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Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Our Stars

News you can use:

Howard's back! He says gold will tank and the dollar will rise. Jas Jain on CA market.

Shilling, writing in Forbes (free subscription required), predicts a nationwide average of 20% decline in housing prices. It's an excellent factual summary without all the nonsense that you usually read:
With inventories high and sales falling, the ratio of inventory to sales flow is rising. Inventories for both new and existing homes have jumped from 3.5 months in 2003 to 5.8 months and 6 months, respectively. It is reasonable to expect those ratios to climb into the 6-to-8-month range of the real-estate-troubled early 1990s.
...
Nationwide median prices will probably fall at least 20% before the break is over. It will take a 35% fall to return prices to their long-run link to the Consumer Price Index; markets overshoot on the downside as well as the up.
Pat Sajak discusses hysteria on the left:
Recently, for example, I was discussing the United Sates Supreme Court with on of my many Liberal friends out in Los Angeles when she said, without any discernable embarrassment, that Justice Anton Scalia was "worse than Hitler". Realizing she wasn't alive during World War II and perhaps she may have been absent on those days when her schoolmates were studying Nazism, I reminded her of some of Hitler's more egregious crimes against humanity, suggesting she may have overstated the case. She had not; Scalia was worse.
...
The moral superiority they bring to the table allows them to alter the playing field and the rules in their favor. They can say and do things the other side can't because, after all, they have the greater good on their side.
...
In a different West Coast conversation, I complained to another Liberal friend about some of the Left's tone concerning the 2004 elections. I thought it insulting to hear those "red state" voters caricatured as red-necked rubes. My friend asked, "Well, don't you think that people who live in large urban areas, who travel and read and speak other languages are better able to make informed choices?"
I see it now - our rightful place is cannon fodder. Heck, why even allow us to vote? Why allow anyone to vote if they don't vote the right way? F__k the south, right? There would be nothing wrong with Kansas if the dullards didn't vote, now would there?

But, as this Beautiful Atrocities post makes clear (gacked from Howard), derangement is not an exclusive quality of the left, although the left is, at the moment, long and strong in this particular leading indicator of losing elections. Check out this MediaChannel article discussing Hitler comparisons:
The article by Ralph Peters ("Howard the Coward," January 5) compares Democrat frontrunner Howard Dean to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and Dean's followers to "Hitler's Brownshirts" and the Gestapo. For good measure, Peters also compares "Herr Howie" to such Soviet Communist leaders as Vladimir Lenin, Leonid Breshnev and even Mikhail Gorbachev.

Here's a sample of Peters' 'opinion" about Dean and his supporters: "Howard Dean and his Deanie-weenies do all they can to restrict the free speech of others. I can predict with certainty that Dean's Internet Gestapo will pounce on this column, twisting the facts and vilifying the writer.These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts. Had Goebbels enjoyed access to the Internet, he would have used the same swarm tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts.It's Goebbels again: Just keep repeating the lies until the lies assume the force of truth."
The Brownshirts used violence to suppress dissent. Criticism isn't violence. Argument is the lifeblood of democracy, and as it turned out, Iowa rejected the Dean Scream. The hysterics are usually really hysterical over the fact that they aren't winning elections, IMO. In retrospect, hysteria is always funny as long as it doesn't veer into violence.

And speaking of hysteria, the low for tonight is predicted to be 62 degrees here (in south GA). In fact, this represents a predictive failure, because the thermometer outside reads 60 degrees, and it's midnight, and the skies are clear. We are going to be down in the 50's overnight. In June. The record low for the seventh of June (Valdosta weather station) was 56, and it's going to come close to that. That record occurred in 1921.

In case you suspect my thermometer or me of miscalibration, here's solid evidence. Only a few blueberries have ripened so far. Crops don't lie, and crops don't watch movies, and crops don't listen to AlGore. And according to the crops, this is a darned cool year. It's also dry, which is the strangest thing. Normally we have cooler temps when it rains more. I cannot give solid data on rainfall, because my bulldog mix ate the rain gauge in a moment of weakness during one of her binge diets. It is so dry that we have very few mosquitos, though, which makes it more worrisome that the birds have begun to die again.

Watch for glaciations appearing in the pages of the NY Times, which alertly and bravely jumped on the New Ice Age story back when I was in grammar school. I figure the NY Times will segue into the Great Bu$Hitler Glaciation with a straight face by explaining it as a direct effect of global warming, which is of course a direct result of Chuck Schumer's failure to put a bullet right between George W. Bush's eyes, notwithstanding Chuckie's other admirable qualities. But, we are assured, Chuckie woulda if he coulda. Maybe he shoulda used dese guys?


Comments:
MOM:

"I see it now - our rightful place is cannon fodder."

If you're a Southern male, that's pretty much a given.

Always has been.

BTW, loved the "Fuck the South" rant.

Whatcha wanna wager that the author retires to Florida and styles him-,(or her-), self"

"Cunnel"?

Regawds;
 
No doubt - Florida. Probably owns three spec houses there already, wouldn't you think? Probably will blame Bush for the losses, right? Probably already has a place reserved in the PEST group whine scheduled for November 3, 2008, I'd guess. They're getting predictable.

One of my brothers is still laughing about that rant. I think he's memorized it.
 
Ralph Peters is not a right-wing nut. I need to find his original article and read it, but everything I've read by Peters previously (he's a writer, terrorism expert, and former Army officer) is well-reasoned and thoughtful.

You're entirely correct that criticism is not violence, of course. But the left wing of the Democratic party has often shown its willingness to use both violence and state power to shut down debate...at many university campuses, for example.

Remember, the Nazis were street thugs before they were a government.
 
David - I'll take your word on Ralph Peters. Yet he did apparently write these words without making the distinction between wanting to shut up your opponents and resorting or advocating violence to do it.

Your point about the Brownshirts being street thugs is exactly the one I wanted to make. They both threatened and delivered violence. Did Dean ever do that?

Here's a link to the ADL's protest letter about the column. Quite a few bloggers took exception at the time. Here's Betsy Newmark's comment.

I have written a lot about the left's desire and attempt to legally ban free speech. But I think it is important to preserve the distinction between those who advocate or engage in violent tactics and those who try other means. Those other means are less harmful to society, because they can be more easily countered.
 
OK, I finally found it (had to go to a German publication due to the inability of legacy media to understand the importance of link stability)...I do think it was over the top. However, consider this excerpt: "His followers try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech. Of course, Dean denies any foreknowledge or blame." If these statements are true--and certainly, we have seen many acts of political intimidation on the part of the Left--then the Brownshirt analogy is not totally inappropriate.

Also, the ADL's letter would be more meaningful if they had also written letters denouncing the daily--almost hourly--claims about Bush being "worse than the Nazis," etc. (Maybe they've written such letters and I just missed them somehow--ya think?)
 
I know there were some protests having to do with something on that line. They'd need a staff of thousands to try to deal with it. I think they hunt and peck, and are drowned out by the uproar.

Peters has a point - this sort of thing is dangerous. But it's important to hold the line when opposing this type of behavior. Let's just say this was a bad day for him. I have them too.

I think the extreme left has backed itself into a trap. Once you embrace the idea that your cause is so just that it justifies silencing your opponents, how do you reverse course? Repentance and amendment is required, and repentance, let's face it, is a word they cannot stand.
 
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