(1) The IRS Wants To Tax You on the Money You Haven’t Even Earned Yet (YouTube)
Category Archives: Socialism
And you must die so that they may live
You are just a cog in the wheel. You are just a sack of flesh and bones in service to the elites (Yellen, Garland, Fauci, Obama/Biden/Romney/Clinton/Bush, Wray, etc.) and your blood, sweat, toil, and tears must feed the Leviathan.
(1) Yellen defends IRS rule requiring banks to report all transactions over $600 (NY POST)
(2) George Orwell was Right (American Thinker)
“Biden is not the puppetmaster, he’s the puppet. Whether it is Susan Rice or Barack Obama, or even Ms. Jill Biden, we don’t know. Whether it is the permanent Deep State apparatuses, or George Soros, or Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Bill Gates — we’re not sure. If it is China making the final call, (which should make Taiwan very nervous), it is unclear but possible. It would not be hard to argue that the globalists in the New World Order are making the final call. But who or whomever it is, it doesn’t seem to be the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He is incapable.”
(2a) Biden mocked for ‘Truman Show presidency’ over fake White House set (NY POST)
(3) Who is really in charge? (YouTube)
If destruction be our lot…
(1) How I Responded When My Yoga Studio Reinstituted a Mask Mandate (FEE)
(2) The Obama and COVID cult(s)
(a) Obama Kids: Sing for Change (Pyongyang Remix)
(b) “Vaccinate!” (Harvey Milk Day performance 5/22/2021)
(3) Irony
(a) Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
LGBTQ+
Either their movement has been co-opted (like BLM) or they have aligned themselves with socialism. It’s also worth remembering that when you see the LGBTQ+ flag draped from a foreign embassy or government building those governments are in league with socialists/socialism. The same can be said for corporations who shamelessly exploit the movement for profit.
The placard had been discarded near anti-lockdown protests in Trafalgar Square.
Weekend 487.1
(1) Viacom/CBS, Inc. (NASDAQ:VIAC), a publicly traded company, goes full commie. Does anyone remember MomCorp from Futurama?
>>> The Star Trek Communist Hopes Star Trek Can Inspire A Real Revolution
(1a) ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish’s Pay Rises to $39 Million in 2020 (Hollywood Reporter)
(1b) Viacom Stock Is A Bargain Pullback Opportunity (Investing.com)
Weekend 486.3
“Eyes like starlight through the darkness…”
A couple of days of walking and biking is like this song from Howard Jones beginning at 2:30.
(1) The Four Seasons: Summer by James Thomson
Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,
Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays!
(2) Disney’s CANCEL Culture is Coming for YOU (Nerdrotic)
(2a) Keep Your Feet (According to Hoyt)
“When they say “normal” isn’t coming back, they are right. But the future that’s taking shape is not what they think it is. They think the future will be with them in control of our every breath, of everyone’s movements and what everyone is allowed to do.”
Color Commentary: I don’t think the elites will like the “new normal” (a case of be careful what you wish for). The reason the election was stolen via fortification (and the narrative augmented by insurrectionists) is their ability to control the narrative is slipping away and the tighter they squeeze the more authoritarian they will need to get. And they can cancel content creators on YouTube or WordPress (or wherever) but free expression is like the physics of water seeking equilibrium. We don’t need the elites to tell us what to watch or what art to like (it’s what Drucker knew about Time Inc. in the 40s.). Harvard and Yale, the Ford Foundation, Amazon, NETLFIX, Disney Company, Citibank, and the Kennedy Center can **** the **** off.
There’s a kind of arrogance today about HOW the Disney Company treats their customers. They must think vacationers will arrive via some kind of Biden / Harris Strength through Joy program because NO member of the creative class is going to substitute their lust for Europe with a trip around World Showcase at EPCOT. Do the elites even watch their own crap (e.g. Keeping Up with the Joneses)?
I’m starting to dig the strategy of pushing back. You like what you like and don’t apologize because your traditions, interests, etc. don’t fit sanitized artificial norms imposed by a series of gutted institutions (the scourge of purple haired weirdos who are engaged in retcon on an industrial scale). Fact: Tolkien was a devout Catholic and there’s nothing racist about an orc. Amazon’s Middle-earth TV series will be dreck and completely agenda-driven.
Weekend 356.0 (…the moon belongs to everyone -or- the man with the mini orchestra)
“cuius regio, eius religio”
(1) Garry Kasparov: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It. (The Daily Beast)
“A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them.”
A quote from 1946 by Victor Sebestyen:
“It is from Stalin that Rákosi took his famous line that the communists used ‘salami tactics, we took what we wanted slice by slice.’ Later Rákosi was brutally frank, or rather, boastful, about how the communists took over in a slow-motion putsch. Speaking to Communist Party workers he explained: ‘Our demands were always modest at first — and were then increased. For instance, first we demanded only “government control” of the banks; only later did we call for outright nationalization of the largest three banks. It was precision methods…that enabled us to defeat the reactionaries.”
Roused by ‘Julia’
Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
— George Orwell
I haven’t written about politics (and have been happier for it) but have to mention ‘Julia’ since the study of ‘welfare states, planned economies, and all manner of bureaucracies’ has been a lifelong passion (dystopia). What is so rich is that ‘Julia’ could have been written by a conservative espousing the risks of the welfare state. It was also released at a time when the ‘end game’ (apologies to Krugman) of the welfare state is on display in Europe.
(1) The Party of Julia (NY TIMES)
(2) The Lonely Life of Julia: In Obama’s ideal world, men are replaced by bureaucrats. (WSJ)
(3) A Nation of Julias (National Review)
(4) O’s campaign gets creepy (NY Post)
(6) Romney: Clinton Said Big Government Era Over, But Obama Brought It Back
“Julia progresses from cradle to grave, showing how government makes every good thing in her life possible. The weak economy, high unemployment, falling wages, rising gas prices, the national debt, the insolvency of entitlements – all these are fictionally assumed away in a cartoon that is produced by a president who wants us to forget about them.
What does it say about a president’s policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again?”
Update
Julia’s world (The Economist)
Avant le déluge
If you are a student of history (or if you ever read Berlin by Jason Lutes) this quote from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard just gave you chills.
Paris has a strange atmosphere right now. It is hard to get a table at the bistros of Saint-Germain, yet people have a sense of foreboding.
They know austerity has hardly begun. The press is full of stories that the biggest property bubble ever known in France has begun to deflate. Yet the party goes on. Perhaps this is what it felt like in May 1931, avant le déluge.
Weekend 193.1
To put this in plain terms, Americans and their institutions have tended to choose the self-interest and individualism of the free market over the nationalized model more prevalent in postwar Europe. The faith once put in planning now seems so remote, even obscure, that its historical retrieval faces decades of cavalier indifference or ideological antagonism, a form of silencing fueled by Cold War anxiety, bull market profits, as well as the failures of American attempts at creating a public safety net. — Andrew M. Shanken
(1) If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth
This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.