Manson had a goal: he envisioned a new world order, with himself and his followers as the leaders. To bring about this new world order, he first had to destroy the existing one. He came up with an idea that he called “Helter-Skelter“: he was going to incite race warfare because he was pretty sure that would bring America down, leaving room for him and his followers to take over. He figured that the best way to start an apocalyptic race war was through violent murder. He wasn’t going to do the murder himself, of course, but he did incite his dumb, sexually-opiated, often drugged followers to commit the deeds on his behalf.
Now, let’s think about the mainstream media. The MSM has a goal: a completely Democrat-dominated political machine, with the MSM and the politicians it’s created in total control. Because this will be a statist new world, the MSM must first destroy completely America’s current, still vaguely capitalist market and individualist ideology. To that end, the media has decided that it will incite race warfare, because it’s pretty sure that race warfare will destroy existing institutions and allow it and its political class to take over. Media members figure that the best way to start this societal breakdown is to sow so much division between blacks and whites in America that the country becomes dysfunctional and, if necessary, bloodied. The media elite are not going to sully their own hands, of course, but they will work hard to incite their followers to commit the deeds on their behalf. (And sadly, to the extent they have followers in black inner cities, these are young people who are minimally educated, inundated with unhealthy sexual messages from movies and rap songs, and too often on drugs. Just think of Trayvon….)
I can’t prove the MSM’s goal, but I can prove its tactics. . . .
Do read her whole post. Her reasoning is solid. I have to take issue on only one point - Charlie Manson was merely a cog in the great socialist wheel. I would name the spiritual progenitors of our MSM as Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Here are the comments she and I made to her post:
Me:
A fascinating piece, but in the pantheon of mass murders with dreams of grandeur and world change, I think you aim a bit too low. I would have picked Stalin as the MSM’s ideological progenitor. He in fact worked to change an entire country, and indeed, under him, there came to be the division between objective truth and socialist truth. There was control of the media to communicate only approved messages. Etc., etc. And some of the old Soviet movies – particularly the post WWII biopic on Ivan The Terrible – are probably pretty analogous to The Butler in that both teach a version of history not grounded in fact, but rather in message.
On a final note, if you are going to point out things about Oprah, I think that you are missing the most outrageous – her assertion that Trayvon Martin is the “Emmett Till of our time.” Oprah rather surprised me, actually. She built her career by being careful to appear as a normal American rather than an “African American.” She was accepted on those terms. Yet now it turns out that she too is a closet race hustler. May her career be effected accordingly.
Book:
I agree with you about the media’s general leftism, along with its global domination plans. What struck me, though, was how tightly their script regarding racism follows Charles Manson’s plans. It’s as if, when it comes to destroying the U.S. specifically through racial divisions, the media poured over Manson’s evil plans for sowing racial disharmony, and made those plans their own.
Me:
Book, as to racism generally, the only reason blacks weren’t targeted as part of the leftist ideology in Stalin’s Russia was because there were none in that country. But that said, the very foundation of socialism and the left has always been the disparity between the “oppressed and the oppressor.” It is their entire schtick. Blacks were being heavily recruited into the communist party of the USA in the lead up to the 60′s. Even Thomas Sowell was recruited into communism as a young man. The treatment of blacks as a victim class fits hand in glove with the opening lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Manson’s view of a race war was nothing new. It was in fact Marx’s view of all human history.
While Stalin and Lenin didn’t have blacks, what they had was class warfare. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Obama and thought that his words could have come from the mouth of Lenin demonizing the Kulaks. Indeed, I looked up some of Lenin’s old speeches old speeches on the Kulaks just to verify my thought – and I was 100% correct. Class war and race war are virtually one in the same – both rely on the oppressed and the oppressor paradigm, both involve demonization of the other, and both are political tools used in precisely the same manner. It is just Marx’s paradigm pointed in two slightly different directions.
I am not saying that your choice of Charlie Manson was in any way wrong. Indeed, I would say that it causes much more of an emotional response to think of it that way then the pedantic argument that I am making. I admit to a bit of shock when I was your post heading in a way that I wouldn’t have been if it referenced Stalin instead of Manson. Thus I will bow to your choice on this one.
The worth of a good pundit is that they get to the essence of things with brevity and clarity. And here is Charles Krauthammer doing precisely that in his most recent article on Obama's State of the Union Flop:
Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.
That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in postwar Europe. . . .
Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenue.
Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.
This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. . . .
Art: Procession Of The Trojan Horse Into Troy, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1184 BC – Troy is sacked and burned after the Greeks use the ruse of the Trojan Horse to gain entry into the city. This brought an end to the Trojan War which had begun over a decade earlier when Paris of Troy stole Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Some 300 years later, these events would be famously memorialized by Homer in the Iliad. Other related works include Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's The Aeneid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
1429 – St. Joan of Arc leads the French in their first sustained - and successful - offensive in a generation, engaging the Enlish at the Battle of Jargeau during the Hundred Years' War.
1509 – Henry VIII of England marries his first wife, the beautiful and cultured Catherine of Aragon, widow of Henry's brother, Arthur. Their marriage lasted 24 years and produced six children, though only one that survived, Mary I. Henry, fixated on producing a male heir, would petition the Pope for an annulment, ultimately leading to England's break with the Catholic Church. . 1776 – The Continental Congress appoints Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
1837 – The penultimate donneybrook, the Broad Street Riot occurres in Boston when a company of Yankee firefighters met with an Irish funeral procession on Broad Street. Fighting broke out, and eventually 1000 people were included in the melee, though no one was killed.
1937 – As part of the Great Purge that reached its height in 1937 and 1938, Joseph Stalin brutally repressed and terrorized the people and leadership of the Soviet Union in order to insure unquestioning loyalty. On this date in 1937, Stalin had eight of his top army leaders executed. According to official Soviet archives, in 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day. According to historians, the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet Repression during these two years is the range 950,000 to 1.2 million.
1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students,Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they were able to register.
1963 – In what became memorialized in a horrific photo, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.
1970 – After being appointed on May 15, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington officially receive their ranks as U.S. Army Generals, becoming the first females to do so.
Kamehameha Day, official state holiday of Hawaii, in honor of its first monarch, celebrated with floral parades, hula competition, and festivals
And in ancient Rome, today was the celebration of Matralia in honor of Mater Matuta, a goddess associated with the sea harbors and ports, where there were other temples to her. Her festival of Matralia, celebrated on June 11 in her temple at the Forum Boarium, was only for single women or women in their first marriage, so sort of a girls day out in the ancient world.
Don't miss Rougeclassicism for their ancient world dates in history.
And for the most interesting in links of current event import, see Larwyn's Linx at Doug Ross's Journal.
[W]hat the political left, even in democratic countries, share [with Hitler, Stalin and Mao] is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.
Carbon dioxide is central to life. We exhale it. Plants use it to create oxygen. Each time we burn a fossil fuel - those fuels that provide over 90% of our energy and feed our vehicles - we release carbon dioxide. It is hard to imagine quite literally anything that we consume or use, from buying an orange at a store to purchasing, say, a desk that was transported across the country on a truck, that is not involved directly or indirectly in the emission of carbon dioxide.
Yet for all of that, the vast majority of carbon emissions are either not man made or are otherwise natural emissions that we simply cannot control. As pointed out at Power and Control: "The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for just 3.27% of the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere each year, while the biosphere and oceans account for 55.28% and 41.46%, respectively."
To what degree, if any, do carbon emissions effect the climate. Scientists in fact disagree on that one. But even assuming that carbon does effect climate, can we can have any sort of impact on our climate by attempting to control the small percentage of carbon dioxide emissions over which theoretical control is possible? That is an even more contentious question. Then, assuming we can actually effect climate, what limits should there be on such efforts to force change by government fiat - i.e., where is the cost/benefit analysis?
For example, Obama has proposed a cap and trade bill that will impose a massive regressive tax on our economy. Yet, as the Governor of Indiana pointed out not long ago, "[n]o honest estimate pretends to suggest that a U.S. cap-and-trade regime will move the world's thermometer by so much as a tenth of a degree a half century from now." The scheme proposed by Obama is like that of the EU. Not long ago, the EU banned outdoor heaters in the UK to limit carbon emissions. Those heaters were responsible for .002 of one percent of Britain's total carbon emissions. Banning them was an exercise in futility. Yet the economic impact was considerable. The cost to pubs, cafes and caterers of this regulation is estimated at a staggering £250 million (half a billion dollars) annually in lost business. Are either justified?
. . . The costs would be more than ten times the benefits, even under extremely unrealistic assumptions of low costs and high benefits. More realistic assumptions would make for a comparison far less favorable to the bill.
I’ve had to rely on informal studies and back-of-envelope calculations to do this cost/benefit analysis. Why haven’t advocates and sponsors of the proposal done their own? Why are they urging Congress to make an incredible commitment of resources without even cursory analysis of the economic consequences? The answer should be obvious: This is a terrible deal for American taxpayers.
What Mr. Manzi neglects to mention is that this cap and trade system seems far more about finding a massive new revenue source and a vehicle to punish traditional energy than it is about actually reducing carbon. Indeed, an identical program in the EU has seen carbon emissions rise since cap and trade was put in place.
Update: See also this cost benefit analysis from economist Martin Feldstein.]
At any rate, if you don't know the answers to the questions I posed above yet, I would suggest you start digging deep and figure it out. And then take a vocal stand - because there are at least four groups of people who are not motivated by objective science but who are completely invested in pushing a particular answer to these questions. And they are about to change your life drastically:
Group I - As Michael Crichton pointed out several years ago in a brilliant essay on the issue of 'environmentalism,' the far left have made of the global warming issue a religion, complete with an Eden, a dogma, a utopia, and severe penalties for heresy. Al Gore is on record demanding that any dissenting opinion be silenced and and that skeptics be denied access to the public. Numerous of the top "scientists" in the global warming industry are on record calling for the actual prosecution of people who contest "global warming" and the need to control our carbon emissions.
They have traded objective science for religious dogma and when that happens, one takes their word as scientific fact at one's own peril. I am reminded of the fatwah issued by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia in 1993 that instructed "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment." Dogma and science clearly do not go together. We could do with true debates on this issue - but debate is shunned by the global warming crowd. There is a reason climate sceptic Lord Monkton was prevented by the left from appearing before the House Energy Committee at the same time as Al Gore. [Update: See also here, discussing Stanford U. Prof. and global warming alarmist Stephen Schneider's refusal to engage in a debate] If they are not prepared to defend their positions, how can they be believed?
As an aside, someone the other day referred to selling carbon credits under a cap and trade scheme as "granting indulgences." After I stopped laughing, I realized just how apt a description it was, for this is a religion and indulgences were used by the medieval Church to grant forgiveness for sins in return for money.
Group II - A second group are those who want to use environmentalism and control of carbon as a vehicle to attack capitalism and redistribute the world's wealth. Indeed, that was a major theme at last years Bali Conference held by the IPCC, which saw a UN panel urge the imposition of a 'global' carbon dioxide tax on the richest nations. The proceeds of the proposed tax were to fill the UN coffers, which they would then distribute to developing nations, ostensibly to help them combat the effects of climate change.
[Update: To clarify, I consider this group to be made up of the larger international community who are agitating for a redistribution of America's wealth. And the day after I published this, they are in the news again. The Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) issued a report in which they claim 315,000 deaths in the Third World last year due to global warming. They are using that as justification to put a carbon tax in America, payable to the UN, at the top of the list for the Copenhagen UN/IPCC Summit. It should be noted that, in consideration of the facts that we are in a seventh straight year of global cooling, that we are in an extended period of solar inactivity as reported by NASA, and that temperatures world wide have risen less than a degree over the past century, the numbers of deaths "due to global warming" posited by the GHF would seem to be more than a little cooked. And indeed they are - see Bishop Hill for the explanation.]
[Update 2: If this report is accurate, then Obama has in fact signed us up for both a unilateral carbon emissions reduction a large scale transfer of wealth to the UN, just as GHF and the IPCC are requesting. This is insanity on steroids.]
Group III - Yet a third group, and some of the most vociferous supporters of climate change regulation, are businesses and individuals such as GE and Al Gore who stand to make a windfall from climate change regulation. These are rent seekers who see a chance to reap billions out of the collective pockets of us all. As one author wrote in the WSJ several days ago, we need to beware the Climate Change Industrial Complex. Truly, we do.
Group IV - The most insidious group of all is the fourth - socialist left wing politicians who are on the cusp of using the supposed need to control carbon emissions to justify a massive expansion of government and curtailment of our freedoms. Some of these politicians are fervent believers in the global warming religion while others are far more cynical. Both see in the issue, an unparalleled vehicle for expanding the reach of government, filling the coffers of government with new taxes, and justifying government control of seemingly every aspect of life and the economy. Under the guise of regulating carbon, there is literally nothing that the government cannot reach and then effect through a combination of regulation and taxation. For example -
Your thermostat - no more central heating, get ready for centrally controlled heating. As Obama said, "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,”
Your pocketbook - it will shrink massively under cap and trade plus all of the other green initiatives, with the proceeds going to fund the climate change industry and government coffers. Estimates now are that the cap and trade policies of Obama alone will to cost each family in America nearly $4,000 annually. That is quite a regressive tax from the man who promised us tax cuts but for the wealthy few.
Private jets - well, you can't afford one, but our overlords will be quick to point out that just a few of those (i.e., theirs) will not add appreciably to our carbon footprint. Green for thee, not for me, as Instapundit would put it. It is much easier to be green when you do not have to worry about paying your bills at the end of the month, but it gets even easier when you are not just incredibly rich, but also have a high tolerance for your own personal hypocrisy.
This isn't the road to a green Utopia. Its the road to an Orwellian green hell.
No one on the left has done more to clarify how the socialist left sees this issue than Nancy Pelosi today. As she said, the left intends to reevaluate "every aspect" of your life. What she implied was that after such reevaluation comes regulation and control of aspects she finds below her standards. Thomas Sowell was right - shades of Hitler, Mao and Stalin indeed.
[Update 3: The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change has just issued a nearly 900 page report challenging the science of global warming. You can find the document here. Below are two videos that show the unveiling of the report and give a brief overview.
The Employee Free Choice Act is an Orwellian attack on democracy in America. In direct contradiction to its name, the Act would strip American workers of their freedom to choose whether to unionize. The Act takes away the right of employees to decide whether to unionize by secret ballot and replaces it with a system quite literally built to allow for worker intimidation by Unions. It is being pushed by Democrats as a massive pay off Big Labour and has, not surprisingly, the strong support of the One.
Whatever the Democratic Party may once have been, with their embrace of this Act and their embrace of high fuel prices as a way to "save the planet," it should be blatantly obvious to all but the most rigid ideolouge that the Democratic Party is not the party of the "working man" today. The situation is such that the father of America's progressives, George McGovern, has written against the Employee Free Choice Act in today's WSJ. ________________________________________________________
This from George McGovern:
As a congressman, senator and one-time Democratic nominee for the presidency, I've participated in my share of vigorous public debates over issues of great consequence. And the public has been free to accept or reject the decisions I made when they walked into a ballot booth, drew the curtain and cast their vote. I didn't always win, but I always respected the process.
Voting is an immense privilege.
That is why I am concerned about a new development that could deny this freedom to many Americans. As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.
The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak.
The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as "card-check." There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.
Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.
. . . To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.
Some of the most respected Democratic members of Congress -- including Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, George Miller and Pete Stark of California, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts -- have advised that workers in developing countries such as Mexico insist on the secret ballot when voting as to whether or not their workplaces should have a union. We should have no less for employees in our country.
I worry that there has been too little discussion about EFCA's true ramifications, and I think much of the congressional support is based on a desire to give our friends among union leaders what they want. . . .
Read the entire article. It truly is a mark of just how rotted the modern left is that, as McGovern noted above, they will demand secret ballots for union workers in foreign countries yet act willing to strip workers of the right in America. This goes hand in glove with my post of yesterday on how the post modern far left of today has more in common with Josef Stalin than John Locke.
I posted below on how Britian's EU membership portends to be an economic disaster. The EU is responsible for the UK's out of control immigration and the costs associated therewith - including rising taxes, crime and the burden on the infrastructure. The EU is in large measure responsible for huge jump food costs with their emphasis on bio-fuels which is taking arable land out of production. Then there are the regulatory costs, the transfer of wealth to the EU, and lastly, the production and cost of energy. Today, Chistopher Booker at the Telegraph and Richard North at EU Referendum both look at the looming catastrophe of the EU driven energy policy and costs for Britain.
It was appropriate that, just as our MPs were voting last week to hand over yet more of the power to run this country in the EU treaty, the EU itself should be unveiling easily the most ambitious example yet of how it uses the powers we have already given away. The proposals for "fighting climate change" announced on Wednesday by an array of EU commissioners make Stalin's Five-Year Plans look like a model of practical politics.
Few might guess, from the two-dimensional reporting of these plans in the media, just what a gamble with Europe's future we are undertaking - spending trillions of pounds for a highly dubious return, at a devastating cost to all our economies. The targets Britain will be legally committed to reach within 12 years fall under three main headings. Firstly, that 15 per cent of our energy should come from renewable sources such as wind (currently 1 per cent). Secondly, that 10 per cent of our transport fuel should be biofuels. Thirdly, that we accept a more draconian version of the "emissions trading scheme" that is already adding up to 12 per cent to our electricity bills.
The most prominent proposal is that which will require Britain to build up to 20,000 more wind turbines, including the 7,000 offshore giants announced by the Government before Christmas. . . .
At £2 million per megawatt of "capacity" (according to the Carbon Trust), the bill for the Government's 33 gigawatts (Gw) would be £66 billion (and even that, as was admitted in a recent parliamentary answer, doesn't include an extra £10 billion needed to connect the turbines to the grid). But the actual output of these turbines, because of the wind's unreliability, would be barely a third of their capacity. The resulting 11Gw could be produced by just seven new "carbon-free" nuclear power stations, at a quarter of the cost.
The EU's plans for "renewables" do not include nuclear energy. Worse, they take no account of the back-up needed for when the wind is not blowing - which would require Britain to have 33Gw of capacity constantly available from conventional power stations.
. . . This is crazy enough, but the EU's policy on biofuels is even more so. The costs - up to £50 billion by 2020 - would, as the EU's own scientific experts have just advised, "outweigh the benefits". To grow the crops needed to meet the target would require all the farmland the EU currently uses to grow food, at a time when world food prices are soaring. Even Friends of the Earth have called on the EU to abandon its obsession with biofuels. Yet the Commission presses on regardless.
As for the "emissions trading scheme" (a system originating with the Kyoto Protocol, whereby businesses can buy or sell "carbon credits", supposedly to allow market forces to ensure that targets are met), the Commission last week predicted that by 2020 this could be raising £38 billion a year from electricity users. Of this, £6.5 billion a year would be paid by the UK, equating to £260 for every household in the country.
The Commission itself predicts, in recently leaked documents, that this will have major consequences for the EU's economy, and that heavy industries, such as steel, aluminium, chemicals and cement, will have to raise their prices substantially, some by as much as 48 per cent. Yet when it was pointed out that this will put EU industries at a competitive disadvantage, the Commission's only response was to suggest tariffs on imports from countries such as China or America that are not signed up to Kyoto.
It looks like the most expensive economic suicide note in history. But just as alarming is how little this madness has been exposed to informed analysis. It seems, finally, that the price we pay for membership of the EU and the price of our obsession with global warming are about to become very painfully synonymous. And no one seems to have noticed.
Read the entire article. And do see the EU Referendum's take on all of this. Dr. North's post is notable for his exploration of the subsidies associated with wind farms.
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