My cup of tea today is Dong Ling with a spoonful of honey.  It’s rumored to be medicinal.  We’ll see if it turns the tide against the chest cold inhabiting my lungs since 2010 began.  Leave out the honey and you won’t find a more bitter tea drink.  It must be good medicine since it requires a spoonful of sugar, though I’ll have to wait for the outcome before I can say for sure.

Outcomes get short sheeted these days in politics.  Politicians, their appointees, handlers and apprentices, devote themselves with great linguistic artistry to public products with no measurable outcomes.  The art of government today is to a) get the money, to b) do the things you want, without c) creating any grounds for critical assessment of what you did.

Politicians in Congress, the Executive branch, and the Judiciary, at all levels of government from the local to the federal, skillfully parse out causes from effects.  Like paints on a canvas, causes and effects are freely blended to fit social, economic, political, regulatory, judicial, and administrative theories as the need arises.  This soup of ad-hoc connected parts and theories oozes out of the public bureaucracy to bind us with an endless stream of laws, orders and judgments, each layer more unfounded than its precedents.

As political men become more estranged from American reality, the passion employed by their defenders becomes more intense.  Fanaticism goes up as reality fades.

In 2009, tea partying got serious.  Tea partyers are a sober bunch of stakeholders in the American ideals that have guided our country to outcomes of success, peace, wealth, learning, growth, health, stability, strength, spirituality, accountability, morality and freedom.  Tea partyers connect real causes to real effects.  Their social, economic and political philosophies integrate to, and reflect reality.  As a people connected to causation, they understand that reality has its limits.  They know we live in a world of scarcity, of limited means and unlimited wants.  They know that power corrupts people, and that governments are run by people.

Real causation radically departs from our modern political culture based on selling the illusion of unlimited means to the fulfillment of unlimited wants. Ironically, while attempting to satisfy all of men’s desires, modern politicians actually prevent the lasting accomplishments necessary to advance mankind’s condition and capacity.  This happens because they force wealth into their unsustainable visions instead of the outcomes that free men would otherwise choose–outcomes that would actually produce something to improve the human condition.

The meaningful class divisions in America today are not between the rich and the poor, or the legal resident and the illegal alien, or between those covered by health insurance and those without health insurance (albeit who still have access to free health care.)  All of those divisions are surmountable by free people acting within the bounds of the American constitutional system.

The key class division in America, not so easily overcome, is between those who create/consume (sell & buy) political illusions, and those who don’t.  This boundary separates the brainwashed believers in statist myths from citizens with free minds.  Multiple wars were fought in the 20th century over this division and some continue today.  The statist disease is pernicious. It promises the easy buck and appeals to scammers and the get rich quick crowd.

The tea I’m drinking at the moment will not cure me because I want it to.  Thousands of words of slick marketing, executive orders or tortured judicial reasoning will not change that fact.  Neither will thousands of pages of incomprehensible legislation.

Hard Truths About the Culture War

Robert Bork

Moral liberalism and the decadence of culture.

What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society-a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. -Irving Kristol, “My Cold War”

Equivocation has never been Irving Kristol’s long suit. About the fact of rot and decadence there can be no dispute, except from those who deny that such terms have meaning, and who are, for that reason, major contributors to rot and decadence. We are accustomed to lamentations about American crime rates, the devastation wrought by drugs, rising illegitimacy, the decline of civility, and the increasing vulgarity of popular entertainment. But the manifestations of American cultural decline are even more widespread, ranging across virtually the entire society, from the violent underclass of the inner cities to our cultural and political elites, from rap music to literary studies, from pornography to law, from journalism to scholarship, from union halls to universities. Wherever one looks, the traditional virtues of this culture are being lost, its vices multiplied, its values degraded-in short, the culture itself is unraveling.

These can hardly be random or isolated developments. A degeneration so universal, afflicting so many seemingly disparate areas, must proceed from common causes. That supposition is strengthened by the observation that similar trends seem to be occurring in nearly all Western industrialized democracies. The main features of these trends are vulgarity and a persistent left-wing bias, the latter being particularly evident among the semi-skilled intellectuals-academics, bureaucrats, and the like-that Kristol calls the New Class.

But why should this be happening? The short answer is the one Kristol gives: the rise of modern liberalism. (The extent to which he would agree with the following argument about the sources and future of modern liberalism, I do not know.) Modern liberalism grew out of classical liberalism by expanding its central ideals-liberty and equality-while progressively jettisoning the restraints of religion, morality, and law even as technology lowered the constraint of hard work imposed by economic necessity. Those ideals, along with the right to pursue happiness, are what we said we were about at the beginning, in the Declaration of Independence. Stirring as rallying cries for rebellion, less useful, because indeterminate, for the purpose of arranging political and cultural matters, they become positively dangerous when taken, without very serious qualifications, as social ideals.

The qualifications assumed by the founders’ generation, but unexpressed in the Declaration (it would rather have spoiled the rhetoric to have added “up to a point”), have gradually been peeled away so that today liberalism has reached an extreme, though not one fears its ultimate, stage. “Equality” has become radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities), and “liberty” takes the form of radical individualism (a refusal to admit limits to the gratifications of the self). In these extreme forms, they are partly produced by, and partly produce, the shattering of fraternity (or community) that modern liberals simultaneously long for and destroy. [Read more…]

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An HD Radio Listening Test in Denver

The multicast HD stations that require an HD receiver haven’t yet, apparently, caught on with advertisers, so you can hear a great deal of incredible music in HD right now with very little, if any, advertising.  I’m a fan of classic alternative and at our location in Kiowa, the above receiver we bought for Christmas brings in 93.3-2 (KTCL’s classic alternative multicast station) very clearly and without commercials.  What a treat!

Only a year ago it sounded extreme to categorize the U.S. Democrat government as socialist.  Now it’s become the exception to see it referred to in more moderate terms.  Republicans fooled themselves that compromise and occupation of a mythical middle ground were a sustainable political philosophy.  The absence of a philosophy could never have become a philosophy.  That’s like elevating agnosticism to the level of a religion.  Sure, it’s a belief, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an empty belief.  And so goes the moderate fallacy–smoke and mirrors that dissolved to nothing at the hands of dedicated socialist ideologues.

Now that the Rubicon is crossed and government is inside and directing our major industries, our major financial firms, our securities markets, our doctor’s offices, our private waters, our open lands, and our formerly-take-home income, what’s next?

Well, [Read more…]

“MERCHANTS OF COOL”

“THEY WANT to be cool. They are impressionable, and they have the cash. They are corporate America’s $150 billion dream.”

That’s the opening statement in PBS’s stunning 2001 Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool,” narrated by author and media critic Douglas Rushkof. What emerges in the following sixty minutes is a scandalous portrait of how major corporations—Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner, and others—study America’s children like laboratory rats in order to sell them billions of dollars in merchandise by tempting, degrading, and corrupting them.

Think that’s a bit of an overstatement?

It’s an understatement. [Read more…]