NBC reported slated to get big taxpayer subsidy
If this report by Kenneth Lovett of the New York Daily News is to be believed, faithful Democratic Party vassal NBC is to be awarded money by New York taxpayers.Call it the Jimmy Fallon tax credit.
Quietly tucked into tentative state budget is a provision that would help NBC move "The Tonight Show" back to New York, the Daily News has learned.
The provision would make state tax credits available for the producers of "a talk or variety program that filmed at least five seasons outside the state prior to its first relocated season in New York," budget documents show.
In addition, the episodes "must be filmed before a studio audience" of at least 200 people. And the program must have an annual production budget of at least $30 million or incur at least $10 million a year in capital expenses.
In other words, a program exactly like "The Tonight Show.
The entertainment industry is subsidized by many states, as well as the federal government, despite its stars like Fallon being ultra-rich one percenters.
That the law seems so narrowly tailored to benefit NBC seems almost scandalous.
What’s really behind those FAA tower closures?
Sequestration chatter isn’t going away any time soon, and one of the expected headlines is making the rounds again this week. Air traffic control towers at nearly 150 airports across the nation are going to sit empty, forcing pilots to figure out safe landing procedures by a combination of the seats of their pants and furiously cracking open fortune cookies. In other words, you’re all going to die.The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday told 149 regional airports across the country it would begin closing their air traffic control towers in April, but said it would spare another 40 towers that had been on the chopping block.
The agency said the cuts are necessary to help meet $637 million in forced spending cuts.They need to cut $637M out of their budget, but how big is that budget? And how big of a percentage would you need to slash before you just start shutting down towers? Doug Mataconis thinks there might be a little more to see here than just red and black numbers on a balance sheet. Could it be… politics?
The tower closures will begin April 7 and will be phased in over four weeks, FAA Chief Operating Officer David Grizzle said in a memo obtained by CNN.
The FAA claims that it cannot cut $600 million from its $58 billion without impacting air traffic control. Honestly, though, I can’t believe that this is true. It seems more likely to me that the Administration is phasing in cuts that are designed to have the most public impact in order to win a political battle. Take a fine tooth comb to that budget, guys, before you start risking public safety.I’m not doubting that for a moment, but somehow I think there’s yet another layer to this onion. It’s not just the number of towers being shut down, but which specific ones. And more to the point… who works there. When you scan down the list of closures, these are all towers which are managed and staffed by private contractors. Not one of them is staffed up by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union. That’s something of a remarkable coincidence, isn’t it? Maybe not.
No FAA air-traffic facilities will be shut down for at least a year, Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, said in an e-mailed statement.
The FAA’s union contract requires that controllers get at least a year’s notice before a facility is closed, Church said. The agency Feb. 22 issued a list of 49 FAA towers that were subject to closing in addition to the private towers.The union workers will be forced to take off one day without pay every two weeks, which spreads the pain around a little but their jobs and their towers aren’t going away. And leave it to public sector unions to find a way to wring a silver (or green) lining out of any dark cloud. Assume there is some sort of public outcry this year after a couple of regional jets clip wings on the runways of some municipal airports. At that point, Washington gets the excuse they need to staff at least some of the towers back up. Will they go back to the private contractors, or will the unions move in with their “much more efficient” practices?
Time will tell. And we’ll be watching with great interest.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/23/whats-really-behind-those-faa-tower-closures/
IRS Wastes Piles of Taxpayer Money on "Star Trek" Parody Video
The Internal Revenue Service spent $60,000 on two parody videos meant for "training and leadership," parodying both Star Trek and Gilligan's Island. CBS News uncovered the video (seen below) with a FOIA request after the IRS refused to provide it to the House Ways and Means Committee.The "parody" is truly cringe-inducing. The acting is awful, the costumes are lousy, and the fake prostethics are acknowledged as embarrassing. As USA Today reports, the IRS has regretted making the video:
The IRS said Friday it was a mistake for employees to make the six-minute video. It was shown at the opening of a 2010 training and leadership conference but does not appear to have any training value.
The agency said the "Star Trek" video "was a well-intentioned, light-hearted introduction to an important conference during a difficult period for the IRS."Light-hearted, well-intentioned, and a big fat waste of money. Sounds like a pretty typical government program!
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2013/03/23/irs-wastes-piles-of-taxpayer-money-on-star-trek-parody-video-n1547111
26 Republicans Vote for Internet Sales Tax
On the Republican side, perhaps the most egregious vote was the Enzi amendment to allow states to form a cartel and collect internet sales taxes for other states. The so-called Market Fairness Act passed in the form of a second degree amendment by 75-24, with the support of 26 Republicans. This will send the message to Harry Reid that he has more than 60 votes to pass this as a standalone bill. In doing so, they have voted to grow government all over the country, hurt low-tax states, impose taxation without representation, saddle small businesses with collecting taxes for 10,000 distinct tax jurisdictions, and adulterate the freest most successful entity known to man. You can read more about it here.
One other important vote from a Republican vantage point was Ted Cruz’s amendment to reduce foreign aid to Egypt. It only garnered the support of 25 senators. I’ll check back with more updates after fully digesting all the votes.
The Power Motive and the Profit Motive
The most common misconception in America's warped political culture is that modern liberals tend to be altruistic and compassionate, while conservatives are self-centered, greedy old misers.On the contrary, not only are many modern liberals driven by a personal profit motive via the aegis of government, but they are also fundamentally selfish in a socially irresponsible and economically destructive way.
But how can this be? How can so many people be so wrong about who is actually selfish and unselfish? It has to do with the nature of altruism and greed.
Far from being "altruistic," many left-wingers expect others to sacrifice on their behalves. They don't expect to actually sacrifice themselves (that's for suckers like soldiers and religious martyrs); they want to sacrifice others to their whims, wants, and needs.
Modern liberals have a profit motive just like everyone else, except they want to profit through the power of government - either by removing the pressures of a competitive labor market or by forgoing the notion that people should create value equal to what they receive.
Take the growth in entitlements over the last 50 years. Since 1960, total government expenditures on entitlements in 2010 dollars went up 12 times: from around $200 billion to about $2.2 trillion annually. Government transfers to individuals have outpaced per capita income gains for around 50 years, all but proving that entitlement increases are part of a political strategy designed to lock up voters and are not economically justified.
Student loans are approaching $1 trillion outstanding, even as around half of new college graduates lack a full-time job. Food stamp enrollment is skyrocketing, beyond what can be explained by relatively flat payrolls. Baby-Boomers have some of the highest net worths in the country, but many are looting younger generations for retirement and health bennies.
Why? Because we're all owed something, just by virtue of being citizens.
Few in the political class seem to have the nerve to call nonsense on this unsustainable charade, because that makes one sound "mean," and in a so-called democracy, "mean" is politically toxic. So on and on we go, spending imaginary money and damaging the poor through dollar devaluation, borrowing on the trust of future generations not even born, all the while sucking the vitality out of the greatest economic engine in the world. As Thomas Sowell once put it, "[t]he welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites."
While past American leftists were a kind of soft socialist and believed in exalting "the worker," today's leftists praise the non-worker and defend him just as earnestly. It is bigoted, you see, to expect people to work and take care of themselves. It's not that "the worker" (whoever that may be) is being screwed by exploitative capitalists' it's that "the system" is structurally unjust simply because some people are working and profiting. If there's value being created, there's value owed to someone else, whether that person was involved in creating it or not. Such warped thinking will grind an economy to a halt - including ours.
It was a matter of "fairness" to yesterday's leftist that the business-owner was profiting at the perceived expense of the worker. According to the debunked Marxian theory of surplus value, whatever the business-owner made in profit was a reflection of value exploited from the worker. (Never mind the land, capital, and technology needed to produce goods for people who actually desire them.)
So the organized left set out to correct this fundamental "economic injustice" by empowering government to rectify the perceived wrongs: through minimum wage laws, state-run entitlements for the middle class (like socialized medicine), and unionized partnership with government. What started out as a fight for "the little guy" - i.e., the exploited worker - turned into cynical political racketeering, viz. trading votes for goodies, whether paid for or unpaid for.
What was a crusade against the supposed "profit motive" was transmuted through economically manipulative government into the "power motive." The authority to remedy argued injustice in the economy was readily misused to abuse workers for private-sector and special-interest gain. Doesn't sound like the fairytale version of socialism; quite the contrary.
President Obama once said, "So long as Americans are denied the decent wages, and good benefits, and fair treatment they deserve, the dream for which so many gave so much will remain out of reach; that to live up to our founding promise of equality for all, we have to make sure that opportunity is open to all Americans."
But note the classic sophistry of taking the assumption of "equality" under the law to mean equality of results. In other words, it doesn't matter how much effort you expend or how much value you add to the economy; we all deserve good benefits and "decent" wages (not proportionate wages).
Heck, Fauxcahontas Elizabeth Warren recently suggested a minimum wage of $22 an hour. And it should be added that "opportunity" comes for workers when governments protect property and contracts, not when they rig the game for those in power and their associates.
One of the crucial things that must be done in American political culture is that we must start praising the value-creators and start earnestly shaming the sponges - and not just welfare recipients, but anyone who abuses government for his own personal profit motive. That can mean people in corporations, unions, universities, non-profits, or other special interests (not including the truly disabled, elderly poor, or U.S. veterans).
But more to the point, if one takes something that isn't his using force, that is greedy and selfish. If one creates value and intends to keep the proceeds of it, that is fair, because one owns his own life and determines what he does with it. If one sacrifices others to one's wants and needs, that is not altruism; it is exploitation. If one sacrifices himself for a cause he believes in, at least that person has done with his own life what he saw fit.
Language is a powerful weapon when it comes to politics, and the left has been winning the culture war because it has defined the terms. If we want to roll back the welfare state, we need to erase the left's terms of false compassion and neutralize its PC-imposed guilt, while we establish clearly in our minds the standards of true justice.
Does Progressivism Exist?
Can
you prove that progressivism exists? We can all name some famous
progressives. We know that progressivism is on the ascendancy, and that
our response to the current push for a final progressive
victory will largely determine the fate of humanity in the coming
centuries. And yet in all of this there is a whiff of mirage -- as
though, if one were to come too close to the thing itself, one would
suddenly recognize that the oasis (or swamp) on the horizon was just
more desert all along.
Let us journey towards that closer view, if you will, and ask, without a hint of irony, whether there has ever actually been a true progressive, i.e., a thinker or politician who espoused progressivism sincerely and as advertised. Stated differently, does progressivism, as a genuine political philosophy, even exist, or is the mirage all there is?
Progressives claim to believe in equality, which they never clearly define, except when they are speaking in strictly administrative terms ("equal pay"). They rally for "fairness," which they describe only in terms of particular goals ("universal healthcare"), rather than according to any underlying principle. ("People before profit" is merely an incoherent bromide, not a principle; go ahead, try to explain it discursively.) They advocate "rights" which multiply like rabbits, while carefully obscuring how this overpopulation of rights affects the more traditional rights that must be sacrificed to make room for these new ones. (A "positive right" to the property of others means that property rights no longer exist.) Progressives plan the destruction of traditional Western rationalism, individualism, and morality -- i.e., of the conditions of practical freedom and material prosperity -- but they do so, without exception, under the banner of "progress." Whether they be socialists, communists, fascists, or some hybrid of these, all progressives -- and I mean the vanguard, the leading intellectuals and statesmen of progressivism -- promote their various hopes and policies by means of the same slogan: Forward.
Forward, in practice, means, and has always meant, the same things: death to multitudes of innocents; economic collapse; spiritual degradation; widespread poverty; a drudgerous, machinelike existence for "the masses," leavened only by mindless amusements designed to palliate the senseless waste of time that is life without genuine hope; and forced debasement in compulsory retardation and indoctrination centers (aka government schools).
The willing victims of this world-historical abuse -- those not offended at being identified as the amorphous "masses" -- seem truly to believe in "Forward," in progressive "equality," "fairness," "rights," and the rest of the dogma. They believe in it while they watch their material prospects dwindling, the moral framework of centuries being mocked into ridicule, the laws tightening around the most absurd minutiae of their daily lives in the name of protecting them from their own childlike ignorance, and their leaders speaking of them, "the masses," with the utmost disdain for their wishes, their dignity, or even their very lives.
But in what, or in whom, are these willing victims actually believing? Do they even know? Christians, Jews, and Buddhists know who they are following. So do Pythagoreans, Cartesians, and Kantians. Do the victims of progressivism know who is leading them "forward" in the name of equality, fairness, and rights?
We all speak of the "progressives." The word is in vogue again these days. I myself usually prefer it to "socialist" or "leftist," mainly because it speaks more broadly of an underlying philosophical position, rather than of a specific economic program or political stripe, and therefore cuts closer to the bone of the hundred-and-fifty-year assault on Western civilization that has led mankind to its present bleak prospect. But of whom, exactly, are we speaking?
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton describe themselves proudly as progressives. So do Bill Ayers, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and all international socialist and communist organizations. So did Frances Perkins, FDR's Labor Secretary, regarded as the mother of New Deal. So did Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canada's first mainstream socialist party, and the godfather of socialized medicine. So did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who, like Douglas, Hitler, and many other progressives, advocated eugenics for the purpose of racial and social purification.
"Wait a minute!" some may object here. "You can't just throw Hitler's name into that list -- he wasn't a progressive, but merely a power-mad lunatic." And so he was. So let us leave him off the list of "real" progressives, in the name of being fair to progressivism.
Here, however, is where things get dicey. If we leave Hitler -- one of the most prominent of "Forward" sloganeers -- off the list of legitimate progressives, then must not our purging of the list continue, until we are left with only the "legitimate" ones?
Mao Tse-tung was a progressive, was he not? And yet his person and policies were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent human beings. My guess is that most of "the masses" would not find this an acceptable road to equality, fairness, and rights, and hence would not accept Mao as exemplary of progressivism. Likewise with Stalin. However, forced migrations and deaths did not prevent many so-called progressive intellectuals in the West from supporting and defending Stalin -- who, after all, was killing as a necessary evil on the road to the progressive dream of collectivization -- until the inhumanity of his methods was exposed to the Western "masses," thereby becoming an embarrassment to the intellectuals. And Mao still has prominent apologists among the "progressive" elite, a group that includes appointees of the Obama administration who, like Canada's iconic progressive prime minister Pierre Trudeau, have lauded Maoist China as an admirable attempt to achieve the ideal of "equality."
And here the complications increase exponentially. Today's "legitimate," "genuine" progressive leaders and intellectuals commonly regard the "illegitimate," "inauthentic" ones as their spiritual kin. According to their own proclamations and policy proposals, they want the same things, although our "legitimate" progressives, whether due to squeamishness or pragmatic calculation, eschew some of their forebears' more extreme measures.
Consider, for example, the moral support and political sympathy so casually expressed by today's political, media, and Hollywood "progressives" towards Fidel Castro and his sidekick, the super-cool Che Guevara of campus T-shirt fame. Castro and Guevara were killers, and thorough devotees of Lenin and (particularly in Guevara's case) Stalin. Their Cuban revolution was a lodestar of the North American New Left, and the Cuban communists, through their intelligence agency, the DGI, were directly involved in training and funding "progressive" terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and Canada's Front de Libération du Québec. These groups were open in their support for Castro, Mao, the Viet Cong, and the Soviet Union. They used, advocated, and incited violence, including murder. Several of the leading members of the Weathermen are now leading "progressive" education theorists and children's rights advocates. Two of them hosted Barack Obama's first-ever campaign event in their home, and one of them -- one who regarded the murder of twenty-five million Americans as a practical necessity of The Revolution -- worked together on multi-million dollar community organizing projects with Obama, as well as probably having a hand in writing the latter's most famous autobiography.
The very progressive Communist Party USA, whose current leadership includes at least one person who received formal honors from the Soviet Union, has boisterously supported Obama throughout his presidency, and cited his key agenda items as the most practical road to socialism in America -- a reasonable position, as Obama's agenda bears a striking resemblance to that of the progressive co-authors of the famous little manifesto whence the CPUSA gets its mission statement.
See the problem? Sorting the "genuine" progressives from the power-mad lunatics gets more complicated with each step. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point, the line in the sand distinguishing the bloodstained tyrants from the "real" progressives, who sincerely wish to promote the cause of equality, fairness, and rights?
Indeed, apart from their declared advocacy of equality, fairness, and rights, the one thing all these progressives -- genuine or otherwise -- seem to have in common is cold-bloodedness. That is, they not only show contempt for individual human life, but they also tend towards statements, sentiments, and policies that would actively require the deaths of many people -- and this requirement seems not to bother any of them very much. Progressivism, as I have previously argued, is in part a death cult.
One of America's most influential early progressives, Edward Mandell House, wrote an idealistic fantasy novel about a progressive dictatorship which supplants the U.S. government, achieving power by means of a civil war in which 40,000 defenders of the constitutional republic are killed, with barely a second thought. This book was published the same year Woodrow Wilson was elected president -- with "Colonel" House as his chief advisor and strategist.
Prince Philip wrote that if he were reincarnated, he would like to return as a deadly virus in order to "solve" overpopulation. Robert Reich garnered an enthusiastic ovation from an audience of university students when he described what an "honest" politician would tell old people: "we're going to let you die." Progressive academics, politicians, and presidents have been vociferous proponents of the absolute "right" of abortion, even up to and including the moment after live birth, i.e., infanticide.
When Islamic terrorists besieged an American diplomatic mission in Libya, Obama and his secretary of state remained blithely unresponsive and disengaged -- for over seven hours, until the final Americans were killed. In the aftermath, they pursued a calculated policy of misrepresenting the attack as a spontaneous uprising related to an online video. Their propaganda campaign -- let us call things by their right names -- was designed to shield them from blame for their refusal to defend American citizens under attack. This propaganda, built on the repeated citing of an "outrageous," "intolerant," "anti-Islamic" video which the administration knew from the outset was completely unrelated to the Benghazi attack, helped to incite violent anti-West protests in several countries, resulting in numerous Arab deaths. Several months later, called to account for this extreme disregard for human life and for truth, Hillary Clinton openly declared victory in the stalling game that the administration had been playing: "What difference -- at this point -- does it make?"
So we return to our initial question: does "genuine" progressivism exist? Thousands of men and women have achieved power and wealth for themselves, subdued "the masses" of many nations, forcibly removed generations of children from their parents' control, turned every traditional moral precept on its head in the name of "social justice," "workers' rights," and "spreading the wealth," and murdered, disarmed, criminalized, or re-educated anyone who stood in their way. They achieved these things by framing them as "progress" on the path to equality, fairness, and rights, but their practical outcomes have been indistinguishable from those of every bloody tyrant in modern history. And they also share a natural enemy in common with history's tyrants, namely all those among "the masses" who wish to pursue their own ends by their own effort, unimpeded by coercive obstruction from other men.
What evidence have we, then, that their true intentions are any different from those of all previous authoritarians? We have only their word, parroted by their adherents among "the masses," that their goals are noble and moral. Why should we accept their word at face value, when we see how cavalierly they treat human life and liberty, and how thoroughly they have destroyed every community they have commandeered? Why, in other words, should we believe they intend some ill-conceived human "progress" merely because they say they do?
They say they are for equality, fairness, and rights; and yet they use these words in ways that contradict their long-established meanings. "Equality" achieved by legally punishing everyone who refuses to accept his state-determined lot in life is nothing like any notion of equality that men espoused throughout the previous millennia of Western civilization. The same goes for "fairness" achieved by forcibly restraining men's aspirations and actions, and "rights" which require the abolition of the basic concept of private property common to every civilized society in the history of mankind.
Why do they use these time-honored words at all, if they are using them in ways that no one has ever used them before? The answer is self-evident: to deceive.
One more thing "legitimate" progressives share in common with their "illegitimate" counterparts is the habitual use of official propaganda: the state's deliberate manipulation of accepted moral language (i.e., traditional beliefs) to effect change surreptitiously. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson created America's Committee on Public Information with the explicit purpose of propagandizing the American public, using lies and threats of public ostracism to push the nation into war with Germany. It has been the practice of Western progressives ever since to mask the more extreme implications of their proposals behind traditional moral language and invocations of patriotism. This practical method -- used freely by the preeminent progressives of the first half of the twentieth century, both "legitimate" and "illegitimate" -- was developed into a theory by the Frankfurt School Marxists and like-minded others at American universities. The undermining of the West, they determined, required the insinuation of anti-Western notions into the culture, and would best be achieved by co-opting and inverting respected Western concepts. Hence the progressives' use of "equality," "fairness," "rights," and all the rest of the lexicon of liberty that has now been turned to the purpose of achieving universal plunder and servitude for the benefit of those who regard themselves as our superiors, and see "the masses" as so much expendable fuel for their journey to the paradise of unrestricted authority. This is the not-so-subtle meaning of the progressive term, "the masses": humanity viewed as an inanimate force, to be directed by ruling intelligences for their own ends.
Such, then, is progressivism as the world has experienced it: a panoply of calculated lies in support of the urges of men and women who have shown through their actions and words that their ultimate aims are power and personal glory, while their chief policy motives are fear and a desire to eliminate potential challenges.
Leaving aside the duped masses dreaming of their dear leaders' promises of "equality" and "fairness," I ask: Where are the "legitimate," "genuine" progressives? There are sincere monarchists who make the case for monarchy as the best form of government, just as there are sincere advocates of democracy, constitutional republicanism, and aristocracy. But if progressivism itself has never been anything but a concatenation of ulterior motives and power lust masked in sentimental slogans and promises of "transformation," is it possible to be a sincere progressive? Which leading progressive actually believes in progressivism's public presentation?
Does progressivism exist? Or has our purging of the "legitimate" list finally left us with a blank piece of paper? Is progressivism a genuine political philosophy at all, or just another patch of sand in the historical desert of authoritarianism?
Let us journey towards that closer view, if you will, and ask, without a hint of irony, whether there has ever actually been a true progressive, i.e., a thinker or politician who espoused progressivism sincerely and as advertised. Stated differently, does progressivism, as a genuine political philosophy, even exist, or is the mirage all there is?
Progressives claim to believe in equality, which they never clearly define, except when they are speaking in strictly administrative terms ("equal pay"). They rally for "fairness," which they describe only in terms of particular goals ("universal healthcare"), rather than according to any underlying principle. ("People before profit" is merely an incoherent bromide, not a principle; go ahead, try to explain it discursively.) They advocate "rights" which multiply like rabbits, while carefully obscuring how this overpopulation of rights affects the more traditional rights that must be sacrificed to make room for these new ones. (A "positive right" to the property of others means that property rights no longer exist.) Progressives plan the destruction of traditional Western rationalism, individualism, and morality -- i.e., of the conditions of practical freedom and material prosperity -- but they do so, without exception, under the banner of "progress." Whether they be socialists, communists, fascists, or some hybrid of these, all progressives -- and I mean the vanguard, the leading intellectuals and statesmen of progressivism -- promote their various hopes and policies by means of the same slogan: Forward.
Forward, in practice, means, and has always meant, the same things: death to multitudes of innocents; economic collapse; spiritual degradation; widespread poverty; a drudgerous, machinelike existence for "the masses," leavened only by mindless amusements designed to palliate the senseless waste of time that is life without genuine hope; and forced debasement in compulsory retardation and indoctrination centers (aka government schools).
The willing victims of this world-historical abuse -- those not offended at being identified as the amorphous "masses" -- seem truly to believe in "Forward," in progressive "equality," "fairness," "rights," and the rest of the dogma. They believe in it while they watch their material prospects dwindling, the moral framework of centuries being mocked into ridicule, the laws tightening around the most absurd minutiae of their daily lives in the name of protecting them from their own childlike ignorance, and their leaders speaking of them, "the masses," with the utmost disdain for their wishes, their dignity, or even their very lives.
But in what, or in whom, are these willing victims actually believing? Do they even know? Christians, Jews, and Buddhists know who they are following. So do Pythagoreans, Cartesians, and Kantians. Do the victims of progressivism know who is leading them "forward" in the name of equality, fairness, and rights?
We all speak of the "progressives." The word is in vogue again these days. I myself usually prefer it to "socialist" or "leftist," mainly because it speaks more broadly of an underlying philosophical position, rather than of a specific economic program or political stripe, and therefore cuts closer to the bone of the hundred-and-fifty-year assault on Western civilization that has led mankind to its present bleak prospect. But of whom, exactly, are we speaking?
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton describe themselves proudly as progressives. So do Bill Ayers, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and all international socialist and communist organizations. So did Frances Perkins, FDR's Labor Secretary, regarded as the mother of New Deal. So did Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canada's first mainstream socialist party, and the godfather of socialized medicine. So did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who, like Douglas, Hitler, and many other progressives, advocated eugenics for the purpose of racial and social purification.
"Wait a minute!" some may object here. "You can't just throw Hitler's name into that list -- he wasn't a progressive, but merely a power-mad lunatic." And so he was. So let us leave him off the list of "real" progressives, in the name of being fair to progressivism.
Here, however, is where things get dicey. If we leave Hitler -- one of the most prominent of "Forward" sloganeers -- off the list of legitimate progressives, then must not our purging of the list continue, until we are left with only the "legitimate" ones?
Mao Tse-tung was a progressive, was he not? And yet his person and policies were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent human beings. My guess is that most of "the masses" would not find this an acceptable road to equality, fairness, and rights, and hence would not accept Mao as exemplary of progressivism. Likewise with Stalin. However, forced migrations and deaths did not prevent many so-called progressive intellectuals in the West from supporting and defending Stalin -- who, after all, was killing as a necessary evil on the road to the progressive dream of collectivization -- until the inhumanity of his methods was exposed to the Western "masses," thereby becoming an embarrassment to the intellectuals. And Mao still has prominent apologists among the "progressive" elite, a group that includes appointees of the Obama administration who, like Canada's iconic progressive prime minister Pierre Trudeau, have lauded Maoist China as an admirable attempt to achieve the ideal of "equality."
And here the complications increase exponentially. Today's "legitimate," "genuine" progressive leaders and intellectuals commonly regard the "illegitimate," "inauthentic" ones as their spiritual kin. According to their own proclamations and policy proposals, they want the same things, although our "legitimate" progressives, whether due to squeamishness or pragmatic calculation, eschew some of their forebears' more extreme measures.
Consider, for example, the moral support and political sympathy so casually expressed by today's political, media, and Hollywood "progressives" towards Fidel Castro and his sidekick, the super-cool Che Guevara of campus T-shirt fame. Castro and Guevara were killers, and thorough devotees of Lenin and (particularly in Guevara's case) Stalin. Their Cuban revolution was a lodestar of the North American New Left, and the Cuban communists, through their intelligence agency, the DGI, were directly involved in training and funding "progressive" terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and Canada's Front de Libération du Québec. These groups were open in their support for Castro, Mao, the Viet Cong, and the Soviet Union. They used, advocated, and incited violence, including murder. Several of the leading members of the Weathermen are now leading "progressive" education theorists and children's rights advocates. Two of them hosted Barack Obama's first-ever campaign event in their home, and one of them -- one who regarded the murder of twenty-five million Americans as a practical necessity of The Revolution -- worked together on multi-million dollar community organizing projects with Obama, as well as probably having a hand in writing the latter's most famous autobiography.
The very progressive Communist Party USA, whose current leadership includes at least one person who received formal honors from the Soviet Union, has boisterously supported Obama throughout his presidency, and cited his key agenda items as the most practical road to socialism in America -- a reasonable position, as Obama's agenda bears a striking resemblance to that of the progressive co-authors of the famous little manifesto whence the CPUSA gets its mission statement.
See the problem? Sorting the "genuine" progressives from the power-mad lunatics gets more complicated with each step. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point, the line in the sand distinguishing the bloodstained tyrants from the "real" progressives, who sincerely wish to promote the cause of equality, fairness, and rights?
Indeed, apart from their declared advocacy of equality, fairness, and rights, the one thing all these progressives -- genuine or otherwise -- seem to have in common is cold-bloodedness. That is, they not only show contempt for individual human life, but they also tend towards statements, sentiments, and policies that would actively require the deaths of many people -- and this requirement seems not to bother any of them very much. Progressivism, as I have previously argued, is in part a death cult.
One of America's most influential early progressives, Edward Mandell House, wrote an idealistic fantasy novel about a progressive dictatorship which supplants the U.S. government, achieving power by means of a civil war in which 40,000 defenders of the constitutional republic are killed, with barely a second thought. This book was published the same year Woodrow Wilson was elected president -- with "Colonel" House as his chief advisor and strategist.
Prince Philip wrote that if he were reincarnated, he would like to return as a deadly virus in order to "solve" overpopulation. Robert Reich garnered an enthusiastic ovation from an audience of university students when he described what an "honest" politician would tell old people: "we're going to let you die." Progressive academics, politicians, and presidents have been vociferous proponents of the absolute "right" of abortion, even up to and including the moment after live birth, i.e., infanticide.
When Islamic terrorists besieged an American diplomatic mission in Libya, Obama and his secretary of state remained blithely unresponsive and disengaged -- for over seven hours, until the final Americans were killed. In the aftermath, they pursued a calculated policy of misrepresenting the attack as a spontaneous uprising related to an online video. Their propaganda campaign -- let us call things by their right names -- was designed to shield them from blame for their refusal to defend American citizens under attack. This propaganda, built on the repeated citing of an "outrageous," "intolerant," "anti-Islamic" video which the administration knew from the outset was completely unrelated to the Benghazi attack, helped to incite violent anti-West protests in several countries, resulting in numerous Arab deaths. Several months later, called to account for this extreme disregard for human life and for truth, Hillary Clinton openly declared victory in the stalling game that the administration had been playing: "What difference -- at this point -- does it make?"
So we return to our initial question: does "genuine" progressivism exist? Thousands of men and women have achieved power and wealth for themselves, subdued "the masses" of many nations, forcibly removed generations of children from their parents' control, turned every traditional moral precept on its head in the name of "social justice," "workers' rights," and "spreading the wealth," and murdered, disarmed, criminalized, or re-educated anyone who stood in their way. They achieved these things by framing them as "progress" on the path to equality, fairness, and rights, but their practical outcomes have been indistinguishable from those of every bloody tyrant in modern history. And they also share a natural enemy in common with history's tyrants, namely all those among "the masses" who wish to pursue their own ends by their own effort, unimpeded by coercive obstruction from other men.
What evidence have we, then, that their true intentions are any different from those of all previous authoritarians? We have only their word, parroted by their adherents among "the masses," that their goals are noble and moral. Why should we accept their word at face value, when we see how cavalierly they treat human life and liberty, and how thoroughly they have destroyed every community they have commandeered? Why, in other words, should we believe they intend some ill-conceived human "progress" merely because they say they do?
They say they are for equality, fairness, and rights; and yet they use these words in ways that contradict their long-established meanings. "Equality" achieved by legally punishing everyone who refuses to accept his state-determined lot in life is nothing like any notion of equality that men espoused throughout the previous millennia of Western civilization. The same goes for "fairness" achieved by forcibly restraining men's aspirations and actions, and "rights" which require the abolition of the basic concept of private property common to every civilized society in the history of mankind.
Why do they use these time-honored words at all, if they are using them in ways that no one has ever used them before? The answer is self-evident: to deceive.
One more thing "legitimate" progressives share in common with their "illegitimate" counterparts is the habitual use of official propaganda: the state's deliberate manipulation of accepted moral language (i.e., traditional beliefs) to effect change surreptitiously. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson created America's Committee on Public Information with the explicit purpose of propagandizing the American public, using lies and threats of public ostracism to push the nation into war with Germany. It has been the practice of Western progressives ever since to mask the more extreme implications of their proposals behind traditional moral language and invocations of patriotism. This practical method -- used freely by the preeminent progressives of the first half of the twentieth century, both "legitimate" and "illegitimate" -- was developed into a theory by the Frankfurt School Marxists and like-minded others at American universities. The undermining of the West, they determined, required the insinuation of anti-Western notions into the culture, and would best be achieved by co-opting and inverting respected Western concepts. Hence the progressives' use of "equality," "fairness," "rights," and all the rest of the lexicon of liberty that has now been turned to the purpose of achieving universal plunder and servitude for the benefit of those who regard themselves as our superiors, and see "the masses" as so much expendable fuel for their journey to the paradise of unrestricted authority. This is the not-so-subtle meaning of the progressive term, "the masses": humanity viewed as an inanimate force, to be directed by ruling intelligences for their own ends.
Such, then, is progressivism as the world has experienced it: a panoply of calculated lies in support of the urges of men and women who have shown through their actions and words that their ultimate aims are power and personal glory, while their chief policy motives are fear and a desire to eliminate potential challenges.
Leaving aside the duped masses dreaming of their dear leaders' promises of "equality" and "fairness," I ask: Where are the "legitimate," "genuine" progressives? There are sincere monarchists who make the case for monarchy as the best form of government, just as there are sincere advocates of democracy, constitutional republicanism, and aristocracy. But if progressivism itself has never been anything but a concatenation of ulterior motives and power lust masked in sentimental slogans and promises of "transformation," is it possible to be a sincere progressive? Which leading progressive actually believes in progressivism's public presentation?
Does progressivism exist? Or has our purging of the "legitimate" list finally left us with a blank piece of paper? Is progressivism a genuine political philosophy at all, or just another patch of sand in the historical desert of authoritarianism?
Virus Goes Missing at UTMB Lab
The missing vial, which contains less than a quarter of a teaspoon an infectious disease, had been stored in a locked freezer, designed to handle biological material safely, within the Galveston National Laboratory on UTMB’s campus, officials said. During a routine internal inspection last week, UTMB officials realized one vial of a virus called Guanarito was not accounted for at the facility
Scott Weaver, the laboratory’s scientific director, said Guanarito is an emerging disease that has caused deadly diseases in Venezuela. The federal government prioritizes it for research because it has the potential to be used a weapon for terrorists.
On Tuesday, an investigator discovered that only four out of five vials were stored of the virus in the grid system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was notified immediately.
According to the Center for Biosecurity, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the US’s resilience to major biological threats, the Guanarito virus is a member of the Arenaviridae group of hemorrhagic fever viruses (HFVs) referred to as the New World arenaviruses.
Continuing from their site:
HFVs as Biological Weapons
Some HFVs are considered to be a significant threat for use as biological weapons due to their potential for causing widespread illness and death. Because of their infectious properties, associated high rates of morbidity and mortality, and ease of person-to-person spread, Ebola, Marburg, Junin, Rift Valley fever, and yellow fever viruses have been deemed to pose a particularly serious threat, and in 1999 the HFVs were classified as category A bioweapons agents by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Several HFVs were reportedly developed as aerosol weapons in the past by some countries. An attack using an HFV as a biological weapon could affect both human and animal populations. Rift Valley fever virus, for example, which is usually transmitted by mosquitoes, can infect livestock, which, in turn, can infect more
http://www.infowars.com/virus-goes-missing-at-utmb-lab/
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