22 November, 2010

Watchmen



When I was in college, a man named Frank Miller virtually invented the graphic novel with his opus, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It remains one of the most famous graphic novels, along with another which was released that same year, Watchmen, by Alan Moore. I read the former soon after it was released and enjoyed it immensely. I picked up Watchmen several times over the last 25 years, but never ended up buying it.

Recently, Watchmen became a motion picture, and I finally got around to catching it on TV. Regrettably, I’ve lost three hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Even more regrettably, the flaws in this story made me finally see some of the flaws in The Dark Knight Returns as well.

In both the Frank Miller work and the Alan Moore work, we see retired caped crusaders electing to come out of retirement. While one might tend to think of the lone vigilante fighting for the people as a conservative idea, these stories are both liberal fantasies. The evil faced in both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen is a crazed and oppressive government hell bent on hurtling the world towards “mutually assured destruction”.  The face of this oppression in Frank Miller’s work is President Ronald Reagan (R-USA) and his cohort, Superman. In Moore’s work, it’s the even more evil, President Richard Nixon (R-USA).

Ok, I’m used to our liberal writers and directors and their definition of evil: conservatism, and their naïve view of world politics and the military. So, this is nothing new.

Watchmen takes things a step further into liberal lunacy, however, and has ultimate evil disguised as ultimate good. I’m going to talk about the end of the story here. You’ve been warned.

In Watchmen, the solution to this mutual assured destruction problem is genocide. One of the Watchmen, Ozymandias,  decides that by destroying all the major cities in the world, he can prevent humanity from destroying itself. After he does so, Nixon reaches out to Khrushchev and détente begins. Our heroes were attempting to stop this madman from his efforts, but failed. And seeing the results, peace breaking out all over the world, most relent and go along with this sociopath. Rorschach can’t stomach it and wants to tell the world exactly what has just happened, and Dr. Manhattan kills him for it, to save this artificial peace.

Our hero, Daniel, almost gets it, and attacks Ozymandias, telling him he hasn’t saved humanity, he’s only deformed it. But even he says at the end that the peace will continue “as long as they think [Dr. Manhattan] is watching” over them.

As I said, this is the ultimate liberal fantasy. The average Joe Schmoe isn’t capable of making intelligent decisions. It must be left to some supreme decider who knows much better than us what is right for all of us. We have to have that overlord protecting us from ourselves.

Ozymandias however is the ultimate evil, no matter how much he is painted as a hero by the film. His vision of destruction of some of the human race so that the rest of us may thrive has been shared by tyrants since the dawn of time. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao, are just a few from the recent past who shared his vision of how to create a utopian society.

Everything about the conclusion of Watchmen is disgusting and revolting, and I wish I’d never wasted the time on it. The only thing useful is that it’s a revealing look into the liberal mind and their vision of utopia.

November 22, 1963



A little less than three years before I was born.

 

Requiescat in pace, Mr. President.

The Rising Cost of Debt



A picture paints a thousand words. I have nothing to add, except to point out that this is a best case scenario.

Read the original article here.

Sarah Palin Schools Ben Bernanke & The Wall Street Journal



This is a little dated. As I said in a previous post, I’ve been busy.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is preparing for his second round of “quantitative easing” to improve the economy. Basically, the reason why he and President Barack Obama’s (D-USA) administration is behind this is simple. They refuse to recognize the failure of Keynesian economics, and thus don’t understand why the economy is not recovering. Given that, this is the only bullet left in their gun, so they have to try it.

Their exact plan is to buy from $600 billion to $1 trillion in government securities. Of course, we don’t have the money to do this, so we’re just printing it. As I said, almost a year ago today, this is an exceptionally bad idea. At the time, I was discussing our historic debt and what to do about it. Here’s what I said then (emphasis added):

So the problem is the debt-to-GDP ratio. There are exactly four ways to reduce it. I suspect that we’ll have to do at least two of them.

1) Grow the economy

2) Cut spending

3) Increase taxes

4) Print money

I’m no Nobel Laureate, but if there’s another way, I sure don’t know about it.

Let’s assume that we’re not going to buy our way out of this by printing obscene amounts of money. You get double and triple digit inflation that way and destroy the economy. Generally, that’s a last resort. And usually fails in any event.

Everything Obama has tried has failed at #1. He’s utterly opposed to #2, and the economic situation and the new Congress makes #3 out of the question. We’re now left with #4, the one that I assumed at the time we’d not be stupid enough to attempt.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Salvor Hardin makes the following famous quote, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” I should write a whole series of posts about that and terrorism, but I digress. However, what Bernanke is planning here is a violent solution to our economic woes and demonstrates his incompetence and general unfitness for the position he now holds.

How does this relate to former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) and the WSJ? She lays it out in detail here.

We shouldn’t be playing around with inflation. It’s not for nothing Reagan called it “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.” The Fed’s pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed’s proposals “clueless.” When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.

(read the whole thing)

China has also ridiculed the plan. Now, generally I’m not a globalist, and usually don’t care what other countries think of our policies. The reason is simply that countries act in their own best interest, and they ridicule our policies when they believe they impact their best interests. The problem is that generally it’s not worthwhile to assume that our best interest is the same as someone else’s, so listening to these whinings is self-defeating.

However, when we’re talking about a global recession, there are times that our interests converge. Germany, China, and everyone else who exports to us is interested in our economic growth. And they realize that this is not the best way to get there.

Unfortunately, the WSJ doesn’t get it either. And they don’t even read their own paper, hence the other part of my subject.

From the WSJ:

Unlike most U.S. economists and politicians, however, Palin tries to draw the concerns about quantitative easing to inflation today and falls short. She says, “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”

Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record (since the Labor Department started keeping this measure in 1968). Even if you pick a single snapshot — say, September’s year-over-year increase in prices — that was just 1.4%, far better than the 6% annual increase for food prices recorded in September 2008.

But also from the WSJ:

An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America's supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.

Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months.

If you’re having problems reconciling the two articles, you’re not alone. You’re with Palin, as a matter of fact.

And, as Ed Morrissey notes:

The problem isn’t that this current inflation rate is somehow historically large.  It isn’t, as Reddy and the original WSJ article notes, although retailers are already having problems in getting consumers to purchase goods in normal quantities because of it.  The point Palin made was that taking a voyage on the QE2 would make a difficult issue for consumers and retailers much worse through the deliberate introduction of even higher inflation, an explicit motivation behind the Fed’s actions.

So Palin was right once again, and once again a reporter winds up with egg on face from starting out with an assumption that Palin couldn’t possibly know what she’s talking about.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Many people are wondering whether Palin is going to run for President in 2012. Many people are wondering if she should, and think she’d be a bad choice for the GOP.

However, Palin continues to make her voice heard against the atrocities being planned and committed by this administration. It was through her efforts that the death panels (no, I’m not going to lessen that phrase by putting quotes around it) were removed from the disaster known as Obamacare. Time and time again she has forced the administration to respond to her and to the American public. And, as above, time and time again, they have underestimated her.

I would gladly post an article here about Romney or Huckabee statements, but they are startlingly quiet, only speaking out on shows like Face the Nation and Meet the Press when directly asked. It has been Palin who has consistently shown initiative and determination in fighting this administration. In short, Palin has shown real leadership, while Romney et al have shown the ability to go whichever way the wind blows.

Something to consider, just like Palin’s words on QE2.

21 November, 2010

College Football Update 11/21/2010



Congratulations to Boston College, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, Illinois, SMU, Notre Dame, and BYU which all became bowl eligible this week. That brings the number of bowl eligible teams to 64. There are 35 bowls this season, so we only need 6 more teams.

Condolences to Purdue, Indiana, Kent State, Utah State, Marshall, Tulane, Arkansas State, Mississippi, and Iowa State, which can no longer reach bowl eligibility this season (unless the rules change). That brings the number of teams ineligible for bowls to 36.

There are 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision (the division formerly known as D-1A) for those keeping score at home. So, if the number of ineligible teams reaches 51, we have a problem.

Ratings?

Computer top 5:

  1. Oregon
  2. Boise State
  3. Auburn
  4. TCU
  5. Stanford

The computer rating is a composite of a “Win”-based rating much like what’s used in the BCS, and a somewhat Margin-Of-Victory (MOV) based rating.

In case you’re interested in the breakdown, here’s Win:

  1. Auburn
  2. Oregon
  3. TCU
  4. Boise State
  5. Stanford
Here’s this week’s MLE top 5:
  1. Boise State
  2. Oregon
  3. Alabama
  4. Auburn
  5. Stanford