Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

Whatever toxins may come along with it, the Tea Party movement has been a wonderful example of grass roots democracy in action in the flagship democracy. Citizens holding their overlords in government to account for their sense of entitlement and profligacy with the taxpayers' dime, is an empowering and encouraging prospect.  The Democrats former (and in many cases continuing) moral righteousness about Guantanamo, Global Warming, Iraq, Afghanistan and the well-being of workers, has not been met in office with any actions materially different from the previous Republican administration, even when the Dems controlled both the House and the Senate. Obamacare, the one possible legislative success of Obama's first 2 years, at the moment just looks like an even more gigantic bureaucratic fiscal snafu than usual, at a time when the US can least afford it. And America seems to have gone morally backwards in many areas under Obama, in spite of all the hope: more wars , more une...

According to Labor electoral genius, House Government Whip,  former Minister of Defence and Federal member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, this electoral result was " a good outcome ".  For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state. The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern. It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it gover...

You can''t make this stuff up. This is what now happens to vipers who are clutched to the breast. Satan is no match for silicon implants. A parable for the innocence of merely biblical evil in the 21st Century?

(... except when you have to ?) George Friedman in his peice at Stratfor wants this old and glib defeatist rubric (allegedly uttered by Douglas MacArthur to JFK and kinda quoted more recently in the movie " Princess Bride "), elevated to "a principle of U.S. foreign policy". It looks to me more like a thin and easy assertion of tactical rhetoric masquerading as grand strategy (how apt therefore that its source should be the egomaniacal MacArthur). The more compelling proposition is probably something more like: now that China is a real military threat to the US, a land war in Asia is more likely than ever to be a disaster. This is just a statement of the obvious. Friedman's (and MacArthur's) proposition however seems to wilfully elide some more important issues. Firstly, to publicly proclaim such a doctrine would be to unilaterally substantially weaken the US's ability to influence events in Asia. And that is just plain dumb. Secondly, it bespea...

An inert but harmful and all pervasive heavy element consisting of constantly re-organising dense neutron clusters. It impedes, constricts and then suffocates almost everything it touches. It was  described in the literature in 2005, after observations of the automatonic responses of vast concentrations of peons combined with the recognition of the overwhelming atomic force of the moron.

Major Richard Winters of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, passed away peacefully on 2 January 2011 He died in Pennsylvannia aged 92. He was a true leader and a hero . All who value the sacrifice and resolve of the generation who took on and defeated totalitarianism in the Second World War will mourn his passing. He is one of the finest representatives of that greatest generation. Most of us only knew him  through the magnificent TV mini-series " Band of Brothers " or the book of the same name on which it is based, which narrated the formation, training and actions of Easy Company in the 2nd World War. But we know him from there as the leader who 'hung tough' in the toughest of circumstances and showed us the true meaning and value of courage, loyalty and resourcefulness. I acknowledge my unbounded admiration for this man and celebrate his life as a test...

The 21st Century paradigm?   Left v Right was so 18 th Century. Collectivism v Individualism was so 19th Century Socialism v Capitalism was so 20th Century The cultural and political debates that are emerging in the 21st Century seem to be better framed in the related, but more informative, dichotomy of " Progress v Freedom", than the opaque, out-moded and blunt, " Left v Right ".  Labelling that tries to be  more descriptive of the political content of a person's ideas is more helpful than the arbitrary putative positioning of that person relative to  opponents. Admittedly there is a residual problem that "progress" is also merely a directional indicator , that on its own doesn't indicate a destination. This means it can be appropriated as a label by anyone who wants to takes us to a different place. "Progressive" is still used as a virtua...