Brilliant: NRO’s Mark Steyn wonders if we “Feel Like Getting Nasty?”

NRO’s Mark Steyn tells us that the  “G20 wants international regulation that will export their mistakes to the entire planet“.

Moron Watch: Pink-Squeaks to the left of me, jokers to the right…

First Thing

Pink-Squeaks (a.k.a., The Left, Secular Progressives, Progressives, Liberals, Pinks, Democrats,  ”Some Republicans”, New-Age Brownshirts, Clowns, Morons, etcetera) have a particular weltanshung that derives from, god knows where.  Ha!  Actually we can trace it to its roots.

In this peculiar post-Christian age–where subjectivity reigns supreme and the notions of free inquiry, objectivity, absolute truth, academic freedom, self-determination, and liberty itself  have been thrown out with the bathwater–with hats akimbo, our guv’mint welfare check in hand, and our pants low down on our buttocks, we shufflle along into a bold, new anti-intellectual dark ages.  Notwithstanding the implications of a new dark age, and just like always, ideas matter; belief is powerful, even if wrong;  personal decisions, short term, are determined by fashion; I want my trust fund money, NOW; any form of strong belief is suspect.

The Left’s beliefs, which color all their thought and policy positions, are learned behaviors.  My constant theme is that The Left has swallowed its own ideology without real debate or thought on the part of the vast majority of its adherents. Mirroring the general population and other political movements, The Left have their thought leaders (a few) and followers (a lot).  They are approaching one of their political aphelions at this point and now possess a vast army of automatons directed by pheromones wafting from a cauldron of politically correct ideology cooked up by a mashup of hard-left academics, rappers, grievance mongers, fashionistas, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy lumpen types, bumper sticker authors, government busybodies, rock musicians, phone sanitizers, and the like.

Above all, The Army of the Lord Obama, wants to appear cool.  They must have it.  They cannot be without it.  Obtaining it is everything.  They go after it with the single-minded meanness of a teenie-bopper after a boy band, backstage pass, lead singer feelup.  They want to be told by Hole lead singer Courtney Love that they are the coolest audience ever.  They yearn for the approval of the Big “O”; they want to see his warm, loving, approving, smiling face peer down from a podium purchased with their milk money and tell them to be comforted, warmed, filled, and that they are forgiven for their past transgressions; that they are loved and that he will care for their every need.  They need to hear that their lives matter as defined by bumper stickers and stroking from stage by middle-aged rock stars dying of Hep-C.  They want their parents to hate them even though mom and dad met an a Woodstock opium group-grope and see nothing wrong with their kids’ slacker lifestyle.  They yearn for police brutality but can’t get a cop to do more than to politely ask them to leave.  They are fed up with their trust fund managers because they wont cut checks directly to Green Peace or for carbon credits.  Dad thoughtlessly only gave them a pedestrian Lexus LX to drive at college and they had wanted a tricked out Escalade Hybrid with spinners.  They’d happily go to a mosque if they only knew someone that would take them but would not be caught dead in Christian church.  They take all of the cool courses at college like Human Sexuality and the Gay Bar Toilet 101, Super Smash Brothers Melee Theory and Practice (Oberlin College), or Stupidity (Occidental College)–I’m not making up these last two!  All this and a tat will make them Cool!

They are not aware that “Cool”  is nothing more than ignorance masquerading as experience.  Nevertheless, that’s what they want and they will get it even if they have to kick and scream and refuse to eat dinner for several minutes.  No thought they have ever had has gone unexpressed due to the fact that their teachers and parents have encouraged they cute little minds to speak!  Heard not seen, they were told how wise they were from the crib and never give the opportunity to learn how to doubt or learn how to critically parse a statement.  (That would be intolerant!)  “Tolerance” masquerading as thought.

Where have they come from?  How did they become what they are?  Very simply, they’ve been taught this stuff.  Their teachers have been William Ayers, Reverend Wright, Che Guevara, Jesse Jackson, Hugo Chavez, Jane Fonda, Super Mario Brothers, Al Sharpton, Robert Redford, The Electric Company, Russell Brand, George Stephanopoulos, Ed Asner, Obama his own bad self, Kurt Cobain, Al Gore, masturbation, Oprah, Barbara Streisand, Abbie Hoffman, Sesame Street, Fidel Castro, and the whole pantheon of whack-job, Pink-Squeaks that are supposedly in the know.  They know who Bernadette Dohrn or Yoko Ono is but couldn’t tell you a thing about Augustine of Hippo or Edmund Burke.  John Lennon, not John Donne, is their muse.

So, back to this all important First Thing/only thing that they believe in: tolerance.  Wasamadda with that?  Well, for one thing, again keeping it simple, believing only in tolerance in practice (there’s an interesting thought) turns out to be not very tolerant.  And, in opposition stand a few of us yelling, “STOP!”  Étienne Gilson, the French Thomist once said (and I am paraphrasing from memory here, so be tolerant; I can’t find the original quote right now) that the person who holds strong beliefs is the truly tolerant person because they have felt the sting of intolerance so many times.  Pink-Squeaks, in their slavish devotion to an all-powerful belief in the primacy of “tolerance” and nothing else (unless, of  course, you might hold some odd belief like abortion or gay marriage is wrong, in which case abortion rights or gay marriage rights suddenly trump everything else in the universe, period) routinely believe in nothing–or at least claim not to believe in anything substantive–but act highly intolerantly as evidenced by visceral hatred for Orthodox Christians, George Bush, free-market capitalism, Iraqi elections, Ronald Reagan, the USMC, John Wayne, and the like.

When they got to college, no teaching real critical thinking, only ideology.  If they expressed any boarderline conservative thought they were ridiculed by teachers and branded as freaks by their classmates.  They suddenly found out that they couldn’t get dates.  When Ward Churchill, Professor and fake Indian, tells his students things like, “When you kill 500,000 children in order to impose your will on other countries, then you shouldn’t be surprised when somebody responds in kind…,” the average student–with no ability to think through the statement critically and many times has no other frame of reference other than that the University evidently certifies that this Clown is therefore, and by his very presence there, cool (and he’s cool anyway because of the weird long hair, the righteous anger, and funny smell and I need to be tolerant anyway)–swoons instead.

Thinking themselves wise, they have become fools.  Regarding tolerance on the left, where’s the beef? 

Ah, Republicans!  As it turns out, maybe 40% of the earmarks in the most recent stimulus/hogwash bill are theirs.  Do they think this will fix their problem?

Moron Watch: Victoria’s Secret & The Card Check

Re VS…

Victoria’s Secret is having financial problems….  We’re putting together a large stimulus package for them right now.

High-end lingerie is having a hard time of it this recession…

Underwear sales are skimpy…

Bra sales are not holding up…

Etcetera, etcetera.

While I’m sorely tempted to demand a bailout for Victoria’s Secret, really the best way to help VS is to go buy your girl some lingerie there.

In the meanwhile, thank heaven for YouTube’s Victoria’s Secret videos and pray that VS’s sales stay up…, well, bad choice of terms, but you know what I mean.

Moron Watch: The Card Check

Why do Pink-Squeaks get so excited about the card check?  Do they even know what a card check is?  I wonder.  In the labor relations business, the Card Check is the difference between an open ballot and closed ballot by employees on the issue of whether they want a union to represent them.  Requiring a card check, which means that the employee fills out a card and they sign it indicating that he or she wants a union to represent them.  Once filled out, these are submitted to the National Labor Relations Board, which subsequently certifies if more than 50% of the employees want a union.  If it hits the greater than 50% mark, presto-change-o, we got’s us a union! 

Currently, employers can choose to ignore this card check and require that the  ballots be secret (NOT “Victoria’s” Secret) so that no employee feels threatened by the union.  (Wow, threatened by union goons?  Who would have imagined such a thing in this day and age?!)  To be fair, the unions would say that they don’t want employees to be bullied by companies and the best way to do that is with an open balloting process.  That may seem counter-intuitive, but that would be their argument.  On a positive note, the unions feel that the open ballot gives them, and thus the employee, more clout with the company from the outset.  And probably that’s true.  (I’ll happily serve as Shop Steward at VS, if the girls want to unionize.  Undergarment Workers of the World Unite!) 

On the other hand, these days most companies slavishly devote themselves to sucking up to their employees.  Old union workers would not know that the modern auto plant, for example, is even located on this planet.  They would not recognize an air conditioned plant much less air conditioned exercise rooms, lunch rooms with TVs, clean bathrooms, spacious parking lots, clean/safe working environemnts, health plans, 401-Ks, plant nurses, child care centers, EAP’s, and on ad infinitum.  It just would have never dawned on the early AFL-CIO guys that the world would ever be like it is.  And to be fair (again), unions have had a real hand in accomplishing these boons, but it was not because of them only.  It also just makes good business sense.  Happy, trusting employees are more productive.  And they are not stupid, happy and trusting notwithstanding. 

Problem is that employees have reported that the union card checks intimidate them.  That’s why secret ballots were allowed in the first place.  If unions acted responsibly this would not be a problem, but they don’t always act responsibly.  Unions are, after all, populated by, well, Pink-Squeaks and the one thing that Pink-Squeaks lust for more than anything else is power over others.  In China under Mao we called them the Red Guard.

Nevertheless, even Pinks have to act reponsibly on occasion these days.  Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for a second and assume that they are not the usual power-hungry, murderous little tyrants we all come to love and know them to be.  Let’s assume that they do have the little employee’s best interests in mind and, ergo…

Pink-Squeaks want the Card Check to help protect employees.

Conservatives want secret ballots to help protect employees.

The policy question is who is more likely to screw an employee these days, employers or unions?  You do the math.

Who says making policy decisions is tough?