Tag: public affairs

Paltrow: More Power to the Prez

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I know–it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, to pick on some Hollywood airhead for saying stupid things. But Gwyneth Paltrow really raised the bar of stupidity when she said this, a couple of nights ago:

“It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass” ( http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/10/famous-actress-wants-give-obama-power-needs/ ).

Yo, Gwynnie–you need to catch up on current events. The most lawless chief executive in modern history already claims he has the power to do “anything I want,” via “phone and pen.” If he can’t get something passed in Congress, all he has to do is sign an executive order. And as long as he has at least 51 Democrats in the Senate, he can perform human sacrifices on the White House lawn with no risk of impeachment.

So, Gwynnie, what more would you like the criminal-in-chief to be able to do–beyond erasing our country’s borders, importing dangerous diseases, stacking the judiciary full of left-wing fanatics, waging jihad for homosexuality against Christianity, changing the mission of NASA from space exploration to “reaching out to Muslims,” and setting back race relations 75 years? In what has he failed to content you? What damage has he left undone, that you would have him do? As it is, if he disappeared tomorrow, it would still take at least another 50 years to repair the harm he has done.

She also said to the lawless SOB, to his face, “You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly.”

Oh! What these people say, when they don’t have someone else to write their lines for them!

What We Can Learn from Bad Movies

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

There are many sites on the Internet listing “the 50 worst movies of all time,” according to this or that viewer poll, this or that critic. Even allowing for much variation, there are still a few films that make everybody’s list: legendary clunkers like Heaven’s Gate, Gigli, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Speed 2 (set on board a cruise ship going six knots per hour), etc. I am always shocked to discover how many of these I have actually seen.

But each and every terrible movie raises the same question: What ever made them think that this was going to be good?

Think about it. A movie isn’t slapped together in an afternoon. It takes days and days of work; and at the end of the day, the director and the staff have to watch the rushes to see how the last bunch of filming turned out. For the most part, it costs a lot of money to make a movie: so supposedly the people who are making it know what they’re doing.

So how is it that you have investors who want a return on their money (and if they were in the habit of just throwing money away on silliness, they would soon not be rich investors anymore), writers who are paid good money for writing, a director whose career could end if he makes a bad enough movie, individuals who are paid good money to act in the film, and all of the work that all of these people do subject to day-by-day review and oversight–and with all that, you still wind up with Exorcist II: The Heretic? How could anybody look at the rushes for The Fifth Element and not realize they were creating the ugliest movie you ever saw?

Is it any wonder that equally fallible (or even criminally mischievous) persons, lacking the capacity for immediate oversight enjoyed by movie-makers, come up with a disaster like Obamacare? Is not Global Warming the Heaven’s Gate of science?

Policy-makers don’t have daily rushes to look at–although, when all is said and done, they are very able to ignore lots and lots of negative feedback.

If America’s immigration policy were a movie in progress, what do you think the rushes would look like? If Ed Wood could look at the dailies for Plan 9 from Outer Space and say “It’s good, print it,” is it any wonder that the leaders who have turned our southern border into a giant vacuum cleaner sucking in millions of illegal aliens, and all sorts of diseases, can look at what they have done and say, “It’s good”?

The only difference is, bad movies hurt those who produce bad movies; while those who produce bad policy walk away unscathed while the rest of us suffer.

‘National Health’ to Push ‘Stop Drinking’ Pill

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

In their continuing campaign to abolish free will among the human race, Britain’s socialized medicine establishment, the National Health, has come up with a drug that’s supposed to stop you from wanting more than one glass of wine or pint of beer ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-pill-stop-drinkers-having-4369536 ). To quote the lead paragraph of the news story in The Mirror, “Hundreds of thousands of drinkers who down half a bottle of wine or three pints every night are to be offered a pill to cut their cravings.”

“Offered,” eh? Hey, it’s only being “offered”–it’s not like they’ve gone all Mike Bloomberg on you and forbidden you to have more than one nip before they tuck you in.

The story does not tell you what happens if you reject the “offer” of the stop-drinking drug, but we can guess. Maybe later on you trip over a loose roller skate and break your ankle; and when you try to get treatment for it, they answer, “Hmmm… Looks like you refused to take the anti-drinking pill. No treatment for you!”

“But it’s a broken ankle! It has nothing to do with drinking.”

“Sorry–we have a policy against treating antisocial types like you who won’t do what the government says is good for you.”

All right, if I drank three pints of beer–48 ounces–I’d be face-down on the floor. But since when is the government my mommy and my daddy and my nanny, to tell me what I can or can’t drink? I have no desire to drink three pints of beer at a sitting–but it’s none of their cotton-pickin’ business!

Oh, and the drug costs 3 pounds per pill; and nobody has any idea what might be the long-term effects of taking it every time you feel like having a second glass of wine.

They’ve stumbled onto a good thing, here. Maybe they can also come up with pills that will kill your desire to stay up late to watch a movie, to phone in sick to work so you can go fishing, to eat White Castles when you should be having tofu, and so on. Maybe they can shut down all our bad habits!

If they really wanted to do some good, why don’t they invent a pill that won’t let you vote for liberals or socialists?

It Won’t Work, But It’ll Make Us Feel Good

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The one lifelong politician who never held a job in his life says the economy is in great shape and the people don’t appreciate it because they’re going broke.

Now we hear from another lifelong drone, the Democrat president who couldn’t keep his zipper shut, who sold pardons, and who is now America’s Revered Elder Statesman–we hear from him that, yeah, the economy is in terrible shape. But the good news, he says, is that the government can fix it easily.

Just increase the cost of labor!

Yup, the ex-prez sez, just jack up the minimum wage and everything’ll be hunky-dory.

Here in New Jersey, the pols are fixing to do just that, despite warnings that it will cripple the state’s restaurant industry ( http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/01/new-jersey-minimum-wage-proposals/ ). That means that the people the pols say they want to help will actually get hurt, as their employers cut back on hours and lay off staff.

This is not working out well for us, people: being governed by persons who are ignorant of everything but the pursuit of power for its own sake. They’ve never done anything but politics–never worked, never started a business, never tried to keep a business going successfully. They have no idea how wealth is created.

Worse, they have no idea how poverty is created–even though they themselves do so much to create it.

At what point do you question the intentions of people who know their policies won’t work and will only do harm, and yet they keep on doing them?

Those Who Can’t Do, and Don’t Know How, Govern

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The other day, the jidrool in the White House said America is way better off since he took office–only the poor stupid people “don’t feel it” because, you see, wages and incomes haven’t gone up, but prices have.

Duh… let’s see. Your income stays the same, or even decreases, while your food and fuel and rent keep on going up and up and up–and you’re better off?

How big a nincompoop is this guy?

The point is: so, here we have this dangle, this stunata, coming up with public policy vis-a-vis the economy, and he knows absolutely not a bloody thing about it. The man has never worked at a job, let alone tried to start and operate a business. You would be better off having me come over to repair your computer, than to have this ignoramus tinkering with the national economy. And believe me, you do not want me tinkering with your computer.

But it’s not just President *Batteries Not Included. We have a whole political class that knows nothing but politics, and a whole Academia that knows nothing but the classroom. Because they’re rich, tenured, or both, they don’t have to experience the consequences of their ignorance; but we do. We do! What they don’t know about economics would fill an ocean basin.

Is there anybody else out there who thinks that government by the totally ignorant is not a good thing? I mean, really–what do you suppose would happen to a business created, owned, and operated by the likes of Barack Obama, John McCain, Sheila Jackson Lee, or some daft professor of Queer Studies at Dunderhead U.? How long do you think it would take them to lose their shirts?

And don’t forget–they want to run our health care, too.

A Really Lousy Vision for America

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I just can’t get over how smart I feel, now that I know the purpose of government is “to help people change their behavior” ( http://leeduigon.com/2014/09/25/seattle-will-inspect-your-garbage/ ).

The Bible (Romans Chapter 13, and elsewhere) says we have governments to restrain and punish evildoers, and to protect our lives and property. Our Declaration of Independence ascribes to government a lofty purpose: to safeguard inalienable rights given us by God Himself. And in the Constitution, government’s function is to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Obviously government isn’t doing any of those things anymore. Restraining evildoers? The evildoers up on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue don’t seem the least bit restrained. They chop away at our liberties and, by their fiscal incontinence, beggar our posterity.

But when it comes to helping us to change our behavior–hey, they’re all on board for that.

Laws used to tell us what we couldn’t do. Now, more and more, laws tell us what we must do.

We must buy health insurance. We must embrace same-sex pseudomarriage. If we’re kids in public school, we must eat “healthy” foods as defined by the government, even if it’s tasteless pap. And there are laws just waiting to be passed that will tell us what kind of dwellings we must build, and where to build them, how much electricity we can use, what kind of cars we must drive, what kind of vaccines our children must receive, and even when we’ve lived long enough and must now sign up for “end of life counseling.” And so on–no end to it in sight.

Could anything be farther from securing the blessings of liberty?

Look, you can’t fundamentally transform the country if you can’t order the citizens’ behavior. For that, you’ve got to have “human rights” commissions, speech codes, Climate Change legislation, and amnesty for a flood of illegal aliens to keep Democrats in power until they can finish their transformation project.

Why aren’t people angrier about all this?

 

Ezekiel Emanuel: We’re Living Too Long

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Mr. Obamacare, Charlie Death Panels, better known as Ezekiel Emanuel, has raised a stir by suggesting that we should all die at 75 (for his original article, see http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/ ).

Let me be fair. Ol’ Zeke, 57–oh, to be 57 again!–hasn’t come out and said the government ought to bump everybody off the day they turn 75. No, what he’s writing about is “living too long… this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive.” So he’s talking about spending millions of dollars to exist in some kind of vegetative or demented state for as long as possible. He says he’s against euthanasia and assisted suicide. And he promises that, once he turns 75, he will not seek medical attention to prolong his life as it winds down naturally.

Meanwhile, George Sauron is  being shot full of Human Growth Hormone so he can stay alive and keep on doing mischief for the next 200 years, and “scientists” are talking about “merging man and machine” so people can live forever, blah-blah…

What Ol ‘Zeke has said is frightening because we don’t trust these Experts and wise men as far as we can throw them. We don’t trust them not to set up some new government authority, staffed by the criminally insane, to tell us when we’ve lived long enough, bye-bye, we don’t have any money to spend on you, it’s all going to the president’s vacations, your time is up, etc.

It’s one thing to say, “I’ll go when God calls me.” But I will not go when Obamacare calls me. They may overpower me and murder me, but I am not going to sing We Are the World and take their little pill.

There are people who have lived too long. But there are many who did not live long enough. Who is fallen man, to decide which is which?

New Atheist Demand: ‘Don’t Say the Pledge’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I don’t know why the American Humanist Association sends me email.

Today they have asked for my support in their campaign to have the words “under God” dropped from the Pledge of Allegiance. “Through the daily Pledge exercise,” whines their spokesman, “our public schools are defining patriotism by promoting god-belief while stigmatizing atheist and humanist children.”

What crap. Has this clown been in a public school classroom lately? When I was teaching, I was the only one in the classroom who stood for the Pledge of Allegiance. Not one student paid the least attention to it. They just kept on yakking, throwing stuff, snapping girls’ bra straps, and laughing. And if you think I had the power to stop that–well, you’d be speaking from pure ignorance.

Anyhow, the humanists claim “harassment” and “bullying,” liberals’ magic words, befall atheists at the hands of Christians, if they exercise their right to remain seated during the Pledge.

In most classrooms, the most difficult challenge facing the teacher is to keep the kids in their seats at all.

Okay, “Under God” was added in 1954. So that makes it bad? Humanist anti-morality has only been added to the curriculum in the past few years, and we’re all supposed to bow down to it.

When atheists spout how they’re “good without God,” I can only think of 20th century atheists like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. The only thing they were good at was piling up dead bodies.

Personally, I don’t care all that much about the Pledge of Allegiance. As a Christian, I would have serious reservations about pledging allegiance to a nation that was not under God–very serious reservations indeed.

Ask some of the people who escaped from officially atheist countries, often at great risk of their lives, how they liked it there.

How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I suppose the answer to that question is, “Incredibly stupid.”

The keynote speaker at the UN’s 2014 Climate Summit, Sept. 23 (mark it on your calendar!) will be a 25-year-old “poetess” who has a master’s degree in Pacific Island Studies. Is that like Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Obese Chicano Hypochondriac Studies, etc.? Anyhow, she’s going to recite some of her Global Warming poetry at us ( http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/25-year-old-woman-to-lead-climate-summit/?cat_orig=world ).

Is this how the Science gets settled? Is this how the debate gets closed? Is this why they never have to answer any questions?

So never mind the fact that we just had the most brutally cold winter most of us can remember, followed by the coolest summer on record since the 1880s. Never mind the fact that the Arctic ice-pack, in open defiance of Global Warming ideology, is twice as big as it was two years ago. Don’t look at those satellite photos! And just ignore that man behind the curtain.

Instead, be instructed by this 25-year-old poetess with her degree in Claptrap Studies.

Remember, if you agree to pay higher and higher taxes, and sign away your liberties forever, and allow them to micromanage every aspect of your lives, the world’s glorious leaders will fix it so there’s no more Climate Change! Yep–the mere creation of dozens of new multibillion-dollar government bureaucracies will put a stop to earthquakes, droughts, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and all that nasty stuff.

I mean, really–if you can’t trust John Kerry and Obama and the UN and the IMF, who can you trust?

And when all else fails, surely you can trust a poetess.

‘Separating Church and State’: What Bunk

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I guess one of the reasons our public schools fail to teach children that constellations are not real places inhabited by superhuman Space Brothers is that they’re too busy teaching other things that are equally bogus.

One of those things is that there is some law in America mandating an absolute “separation of church and state.” And that’s why you can’t say “Bless you” if someone sneezes in the classroom–although I’d like to see what would happen if a kid said “Obama bless you.”

For those who still don’t know, because they’ve been taught something that isn’t true, the words “separation of church and state” do not occur in the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land (although you’d never guess it from the actions of our government). There is no such law. Go ahead, look it up. You won’t find those words in the Declaration of Independence, either.

All they’re really doing is trying to separate the people from Christianity and establish their own atheistic religion of statism. They’ve done quite a job of it, so far. They invoke the boogieman of “theocracy” to justify their own de facto theocracy.

There is no law in America that forces people to pray. But there are imaginary laws used by our bureaucrats and judges and “educators” to force people not to pray. They’re the ones who are in the theocracy business, not us.