NOT N.I.C.E.

Jonah Goldberg, on the use of the term "Death Panels":

...But I guess I'm more in the McCarthy & Steyn camp. As a matter of the finer points of policy discussion, I think the death-panel label is awfully blunt and inexact.

I think M&S are right that it distilled some important issues down to an important truth: if Obama, Pelosi, Waxman et al get their way, the relationship between the citizen and the state is profoundly, and perhaps permanently, altered and down that path lurks death panels. Oh, they won't be called death panels, but that function will lurk like the ghost in the machine of the federal bureaucracy. Back when the health-care debate was abstract and liberals were sure they would win the day, they were far more comfortable talking about this sort of thing. Barack Obama talked about rationing care for people like his grandmother and seeking guidance from a super-smart panel of experts in this regard. Just a month ago, the New York Times magazine saw nothing wrong with running this unabashed love-letter to a health-care system, in effect, ruled by death panels (See my post on this last Friday, or Tom Maguire's Sunday item for more). Now, suddenly, to even suggest such a possibility is McCarthyism — now called Palinism — according to Richard Cohen.

What drives me crazy about liberal complaints about conservative tactics these days is how selective they are. Obama, Barney Frank, Jacob Hacker, and others have said that they want these reforms — specifically the public option — to lead to single payer. But when conservatives take them at their word, suddenly it's outrageous misinformation and "fishy" stuff. When the wind is at their backs, liberals look way off to the horizon, like Obama at a podium, dreaming of a future of European-style statism. But when conservatives use this to their advantage, suddenly it is outrageous to even consider the possibility of a road to hell being paved with good intentions. Suddenly liberals bleat that it is scare-mongering to look beyond what they are proposing in this exact moment, outrageous to ask "Where will this lead?" I agree entirely with Andy that conservatives are under no obligation to unilaterally agree to liberal terms or definitions but rather, as he puts it, "Our function is to call the opposition on such hair-splitting nonsense, not to make the fog harder to pierce."

And this raises what I think is part of the problem. As Mark says, this is a massive political fight — one that conservatives are winning, by the way — and there's a natural tension between wanting to argue the finer points of policy and win the battle over the politics. I don't begrudge NR's attempt to get this balance right by erring on the side of describing the policy correctly and in good faith. But, also in good faith, I don't see it quite the same way, and I don't think Palin's contributions are part of the problem with the health-care debate.

I'm inclined to agree with Goldberg. In fact, as a physician, I think that the descriptive "Death Panels" terminology effectively summarizes what is an entirely logical progression of Obama's health policies. This progression is derived directly from Obama's own words and those of his health-reform minions/czars.

Here is the logical progression:

(A) In order to reign in health care costs, some system of health care rationing must be put in place, or as Obama says, your government will undertake a "very difficult democratic conversation" about how "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care" costs. Or,for the exact quote:

"Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now."

------------>

(B) So, what criteria for rationing health care (particularly at the end of life) is likely to be used? ------------->

(C) To answer (B) we only need to consider what criteria for health care rationing has already been put forth by one of Obama's key advisors on the issue, a bioethicist and "expert" on cost-efficient health care, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who wrote an article in a major medical journal in January, 2009 titled: "Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions") :

Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — "the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks

----------->

(D)Therefore, based on a system proposed by none other than the key advisor to Obama on this issue:

The basic premise seems to be that since someone or some entity must allocate scare medical resources there should be a "morally" acceptable method for such allocation. The authors, which include Dr. Ezekiel J Emanuel, brother of President Obama's Chief of Staff, and "Special Advisor for Health Policy" to the president presents a detailed proposal of how this allocation should be done. (Using the passive voice here serves the purpose or not having to say that the government will do the allocation.)

The authors begin with a critical review of the currently in existence allocation systems and finding flaws in each proceed to devise their own "hybrid" supposedly salvaging the good and casting out the less desirable elements of the various systems.

Expectedly, this "morally acceptable" allocation process would allocate less to the elderly and those with incurable illnesses. Perhaps unexpectedly, their process would place, for example, a fifteen year person allocation-wise above an infant because they say more social expenditures have been made on the adolescent and society need to get its money's worth.

The underlying theme is that individuals exist for the good of the collective ( state, society, pick one) and in health care decisions the greater good of society, now apparently denominated in "life years", trump the individual every time.

The authors describe their system:

This system incorporates five principles ... youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. As such, it prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid. Many thinkers have accepted complete lives as the appropriate focus of distributive justice: “individual human lives, rather than individual experiences, [are] the units over which any distributive principle should operate.”Although there are important differences between these thinkers, they share a core commitment to consider entire lives rather than events or episodes, which is also the defining feature of the complete lives system.

They explain further in regard to the old folks issue.

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

The blog Freerepublic.com summarizes the system in this way.

Infants get minimal treatment, because the State has not invested anything yet in their education. Old people get minimal treatment because their working lives are over.

So if you discriminate because someone is old that is ageism and invidious but if you treat differently because they have lived longer ( i.e. have had more life years) it is not. Talk about contrived nonsense.

Here is another quote that I find chilling.

The complete lives system assumes that, although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them.” (my bolding)

If you like social justice that sentence should really please you. Not only should most things be distributed fairly but now apparently how many "life-years" you get.

If you like distributive justice you will find a lot to like here. If you are old enough for Medicare or economically unfortunate enough to rely on Medicaid, you might be a little worried that the President's Advisor on health matters thinks this way.

----------->

(E) Now, there are many options for what you might call a panel that is set up to determine the "fair distribution" and "socially just" allocation of costly life-prolonging medical treatments, but "DEATH PANEL" captures the essence of what these arbitrary committess would do; and, in addition, it is a perfectly clear, concise, and to-the-point term.

What would you call them? Only the reality-challenged political left, with their loving, compassionate and bizarre notions of "social justice" would consider them... NICE.

UPDATE: Why stop at Death Panels? Why, indeed? When you can have Fat Panels, Exercise Panels, and Diet Panels to fairly distribute the socially just opinions of the leftist elites about how you should live your life.

PSYCHOSIS PANDEMIC

BDS has gone viral:

Now that Mr. Bush is quietly going about his retirement, this strain of rage - the GWB43 virus - has spread like wildfire, finding unsuspecting targets, each granting us greater perspective into what not long ago seemed like a mysterious phenomenon isolated only on our 43rd president.

The first person to catch the virus was Sarah Palin, whose family also was infected, including, unforgivably, her children.

Then it was Joe the Plumber, for asking a question.

Next were the Mormons.

Then it was Rush Limbaugh - who hit back.

Next, tax-day “tea party” attendees were “tea bagged.”

Then there was a beauty contestant.

And a Cambridge cop, too.

And now we have town-hall “mobs.”

Smile … you’ve been “community organized.”

When put on the media stage, these individuals and groups have been isolated for destruction for standing in the way of a resurgent modern progressive movement and for challenging its charismatic once-in-a-lifetime standard-bearer, Barack Obama.

This is their time, we’ve been told. And no one is going to stand in the way.

The origins of manufactured “politics of personal destruction” is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based “progressive” street agitator titled, “There Is Only the Fight.”

Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky’s techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, “Rules for Radicals.” In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight - all in the pursuit of progressive political victory.

“Rule 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

In a post long ago, I discussed the psychological underpinnings of BDS, which boiled down to psychological displacement.

Displacement is a defense mechanism which separates emotion from its real object and redirects the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid actually dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. It is usually considered a "neurotic" defense.

However, when you notice that the psychological maneuver is omnipresent, i.e., that it has gone viral as Breibart documents, what you are dealing with is displacement's primitive psychic antecedent: projection. In this case, the offensive or threatening emotion and/or behavior originates from one's own mind and is completely disowned so that the individual (or group) does not have to take responsibility for having it. Istead, it is perceived as originating from someone else. In other words, it is a primitive form of displacement.

Is your "grassroots" movement the product of a Soros-funded lawncare conglomerate? Then accuse your detractors of being "astroturf" and you can remain blissfully clueless about your own behavior!

Is your presidential candidate the most unprepared and unqualified in history without an iota of executive experience? Then accuse Sarah Palin, who was the chief executive officer of a state as being MORE unqualified!

Have you been uncivil, irrational, hysterical and deranged for the last nine years; with complete disregard for the free speech of others? Then accuse your political opponents of that behavior when they dare to disagree with you (make sure you sound simply outraged at their behavior, which on any level that is closely examined simply cannot compare with yours)!

Of course, you must be careful because displacement can get even more psychologically primitive than projection, and that is when it crosses over the bounds of reality into frank delusional paranoia. Most of us can become occasionally neurotic as we stumble around and try to cope with the the disappointments and dangers of life; but it takes a significant level of psychological obtuseness and denial to drift into the realm of psychosis.

Of course, this process can go either way, politically speaking. But right now in history, much as the left would like to believe the opposite--in fact, much as they are trying to pretend it is the right that is "crazy"--the pandemic psychosis of projection and displacement is really their very own.

THE LOOTER MENTALITY

I found this idiocy reported by Protein Wisdom absolutely hilarious:

Jesse Taylor of Pandagon is still at it, declaring Ken Gladney a fraud, still using a sexual term to refer to non-leftists who dissent from Obamessiah’s policies and “still not getting it” when it comes to medical care.

There’s the old argument that the power of the conservative movement convinces people to vote against their own economic interest; now they’re getting people to take to the streets and play victims against their own economic interest.

And, as Darleen Click notes, "...Jesse, like the majority of statist Leftists (but I repeat myself) I have talked to believe “economic self-interest” means voting yourself a share of your neighbor’s earnings. Adults with a developed set of morals realize that’s dishonest."

Let me just point out that the absolute last thing that the cognitively impaired leftist ideologues are concerned about is economic self-interest. Case in point is Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a successful entrepreneur (dare I say, capitalist?) who writes a reasonable op-ed piece about the potentially negative consequences of Obamaomnihealthcare being imposed on businesses, the immoderate left went positively hysterical. Mackey probably balanced the long-term economic consequences of having an inept and economically disastrous program of socialized BS (disguised as "health care reform") on his business, versus the short-term consequences of pissing off the organic arugula crowd. Tsk. Tsk. You just can't win with the left.

Indeed, economics is always a zero-sum game for them:

In short, the means of creating unlimited wealth weren't really stumbled upon by human beings until the rise of industrial capitalism. Human beings had finally discovered the key to economic growth, which came down to the magical combination of individual liberty, free markets, strong private property rights, sound money, and the rule of law. And then get the hell out of the way.

And even then, it took several hundred more years to tame the "boom or bust" cycle [oops!], to the point that people no longer expect economic recessions, much less, depressions. It is now as if people imagine that unlimited economic growth and prosperity are the norm instead of an extraordinary deviation from the past. And with that, a sense of entitlement is nurtured, which in turn is rooted in what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called constitutional envy....

In other words, communism is our default state (as seen in our immediate families), whereas certain traits and habits of mind associated with capitalism must be learned, among them, trust of the stranger, the tamping down of envy, a focus on the future instead of the present, and an understanding that economic exchange isn't a zero-sum game....

For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.

Once you understand this, then much about the left begins to make sense. In Europe, we can see how the welfare state puts in place a system of incentives that creates a new kind of enfeebled man, but that's not exactly correct. In reality, it simply reveals man for what he is -- a lazy, frightened, selfish, superstitious, instinct-loving and lowdown rascal. Leftism aims low and always reaches its target.

Not only does the left "aim low", their fundamental economic assumption is that the only way to get wealth is to steal it from someone else because they cannot imagine how to create it. Thus, all their political policies are imbued with an infantile economic primitivism--of the sort a caveman, whose only strategy is brute force, would come up with: Ugh hits Grog over the head with his big club to get his "rightful" share of nuts and berries--and that's the only economic theory they can understand.

This is the origin of the looter mentality. It is the mentality of the parasite who wants the benefits of wealth without the effort of having to create any; who is always demanding "his 'fair' share" of wealth without the necessity of providing any value to anyone. Looters are people who think that wealth just appears out of nothingness and that it is perfectly justifiable to steal it from someone else, since it is a zero-sum game; and therefore it is a matter of "social justice" to redistribute it according to their whim.

Their redistribution plans have become more sophisticated than Caveman Ugh's, but follow the same basic principle.

This is why the left's policies almost always end up enabling and exposing the worse and most brutish aspects of human nature; and, curiously, these are the same people who are always coming up with some new, improved utopian scheme that promises a veritable paradise of human love, compassion, kindness and brotherhood. So, how come they always deliver a toxic brew of hate, envy, and discord? How can they be so completely clueless about something as obvious as the reality of human nature?

Perhaps, the best answer to that question is that, when it comes to themselves, the left is constitutionally unable to understand or accept the dark side of their own natures with any degree of clarity, let alone honesty.

The squalid utopian fantasies of socialism, communism--or any variant of Marxism for that matter--appeals primarily to people who refuse to acknowledge their own human imperfections, and hence their own capacity for evil. They don't want to admit it, but those who are drawn to the leftist view of the world, tend to see themselves as superior; above all the boring, ordinary human beings around them; more virtuous, more compassionate, smarter; and of course, much better qualified to decide what's best for lesser beings like you and me.

It is extremely ironic, considering the left's rhetoric to the contrary, to realize that it is conservatism and its underlying priniciples that fundamentally embrace the truth about human nature; and understand that nature is closer to the "lazy, frightened,s elfish, superstitious, instinct-loving, lowdown rascal" than to the utopian "ideal man", promoted in the rantings of communists, socialist, or any collectivist or totalitarian (whether from the left or the right side of the political spectrum). And, as a consequence of understanding that reality, conservatism and its economic policies (i.e., capitalism) are able to harness even the most negative aspects of human nature to bring positive good both to the individual and to the larger society as well.

Conservatism and capitalism are both ideas that have worked amazingly well for one reason: they do not pretend that human nature is something it is not. Leftism of any stripe fails miserably and catastrophically because they routinely pretend that human nature can be changed and perfected.

In essence, the left's denial and its psychological attraction to all these dysfunctional utopian systems inevitably leads to envy and a host of other negative and sadistic human traits; and, along the way, it promotes a cult of victimhood and identity politics with all the associated social and political conflicts those emotions generate. Envy, in particular, is the lovely human emotion that drives all these leftist systems; and it exists in pure, unadulterated and vicious form in those systems.

Contrary to leftist dogma, economic self-interest is not a matter of race or gender victimhood--or victimhood pimping of any kind. It is not a matter of "oppressor" versus "oppressed"; nor of "social justice"--it is a matter of supporting the freedom of the individual mind the fountainhead from which all wealth is created. The wealth of any individual not only benefits him or her, but also ultimately benefit everyone else in a free society because it slowly and inexorably pulls all up to a higher standard of living.

In a free society, wealth is never a zero-sum game; it is constantly created and exchanged; but in the left's Looter Utopia, where the looter mentality reigns, whatever wealth is created by those able to produce it is confiscated by brute force. This process continues until all those who are able to produce are prevented (for the sake of society) from producing, and the creation of wealth ceases, the very process having been murdered by the looters. Ultimately, the Looter Utopia ends up enshrining and enabling human barbarism, ensuring that we all return to the cave.

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE

Two posts back, I wrote about the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. academic institutions.

If you want to understand what is waiting for us at the end of the left's rainbow, then we need to look at the agenda being implemented by the heroes of the left . Andy McCarthy reminds us of that agenda:

At Powerline, John Hinderaker notes that the "leftist majority in Venezuela's legislative assembly has adopted a measure that extends state control over education and mandates that all education be conducted in accordance with 'the Bolivarian Doctrine.' Opponents of Hugo Chavez call it the 'socialist indoctrination law.'" John goes on to describe (including photographic evidence) how pro-Chavez jackboots — sort of the Venezuelan version of ACORN or the SEIU — were dispatched to beat up dissenters.

John's post reminded me of three things. First there was that warm embrace in April between Chavez and President Obama. Second was the fact that Obama had enthusiastically teamed up for years with his friend Bill Ayers, the self-described communist and former terrorist, in an ambitious education reform project in Chicago — the Annenberg Challenge, a kitty they used to line the pockets of sundry radicals. And third was the speech Ayers gave in 2006 at the World Education Forum in Venezuela, with a smiling Hugo Chavez in attendance. I've posted on it before — prior to the election, when the media and a choir of moderates insisted that we knuckle-draggers were making too much of the trifle that Obama was pals with a disturbing number of America-hating revolutionaries. But somehow it seems worth repeating some excerpts today — you know, as a weekend interlude amid the debate over Obama's effort to nationalize another one-sixth of the private sector:

President Hugo Chavez, … invited guests, comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica [sic]! Welcome to the World Education Forum. Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana! ...

[M]y comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice … has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution [i.e., Chavez's movement] and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane…. [For more information on the Venezuelan socialist Luis Bonilla-Montoya, see here.]

I began teaching when I was 20 yeas old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!

… [I’ve] learned that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space—what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society?

Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and materialism—turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together, voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.

… Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failing of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.

… [W]e, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation.

Viva Mission Sucre!

Viva Presidente Chavez!

Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!

Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Isn't it nice that we have a sociopathic thug and a murderer as a recognized leader in the field of education? And that he has worked closely in the past with our current President on changing education in this country? I'm impressed. But Ayer is correct in one thing: Education is Revolution.

All thuggish leftists and collectivists, including many of those we have elected to represent us in Congress; as well as the Taliban and other Islamofascist movements, intuitively understand that by controlling the education of the young, they can have an endless supply of fodder for their revolutionary utopia.

Controlling health care, as was pointed out in the previous post, helps them control everyone's life in the present. But, when they completely control education, then the political left will control the future and will have achieved their final victory.

BTW, "Hasta la victoria siempre" was the signoff used by Ernesto "Ché" Guevara in the last letter he wrote to Fidel Castro.

It translates as "Forever, Until Victory" or in other words, "Keep fighting until victory". Guevara, in addition to his revolutionary credentials, also happened to have a medical degree. Cool, huh?

THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA AWAITS !

All that needs to happen is to surrender to the left's vision of health care for the U.S.:

Once the government decides it is in charge of health care, it has a say in everything you do (this, natch, was an argument of my book). Guns, diet, and cars are more relevant to our slightly lower life expectancy than insurance premiums and reimbursement rates, so of course Henry Waxman and Barbara Boxer and the rest of the gang are going to use their control over the health-care system as an excuse to go after those aspects of our lives. Why wouldn't they? They already want to influence those aspects of our lives now. Health care is really the only other policy area — after "the children" and global warming — that gives the State access to the most private spheres of our lives. Whenever someone says "it's a health-care issue" it's somehow supposed to trump traditional rights and liberties. That's what the push in the 1990s to make gun control a health-care issue was all about. That's why cameras once used to catch terrorists are now used to catch people eating in their cars in the U.K.

This isn't about better health care, folks. It is about P.O.W.E.R. If a person truly wanted to improve health care--and the lives of real people--then they might be interested in stats comparing current American healthcare and Britain’s NHS:

1. U.K.’s heart-attack fatality rate is almost 20% higher than America’s

2. Angioplasties in Britain are only 21.3% as common as they are here

3. NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer

4. Breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate; in Britain it’s almost double at 46%

5. Prostate cancer kills 19% of American and 57% of Brits

6. in 2006, a U.K-based board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took three years to get that outrageous decree reversed.

7. NICE will cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain from 60,000 to 3,000. Result? “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky and has a 50% failure rate.”

8. Nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment

9. U.S. = 34 CT scanners per million; Britain = 8

10. U.S. = 27 MRI machines per million; Britain = 6

11. Brits wait twice as long to see a specialist than Americans

12. In U.S., recommended age for colon-cancer screening for men begins at 50. NHS starts at age 75.

13. Avastin, a drug for advanced colon cancer, is prescribed more often in the U.S. than in the U.K., by some estimates as much as 10 times more.

14. In U.K., 20% of potentially curable lung-cancer patients became incurable on the waiting list.

Thomas Sowell once wrote that the that political left have a major "investment in failure":

It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise.

The old advertising slogan, "Progress is our most important product," has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves "progressives." What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

One wonders what they would do in heaven.

We are in no danger of producing heaven on earth but there have been some remarkable developments in some Third World countries within the past generation that have allowed many very poor people to rise to a standard of living that was never within their reach before.

The August 18th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reveals the economic progress in Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American nations that has given a better life to millions of their poorest citizens.

Some of the economic policies that have led to these results are discussed in "The Economist" but it is doubtful that members of the political left will stampede there to find out what those policies were.

Go on! Take a wild stab at whether the policies involved allowed the "selfish" free market to operate; or whether they represented the latest in "selfless" tyranny.

Coincidentally, America as a whole is beginning to appreciate the "selfless" tyranny of complete leftist rule. We have the selfless-tyrant-in-chief, whose every move is calculated for our very own good--and, only incidentally, to keep himself in power by stacking the political deck (think ACORN, the recently articulated goals of the NEW, IMPROVED! Injustice Department, and all the usual double dealing and payoffs that America has come to associate with Chicago-style thug/politicians, who are easily mistaken by the left as god-like and worshipped.

It's just too bad for them that the "common folk" are beginning to wake up and smell something fishy.

In the same piece quoted above, Sowell went on to note:

Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left's denunciations of society.

When the poor stop being poor, they lose the attention of the left. What actions on the part of the poor, or what changes in the economy, have led to drastic reductions in poverty seldom arouse much curiosity, much less celebration.

The collapse of the global left is due to its pervasive intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Obama is the poster boy for this bankruptcy; and he carelessly and stupidly repeats all the mistakes of the left's past. This time he thinks it will work out because HE is the one in charge and he has cleverly repackaged all those failed policies in ribbons of hope and boxes of change.

But the disastrous policies he and the Democrats are trying to ram down America's throat remain out of touch with reality; and like all the despots before him, he and the clueless Democrats deliberately and callously ignore the actual consequences to real people. Like most people who wind up on the political left, they are truly only concerned with two main issues: feeling good about their moral superiority over the "common folk" (along with all the attendant preening self-righteousness and moral lecturing); and obtaining power over others (for their own good, and society's).

The statistics above--as well as the economic consequences of all their other policies--should pose a moral conundrum for any rational person who genuinely wants to improve the lot of the common man and the make the world a better place.

When you have no real principles except the desire for power over others, all moral conundrums are easy to resolve.

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS PICKS UP A TURD BY ITS CLEAN END

You've probably heard about this story. The best response I've seen to the moral cowardice of Yale is:

“Your Veritas Sux If It Ain’t Got the Lux.”

Academia has reached a new low, and that accomplishment is not easy considering the recent history of academic lunacy.

I remember an article by Victor Davis Hanson in 2007 which asked the pertinent question, "Have American academics lost their collective mind?"

Having been in academia for much of my professional career, I think I am qualified to andwer that question in the affirmative. And let me add, that it is because the "mind" of academia has become a "collective", that it has been lost.

Hanson considered some of the more recent examples of academic lunacy in their banning of certain politically incorrect speakers, while enthusiastically encouraging the speeches of thugs and tyrants:

In each of the above cases, the general public has had to remind these universities that their campuses should welcome thinkers who have distinguished themselves in their fields, regardless of politics and ideology. The liberal Chemerinsky, the Clinton Democrat Summers and the conservative Rumsfeld have all courted controversy -- and all alike met the criterion of eminent achievement.

But the propagandist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not. Unlike Chemerinsky, Rumsfeld and Summers, he used the prestige of an Ivy-League forum solely to popularize his violent views -- and to sugarcoat the mayhem his terrorists inflict on Americans and his promises to wipe out Israel.

Here's a simple tip to the clueless tenured class about why a Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld should be welcome to speak, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shunned: former Cabinet secretaries -- yes; homicidal dictators killing Americans -- no.

I noted in this post that:

Columbia University does not, as one person has astutely pointed out have to "give a soapbox to every lunatic in the world" to somehow "prove" that it believes in free speech or the free exchange of ideas. Giving a soapbox to a Hitler or a Bin Laden or a pipsqueak like Ahmadinejad is merely yet another histrionic display of narcissistic self-indulgence by a politicized academia; just as the decision to recind Larry Summers invitation to speak was at another institution of higher learning.

What all these cowardly academic antics have in common is the dedication and committment to a particular political ideology, rather than to any value or belief in "the free exchange of ideas."

And the collectivist ideology that many American universities and their faculties implicitly and explicitly promote and represent is what I have termed neo-Marxist fascism.

If students in these madhouses aren't anti-American by the time they enter college, quite a few are by the time they finish. And, of course, they are oh so politically correct and culturally sensitive!

Here is a definition of "politically correct" which captures its essence:

Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

The process of indoctrinating young minds into utopian Marxism and all other variants of collectivist thought has become the holy mission of many universities and colleges and their faculty, while disguising the neo-Marxist dogma as political correctness and multiculturalism. This travesty has implications for generations of minds, whose thought processes have been perverted by the distortions of reality that are necessary to shore up the underying totalitarian ideologies.

Hiding behind the concept of "academic freedom", the purveyors of thought oppression have gained control of education in this country.

The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of those overly-prized qualities of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" need to be thoroughly and painstakingly exposed for what they are: the politically correct posturings of incompetent social engineers who wish to impose their own mediocrity on all aspects of society. They champion a new kind of oppression (the oppression of the competent) under the benign guise of "political correctness". If your ideas merely hurt their feelings, you can be sent to their gulags.

The transformation of our intellectual centers of knowledge into vast emotional swamps of multicultural victimhood, offended by any idea that they don't like, can be best appreciated by the unwillingness to tolerate dissent and difference of opinion, and the utter willingness to resort to physical violence to silence anyone they don't agree with.

In this manner, the professors--sure of their ideological and moral superiorty-- are no longer bothered by pesky ideas, which might actually have to be defended by reason and logic. No, they rely almost totally these days on the primacy of their feelings, which they proudly point out need no defense, since they are honest feelings and reflect the utmost emotional sensitivity--except, of course, to those who happen to disagree with them.

It is precisely the "collectivist" and totalitarian mindset taught in American Universities and colleges that has ushered in an era of academic lunacy with its disconnect from the real world; its worship of feelings over thought, and its betrayal of knowledge, truth, and reason.

'LUX ET VERITAS' AT YALE IS COMPLETELY DEAD. LONG LIVE 'LUX ET VERITAS'!

IMPOSTERS

Patterico has outed a woman posing as a doctor at a Sheila Jackson Lee event on health reform in Texas.

What I noticed in her email exchange with Patrick was Mayer's incredible lack of shame or remorse at her deliberate, bald-faced lie:

I asked:

If I understand what’s going on here, you’re not a doctor, but you play one at town hall meetings.

Is that about it?

P

And she replied:

Do you mean play a doctor like you play a journalist? Then the answer is no. But who knows, that was only my first town hall meeting–even though I was a delegate. If I go to another one, which I seriously doubt because my husband is already extremely annoyed, then maybe I’ll play a plumber.

Notice how she neatly turns the tables on the person exposing her? She plays a doctor, like he plays a journalist; and even suggests that next time she'll play a plumber (thereby showing her hostility and envy toward a real person who asked a real question of candidate Obama and neatly attacking Joe the Plumber--who incidentally happens to really be a plumber).

This turn-about attacking strategy is a hallmark of the way a typical psychopath deals with exposure of his (or her) psychopathy. They are not remorseful; not at all. In truth, they believe that everyone else is just like them and find it impossible to appreciate that other people are not the lying and manipulating con artist that they are.

There have been many famous imposters throughout history. They falsify their identity and either borrow someone else's identity or make up an imaginary person with a different name or pretend to have a different profession. Their success with the new identity or profession often depends on the complicity of others in the lie and the web of lies they create. In Roxana Mayer's case, both Congresswoman Lee and the Houston media were complicit--probably because Mayer met their psychological needs with her impersonation.

If we delve into psychoanalytic literature regarding imposters, the prevailing thinking is that the imposture is often part of a compulsion to enact the family romance:

The family romance is a conscious fantasy, later repressed, in which a child imagines that their birth parents are not actual but adoptive parents, or that their birth was the outcome of maternal infidelity. Typically, the fantasy parents are of noble lineage, or at least of a higher social class than the real parents.

The family romance (Freud, 1909c[1908]) differs from children's sexual theories in that it does not address general questions about the origins of life but rather the question, "Who am I?"—where "I" denotes not an agency of the mind (or ego) but the result of an effort to place oneself in a history, and hence the attempt to form the basis of a knowledge.

The family romance fantasy has several possible aims and sources: revenge against frustrating parents; rivalry with the parent of the same sex; separation from idealized parents by means of their transformation into fantasy parents; and the elimination of brothers and sisters for competitive or incestuous purposes.

Now, you may think that Freud is full of it, but he and other analysts have postulated that the defect involved in becoming an imposter relates to a defective superego (a sort of "parental" structure in the psyche); and that this defect leads to the psychopathology exhibited in specific cases. Imposters suffer from a type of psychological perversion, and they are desperately searching for those idealized parent(s)( that they believe they have lost and at the same time enacting revenge against the ordinary and woefully imperfect parents they were stuck with in the real world.

In Mayer's case, perhaps the specific motive was trying to cover up for the idealized parent she adopted by pretending to be an expert in a field that could lend him some credibility (as his credibility sinks). Note her statement that, "I also went to lend support to the reform effort. It’s easier to be against something especially since anger is such a great motivator."

Unresolved neurotic/personality conflicts are also very strong motivators.

My guess is that Mayer would have continued the impersonation and played the concerned doctor to the hilt if she had not been outed by a little bit of fact-checking done by a blogger who happens to be more of a journalist than most professional journalists these days. She would undoubtedly have had a lot of complicit neurotics--trying to salvage their idealized relationship with the Obamessiah--who would have been willing to play along with her.

There are often many layers of complexity in this particular type of psychopathology, but to cut to the chase: imposters are liars, manipulators, and con artists.

And, they are much more common that you would think.

UPDATE: Oh, and btw, there will always be those who, as Wretchard points out, can be counted upon to remain the bihag ng pagibig; the slave to love; and will continue to love and cover for the liar, the deceiver; the manipulator--no matter what evidence is provided or how many times reality hits them over the head.

HAPPY COST OF GOVERNMENT DAY !

Today, August 12 is the day when:

On average, working people must toil 224 days out of the year just to meet all costs imposed by government. In other words, the cost of government consumes 61.34 percent of national income.

Cost of Government falls 26 days – almost a full month – later in 2009 than last year’s revised date of July 16. In 2009, the average American will have to work an additional 43 days out of the year to pay off his or her share of the cost of government compared to 2000, when COGD was June 29.

In fact, between 1977 and 2008, COGD has never fallen later than July 20th. This year even marks a sharp leap of 23 days from the previous record date, in 1982, when it fell on July 20th.

Let me repeat that: the cost of government consumes 61.34 percent of national income.

Cheers!

(h/t The Corner)

BOURGEOIS DECADENCE

A statement that is par for the course by the increasingly moronic tyrant of Venezuela.

Remember, this clown is a "hero" to those progressive thinkers of the left.

What do you suppose is next on his proletariat hit list? I would guess that Tennis may be just a little too individualistic for the collective cognitive (un)consciousness to grasp....

SHEER PROJECTION AND PARANOID FANTASY

You can always tell what liberals** are up to by what they accuse you of." - Ann Coulter

I am not a big fan of Ann Coulter; nor have I read her books, but I heard her say this on Fox News the other day and I was struck by how psychologically astute the comment was.

What Coulter is alluding to is the mechanism of projection, which is the psychological strategy by which the user is able to disown his or her own thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors-- even as they virtuously accuse others of possessing those same thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

In, "The Necessary Enemy", Dr. Zero at Hot Air identified a crucial psychological defense that is required for collectivism in all its variations:

Collectivist politics of any stripe requires enemies, because they rely upon coercion. Socialist utopias don’t come into existence spontaneously. There would be no need for confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy, if the wealthy voluntarily used their money to buy cars and houses for everyone in the lower income brackets, without requiring them to work in return. Nobody would be talking about nationalizing health care if doctors and hospital staff were happy to work eighty hour weeks for minimum wage, and pharmaceutical companies were run as giant charities that cheerfully sank billions into developing drugs they resell at cost. Few people would leave a sizable chunk of their estates to the government, if the government didn’t seize the money through death taxes. No large group of people on Earth has every freely chosen to peacefully organize themselves into a socialist collective – they either slip into it through small losses of freedom that seem relatively painless as they happen, or they are forced into it at gunpoint. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed Obama’s current budget and regulatory plans at the outset of the New Deal, he would have been laughed out of office, and if he had attempted to impose Obama’s policies by force, he would have needed infantry platoons and tanks.

The basic premise of socialist government, as Obama famously explained to a plumber in Ohio last fall, is to take wealth away from the more successful people in society, and “spread that wealth around.” This will always be a more attractive proposition to the people serving as the bread, than the people being used as the peanut butter. The creators of wealth must be forced to participate in the system, far beyond the point where a sense of civic duty or compassion for the downtrodden would keep them in line. After all, nearly half the country currently pays no income taxes, and they’re not all “downtrodden” people deserving of charity. In fact, the socialist dream is to reach the point where over half the population pays no taxes, and will thus be inclined to support all expansions of government power. You can’t get to the magic 51% of tax dependents just by using hungry orphans as props.
Increasing levels of coercion are necessary to expand the socialist system, and keep wealth producers trapped within it. To maintain popular support, the socialist needs voters to stay angry at designated class enemies. The Obama style of total government control over private businesses tends to turn feral with frightening speed, because it attempts to preserve the illusion of private enterprise, even as the “entrepreneurs” are enslaved to the total state.

The psychological defense mechanism being described is projection (which, with just a little psychic push and hysteria becomes full-blown paranoia).

The beginning of the 21st century will surely be looked back on as a golden age of paranoia. The headlines of today fairly ooze with the delusions and vast conspiracies dreamed of in the mind of the paranoid left.

I will also admit that paranoia and delusional thinking are equal-opportunity, multiracial, multicultural and gender-indifferent psychological processes. And, they are so easy and convenient to use, that they are accessible even to the youngest of children or the most physiologically disabled adult mind. The political left certainly has no claim of exclusivity in the use of these two immature defenses, but they are without a doubt the gold medal winners in the American paranoid olympics, and the political right will have to work very hard to ever catch up with them.

Let us compare and contrast for a moment the paranoia of the left versus the paranoia of the right. Recently, Eugene Robinson briefly teetered on the edge of extreme hyperbole, then fell over into it without much resistance when he said:

If there has been a more clinically insane political phenomenon in my lifetime than the "birthers," I've missed it. Is this what our national discourse has come to? Sheer paranoid fantasy?

Jonah Goldberg responded:

Really? Did Robinson miss the 9/11 truthers? This was the movement that insisted the U.S. government was in on, or even orchestrated, the 9/11 attacks. Such theories went from the simply nutty to full-on whackjob bonkers. Some, like former DNC Chair and then-presidential candidate Howard Dean simply entertained the "theory" that Bush was "tipped off" by the Saudis but let 9/11 happen anyway. Some, like Rosy O'Donnell argued that the conspiracy was so advanced that the inside job was “the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel.”

Now, it may be foolish for birthers to assume that Obama's refusal to release the full birth certificate is proof that he's foreign born (as opposed to assuming he's simply trying to gin up a controversy or conceal something else entirely) but is it really more crazy than thinking the United States government orchestrated 9/11?

There was also Michael Moore who insisted that Bush knew where Osama Bin Laden was but the president was simply keeping him on ice (Moore also believed OJ was innocent, for the record). The vast bulk of the left agreed with the Moore vision that Bush always knew there were no WMDs but "lied us into war" for ulterior motives. Those alleged motives varied in outlandishness, to be sure, but for a long while there no theory was crazy enough to earn much scorn from the Olbermanns and Conasons. When Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in DC, Democrats flocked to the premiere, unconcerned with the paranoid delusions and deceits it contained. Click here to see then DNC chair Terry McAuliffe looking gaga as he shakes Moore's hand.

Oh and let's not forget all of the nonsense during, and in the wake of, Hurricane Katrina when several prominent figures made all sorts of crazy statements. Randall Robinson said that blacks — and only blacks — were eating the flesh of the dead almost immediately after the flooding. Spike Lee and others insisted that the levees might have been bombed by the Bush administration in order to kill or scatter black residents of New Orleans. Cynthia McKinney says the American forces rounded up and executed 5,000 "prisoners" and dumped in the swamps of Louisiana.

Meanwhile, the GOP leadership and the vast majority of rightwing and conservative pundits have either rejected or ignored the birther stuff (including Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan). But the GOP is supposed to own it. Democrats, meanwhile, were never held to a remotely similar standard when a far more evil and pervasive bout of paranoia claimed their own party. Funny how that works.

Yes, funny, isn't it?

There has been a series of bizarre conspiracy theories emanating from anxious leftists for the past 8+ years as they have desperately attempted to keep the holes in their ideology plugged; and thus preventing any **reality** from washing over them or flooding their cognitive processes.

Every time a leak in that ideological dike appears, the postmodern-progressive-paranoid chewing gum is brought out to plug it up. The TNG memos were a clever plot by Karl Rove. The Bush Administration was behind 9/11; Katrina was allowed to destroy New Orleans because Bush hates blacks. George Bush is about to impose a theocracy on the unsuspecting U.S. Pat Tillman was murdered because he wanted to meet with anti-war activist Norm Chomsky. Sarah Palin is not the mother of Trig and faked her pregnancy. The list of the paranoid delusions goes on and on and on.

Taken as a whole, they are evidence of an ongoing and determined refusal to face reality--because it is a reality that threatens the belief systm of a very large section of the American population. Without the delusions and conspiracies concocted by the always creative political left, their whole house of Marxist cards will come crumbling down.

Some have said that Unwillingness To Face Reality And Its Consequences is the most serious mental illness of our time; and that is most certainly true.

The bacteria of paranoid stupidity is very easily spread. The infecting agent is usually a true believer who cannot face some unpleasant aspect of reality (i.e. an "unpleasant" or "inconvenient" truth) that is starting to trickle out into the open. It must dammed up immediately. The paranoid gum is handy and easy to use--just chew it up and plaster it over the hole.

For the political left, the gum has created a series of interrelated and connected paranoid theories that link the Bush Administration to anything bad in the world. Obama himself resorts to this technique in practically every speech. His pattern is simple to appreciate: first he courageously takes responsibility for what is happening; then he forcefully reminds of that he inherited the problem and it's not really his fault at all; it's Bush's. Now that's how real "postmodern responsibility" works.

He just neglects to mention that his own party has controlled Congress since 2006--well before the current economic problems became evident. But that's not relevant, is it? Funny how that works.

Just as the Jews serve as the handy scapegoat on which the dysfunctional Arab/Islamic culture in the Middle East can blame all their own societal failures; Conservatives and the political right serve the function of being the source of all evil in American society to the dysfunctional political left. If they did not have a George Bush on which to blame all societies ills, they would have to invent him--or, better yet, insert any current prominent Republican--e.g., Sarah Palin--into the same BDS scapegoat mold; and then transfer all their rage and hostility toward that individual or group. Not to have such a scapegoat on which to project their own inadequacies would mean they would have to question some very basic assumptions about their fantasized superiority.

In making paranoid pronouncements, the paranoid person always takes himself or herself extremely seriously. Rarely does the paranoid person present themselves to a mental health professional seeking help for their paranoia; or even complaining about their psychological projections, no matter how bizarre or dysfunctional they may be. That is because for them, the paranoia and the accompanying projections explain away and rationalize so much about their failures as individuals, ideologies and cultures.

The insane asylum we refer to as the Middle East and all its affiliates in Africa and Indonesia where Islamic delusion runs rampant, have a fully formed paranod fantasy that explains their lack of progress and their dysfunction in the real world. Likewise, the lunatic left also subscribes to their own special convoluted explantions of dysfunction and lack of power. In both cases, if the object of their projections did not exist, they would have to invent them because their world view cannot be held together without the gummy glue of the paranoid fantasies that connect all their dots. To them, the fact that Blackwaters and Halliburtons--or any successful capitalist business exists--is enough to explain their own dysfunction and lack of progress.

Funny, isn't it, how this characteristic and prevalent delusion of the political left perfectly parallels the paranoid delusions of the backward Islamic oountries of the Middle East and their attitude toward the "evil Jews."

If only Israel and the Jews could be "wiped off the map"; or, if only those evil capitalist companies could be "torn up into a thousand pieces and scatter[ed] to the wind" then Islam/Progressivism would be more successful.

Everything can be explained by this kind of paranoid logic. In fact, paranoia is really nothing more than the use of reason and logic in the service of the irrational and bizarre.

• Are you poor? Someone must have robbed you of what you are entitled to!
• Are you angry and experiencing hatred, but like to think of yourself as a loving, compassionate sort of person? Then the object of your hatred magically becomes the one who hates...you!
• Is your genius not universally recognized? You must have powerful enemies that prevent you from achieving the success you know should be yours.
• Have you made mistakes in your life? Someone has clearly tricked you into acting a certain way otherwise you wouldn't have.

Has your ideology continually and repeatedly failed in the real world and resulted in death and misery for all who implement it? Take heart! It is not your fault or your ideology's! Either it wasn't implemented virutously enough; or there were evil [Republican, Neocon, Male, White, Christian, Jewish] forces (choose one or more) that have been plotting against it!

The above mental gymnastics allow the paranoid person to externalize blame and avoid responsibility for his situation in life, as well as his own feelings. It is always someone else's fault and not his. It is always someone else who is experiencing the objectionable feelings, and he is always the victim of it.

In addition to externalizing blame for one's own pitiful situation in life, there is yet another advantage to paranoia and projection: very often, a creative distortion of reality can reliably pump up one's own self-esteem! You are the righteous; persecuting the true racists thus proving you, yourself, are incapable of any racist thoughts or emotions! Aren't you wonderful?

Sometimes, it pumps it that self-esteem up at the expense of a great deal of fear; but nevertheless, it is comforting to know that someone appreciates your genius or the threat you represent. Clearly if the CIA, FBI, aliens, Jews , POTUS, Republicans, Business/capitalism, Big Oil [--fill in your favorite bogeyman here--] are out to get you, you must be very special and unique indeed.

In short, paranoia and its baby brother projection organize and distort reality in a way that makes it palatable; and, at the same time help the user to avoid recognizing some unpleasant truths about himself. When practiced on a societal or cultural level, it accomplishes the same thing on a larger scale. All you have to do is eliminate the external problem and everything will be all right and you'll never have to question your beliefs--or say you are sorry-- again.

The typical con artist does this consciously and deliberately and understands the effectiveness of the psychological maneuver. Con artists come in all sorts of political stripes, of course, but the left is far more prone to this sort of immoral maneuver because they have an intense need to appear virtuous. A con artist that I am personally familiar with, in fact, once astutely commented that the difference between leftists and conservatives is that leftists think they are "better people"; while conservatives think they have "better ideas." In this, as in so many ways, the left is like a typical shame culture where the appearance of virtue is far more important than actually being viruous.

Reality is always redrawn in order to pump up their own righteousness and virtue. Anyone who opposes their policies is automatically branded as racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic-- take your pick, depending on the circumstances.

Hell, anyone who offers ANY new ideas in these areas are automatically branded with one of the "isms".

It is useless to point out the truth to people in the grip of these kind of paranoid delusions. It is just so easy to attribute one's own cynical motives and unacceptable feelings to others, particularly when such attribution is culturally sanctioned.

It is inconceivable to paranoid persons that people actually exist who view the situation differently from them. It is inconceivable that they could be wrong about their perception of reality. Con men always think others are out to con them. In fact, most paranoids consider themselves the ONLY reality-based community, because they get to define what reality is and it is always what they happen to feel. And it is always about making sure they feel good and virtuous and self-righteous.

Paranoia and projection also provide a rationale and justification (to the paranoid, at least) for acting out against those who--from their perspective-- stand in the way of implementing their social programs; or will not submit to the will of their god (whoever and whatever it may be).

Oh, and by the way: DO NOT make the mistake of thinking that only psychiatric patients who have a serious mental illness utilize these defense mechanisms. Paranoia is a symptom of many mental illnesses; but both paranoia and projection are also physiological states of the brain that can be achieved by otherwise "normal" people under the proper circumstances. The distortion of reality that occurs with the use of these defenses is always done to serve inner psychological needs.

Paranoia and projection as psychological defenses used by otherwise normal people are not mental illnesses that can be "cured" by mass quantities of antipsychotic medication in the water supply. Instead, they represent a distortion of reality that occurs in order to meet the inner needs of a crumbling self (or a crumbling ideology, culture, or society) that cannot otherwise be psychologically sustained.

To those who are using such a defense, their behavior and rhetoric seem perfectly logical and internally consistent. It is, in fact, as impeccable as any reasoning can be--considering that it originates from distorted premises. Paranoia has been referred to as "the rational in the service of the irrational" for good reasons.

And, by that kind of "logic" it makes perfect sense to use the maximum force possible to destroy those who the paranoid believes are responsible for the evil: e.g., all those absurd conspiracies that are wholeheartedly supported by the left that claim Bush and Cheney downed the twin towers; and have those who oppose them murdered. All those absurd theories that the Israelis created a disease that is specific to Arab genes or that the fictional Protocols are behind the lack of Nobel Prizes for Muslims; or even that the genocide in Darfur is just another Jewish conspiracy. These kind of paranoid fantasies all comes from the same psychological source.

As long as they maintain those delusions, they do not have to deal with the sad state of their own culture; their own sick religion; or their pathetic ideological inadequacies.

The "Birther" conspiracy could have been put to rest long ago if Obama had practiced what he preached about "transparency" and had released the long-form of his birth certificate; or if Obama had released ANY of his past records from college and law school--which, of course, he never did and thus his history remains murky and opaque without much external validation to this day. Nor did a profoundly uncurious media make any attempt to fill in the blanks of his opaque history (except to take him at his word). Instead of seeing the story as one of Obama's lack of transparency and neurotic obsession with keeping possibly deleterious aspects of his past secret and hidden from view (which naturally makes reasonable people question what there is to hide), the media still believe the REAL story is presenting even the most reasonable of questioners about that lack of transparancy as delusional.

Granted that there may indeed be a few who will never let the truth stand in the way of their delusion that Barack Obama/Barry Soetero is not a real US citizen; how pray tell is that somehow orders of magnitude more serious than the 9/11 "Truthers" who can never be convinced that Bush and Cheney were the evil behind the attacks on 9/11?

I said in a post just before the 2008 election that I didn't expect that an Obama win would "heal" the fundamental psychopathological and paranoid defect that drives the political left and their postmodern progressivism. On the contrary, it is clear that winning has only further hardened the baseline projection and paranoia and extended the delusions and conspiracies about all who continue to disagree with them.

After all, they now have to explain why their policies are making things worse, instead of better. And they will need a lot of scapegoats to accomplish that job.

Probably at least 50% of the population, in fact.
_____________________________________________________________

**NOTE: Coulter call the progressive left "liberals", but I won't give them that title, since I am a classical liberal and don't believe they deserve or are entitled to the label. To me they are "progressive" or "leftist"; which are both synonymous as far as I'm concerned with the term "collectivist."

SHIT HAPPENS

...especially in rigidly-controlled communist economies.

For religious perspective on this issue:
Taoism: Shit Happens.
Hare Krishna: Shit Happens Rama Rama Ding Ding.
Hinduism: This Shit Happened Before.
Islam: If Shit Happens, Take A Hostage.
Zen: What Is The Sound Of Shit Happening?
Buddhism: If Shit Happens, Is It Really Shit?
Confucianism: Confucius Say: “Shit Happens”.
7th Day Adventist: Shit Happens On Saturdays.
Protestantism: Shit Won’t Happen If I Work Harder.
Catholicism: If Shit Happens, I Deserve It.
Jehovah’s Witness: Knock, Knock: “Shit Happens”.
Unitarian: What Is This Shit?
Mormon: Shit Happens Again & Again & Again.
Judaism: Why Does This Shit Always Happen To Me?
Rastafarianism: Let’s Smoke This Shit.

and my contribution:

Communists/socialists: Glory to socialist republic! Shit happens, comrade!
Capitalists: Buy your toilet paper here! Sale! Stock up now!

REAL WOMEN SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

This is a powerful and courageous video put together by Iranian women:



Of course the cowardly silence of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party leaders about this precarious and precious step toward freedom initiated by the Iranian people probably indicates that Obama et al mostly consider these fearless people as some sort of nefariously organized "angry mob" (organized by the evil...Jews perhaps??)out to undermine the duly "elected" president of Iran (he WON!, he WON!).

Watch the entire video. (h/t The Corner)

THE LEFT'S PROJECTION AND DENIAL GO EVER ON AND ON

CASE IN POINT:

THE RIGHT'S EVIL MOB RULE / NAZI TACTICS AGAINST HEALTH CARE REFORM (and the Obamessiah:



AND THEN, COMPARE AND CONTRAST WITH

THE LEFT'S INCREDIBLY NUANCED AND DEMOCRATIC DEBATE ON ISSUES:



I would say that the Obama Administration's and the Democratic Party's talking points about Republican "Mobs", astroturfing, Nazis with swastikas, and "these people are too well-dressed to be genuine protesters" is a case of the leftist projecting their own thuggish motives onto relatively normal Americans who are unhappy with what is going on right now in Washington.

And then, to go along with the left's primitive psychological projection documented above, we now are informed by President Postmodern, the "Denier-in-Chief", that the "War on Terror" is completely over.

How nice. I am so relieved.

Has anyone from this pathetic Administration mentioned this important information to Al Qaeda..or Hamas...or [insert your favorite terrorist organization here]?

A RESPONSE TO BIG BROTHER SISTER

I go away for a while and the next thing you know we've got Big Government with Big Brother Obama sending out Big Sister to chide all of us "fishy" opponents of the government takeover of the U.S. Healthcare System.

I'm not returning to blogging on a regular basis, but I simply have to post Reason TV's response to the rather chilling, (but rather typical)knee-jerk Orwellian approach taken by this administration.

BTW, I think that the best way to respond to the request to "flag" fishy speech about Obamacare is to FLOOD the White House with "Fishy" emails of the sort that proclaim "I AM SPARTICUS"--i.e., send an email that says you are flagging yourself because you think that OBAMACARE stinks and smells like fish....

Enjoy:

MAGICAL ROSE GARDENS vs THE BLOOMS OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. -Dale Carnegie

Truths and roses both have thorns about them. -Henry David Thoreau
-----------------

Well, folks, it's been a good run, but I'm ready to call it quits for an extended period. Blogging just isn't all that fun anymore, and definitely not worth the time and effort that is needed to post regularly--and that doesn't even factor in all the hate mail, the trolls, and the generalized sociopathy that runs rampant in the blogsphere these days.

Of course, in addition to the hate mail, I also get the other kind, and I know that a lot of you have found sustenance to battle the growing insanity by coming here. For that, I am grateful and thank you all very much. I'm sorry I haven't been able to respond to all the positive emails that I get that have kept me going for these five years.

There are many fine bloggers out there and more than enough to counter the craziness that seems to have descended on the great country of ours. I am not ruling out returning to blogging someday--or even blogging with others; but right now, with so much going on in my life, I just don't have the time to blog on a daily basis and keep it fresh and interesting. When--if--I return to blogging, expect to see Dr. Sanity in a different format. Hope and change and all that jazz.

And, speaking of hopenchange, it is sad to realize that many things happening in our nation and around the world right now are beyond any psychopathology that I could have imagined a few years ago (and I could imagine a lot).

At any rate, now seems to be the time to focus on family and friends; and do what is really essential to preserve life, liberty and happiness. I will be relocating to California in the near future to be closer to family; and I also plan on working on several projects which have been sorely neglected since I took up blogging. After that, who knows?

So, goodbye for now...and I'll leave you with some pictures from my rose garden, a place that never fails to soothe and stimulate my senses and keep things in perspective for me....


MISTER LINCOLN


CHERRRY PARFAIT


STRIKE IT RICH


MICHAELANGELO


POPE JOHN PAUL

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY !

Enjoy the day with your families and celebrate the birthday of this Great Country in which we are so privileged to live!

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

I think Neo is on to something here:

This is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen online—a movement to repeal the 22nd amendment. You know, the one that limits a president to two terms.

Think it can’t happen here? Think again. These people set up this group on Obama’s inauguration day. I’m fairly certain it’s a very small movement now. But this can grow, depending on how much money they get to spread their message. It’s a move for Zelaya-style “democracy” in this country.

Who’s really behind it? You can bet your bottom dollar it’s not the group they themselves describe

In my profession, the key to understanding people is to pay much more attention to what they do rather than to what they say. The degree of correlation between the two is the measure of the person. And further, it is a well-known truth that the best (and essentially the only) predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Obama has left a minimal paper trail. What we do have is a very carefully manufactured persona whose primary purpose appears to have been to obscure the
"real" person. It is quite amazing, really, how Obama attempted to hide his real thoughts and feelings about quite a lot of things (e.g., his habit of voting "present" so as not to be held to any particular opinion on most matters).

People are generally bewitched by his mellifluous words and soothing style of speaking, but the key to Obama has always been his actual behavior. Who has he actually associated with and for how long? What has he actually chosen to spend his time on? What does he actually choose to comment on and what does he ignore? (Don't listen to the words he is saying, note the fact that he is saying something about a particular event--e.g., that he chose to immediately meddle in the Honduras' presidential ouster; but to keep quiet and not to meddle in the Iranian stolen election).

Victor Davis Hanson compiles some of the most egregious examples of the disconnect between what the Democratic Messiah says, and what he does:

I don't think it has occurred to the divine ones that the administration now is at odds with the sort of ideology and attitudes Obama himself espoused on the campaign trail.

They call for patience and for confidence in Iraq — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss our chances while demanding a strict and rather rapid timetable to get out.

They ask for understanding about renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, intercepts, wiretaps, and Predator missile attacks as complex issues — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss these necessary tools as Constitution-shredding authoritarianism.

They ask for patience on jobs — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, pontificate about a "jobless recovery" when jobs and growth were far better.

They reassure us that missile defense is insurance against North Korean lunacy — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss such investment as needless militaristic provocation.

They ask for latitude about the definition of what is a tax, what defines unemployment, and how we calibrate deficits — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, blast obfuscation while promising "transparency."

They reassure that their planted questions, the favoritism shown some journalists, the refusal to release White House visit logs, and the arbitrary firing of inconvenient auditors are nothing new — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, charge government intimidation and suppression of thought.

They ignore corruption in the Democratic-controlled Congress, cater to lobbyists, are not bothered by the tax improprieties of their major cabinet appointments — and do not, in prior Obama-like fashion, demand an end to executive malfeasance.

I know this is old-story politics, but two things are different. One, never has the gap between pre-presidential and in-office behavior been so wide (heaven and earth really are quite distant), and, two, the past promises of utopia have so conditioned a mesmerized media that they don't realize their own complacency in allowing an administration to use whatever means they chose for professedly exalted ends.

And, by the way, if you do listen to Obama's rhetoric, then before you swoon in ecstasy, notice how self-referential and fundamentally narcissistic everything he says is. It is always about him first and foremost. His lovely words are fluid in both form and substance; and he has perfected the art of postmodern demagoguery.

But the whole point of postmodern rhetoric is to obscure and hide the truth or reality. You can hide behind such rhetoric ("it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" for example), but the key is to watch the behavior.

Obama's behavior has been extremely consistent--consistently leftist and socialist; consistently supportive of thugs and dictators; consistently an example of the 'end justifies the means'.

Don't think it can't happen here; it is happening as we speak; and half our population is aiding, abetting, and loving it.

UPDATE: Likewise, don't listen to what the left says their ideas and policies will do; look at what those ideas and policies actually do (and have done) in the real world:


[Political Cartoons by Chuck Asay]

NO BLOGGING

Sorry. No blogging today. I'm back from vacation, but overwhelmed with work.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN !

I'll be traveling all day today and back to regular blogging on Thursday or Friday.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to discuss the meaning of the well-known proverb: Birds of a feather, flock together.... when applied to today's politics.



[Cartoons by Michael Ramirez]