Category: Rants

I have no idea who in the hell John Andrews is.
buy neurontin online www.lifefoodstorage.store/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/neurontin.html no prescription

I know only that he publishes the occasional burst of stupidity on the intellectual Chernobyl that is the TownHall.com opinion page. His latest masterwork, "When Will Atlas Shrug?" sets a standard for inanity that may not soon be equalled. His title indicates his penchant for asking questions shortly before providing really, really bad answers. With a wary eye and a heavy heart we begin.

What is the breaking point?

The Breaking Point is a 1950 film based on Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. It stars John Garfield and Wallace Ford.

Where will the resistance form?

online pharmacy buy xenical online no prescription pharmacy

According to Red Dawn, it starts in Colorado. Remember this. It becomes relevant later in the column.

Heavy questions, but unavoidable in the current political climate. The productive members of society can only be pushed so far, some say.

"That's a great quote, who said that?"

"Some."

How far can productive people be pushed? Let's ask Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Or the heads of all the airlines (OK, they were railroads in the novel) who have leaned on the Federal Bankruptcy courts to stay alive in the past eight years. Or the Big Three. Come on, don't walk away. This is fun.

What they envision is not defiance of law or a reversal of the election.

That's big of them.

It is people's growing disengagement from a new economic order that punishes effort and rewards envy – the creepy future that Barack Obama and the Democrats intend for us.

If you want to learn more about this creeeeeeeeeepy fuuuuuuuuuture, send 10 Bazooka Joe wrappers and an SASE to:

John Andrews, Curator of the Future
Tar Paper Shack Filled with Mail Bomb Parts #17b
Aryan Nations, Idaho 70065

Columnist Michelle Malkin calls that withdrawal, "going Galt."

"I wonder if the term originated with her. In fact, it didn't. If I even bothered to Google it, I would have caught this."

Malkin was the first speaker when several hundred Coloradans gathered for a free-market leadership conference in Colorado Springs on March 6-7.

Wow, that sounds PRODUCTIVE! A forty-eight hour circle jerk echo chamber attended by a broad sample of Colorado Springs' most promising future Federal Courthouse bombers! Maybe the first step in going Galt is to waste one's time at shit like this.

Her reference was to John Galt, the individualist hero of Ayn Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged." She told of seeing a placard at the Denver protest rally for Obama's stimulus bill signing that warned: "Atlas will shrug."

Said sign was held by a 36 year-old assistant manager at the Lidz kiosk in the Greeley Mall. He likes to think of himself as "Atlas" when he's crying himself to sleep in his efficiency under a dangerously teetering mountain of discarded Hot Pockets boxes.

So what, you ask. So in human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons.

I think if anyone is going to lecture us on behaving like automatons (sic) it should definitely be Objectivists. And/or hardcore Rand fans. They aren't even slightly cult-like or apt to parrot the views of The Leader. They don't rigidly adhere to a dogma and blink in unison.

Of course in the 1950s, when Rand was writing her epic about a slow-spreading spontaneous strike among Americans fed up with big government, tomorrow supposedly belonged to New Soviet Man.

This fallacy of hindsight exists only in the minds of fourth rate conservative columnists. It becomes slightly more true every time they need it to prove a point.

Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, the three champions of freedom who would prove otherwise, weren't yet heard of.

That was so awesome when they teamed up to defeat Communism! And Magneto! It's kind of amazing that the greatest sustained period of prosperity in the history of this nation was during the New Deal era yet those Presidents made no contribution to the inevitable implosion of the Soviet system. Hard to believe, but true.

But we're now told that 2008, with its routine recession and its celebrity election, showed freedom is untrustworthy after all.

You are told that at lunatic conferences at the airport Radisson in Colorado Springs at which Michelle Malkin is the keynote speaker.

The novel — with John Galt as capitalist superman and Dagny Taggart, Ayn Rand's alter ego, as railroad tycoon — may not be great literature.

It's not that it isn't great literature, John. It's that it is horrendous literature, literature written in some other language and translated into English with a free online translator. When something is A) a book and B) 1000 pages long, I'd say "bad literature" is a pretty significant shortcoming.

But its message of radical self-reliance has inspired millions across the decades.

Well, the Communist Manifesto has certainly inspired many millions more. So if popularity is the criteria for judging the merits of written work – and it isn't – Atlas comes in far behind Marx, The Grapes of Wrath, and Everybody Poops, which has inspired untold billions to poop.

And as a Coloradan, I like it that the story is set right here. "We can't lose Colorado. It's our last hope," says a Taggart employee at the start. A Rocky Mountain valley is the retreat from which Galt triumphs at the end.

HOLY SHIT! IT'S RED DAWN!

Retreat attendees…weren't about to unplug Galt-style from daily life in protest against wind power, national health care, and charity-choking taxes. But they took seriously the disincentive effects against wealth creation and social comity in these and other collectivist proposals. We should too.

*hits floor*

(there is a 72 hour gap in the entry at this point while Ed is administered smelling salts and various creams and lotions)

Read that amazing paragraph again to make sure it exists. To summarize: these bedwetters who won't shut the fuck up about "going Galt" for the past three weeks not only A) aren't productive but B) have no plans to actually do anything except sit around and talk about it before heading back to work at the screen door factory. So this is essentially the biggest exercise in autofellatio since…well, everything these people do follows the same all talk, no action pattern.

As ever more people ride in the wagon and fewer are left to pull it, there will come a breaking point.

Well, there are probably fewer people pulling it because millions upon millions of people are out of work thanks to two decades of policies intended to enrich the select few at the expense of everyone else.

But definitely also because Chad from Topeka has recognized that there is a disincentive for him to work any harder at his maintenance job.

Crowding taxation onto the highest earners and debt onto our kids, as President Obama proposes, invites collapse.

The kind of collapse one might see if, hypothetically, a president spent 8 years and $1.5 trillion cutting taxes and leaving future generations to pay the bill. John Andrews, you're not very good at this. Refuting you is about as challenging as reading from the Twilight series. That's a good analogy, in fact. Both Twilight and this column are challenging inasmuch as they are so terrible that I have to threaten myself with bodily harm to make myself keep reading.

Ignoring the constitution at will, as statists and the spending lobby do, breeds contempt.

It did, hence the 2006/2008 elections, hence the reason you are writing this inane horseshit and (presumably) getting paid for it.

Ruin must result.

It did. Score another one for John!

Did the USA learn nothing from the USSR's implosion, wondered Vladimir Putin recently.

So we're taking advice from Putin now. What, was Mugabe busy? Couldn't find a copy of the collected works of Pol Pot? How about we learn something from the collapse of our own economy rather than taking GaltLessons from the Soviet straw man?

Cold War victory taught us the power of ideas. The East crumbled when the West asserted the superiority of liberty, wakened by thinkers like Hayek with his expose of the road to serfdom and Bastiat with his ridicule of "everyone seeking to live at the expense of everyone else."

Yep, that is what brought the Cold War to an end. B-52 Stratofortresses carpet-bombed the Warsaw Pact nations with copies of Hayek wrapped in American flags. Those who weren't killed by falling books said "Holy shit! This is brilliant!", overthrew their governments, bought Weber grills, and joined the John Birch Society.

Also influential was Rand with her capitalist commandos.

I asked the Capitalist Commandos for an autographed photo. It wasn't autographed, but they did send this:

And just so we're clear, he's crediting Ayn Rand for helping to end the Cold War. Just so we're clear.

Galt and Taggart's crusade was idea-powered.

No, it was fictional. Not quite the same thing.

With moral truth they defeated the lies of something for nothing and freedom through coercion. Not even the government office of Morale Conditioner, censoring radio, could stop their entrepreneurial comeback.

What a stirring fictional lesson. The rest of us will rely on a similar energy and spirit to get through this while you useless drags on society sit around conference rooms jerking each other off.

Their strike against the redistributionist guilt trip was fiction. But we can shrug it off for real. The Tea Party movement is a symptom.

Here is a photo of the Teabagging event in New York City, population 11 million:

The only movement of which this reminds me is a bowel movement. Here is the raucous crowd, a pleasant mix of toothless hillbillies and well-armed sociopaths, in Rochester (aka "God's Asshole"):

I don't mean to be crass, but…perhaps these people should consider going jogging rather than going Galt.

If the Teabagging "movement" is a symptom of anything, it's a symptom of how stupid these people are to gather in one place so the ATF and FBI can photograph the people they'll be busting in the next few years for hoarding ammonium nitrate.

Colorado may again play a role.

What do you call a state with a Democratic Governor, two Democratic Senators, a Democratic majority in both chambers of the State Legislature, and a 5-2 Democratic edge in House seats? If you're John Andrews, which is to say if you are retarded, you call it GROUND FUCKIN' ZERO for the new conservative revolution, baby!
buy clomid online www.lifefoodstorage.store/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/clomid.html no prescription

I am becoming more and more convinced that right-wing columns are all written as parodies by bored sociology grad students and a supercomputer which has attained the intellectual capacity of cattle and, therefore, Republicans.

(note: primer on the FJM can be found here)

We always knew this day would come.

Unless someone writes a musical comedy about the Symbionese Liberation Army, Thomas Friedman's attempt to re-invent himself as a progressive will stand as the most baffling, compelling, I-gotta-see-this event of my lifetime. His entire worldview has collapsed around him recently, so he wrote a book in his inimitably idiotic literary anti-style about his concern for the environment. That'll sell books to the kids and the liberals, right? Were it that easy, Mr. Friedman. Were it that easy.

New book persona aside, The Unit's weekly NYT columns show that he still has plenty of vigor for the kind of jingoistic, libertarian tent-pitching that made him famous. To wit: "Paging Uncle Sam," which is either the title of his column or an upcoming Charles Bronson movie that I absolutely have to see. The call is from rhetorical Excellence; is Friedman man enough to accept the charges?

Seoul, South Korea

Knowing what we know about this mustachioed twit, this simple byline foreshadows unspeakable horrors. We all know that 75% of this column is going to be based on throwaway comments from conversations with random Korean people.

I wish I could have been there to see the puzzled Koreans trying to mind their business on the subway and thinking "Why is this caucasian porn star asking me about tariffs?"

It is very useful to come to Asia to be reminded about America’s standing in the world these days.

Yep, nothing like randomly encountering some people in a foreign country to prompt some grandiose generalizing about what "the world" thinks about America.

For all the talk in recent years about America’s inevitable decline, all eyes are not now on Tokyo, Beijing, Brussels or Moscow — nor on any other pretenders to the world heavyweight crown.

Belgium? Belgium??? Are they even in the conversation? Is this like the NCAA tournament where we have to include Winthrop, Iona, UNC-Asheville, Siena, UM-Baltimore County, and Coastal Carolina because they won whatever turnip truck of a conference crowned them champion? Belgium: the token Benelux entry in the field of new world powers.

Take that, Luxembourg!

All eyes are on Washington to pull the world out of its economic tailspin. At no time in the last 50 years have we ever felt weaker, and at no time in the last 50 years has the world ever seen us as more important.

Friedman talked to the world. This is what it said. Verbatim.

While it is true that since the end of the cold war global leaders and intellectuals often complained about a world of too much American power, one doesn’t hear much of that grumbling today when most people recognize that only an economically revitalized America has the power to prevent the world economy from going into a global depression.

Little late to be talking about prevention, Tom. I suppose that "one doesn't hear much of that grumbling" in your social circles.

It was always easy to complain about a world of too much American power as long as you didn’t have to live in a world of too little American power. And right now, that is the danger: a world of too little American power.

National Review's Michael Leeden: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's the kind of power they want us to assert.

Somewhere in the back of their minds, a lot of people seem to be realizing that the alternative to a U.S.-dominated world is not a world dominated by someone else or someone better.

"(A) lot of people" "seem to be realizing" things. The depth of research, the empirical support! Stunning.

It is a leaderless world. Neither Russia nor China has the will or the way to provide the global public goods that America — at its best — consistently has. The European Union right now is so split that it cannot even agree on an effective stimulus package.

Maybe they lack your Napoleon complex, Tom, your need to dominate and control and subjugate, i.e. "lead."

No wonder then that even though this economic crisis began in America, with American bad borrowing and bad lending practices, people have nevertheless fled to the U.S. dollar. Case in point: South Korea’s currency has lost roughly 40 percent against the dollar in just the last six months.

Ah, the rock-solid American Buck! Given the extent to which the governments of Asia have gone all in on the dollar as a reserve currency, what you call fleeing to the US dollar has the desperate feel of good money chasing bad.
buy prednisone online buy prednisone no prescription

“No other country can substitute for the U.S.,” a senior Korean official remarked to me.

Guy next to Friedman on the plane? Auto rickshaw driver? Bartender?

“The U.S. is still No. 1 in military, No. 1 in economy, No. 1 in promoting human rights and No. 1 in idealism. Only the U.S. can lead the world. No other country can. China can’t. The E.U. is too divided, and Europe is militarily far behind the U.S. So it is only the United States … We have never had a more unipolar world than we have today.”

It's uncanny how much this unsourced, unverifiable quote supports the author's thesis! What a happy coincidence. I'm not saying Thomas Friedman fabricated this quote, but Thomas Friedman fabricated this quote.

Yes, many Asians resent the fact that Americans scolded them about their banking crisis in the 1990s, and now we’ve made many of the same mistakes. But that schadenfreude doesn’t last long. In random conversations here in Seoul with Korean and Asian thinkers, journalists and business executives, I found people really worried.

"When I threw loaded questions at random people, their responses confirmed my preconceived conclusions. Amazing!"

This is a region where Western brands carry great weight, and for people to see giant U.S. financial brands like Citigroup and A.I.G. teetering is deeply unnerving.

Not to mention the weight Western brands carry with Friedman, the man who can't go three paragraphs without dropping a trademarked name.

“There is no one who can replace America. Without American leadership, there is no leadership,” said Lee Hong-koo, South Korea’s former ambassador to Washington. “That puts a tremendous burden on the American people to do something positive. You can’t be tempted by the usual nationalism. When things don’t go well, most people become nationalistic. And in the economic world, that is protectionism"

Uh oh! Throw in the Aerosmith CD, dim the lights, and let the free-market dry humping begin!!

"We are pleased to see President Obama is not doing that. Americans, as a people, should realize how many hopes and expectations other people are putting on their shoulders.”

Clearly the President's goal should be to do what makes other nations happiest: refuse to treat their goods the way they treat ours.

And that’s just on economics. President Obama’s first big security test could come here — and soon. North Korea has gotten crazier than ever; it has been made even poorer by the global economic crisis and by the withdrawal of aid by the new South Korean government.

This is a different column, but OK! I guess this is kinda important.

Now the North is threatening to test one of its Taepodong-2 long-range missiles, which may have the capacity to hit Hawaii, Alaska or beyond.

Alaska.

Was that a multiple choice question? Because I totally pick Alaska.

The North last tried such a test in 2006, but the rocket exploded 40 seconds after its launch. If the North does test such an intercontinental ballistic missile again, American forces will have to consider blowing it up on the launch pad or shooting it out of the sky.

YEAH! And then we gotta use our photon torpedoes and death rays and Dr. Manhattan and all kinds of other weapons that are as non-existent as a functioning Anti-Ballistic Missile system.

We never should have allowed the North to get a nuclear warhead; we certainly don’t want it testing a long-range missile that could deliver that nuclear warhead to our shores, or anywhere else.

So the fact that they do (or, more accurately, may) have nuclear warheads is a reason that we should start a war with them and WHAT THE HELL ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT I thought this was about the economic crisis and leadership.

Never more inward-looking, never more in demand: that’s America today. This moment recalls a point raised by the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum in his book, The Case for Goliath.

No, to me it recalls a point raised by a more noted scholar, Rudyard Kipling, in his poem "The White Man's Burden" or perhaps by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

When it comes to the way other countries view America’s pre-eminent role in the world, he wrote, “whatever its life span, three things can be safely predicted: they will not pay for it; they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone.”

If this logic worked for colonialism, I guess it'll work equally well for neo-colonialism!

Welcome to Friedman's world, a world desperately seeking a Caesar. When someone like Tom says "leadership" it means control; "setting an example" means establishing hegemony; "she was all over me" means date rape. This is in many ways the sickest and most dangerous worldview, one in which the rest of the world not only needs American hegemony, they want it. Just look at how they're dressed.