The state is your family now, little comrade

Heather Wilhelm at Real Clear Politics uses the topic of bullying to point out just how close to boiling the water is for all of us frogs.

Keeping young human beings from aggressing on one another for the purposes of establishing a pecking order, shaking down some lunch money, or just to be mean, is an age-old challenge for adult authority figures in any and all societies.  The most effective way to deal with it is to keep an eye on the urchins and step in and quell each particular situation as it arises.

As Wilhelm points out, though, as the FHers have conquered our entire culture, the effort to put the kibosh on bullying has undergone mission creep.  To be fair, as technology has advanced, bullying has taken on insidious new forms.  Still, parental involvement would be the most effective way to address that.  But the FHers have seen an exquisitely ripe opportunity to impose acceptance of all manner of "lifestyle choices" that were considered, as recently as fifty years ago, the kind of thing one ought to quietly pursue and not shove in others' faces.

She cites a recent book, “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy,” by Slate editor Emily Bazelon, and is admirably charitable about ascribing the most benign of motives to Bazelon, who, predictably, winds up, in her tome, advocating the placing of "Heather Has Two Mommies" on kindergarten bookshelves.

But Wilhelm does get to the core of what is really going on here - namely, supplanting family and faith with the leviathan state:

The common-sense solution to bullying, of course, would be to monitor kids, discipline them in a consistent manner, and have a well-communicated zero-tolerance policy. (Bazelon, to her credit, offers a thorough profile of a program, called the Olweus method, that does just that.)

You could also teach kids that all human beings are worthy of respect and love and should not be tormented, but that might be too simple for the people who brought you Obamacare. Plus, it’s just not as fun as social engineering. “You’re asking a school to do something differently than what’s done at home and church,” Whitney Pellegrino of the Justice Department tells Bazelon. “It’s a long process.”

If that quote doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Sadly, many families appear to have checked out of the whole “child-raising” thing, and it shows. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and so, apparently, does the government’s education establishment. When families check out or disintegrate, something will move in to take their place.

In other words, meet the new parents . . . and be at least a little afraid. 

Playing more deadly sequester games

The MEC - through ICE, so it doesn't have his direct fingerprints - releases a bunch of illegal aliens that had been incarcerated for various crimes, because Congress won't cave to his demand that the regime be able to seize yet more of our assets at gunpoint.

Peter Wehner at Commentary sums up what the MEC is up to as the clock ticks toward March 1:

The president’s greatest fear is that the sequester cuts will kick in and life will go on. So he’s threatening to pass over wasteful programs in order to target more essential ones. 

The thuggery is now on full display.

Thug nation

Woodward says a "very senior" official in the MEC regime told him he'd "regret having criticized the sequester ploy.

These people play for keeps.

Memo to all my little professional-class / serve-on-boards-of-civic-organizations / support-the-arts / want-life-to-be-"fair" "friends":  These goons over whom you gush so are not nice people.

His perspective on presidential history leads him to a noteworthy conclusion

Bob Woodward, appearing on the Morning Joe TV program, calls the MEC's pulling an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf "a kind of madness."  Ask if we can imagine any previous president - and he names Reagan, Bush 43 and Clinton - so increasing our vulnerability just to score points in a budget battle with Congress.

The kick-me sign on America's back

The Senate confirms bigot and appeaser Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.  Now that Secretary Global Test is already on his first tour of world capitals, the signal being sent to those entities probing for signs of weakness are exponentially more clear than they were in even the last days of the H-word Creature, who at least knew how to talk tough when it was to her advantage, and the rather squishy Leon Panetta.

There are, of course, a few proper objects of rage and contempt to list here.  Turncoat Pubs, the Most Equal Comrade, and the appointee himself.

I came close to blogging several times today, what with the ongoing sequester scare-mongering, the bestowing of the Best Picture Oscar by post-America's premier food desert crusader, and such local manifestations of Western civilization's death as the regional hospital in our city imploring Gov. Pence to rethink his rejection of Medicaid expansion and my city's human-rights council (the existence of which, as a taxpayer, makes my teeth grind) pushing through a redifinition of the term "family" (you know exactly how they redefined it) for purposes of "fair housing."  Alas, I focused on paid writing concerns instead, eyeing the clock for the onset of cocktail hour, which, happily, is now here.

Where my will to continue fighting comes from is something I don't entirely understand.

Lincoln bedroom redux

Organizing for America, the revolutionary socialist group that morphed into the MEC's campaign machine last year, and is now back to a general dismantling of our country, is offering those who donate half a million bucks or more a seat on an "advisory committee" that will meet on a quarterly basis with the MEC.  When asked about it today, Jay Carney was none too keen to discuss it.

One of those little vignettes that serves as a microcosm of the whole present implosion

Sandra Fluke is now pushing for transgendered soldiers.

Whee!  Let's just make up our own reality!

Never mind such immutable facts as that people have one or the other set of particular kind of genitals between their legs, and that the human condition has always involved brutish aggression threatening the happiness of those attempting to live peaceably and productively, and that the United States would quickly be overrun by such aggressive brutes if they sensed a diminished focus on the part of our defensive apparatus.

Sandra Fluke has clearly never actually held anything dear or regarded anything as sacred in her entire pathetic life.

Maybe the post-American regime will make people become doctors to deal with situations like this

Florida doesn't have enough doctors to accommodate the Medicaid expansion that Gov. Scott wimped out and signed on to.

Man, if this trend plays itself out, I'm gonna miss my knishes, blintzes, latkes, matzo soup and pastrami on rye

Two recent pieces - one by Austin Hill at Townhall, and one by Neo-neocon at her blog - that are responses to a recent LA Times piece on the demise of the Jewish deli.  There used to be thousands in New York, and now that's down to a couple of hundred.

Neo-neocon's main point is that delis have had an authenticity problem for some time.  She says that the dough for their bagels and rye bread had undergone a decrease in chewiness, for example.

Austin Hill raises some interesting points.  He doesn't mention Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction, but he's clearly addressing it:

Consider, for example, the notion of “too much competition.” What exactly does this mean?

Obviously the more competitive a marketplace is, the more difficult it is for any particular business entity to survive and thrive. But how do we know when the level of competition is appropriate, and when it is “too much?”

Americans are accustomed to fierce competition in other arenas – in sports, especially, and even in the arts and entertainment. Similarly, most of us would never say “my favorite team didn’t make it to the Super Bowl this year because there was too much competition in the NFL.”

But when it comes to local small businesses, we often succumb to this vague, un-defined notion that there is this magical amount of competition that’s “just right,” and if our favorite business can’t compete, then therefore there is “too much” competition.

And he points out that delis, as small businesses, are facing the ravages of Obamanomics typical of that type of organization:

 And guess what the LA Times article about the delis completely ignored? The impact of government policy on small businesses. Nowhere did it reference the expansive and onerous mandates placed upon business via Obamacare, the impact on business owners of the President’s payroll tax hike, or his income tax increases on “rich people.” 

No, the LA Times apparently wasn’t interested in how the President’s income tax hikes have taken money away from what the I.R.S. designates as “Subchapter S Corporations” (sometimes abbreviated as “S-corps”), and how this has effectively taken money directly out of small corporations, many of which operate small businesses. Likewise, the article made no reference to the fact California voters approved an increase in state income tax rates for “rich people” (thus leading to even less revenue in Subchapter-S Corporations) on their ballot last November, nor did it acknowledge that California has for years been on a trajectory of higher and higher unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation mandates for businesses.

Hitting the delis is always a must on any trip I take to New York, so this is a sad development.  Not only will I miss that particular kind of chow, but the continuing fading of the particularities of our culture as well. As we all assimilate by virtue of the homogenization of our food, music and customs, it will be left to the "diversity"-hustlers to keep the rich and distinct ways of living one found in the various types of neighborhoods in America -  when it was America -  alive.  Alas, that will be done in the manner of museum-curating, trotting out the delectables from the country's various cultural tributaries at "ethnic festivals" and in the form of offerings found in the frozen-food section of the supermarket, and there no doubt prepared with the kind of nodding to health persnickety-ness and mix-and-match whimsy typical of a culture that no longer has a grasp of its own heritage.

I wonder how Shapiro's in Indianapolis and Katzinger's in Columbus, Ohio are doing.  My two fave midwestern oases for this type of fare.

Why do some people feel like they have a vested interest in spinning Iran's nuke program as no big deal?

Compare and contrast this Foreign Affairs article by a USC professor of international relations with the latest IAEA report which says that Iranian installation of upgraded uranium enrichment equipment is underway.

The FA piece, if you read it all the way through, is clearly just a garden-variety attempt to make the West look trigger-happy.  That's the whole point of it, to speak candidly.

Why identifying someone as a Republican sure as hell tells you nothing about whether he or she is a conservative

Today's exhibits:  Senator Richard Shelby, who says he will vote to confirm Hagel as SecDef, and Florida governor Rick Scott, who made opposition to FHer-care core to his very political identity, and is now going to accept federal expansion of Medicaid in his state.

We are truly on our own.

It's come to light that the terminally ill patient known as Western civilization has yet more complications

Savvy sort that you surely must be if you check in with LITD, by now you know about Samuel Betances's indoctrination sessions at the US Department of Agriculture.

Yes, of course, your reaction, like mine, is "Just wow."  Well, yes, it's gone this far.

How to unpack this development?  Do we start with the fact that the US Department of Agriculture mainly exists to dole out SNAP coupons (formerly known as food stamps), subsidize crop insurance, and put floors under commodity-price fluctuations?  Or maybe take a look back at how all this "diversity training" dog vomit insinuated itself into our society's schools, corporations and governmental bodies?  Or do we look at the fat stipends these balkanization-hustlers pull down?

How did this crud find its way into the USDA, which ostensibly exists to serve farmers, who, for all the bureaucracy that has become part of their lives, are still generally a hail and hardy bunch who slip on a tee shirt and pair of jeans and a pair of boots before dawn, down a cup of coffee and head out to the tractor barn to begin fourteen hours of busting their tails?

Well, that gets us back to the nature of the USDA, which, for all the specifics of its functions, is primarily characterized by the fact that it is a large, unwieldy governmental organization.  Such entities, for all their supposed services, really exist for two purposes: to perpetuate the job security of those working within them, and to spread the leftist agenda.

Okay, so we caught this one and brought it to light.  The videos have gone viral and talking heads on radio and television are keeping it front and center for the time being.

Just remember: squishing one cockroach like Betances does not make our house pest-free.

War is a slog, and celebrations of any victories in the skirmishes that comprise it must not distract us from the still-arduous task ahead.

Another humdinger Hagel speech from 2007

This one was to the Cato Institute, and he said that negotiations with North Korea were headed in the right direction.

What FHer-care is really all about

Universal Studios Resort in Orlando, Florida drops health insurance coverage for a big swath of its employees.  Can't afford compliance with FHer-care's regulations.

There's no point in getting all indignant about the falsity of the MEC's claim that we'd get to keep our insurance if we liked it.  The son of a bitch is orchestrating the circumstances by which we go to a single-payer system.

The goofy priorities of our overlords - today's edition

File under WTF: Secretary of State Global Test gives his first major foreign-policy on global change.

How much more blatant a sign of Hagel's disdain for his own civilization do we need?

In a 2007 address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he berates the presidential primary candidates in both parties for what he saw as competition to take the hardest line against Iran, while he advocated engagement.  Said the US was acting like a "schoolyard bully."