Comrade Tingles About to Be Airbrushed
2 hours ago
Friday, May 17, 2013
King of the Diner
Did you see this?
This is the town I work in. They have banned plastic bags. And I think California has banned goose-liver.
But we can eat African Lions. And Swans, and Peacocks.
WTF?
Who the hell is running this asylum?
If you ever decide to move to California, immediately get a lobotomy before you come, so you'll be on a "level playing field" with the decision-makers of this State.
I'm surprised the procedure is not mandatory.
Wait. Given that the voters keep electing these brainless, clueless fascists....maybe it is.
The Gunslinger
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
How Do I Get Back?
I signed up for Medicare today. You're supposed to do it three months before your 65th birthday.
It turns out I'll be 65 in August.
What the fuck?
Dude, Medicare is for OLD people. How the hell did THIS happen?
I'm obviously the victim some sort of time-warp that has thrust me into the future and my future body. Before I woke up this morning with instructions to apply for Medicare, I was 25.
This isn't how it happened it Back To The Future.
I want my money back.
The Gunslinger
It turns out I'll be 65 in August.
What the fuck?
Dude, Medicare is for OLD people. How the hell did THIS happen?
I'm obviously the victim some sort of time-warp that has thrust me into the future and my future body. Before I woke up this morning with instructions to apply for Medicare, I was 25.
This isn't how it happened it Back To The Future.
I want my money back.
The Gunslinger
The Japanese Point of View
I suppose I ought to talk about Benghazi-gate, or Associated Press-gate, or IRS-gate, but really, what more is there to say. Happily the press actually seems to care about the Bamster perusing their private phone records. Who'd a thunk it? Frankly, I would have expected them all to be happy and anticipatory....hoping for a private call from their "Dear Leader".
And the rest...well, since the Republican leadership will be orgainizing a lot of the questioning, I think we can expect stupid, incompetent, pointless, spineless, pointlessly political, self-aggrandizing hearings/investigations.
To say that Øbama is a joke, a thug and an evil aberration even among evil Progressives...is understatement and obvious, so really, what's the point.
Either the public and the press care or they don't. Either they will change their minds about this traitor parading as President, or they won't. I just feel that, at this point, there is virtually nothing I can do.
I watch Supernatural, a really cool TV show. And it has all sorts of supernatural creatures as villains. Some have the power to mesmerize and hypnotize...getting what they want from people who would normally not give it to them, and getting people to do what they would normally find unthinkable.
If I had taken JUST a little more acid in the 60's, I'd think Øbamer was one of them.
Now....on to the subject at hand...
Here's a really cool article by Toru Hashimoto talking about Freedom of Speech in Japan...you know the country whose Constitution and Rights was conferred by us...vs the utter lack of freedom of speech in America.
It's a pretty disturbing comparison.
The Gunslinger
And the rest...well, since the Republican leadership will be orgainizing a lot of the questioning, I think we can expect stupid, incompetent, pointless, spineless, pointlessly political, self-aggrandizing hearings/investigations.
To say that Øbama is a joke, a thug and an evil aberration even among evil Progressives...is understatement and obvious, so really, what's the point.
Either the public and the press care or they don't. Either they will change their minds about this traitor parading as President, or they won't. I just feel that, at this point, there is virtually nothing I can do.
I watch Supernatural, a really cool TV show. And it has all sorts of supernatural creatures as villains. Some have the power to mesmerize and hypnotize...getting what they want from people who would normally not give it to them, and getting people to do what they would normally find unthinkable.
If I had taken JUST a little more acid in the 60's, I'd think Øbamer was one of them.
Now....on to the subject at hand...
Here's a really cool article by Toru Hashimoto talking about Freedom of Speech in Japan...you know the country whose Constitution and Rights was conferred by us...vs the utter lack of freedom of speech in America.
It's a pretty disturbing comparison.
The Gunslinger
Friday, May 10, 2013
In response to great responses
Well...I'm thrilled to see my previous post evoked such thoughtful responses. (And I encourage everyone to read them).
BUT...I'm not teaching history here, guys, but rather developing a marketing strategy.
The idea is to SELL it...to youth and low info citizens. To sell the idea that the time of the Progressives is over. That they're passe, that their ideas belong to the early 20th century and the rather primitive industrial age—that they're about as hip and cutting edge as a steam engine.
I'm using it as shorthand & symbol, not history.
If you wish to focus on the agrarian age as peopled by kings and warlords rather than by our founders in the early republic with independent citizens living on the land, then it still works! In fact, I daresay it works rather better because that's pretty much exactly what our target audience thinks "conservative" means. So let's use their definition and make it work for us. I've argued for a long time that the English word "conservative" is not one that evokes anything good in the mind of most young people, or anyone else interested in innovation, improvement, new and exciting human inventions and frontiers or anyone interested in fashion, style, trends. It sounds antithetical to anything new and fun, and frankly, how boring is that?
Conservatives insist on saying that they want to rehabilitate the word. I say use the popular conception to our own advantage.
Look, what we need to do is surrender the WORD. Not the principles. Almost everyone is a conservative. But because they have a complete misunderstanding of what the word means...even though for at least 40 year conservatives have had the opportunity to explain themselves...they reject people and ideas described or defined as Conservative.
When will we learn this particular lesson?
The Marketing Plan is to agree with our target audience that Conservatism (as THEY understand it) is old-fashioned, stodgy, tired, frumpy, boring, conformist, uncreative, soggy, humorless, musty, dusty...and so over. We will freely admit it belongs to the bygone Agrarian age which was replaced by the Industrial Age: where everyone congregated in the cities, and found themselves under the harsh rule of the Robber Barons, the Tycoons, the Rich who partnered with the Ruling Class who ran everything including the government with an eye to consolidating both political and economic power in their own hands in order to live in luxury on the backs of the poor and working classes laboring in dirty factories, crushed together into company housing, losing their independence, their individuality, their land and property and finally their spirit.
We want to convince people that the Progressive Age is over. That it's a relic of the past...and that its pitiful, sad and desperate adherents are trying desperately to stay relevant by grasping as much power over individuals as possible to prevent their own inevitable decline into irrelevance as the world moves on and passes them by.
We want to celebrate Libertarianism as the face of the Information Age. To the name Libertarianism (or whatever cool buzzword we choose to call it) we will attach all the important principles of Conservatism. And the young and the stupid and the low information citizen (which includes most "liberal" people) will never know the difference, because they have never known what conservative principles are anyway.
When we say the Information Age is about individuality, creativity, non-conformity, about being left alone, about choosing our own path, our own fortunes, about building our own futures...they will never know that we are merely quoting age-old Conservative principles we have believed in for decades. It sound like tomorrow, freedom, artsy-fartsy hipster creativity.
And so it is.
The funny thing is, we won't even be lying to anyone...just manipulating a few symbols and may coining a few cool phrases.
It could work.
TBC
BUT...I'm not teaching history here, guys, but rather developing a marketing strategy.
The idea is to SELL it...to youth and low info citizens. To sell the idea that the time of the Progressives is over. That they're passe, that their ideas belong to the early 20th century and the rather primitive industrial age—that they're about as hip and cutting edge as a steam engine.
I'm using it as shorthand & symbol, not history.
If you wish to focus on the agrarian age as peopled by kings and warlords rather than by our founders in the early republic with independent citizens living on the land, then it still works! In fact, I daresay it works rather better because that's pretty much exactly what our target audience thinks "conservative" means. So let's use their definition and make it work for us. I've argued for a long time that the English word "conservative" is not one that evokes anything good in the mind of most young people, or anyone else interested in innovation, improvement, new and exciting human inventions and frontiers or anyone interested in fashion, style, trends. It sounds antithetical to anything new and fun, and frankly, how boring is that?
Conservatives insist on saying that they want to rehabilitate the word. I say use the popular conception to our own advantage.
Look, what we need to do is surrender the WORD. Not the principles. Almost everyone is a conservative. But because they have a complete misunderstanding of what the word means...even though for at least 40 year conservatives have had the opportunity to explain themselves...they reject people and ideas described or defined as Conservative.
When will we learn this particular lesson?
The Marketing Plan is to agree with our target audience that Conservatism (as THEY understand it) is old-fashioned, stodgy, tired, frumpy, boring, conformist, uncreative, soggy, humorless, musty, dusty...and so over. We will freely admit it belongs to the bygone Agrarian age which was replaced by the Industrial Age: where everyone congregated in the cities, and found themselves under the harsh rule of the Robber Barons, the Tycoons, the Rich who partnered with the Ruling Class who ran everything including the government with an eye to consolidating both political and economic power in their own hands in order to live in luxury on the backs of the poor and working classes laboring in dirty factories, crushed together into company housing, losing their independence, their individuality, their land and property and finally their spirit.
We want to convince people that the Progressive Age is over. That it's a relic of the past...and that its pitiful, sad and desperate adherents are trying desperately to stay relevant by grasping as much power over individuals as possible to prevent their own inevitable decline into irrelevance as the world moves on and passes them by.
We want to celebrate Libertarianism as the face of the Information Age. To the name Libertarianism (or whatever cool buzzword we choose to call it) we will attach all the important principles of Conservatism. And the young and the stupid and the low information citizen (which includes most "liberal" people) will never know the difference, because they have never known what conservative principles are anyway.
When we say the Information Age is about individuality, creativity, non-conformity, about being left alone, about choosing our own path, our own fortunes, about building our own futures...they will never know that we are merely quoting age-old Conservative principles we have believed in for decades. It sound like tomorrow, freedom, artsy-fartsy hipster creativity.
And so it is.
The funny thing is, we won't even be lying to anyone...just manipulating a few symbols and may coining a few cool phrases.
It could work.
TBC
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Wave of the Future
This just occurred to me:
Conservatives are the face and the reflection of the Agrarian Age
Progressives are the face and the reflection of the Industrial Age.
Libertarians are the face and the reflection of the Information Age.
If this is so, the progressives are doomed to be rendered obsolete as their models and mindsets of centralization are being smashed by the quick moving immediacy and individualization of the InfoAge.
They will be supplanted by libertarians in the same way they supplanted conservatives during the last 100 years...pretty much exactly from the beginning of the Industrial Age...when huge numbers of people moved from their independent farms and massed together in centralized locations to create centralized governance and centralized centers of power and influence.
Conservatives have always given progressives lots of credit for infiltrating society in a relentless march toward taking it over. But I think that might be a mistaken view of history. It's not that the progressives had impossible patience and kept at it against all odds until they won through persistence and by slowly and cleverly breaking down the morals and traditions and virtues of the earlier age.
It's that industrialization and its attendant centralization appeared to be the "new thing", the "progressive" thing, and Progressives latched onto it as 'evolutionary' and necessary, and they adopted it as their vision. The future...human progression.
Industrialization and centralization was a steam engine speeding down the shiny new track and they jumped on board.
It was the industrialization of manufacturing and business, and the necessary centralization of the workforce and government to regulate, tax and control it...that became the "progressive" vision. It preceded the progressive ideology. I would say, in fact, that it gave birth to it.
So. Modern Liberalism or Progressivism is the ideology of the Industrial Age. Of dingy cities, of black smoke belching factory chimneys.
Progressivism is the ideology of moving people from the independence of land ownership and the farm, into cities. Into centralized, small, cramped quarters surrounded by strangers in stead of generations of family on the farm homestead.
And there was nothing conservatives could really do...it was the movement of people and labor and production and power. How could we fight that?
But now...the information age is tearing down the old centralized structures. The libertarian, the individual-focused age is upon us...where production and labor and talent and people are dispersed from the cities...even out of offices...working from home, or the road. In motion, alone-together-moving-meeting. Making it all happen without the need for centralization.
That is the wave of the future, and the hackneyed mindset, worldview, ideology of the dying industrial age will be swept away with the same inevitability of history as it swept away the one that preceded it.
TBC
Conservatives are the face and the reflection of the Agrarian Age
Progressives are the face and the reflection of the Industrial Age.
Libertarians are the face and the reflection of the Information Age.
If this is so, the progressives are doomed to be rendered obsolete as their models and mindsets of centralization are being smashed by the quick moving immediacy and individualization of the InfoAge.
They will be supplanted by libertarians in the same way they supplanted conservatives during the last 100 years...pretty much exactly from the beginning of the Industrial Age...when huge numbers of people moved from their independent farms and massed together in centralized locations to create centralized governance and centralized centers of power and influence.
Conservatives have always given progressives lots of credit for infiltrating society in a relentless march toward taking it over. But I think that might be a mistaken view of history. It's not that the progressives had impossible patience and kept at it against all odds until they won through persistence and by slowly and cleverly breaking down the morals and traditions and virtues of the earlier age.
It's that industrialization and its attendant centralization appeared to be the "new thing", the "progressive" thing, and Progressives latched onto it as 'evolutionary' and necessary, and they adopted it as their vision. The future...human progression.
Industrialization and centralization was a steam engine speeding down the shiny new track and they jumped on board.
It was the industrialization of manufacturing and business, and the necessary centralization of the workforce and government to regulate, tax and control it...that became the "progressive" vision. It preceded the progressive ideology. I would say, in fact, that it gave birth to it.
So. Modern Liberalism or Progressivism is the ideology of the Industrial Age. Of dingy cities, of black smoke belching factory chimneys.
Progressivism is the ideology of moving people from the independence of land ownership and the farm, into cities. Into centralized, small, cramped quarters surrounded by strangers in stead of generations of family on the farm homestead.
And there was nothing conservatives could really do...it was the movement of people and labor and production and power. How could we fight that?
But now...the information age is tearing down the old centralized structures. The libertarian, the individual-focused age is upon us...where production and labor and talent and people are dispersed from the cities...even out of offices...working from home, or the road. In motion, alone-together-moving-meeting. Making it all happen without the need for centralization.
That is the wave of the future, and the hackneyed mindset, worldview, ideology of the dying industrial age will be swept away with the same inevitability of history as it swept away the one that preceded it.
TBC
Monday, May 06, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Apparently Hell Has Frozen Over
NewsBusters readers know Ellen Ratner as the perilously liberal news analyst typically offering the left-wing views on Fox News Watch.
On Thursday, Ratner published an article titled "George W. Bush Has Saved More Lives Than Any American President"
On Thursday, Ratner published an article titled "George W. Bush Has Saved More Lives Than Any American President"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
