the Kommisariat's Kontinuing Kronicles: more right-wingery in the USA, 2k11-12

is that what strauss taught? just make a bunch of unsupported and unsupportable statements?

also he manages to start this thing by not getting a joke

This one is almost unexcerptable: http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/84536

A taste:

So that brings us back to corporate jets, which are modest affairs compared to Air Force One. The last thing we want to do is tax corporate executives and make them pay more for their business comfort. If the current tax accounting rules prevent a disguised transfer of income to these executives, they should be retained. If they are too lax, they should be fixed. The object of a good set of tax rules is to get an accurate measure of income, no matter what the state of the economy.

The big mistake in this area, therefore, is to assume that further restrictions on corporate jets necessarily result in more revenue for scholarships or food programs, as the president has claimed. The calculations are parallel to those made for the president.

Take a chief executive officer who earns ten times as much as the president does per hour. What is gained by stranding him in an airport, having him wait with countless other travelers—whose time is not worth one percent of his time—to catch a plane that might not get him to his final destination?

The President of the United States is not a fucking corporate CEO, no matter how much people try to spin it that way.

wow that jaffa review is a total mess

"review"

Jeez. This prat presumes that unless corporate jets are subsidized, the CEO of Exxon or Disney will naturally be bumped out of his jet and into commercial air travel? If his time is that fraking valuable, he'll let the company pay the small amount of tax involved and save his super-expensive time. More silliness as the silly season approaches.

im actually sort of mad about the aristotle thing. there is so much to be said about aristotle... and you guys hired someone who actually wanted to write about leo effing strauss??? [said to nytbr editors]

I know, right? Apparently these companies are going to go down the tubes if their air travel prices go up.

If his time is that valuable WHY DON'T THEY GET WITH THIS CENTURY AND TELECOMMUTE

f the current tax accounting rules prevent a disguised transfer of income to these executives, they should be retained. If they are too lax, they should be fixed.

you got it, dickhole! http://www.msn101.com/content/emoticons/ThumbsUp_A1VHO4.gif

xp yeah i'm really amazed that stuff like that [review] passes for... anything.

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, believed that in the “Ethics” Aristotle had said everything needful for happiness in this life. Thus Aquinas did not write his own book on ethics, but instead wrote a commentary on Aristotle. This tradition was extended by the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, Leo Strauss, who wrote that all his work had no other purpose than to address “the crisis of the West.”

But what is the West? And what is its crisis? According to Strauss (and many others), the West is the civilization constituted at its core by the coming together of classical philosophy and biblical revelation. The vitality of Western civilization results from the interplay of these alternative principles, though each contains within itself what claims to be exclusive and irrefutable authority. Symbolic of this authority are Athens and Jerusalem. In “The Second World War,” Churchill remarks that everything valuable in modern life and thought is an inheritance from these ancient cities. The debunking both of Socratic skepticism (“the unexamined life is not worth living”) and of biblical faith (“Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”) has led to the crisis of the West, a chaos of moral relativism and philosophic nihilism in which every lifestyle, no matter how corrupt or degenerate, can be said to be as good as any other.

In their brilliant and highly readable “Interpretive Essay” Bartlett and Collins suggest, without positively asserting, that Aristotle offers a solution to the problem, or crisis, of human well-being. But they seem to doubt whether it can meet the challenge of the God of Abraham. But these two principles are not adversarial in all respects. Indeed, much of Strauss’s work is a radical attack — made with the greatest intellectual competence — against the latter-­day enemies of both the Bible and a Socratic Aristotle. Strauss maintained that Athens and Jerusalem, while disagreeing on the ultimate good, disagree very little, if at all, on what constitutes a morality both good in itself and the pathway to a higher good.

WHAT ON EARTH DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS

the whole line of thinking is so cult-like, "we know what we're doing, shut the fuck up". none of what jaffa writes there can reduce to anything else.

do goons know who this guy is? "the crack emcee"? he's a bay area guy i guess

anyway, he's some kind of tea partyish type dude now

http://www.themachoresponse.com/crackMC/wordpress/

both the Bible and a Socratic Aristotle

...a Socratic whosis? wtf is this supposed to mean; nothing denoted by Socratic overlaps with that which is denoted by Aristotelean. But it sounds "intelligent", if you like high-flown nonsense.

is that crack mc who did the last track on consolidated's Play More Music LP? 0_0

http://i.imgur.com/fstIJ.jpg

Reminds me of http://shakespeareassholes.wordpress.com/

I don't think that guy knows how circumcision works

gold mine

tempted to create a 'queer' username for satan (queer)

http://i.imgur.com/SMcHJ.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fp67geuhJM

I feel so bad for that poor family that woke up on their camping trip without realizing some right wing nutjob had pasted over half their Winnebago with batshit buffoonery. Oh, well. They'll catch it at the next rest stop, for sure.

There's an oddly misplaced "LOVE NOT HATE" in the middle of that guy's car. Maybe he just needs to proofread more thoroughly.

Also i hope he does realize there are three 6's on his own license plate.

(Wh)oregon plates too

so the vicious union thugs who assaulted kenneth gladney were acquitted of misdemeanor charges (some good nutty quotes here: http://stlactivisthub.blogspot.com/2011/07/reminder-of-how-tea-party-used-kenneth.html)

dana loesch, editor in chief of big journalism, p sure its a conspiracy:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--VFmymGEgTk/ThzBc1xJxzI/AAAAAAAACQ8/zIiYMqVjXGY/s1600/loeschconspiracy.png

http://bigjournalism.com/dloesch/2011/07/12/no-justice-gladney-attackers-found-not-guilty/#more-207672

comments on this are a trip

conservatives on some weird racial shit given that gladney is black and the seiu guys are white

breitbart thinks it was a hate crime

money wins cases, yo

I haven't seen dude's ER records, but I kind of doubt anyone not in the courtroom has, either. But judging from the verdict, the video, and the ridiculous commentary, I think I'm going to call this myth busted.

(soon to be on discovery channel)

What you MUST remember is that St. Louis is probably THE most pro-union city in the Midwest. There is actually a city ordinance there that you, as a householder, MUST hire a union plumber to fix a leaking faucet. You may NOT fix it yourself legally. Of course, that's ignored regularly, but the mere existence of that ordinance shows you what you're up against in St. Louie.

huh, here's a phrase i hadn't run into before:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Cold+Civil+War%22

I've been using that phrase since approximately Jan 20th, 2009.

C'mon, look at the election of 1800, this country has been constantly in a state of cold civil war with the exception of 1861-1865. It's called democratic politics.

http://www.alec.org

h/t pareene.

lol my mom's old boss (who on occasion employed a teenage gr8080) is quoted in this article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0714-20110714,0,7101950.column

maybe the wrong thread but w/e

goole:

http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

pretty novel idea, i must admit

instead of running everything you want through the national legislature, just run the same awful shit through the 50 states at the same time! federalism!!

“…I can’t help but be a little bit cynical here. Because we find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over. And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration. […] Isn’t that amazing? The timing of this?”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_07/gohmert_heritage_foundation_sh030941.php

That Obama-- trying to finish the debt deal just so he can have a big blowout back in Chicago...

Always disappointed that the commentators have no idea how to match the tone at Pareene's current gig, as opposed to his last two. Say what you will about Gawker or Wonkette, at least their peanut galleries have something akin to self-awareness.

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/172431-republicans-approve-cut-cap-and-balance?page=1#comments

Most of these comments...Wow

this started on the NRO thread, but the o.g. article is really something

http://blogs.forbes.com/richardminiter/2011/07/18/why-the-democratic-party-is-doomed/

The Democrats are a coalition, forged in the New Deal, of diverse interests that do not get along well. Imagine the deer-hunting union member sitting down with the vegetarian college professor and the lesbian lawyer and you will begin to see the trouble party leaders have holding the horde together.

Porn Industry. Usually overlooked by analysts, this lucrative industry is a small but important source of campaign cash for Democrats. But the Internet is gutting it. XXX theatres, a fixture of the 1970s are long gone, and the DVD side of the business is dying too. As a 2009 Conde Nast Portfolio magazine article shows, YouPorn.com and other porn sites now offer hours of video content online for free, squeezing Larry Flint’s Hustler, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy and their many print rivals. The underground cultural force of these publications is shrinking with their revenues. While porn is here to stay, the Internet has empowered anyone to put up a website and collect revenue from ads or pay-per-view — underpricing the Goliaths that write campaign checks. As for Democrats, organizing tens of thousands of small-business porn stars will prove a difficult and low-margin proposition.

richard miniter would *never* overlook the porn industry

Richard Miniter sure rubs people the wrong way...

Miniter was the editorial page editor and Vice President of Opinion at The Washington Times from March[11] until October 2009.[12] Miniter filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission related to his position at the Times. According to the Washington Post,

The former editorial page editor of the Washington Times has filed a discrimination complaint against the paper, saying he was "coerced" into attending a Unification Church religious ceremony that culminated in a mass wedding conducted by the church's leader, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.... [Miniter] said in an interview that he "was made to feel there was no choice" but to attend the ceremony if he wanted to keep his job, and that executives "gave me examples of people whose careers at the Times had grown after they converted" to the Unification Church.

In September 2010, the case of Miniter v. Moon et al. and the related EEOC complaint was settled. Miniter refused to disclose the terms, but said "I am very, very happy with the equitable and just result."[13]

In 2007 Miniter and five other conservative authors sued Regnery Press and its parent company Eagle Publishing, claiming that the publisher had sold their books at a steep discount to book club subsidiaries owned by the same parent company, thus depriving the authors of royalties. According to Miniter, "The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books.... It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance."[29]

An attorney representing Eagle and Regnery countered that, "No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers."[29]

On January 30, 2008, a federal judge granted Eagle Publishing's motion to dismiss. The written opinion granting defendant's motion stated that plaintiffs could not join a necessary party, the Regnery subsidiary, because their contracts with Regnery contained mandatory arbitration provisions.[30][31] The authors have subsequently entered into arbitration with the company.[30][32]

pretty tough being a third-stringer in that game huh

As I learnt consulting the 2009 Conde Nast Portfolio magazine article, referring only to that source to inform this article, YouPorn.com and other porn sites, just some other porn sites I guess, now offer hours of video content online for free, squeezing Larry Flint’s Hustler, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy and their many print rivals.