The Law against Owners

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Public-unions-make-a-private-sector-power-grab-92054474.html
I disagree with the op-ed. Corporate governance is currently dysfuntional in this country. This is because management has all the power under Delaware law--not the actual shareholder-owners of public corporations, but management. This is why executives receive huge pay packages that bear no relation to their performance--they pack the boards with their buddies. It's a mutual admiration society for millionaires. The owners, including pension funds, should have more power to control the companies THAT THEY OWN! This counts as yet another opportunity that the republicans have flagrantly missed to engage in useful reform that would have preempted democratic efforts. Republicans ought to keep well in mind that no matter how intensively you look backward and think backward--the world will keep moving forward.

The Rewards of Extremism

The lesson is: if you're crazy enough, people will take you seriously and SUBMIT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/opinion/26douthat.html?ref=opinion

Degenerate Inbred Ingrates

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/middleeast/27qatar.html?hp
This is the face of "Islamic" decadence. The whole population is a rentier class with nothing in particular to do. Boredom is the great peril in their lives. With no access to psychotropic drugs or sexual promiscuity, eating is the only sensory pleasure everyone can readily indulge. And, apparently, their preferences have been reshaped to prefer processed foods--consumed in large amounts and frequently under social pressure. Hence their rapid run to the top of the obesity rankings.

Summary of a Paradigm Shift

This fellow wrote a book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories", a couple of years ago that demolished the received thinking about nutrition, the dogma promulgated by the USDA, the ADA, the AHA, etc. He summarizes his main findings in this lecture: http://videomedia2.swedish.org/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=cd8c7aa15bc94a0486f4ee9b66ef8f8f   I also recommend this talk, by another researcher with a similar point of view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Political Cycles

A couple of things occurred to me after reading a WSJ editorial about Obama's birth certificate issue, with a diatribe postulating Obama as a mere puppet of greater powers. The former issue is a joke on the two digit IQ redneck crowd, the latter an assertion with no more basis than could be presented for any other modern President. I find the WSJ editorial page a bit mysterious, though it's little worse than the NY Times editorial page. Who reads this stuff? Who buys it? Both papers offer such superficial propagandizing for the most part. Given the typical level of discourse in the "best" newspapers in this country, it sometimes surprises me that we have not experienced a still more pronounced collapse in the standards of governance than even Bush or Obama have managed to achieve.

Contra the WSJ's promotions, Obama is not a stupid man. His political and moral principles, however, are not traditional in America. He promotes socialism, in speech and action. Collectivism is not characteristic of America politically, socially, economically, psychologically. It represents an ever-advancing imposition of the elite upon the American people. And Obama has made himself a figurehead in one of the periodic revivals of the elitist tendency to promote socialism in America.

Compare and Contrast

I think the following quotes are a useful summary of the freedoms won and lost by the American people in the course of our history. From an article in Reason magazine by David Boaz, called Up From Slavery: "Brink Lindsey talks of an "implicit libertarian synthesis" in American politics today in his book The Age of Abundance. He argued in 2007: Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver." Juxtapose the above to this perspective, which has, to my sense, considerable merit: "Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation writes about the decline of freedom in America: First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants.There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security."  It seems that we transitioned from positive governmental and societal discrimination against large segments of our society to constraining the freedoms of all by means of taxes and regulations--using as an excuse for these universal constraints the past injustices imposed upon the repressed groups. Of course, the disconnect in this line of implicit reasoning is that these modern constraints were not necessary to achieve the equality of opportunity previously lacking. They're just an excuse for socialism and elitist overreach.