Dear Friends,

It has come to my attention that Bob Johnson, a stalwart Democrat heretofore unknown, indeed unknowable as a political shrinking violet, has succumbed to the ululating horror.  The world promised to him in the murals was found to be uninhabitable.  He was last seen entering the Mouth of Madness in the Maelstrom of Irrelevance.  He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.  Please consider contributing to his undying cause of cracking Bill Kristol on the beak.  

Welcome to the Two-way Mirror Mountains!  Welcome to the Agony!   Welcome, Dread Shoggoth.

Democrats suck.  They do not learn that good policy is good politics.

As Ian Welsh says,

The Democratic reaction to losing Kennedy’s seat will be to do exactly what voters were punishing them for.

From a perspective of operant conditioning or other theories of what constitutes rational behavior i.e., the theory of learning to “earn rewards” and “avoid punishments,” the behavior of Democrats is what behavioral learning theorists refer to as “misbehavior,” because it doesn’t fit their theory of what rational behavior should be like, dammit!, assuming, of course, that behavior is rational in the first place.  In plainer, descriptive language this behavior might more simply be called “working for pain” or “earning pain.”  Earning pain is a real phenomenon in both rats and humans.  And can be downright amusing to watch in the human case.

Struggling against a sea of troubles, a once-in-a-lifetime president having a once-in-a-lifetime mandate for real change, Barack Obama, has made the counter-intuitive and unpopular decision to stay the course.  

On war, health care, the economy, on justice and accountability, on the rule of law itself, Barack Obama, and Democrats more generally, have opted to stay the course.  They view staying the course as the safe option.  Freeze when Republicans are in power, and run to electoral safety when they are out.  Just like rats irrationally yet repeatedly running between electrified grids and freezing after each shock, in various states and fits of fear, if I may deign to notice.

Following an epidemic of fraud, a tsunami of foreclosures (with a second tsunami in short order), and record gambling losses transferred to the public balance sheet, former Fed vice-chairman Alan Blinder is scared:  

My fear is that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a sturdier and safer financial system is slipping away.

There will be no consumer protection legislation.  No clawbacks of ill-gotten gains.  No regulation of on- or off-balance sheet financial instruments.  And no prosecutions of fraud.

Scott Horton’s expose of obvious war crimes will also go unheeded.

Barack Obama will not be content to simply re-arrange the deck chairs, he’ll say.   Americans do not run from their troubles, but take them head-on, he’ll say.  What he means is,

All ahead flank!

And all ahead flank it will be.

Cass Sunstein, professor of law at Harvard and Obama’s “Information Tsar,” gets his proto-fascist freak on in Conspiracy Theories, wherein he forwards the thesis that, conspiracy theorists are bad, because they endanger government anti-terrorism policy,  whatever that policy may be,  therefore conspiracy theorists need to be thwarted by a strategy of government-sponsored infiltration and re-education.  Government needs to fight back against independent public thinking!  I kid you not.

Update  Let’s be perfectly clear: Sunstein is literally advocating a government conspiracy against those “conspiracy theorists” he claims are damaging to governmental purposes.  Let that sink in.

There are numerous claims and allegations that Cass Sunstein wrote a controversial paper entitled, “Conspiracy Theories…,” in which he is alleged to have advocated government infiltration of said conspiracy theorists.

The link to that paper is here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa…

His publication record at Harvard fails to show this particular publication.  That link is here:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/fac…

Question: did Cass Sunstein write the paper he is alleged to have written?  Or is that paper a forgery?

All other questions and controversies are null and void prior to ascertaining the veracity of this fact.

Cass Sunstein, professor of law at Harvard and Obama’s “Information Tsar,” gets his proto-fascist freak on in Conspiracy Theories, wherein he forwards the thesis that, conspiracy theorists are bad, because they endanger government anti-terrorism policy,  whatever that policy may be,  therefore conspiracy theorists need to be thwarted by a strategy of government-sponsored infiltration and re-education.  Government needs to fight back against independent public thinking!  I kid you not.

Update:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/fac…

Sunstein’s full list of publications does not list “conspiracy theories” among them, at least not over the past couple of years.  It is definitely a topic he has written about before.  I wonder if this paper I linked is a forgery attributed to him.  That is first and foremost on my mind.

Update 2My second guessing was a mistake.  We’ve got a live one.  His Harvard web page does indeed list the paper and was published as, Vermeule, Adrian & Cass R. Sunstein. “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” 17 Journal of Political Philosophy 202 (2008).

h/t soilyeti.

Transparency:

In a piece titled, “The Label Factor: Is Obama a Wimp or a Warrior?” Helene Cooper in the New York Times asserts that,

Like every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security.

Really?  Whose perceptions are those?

Maureen Dowd wants you to know that she’s frightened.  Muslims are massing on our borders, and these prowling hordes are coming to kill us.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know there’s no father figure in her life.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know (again) that Obama reminds her of Mr. Spock.  Or a professor.  But not a lord or hero to come to her defense.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know that the dots are flying at her like 3-D asteroids.  This is not some random speck, a fleck, a pinpoint, a daub, a stipple.  It’s not just some freckle looking at me funny.

I’m not alone here, right?

Let’s have a show of hands!

The internetine blogosphere evinced a collective yawn as the toobzual chattering classes learned that, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, tax cheat Timothy Geithner advised AIG to withhold critical information from its SEC filing, information taxpayers deserve to know, because they were the ones Geithner was looting, and that by law shareholders have a right know, because, well, they’re the fucking shareholders.  None of the relevant disclosures were made until after the deal was done and Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary.

Because yawning occurs on both the upward and downward limbs of motivational excitement, i.e., both when waking up and when going to sleep, it was unclear whether the collective yawn was due to the irrational exuberance, excitement, liveliness, energy, high spirits and cheerfulness related to President Obama’s promises of an era of unprecedented transparency in   government, or whether having been rapidly conditioned and  habituated to the new President’s lies and the general lack of accountability for law-breaking by the ruling elites, the yawning response rather reflected the quickly-formed hard-boiled, apathetic, blind to, careless, case-hardened, cold, cold-blooded, deaf to, hard, hard-bitten, hard-boiled, hardened, hardhearted, heartless, impassive, impenitent, indifferent, indurated, inflexible, insensate, insensible, insensitive, insentient, inured, obdurate, soulless, spiritless, stiff, stony, stubborn, thick-skinned, torpid, tough, toughened, unaffected, unbending, uncaring, uncompassionate, unconcerned, unfeeling, unimpressionable, unresponsive, unsusceptible, unsympathetic attitudes required to survive the next decade from fucking Hell.

Early indicators are that Las Vegas and Wall Street bookmakers are aggressively shorting “optimism.”

Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today.  An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own “selfish” benefit.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Can I have a “Heh, indeedy?”

Hannah Arendt argues that great evils in history are not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but by ordinary people who accept the premises of their time and believe their actions are normal.

Voltaire put it this way:

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.

In other words, please don’t take Obama seriously when he does or says or generally promulgates patently absurd, stupid things, e.g.,

Overseas Contingency Operation on Underwear

Global War on Skivvies

Various Briefings and De-Briefings

Operation Butterballs

Going commando

Update

In a majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court has now ruled that due to the ingenuity of the diaper bomb, upskirt  photography has become a powerful tool in the global war on skivvies, and that there is no longer a reasonable expectation of privacy in these nether regions.