What Do You Wear To The New Dark Ages

I'm thinking it would be something slinky, something showing lots of skin, and it would probably be black, red, or hot fuchsia. It would have to be shocking--maybe with words or images that would make most people gasp.

After all, the new dark ages would be all about eschewing values of any kind. It would be about money, sex, drugs, and life where the decadent is held in the highest regard. It'll be a new world when we re-join the dark ages. Our reverence will be directed toward the importance of not judging anything. Actions will not be seen as good or bad. No laws will be enforced, families will be hard to find and, if found, shunned.

Nobody loses, though, don't worry. There will be a soft landing for every personal "non-success" (we might call them failures). Nothing left to lose, nothing to gain. All the same. (Wait! Didn't Janis Joplin call THAT freedom: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose?")

We'll feel fine. We'll be anesthetized. We'll be global. There will be no Islam, no Christianity, no Judaism. We'll learn in our schools and universities that we are the enlightened ones. We are too smart to need the "crutches" of by-gone eras called religion, and governing documents that tell us we have individual inalienable rights to pursue happiness.

But it's okay. We'll all be paid the same, no matter what we do. There will be no need for war either--again--nothing worth fighting for. Besides, we learned in school that fighting is mean and bad. And we don't want to be mean and bad.

Except for those few who (and THEY know who they are) make the decisions. Don't worry, though, they will take care of us. We'll be able to shop for entertainment, dispose of inconvenient babies, go to college, and work for the greater good.



I have been wondering where our old neighbors, the Christians, have moved. When last seen, they were clinging to their religion and guns and telling us crazy things about fighting for stuff you couldn't even BUY. Let me see, what did they call that stuff? I think it was, "freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."

Or maybe, in the new dark ages, we fashionistas would all--everyone--choose to wear drab brown/grey shirts and pants with little matching hats that resemble operating room garb. They're so cute!

Photo Credit.

From Dennis Prager:

That the news media were biased in the 2008 presidential election is now acknowledged by fair-minded people, left or right.

As Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said this weekend at a Politico/USC Conference on the 2008 election: “It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business. … It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Given how obvious this bias is, the question is not whether liberals in the media tend to offer biased reporting. The question is why? Why can’t liberal news people report the news without any slant?

The answer is that for people on the left, all -- I repeat, (set ital) all (end ital) -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society,

For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.

Read more.

Which was Sal Alinsky's mantra too.

OMG Somebody Finally Said It

OMG Somebody Finally Said This!

Obama is what I have called a "bargainer" -- a black who says to whites, "I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me." Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer. Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo.

Continue reading below.


From the LA Times:
Obama's post-racial promise

Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.

By Shelby Steele
November 5, 2008


For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become -- at least for a time -- a national obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of his victory as we are about its political significance.

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long -- that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn't a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn't it imply a "post-racial" America? And shouldn't those of us -- white and black -- who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black president? And yet an element of Barack Obama's success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle. His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America -- and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

Obama's special charisma -- since his famous 2004 convention speech -- always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas. In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up -- given an air of "change" -- by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in.

This worked politically for Obama because it tapped into a deep longing in American life -- the longing on the part of whites to escape the stigma of racism. In running for the presidency -- and presenting himself to a majority white nation -- Obama knew intuitively that he was dealing with a stigmatized people. He knew whites were stigmatized as being prejudiced, and that they hated this situation and literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma.

Obama is what I have called a "bargainer" -- a black who says to whites, "I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me." Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer. Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo.

Obama's post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black advancement. Thus, whites became enchanted enough with Obama to become his political base. It was Iowa -- 95% white -- that made him a contender. Blacks came his way only after he won enough white voters to be a plausible candidate.

Of course, it is true that white America has made great progress in curbing racism over the last 40 years. I believe, for example, that Colin Powell might well have been elected president in 1996 had he run against a then rather weak Bill Clinton. It is exactly because America has made such dramatic racial progress that whites today chafe so under the racist stigma. So I don't think whites really want change from Obama as much as they want documentation of change that has already occurred. They want him in the White House first of all as evidence, certification and recognition.

But there is an inherent contradiction in all this. When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer's ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.

Certainly things other than bargaining account for Obama's victory. He was a talented campaigner. He was reassuringly articulate on many issues -- a quality that Americans now long for in a president. And, in these last weeks, he was clearly pushed over the top by the economic terrors that beset the nation. But it was the peculiar cultural manipulation of racial bargaining that brought him to the political dance. It inflated him as a candidate, and it may well inflate him as a president.

There is nothing to suggest that Obama will lead America into true post-racialism. His campaign style revealed a tweaker of the status quo, not a revolutionary. Culturally and racially, he is likely to leave America pretty much where he found her.

But what about black Americans? Won't an Obama presidency at last lead us across a centuries-old gulf of alienation into the recognition that America really is our country? Might this milestone not infuse black America with a new American nationalism? And wouldn't this be revolutionary in itself? Like most Americans, I would love to see an Obama presidency nudge things in this direction. But the larger reality is the profound disparity between black and white Americans that will persist even under the glow of an Obama presidency. The black illegitimacy rate remains at 70%. Blacks did worse on the SAT in 2000 than in 1990. Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black, though we are only 13% of the population. The academic achievement gap between blacks and whites persists even for the black middle class. All this disparity will continue to accuse blacks of inferiority and whites of racism -- thus refueling our racial politics -- despite the level of melanin in the president's skin.

The torture of racial conflict in America periodically spits up a new faith that idealism can help us "overcome" -- America's favorite racial word. If we can just have the right inspiration, a heroic role model, a symbolism of hope, a new sense of possibility. It is an American cultural habit to endure our racial tensions by periodically alighting on little islands of fresh hope and idealism. But true reform, like the civil rights victories of the '60s, never happens until people become exhausted with their suffering. Then they don't care who the president is.

Presidents follow the culture; they don't lead it. I hope for a competent president.


***
Shelby Steele is an author, columnist and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

So You Think You Know Your Government?

Civics isn't being taught in schools anymore. It breaks my heart, but it's true. The result of that is that most people are, well, pretty ignorant about our government.

The American Civic Literacy project has floated a test on its website to see how much we know about how our government works and who's responsible for what in the day-to-day operations of it. I took the test--cold--today and scored 88.87%--got 4 wrong out of 33.

If you fail this test, and most people do, maybe you'll join me in trying to encourage your public school system to add Civics back into its curriculum. It would be refreshing to have our schools teaching children what they need to know in order to be good citizens--like what's in those pesky documents on which our country was formed.

Again, most people taking this test fail. Including your elected officials and graduates of the most prestigious universities in the Country.

Apparently, earning a college degree does little to increase knowledge of America’s history, key texts, and institutions. The average score among those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree is 57%, or an “F.”

That is only 13 percentage points higher than the average score among those who ended their formal education with a high school diploma.

Do you have the courage to take the test? Well, see how you measure up and good luck to you!

New Direction For H&A/Intellectuals Anyone?

I've change my mind. This blog has become something other than a short log of my thoughts.

What I have had to reconcile is that, just like in many other things in life, I'm swimming upstream.

A blog should be readable by someone who doesn't want to spend a lot of time reading, they say. Well, that's just not my way. From now on, I'm not even going to try to write it that way. The purpose of the hairpinandarrow_blog will be re-defined so that someday I can remember this unbelievable time. It's being compiled so that someday I can look back and see why I was thinking what I was thinking at any given time.

It will remind me of my favorite thinkers during this insanity--a journal without the links, though I do use links sometimes. In the future, I'll be able to read their words and wisdom--just like re-reading a favorite novel--and I'll get to live with them as long as I can access the blog. I won't have to depend on clicking back and forth between links so much. It'll mostly be here in one place. Long, perhaps, but here.

Today I'm blown away again by the insight of one of my favorites, Thomas Sowell (btw, a black American). I respect a lot of people, but he may be at the top of my list.

Here's what he has to say today about "Intellectuals." (a frequent description of the President-elect and his terrorist/criminal friends--after all they are "professors" and "clergy," aren't they?)

I'm worried about the difference between fact and illusion that masquerades as truth today. If we follow along with "conventional wisdom" without thinking for ourselves--checking the facts, drawing our own conclusions--we are deserving of the cards we are dealt.

There's a responsibility that comes with freedom (insert any word here "constitution," "blessings," "love," "citizenship," "mother or fatherhood," and so on. The list is unending.) With any blessing or gift comes responsibility to care for it properly and to pass it along to those who come after you. The alternative is to shirk your duty as a citizen and to be prepared for the loss of your blessing or privileges. I don't think that the people who live in the USA today would last very long in a society that usurps their freedoms--they've become used to them. They've taken them for granted. They've gotten lazy. I wonder when "too late" is really "too late."

*****
"Intellectuals"

by Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, November 11, 2008


Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending "the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life."

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics."

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book." But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual -- the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model-- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear-- that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine-- about the same number as the people killed in Hitler's Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century-- far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley's view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable-- or even expert-- within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.



Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Happy 233 Birthday, USMC!

Deaf, Dumb, and Blind

Sheeple who voted for President-elect Obama, can only hope they aren't responsible for the total undermining of the greatest Republic ever known to the world. Controlling the media should frighten you. Kicking the 3 reporters off the plane to make room for more sympathetic (Jet and Ebony) media should frighten you more. Making the statement that the Supreme Court isn't radically left enough should make you fearful of what's ahead.

That voters show no interest in the multiple investigations into Barack Obama's historical and credential shortcomings is astounding. Especially in light of the length they've gone to manufacture flaws to attribute to the Republican VP candidate this year, Governor Sarah Palin. If it's about Obama, they won't see it, they won't hear it. Facts can hit them in the face and they won't know them.

Blindness toward this man's associates, history and credentials (or lack thereof) if left as it is now, will certainly come back to bite the entire country in the proverbial butt. How can anyone be happy about this? This IS the story about the 2008 Elections--not that we've elected our first black President, but that we did it blindly--without regard to his record, to what brought him to our attention and to the real way in which he was elected.
*********


All the News That's Fit to Censor

Burt Prelutsky
Monday, November 10, 2008

Quite recently, it struck me that it’s not that the MSM has done everything in its considerable power to spin, deny or conceal, all the unpleasant truths about ACORN, Rev. Wright, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge, that upsets me the most. The thing that truly depresses me is that millions of my fellow Americans know the truth, but simply don’t seem to care.

They also don’t seem too concerned that in a 2001 radio interview, Obama declared that his problem with the Warren Court was that although it ruled in favor of Civil Rights, it was not sufficiently radical when it came to redistribution of wealth.

Apparently, Obama thinks the Founding Fathers should have included that in the Bill of Rights. Obama can deny it all he likes, but anyone who subscribes to the belief that we should adopt a fiscal policy based on “From everyone according to his abilities to everyone according to his needs” is a disciple not of Warren Buffet, but of Karl Marx.

Still, as some cynic once observed, when you rob Peter to pay Paul, don’t expect Paul to raise any objections. So, even though Obama claims he will cut income taxes for 95% of us, even though he knows full well that over 30% of us don’t even pay a single penny in income taxes, millions of Pauls are ready and eager to vote for this con man.

Frankly, I find it amazing and pathetic that so many Americans are anxious to finish the job begun by FDR to turn us into a socialist state. Is it simply because they long for America to go the way of China, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba, or do they simply not give a damn? Sheep, after all, are not known for their spirit of independence or their intelligence.

When I suggest that socialism often leads to tyranny, I am not indulging in right-wing hyperbole. After all, aside from control of capital and the means of production, one of the essentials of all dictatorships is central control of the media. In 2008, the left already controls most of the MSM, not to mention the liberal arts departments on most college campuses. The warning signs are all around us.

Recently, as you may have heard, Beverly West, a reporter with Florida television station WFTV, dared to ask Joe Biden whether Obama’s connection to ACORN was a legitimate concern and whether Obama’s response to Joe the Plumber was Marxist. As a result, the Obama/Biden campaign informed WFTV that it was cutting off access because of such rude questions.

The American Issues Project, whose TV ad called for an examination of the Obama/Bill Ayers connection, led to the Obama machine’s demand that the Justice Department begin a criminal investigation of the AIP. The idea that the AIP should be investigated for running a legitimate TV ad, but ACORN should not be prosecuted for perpetuating voter fraud is the sort of thing that George Orwell would have dealt with if he’d lived long enough to write a sequel to “1984.”

If Obama is elected, there’s no question that the Democrats will pass the ill-named Fairness Doctrine, thus ensuring that talk radio, the only part of the MSM not fully under control of the far left, will be silenced once and for all.

After that, our only means of communication will be smoke signals. That is assuming that under Obama’s new order we’ll be able to afford blankets.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH US KIDS TODAY?

From a post-2008-election Hugh Hewitt interview of Mark Steyn: These are excerpts that make the points that especially are concerning about the future of our great nation. I have taken them out of context. The three sections do not transition into each other in the interview. But these three points need to be made if conservatives are going to "find themselves" before the next election.

If you want to read the entire interview, go here. As a post-script that should be the screaming heading, Mark Steyn is one of the most astute thinkers of our time. He understands politics in the US and the society that drives our culture better than anyone. And he has risked his freedom to say it.

...HH: Now which part are you skeptical of? The circles of serenity or the triangles of opportunity?

MS: (laughing) Well, right now…

HH: (laughing)

MS: Right now, I’m not sure, I’m not feeling terribly, I’m feeling the serenity of a guy who’s in a canoe without any paddles, and he’s had a time to get used to the fact that the falls are coming up and he’s going to go over…

HH: (laughing)

MS: …because I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity, and I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of individual liberty in Barack Obama’s America. I think the virtues of this country, which is individual liberty and self-reliance, are not part of Obama’s vision for America. ....
****

....HH: Now Mark Steyn, you’ve spoken on college campuses, and you know, that there are a lot of young conservatives and young Republicans out there. They don’t, however, 66-28%, I believe, was the youth vote under 30. And I don’t think we present well, either technically, technologically, or rhetorically to people under 30 in this country. Your thoughts?

MS: No, I think that’s a fair criticism. And if you mean that the McCain campaign was not comfortable with the internet generation, simply as a technical proposition, I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But we have to accept the reality of the situation, which is that by the time a lot of these students get to college, they’ve been raised in what is essentially a liberal environment for twenty years. In the school system in this country, liberalism is the air that you breathe. It’s the air that you breathe. If you look at these children’s books about the amazing Obama story that they’re going to start teaching in schools this year, he’s already being beatified as one of these Rosa Parks figures. So in a sense, that’s what you’re up against the whole time, that the founders’ vision of America is not taught in American schools...
****

...That was McCain’s mistake. You’ve got to be committed to economic liberty, too, which is the great driver of opportunity in this country. He made far too many stupid but very revealing remarks, John McCain did, that shows he doesn’t understand that in fact it’s the economic dynamism of America that pays for everything else.

HH: You know, when people wanted to drill, drill, drill, Mark Steyn, we’ve got thirty seconds, I thought we tapped into that again. People know you’ve got to go get energy by drilling for energy. I think people know this. The financial crisis obscured it. I don’t think it’s going to be long returning to the top of people’s agenda. Your last word?

MS: Yeah, and especially not when the Obama message is no, you have to drive a smaller car, when you have to eat less and you have to live in a smaller home. That is not the American idea, and that’s where he’ll trip himself up.

HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure, www.steynonline.com, America.

End of Interview.

***

Yeah, and perhaps the end of opportunity for personal success and liberty in America. Say your prayers.

Now, who exactly is going to:

1) make certain our teachers teach our children the true and inspiring lessons of our founding fathers in our public schools,

2) protect our individual liberty and self-reliance, and

3) lead us toward economic and national security?

Letter to Oprah

Found this letter to Oprah. Thought it worthy of inclusion today.

Dear Oprah,

This isn't a story idea. It's just my reaction to your political action during the 2008 election. I appreciate that you believe you didn't use your show as a platform for Barack Obama. I really do. But I don't believe you are being quite honest with yourself.

You had both of the Obamas on your show prior to election day and you refused to have their opponents on before the election.

That you say the Obamas were on prior to the primaries is a technicality--if it's so. I haven't checked, because all I remember is that they were on at least twice, that you practically swooned over them with all the excitement you exuded, and that the timing of it all doesn't matter. They were there, you endorsed them, and you didn't invited their opponents to visit. End of story. You, in my mind, did use your show as a political platform whether you let yourself off the hook or not.

It's okay. It's your show. But I expect you to be honest with yourself and us about it. That's all. (Well, not ALL to me) --I am a confused viewer--a woman of a certain age--who wants to think you would want to give any woman running for one of our highest offices some "Oprah" exposure too. But I didn't see Hillary or Sarah Palin standing next to you at any time. If they did. I didn't see it. And I didn't hear about it.

Sincerely, A Viewer

Hello Obama Voters in Ohio, PA, W. VA--Get This!

Hello coal states. Here is an eye-opener!

The link--in case things get dicey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Jojrgx8eM