth from Paradise with flaming sword to bar his return, has had not a peep to say about his return to a position of influence? When have these extremists ever been so accommodating once they settled on a victim? True they sold themselves out regarding the more serious offenses of Bill Clinton but they never before had to reverse course like this. It is more akin to the cycle of adulation denunciation and rehabilitation in a Stalinist party drama.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:06 pm 84. sirius_sir:

buddy, that ‘September Panic’ remains a story to be thoroughly investigated and explored. But then, I thought the same about the Wilson-Plame-Fitzgerald (Let’s Undermine a Sitting President) Affair.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:24 pm 85. JFSanders031:

Kinuachdrach: “The fault is not in our stars, nor in our oligarchs, but in ourselves.

Like I have said before, The rise AND fall of civilizations depends ENTIRELY on the quality of it’s citizens.

Now do those of us who make the grade ONCE AGAIN pick up the yoke and drag the worthless sunsabitches forward or do we let a few billion of them die off and make the load a LOT lighter.

69. bogie wheel: “And can we please take the Viagra & Summer’s Eve ads somewhere other than prime-time TV? And why does there seem to be a male urinal scene in just about every other show I watch?”

Who in their right mind watches network television anymore??? Are you THAT guy?

73. LotM: It is SO nice to not have to wear out a mouse wheel every Saturday scrolling past his posts.

82. buddy larsen: I kinda thought that would be what you would say. That sucks on ice.

The “Oligarchy” has been with us since Alexander Hamilton started whispering behind Jefferson’s back… In a country ostensibly founded on the principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which can be assumed to be the accumulation of large amounts of very hard assets. Because we all know that if they tell you money can’t buy happiness it is because they don’t want you lowly stinkin peasents crashin their cotillion)
the concentration of said happiness is what the whole damn game is about!

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:35 pm 86. sirius_sir:

“Undermine” seems to be the word of the hour. I just came across this article from the Opinion Journal: “The politicized 2007 NIE report undermined the Bush Administration’s efforts to rally international support for tough action against Iran.”

That isn’t exactly news to most of us here. But the source of this critique is interesting, a paraphrased assessment of which by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency and the German Supreme Court appears near the end of the article: “The court’s decision and the BND’s reports raise the question of how, or why, U.S. intelligence officials could have come to the conclusion that Iran suspended its program in 2003. German intelligence officials wonder themselves. BND sources have told me that they have shared their findings and documentation with their U.S. colleagues ahead of the 2007 NIE report — as is customary between these two allies. It appears the Americans have simply ignored this evidence despite repeated warnings from the BND. This suggests not so much a failure of U.S. intelligence but its sabotage.”

“Germany’s Spies Refuted the 2007 NIE Report”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124803669414063037.html

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:42 pm 87. bogie wheel:

Who in their right mind watches network television anymore??? Are you THAT guy?

“House” and Steelers games. About half of “24″ this season till I fell behind. Guilty.

Dude, I gotta watch *some* network fare, since I’m too cheap to pay for cable!

The rest is Internet and Netflix.

P.S. It *was* a good season for hockey-watching here in Pittsburgh! But pshaw, I boast too much. Heh.

bogie wheel out

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:42 pm 88. NahnCee:

no mo ur – *IF* you had been around for more than a nonce, you would know that Belmont Club has been a fixture for several years now. Further, that Whiskey has been blaspheming women for the same amount of time. I have upon other occasions attempted to answer him rationally, then decided that he’s nuts and usually ignore his diatribes.

I’m now merely considering a third alternative, which is that for some reason he’s a propagandist for something somewhere and has an underlying motive for his ongoing insane blather.

If women are Beta’s and Obama supporters, I have to point out that equally men are part of the “elite” academia, media and Wall Street scenes, so it just seems dumb to me to focus solely on a thesis (over and over again) that all women want thus and so.

And for you to jump on me using the term “immediate defensive words” just marks you as the newest of newbies, and also makes me wonder what YOUR problem with uppity women might be, also.

Run away now and search the BC archives for Whiskey and woman-hatred, and educate yourself.

////

“Some of which we are seeing in the disparity between unemployment in the current recession (e.g., more men than women out of work by a large amount).”

Issue the Twoth: A male person has recently started lurking outside the front door of my building in downtown Los Angeles. He’s white, late 50’s to early 60’s, pink complexion with a receding hairline, and he smokes. All the time. He’s overweight with a gut that hangs over his belt and his trousers look to be polyester with age-pebbles on them.

I’ve been thinking to myself that he’s been laid off from somewhere else and is working as a temp at some office in my building, perhaps as a CPA or a para-legal.

Hint to middle-aged gentlemen who’ve been laid off: control your smoking habit. If you need to leave your duty post every half hour to travel multiple flights of stairs to the ground floor and then go outside to grab what is still an illegal cigarette, it does not bode well for your flexibility or reliability, or continued employment.

I’m not sure what you can do about being overweight and frazzled-looking, but seriously — retire the polyester trousers and invest in something that doesn’t reek of 1984 and desperation. Ditto the tie that isn’t quite long enough and leaves a huge expanse of belly between the bottom of the tie and the top of the belt.

I feel sorry for the dude but, really, in today’s job market, polyester and smoking just are not competitive, and leave no room to ascertain how good your professional skills might be.

Jul 19, 2009 - 7:45 pm 89. buddy larsen:

sirius/86; re your quote from BND This suggests not so much a failure of U.S. intelligence but its sabotage
–straws in the wind to help understand the strange passivity of the GWB admin’s wind-down phase.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:09 pm 90. buddy larsen:

Also your previous comment, on the need for a full investigation of the September Panic –add to that, the strange persistance of the system-suicidal mark-to-market, the strange inexplicable cancellation –just in time, fuses for the fireworks, of the uptic rule, and the strange (just-in-time to set-up the Fannie & Freddie blow-off) extension of allowable leverage in the too-bigs-to-fails, by a factor of, oh, 3 or so (no, not “.3″ but THREE).

remember the pre-late 2007 background, Bush’s “good economy” and fifty some-odd straight months of GDP growth & low unemployment, etcetera, was the “it’s the economy, stupid’ Gigantosaurus Rex that was standing in the way of the Democrats and the 2008 election.

Good gawd amighty, how much ‘unfortuitous coincidence’ are we ’spose to swallow, anyway?

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:21 pm 91. Lifeofthemind:

NahnCee,
Your frustration with whiskey is understandable but do not get to upset with men in general or The Club in particular. The distinctions that I for one draw between whiskey and MC or C4 may seem arbitrary but I hope that they are defensible. The latter two I see as using the BC as a vehicle to express their animus at the members of this community and the communities and civilization we cherish. The bottom line is that they do not choose to be of the Club even when they are in it. Our fermented friend truly means no harm, even to you. For one thing while his mantra may be narrow and repetitive it is not without some merit. Fortunately most participants in this discussion reply to him by drawing out other factors, failures on the parts of men that may have a synergistic relationship to the forces that are described regarding women.

When we as members of your virtual family start looking seedy I hope that you will discreetly brush off our shoulders and smooth our jackets before sending us off to battle. That is sure to get a better response then pasting long passages in a foreign language and expressing contempt for those present, as someone does.

Bottom line, he is not what Dr. Johnson called “A most unclubable man.”

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:29 pm 92. buddy larsen:

while GWB, under pressure on the war ever since the nasty Kerry campaign of ‘04, was stuck patrolling the front porch, they stole everything in the house out the back door.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:35 pm 93. buddy larsen:

…which lets him off the hook only by the tiniest little smidgin. well, no, not ‘off the hook’ but not ‘on the hook by choice’. oh hell i dunno what i mean. engrish not my first ranguage, chop chop.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:47 pm 94. Lifeofthemind:

buddy larsen,
If I dodge a bullet by “the tiniest little smidgin” I will not demand a Do Over.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:52 pm 95. hdgreene:

“These are good people, trying to do good.”

“They think they can get the French Revolution right this time.”

Please, PLEASE provide for me the logical train here!

You may be able to correct me on this, no mo uro, but I think a lot of the European left looked back with nostalgia at the French Revolution. The leaders of the movements of 1848 where probably good people trying to do good, but were saved by never getting power. I don’t think those who started the Russian Revolution wanted to end up deliberately starving much of the nation and working millions more to death. But at some point the Sociopaths take over.

It used to puzzle me when I’d run into people on the left who regarded the French revolution as more authentic than the American Revolution. I knew Trotskyites who thought they could improve on Stalinism and Stalinist who figured they got it about right the first time. And these were nice, idealistic guys. Friends of mine, in fact.

I was talking to a lawyer friend one time who told me he was going to study Marx (in fact, the Stalinist recommended the reading material). I asked him why, and he said “Because it is a powerful analytical tool.” I said, “Yeah, if you want the wrong answers.” But later I realized that you can control the answer using a thick cloud of BS. But this came from one of the smartest guys I know. A sincere humanist. But logical? No, it was not logical.

If you are looking for the logic train in politics, I think it left the station around 1790 after a very brief stay.

Jul 19, 2009 - 8:59 pm 96. Tcobb:

What’s in it for Whiskey that he keeps blathering on and on and on about “what women love”?

Does he *seriously* think that the United States of America would be bigger, better and safer if women were stripped of the vote, and relegated back to a position of barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen 365/24/7? Like they are in Afghanistan, for example.

I might not agree with Whiskey’s basic premises (and you certainly don’t seem to either) but the fact is that if women weren’t allowed to vote in the last presidential election Obama would not have won.

If anybody’s keeping score–one point for Whiskey.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:00 pm 97. buddy larsen:

Nor Bill Clinton. Two points for Whiskey. OTOH, if evolution hadn’t evolved in such a way as to maintain the species, the species wouldn’t around to hold elections in the first place. And women and men are the way they are because that’s what survived. Does the female drive to evaluate on genetic markers get fooled by the master actors that the system throws up? Yup –but them getting fooled is only the half of the story –men getting fooled is the other half. We just get fooled differently. We all need a better system. The dart and the phonebook sounds pretty good right about now. Or “Sarah”.

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:46 pm 98. Charles:

How to Stage a Revolution

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:48 pm 99. Oh Dear:

96.
And if men couldn’t vote, they couldn’t run for office and Palin not Obama would be President…..

43%, I believe, of woman overall, voted GOP in the last election. That is not an unsubstantial number of women. Hands up those women on this list who would like to be disenfranchised.

Why don’t we just raise the voting age–66% of those 18-29 voted for Obama.

Or why not take away the vote from African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and all those under 64 because all those groups voted for Obama over McCain.

Why isn’t anyone making those arguments? Because it is still taboo to criticize any social group apart from women?

Jul 19, 2009 - 9:53 pm 100. Tcobb:

#99/Oh Dear
I didn’t say anything about taking the vote away from anyone, nor would I advocate doing so. But the plain fact is that if the women’s votes in the last presidential election had all been discarded Obama would not have won. That’s a statement of fact, not of values.

I regret that you find facts offensive or threatening. Its a common disease.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:08 pm 101. buddy larsen:

Oh/99; raising the age has been brought up many times –it has one huge advantage –everyone not yet old enough to vote WILL BE soon! Ageing, growing up, is a universally shared experience –all those old enough were once too young –no race, gender, economic, educational, or intellectual discrimination at all, anywhere. Merely a nod toward a truth –the same truth as pertains throughout society –for some things there needs to be an age entry barrier. Driving, drinking, gun-owning, contract rights, any potentially risky activity has an age barrier. voting a political leadership at age 18 is too young –we’ve just made a counting error, that’s all. The age needed to’ve been @ once adult responsibilities have come into a person’s life.

we just cannot let an Obama girl you tube create the future of the United States. but we did, didn’t we.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:11 pm 102. buddy larsen:

charles @ 98 –yo link are busted, pard –

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:25 pm 103. GerryP:

Peter Boston @ 52

This doesn’t really relate to #52, but to a link you provided on another thread. I waited too late to respond there, so will try here. You linked to some tables on inequality of wealth by Prof. William Domhoff.

Dr. Domhoff was kind enough to give me a couple of hours to critique a related study I did, back when I too was a radical-left economist. He is very leftist, and his presentation that you cited was very slanted, to produce an impression of more money inequality than actually exists in the U.S.

His figures were not false, just slanted. First, he used WEALTH inequality rather than INCOME inequality, probably because it is more unequal. Even then, it is not as unequal as shown, because those figures do not usually show NET WEALTH. Rather, they show a total of assets owned, without balancing them with debts owed. Kind of a party-pooper to point it out.

Surprisingly, many very wealthy people spend more than they get and do lose everything. (See “The Millionaire Next Door.”) Others never get out of debt, and have little NET worth.

If you look at income inequality, it is not as great as wealth inequality. Especially since various long-term studies show constant, large turn-over in every income group – low, medium and high. In short, in the U.S. most income inequality is temporary, depending on where people are in their life stages – young, or kids in college, or retired, etc.

Could the super-wealthy control things if they wanted? My study showed that, theoretically, they could. But no creditable study has ever shown that they do, or ever did. It would take super-human coordination, discipline and focus for such long-term coordination by 100 or so tycoon families. Not even the Rockefeller group at their well-coordinated peak ever achieved that kind of control.

But as Kinuachdrach points out in #52, conspiricy theories about the wicked capitalists usually don’t pan out. We ordinary citizens just dont’t do our part, which seems to count for a lot more of our troubles.

Crony Capitalism is another matter, as erc rodson points out at #81. Ayn Rand wrote about it. But the best is probably Thomas J. DiLorenzo in “How Capitalism Saved America.” Crony Capitalism – trying to get a jump on your competitors by getting the government to take your side – is destructive to both capitalism and to democracy. And we’re drowning in it.

What we are getting right now is Crony Capitalism on steriods. I never saw such a mess. We are going to have to shovel out the stables when we get a grip again.

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:28 pm 104. M. Simon:

Clear ‘em out and wall the sonzabitches off.

I have a different kind of wall in mind. As in “up against the…”

Jul 19, 2009 - 10:57 pm 105. Robohobo:

Kingston53 @ 24:

The administration is in a race against the clock.

True, but the question is why? The answer? That one is not so apparent. Why does all this change have to be done this year? What does The 0bamanation have in store for us next year? I do not see that our society and culture is so broken that EVERYTHING has to change immediately.

Nahncee @ 88:

…blaspheming women…

What? You people are holy now? C’mon. And then you launch into a diatribe that fairly well proves most of whiskey’s points. Nice.

Whiskey points out many things that have frosted my pebbles for years. You cannot go through a night of watching the idiot box without seeing men in general bashed. We have become the new straight man, as it were, for all sorts of scurrilous attacks. We are the bumbling husband that can do nothing right – can’t fix a faucet, change the oil, counsel the kids, etc – the examples are endless. I used to just shrug it off but after time of having the same spot rubbed and rubbed, it has become raw. And I am tired of having to defend myself in my own house.

My spouse works in an industry that employs women exclusively. Also, my one child is now a young adult female, but I remember the trauma that was induced upon her by other young females in HS. I have also worked my entire life and seen women in the workforce. Here is fact, if men treated other men as women treat other women there would be fights and beatings daily, nay hourly, in the workplace. So, there is nothing that you can say or do that would have me totally discount whiskey. I think it probable that your objections to what he has to say speak more about your own blind spots than you realize.

Buddy @ 90:

Good gawd amighty, how much ‘unfortuitous coincidence’ are we ’spose to swallow, anyway?

Precisely. But that would expose lots and lots of creepy crawly critters that the current POTUS, The 0bamanation, does not want to see in sunlight.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:03 pm 106. M. Simon:

64. Doug:

Bogie:
California Dope Crop:
$ 18 Million
(and counting)
Jul 19, 2009 – 3:59 pm

I think you meant $18 billion. Now let us think of it in terms of agricultural commodities. Suppose as a WAG we say the crop is 40 million users at 1 oz per month. (probably a high estimate) for the whole USA. 30 million pounds a year. At $10 a pound (very high grade hot house tomatoes) that is $300 million a year at retail. Proportionate to population the California share is $60 million retail cost. The difference between that and $18 billion is prohibition.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:25 pm 107. buddy larsen:

robo, well, back to the lede (the stress-test whitewash), note how the congressional hearings –and even the conventional wisdom being painted over such cases as Bernie Madoff –in re ‘what happened’, tend to settle on generalizations about human nature –’greed’ and ‘mistakes in enforcement’. You betcha. When you get pushed off a cliff, the push does you no harm, neither does who pushed ya. It’s not even the rocks below, really. It’s you –it’s just that you stopped too suddenly. You killed your own self, dummy.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:26 pm 108. M. Simon:

88. NahnCee,

Tobacco is a drug. An anti-depressant. It also seems to be a more prominent feature of our most creative people. Something it seems to have in common with pot smokers (another smoked anti-depressant). From my experience in the early days of the computer revolution I’d say about 1/2 those guys were heads. Look up Wozniak and LSD. Jobs and LSD. Microsoft and LSD. Paul Allen and LSD.

Here is a start:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/microsoft_AP-thumb.jpg

As to dumping the fat and the polyester – yep.

Jul 19, 2009 - 11:55 pm 109. Oh Dear:

100: No, I don’t find your “facts” threatening and offensive. I find your argumentation elementary and simplistic because you don’t want to deal with the reality that those under 64, African-Americans and Latinos and Asian-Americans voted for Obama in larger proportions than women. If the GOP is going to restore itself–if there truly is going to be a two party system (or even a three party system) in this country–it is no good whining (as some in this camp do–not necessarily yourself)–that women are at fault. Those who do, insult me and every other right thinking, right voting woman out there and on here. Some people on this site are doing nothing to disabuse us of the belief that you would rather disenfranchise women than stop and think about why the GOP is failing women. (bloody obvious to me)

Jul 20, 2009 - 12:20 am 110. Karen Yvonne:

Economic benefit must be sundered from political power. Somehow.

Chile did it, during the Pinochet years. The cost was pretty horrific though.

I believe Obama still would have won (but by a slimmer margin) had no women voted. If anyone can demonstrate otherwise, I’d like to see the proof.

Jul 20, 2009 - 12:24 am 111. Doug:

Indeed, M Simon.
It was very late!
Billions it is.
Soon we’ll be talkin Quadrillions wrt the Feds!

Jul 20, 2009 - 12:30 am 112. Doug:

Oh Dear @109
If your 43% figure is correct, then the rate for unmarried women w/o children voting GOP must be very low indeed.
I assume you are refering to abortion, re: bloody obvious?
Ideal would be only parents, both men and women, and for officeholders as well.
The loss of some exceptional unmarried/childless would be more than made by screening out most of the single/childless eternal children.

Jul 20, 2009 - 12:56 am 113. bogie wheel:

An anti-depressant. It also seems to be a more prominent feature of our most creative people. Something it seems to have in common with pot smokers (another smoked anti-depressant). From my experience in the early days of the computer revolution I’d say about 1/2 those guys were heads.

As a creative type myself, but one who has never been seriously tempted to try out any, errr, substance (there but for the grace of God go I), I’ve always been curious about this connection between creatives and drinking and drugs.

Ditto the connection (if any) between creativity and mental/emotional disorders — depression, bipolar, schizophrenia.

Geez, just go down the list of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th century — Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Chandler, Mailer, Williams, O’Neill — alcoholics all. Flannery O’Connor is one of the rare birds who never got caught up in that particular trap, though she had the lupus cross to bear.

Personally I don’t think any of it enhances creative output — just the personal melodrama.

But I often wonder whether Cali in the 1970s was, for those who experienced it, kind of a tech version of Paris in the 1920s.

Jul 20, 2009 - 4:44 am 114. no mo uro:

Nahncee-

I may be a ‘newbie’, whatever that means, in terms of posting, but I’ve been reading BC for years, long enough to see your responses to Whiskey and attempts to have him put forth a solution. His response is that one doesn’t exist, other than an organic breakdown and fear. I don’t WANT to like what he says but as time passes and the left keeps control of the bully pulpits of media, entertainment, and the education industry, it looks like he may be onto a kernel of truth – both about the return to lower primate mating models in the absence of societal and religious social norming governors on single women, changes in their voting habits that reflect that trend, and use of fear and retribution against the left that may end up being the only way out of this mess.

Look, I have my differences with the guy, too. The evil seed of the practice of women turning into what he describes and men into enemies has been heavily fertilized by Gramscian termite damage, that is clearly proven by the facts on the ground, but it is like a great log in his eye about which he will not bend. Also, his ideas are largely limited to single women/men in urban life, and don’t explain the NPR suburban/rural leftist mommy Obama worship thing very well, if at all.

Others have made the points I would make in response to your post, notably robohobo #105 and his comments about your selfview as a goddess ‘blasphemed’ (a little humility, please!), and his bits about your diatribe unwittingly proving some of Whiskey’s points because of your blind spots (and I’ll freely admit I have my own).

But this was best:
“I regret that you find facts offensive or threatening. Its a common disease.”

A little harsh, perhaps, but we all have to do a reality check from time to time and pull back and reassess our worldview when the facts on the ground support a different conclusion than the one we would prefer. I recognize, Nahncee, that the bad things that women seem to be doing along with help from media, entertainment, government, and the education system cast women like yourself into a bad light, and you would prefer not to have that light cast your way. I don’t prefer to have my maleness castigated because some guys cheat on their wives, either, but I’m not about to deny their existence because I’m afraid of how said existence might make me look.

The answer is not denial that these things are happening for fear that it will cast a bad light on you. Resolving cognitive dissonance in a way which jibes with the reality of outcome is something the center/right/libertarian sector is supposed to be a lot better at than the left.

Nor is the answer to shoot the messenger (ie Whiskey).

The answer, Nahncee, is to recognize that some of your most precious ideas about women and society and their politics might not be exactly right, that men pointing that out are NOT attacking you personally or ganging up on you as a female but rather are relating true facts, and for you to admit that there may be data sets and information about which you didn’t have previous knowledge, and that there are others who can see some truth in those facts that you perhaps did not.

We all need to do this, from time to time, yourself included. Fred who used to post here regaled us with tales of his awakenings. Lord knows I’ve had to do it in my life. It’s a big component of wisdom.

If you can’t do it, you end up like Arianna Huffington, who was so incapable, for reasons of pride and inflexibility, at reconciling her platitudes with reality that she ended up a leftist. Rather than be brutally honest with herself and admit she might have been wrong about certain things, and adapting to how the world really is.

I’ll continue to read and enjoy your posts.

Jul 20, 2009 - 4:59 am 115. no mo uro:

“The leaders of the movements of 1848 where probably good people trying to do good, but were saved by never getting power. I don’t think those who started the Russian Revolution wanted to end up deliberately starving much of the nation and working millions more to death. But at some point the Sociopaths take over.”

hd greene

I think that the facts support the notion that the sociopaths were, in fact, the ones that started these things knowing fully the horror and suffering that would occur, and that well meaning dupes went along for the novelty and for the ride, only to be smashed themselves in the end. Think of Lenin’s comments about killing off his opponents and treating them as something less than human, obstacles to be removed instead of human beings. Ayers comments about 25 million needing to be killed or sent to camps, for example.

FWIW.

Jul 20, 2009 - 5:20 am 116. Wadeusaf:

“What women love”?

Why every time I read Whiskey on women, do I flash on Lilly Von Schtup…, “they quote Byron and Shelly then jump on your belly and bust your balloon.”

Feeling tired? Remember “Serutan spells natures backwards?” Weren’t they taken to court for false advertisement too? About sums up the unread economic logic of the tarp and trade bills, er the cap and tax dance uh, the carp and smoke scams.

Personally I feel dizzy after trying to follow all the possibilities. Murphy be damned, we are going to get it right this time just like that proverbial monkey on the royal typewriter. That the odds are slightly in the monkeys favor does not deter my thinking in the least that this is not a cabal of godless do-gooders and know it alls.

Jul 20, 2009 - 5:20 am 117. bogie wheel:

The 2008 election, as near as I can tell, was a 52/46 split among those who voted (still nowhere near the entire eligible American adult population, as someone has already pointed out). A 3% swing, therefore, would have made it a photo-finish 49/49, and a 4% swing would have broken in McCain’s favor 50/48.

The demographics on the votes cast for Obama (as best I can determine – this is NOT a straightforward task esp. when done on one’s limited free time):

96% of African American votes (12% of electorate)

66% of Hispanic votes (7% of electorate)

56% of female votes

70% of unmarried female votes

41% of white male votes (36% of electorate)

46% of white female votes

55% of white votes (76% of electorate)

54% of Catholic votes (27% of electorate)

25% of evangelical votes (14% of electorate)

66% of under 30s votes (17-18% of electorate)

71% of first-time voters

63% of Asian votes (2.5% of electorate)

78% of Jewish votes (3% of electorate)

49% of senior votes (16% of electorate)

*************************

So, it appears that when you slice and dice the percentage of Obama’s votes, multiplied by the punching weight of various demographics in the 2008 voting turnout, there are a number of demographic slices that, when broken out in isolation, could be said to have provided Obama with that 3.1%+ swing margin of victory.

Heck, you could even say white males “got Obama elected” (i.e., “without their votes, he would not have won”). Sure, the majority of them voted for McCain, but the PERCENTAGE of them who voted for Obama, times the PERCENTAGE of them who voted overall, more than covers that 3.1% margin. Ditto Catholics, seniors, and even Hispanics and evangelicals (just barely). There are only a few voter combinations above that did not and could not possibly have provided that winning margin (Jews & Asians).

So while it’s convenient to make women, blacks, under 30s, etc. the “whipping boy” (so to speak) in this past election, I think that isolating one demographic above all the others tends to skew the picture.

IMO, there are more useful ways to discuss voting demographics: (1) as trends over an extended period of time, and (2) in the context of the particular event phenomena of any particular election, given that voter turnout is not a fixed factor from election to election.

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:08 am 118. no mo uro:

“And remember, Gritto spelled sideways is Ottrig”

Moe Howard

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:12 am 119. bogie wheel:

55% of white votes (76% of electorate)

Cr*p. Make that 43% of the white vote. I copied the McCain number mistakenly there. But the overall point still holds (percentage of vote times percentage of electorate).

I’m not a math person but I try! (maybe I shouldn’t)

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:25 am 120. buddy larsen:

the palindromist drives
a toyota
race car

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:31 am 121. buddy larsen:

well, what the heck, why not?

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:46 am 122. Doug:

Goldman Sucks is a beloved American Institution, Buddy.
That’s not funny.

Jul 20, 2009 - 7:35 am 123. Doug:

btw Buddy,
Do things like Goldman’s performance affect “leading economic indicators?”

Rufus is touting this:

LEI (Leading Economic Indicators) just came out UP 0.7.
That, followiing last month’s 1.3 is Very Strong.

My gut tells me there is something wrong.
Then again, I’ve had gas pains before.

Jul 20, 2009 - 7:40 am 124. Night Owl:

“Is America being increasingly dominated by an economic oligarchy?”

Increasingly it would appear so. They took advantage of the capitalist system to get their wealth and power, and will now try to destroy it in order to keep it to themselves. The leftist lie of social equality would be a useful tool in this endeavor.

Jul 20, 2009 - 9:03 am 125. Night Owl:

“I might not agree with Whiskey’s basic premises (and you certainly don’t seem to either) but the fact is that if women weren’t allowed to vote in the last presidential election Obama would not have won.”

Probably true. But that type of society might have other more undesirable aspects. Compare societies today where women are denied rights, with ours, to get an idea.

Jul 20, 2009 - 9:49 am 126. Karen Yvonne:

It seems that groups who’ve been denied the right to vote in the past, whether women or minorities, are particularly prone to falling for bad ideas and end up hurting the cause of liberty instead of helping it.

Jul 20, 2009 - 10:13 am 127. trangbang68:

The defenders of Whiskey’s rants are puzzling to me. Do you really believe Obama is rooting for America to get nuked? Granted we live in a feminized, Sodomite -friendly society and urban youth voted for Obama in numbers, but every woman is not a white man hating bitch with a pair of shears to cut off the family jewels. What kind of reality do you live in,I mean really?

Jul 20, 2009 - 10:21 am 128. blert:

Goldman Sachs shows every sign of engaging in a ‘bust-out.’

That GS is undercapitalized was evident only nine months ago.

If all GS assets were marked to market she’d be broke.

Her exposure to asset declines is insane due to high gearing.

But then, that’s true for the entire financial sector: they’re all zombies.

Each in their own way being more broke than the other.

Wells Fargo has a black hole in LA mortgages…

Credit Card lending is now a nightmare for everyone, we have Great Depression level unemployment in California — coming soon to a state near you. The BLS statistics are BS.

Citi and BofA are bleeding so bad that they have to sell off their winners to report viable earnings.

Huge gross earnings are being completely zapped by write-downs.

The Quantitative Easing project has caused dollar revulsion: China, Japan, Russia are all moving to shorten maturities. Soon Uncle Sam will be financing the Obamination on the credit card — T bills.

Monkeying around with interest rates and the printing press must cause capital to flow into the wrong goods/ investments. Given enough rope, the Fed will strangle the economy. False pricing is hardly different than centrally planning the American economy.

Everything about H says he has central planning as his prime object.

Be terrified.

Jul 20, 2009 - 10:33 am 129. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”"will Hope and Change result in effort to break the power of the oligarchy (assuming it exists) or become a program to concentrate control in their hands?”"”"”"”

The latter. Irony of ironies, the “left/progressive/socialist messiah” that the left has been waiting for is going to transform the governing structure of the country into the malignant fantasy that America’s left always railed against.

I knew early on that Obama was a fraud, I just didn’t know he was one across the ideological spectrum.

Jul 20, 2009 - 11:00 am 130. Night Owl:

“Can you not admit that there is a society wide problem with women having no civilizational governor on their primate Darwinist influences and behavior? Is this not a subject worthy of discussion?”

“both about the return to lower primate mating models in the absence of societal and religious social norming governors on single women”

You’re saying that in order to control the male drive to procreate with every female- in other words limit his Darwinist influences and behavior- we have to place limits on the behavior or choices of women- ie. with modesty, and chastity. Marriage and fidelity are traditional governors placed on both sexes.

(I’m not sure how to limit the Darwinistic desire for women to mate with alpha males, unless we force them into arranged marriages.)

Women’s behavior is thus pivotal to the level of civility in a society. And how women are treated is a measure of the level of civilization in a society.

A balance needs to be reached in terms of how much limits we place on ourselves, and women in particular. If the balance swings too far in ether direction society suffers- Sodom & Gomorrah vs. the burqa.

Both comments make me think. Good points.

Jul 20, 2009 - 11:09 am 131. blert:

U-6 is acknowledged to be over 16% nationally…

But look at all the players not counted:

Independent Contractors — a common form for programmers…

Illegal immigrants — job losses have been massive…

Commissioned Agents — real estate professionals getting hammered…

Sole-proprietors — these capitalists have seen their wages crushed yet normally can’t get unemployment benefits. There are a lot of tradesmen in this situation.

And then there’s the impact of the average work week dropping down to only 33 hrs! In terms of wages lost the shrinking average hours is as if 3 million more were unemployed. ( a small number times a really huge number still returns a mighty big number )

And to top it all off the BLS is scamming everyone with their Birth/Death Model. They’re using WAG to project the birth of new businesses going on a tear right into the teeth of this massive credit contraction. A credit vise is exactly what stops new business formation cold.

Since January the BLS has invented over one million new business start-ups that never occurred. Naturally, they reduced the number of unemployed by that amount.

After making corrections it becomes apparent that California is already at unemployment in the high twenties. ( 26-29% )

Oregon, Nevada, Arizona are in the same neighborhood.

If unemployment benefits are not extended further — right away — a tidal wave of poverty and despair will boil across the land.

My favorite charity is the local ‘food closet’ — free groceries to the needy without paperwork established by the local churches across sectarian lines.

The surge in demand is evident. All too many are plainly living out of their cars.

This Greatest Depression is absolutely tracking the first one — except it’s worse. The trajectory of international trade is down much more than it was in the 30’s. The manufacturing contraction is of a similar scale — only for Detroit the contraction figures to be permanent.

The harvest is of real concern: uneconomic ammonia prices must cause crop yields to plunge. That’s the ringer — no one is expecting yields to drop like a stone. Instead the focus is on the weather and the number of acres planted.

I’ll tell you why the acreage went up. Knowing that yields were destined to drop every farmer planted even more.

Rocketing food prices with the unemployed being thrown from the bus = food riots breaking out everywhere.

BTW have you noticed how the decline in restaurant business is killing the dairy herd? It’s in the cheese: restaurants are huge buyers of cheeses ( pizza anyone ? ) and sales have been hammered. The loss of cheese income has cheese makers not purchasing milk to such a degree that wholesale milk pricing has cratered. The dairymen are killing their cows as fast as they can.

So even an item considered a staple turns out to be vulnerable to discretionary spending curtailment.

On present trends, Vegas may end up a ghost town.

////

The good news: the Russian navy is rusting into history. The Russian ship building infrastructure is toast.

What a tragedy!

Jul 20, 2009 - 11:16 am 132. no mo uro:

trangbang68:

Why can’t someone recognize certain truths in Whiskey’s writings without simulataneously buying into the entirety of his rants, or without claiming that he is misrepresenting every last female in America?

When did Whiskey or anyone else claim that every woman was a shear-wielding hater?

Do you deny that the social phenomenon he describes is not worthy of discussion, or that it isn’t a major factor in electoral politics? If you do deny it, why, precisely?

You’re not worried by vast swathes of our young women deciding peremptorily that they’ll never have a lasting relationship or three or four kids with a guy unless he’s extremely rich and powerful and yet simultaneously willing to do whatever they (the women) tell him to do, and that guys who don’t fit that description are treated as drunken one-night-stands at best (if they happen to be kowtowing metrosexuals) and something less than human beings at worst (if they happen to be regular guys)?

You’ve never observed or read about the statistics of this behavior as being common, nowadays?

Look, Whiskey misses out on a chunk of the Obamamania population, and many posters here like me have gone to great pains at BC to point out people who don’t fit this demographic and yet are still guzzling the messianic koolaid. Doesn’t mean his ‘man-hating anonymous urban women’ don’t exist or aren’t a big factor in Obama’s power base.

Jul 20, 2009 - 1:26 pm 133. GerryP:

Whiskey’s complaints do have some basis in truth. As a woman, I admit that.

But where did these things come from? My perspective differs from Whiskey’s because: 1. Boomer’s memories only go back so far. Mine go back a lot further. 2. I have counseled scores of young women about dating and marrying.

That makes me conclude:
1. Whiskey’s situation did not exist significantly before the “free-sex” revolution of the 1960s. After that, young women had little social support to deny sex to suitors before (or without) marriage. Young men also got more support for demanding sex before or without marriage. Or as a condition for dating. The underlying problem here is the inability of most young women to marry early, or at all. That is matched by the lack of incentive for young men to marry young and significantly more faithfully.

2. Alpha males could not play as much havoc with that older situation. Non-alpha males were almost guaranteed spouses. Most women were almost guaranteed spouses. Happily, that also meant most children were born to married fathers and mothers, living together.

2. That old system caused some kinds of harm for individuals, true. But its destruction gave rise to much more malignant damages.

First and foremost: fatherlessness soared from about 6% in 1960 to about 36% of all children now. That led to social disasters we are still discovering. One was a nearly-matching increase in crime rates. That turned out to come from a new criminal class drawn largely from the new pool of fatherless kids. (Most fatherless kids do not become criminals. But most felons do come from the pool of fatherless kids.)

My counseling experience leads me to strongly suspect that many of the behaviors among women that Whisky deplores now, can be traced to the refusal of so many more young men to commit to marriage. Or even to date without sex.

A young man’s “fear of committment” closes the best options a young woman has. What she does to adjust to that hard reality, are all worse options than young women had before. (When Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy)

Men and women both are paying heavy prices from the fall-out from that socially-approved “free sex.” Just another example of unintended consequences.

And what was it that unrepressed sex was supposed to bring? The famous bumper sticker said it – “Make Love, Not War.” Free sex was going to rid us of war and violence! And social and personal dysfunctions! How has that worked out?

Jul 20, 2009 - 2:28 pm 134. trangbang68:

no mo (not related to Hideo are you…never mind)

My problem with Whiskey’s posits are they are so over the top that any kernels of truth in them are lost in the haze. Obama’s a Muslim Secret Agent Man, He wants America to be nuked to appease his Kenyan ancestors, 100% chance America loses a couple cities to nukes in a week or so. I didn’t think that way when I was in a drug induced psychotic state of paranoia in the 70’s (well maybe I did, but I had an excuse).This stuff is Art Bell crazy “they’re coming to take me away,hey hey” nuts.
There are enough real issues to confront without crossing through checkpoint Charlie to the twilight zone.
As far as the hookup culture in urban America, I would attribute it more to the pornification of popular culture than some Obama metric. The answer in a lot of cases is young men need to man up and win the girls’ hearts instead of acting like spineless weenies.. I have hope for the youngbloods coming back from the wars that they’ll change the culture and be our future leaders.
Obama won because of a perfect storm of media fed war fatigue, Soros manipulated markets and the crap McCain campaign. Another storm is coming as young folks realize the government conmen have squandered their birthright and the working and investor classes get kicked to the curb. It ain’t going to be pretty.

Jul 20, 2009 - 2:43 pm 135. Fletcher Christian:

Increasingly? No. By the way, let’s use the correct term; “economic oligarchy” is semantically equal to “plutocracy”. And the USA has been that for 50 years – at least. Otherwise, why has every President in that period been a multi-millionaire or at least friends with such?

Jul 20, 2009 - 2:50 pm 136. ridgerunner:

GerryP/133
I agree that the sexual revolution has caused vast havoc, but the blame can’t simply be placed on young men refusing to date those who don’t put out. In the 70’s and 80’s, I managed several rent houses for a total of about 45 “tenant years.” To avoid complications with tenants, I maintained carefully disciplined communication with them–no joking around, no chitchating. Nevertheless about 15% of the female, mostly married and middle-class, tenants made sexual overtures, which I always brushed off. There is a female primate tendency to seek insemination from alpha males and it certainly exists in our species. If it did not, there never would have been a sexual revolution.

Jul 20, 2009 - 3:26 pm 137. JFSanders031:

Dang blert! When you put it like that. It makes me want to make a brain cake in a gas oven.

The breakdown of traditional society is and will continue to be a problem until we cycle through a significant number of generations. But the pendulum will swing the other way. Mostly because those with nontraditional cultural behavior tend to weed themselves from the gene pool.

Jul 20, 2009 - 3:51 pm 138. GerryP:

Ridgerunner @ 136

Right. But your experience was in the 70s and 80s – AFTER the sexual earthquake of the 60s had re-shaped the culture. It demonstrated rather than negated the great change in society from the sexual revolution of the 60s. Flirting has been a feminine pattern forever. Widespread flirting by openly offering sex is relatively new.

Young guys today are simply following the natural progression from that 60s earthquake, rather than making informed, wise choices about their sexual options. But what young guy looks far ahead or thinks in terms of what is good for society at that point?? It would take some new societal standards, persuasively enforced, to affect that.

My point is that choices by young guys also affect the choices of young women. That shapes the outlook of women in general, in many of the ways that Whiskey so deplores. They go together.

Society no longer protects young women. So they have had to adapt. Many of those adaptations have been very bad for society – and also for men and women, in general.

To change, society would need to re-instate the kinds of protection for young women that it threw overboard in the 60s. Better relations between men and women would then be more possible.

Jul 20, 2009 - 4:21 pm 139. heyyoukidsgetoffmylawn:

http://www.glennsacks.com/blog/

Jul 20, 2009 - 6:49 pm 140. ridgerunner:

GerryP
Societal norms and the range of behaviors outside those norms are set by the interaction between economic conditions and evolutionarily determined instincts. The sexual revolution of the 60’s was possible proximately because of the energy subsidy provided by oil, but ultimately for it to occur there had to be a substantial instinctual tendency for women to seek multiple partners (see Helen Fisher’s estimate that primeval monogamy was serial and only lasted circa 4 years per episode). Over the next few decades the reduced energy subsidy will likely put female adventurousness back in the box, so to speak.

Jul 21, 2009 - 2:44 am 141. Jay:

Human sexuality as with human social behavior is much more complicated than chips. We can learn about hominoid behavior from our chip hominoid “relatives” but the behavioral biologists deliberately simply the complexity of biology to advance their academic careers, as per my economists colleagues do with the complexity of economic systems.
Male and female infidelity is in the Hebrew Bible. Lets not forget the changes made in divorce laws in the 60’s. A wife can have sex with a male other than her husband and then divorce her husband to move in with the other man, who shares the loot the babe got from the divorce judge. In my time a divorced wife had to face social disgrace especially is it is known that she is at fault and her financial situation was not so good. If the woman had a child she had to depend on the ex for real child support.
The low classes did not provide child support except if the parents of their daughter raised the child.
I grew up in a government project that was safe when I was young. The stupid segregation was two white buildings next to two black buildings where the buildings where 40 feet apart. Most of the whites were Catholics and went to a Catholic elementary school. I went to a school that was almost all black. The black children from the project had a mother and father who took care of them plus relatives who would visit, many with cars (we could not afford a car). The blacks were optimistic that their life would improve. Births out of wedlock were very rare. The white hillbillies were different.
Then came the Ivy League elitist “reforms” and welfare became an industry and the worst elements of the black community became their “spokesmen”.
Read the story of Drudge of Professor “Skip” Gates getting arrested in his home near Harvard. I met this guy on a flight from SFO to Taipei. He kept his reading light on all night and our Business Class United seats were such that he kept me awake. So we talked. He was reading material for his talks in Taiwan. He was a high strung well mannered upscale black. When I told him my background he told me to write it up.
Later I saw him interviewed on CSPAN. He said that his mother hated whites (they were from northern West Virginia). Given my background I knew that he did not hate whites and that he could not be they way he is if she hated whites so much.
So he gets arrested for abusing the cop (as per the story) and he shouts racism. He is a fat cat Harvard prof who is a professional black.
This type of social conflict for profit is much more dangerous than young urban women who abuse men.
By the way I firmly believe that any woman who can have children and do not need mental help. And any woman who deliberately raises children by rejecting a husband who provides material and emotional support to the children is also sick.

Jul 21, 2009 - 10:07 am 142. GerryP:

ridgerunner @ 140

Interesting thesis. Low energy prices, plus biological pre-set tendency for females to seek multiple partners, was what brought about the 1960s “free sex” revolution. Is that a fair summary?

If so, why didn’t, say, Saudi Arabia also have a big sexual revolution in the 1960s? They had cheaper energy, for domestic consumption, than anyone in the world. And presumably they are the same homo sapiens species as Americans – no real biological difference. So it would appear they should have had a sexual revolution even bigger than ours by that standard.

But it never happened. Why not? Maybe societal norms, culturally enforced, was why. The same thing that got thrown under the bus in the U.S. in the 1960s.

Jul 21, 2009 - 10:28 am

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