The “Donation of Constantine” - another convenient lie

The recent documentary, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” takes the eponymous position that the fevered frothings of prophet-for-profit Al Gore and his fellow Carbon Cult revelators and seers are sincerely held and honestly pursued beliefs, if at variance with observed reality. This position was challenged at once by those who pointed out Gore’s vigorous advocacy of government actions that would directly and indirectly subsidize ventures that he has created or invested in for his own material gain.

Now, with the emerging “Warmingate” or “ClimateGate” scandals, the broader corruption of the “scientific consensus” providing secular cover for this established religion is made plain even to laymen, despite the efforts of duplicitous Old Media.We may recall that this was one of the main themes of the documentary, “The Great Global Warming Swindle“: politically fashionable research garners grant money, fame, and position for academics. Similarly, as we saw in the Korean phoney cloney incident, out and out fraud easily slips through the review process of the most prestigious scientific journals of all - when it is seen as supporting a political agenda embraced by the elite.

What we have in what has become the pseudoscience of climatology (as opposed to the actual science of meteorology, which still is regulated by real results and actual data, not self-serving fanciful computer models) is a convergence of two evils: venality and fanaticism. As in the days of the Crusades, profit and piety can go hand in hand, and the one wear the mask of the other. Affected sackcloth and ashes are replaced with hybrid cars that use more energy and “green” light bulbs that poisonously pollute and don’t work reliably in the first place.

Ambitious young researcher! Pay lip service to the established creed, and you too can be bathed in the aura of the elect, and a share of the ever-flowing billions!

Foolish unbeliever! Bring forth contrary facts, or exercise heretical skepticism, and be cast out, silenced, denounced, unwelcome data deleted, grants, publications, tenure denied!

An established religion, of course, is part and parcel of an aristocractick order.

Horatius

Such excellent paving-stone work your people do here

Remember when we were told (by the same people who breathlessly assure us the President is not chain-smoking) that he didn’t bow to the guardian of Mecca? Well, now it’s “Tenno Heika Banzai!” from the Nobel laureate.

The silver lining is that this dispels the concern that President Obama had some particular sense of fealty to the King of Saudi Arabia. He instead clearly believes it is his role as Chief Executive and head of state of the United States of America to abase himself, on behalf of the nation, before any male monarch (a hug from Michelle being good enough for the Queen of England).

As usual with any gaffe or gaucherie on the part of The One, the excuse-makers are out in full force. We are told that such behavior is customary, or at least customary in Japan. A photographic compilation of the monarch of Japan meeting heads of state, their spouses, and others, tells a different story. Likewise an examination of how other US Presidents have greeted Japanese monarchs.

The worshipers of “The One” counter that this groveling somehow gains benefits for the United States by replacing the image of ignorance and arrogance held by world media and academic elites during the Bush years. Unsurprisingly, no such benefits are forthcoming, and the specter of Jimmy Carter is looming like that of Jacob Marley as Generic Winter Holiday season approaches.

Of course, in Japan, and evidently in Indonesia, where the President obviously spent some very formative years, children are often trained to do this self-abasing in the presence of “important” people. Since young Barry didn’t stay around long enough to get the rest of the lesson, Horatius will provide it here: when you yourself get to be an important person, you don’t bend over like that any more.

And a kowtow before the Dragon Throne to boot

As we have noted before, it is clear that President Obama is sorely suffering from a distinct lack of top-pay-grade guidance and advice. It becomes even more evident that we need to know whether the protocol officers of the Department of State are not explaining proper ceremonial behavior to the head of state. This groveling to male monarchs (and Communist Chinese Premiers) is now a pattern, and is quite unbefitting. Perhaps the Secretary of State has some ulterior motive in allowing it to go on?

Horatius

Spot the people-eating alien menace in disguise

There’s “out of touch”, and then there’s “not of this world”. The President and the Congress are so removed from mere Earthlings that one wonders whether ABC’s “V” is an example of “organic” programming…

Horatian hyperbole, you scoff?

Consider: Congress is comprised of more than 40% millionaires, in a country where the proportion is 2% - and all but one of the richest are “tax the rich” Democrats, obviously of the Leona Helmsley wing of the party.

Consider: The bill Speaker Pelosi is in a mad, promise-breaking rush to push through before anyone has a chance to read it specifies massive fines or jail for individuals who fail to buy US$15,000 per year health insurance. At least Morena Baccarin is easier on the eyes and ears when she tries to eat our children while claiming to mean us no harm!

Consider: When the country recoils in horror from the Fort Hood killings and beholds a proper response from which more of the world could learn a thing or two, the President shows his utter inability even to fake human fellow-feeling without a TelePrompTer, lots of lead time, and room in his prepared schedule.

This tone-deafness, seen in his making a laughingstock of himself by accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, can be generously blamed on President Obama’s lack of any elder statesmen advisors. That still begs the question of whether there is a human person like you and me in the suit.

Even the versions of his formative years written for him by William Ayers show good cause for the doubts raised early in his candidacy by Al Sharpton and others as to whether his personal experience qualified him as “black enough” to represent the constituency he made his political bedrock. It was perhaps a telling slip when he confused George Jefferson’s wife, “Weezy”, with Fred Sanford’s late Elizabeth. It is not a question of a particular ethnic identity, but of any genuine identity at all.

Some wags suggested in jest that this slip showed that Barry was a “Manchurian Candidate” programmed by Cold War Commie adversaries. Perhaps instead it was a telling sign that it’s not chain-smoking but a reversion to lizard form that is changing the President’s shape lately!

Horatius

Not Al Gore’s way. Remember how George Bush brought Katrina on New Orleans because global warming, for which he was responsible (much as Ronald Reagan killed people with AIDS and crack), was causing more and worse hurricanes? Well, as with so much else in the canon of the Carbon Cult, that turns out to be so much hot air.

Not Newt Gingrich’s way. He chose to ride a RINO, but the message is getting too clear to miss for those on the front lines: more people are demanding an actual opposition to the current regime in Washington than will tolerate “Democrat Lite” as they have in the past. If the Republican Party declines to answer the demands, it will not be tolerated.

Not the way of the feather-bedders in Congress. People are learning, and may remember, that each “stimulus” job, even the ones allegedly “saved”, cost $160,000, and each “clunker” $24,000, in future tax money that will have to be paid with interest. This is a reminder of the true purpose of such handout schemes: to provide excuses and cover for putting political allies and operatives on the payroll in administrative positions that become entrenched feather beds, stuffed with comfy perks and benefits and protected by powerful union patronage.

Not Hillary Clinton’s way? The prevailing wind remains squarely at her back, putting her on course to mount a powerful primary challenge to President Obama in the (allegedly apocalyptic) year of 2012. Still, she may be failing to notice the import of the preceding paragraph, if her remarks as reported from Pakistan are any sign. Paraphrasing one of Ronald Reagan’s classics may be OK, but not if you are praising what he so effectively mocked.

Not the trial lawyers’ way (speaking of Hillary)? They’ve had a 2,000 page bill written and rewritten specifically to remake the entire health care system for their benefit, but those who actually treat, save, and cure folks may not be willing to keep playing second fiddle to a profession that’s earned a reputation as parasites and con-artists.

Not the way of the Aristocratick Combination in general? That remains to be seen; a year is a long time, and people may remember the contempt they have been shown by the czars and Marie Antoinettes, and the absurdities that seem almost to require drugs as an explanation - or they may not. They may instead, yet again, be narcotized by bread and circuses, by the Mephistophelian lure of something for nothing, grab now and make somebody else pay later.

Neither Al Gore, nor James Hansen, nor indeed Horatius can tell which way the wind will be blowing in a year’s time, but truth will out, and it is an ill wind that blows none any good. More cynically, if the dwindling and threatened number who produce wealth and pay taxes fail to “throw the bums out” next November, one might as well eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow we may face the Death Panel…

Horatius

…make the most of it!

It’s not “spin” that is the most egregious and dangerous part of having 3/4 of all professional journalists in the United States self-declared supporters of the party in power - even as self-described “conservatives” outnumber “liberals” 2 to 1 in the country at large.

It’s not that even “spin” has spun into utter disregard for truthfulness, with hoax and fraud published and broadcast with no fact-checking (except of a lone comedy sketch lampooning the President’s ineffectuality as seen from the perspective of the left). No, not even when numbers reported about the same facts differ by three orders of magnitude in an attempt to literally belittle ideological opponents in the former Newspaper of Record.

No, the most insidious weapon of lock-step media bias is Orwell’s Memory Hole, deployed against a manifestation of popular rejection of the current Executive and Congress in Washington City. What could be more legitimate, more reasoned, more “by the book” than to write one’s Congressman? And yet the only way to learn that four million individual such messages have been sent in an organized campaign that cannot be ridiculed away like the “tea parties” or belittled into a thousandth of its size by a New York Times headline is to read World Net Daily.

It may be beyond the comprehension of the lefty journos in their hermetically sealed echo chambers, but opposition to “Federal” overreaching and utter lawlessness is not dismissable as the raving of ignorant right-wing religious zealots, duped and manipulated by malevolent corporate masters.

If George III could have profited by the example of Caesar (who needed no William Ayers to become a “powerful writer“) and Charles I, but failed to do so until he had lost his Colonies, we can only anticipate that the members of the current Aristocratick Combination will likewise remain insensate to the storm they have brought upon themselves until they have lost their Congress.

Horatius

In a time when readership and viewership figures speak rather loudly about disgust at shameless media ideological shilling, the nuts and bolts of how important information is lost to lock-step bias can be found here.

Similarly rare is a bit of face-value perspective on the question of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, from a straightforward cost-benefit analysis that starts by accepting the claims and promises of the IPCC and other advocates of such curbs.

Another hit on the Carbon Cult, timely again since the incident of the one question Al Gore has taken (but not answered) in this millennium, is the ongoing hysterical effort to hide the fact that polar bears are prospering on a growing Arctic ice cap.

Following the scent of pseudoscientific “forensic evidence” practices in courtrooms, we have a piece casting doubt on the time-honored custom of “releasing the hounds”.

Following something else customary, namely the money, we have a couple of examples of ruling-party members of Congress doing business as usual with the “emergency” bailout/stimulus/save-the-Earth bonanza.

Horatius

Giving orders to the wrecking crew

With all the palpable falsehoods (”opt out”) and verbal gymnastics (”public option”) coming from those who control the Congress and the Executive in Washington City, it is as refreshing as it is surprising to hear a plain, clear statement of honest intent on the part of none other than the most prominent architect of the financial panic and ensuing miseries of the past year, Representative Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts.

The Hustle never goes out of style in Washington

Let anyone who fondly hopes that the tether of modern “Federal” government to the stated principle of the United States Constitution, namely limited government, has not snapped its elastic and come completely undone simply consider this straightforward utterance by Barney the Dinosaur himself.

Horatius

Is the rule of law hiding in the garage?

In the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, called ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confederation, Alexander Hamilton pulled a mighty bait-and-switch, slamming the doors shut, swearing everyone to secrecy, and announcing that they were there to replace the Articles with a new unitary Constitution binding the 13 sovereign States under a single new national (”Federal”) government.

Then, and in the years that followed, there were those who could see what lurked within the large equine structure of the document. All the frippery about “enumerated powers” aside, what came to matter was a simple little item known to posterity as the “elastic clause”.

The entire Constitution, in the minds of the successors of Hamilton who run the courts and the institutions of learning, boils down to the Preamble and this one clause: whatever they deem will “promote the general welfare” is to be implemented in whatever way the “Federal” government deems at the moment to be “necessary and proper“.

All the rest of the document, in particular the specific limits of the Bill of Rights that had to be inserted to persuade sufficient States to ratify it, is so much camouflage and dross. Let those who bemoan the hijacking of the Constitution by later power-grabbing Presidents and overreaching Justices disabuse themselves: this arrangement was precisely what Hamilton sought to engineer in his manipulation of the Philadelphia Convention.

We are left, then, at the mercy of the prevailing interpretations of “general welfare” and “necessary and proper” of those who hold power in Washington at any given time. Bizarre, even comical diktats, like Nixon commanding the flow of time itself, or the double-taxing of people who work independently as “self-employed”, have no check but the “straight-face test”.

Of course, a certain vestigial ritual deference to the worm-eaten hulk of the Constitutional Trojan Horse has remained as a loose - not to say elastic - tether between the image of a free nation and the actual conduct of unbridled central power.

Legislation from the “Federal” bench (so much for separation of powers), for example, on matters as unrelated to the Constitution as contraception and abortion is justified with “emanations from penumbras” of Amendments to the “founding” document.

Even when so outlandish they can serve the practical purpose of training law students in keeping a straight face while spewing wanton absurdities in court, those who pronounce new powers on the part of the national government have been customarily expected to come up with some sort of fig leaf to place over the hatch of Alexander’s Trojan Horse.

Not any more.

Such specifically relevant personages as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy no longer even bother themselves with fig leaves or emanations - they frankly refuse to go through the charade of pretending that there exist any constitutional limitations upon their power over any and every element of people’s lives, liberties, and property.

The tether of the Elastic Clause has been released, and “Federal” power floats free upon the wind, unsecured even in winks and metaphors to the ground of law and liberty.

Rejoice, Hamilton, thou art unbound!

Horatius

Have we not arrived?

Horatius has perhaps been noted to have remained quite silent through a summer of discontent during which the gulf, between the Federalists of the Congress and Executive and the people who actually produce the wealth and pay the taxes in the country, became so obvious that he felt it better to let events speak for themselves.

Washington is run by those who speak of freedom while enslaving, of peace while waging war, and of informing and including the people in their governing process while in fact denying even the members of Congress themselves an opportunity to know what it is they are expected to vote upon.

One’s beliefs and preferences about the proper powers and role of the Federal government need not be considered here. If nobody knows what’s in a bill when it is voted upon, how can it serve any honest set of such beliefs and preferences?

The Orwellian maneuvers and utter arrogance of the Congressional leadership and the palace of the Czars at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are shown for all their breathtaking enormity by making of Congress itself a plantation, lorded over by an Aristocratick Combination within an Aristocratick Combination. The elected representatives of the people and the States are told that reading is for their betters, not themselves, and that theirs is but to obey Miz Nancy and Mars Harry.

Lest anyone be dismayed at the use of this ugly imagery, Horatius begs to direct attention to an excellent and most apt commentary by Herman Cain today.

Perhaps the touted speed-reading of the late President John F. Kennedy could have coped with the production of thousand-plus-page bills presented willy-nilly for votes, but the truth is that these things are pushed through without any single person truly reading them from beginning to end.

Truly, the message of the successors of Hamilton is, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Cameras may be watching everyone everywhere in Airstrip One, but as Cain reminds us, it is well within the power of the voters to sweep away the current Congress and send in its place people who understand that a legislature is a deliberative body, and who will, instead of plunging into madcap debt and crackpot experiments in massive new government interference and burdens, instead… deliberate.

Horatius