Comfortable Progressive Society

Michelle Cottle of Time magazine explains to the shallow, unsophisticated "values voters" how rarely liberal sophisticates think of them here.

Quoth she: Truth be told, most of the time liberals don't bother to think about social conservatives at all. Except at election time, when they suddenly become aware of them as some frightening, incomprehensible menace to their otherwise comfortably progressive society.

Comfortably progressive society is frightened by anyone that would want to minimize the practices that are linked to the majority of AIDs and non-food hepatitis cases. Because health isn't important as long as you are allowed to get your kicks. Or that comforting knowledge that if pregnacy becomes "inconvenient or uncomfortable” you can have all those "non-person" arms and legs and little fingers and toes removed as a medical situation between you and your doctor. Isn't it strange that she laughs at the backwoods hicks for ignoring the obvious conclusions of evolution, but throws wholehearted support to the gay agenda by avoiding the scientific research that proves that a mommy and a daddy are clearly superior to two mommies or two daddies.

I've got a little news for you Michelle. We like our values because they protect us from destructive behaviors. We know what works and we want to teach it to our children. Many of the social expiriments of the past 100 years have been failures. Marxism, socialism, the Great Society, radical feminism are all victims of the same thing. They require people to act in contravention to their own interest. When we were all being told that the march of socialism is inevitible, we said no and you progressives laughed at us. You vilified Reagan and we laughed at you. We're still laughing. We know Michael Moore and Michael Jackson are progressives, that's why we're not. You can take this to the bank. The more people see the outcomes of your comfort and progress, the more conservative they become.

R. C. V.

I wonder if the common working American ever gives thought to how they can help win the war with the jihadists. I think about it all the time in a strategic sense. I think about it as “How do we collectively win this thing”. But what about on a personal level? Do I convert to Islam and worship at a mosque so that I can infiltrate a sleeper cell and pull a James Bond break-up of plot and stop the bomb clock .18 seconds before NYC is vaporized? How do I personally help fight the war on terror? I can tell you this much, leave infiltrating the sleeper cells to the professionals. We have our best people on that right now and it works far more often than it doesn’t. For the rest of us though, there are three things everyone can do and they make a big difference. Three simple things. Resolve, Courage and Vigilance.

Resolve. We must resolve that we will win. We must decide that we will kill whoever we have to kill to win and that we will help those that help us in our fight. The more divided we are as a people, the harder it will be to win. A house divided against itself cannot stand, The appeasers are the biggest danger. The appeasers either think that fighting is evil or they think fighting is worse than losing. Maybe they don’t think we can win and don’t want to try. Appeasers have resolved “not to win”. Don’t be an appeaser. Resolve that we can and will win.

Courage. We must have the courage to live our lives as if there was no threat. There are no non-combatants in this war. Non-combatant status is defined by the Geneva Conventions, but the enemy does not recognize the Geneva Conventions. Your lifestyle is a threat to radical Islam and that makes you a combatant and a legitimate target in their minds. To work, produce goods and export capitalism and democracy is the West’s best hope and Radical Islam’s worst fear. Live with a constant threat and sail bravely into danger each day. Over time, the stress from such fear takes a toll. Be strong. Love your children and watch over them. Teach them to be strong and that freedom is worth fighting for. The stronger we are, the shorter the war will be. Resolve and courage together are a formidable combination.

Vigilance. The key to stopping attacks is to interrupt the enemy when he masses his force for the attack. On Sept 11th, it probably only would have taken a small number of breaks to stop the attacks, but some of the obvious clues could not be used because of anti-discrimination laws. If we are to protect ourselves, we need to use every tool. If we put a blindfold on, we give the enemy an advantage. Pay attention no matter where you are. When you are in the airport, subway, grocery store, shopping mall or school parking lot you are in the places that are or may become battlegrounds. But in order to attack, they must come out among us. And if we are watchful, we can interrupt the operation and deny them the casualties they want to create. Any attack, whether successful or not leaves clues that we can use to track and kill the monster.

These are dark days, but the best steel is forged in heat and pressure. The “Greatest Generation” earned it’s place in history and so shall we. Resolve, Courage and Vigilence

Dark Hours

There is a brutal culture war being waged and I’m not talking about Red States vs Blue States. Right now in much of the world, there is a dedicated, intelligent and resourceful enemy preparing for a drawn out fight. He is establishing control of information weapons and indoctrinating his base. He is recruiting forces and establishing intelligence networks. He is collecting wealth and systems to distribute it to provide logistical support. And he means to win or die trying. His persistence and brutality will surpass even the Japanese Imperial Army of WWII. This enemy is radical Islam and the objective of this war is to bury western culture under the blanket of a new Caliphate. If successful, this new Caliphate will destroy all external traces of non-Islamic culture. If the instructions of Mohammed the prophet are precisely followed, Christians and Jews will be allowed second-class citizen status and will be heavily taxed. Atheists, agnostics, poly-theists, pagans, wiccans, and satan worshippers will embrace Islam or die. Madonna and Britney Spears and all of the actresses from Sex and the City will get the same treatment as Theo Van Gogh as retribution for immodest behavior. Mullahs and other clerics will be the government. Civil disobedience will not be tolerated. Do not think for a minute that the appeasers will be spared, they will just have the privelege of dying after losing all their liberties.

Someone you know will die in this war. The enemy is trying to build, buy, or steal weapons of mass destruction. At least some of it is already in their hands and they are just working out the details of delivery. And since the enemy considers us (the west) to be less than human and the scourge of the earth, he will place that weapon against the softest target that will yield the most civilian casualties. At least once, a major European or American city will take the brunt of a Nuclear, Biological or Chemical attack. I say this, because hopefully once is all it’s will take to convince the liberals and humanists that it’s time take the gloves off and deal with these bastards on their own terms. You may as well get your mind right. There will come a time when we will have to engage in genocide if we want to survive. We will have to show the men of Islam that we will murder their women and children in retribution for the murder of ours. It’s not pleasant or reasonable, but the mindset we are dealing with is not rational and cannot be reasoned with. The combat will be inhumane because one of the combatants lacks any trace of humanity. In an inhumane (no holds barred) fight to the death, you have to eliminate the enemy will and means to resist. The Geneva Conventions will go out the window and war will return to what it was before the renaissance and the age of chivalry. The will and means to resist will persist until the intolerance of Islam is broken. There is no truce or end to this fight until Islam undergoes a reformation that concedes freedom of/from worship and that ain’t gonna happen till a whole lot of their blood has been shed.

Now I know that it sounds bad, but it’s not the end of the world. We are destined to win this fight for the same reason that the fight is going to happen. Western culture is what it is. That is the reason the Islamics hate us and it is also the reason we will win. We are not in a war of army vs army, philosophy vs politics, or religion vs secularism. We are in a war of culture. A war of liberty vs slavery, discovery vs tradition, ideas vs dogma. The very culture that the Islamic Radicals wish to put in place is self-defeating. It is attempting to harvest our tools and use them against us. It cannot create the tools it needs to fight us because it stifles the ambition and thought that are the pre-cursors of invention. Prior to the advent of Islam, Arabs were amongst the best navigators and mathematicians in the world. Our number system which fomented the massive creativity of western engineering is based on an arabic number system. But when Europe emerged from the dark ages, Islam and particularly the Shi’a Islamics failed to make the leap. I suggest that this was not happenstance. Islam values tradition over efficiency or production. Its theocratic structure enforces tradition. Western culture values efficiency and production over tradition and thus adapts to capitalize on the new. Tradition is window dressing for western culture. This is where the multi-culturalists, humanists and liberals need to listen up. These people want to bury you. There is no place in their world for a humanist, multi-culturalist or liberal. These people think that that an Elks Lodge square dance is a den of iniquity. They will ask for your protection till you are bent over a barrel and then they will open your jugular and use your blood to dye their uniforms.

I have heard all my life, the secularists and humanists arguing about the survival of the fittest. Darwinian selection, the theory of evolution. What we have here is the Darwinian selection of cultures. Most cultures are symbiotic and co-exist with neighbors without substaintial conflict. Others are tribal and have long standing conflicts with neighboring tribes, But extremist Islam says there is no other permissible culture. Extremist Islam has no allies and no neighbors. It seeks weakness and will exploit any useful idiot in it’s quest to establish the caliphate. You need to decide if you are going to be a useful idiot. It will soon be time to decide whether your multi-culturalism includes all cultures or only includes cultures that permit multi-culturalism. Because before the conflict is over, both sides will be burying casualties in mass graves. Get your mind right. It’s coming. And when it starts, if you aren’t with western culture, you’re against western culture and there will be days when there isn’t enough food to feed those that aren’t willing to fight.

I wish this wasn’t the state of the world. I don’t care who or how Islamics worship as long as they grant others the same right. I don’t care what kind of government they want to have as long as they are not exporting terror and thuggery. I’ll even go a step further and suggest that most of the leaders of extremist Islam are actually just thugs that would like to work their way to the top of a substantial power structure. But the lines are being drawn and I’m willing to take sides. They are not going to control the US of A while I draw breath. Get your mind right. We didn’t pick this fight, but it’s coming. This bully doesn’t just want your lunch money, he wants to enslave you. Oh… didn’t I tell you – Islam permits slavery and it’s still practiced in secret in some Islamic countries.

There is a way out of this without the genocidal counter-Jihad. It will take the entire west banding together and declaring “No Mas” with one voice. The Jihadist will then try and fracture the coalition – one country at a time. But if the West stands firm and takes it to the Jihadists with the best criminal pursuit and information war that we can wage, I give us a 75% chance of avoiding the bloodbath. I see the chance of that happening about 20%. That’s a 1 in 5 of executing a strategy with a 3 for 4 possibility of the best outcome. That’s not good odds.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Dark Days and Dark Hours. Europe is on the verge of explosion. You’ll know the fight is getting close when Europe begins deporting Islamic radicals with an abbreviated legal process. Be vigilant.

Bill Gates as a Scientist?

Farreed Zakaria has an article about US losing the scientific research advantage by not allowing as many foreign students into US Universities and that we might loss the next "Bill Gates". He suggests that Bill is a scientist. Bill is no scientist, but he is a businessman. In reality, he bought someone else's work on the cheap and then copied the work of others and hired high-priced lawyers to protect him. He failed to see the importance of the GUI until Apple made it popular. He failed to anticipate and prepare for the dawn of the public internet, so he had to snuff Netscape. He tried to clip the wings of Sun with IE organic Java instructions, I think he was forced to a draw on that one. Bill Gates is more of a pirate than a scientist. For every two scientists he made poor, he made one rich. He kept the difference.

Subtle Lies

Words have meanings… Really! I mean it. I don’t mean this in some kind of “existential galactic bran muffin” way. Not in some bimbo teenager “like “whatever”” kind of way. I mean words really have meanings. Some have pretty much one full meaning. Take “sun” as an example. It’s pretty much what it is. Some have more than one meaning. Take “iron”. it’s a noun, verb, element, appliance, slang for weapon. Some words have less than a full meaning. “Whachamacallit” comes to mind but I don’t think I spelled it right. Sometimes, the less of a meaning a word has, the more words it takes to describe it. I’m gonna leave “Whachamacallit” alone. But words have meanings and the only reason you are staring at this is because you are digesting the meaning that I am transmitting. If I don’t transmit effectively and you don’t receive effectively, the process is useless. Words have to mean things or they become useless.

That’s the prologue. Words mean things. This is just to set us up. I take notice of slogans and bumper stickers that misuse words. Today we’ll talk about a couple of them. Here’s a favorite: “Re-defeat Bush”. This is meant to remind liberals that they sued in three counties in Florida to get votes in those counties special consideration over votes in the other 50 counties, while employing lawyers to challenge military absentee ballots. The credo “count only the votes that will help us win” was the watchword of the day. They seem to think there was virtue in this because their candidate was ahead in the popular vote. A hint for bearers of this bumper sticker: there’s a little document called The Constitution of the United States of America that gives pretty clear instruction on how presidential succession is determined. Popular vote ain’t in the rules. Get over it. Your boy was never in the lead and 10,000 people in the conservative Florida panhandle didn’t vote because they were told that Gore won FL an hour before the polls closed in the central time zone. Gore was never in the lead after all the polls closed.
Remember how Gore won NM by 236? Bush won the first count. But Gore was never ahead in FL. But be happy, you got your way. If 2000 was a defeat for Bush, 2004 was a re-defeat. Gore – Kerry, what’s the difference?
Another one is “Hate is not a family value”. This one presupposes that anyone that disapproves of the behaviors such as child molestation, abortion, promiscuity, lasciviousness, moral ambiguity or pornography is consumed and driven by some deep and bitter rage, and that every waking moment is a voyage on a sea of hatred toward gays, lesbians, transvestites and criminals.
The truth is that discrimination is a family value. I’m sure that Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t want her adopted children hanging out with some gun totin’, squirrell huntin’, cotton-eyed joe while they go four wheelin’ in their pick-up trucks. Rosie O’Donnell discriminates. Or does she hate? I’m confused. As we attempt to transfer to our children the things that we believe will set them up for success and happiness. We teach them to discriminate. I don’t want thieves in my house. I disapprove of the behavior. I discriminate in allowing access to my property and my family. That is not hate.
It is also known that anti-gun activist Rosie has a gun totin” bodyguard that acts to discriminate in allowing access to her property and family. Hey Rosie, is that hate or is it your family values?
I disapprove of the gay, lesbian, transvestite, transgender agenda. I have seen the statistical data on the physical and mental health consequences of the associated lifestyles. I’m also aware of the agenda of such radical elements as NAMBLA. If same sex couples want to play together, It’s probably not my business as long as they don’t want me to fund the AIDS research and treatment, the psychiatric care, the sex change operations or the government subsidies for “his” and “his” matching spank-me costumes. But I want to opt out of Medicare if I have to pay for the risky behaviors of others. That’s my discrimination. I don’t want to pay for Robert Downey Jr's next detox either.
I believe that porn is damaging. I think that Michael Jackson is screwed up because he was abused and then he was sheltered in a “progressive” permissive environment. I think Elvis would have lived a lot longer without the drugs. Behaviors are the ultimate arbiters of success and failure. I discriminate between behaviors.
I don’t know anyone that disapproves of “progressive” values that “hates”. But have you heard the venom coming out if the mouths of “progressives” since the election?

Gays Already Have the Right to Marry

The real agenda is to redefine marriage.

With respect to marriage, gays are already treated equally in all 50 states. I’ve checked and it’s true. Gays can get married and have the exact same sanction as non-gays. The exact same legal rights are available. I asked the registrar at the local courthouse if it was possible for two gay men to get a marriage license. She said “no”. I asked her if two straight men could get a marriage license. Once again, she said “no”. But apparently if a straight or gay man wants to marry a gay or straight woman, then that is OK. We already treat them the same as straights. If they want to be married, they can find someone of the opposite sex and take their chances like the rest of us. But two men or two women cannot be married because that’s not what marriage is.

This is because marriage is not the right to marry who you love. Long before the search for a life partner was guided by love, it was guided by politics, security and property interests. (Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Huge Tracts of Land!) Marriage is only recently and mostly in the hedonistic West, specifically linked to that blissful state of love. It can be argued that the vast majority of the world considers love an annoyance when working out matrimonial details.

Many people don’t get to marry their first or second choice of love, because the ones they would choose chose someone else. Getting married becomes a search for a qualified candidate. You must find someone who is Ready (not married to some one else) Able (of the opposite sex) and Willing (agrees to marry you) Who you love is inconsequential. I’ve been married twice and I don’t remember any question or affadavit certifying that I was in love. I even know of some mercenary marriages that were entered for financial reasons. But they were marriages because marriage is a tradition and legal agreement between a man and woman that allows them to have certain claims on each other under the law (and church where so respected).

The word “marry” is actually a word for “agree” or “join” and this joining is an agreement of two people with the sanction of the church and/or the state.

But remember - just because you love your dog, your toaster, the thumb hole in your bowling ball or an apple pie, doesn’t mean you may enter into a marriage contract with any of them. Have fun with this.

Last Man Standing

As I survey the carnage that was political discourse 2004, there’s a central idea rising as a wisp of smoke from the scorched earth where reason and truth once stood, and we’ll get to that central idea in a moment, but first, we need to review the battlefield and the weapons. This was a negative campaign – on both sides, but that is neither new or significant. Negative is OK if the negative is true and objectively presented. Positive themes are OK too as long as they are true and objectively presented. Thus what’s important is truth and objectivity. Surveying the field, the ugliest moments of the battle were when truth and objectivity were ripped to shreds by antagonism and bias. The scorched earth of this campaign was truth and objectivity.
Just like in refining, the important truth reveals itself after the burning is done. Both sides in this hard fought debate claim to be looking out for the interest of the majority, the middle class and the poor, but there is a difference between the blue regions and the red regions. The blue regions are where people are likely to ask government to raise money to help those in need. The red regions are where people personally do something when they see a need.
The blue regions hate poverty and injustice. They hate bigotry and prejudice. They want the government to use taxes (collected under the threat of force) to fix problems. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to fix those things (but the whole threat of force thing is disconcerting.)
The red regions love people. They love unborn children, They love the sinner – and want to discourage the sin. They love the proven traditional families and traditional values and they don’t trust new ideas and values that lack a successful track record. (Show me a society with a large overt element of homosexual culture that wasn’t on the decline.) They don’t want the government to fix things. They want the government out of their lives.
The blue regions do not love John Kerry, they hate Dubya.
The red regions love Dubya. They voted for him more than they voted against Kerry.
This is the wisp of smoke. Hate and fear won’t get you there. And if you don’t believe me, look at military history. Patriots defending the homeland (people that love their country) have a huge track record of success over foreign armies (that hate their country). The homeland was defended from the foreign armies on Tuesday. Those that love America as it is, defended it from those that think it is too homophobic, racist, sexist, unfair, capitalistic, fascist, intolerant. The campaign was brutal, and the victory was never certain. It had it’s darkest hours in an April of Abu Ghraib, the rumours of voter registration fraud in October and in the first guns (exit polls) of November. But each troop had one bullet, and each troop fearlessly took that bullet and ramped it into the chamber and let fly, even though the “exit polls” made it seem like a suicide mission. But it was only minutes after the first polls closed that the smell of fear began to rise from the ranks of blue. And there was cheering in the trenches when the enemy center broke wide open and the blue forces and the media that fed them began to plead for mercy (Also called reaching across the aisle and the “spirit” of bipartisanship.)
Just as those that loved Reagan and Clinton re-elected them (the only thing they have in common), George W. Bush and his elegant wife were confirmed by the outpouring of love for the things that mean the most to the folks that are the true heart and soul of this country. Hate and fear may occasionally or temporarily prevail, but it’s not the way to bet. I offer the following as proof.
Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States if the Republicans don’t nominate a candidate they love. She, perhaps more that anyone except Jacques Chirac, represents what they hate and fear. But hate won’t defeat her, because the army of Blue loves her.

Political leanings aside – Lennon and McCartney were right – Love is All You Need.