Why Fred's Coming...

"But the key to Thompson's hesitation may lie elsewhere: It's what presidential candidates have traditionally had to do to get elected. You go hat in hand and you beg money from people who have had enough success in life to give them a sense of entitlement. If you've had the ability to make millions selling plumbing fixtures, shouldn't you have some input on the next Secretary of State?

It is this sort of system that produces a George Bush as a presidential candidate. I had a conversation with a rich young man, more thoughtful than most, who has had some success in politics. He had been in one of those rooms with Bush, everyone there just like him, just like Bush. He wondered if Bush ever met anyone other than the people just like him—wealthy, confident and privileged. Is this a system that produces a president that has any idea how most of the people in America live?

The worst time running for president is in the early months, going door to door like a condo salesman, asking the guys with check books to invest in your campaign. Mitt Romney is great at it. Thompson hates it. His strategy may be to come in in the middle of this campaign, capitalize on the discomfort Republicans have with the field and gamble on good poll numbers to create excitement. If that happens, the money will come.

But what are the odds it can happen? Romney raised $23 million during the first quarter of 2007. But Thompson just announced he was considering a run for president and his poll numbers jumped Romney to put him in third place behind John McCain and Rudy Giuliani—with no announcement, no organization and no campaign.

The internet and the power of average people to raise huge sums for candidates has been demonstrated, by Howard Dean in 2004 and by Barack Obama this last quarter. Thompson may finally be able to see how he can get there with small contributors and build a grassroots organization without the inevitable compromises that big money campaigns dictate. Go to Google and type in “Draft Fred.”

***

The problem with our politics is that the people who can get elected president are the people we wouldn't want as president. If there is anybody who can upset the status quo, create a new dynamic and overcome the process it would be Fred Dalton Thompson." [ Ding ding ding ding ding. He's got a shot at breaking through the essential problem we face as a culture. My traditional formulation has been: Anyone smart enough to be President is smart enough NOT to want to be President. But that last paragraph has another essential element in its first sentence. Lots more on this later... -ed. ]

Where Is The Truck Debris?

This will be just hilarious for the idiot "truthers" to "explain". Now why is it that they have a predominantly paranoid schizophrenic relationship to reality? Maybe this might be related...

This is my favorite comment from the thread. Heh:

"So, let me see if I have this straight: Bush & Friends can't even
get away with firing 8 lawyers without news of it being turning into a national
scandal.

But...Bush & Friends are savvy enough to orchestrate the most
diabolical plot in our history, killing thousands, and nobody among the
thousands of people that would've been involved in this elaborate plot has
opened their yap to anyone, anywhere. Oh yeah, and if Bush & Friends are so
good at hoaxing people, why didn't we "find" any WMD's in Iraq? If they could
kill over 3,000 people on our own soil it wouldn't be hard to plant a small nuke
in a bunker near Baghdad and call it Saddam's."

UPDATE: And how can this not be my favorite picture?

There Is No God And We Are His Prophets!

"This is as fine an example of the incoherence at the heart of leftism that I can think of. It is incoherent because it is nihilistic to the core. It is not rooted in any intellectually or morally defensible first principles, but is entirely subjective, arbitrary, and convenient. For what is the first principle of the secular left? We have been reviewing the deep structure of their ideology in recent days, and it all goes back to there is no God and we are his prophets! But this first principle has many disturbing and dysfunctional ramifications, which include the impossibility of transcendent meaning, the absence of any vertical order in the cosmos, and the devaluation of wisdom embodied in tradition (tradition representing the extension or "prolongation" of the vertical into the horizontal).

Therefore, when a leftist tells you that truth does not exist and that various texts are simply forms of domination rooted in the will to power, believe him, for this is the nature of the dark principality he inhabits. This is why I would never argue with a leftist, because they are so deeply and fundamentally illogical. Why try to reason with someone who has rejected the possibility of objective truth a priori? He is simply going to use whatever strategy or technique at his disposal to win the debate, not to arrive at truth, which isn't possible for him anyway. "

The New Open Door

"But then flooding schools with people with mental problems and then arming professors seems like a hell of a way to run a railroad. Somewhere we have stumbled over a contradiction in our attitudes to modern life: that in pursuing our most altruistic instincts we have also opened the door to dangers against which we must defend ourselves. When we come forward with an open hand we are at our most vulnerable. Open societies are places of great possibility, for both good and evil."

Flight 93 On The Ground

"To be more specific, if something doesn't look right, it probably isn't and you should report your concerns to the authorities. If someone seems irrational, delusional or just plain weird, let someone know. If someone seems to believe you have a romantic relationship and you don't - be alert and report stalking or obsessive behavior as soon as you encounter it. Sometimes, if these situations are caught early, the subject can be helped with medical intervention. Do not put embarrassment above safety.

Most importantly, if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and you can access real shelter or cover, waste no time running full speed in that direction. If you are trapped, in a room with an assailant who is picking off victims as he/she finds them, FIGHT. Throw things, big things if you can grab them. Use that as a distraction to assault the shooter. Go down fighting if you must, but do not let yourself be immobilized by fear. Unless you can hide among the bodies and successfully play dead (a risky tactic if the assailant decides on a 'coup de grace' shot), you may as well go down fighting. If you cower in a corner or under a desk, as soon as he sees you he will kill you. Take the initiative away. You have nothing to lose in this situation. Remember the lesson of 9/11, submission to an adversary bent on killing plays into his expectations and will likely result in your death."

UPDATE: "It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act."

VDH On The Anxiety Society

"Just as the nation could not breathe without learning the size of Dick Cheney’s shotgun pellets (I remember a Washington reporter calling me to ask what a 4-10, 20, and 28 gauge were), or the minutiae of Scooter Libby’s testimony, so now the fired federal attorneys hog the airways.

These may or may not be critical stories of the age, but my confusion is over their transitory nature: the world is supposed to stop over the Harriet Meyers nomination or Valerie Plame testimony. Fine, but why then do they become ancient history within hours? Various explanations: 24-hour cable news stations must create scandal and headlines; the NY-DC media is in a serial hysteria over George Bush; the inability of the American viewer to put up with a sustained analysis, etc. In any case the net effect is abject cynicism, with the public realization that what was supposed to work the nation into a frenzy will be sominex in three weeks—and all this tucked between fights over the corpse of Anna Nicole and worry over lost hikers."

On The Necessity Of Banning Dihydrogen Monoxide

The Messiah Pariah

"Think about that one for a moment. Again, as we were discussing the other day, the deeper the cause, the deeper the effect. The cause of this messiah was so deep that its shattering effects continue to be felt today -- again, even if you only look at it in purely Bionian terms, let alone religious ones; for if truth is catastrophic, then Truth must be the biggest catastrophe of them all, shattering every man-made idol with which it comes into contact.

Understood in Bion's sense, it is not the least bit of hyperbole to say that the United States is the "messiah among nations." With this understanding in mind, it is entirely predictable that the Establishment -- e.g., the UN or the international left -- would react to us the way they do. The truly messianic liberal principles embodied in our founding documents absolutely shatter the leftist agenda into into so many bits of totoiletarian fasces."

On Enemies And Their Our Victims

"An enemy, as opposed to an opponent, is a very different creature.

An enemy is someone with whom we, as individuals and as a community, have fundamental differences. An enemy has values and beliefs, that are very different than out own. An enemy wants to deprive us of our beliefs and values, because that enemy finds our beliefs repulsive or threatening to their own. Enemies will fight to the death, should they choose to engage us or we choose to engage them.

That is a bitter lesson.

Had we bombed Berlin and rid the Germans of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi political leadership, 50 million lives would have been spared.

Had we assassinated the likes of Josef Mengele and other Nazi ’scientists’ and ‘doctors,’ untold horror and tragedy would have been averted and tens of thousands of ‘medical experiments’- many thousands of which the German ‘doctors’ meticulously noted were done without anesthesia, would never have taken place. The wholesale slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and ‘mental defects’ would never have occurred. [ Of course, many of our own "best and brightest" were aiding and abetting the madness under the rubric of "eugenics". -ed. ]

There are people who believe that enemies are opponents- that is, they can reasoned with and rationalized with and common ground can be had. Believing that an enemy can be an opponent is what led much of Europe to appease Hitler, in the beginning. Herr Hitler, it was believed, was after all a European. Surely he could be reasoned with. Surely he would respond to the rational idea that war was catastrophic.

The world watched and listened as Germany stated her objectives and prepared for war- and remained in denial about the obvious German intentions. The Germans could never be enemies, they believed. They might be opponents- but never enemies.

They were wrong.

Reynolds is absolutely right. If we do not deal with the mullahs and other racist, bigoted and dysfunctional leaders in Tehran and the Arab world, we and our allies will pay dearly. The conflict will not be limited to Africa or other far away places that the media can ignore. We are facing a confrontation in our own back yard.

This kind of denial and moral bankruptcy from the left is not surprising. They have not stood up against any slaughters or tragedies. Stalin, Pol Pot, post war Vietnam, Che, Darfur, Rwanda, Sierra Leonne, Mauritania and Algeria are only a few places of the the left saw fit not care about. The truth is, the only victims the left have consistently proved to care about are themselves."

Focus

"My advice to investors and entrepreneurs is not to dive into a hot Web 2.0 start-up. Instead, invest in building up your attention span. Take a walk. Read a book. Shut down your computer and your cell phone for 24 hours. Focus." [ Turn off the TV too. -ed. ]

The Islamic Democracy Conundrum And Nightmare's Handmaiden

"I'll discuss this more when I get some time tonight...but the conundrum presented here is a serious one. If we believe we can avoid conflict by doing the right thing, and doing the right thing means handing power to people who are determined to have a conflict with us...there's a good chance we've got issues with the way we're formulating the problem." [ You betcha. Reading assignment: Kurtz here and here. Gagdad here and here and here. There are prerequisites for democracy; some pretty whopping ones in fact that we take so completely for granted that we can't even see them any more. The problem is that we have violated the Prime Directive and have stumbled into the Golden Hour whether we like it or not. Given this situation, the only responsible thing to do is to suck it up and attempt a democracy transplant even given the low odds we have of success. And it's made all the more maddening given that Kurdistan right next door from the hellish nightmare we struggle with today could nearly be the 51st state. All the more amazing given the level of British intervention it took to get India anywhere close to 51st state stature next door to the hellish nightmare of Pakistan. You can run -- but the hellish nightmare will kill you where you live. If we learned anything from 9/11 that should have been it. But denial is nightmare's handmaiden... -ed. ]

Crichton On "Information Casualties"

"But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

You may know that Australian aborigines fear a curse called “pointing the bone.” A shaman shakes a bone at a person, and sings a song, and soon after, the person dies. This is a specific example of a phenomenon generally referred to as “hex death”—a person is cursed by an authority figure, and then dies. According to medical studies, the person generally dies of dehydration, implying they just give up. But the progression is very erratic, and shock symptoms may play a part, suggesting adrenal effects of fright and hopelessness.

Yet this deadly curse is nothing but information. And it can be undone with information.

A friend of mine was an intern at Bellvue Hospital in New York. A 28-year old man from Aruba said he was going to die, because he had been cursed. He was admitted for psychiatric evaluation and found to be normal, but his health steadily declined. My friend was able to rehydrate him, balance his electrolytes, and give him nutrients, but nevertheless the man worsened, insisting that he was cursed and there was nothing that could prevent his death. My friend realized that the patient would, in fact, soon die. The situation was desperate. Finally he told the patient that he, the doctor, was going to invoke his own powerful medicine to undo the curse, and his medicine was more powerful than any other. He got together with the house staff, bought some headdresses and rattles, and danced around the patient in the middle of the night, chanting what they hoped would be effective-sounding phrases. The patient showed no reaction, but next day he began to improve. The man went home a few days later. My friend literally saved his life.

This suggests that the Ukranian invalids are not unique in their response, but by the large numbers of what we might call “information casualties” they represent a particularly egregious example of what can happen from false fears."