Arm yourself with these questions for 2011 and forever

Pajamas Media has this post by an ex-Soviet immigrant:

Question Insanity: What to Ask Progressives
An ex-Soviet immigrant goes Socratic on his liberal American critics.
by Oleg Atbashian

Dear Americans, these are some questions I have collected in 16 years of living in your country. Please see if you can answer them for me:

* If all cultures are equal, why doesn’t UNESCO organize International Cannibalism Week festivals?

* Why do those demanding “equal pay for equal work” never protest against “equal pay for little or no work”?

* Why has no politician ever run on men’s issues or promised to improve the lives of males?

* If all beliefs are equally valid, how come my belief in the absurdity of this maxim gets rejected by its proponents?

* Ever noticed that for the past thirty years, we’ve been hearing we have less than ten years to save the planet?

* Once a politician labels the truth as hate speech, can anyone trust him to speak the truth afterward?

* If a politician gets elected by the poor on a promise to eliminate poverty, wouldn’t fulfilling his promise destroy his voting base? Wouldn’t he rather benefit from the growing numbers of poor people? Isn’t this an obvious conflict of interests?

* How did the “war on poverty” end? Has there been a peace treaty or a ceasefire? Who is the occupying force and who are the insurgents?

* Why weren’t there demonstrations with anti-feudal slogans under feudal rule? And under Stalin, no anti-communist demonstrations? And under Hitler, no anti-fascist demonstrations? In a free capitalist society, anti-capitalist demonstrations are commonplace. Is capitalism really the worst system?

* If capitalism makes some people rich without making others poor, who will benefit when capitalism is destroyed?

* If the poor in America have things that people in other countries can only dream about, why is there a movement to make America more like those other countries?

* Why, on the rare occasions when Obama’s actions benefit America, does his base get angry? And every time his actions are hurting this nation, his base is happy? Who exactly are these people?

* If cutting out the middleman lowers the price, why are we paying the government to stand between us and the markets?

* If racial profiling is an abomination, what do you make of the last presidential election?

* After Eric Holder called Americans a nation of cowards, what has he done personally to help the situation?

* If diversity training benefits everyone, why do those classes mostly consist of white heterosexual males?

* Why is a huge poisonous cloud over a volcano considered magnificent — but a smokestack over an American factory is ugly and harmful?

* How many Kyoto Protocols are rendered pointless by one medium-sized volcanic eruption?

* Why is burning gas in my car hurting the planet, but setting fire to housing developments in California is saving it?

* Why does Hollywood glamorize drug addicts, criminals, liberal Democrats, and mentally challenged people? What do they all have in common?

* How come Hollywood can always find a good side in thugs, but never in businesspeople? What was the last movie that pictured a self-reliant, industrious man as a role model?

* If it’s capitalist greed that forces Hollywood to exploit the lowest human instincts, why didn’t the same greed force Hollywood to exploit America’s patriotism and make war movies showing the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as a force for good? Wouldn’t one such film bring more green cash than all the anti-American flops in the recent years? Where was Hollywood’s capitalist greed then?

* How come those calling Sarah Palin a “bimbo” often look like part of Paris Hilton’s entourage?

* If there are no absolutes and family is an antiquated tool of bourgeois oppression, why is having gay marriage an absolute must?

* Would you know from the media coverage that there are more sex offenders among public school teachers then among Catholic priests? How come the church gets the blame and the Department of Education doesn’t?

* Why is the media so outspoken about sex abusers being priests, but avoids calling them homosexual pedophiles? Who are they afraid to offend?

* Why do those who decry modern civilization never live far from shopping centers and why don’t grind their coffee with a stone ax?

* If we are called a “consumer society” because we consume, why aren’t we also called an “excreter society” because we excrete? For that matter we also sleep, dream, talk, think, invent, play music, raise children, feel pain, get sick and die. Many of us work for a living. Why aren’t we called a “producer society” because we produce the things we consume? Who puts these labels on us and for what purpose?

* How come the unselfish Americans hate their country out of personal frustrations, while the selfish ones defend America with their lives?

* If describing terrorists as freedom fighters is justified by the journalistic principle of neutrality, what is the name of the principle that justifies describing U.S. troops as rapists and murderers?

* When the media portrays the killing of terrorists as “slaughter of civilians,” while slaughter of civilians is portrayed as “resistance to occupation,” is the media really being neutral? Whose side are they really on?

* If Hollywood types are so opposed to capitalism, why is there a warning against unauthorized distribution of their movies?

* Why is experimenting on animals cruel, but experimenting on human embryos compassionate?

* How come industrial logging is a crime against nature, but the destruction of forests by wildfires is a natural cycle of life?

* Why do those who object to tampering with the environment approve of tampering with the economy? Isn’t the economy also a fragile ecosystem where a sudden change can trigger a devastating chain reaction?

* Isn’t the latest economic crisis such a chain reaction?

* Aren’t most of today’s social ills the result of tampering with social ecosystems?

* Why is bioengineering bad, but social engineering good?

* If Al Gore is right and our consumption of the planet’s resources is a moral issue, doesn’t that make genocide an ethical solution? How about an artificial famine? What would Al Gore choose?

* If being a winner in nature’s struggle for survival is selfish, does being extinct make you an altruist?

* Since our planet’s resources are limited, wouldn’t the ultimate act of environmental activism be to stop eating and starve to death?

* How come those who hate humanity for its faults are called “humanists” but those who love humanity for its virtues are called “hate-mongers”?

* If economic ups and downs are natural cycles, why is the downturn always blamed on unbridled capitalism, but the upturn is the result of a wise leadership of a Democrat president?

* Why is there never a media story praising capitalism for the booming economy?

* Ever noticed that those who demand “power to the people” also believe that people can’t do anything right without government supervision?

* How exactly does dependency on the government increase “people power”?

* Why is there never a headline that says “Government program ends as its intended goal has been achieved”?

* How come so many anti-American radicals are wearing American brands, listen to American music, watch American movies, and play American video games on computers designed by American engineers?

* Why do advocates for higher taxes have accountants advising them how they can pay smaller taxes? Wouldn’t you expect them instead to seek advice on how to give away more of their income to the IRS? Or at least not to hire accountants at all?

* Can you name one person who paid the IRS more than he owed because he trusted the government to put his money to good use?

* Did it occur to any of the 9/11 Truthers that a government conspiracy to murder thousands of people would have also included a plan to rub out a few troublemakers?

* If U.S. oil companies own everyone in Washington, how come they allowed Congress to grill them for the alleged price gouging — and to broadcast it on C-Span?

* Why didn’t Congress also grill Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, and a guy named Abdullah Ibn Abdul Aziz Bin Abdulrahman Bin Faisal Bin Turki Bin Abdullah Bin Muhammad al Saud?

* Why are windfall profits a problem when they enrich U.S. companies that pay billions in taxes — but when Hugo Chavez uses the same windfall profits to fund Marxist guerillas in Colombia, it’s not a big deal?

* If George W. Bush was an oil-thirsty dictator, why couldn’t he in eight years get permission from Congress to drill in ANWR? And why didn’t that failure in any way hurt his dictatorial reputation with the media?

* If it’s true that the media emphasized bad news and harassed President Bush only because they competed for ratings, what changed now? Aren’t they worried that today’s emphasis on good news from the White House will destroy their ratings and make journalism irrelevant?

* And finally, if all opinions are equal, how come a liberal who disagrees with a conservative is open-minded, but a conservative who disagrees with a liberal is a bigot?

I hope you will find my questions handy. Feel free to pass them around and propose some of your own in the comments below.

In this post he had a story that preceded this list, read it here.

"the country is just not into you"

That is part of the closing line of of the last paragraph of one of the most interesing analogies I have ever seen.  In a post written by  by Oleg Atbashian.  He compares Obama's lies with a teenage boy trying to score with a girl.  He says, "When my old lies didn't work(ing) anymore and I needed to up my game, I sounded exactly like post-midterm Obama.

He goes on: I wonder how many American voters had elected Obama, not because they shared his theories or understood any of his hope and change rhetoric, but simply because they shared the same political hormones. Perhaps the number of voters with the hormone-impaired thinking can roughly be calculated by taking the amount of votes for Obama in 2008 and subtracting the much smaller amount of Democratic votes in 2010. Easy come, easy go.

I know how American liberals feel. Most of my Ukrainian girlfriends in my younger years must have been archetypal conservatives, while my endocrinal excesses made me an untrainable liberal. I thought I had their mandate, I didn’t listen, I pushed my agenda, and they voted me out of their lives.

Go read it all, it's a very interest concept.

The Amazing history of word meanings

Frank Miele explains what liberal means and used to mean.

What the world needs now is more real liberals

Liberals — God bless them!

No, seriously. Don’t let my conservative credentials sway you into thinking I am being facetious. I am not.

But consider which liberals I am praising, and then stop and ask yourself if the people who use that title today are fit for the honor.

Taking the definition from a good “liberal” source — Wikipedia — to make sure it is not some accident of warped conservative thinking, let’s consider the following:

“Liberals in the 19th century wanted to develop a world free from government intervention, or at least free from too much government intervention. They championed the ideal of negative liberty, which constitutes the absence of coercion and the absence of external constraints. They believed governments were cumbersome burdens and they wanted governments to stay out of the lives of individuals.”

Like I said before, God bless liberals. I just wish we could find one worthy of the name today.

It's an interesting article. Read the rest. 

Victor Davis Hanson on our ongoing Revolution

Reflections on the Revolution in America

America’s Extreme Make-over
These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.

Radical But Well Off

A word of caution: we are not talking about hoi polloi versus hoi oligoi, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.

Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.

Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.

The Distant Poor

They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid. (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).

Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.

There is much more but he ends with this;

The Mind of the Revolutionary

Where do these ideologies derive? Again, I wish I could say that they are grassroots driven, by the muscular classes who are victimized by business and, in their cry-from-the-heart protests, demand a fairer cutting of the pie. But so often the utopianism is from above, and predicated on abstract education, relative affluence, and little exposure to business or indeed much beyond the metrosexual world in general.

So fascinating these modern revolutionaries. A Buffet does not choose to pay the high income tax rate on his earnings, though he surely could in lieu of lecturing how taxes are too low. A Gates Sr. does not plan for his offspring to pay into the strapped treasury needed inheritance taxes, though he remonstrates that they must be raised on everyone else. A Geithner does not comply with the tax code, though he assumes it should be raised on others. A Gore lectures on honesty and truth and science on his way to a $100 million con that turns him from an affluent ex-politician into a global grandee.

I’m sorry — I don’t take seriously much of anything from this wannabe revolutionary bunch.

Read it all here.

We Need to Work on the Education Establishment

The information in this article is not news, but it is alarming. Children are our most precious resource, it is disheartening to think of the many subtle ways they are indoctrinated to the liberal (progressive) way of thinking. This is from American Thinker Blog.
Liberal assault on education

by Jason Abston

According to various polls, many educators at all levels consider themselves to be liberal. This political ideology often makes its way into the classroom.

While some liberal educators do a good job at educating students, it is unfortunate that others are more interested in promoting their political views. Various news stories in the fall of 2009 highlighted elementary teachers leading students in singing praises to the Obama administration.

The textbooks educators use are often a tool of indoctrination reflecting their ideologies. When a particular text teaches something contrary to that ideology, the educator often avoids the topic.

Texas is currently undergoing debates on the content of textbooks for public schools that may have dramatic implications for everyone. Fox News says that book publishers develop material for the rest of the nation based on Texas.

He goes on to explain this all starts in the  education of the classroom teachers. He is right.  Keep your eye on this discussion in further news from all media. Read the rest of todays article here.

My Sentiments Exactly

From Real clear Politics
RNC Slams Specter for Being 'Rude and Arrogant'
by Tom Bevan

Seeking to capitalize on Snarlen(sp) Arlin's blunder the other day, RNC Co-Chairman Jan Larimer released the following statement:

“Senator Specter's rude and arrogant comments yesterday were not only disrespectful to Congresswoman Bachmann, but demeaning to all women. Senator Specter should immediately apologize to the Congresswoman and to all of his constituents for such disgraceful behavior. Women should never be treated as second class citizens. It's clear Senator Specter has spent too much time in Washington, and this November I am confident Pennsylvanians will choose a new direction.”

I started a draft post on this subject earlier this morning. This is a better way to put it. I had also included some remarks by Sarah Palin quoted in Gateway Pundit.

Sarah Palin sent out a Facebook message today in support of the March for Life that is being held on Friday. She told her supporters that real advocates are pro-life.

Life News reported:

“The pro-life movement is pro-women, and it empowers women with the message that we are strong enough and smart enough to be able to pursue education, vocations and avocations while giving life to a child,” she writes today.

“This movement is largely run by women. In fact, many of the earliest leaders of the women’s rights movement were pro-life – women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul, the author of the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, who said, ‘Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women,’” the Feminists for Life member adds.

I think both these events show an anti-woman bias exists in liberals. Arrogance and believing a feminists would take away the most feminine part of her body, her unborn child, seems to be extremely anti-woman to me.

A Flock of Dead Ravens

I love that phrase, particularly when I see it in this context:
Tight Massachusetts race alarms California Dems

"For Boxer, a favorite Republican target, a GOP win in Massachusetts would be a particularly dark sign representing "not just the canary in the coal mine," said Wade Randlett, a leading Silicon Valley fundraiser for Obama. "It's the flock of dead ravens landing on the lawn."

Go read it all, this is way down in the article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

An interesting Article on George Soros

I ran into this article at American Thinker.  I have often wondered about this and I think Mr. Duke has some good answers to the questions on Soros' ethics.

The Pathology of the Rich Socialist
By Selwyn Duke

People such as George Soros and Michael Moore certainly talk a good game, but the next Mother Teresa they are not. Mother Teresa never criticized the free-market system; wealth just wasn't for her. Soros and Moore are quite the opposite. They will never take a vow of poverty and dedicate themselves to helping the poor. They just want our civilization to take a vow of poverty and become poor.

This has caused many to wonder: How can someone preach socialism while being the most rapacious "capitalist" imaginable? Well, I have a theory about this.

Read his theory here.