If the Russians see what's going on here, why don't we?

Pravda (remember them? the communist party newspaper that eventually went on to have a ridiculously overpriced cowhide bag named approximately after it) has correctly identified, in its lede sentence of a current editorial, what's going on with our current administration (I almost said "totalitarian regime").

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

There's just enough weird pro-Russian anti-western propagandaist nonsense in the article to convince me that Karl Rove didn't somehow land a job as an intern for the newspaper, like the following bit:

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

But it goes on from there, with a forthright directness of speaking which would be considered gauche in American society, to judge (despite the left's insistence that no one has the right to judge anyone about anything) our current trajectory and find in it a tragedy unfolding.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

It doesn't seem the former communists harbor any doubts about the tipping point for our own descent into communism.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

In 1984 anyone who supported a Pravda editorial over the US government would also have had to be wearing a Free Tibet t-shirt and a Mondale/Ferraro '84 pin. It's astonishing that a mere 25 years on, we've reached the depths that we have.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

Yeah, I noticed that too, and yet it seems from all the non-existent outrage over this blatantly fascistic lurch toward statism that I and Pravda are the only ones who've noticed.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

And they'd be right to laugh, to watch the world superpower suffer such obvious and self-inflicted and avoidable damage on itself.

BHO will prove to be our collective damnation.

An old argument with a new twist

In observing mankind I find that I sometimes begin to suspect correlations and draw conclusions based on observations I make. Although this sounds totally banal, there is a subset of our population (cough donkeys) who would argue that drawing conclusions about tendencies from one's own observations is being judgmental, which I suppose them to mean as a pejorative. There was a time that the ability to draw general conclusions from specific sets of observations (I think this is called inductive reasoning, no?) might have been considered a good thing, as this ability is one of the handful of traits which separates man from the lower animals. But I digress.

One of the trends I noticed in college was that there was a moderately positive correlation between being a democrat and being a cat person. (And preferring Coke to Pepsi is positively correlated with being a communist, or at least a democrat, which obviously is pretty much the same thing. I kid.) What made this fun was the fact that my roommate at the time was a stern rightwing NROTC candidate who totally inexplicably liked cats. He also disagreed with my catlovers = democrats theory. Naturally enough, we spent the next several days arguing the point with an appropriate level of vigor, and we at some point reduced to debating which party a cat or a dog would tend to vote for in the upcoming 1992 presidential election. This was done with rather astonishing earnestness.

My theory, the truth which seemed so self-evident that I was surprised to have to even explain it, was that not only are catlovers democrats but the animals themselves would vote for democrats given the chance to, and dogs the opposite. The argument runs thusly:

1. Cats really don't do anything for you. They play, occasionally, more for their own amusement than your own. They perform no essential or even useful function within the household. Just like the unemployed street youth of Ann Arbor.
2. Cats clearly don't love their owners and labor under the delusion that they're smarter than we are. Just like the democrat kids angry at their parents for instilling and requiring discipline. (For some reason cat people agree with this assessment and find it sort of Hugh Grant rogueishly charming or something.)
3. Cats don't follow instructions, just like a bunch of unwashed hippie protesters ignoring orders to disperse their foul gatherings.
4. Cats nonetheless expect, due to their own apparent sense of wholly undeserved entitlement, for their needs and wants to be provided for them despite having made not the least attempt to earn them. Just like a 1991 pre-welfare-reform era welfare mom.

Pretty damning stuff, yes? On the same points:

1. Although performed with uneven competence, a dog takes seriously its mission to protect the household (even against mailmen and children) and secure the perimiter. A dog is surprisingly vigilant in this even when sleeping, as anyone who's ever seen a startled dog woken up by an imperceptible noise two blocks away can attest. A dog wants to earn its keep.
2. A dog loves everyone who hasn't run afoul of them within the context of item 1. Dogs in particular were fans of Ronald Reagan for his tireless optimism and cheerfulness.
3. Dogs follow instructions reasonably well provided they don't require patience or an unnatural act like ignoring available snacks or something.
4. Dogs therefore earn their keep, are cheerful warriors, and Just Want To Help The Ball Club.

Clearly a republican animal. That anyone could argue otherwise boggles the mind.

So with all this by way of a back story, recently I uncovered the fact that probable communist Eric Zorn has written the worst possible thing imaginable about dogs, Your dog does not love you and other cold-nosed truths. This bit of defamation was in response to a woman jumping into near-freezing water to save her dog.

Let me just say, hats off to Miss Craigie, and I think I'd rather hang out with her than a crabby old sourpuss like Eric Zorn. And my dog obviously loves me, so phllbtphlpt.

Income tax funtime

Just for fun, and because posting has been a little light 'round here the past few weeks, I offer the following for your edification.

Completing polls vs unfocused whinging: which is more rewarding? Discuss.

Whinging about the excesses and ridicularity of the government is fun--I do it all the time. But whinging with specific ideas to fix stuff can be rewarding too. If you've got better ideas than the ones I've tossed out above, and I know you do, leave them in the comments section.

But sir, it's wafer thin

So I was reminded today that a few weeks ago I conducted a little poll here at ECM which asked my three-plus loyal readers to select one or more topics for a future essay. Climate change, nee global warming, came out the surprise winner. Compounding my astonishment at receiving more votes than I have readers, the "control" response concerning a request for instructions at having dropped a pencil received but a single vote. No matter my other preferences among the poll options, I would have voted for that myself. And although more than half the traffic here is generated from Star Wars-themed searches that turn up my recent foray into film criticism, nary a weary traveler selected the More Star Wars option. So go figure.

So climate change has seized the fancy of my several loyal readers, and I myself am somewhat curious as to what I'll uncover (see? objective inquiry without presumption of the outcome!). I've read a bit on the subject but a quick update or refresher on the latest writing on the subject won't hurt. It will likely be early summer before everything comes together and the long-awaited essay appears on the subject, but the waiting and the investment of additional time will make it only more delicious when it appears. And the whole climate change movement isn't likely to go away by then anyway, and if it does, then there's probably no need for me to write about it in the first place.

Besides, for the moment I sense an unexpected weakening of the Leninite BHO agenda in Washington. It's a long way from having been thwarted, and after all a tremendous amount of damage already has been done, but I'm hearing rumbles about slipping poll numbers and reluctance in the Congress to take on cap-and-trade, and that the $650B that was to provide in revenue (and politburo-type economic control) is now expected not to be available, calling into question the possibility of enacting the nakedly vote-buying Making Work Pay tax credit. If a touch of heretofore unsuspected democratic righteousness causes not one but two awful proposed programs to vanish at once, this can only be described as a good thing. But the reluctance to take up cap-and-trade pushes climate change a touch down the list of my priorities for the moment (leaving aside that my opinion of most of the political elements of the climate change movement, leaving aside the actual science, were actually a double-bluff XK-Red-27 technique to impose an otherwise obviously undesirable Bolshevik command-and-control apparatus which would be ultimately no less bloodthirsty than the original for its apparent love of the proletariat).

So for the moment my biggest concern is in matters economic. In that spirit I call attention to today's invaluable essay from Mark Steyn, entitled False Choice. It's wonderful enough to be worth quoting at length:

Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, President Obama fell back on one of his favorite rhetorical tics: “But I also know,” he wrote, “that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people.”

Really? For the moment, it’s a “false choice” mainly in the sense that he’s not offering it: “a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” is not on the menu, which leaves “an oppressive government-run economy” as pretty much the only game in town. How oppressive is yet to be determined: To be sure, the official position remains that only “the richest five percent” will have taxes increased. But you’ll be surprised at the percentage of Americans who wind up in the richest five percent. This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 per cent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade. But to talk about it in percentages of this and trillions of that misses the point. It’s not about bookkeeping, it’s about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control. No matter how small your small business is — plumbing, hairdressing, maple sugaring — the state will be burdening you with more permits, more paperwork, more bureaucracy.

And don’t plan on moving. Ahead of this week’s G20 summit in London, Timothy Geithner, America’s beloved Toxic Asset, called for “global regulation.” “Our hope,” said Toxic Tim, “is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight . . . ”

“Global oversight:” Hmm. There’s a phrase to savor.

“We can’t,” he continued, “allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints . . . ”

Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don’t want to be subject to the punitive “oversight” of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn’t you be “allowed” to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?

[...]

Unfortunately, all of it costs money he doesn’t have. So he has to borrow it, in your name. Where does the world’s hyperpower go to borrow more dough than anyone’s ever borrowed in human history? More to the point, given that, partly at the behest of Obama and Geithner, almost every other western government is ramping up national debt to cover massive bank bailouts and other phony-baloney “stimuli,” is there enough money out there to buy up the debt that’s already been run up? Last week, at the official British Treasury auction, investors failed to buy the full complement of so-called “gilt-edged” 40-year bonds. Two such auctions have already failed in Germany. The U.S. Treasury, facing similar investor reluctance to snap up $34 billion of five-year notes, was forced to increase the interest it will pay on them. The Chinese and the Saudis have long taken the view that it’s to their advantage to own as much of the western world as they can snaffle up, but it’s unclear whether even they have pockets deep enough for what America and the many Bailoutistans of Europe are proposing to spend.

In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth, and your children’s future. What began as an economic crisis is now principally a political usurpation. And, to return to the president’s “false choice,” that “chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” is exactly what we need right now. It’s the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most-efficient route to economic stabilization and renewal. A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all.

As they say, read the whole thing.

I think matters have reached a point where the legislative branch of the federal government has become nothing but a bunch of corrupt, unaccountable, self-dealing petty-tyrants-for-life. And I think what we need is a comprehensive framework of ideas--or one big idea--to restore accountability to the people in the manner of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America, which for all its faults mainly delivered on its promises and was ultimately betrayed because of the corrupting power of power itself. The elephants of the middle 'aughts lost their way, their principles, and all sense of restraint or accountability after a decade in power. It's taken the donkey two months to replicate that feat.

The problems with reform are that we trust in a group of men to govern us instead of the system. A favorite accounting aphorism is "let the system be the solution." When everything is ad hoc and the operators exercises maximum control to evaluate treatment of each item before it is recorded, the system inevitably fails because of the fallibility of its operators. When a system of rules, carefully adhered to, governs outcomes instead of individual judgments performed a thousand times over, results are better and more consistent, and errors made systematically are more easily detected and corrected than those which are introduced by hand at each of a million decision junctures.

The relevance here is that the donkey and the elephant have both proven themselves incapable of running a limited government when put in charge of a system which is essentially the rule of men instead of the rule of law (though, to be sure, I think the donkey's errors are more destructive and enervating). It is time we return to a system of the rule of law, not the rule of men, even if a constitutional amendment is required to pry the reins of power from their hands.

Quoth Madison in Federalist 51:

In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. (Emphasis mine.)

It is unfortunate, however unapologetically undemocratic it is to point out, that one of the essential checks on the tyranny of the legislature has been undone by the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which reduced the separation between the houses of the congress by rendering similar their modes of election. Since undoing that seems unlikely and any such plan would in all likelihood be falsely accused of racism by some convenient demagogue, perhaps it is time to consider some of Madison's "still further precautions" against the dangerous encroachments of the outlaw federal congress.

I am assembling my thoughts on this into an essay which will end up taking precedence over the one about climate change. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts as to what one single constitutional amendment would do the most good to permanently restrict the type of behavior emitting from the congress these days.

As an accountant, I can't help but find this funny, no matter how big a geek that makes me

Dinosaur Comics is hilarious and I recommend it with enthusiasm.

You'll like this sort of thing, if this is the sort of thing you like.

There's more!