Quote of the Day - Smoke-'n-Mirrors Edition

"On the one hand, this is the single largest year-to-year cut in the federal budget, frankly in the history of America in absolute terms… probably for that we all deserve medals, the entire Congress," the Texas congressman (Jeb Hensarling) said on CNN’s "State of the Union" Sunday. "Relative to the size of the problem, it is not even a rounding error. In that case we probably all deserve to be tarred and feathered."

(My emphasis.)

Which goes along with this:

"Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything," writes the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson in a recent collection of essays ("American Politics, Then and Now"). The concept of "vital national interest" is stretched. We deploy government casually to satisfy any mass desire, correct any perceived social shortcoming or remedy any market deficiency. What has abetted this political sprawl, notes Wilson, is the rising influence of "action intellectuals" — professors, pundits, "experts" — who provide respectable rationales for various political agendas.

The consequence is political overload: The system can no longer make choices, especially unpleasant choices, for the good of the nation as a whole.

--

Government is suicidal because it breeds expectations that cannot be met.

Knoxville or Bust

It's on.  The Luckygunner.com Memorial Day Weekend Blogger Shoot.



(No bloggers will actually be shot.  I hope.)  I've got my airline reservations (thanks, U.S. Citizen!) and I've made my hotel (Lenoire City Holiday Inn Express) and car rental reservations.  I fly in Friday evening, and leave Tuesday morning.  The shoot is Saturday and Sunday, leaving me Monday to visit.

I'm really looking forward to it.  Now I just have to decide whether I want to risk transporting firearms through Chicago on the way home. And what to bring if I do.

Quote of the Day - Nazi Steampunk Zombie Edition

Nazi steampunk zombies.


Sorry, I just wanted to type that myself to see if it felt as awesome to type those words as it did to read them. It did. :D

Tam, in the comments to Breda's review of Sucker Punch.

NO Bowling Pin Match, Sunday April 10

UPDATED AND BUMPED: There will be NO BOWLING PIN MATCH SUNDAY APRIL 10.

The range is doing major berm improvements, and the Action Range will be unavailable. Sorry. Next match will be Sunday, May 8.

Hope to see you there.

Quote of the Day - Church of the New Media Edition

From Victor Davis Hanson's latest, Kingdom of Lies:

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.

I now refer you to my January, 2008 überpost, The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation. Read all of Dr. Hanson's piece, too.

GBR-VI is Coming

Now for more original-content-free blogging, a reminder that the sixth annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous is coming up April SEPTEMBER 8-11, 2011 in Reno, Nevada.  Registration is now open.  Sponsors will again include:

• The National Shooting Sports Foundation
• Brownell's
• Hi Point Firearms
• Ruger
• Glock
• Others, to be announced

If you want to go, but can't afford the air fare, I may be able to help. I've got $400 worth of air travel coupons from Delta that I otherwise cannot use. Unfortunately, Delta makes actually using these as difficult as possible. I can use them to book a flight for someone else, but I have to make the reservation by phone with a Delta ticket agent, and pick up the tickets myself at the Delta counter. And, of course, I don't get the cheap travel rates you can get off the internet when I do this. But if you want to go, drop me an email (my address is on the left sidebar) and we'll see what we can work out. You don't have to be a blogger, you can be a reader who just wants to meet us and our special guest, get to shoot some guns, eat some pizza, have some great conversation, and take home some terrific swag, and maybe get a new gun out of the deal.  Last year included a Hi Point carbine, a certificate for any standard Glock, and an air rifle, not to mention a Leupold scope, a set of LaRue Tactical rings, a set of Crimson Trace lasergrips and a bunch of other great stuff.  This year we will have a Ruger Blackhawk convertible in .45LC/.45ACP at a minimum.  I'm expecting at least three other guns.

Maybe this year, I'll win one.

Each year has been bigger than the one before.  (I know, I've been to all five.)  Sign up and come on out.  It's a great way to spend a long weekend.

Anybody Seen This?

I'd like to know more about it.  I can't remember hearing anything about it in the media or on the blogs back in 2009. It certainly didn't come up during the 2010 election.  Lots of mentions of "social justice." Make sure you check today's QotD.

Accuracy in Media had something on it.  Here's Howard Dean's full speech on Vimeo. Lots of other related video as well.

I wrote a post back in 2005, True Believers, where I quoted from another blogger, Glenn Wishard of Canis Iratus in his post A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century. I'll quote it here again:

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls "politicism". In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.

(Emphasis in original.) I commented:

I think Glenn's declaration that the 20th Century "neatly contains" the rise and fall of "the Marxist ideal" is a bit premature, but I fully concur with his conclusion that "politicism" has neatly divided societies in the manner described....

True Believers still holds up five years on.

Howard Dean blames the current state of the global economy on "the free market," but as others have noted, we have not experienced free markets — that is, the invisible hand — for decades. No, the Progressive love for "social justice" (the New Deal, the Great Society, etc. etc. etc.) has shoved a stick into the spokes of free trade repeatedly. But it can't be their fault, they meant well.

Time to do it again, ONLY HARDER!




Mr. Wishard appended to his "History" post this observation:

I really do think that history will look back on the 20th century as the absolute low point of human history - as bad as anything the Dark Ages offered, without any of the excuses.

I think, once again, that he was premature.  And optimistic.

I found an interesting quote this evening from a Google search that led to this site.  Someone searched on the phrase "I'm a pessimist," and found this post from last year, but when I did the same search, what I found was more interesting, and more applicable to this topic:

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. -- Antonio Gramsci

Yeah, that Gramsci.

We're getting not what Gramsci wanted, but we are getting what he worked for.

A couple of days ago, I ran across another reference to Jane Jacobs. I first saw mention of her in an Orson Scott Card column from 2004, Who Was On Watch As the Dark Age Approached? I cited that piece and his mention of Ms. Jacobs in my 2009 essay Restoring the Lost Constitution. Card said this:

Jacobs sees us as being well down the road to a self-inflicted Dark Age, in which we will have thrown away many of the very things that made our civilization so dominant, so prosperous, so successful. We are not immune to the natural laws that govern the formation and dissolution of human communities: When the civilization no longer provides the benefits that lead to success, then, unsurprisingly, the civilization is likely to fail.

As she says in her introduction, "People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?" 

Dark Age Ahead gives us a series of concrete examples of exactly that process. 

"Every culture," she says, "takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely." Our civilization, however, is failing to do that. On the contrary, we are systematically training our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

A civilization is truly dead, she says, when "even the memory of what has been lost is lost."

Just a few days ago, Jerry Pournell repeated the warning:

Readers should be aware of Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. Civilization is more fragile than most believe. Note that a true dark age comes not when we lose the ability to do something, but forget that we ever had that ability: as for instance no university Department of Education seems aware that in the 1930's to the end of World War II, essentially the only adult illiterates in the United States were people who had never been to school to begin with (see the Army's tests of conscripts). My mother had a 2-year Normal School degree and taught first grade in rural Florida, not considered a high intelligence population. I once asked her if any of her students left first grade without learning to read. She said, "Well, there were a few, but they didn't learn anything else, either." The notion that a child could get out of elementary school unable to read was simply shocking up to about 1950 when new University Education Department theories of reading emerged. Now a majority of students read "below grade level" and actual functional illiteracy approaches 15%.

--

Anyway, that's what we mean by a Dark Age. As with the 5th Century peasant in France who gets a yield of perhaps 3 bushels a year on land that under Roman civilization yielded 12 -- and has not only forgotten how to get such yields, but has no idea that such yields have ever been possible. Or a civilization that spends more and more on schools that cannot accomplish what was once standard in country schools like Capleville (where I went 4 - 8th grade), or even remember what was accomplished.

Billy Beck calls what's coming The Endarkenment.

I'm beginning to believe that Billy's an optimist, too.

I'm going to take a few days off.  Please talk amongst yourselves.

Quote of the Day - Justice Edition

(J)ustice is justice, whereas "social justice" is code for one set of rules for the rich, another for the poor; one set for whites, another set for minorities; one set for straight men, another for women and gays. In short, I pointed out, it's the opposite of actual justice. -- Burt Prelutsky, Me and the Rotarians.

Found at var/log/otto

And watch this while you're there.

They Must Be Due to Ideology

Bill Whittle, if you haven't seen it:



Yup.

This too:

Quote of the Day - Hand of the State Edition

I believe that markets move in and out of balance on varying temporal horizons naturally. They overshoot and undershoot but become excessive in nature in a systemic way only when they are deliberately distorted.


Intervention in or manipulation of markets by the state is such a distortion. Its acts postpone the day of reckoning for years or even decades. It creates (a) false sense of equilibrium that ultimately gives way to disequilibrium and heightened instability. We have not experienced free markets — that is, the invisible hand — for decades. The recent failure of markets to predict uncertainty was not a failure of free markets but a failure of fiat money and socialism.

Ben Davies, CEO - Hinde Capital, London.
Fall Dinner Meeting of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education
Union League Club, New York
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Quoted in full at No Quarter

The whole speech is worth your time.

Quote of the Day - Nihilism Edition

While we take the electric light for granted-- to be able to read and write after dark by a clear light is a technological achievement that has transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. There is no way to measure the increase in knowledge gained. And there is no better measure of the unthinking contempt of the environmentalist movement for that achievement than a call to turn off the lights and sit in the dark

--

That is the dark side of environmentalism, an ugly violent side that emerges easily. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism's creed that the only real problem with the world is the people. No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

Sultan Knish, Sitting in the Dark

RTWT. Godwin's Law warning, though.

See? Face Colanders

As a follow-up to Our Economic Titanic, I recommend you read The Years of Crisis and Real Blood in the Streets.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Quote of the Day - Originalism Edition

One of the most remarkable features of Justice Scalia's majority opinion and Justice Stevens's dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter) is the view that the Second Amendment means only what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification in 1789-91. -- Sanford Levinson, Huffington Post, D.C. v. Heller: A Dismaying Performance by the Supreme Court

No, they tried to define what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification - "original public understanding."  And Scalia was far more correct than Stevens, which Sandy Levinson didn't bother to point out.  I thought Stevens' errors were the most remarkable feature of his dissent.

Quote of the Day

I was a guest on National Public Radio earlier this week, where I debated a left-of-center law school professor. The host asked me whether President Obama could deal with the tension between his agenda of higher government spending and targeted development and the business interests of new advisors with business backgrounds such as former JPMorgan exec Bill Daley, and current General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.  “What tension?” I asked. Why in the world would a past TARP recipient and future green energy recipient like GE object in the slightest to Obama’s vision of a world of targeted government “investments” in what he believes to be the industries of the future?

The fact that Immelt is a Republican is as beside the point as the fact that Daley is a Democrat. Increasingly our nation is divided, not between Rs and Ds, but between TIs and TBs: tribute imposers and tribute bearers. The imposers are gigantic banks, agri-businesses, higher education Colossae, government employees, NGO and QUANGO employees and the myriad others whose living is made chiefly by extracting wealth from other people. The bearers are the rest of us: the people who extract wealth from the earth, not from others.

What is the difference between crony capitalism and socialism? Not much. Both systems are based on a lack of appreciation of individual liberty. Both systems depend on elaborate centralized bureaucracies. In both systems, large proportions of people work for the government. Does it really make that much difference whether the government money is reported as W-2 income as opposed to 1099 income? Don’t the favored people become rich under socialism?

The QotD is that last paragraph, but I thought you'd appreciate the setup.  It's from The American Nomenklatura by Jerry Bower at Forbes.  Good piece.  RTWT.  Kinda goes along with the "Apparatchiks and Entropy" theme.

UPDATE: In related news, General Electric paid no taxes in 2010.  In fact, it collected $3.2 billion in tax benefits.  "What tension?" indeed.

Four Year-Old Kills Newborn Sibling

Will the parents be prosecuted for negligence?

Tragedy hit a Texas family over the weekend when a young boy accidentally ran over and killed his newborn brother with a minivan.

A 4-year-old boy climbed into his family's parked van Friday and with his 5-year-old brother sitting in the passenger seat, managed to put the keys in the ignition and start the vehicle, Dallas' Star-Telegram reported.

The boy's mother, who was holding her 3-week-old son in her arms, heard the van ignition and when she spotted her two young sons behind the wheel, ran to stop the rolling vehicle.

The van crashed into an RV power station, then knocked her down and ran over both mother and infant, killing the baby, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner's office.

This happened last October, but I found the negligent parenting parallel compelling.

Our Economic Titanic

This is a harsh-your-mellow post of the Über-variety.  You are forewarned.

Every generation has its Chicken-Littles, foretelling gloom, doom and disaster if Something Isn't Done RIGHT NOW about some crisis du jour.  Paul Ehrlich springs immediately to my mind, predicting from the depths of 1968 worldwide mass starvation by 1980 even if the world's governments seized immediate dictatorial control over agriculture and human reproduction in his book The Population Bomb. Unapologetic more than forty years after his hyperbolic assertion that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...", Wikipedia reports that in 2009 Ehrlich and his co-author wife were proud of the book, stating:

The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" (my emphasis) and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."

Nothing if not brazen.

Oh, and well, wrong.

Then there are the Cassandras who can see what's coming down the pike that the rest of the public can't seem to.  Their predictions aren't as immediate, but can be every bit as doom-laden.

I'm not immune.  In the seven years I've been writing here, one ongoing theme has been "Tough History Coming," a phrase from a Peggy Noonan op-ed that caused quite a stir when it was published in 2005. Many pooh-poohed this (normally Pollyannish) Noonan observation:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

One commenter stated, "(E)very generation, feels like the 'wheels are coming off' in some sense." To which Billy Beck, responded: "Every now and then, they're right about it." In fact, I quoted Billy again just the other day on the same subject.

"Man-caused disasters" of epic proportion are hardly limited to assaults on Mother Gaia. We puny humans can screw ourselves up in other ways as well. What we appear to be best at is socio-political self-savagery, followed by the interpersonal type, and America is hardly exempt.  In fact, we seem to be as exceptional at it as we've been at most everything we've tried.  Now we're trying economic self-savagery again, and this time we appear to be intent on doing it harder.

Let's look at the evidence.

The United States federal budget has, since 1968, been in the black only five years according to this Congressional Budget Office report (PDF): 1969, and 1998-2001. Those last four years the budget was black only because the Social Security surplus was used to buy our debt.  It's always used to buy our debt (and the IOUs are put in AlGore's "lockbox" and forgotten), but those five years the combination of overall revenue versus overall expenditure produced a bit of a surplus.

Over that 40-year period, the national debt climbed from $285.5 billion to $5.035 trillion, an increase of 1,763%. During that same period the expenditures of the federal government as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product hovered at about 20.6%, and tax revenue as a percentage of GDP hovered around 18.3%.

Think about that.  Take the GDP as a value of 100 units.  Our income was 18.3 units, our expenditures were 20.6 units.  Our expenditures were 112.6% of our income on average.  I don't know about you, but I couldn't run my personal finances for 40 years having to borrow the equivalent of 12.6% of my income each and every year, and never paying that debt down. Yes, I have a mortgage equivalent to a bit over 150% of my annual income, but I don't pay it with my credit cards. My net debt has increased, but I at least understand that I have to pay it down, and so far I've been able to.

When Ross Perot ran for President in 1992, the national debt was in excess of $2.6 trillion, the deficit was in excess of $260 billion, Congress showed no intention of changing its spendthrift ways, and the executive showed no inclination to restrain them. Perot ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and lost massively. Bill Clinton won the election, and say what you will about the man (and I have), deficits did decrease under his administration until there was actually more money coming in (if you include Social Security) than going out.

That changed abruptly. We were back to deficit spending where we've been ever since, and now we're turbocharging it:




The data for this graph is from the Congressional Budget Office as well.  The projected spending, if our Congressweasels don't step up to the plate, is pretty much set.  The projected revenue, on the other hand, is vaporware as far as I'm concerned.  Does it look anything like 18% of projected GDP to you?

And will our Congressweasels step up to the plate?  Why should they?  They've been kicking the can down the road for decades already.  Nobody wants to be the guy left without a chair when the music stops.

No, we keep hearing that we should "tax the rich."  Well, we do tax the rich. No, really.  And it's not enough to keep up with the spending.

And the Left keeps clamoring for more spending, and more taxes on "the rich."

Iowahawk, in his inimitable way takes that concept to its logical conclusion.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that made me want to drag the driver out of the car and beat him sensible with a Cluebat™. It said, "Hey, Conservatives: Medicare IS Socialized Medicine."

Well, DUH. So is "Social Security." What's your point? They're both failing, just like all "Socialized" programs do. Social Security?

"Social Security has been the most successful social program initiated by the federal government in the history of this country," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent Socialist and the (Senate Social Security) caucus's leader. "We are getting very tired of hearing Republicans saying Social Security is collapsing."

It's not, and estimates are that its trust funds won't be exhausted until 2037.

Trust fund? TRUST FUND?? The one that's full of IOU's from the National Treasury?

Fueling the new worry is a report this week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that suggests Social Security may be more of a drain on scarce resources - or in need of strengthening - than had been thought previously.

The CBO said that if interest were excluded, the system would run a deficit of $45 billion this year and a total of $547 billion from 2012 to 2021.

Medicare? Well, aside from the fact that Medicare doesn't pay enough to make doctors want to accept it, it's hemorrhaging money too. An estimated $100 billion a year through fraud alone. But there are bigger problems.

Medicare is already growing faster than Social Security, and it could become bigger and more expensive than Social Security in the next 25 years. It is also growing faster than the economy, and if that keeps up, Medicare could cause the national debt to swell up to more than two-thirds of the gross domestic product in just the next decade.

For years, experts have also warned that Medicare faces trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities — meaning that it will have to pay trillions of dollars more than the amount of money that is coming in. In fact, last year, the Medicare trustees warned that the program was facing more than $36 trillion in unfunded obligations.

Even worse? Other payouts, in addition to Welfare and Social Security represent one-third of U.S. wages:

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

And the public reaction?

Less than a quarter of Americans support making significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare to tackle the country's mounting deficit, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, illustrating the challenge facing lawmakers who want voter buy-in to alter entitlement programs.

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was "unacceptable'' to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security "unacceptable."

Nick Gillespie of Reason says it: 3 Essential Facts About the Current Moment: We're Out of Money, The Public Sector is Overpaid, & We Can't Tax Our Way Out of This. Eric S. Raymond as well:

The political system I have been criticizing all my adult life is fast approaching the point of "no choices left". And not just in the U.S., either; the same problems of political overcommitment and structural insolvency are playing out in advanced nations all over the planet.


Politics as we know it has had a structural problem for a long time; the self-destructive interest-group scramble that Mancur Olson identified in The Logic of Collective Action continually makes parasitic demands beyond the capacity of the underlying economy to supply, and the difference has to be papered over by massive government borrowing.

This is all very well until, as Margaret Thatcher put it about socialism, "you run out of other peoples' money." The system is reaching that point now. Bond investors are figuring out that the debt load has become impossible and are increasingly refusing to either purchase new debt or roll over existing paper. The muni and state-bond market in the U.S. is near-moribund, and the threat of sovereign debt default is tearing the Euro zone apart. U.S Treasuries increasingly look like Wile E. Coyote running in midair; they’ll keep selling only as long as nobody actually looks down...

Insolvency is no longer a sporadic problem, it’s become pervasive at all levels of government everywhere. This is why the recent brouhaha in Wisconsin was so surreal. The public-employee unions weren’t just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic, they were fighting to preserve their right to bore more holes in the hull.

References to the Titanic are getting to be common:

In the James Cameron [*spit*] movie "Titanic," there is this great scene that illustrates a point about our current economic situation.  The iceberg is struck.  Because of the glancing blow, the more primitive metallurgy that resulted in brittle steel of the hull, a long gash was ripped across three of the main watertight compartment sections of the front of the ship. With the first three main sections rapidly filling with water, the engineer/ship designer, played by Victor Garber, lays out the side view plans of the ship to show the captain that there is no doubt that the ship is going down and there is absolutely no way to stop it.  It may take an hour or so for the ship to disappear below the waves, but no amount of bilge pumping or anything else is going to stop the inevitable.

That's what is happening with our economy.

There are a lot more.

The world is paying attention. After all, other governments are going broke, too, and fewer want to buy our debt.

I thought about filling this post with charts and graphs like the ones I started it with, but that's not really necessary.  If you read this blog regularly, you're probably part of that tiny fraction of the population that's paying attention.  I've been working on this post for a while, collecting links and thinking.  You see, I'm in kind of an odd situation.  I'm an engineer, and the company I work for specializes in raping Gaia primary metals mining.  Yes, we design the plants that process the ores ripped from Gaia's womb the earth.  Iron, copper, silver, gold, molybdenum, etc.

And we're busy as hell.

So's our competition. 

We're hiring, they're hiring, the mining companies are spending money improving processes, expanding facilities, and building entire new mines all over the world.

So long as demand (and prices) stays high, we'll remain so.

But I keep thinking that we're sailing on the Titanic, rearranging the deck chairs while the public sector unions crew are boring holes in the hull and the aging population passengers are ceasing to bail out the bilges, but instead doing the exact opposite.

As I watch Japan dig itself out from under the - literal - fallout of a massive earthquake and tsunami, I observe as Victor Davis Hanson does, The Fragility of Complex Societies.  Being an engineer, I do believe I understand the world in ways most other people never will.  I understand, for one thing:

Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.

Theory and reality are only theoretically related.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice there is.

And I understand that when someone high up in the financial machinery of the government states:

"If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when," Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in a question and answer session after delivering a speech at the University of Frankfurt. "The short-term negotiations are very important, I look at this as a tipping point."

then The End is (most probably) Near™.

How near? Well, I'm 49 now. Let's just say that I'm more and more convinced that Dale of Mostly Cajun was more right that he probably thought when he said:

Retire? I will probably get killed in the early battles of the coming revolution.

But it won't be a revolution, I don't think.

It'll involve face colanders, possibly.

Richard Fisher said he was confident in the Americans' ability to take the right decisions and that the country would avoid insolvency.

I'm not.

I started this essay with the working title of "Apparatchiks and Entropy," inspired by my Quote of the Day for February 15, which stated in part:

The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them -- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, "The scum rises to the top."

The apparatchiks are, in part, that third of the economy made up of Federal payouts. They are, in part, the public sector union members boring holes in the hull of our Titanic economy. They are, in part, the people waiting to receive the benefits they've been told they were paying for all their working lives, whose proceeds even now they believe sit in "lock boxes"and "trust funds."  They are, in part, the people Peggy Noonan described:

I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

The apparatchiks have been manipulating organizations to serve their own ends, to "get theirs," for so long now that the entropy is irreversible. The Titanic is sinking, and cannot be saved.

And I wonder what the future of my grandchildren is going to look like, because the Cassandric words of Donald Sensing still echo in my mind:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

UPDATE: More cheery news with another Titanic reference.

UPDATE: Found this at Theo Spark:

Quote of the Day

When conservatism reigns, people are left alone to either succeed or fail on their own in freedom. If you don't like the fail part, then you don't understand the value of failure. Ray Kroc was nothing more than a mediocre paper cup salesman until he discovered and bought the restaurant from the McDonald brothers. Walt Disney failed over and over to find the right people to financially back his ideas for most of his life. Edison tried a thousand different ways to create a lightbulb before he found the right design. The common denominator to success in this country has always been freedom and a rule of law that protects individual freedom.

When leftist ideology reigns, there is no point in striving or failing. If you succeed, the fruits of your labor will be taken from you and given to those who don't care to strive for anything beyond playing the lottery and watching American Idol and believing that anybody who has wealth must have gotten it by nefarious means. This is what produces countries like North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. Equality is celebrated and encouraged until everyone but those at the top of government have become equally miserable.

The ComPost Files - Silence is Consent

Runner-up:

Apparently, our Libyan adventure is called "Operation Odyssey Dawn" because "Operation Princess Rainbow Sparkle Pony" wasn't manly enough. - "canadiancynic"

(*snort*)

Quote of the Day - Jilted Lover's Edition

All presidents play politics but good presidents rely on a set of core values. Obama’s core has a picture of Neville Chamberlain. - Bin Quick, Firedog Lake, Obama, "You're a Goddamned Quarterback!"

From the same piece, this runner-up:

Obama plans to convince hardcore Democrats to abandon their principles to re-elect his sorry Corporate Ass so he can abandon hardcore Democrats. I have an idea, try "buck up", it worked so well for the 2010 midterms. If Obama wants to energize hardcore Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats, all he needs to do is repeat this, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Otherwise, my answer to Mr. Obama is FUCK YOU!

It gets better:

Obama doesn’t understand that he lost hardcore liberals with his compromises. Liberals and Progressives won’t support Obama2012 because we are terrified of his next round of capitulations. I'm sure some "Democrats" will surrender their principles for a perceived "victory" but I believe a second Obama term would be worse than a Palin presidency. I will donate, work for and do everything legally possible to send this sorry "Corporate Whore" back to Chicago as soon as possible.

I guess that tingle up the leg is gone, too.  Too bad "Bin Quick" is a racist, isn't it?

And the comments are priceless.

I'm with Tam when she said "It's a good thing schadenfreude doesn't have calories." I already weigh 300 pounds.  "We Told You So" tastes so good.

Quote of the Day - On This Day Edition

From Mostly Cajun:

Today in History – March 21

1947 – President Truman signs Executive Order 9835 requiring all federal employees to have allegiance to the United States. Today the freakin’ President of the United States doesn’t have allegiance to the United States.

Edumacation - We Don't Haz It

How ignorant are Americans?

When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

RTWT.

Nothing I haven't been repeating and commenting on since I started this blog.

And these people VOTE.