“Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”

via www.nationalreview.com

I suspect that this IRS thing will fade away--but it shouldn't.

For some (technically unfathomable) reason I am getting lots of (mostly favourable) comments on a post I entered in a long defunct blog of my own that I had had a go at before joining RedStateEclectic.

Funny to read a post that is five years old. My writing may have been a wee bit more laddish then; also, I may have a lesser urge to be reproachful toward the unenlightened (really?). At any rate, in large measure I remain in agreement with my former self.

As of writing these lines, Germany's most frequented DE>EN - EN>DE on-line-dictionary reveals uncertainty as to the meaning of the term "doublethink".

http://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=307224&idForum=2&lp=ende〈=de

Is this a case of the confused finding it difficult to sort out their confusion? I suspect so. I harbour the presumption that muddled thinking is essential to upholding what a vast number of people in Germany consider their dearest believes. The ever-present intimidation of "political correctness" both expresses and enforces "intellectual" commitments concocted from inconsistency, cowardice and opportunism.

Let me give you an example of how doublethink serves to fend off the moral overload people are constantly exposed to these days:

Recently, a senior civil servant told me that he had applied for a new job. He regarded himself the best candidate for the position but was almost certain he would not be considered because the second best applicant would likely be favoured on the grounds of being a woman. He thought this unjust. When I challenged him to protest the probable decision, he switched to a different position, underwriting the need for positive discrimination (affirmative action) on behalf of women.

The implications of the underlying theory which he espoused startled me: The first assumption was that there is a uniform view as to the station women deserve in our time. The second assumption was that this standard of where women should have arrived at in our days has been anticipated by all men in human history, only to be studiously violated by them until very recently. The third assumption was that the male conspiracy behind the suppression of women established a guilt among contemporary men and an obligation for them to make good in terms of positive discrimination favouring women.

In the course of our discussion, he remained trapped in doublethink, firmly believing both that it was not right to pass the best candidate over and that such injustice assumed the quality of just behaviour when it came to restoring women's rightful station in contemporary life.

Eventually tired of the debate, he told me that the issue was of little import as the promotion would involve only a negligible pay rise and that his present position required only one or two days effective work per week and thus left much leeway for other activities to satisfy his needs.

Incidentally, the man's job is to define what our pupils are to be taught.

A hallmark of our time, assiduously promoted in the educational system and asserted by a haggling variant of democracy, is the replacement of consistent principles of justice by a calculus of popularity ("but that is what everyone thinks") and expediency ("why, I can/can't get away with it"). The idea that justice rests on consistent principles gives way to a notion of justice based on the enforcement of organized interests.

Once special interests are fortified by a majority, the totalitarian concept of democracy (i.e. the belief in the unconstrained power of a majority) guarantees that these special interests define justice - arbitrarily, of course.

Democracy as we know it, i.e. the philosophy holding that political power defines justice, overrides consistency and, thus, creates moral overload and the need for doublethink.

Main Entry: dou·ble·think
Pronunciation: 'd&-b&l-"thi[ng]k
Function: noun
: a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas

(Source: Merriam-Webster)

What light, through yonder technology breaks? 

It is D.C, and the internet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious fax

Who is not just sick but obsolete

but  yet, our FEC, doth clung far longer than all.

Inspired by this email from the Federal Election Commission that arrived just this morning:

Welcome to 1998, FEC!!!

**********

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Notes Steven Kates, author of the best introduction to economics there is:

If even Chris Matthews is done with Obama, who’s left? You can even watch the video here but this is the text:

‘What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,’ Matthews said.

‘So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,’ Matthews continued. ‘But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.’

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama ‘a ship with the engine off.’

“A ship with the engine off.” He’s actually much worse than that and far more destructive but it will do for now.

The source.

Compare this with what Richard Epstein has to say (in the first 2 minutes of the below video) about his former colleague.

From Beethoven's piano concerto No. 5.

The problem with compromising your principles means that you have to give up some of them, and for the past 45 years, GOP leadership has been willing to hand off our 2nd amendment rights in exchange for nothing more than, at best,  attempting to quiet down the chattering class of the left.

Those of us 50 and older learned a long time ago that the left will never be satiated.  They will never have a government to suit them. They will never have enough welfare programs. Nobody will ever pay their fair share.  And no amount of private firearm ownership is permissible. 

Of course, the manipulations always come with demeaning, condescending statements from both sides of the aisle, assuring us that nobody wants to take guns away from everybody. They only want to decide who is allowed to have them.

They're liars. They are too politically savvy to actually talk about repealing the 2nd Amendment. Instead they content themselves with taking our rights away through incremental-ism. Every snippet of freedom the government allows us to keep in the name of compromise moves to the top of the list of the next loophole to close. Private sales of guns, for example. But make no mistake - the long term agenda of the big government politicians is to take all guns away from anybody not carrying a government ID.

Via Paul Mushine,  the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs  brought us this less than shocking audio of Democrat legislators caught talking on an open mic.  Their ultimate goal? "Confiscate, confiscate, confiscate."

"We needed a bill that was going to confiscate, confiscate, confiscate.” 

"They want to keep the guns out of the hands of the bad guys, but they don’t have any regulations to do it.” 

"They don’t care about the bad guys.  All they want to do is have their little guns and do whatever they want with them.” 

"That’s the line they’ve developed.”  

******

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Remarkable music by Martin Palmeri, not only for the aficionado of tango music.

Lysenko, one of the masters of political biology.

Following up on my Scientists Not Interested in Science, find below a level-headed reminder of some facts of basic, depoliticised biology.

In his summary, Luboš Motl writes:

The basic theme of the [below] article is simple and most of us learned it as fifth-graders: CO₂ is primarily the plant food while its other implications for nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian organizations should work hard to help the mankind to increase the CO₂ concentration and it's surprising that virtually all of them are failing to do so.

Thus, ex-moonwalker Harrison Schmitt and physics professor Will Happer of Princeton argue:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The entire brief article.

Niall Ferguson on the European Union - see also my Another Medal for the EUSSR:

I’m absolutely certain that Lord Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit will tell you that the European experiment has succeeded because there has been peace in Europe since it began in the 1950s. Can we just knock that on the head? European integration has had absolutely nothing to do with peace in Europe since World War II; that has been the achievement of NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]. The creation of the European Union was not about war and peace, otherwise there would have been a European Defence Community, and that was vetoed by the French National Assembly in 1954.

[...]

Europe has to be judged in economic terms, since its own terms have always been economic. And how did it do? In the 1950s the economy of integrated Europe grew at 4 per cent. In the 1960s, it was about the same. In the 1970s, growth was 2.8 per cent; in the 1980s, it slid to 2.1 per cent; in the 1990s, it was only 1.7 per cent: and so on, down to zero.

As European integration has proceeded, its growth has declined. The share of Europe in global GDP has fallen since 1980 from 31 per cent to just 19 per cent. Since 1980 the EU has grown faster than the United States in only nine out of 32 years. Never has its unemployment rate been lower than the US unemployment rate.

Are any of you investors? What were the worst equity markets of the last 10 years? They were Greece, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the worst in the world. And on top of all of this, we have monetary union — the ultimate experiment gone wrong.

We warned them, ladies and gentlemen. We said, if you have a monetary union without labour market integration and without any fiscal federalism, it will blow up. I predicted that in 2000. It is happening in real time, in a chemistry lab, on the other side of the Atlantic.

But this was also a political experiment gone wrong. Do you know what that experiment was? The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union — despite their wishes — by economic means because the political means failed.

[...]

And when the European peoples voted against further integration, their respective governments were told to try again. It happened to the Danes in 1992, and to the Irish twice: in 2001 and again in 2008. Their citizens gave the wrong answer in the referendum, so the governments just held another one. This tells you something about why this experiment has failed — it has failed because it has lost political legitimacy. And we see this not only in Greece but in government after government across Europe. Thirteen have fallen since this crisis began two years ago, and more will follow in the months to come.

Read the full article here.

The story that's beaking tonight is out of Cleveland, where a neighbor rescued three women who have been missing for over 10 years.

Here's an interview with the man that rescued them:

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Written by an Iowa State senior by the name of Barry Snell, there's so much good stuff in it that you'll have to read it for yourself.  Here's a few key points, but I'd be doing him a disservice if I didn't stress that there's much, much more at the link below: 

The emotional mob does not rule in America.

... you have to be a complete idiot to think the Second Amendment is about hunting.

... concealed carry is now legal nearly everywhere, and guess what? Violent crime continues to go down. 

...many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion.

Again, I can't encourage you enough to go here and read the whole piece.

**********

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For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

... is the title of a suite in ten movements composed for piano by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.

For anyone who doubted what was happening before their very eyes, the reality of Rand Paul 2016 becomes more and more clear, as per today's National Review:

Rand Paul’s chief strategist is leaving his Senate post to run the Kentucky Republican’s political shop.

Doug Stafford, who is widely seen as Paul’s closest adviser, will soon resign as chief of staff to manage Paul’s national political operation. Today’s news is the clearest sign yet that Paul, a potential 2016 contender, is building a presidential campaign.....

via reason.com

Hang on to your hats. This time will be different. Will the liberty movement splinter?

via www.youtube.com

Interesting interview. I like Gary Johnson. I don't know if I necessarily agree with him on every single issue 100%, but I agree with him on a lot.

I keep thinking that there's got to be some common ground on some of the social issues--of course I have no idea where that ground is.