Midcan5's Blog

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Dwight D. Eisenhower In 'Immortality' Milan Kundera speculates on the eleventh commandment, the big one Moses didn't bring down with him. Gawd must have known her creation was incapable of so hard a command, ten were enough, 'Thou shalt not lie' impossible. But suppose for a moment the eleventh commandment....nah, impossible for what would the politicians ever say, honest politics would pose so hard a problem that talking heads would spin out of control, honest reporting would be the death of contemporary dialogue. And so it goes, a managed narrative has become the norm, the forms it takes are outlined below. Lies and facts interweave. Bull S...: Imagine that the most prevalent detail of American politics today is BS. Harry Frankfurt defines it thus, "It is .... this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard...

Or worse off - a Fox survey has over 80% claiming they are worse off? Personally, I cannot blame any president for how I feel each four years. Are Fox viewers eighty percent worse off, and if so, why? Whose fault is that? Are you worse off because Obama was elected and he didn't help you out, are you too lazy for work and require the government to make things better for you? Are you worse off because the Bush tax cuts were left in place? Or are you entitled to the government helping make it better for you, all the while whining that the particular government in power hasn't made it better for you? Why does this question contradict the intent of the question? I thought the conservatives / republicans / libertarians did it all on their own, from nothing, did I miss a qualification or footnote? If you are better off, should you thank Obama? Should you thank Government? Should you thank luck? Should you thank your dead relative who left you lots? Should you thank youself? ...

By now it is obvious to all but the brain dead and retarded partisans that the republican party is useless. The party's only goal is to get back into power so they kiss the feet of the purses that control and manage them. The few sane and rational republicans left are leaving the party as Olympia Snowe did, or they have put on a clown hat as John McCain and Orrin Hatch do now. Republicans must now act like retarded tea party members. If an honest republican appeared today they'd be labeled crazy and placed in a Koch rehabilitation center. So with hope that the number of lunatics can at least be reduced in the party of Lincoln, the following voter's guide has been proposed. If a republican candidate says no new taxes under any circumstance, don't vote for them. If a republican candidate appears twice in a week on Fox media, don't vote for them. If a republican candidate is taken seriously on Fox news, don't vote for them. If a republican candidate is praised...

You gotta give Harry credit, we have lived through the most insane nonsense from the republicans and their spokespeople for at least four years now, and when Harry says something off the wall, the right wingnuts, republicans, and assorted tea party whiners are all up in arms. So now that Harry has struck back with the same artillery, it's time we all had a go at it. So let's see if imitation is really a sign of flattery. Quotes below cannot be confirmed, but whoever said truth had any business in republican politics. "Mitt Romney is not really a Mormon, he is a closet Episcopalian." "There are over two hundred Nazis in the republican party today." "Republicans are openly working to help the poor get poorer." "Romney really does believe today what he believed yesterday but not the next day, but..." "Republicans in the Chamber of Commerce think slavery is an excellent business practice." "Mitt Romney swallows lots of...

Midcan puts on his conservative / republican / libertarian / cynic's hat. I often hear the conservative right say that many college degrees and studies are useless because the real value of education is in turning the endeavor into a money making product. The arts are often criticized and many studies have no direct correlation to the market world. So watching the Olympics this week has brought to my attention a major flaw in the games, they are all useless in a market money driven world. I mean, who is going to pay you for swinging around on parallel bars, or swimming back and forth, or running fast. These could be valuable activities if the police were chasing you, or the playground was well equipped and you want to show off, but come on folks, markets don't care about these things. Synchronized diving, you gotta be kidding me! So how about some real American sports? So many things in our nation concern guns and the Second Amendment that an automatic weapons destruction...

"If Nikki White had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today." "Around the time she graduated from college, Monique A. "Nikki" White contracted systemic lupus erythematosus; that's a serious disease, but one that modern medicine knows how to manage. If this bright, feisty, dazzling young woman had lived in, say, Japan - the world's second - richest nation - or Germany (third richest), or Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, etc., the health care systems there would have given her the standard treatment for lupus, and she could have lived a normal life span. But Nikki White was a citizen of the world's richest country, the United States of America. Once she was sick, she couldn't get health insurance. Like tens of millions of her fellow Americans, she had too much money to qualify for health care under welfare, but too little money to pay for the drugs and doctors she needed to stay alive. She spent the last...

"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are suffered to repeat them." "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see." "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."* Is history useful prognosticator? Alex Rosenberg thinks not, '"Human history is a thoroughly Darwinian process. Like all other Darwinian processes, it can't repeat itself, not even as farce. It is always unpredictably producing novelty, which historical study can't anticipate. The lesson of history - both natural and human - is that there are no lessons to extract from it." But we humans don't often accept reality, and ardently believe certain things, and argue for these things, and think these things mean something. Consider as you read the excerpt below that America had her best years after FDR's New Deal and read carefully the bold words and then ask your self, maybe history does repeat itself. Maybe today we are living in...