Is this heaven?

No,  it’s… well, yeah, I guess it is heaven.  Yes, yes! I’m quite sure it is heaven. 

j.d.

The REAL Obama/Reid/Pelosi Program

Has the last two years really been a “miserable failure”?

So the Democrats will probably lose control of the House.  Great.  See the nine points below.  The first five were done by 1935.  The next four just got finished this summer (if you really want to get heavy into it see Unqualified Reservations).

So maybe we’re going to elect 30-40 Tea Party candidates to the Congress.  I love it, but they, and we, have a little bit of a job ahead, cleansing 80 years of Aristotelian “revolution in the State.”

Better pack a fucking lunch.

Garet Garrett, 1938:

Now given — (1) the opportunity, (2) a country whose fabulous wealth was in the modern forms — dynamic, functional, non-portable, (3) a people so politically naive as to have passed a law against any attempt to overthrow their government by force — and, (4) the intention to bring about what Aristotle called a revolution in the state, within the frame of existing law — Then from the point of view of scientific revolutionary technic what would the problems be?

They set themselves down in sequence as follows:

The first, naturally, would be to capture the seat of government.

The second would be to seize economic power.

The third would be to mobilize by propaganda the forces of hatred.

The fourth would he to reconcile and then attach to the revolution the two great classes whose adherence is indispensable but whose interests are economically antagonistic, namely, the industrial wage earners and the farmers, called in Europe workers and peasants.

The fifth would be what to do with business — whether to liquidate or shackle it.

(These five would have a certain imperative order in time and require immediate decisions because they belong to the program of conquest. That would not be the end. What would then ensue? A program of consolidation. Under that head the problems continue.)

The sixth, in Burckhardt’s devastating phrase, would be “the domestication of individuality” — by any means that would make the individual more dependent upon government.

The seventh would be the systematic reduction of all forms of rival authority.

The eighth would be to sustain popular faith in an unlimited public debt, for if that faith should break the government would be unable to borrow, if it could not borrow it could not spend, and the revolution must be able to borrow and spend the wealth of the rich or else it will be bankrupt.

The ninth would be to make the government itself the great capitalist and enterpriser, so that the ultimate power in initiative would pass from the hands of private enterprise to the all-powerful state.

NeoVictorian

The 2010 elections are the most important elections in my lifetime

First, a little background on why you should listen to lil ole me.  Bear with me, I know this is wordy. 

I foresaw the dot.com and housing bubbles bursting.  Really, I did.   Well, I still lost my ass in both bubbles, so act on my wisdom, rather than merely agreeing with me but doing nothing.  True confession to follow:

  In late 1999 or early 2000, I had a little “disposable income” that I wanted to invest. But I had never invested in the stock market and was afraid.

So I did what I always do when I venture into some area of unfamiliarity: I studied up on it.  In the case of stocks, I read books. Many, many books. New ones, old ones. I became quite the student.  I studied the economic reports and company balance sheets in the Wall Street Journal. 

I vividly recall reading one book in particular, about how the stock market works not just in good periods but in bad ones, too.  I can’t remember the name of the book, but the guy detailed what had happened in the past, and showed how the market is cyclical, and that in each phase of the cycle people had acted the same as they always had acted in the same phase of all previous cycles.

I know I am being vague, but it was a long time ago, and I can’t remember the name of the book.  My point is that I read the book and then looked at the stock market at that time and thought “Wow! The market is over-valued!  Price-to-earnings ratios are sky-high! Most of these dot.com  companies do not even have any earnings!  Dividend and yield are miniscule! The stock market is going to crash!”  Okay, I did not say exactly those words, but you get the picture. 

And not only did I think it, I put my money where my mouth was, and I shorted a couple of companies (for those who do know, shorting is when  you borrow shares at the current price, sell them and re-buy shares later to replace them; if the current price drops, when you buy them later you keep the difference, but if the price increases, you have to pay extra for them).  I even remember the companies that I shorted, LU (Lucent Tech) and IBM.  LU in particular seemed grossly over-priced. No way could it keep going higher, it was bound to crash.  At least that’s what the books said.  (Contrary to this information, all the “experts” were saying that the dot.com bubble was different. He he. The experts were probably saying that about the tulip craze in Holland way back when.)

So I shorted those stocks in late 1999 or early 2000.  And promptly started losing my ass.  In other words, the prices kept going through the roof.  If any of you remember, I shorted them at about the worst time ever to short, at least for a small time short-term investor who lacked balls and who could not afford to lose money, at least on paper.  When you short a stock, as the price goes up, your account goes down, at least on paper.  I saw my hard-earned money going down the toilet and promptly sold my positions shorting LU and IBM to cut my losses.  And those stocks kept going up!  So I joined the crowd and even “went long” those stocks (I purchased them this time instead of borrowing somebody elses to sell and repurchase later).

Why leftists are elitist

And also why they deny it.  A very succinct must read over at ChicagoBoyz, h/t WashingtonReb.

Speaking of WashingtonReb, I have been aware of that blog for many months. I’ve gone there a few times and not been really impressed.  And today I found out why. I just would flit about, eyeballing the headlines, and not really reading the articles. Nothing to see here, move along, I always thought. And so I did.  But this time I actually clicked on some of the links, actually read some of the articles. Okay, I’m man enough to admit that I’ve been wrong all this time.

And no, not because they just referred their readers here. Well, actually, the reason why I went back and actually read their stuff is because they were kind enough to link to us.  But the reason that I recommend them now is because their stuff is great.  What keeps bloggers coming is content, content, content, and they deliver the goods, imho.  [tl/dr: WashingtonReb has good stuff; go read it!]

John Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooe