The Nightingale And the Rose

Pardon me while I don’t quite bite. Anything can be spun, including facts and numbers - like ‘the economy is improving’ and ‘unemployment is decreasing‘ and ‘green‘ jobs are the future. It’s generally done by introducing a ‘new’ method of counting, using ‘new’ parameters and a different basket of assumptions. In education, overall results are generally improved by lowering the bar and dumbing down tests.

All this frantic fudging does not change a single thing of significance. Obama is still a socialist (whether we say it or not). And he may even be a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood for all we know (whether we even dare ask the question).

Partisanship has nothing to do with it. The proof is in the pudding. America is slipping, the dollar is slipping, our educational system is not producing and we are making mistakes in every area of endeavor relative to the rest of the world.

Whether we point it out or not, whether or not we’re turning off our radios because we’re sick of hearing about it, it’s happening at an alarming rate.

I note that the Batchelor show has one big advantage over everybody else in the business: he doesn’t take calls. Therefore he’s spared the tedious bleating of the inarticulate, the partisan poisoned, and the uninformed. Batchelor only talks to ‘experts’; meaning, that what has made them experts is in large part their familiarity and comfort level regarding language. This translates well to radio. It does not mean, however, that the ‘great unwashed’ - the rest of us - have nothing to say.

While everyone likes to claim the people’s support for whatever murderous scheme they might find themselves accessories to, they remain prepared to drop public opinion for expediency’s sake. In Beck’s case, I am not so sure his being dropped from major markets has so much to do with poor ratings as with his fingering of the great puppet master himself: Soros, who seems to have his fingers in every conceivable pie - just as I never believed that the re-elections of Reid and Pelosi were entirely free of electoral fraud.

I just finished reading ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ by Oscar Wilde. It is one of the stories that came in a volume published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin. Like Grimm’s fairy tales, the themes in these stories are not necessarily all clover and honey. Some serious issues are explored here under guise of clear language and simple metaphor. ‘Nightingale’ for instance explores the notion of personal sacrifice for a lost cause. It can bring tears to a child’s eyes and continue to haunt into adulthood.

In America, there have been many more such sacrifices than those currently living here. In fact, it could even be said, that every grave in America holds the remains of a martyr who had some sense of the eternal. What would any of them say if they were to come back today and watch the rose tossed carelessly aside to be crushed by an unseeing wagon wheel? Would they be impressed by the gloss of manipulated polls and surveys? Or would they be moved to weep at the flag (they fought and died for in some cases) being dragged through the muddy streets of our relentless discontent?

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Snow Job

POTUS is not independent. FLOTUS thinks she is.

I worked for a service-based company for many years. Time and time again I refused promotion. Promotion meant a desk, uncompensated overtime, scheduling and personnel issues. It meant taking irate telephone calls from customers. It meant being the man in the middle, squeezed from both ends - like toothpaste.

POTUS thought he’d be in charge. Instead, he finds himself squeezed. FLOTUS cannot understand why her articulate husband is s such a wimp. “Do it,” she says. “Bleed them dry. Make them give it back.” POTUS knows it’s not that easy. He hesitates, postpones. Among all the twists and turns, he’s lost sight of the revolution.

FLOTUS has no qualms, only resentment. She resents America, its institutions, its predominance. She resents her husband for not getting it done.

POTUS doesn’t like his job. He doesn’t like to face his wife empty-handed. Cigarettes are easier. They burn down and you light another one. One way or another, eventually the job gets done. But it’s not pretty or spectacular. Difficult to script a martyr’s video on the basis of lung cancer.
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I usually look on the prospect of snow in horror. But I always manage to get it done - one shovel full at a time. This time there were three of us: my son, my brother and me. It was a glorious morning's exercise. We actually had fun.

http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

On the Flooding in Pakistan

Now that the world’s only superpower has been sufficiently hobbled to the wild cheers of it’s enemies, these self-same enemies are lamenting that they themselves are going down. Where are all the others to help? China? Russia? Venezuela? Brazil?

Predictably, America still bears much of the blame: not enough aid, expertise, outpouring, generosity, etc. In addition, it’s America’s fault that so much rain has fallen in the first place. It’s all a trick by the Great Satan to punish Muslims. It’s been proven and widely flaunted by the Americans themselves, after all; that ‘global warming’ causes such catastrophes and that America is first and foremost responsible for ‘global warming‘. All the more reason to double down on the ‘Great Satan’, to bring him to his knees and rid the world of this singular evil.

No doubt, this is the template by which the next crop of mosque sermons will be written. At least, in America, a man - a brother - has now come to power; a man who has been the first from that nation to acknowledge that eight years of Bush’s policies - indeed, the whole history of America’s shameful rise on the backs of the poor - has been instrumental in bringing us to this sad point. Israel, that shining abomination (on the hill) - by the grace of this singularly enlightened individual - can now no longer expect the West’s illicit support for its shameful insistence on maintaining its heathen stain on the sacred land of the faithful.

He (Obama) has come out in favor of building a holy mosque, near Ground Zero no less; which is destined to rise much faster, much higher, than the star-struck replacement for what has been brought down and reduced to ash in the name of Allah. Our flag, our minaret(s), will point proudly skyward on the day of the tenth anniversary of our heroic victory over capitalist blight - thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the enlightened one. The mean remnant of unbelievers will fail to stop our progress in bringing to the world shariah by which we will then proceed to cleanse all mankind of its sin.

As for our dead and dying, we grieve as is natural. It is Allah’s will. They are the martyrs who in both large and small ways have sacrificed (or are in the process of sacrificing) their existence for the greater glory of Islam - the only true religion. For even as we die our quiet deaths, America’s fall will reverberate around the world and usher in righteousness.

Allah Akbar!

'Disgrace'

One must always keep in mind that every loss is a win for somebody; that every failure opens a door to a fresh opportunity; that every defeat is celebrated somewhere as a victory. When we say that things do not look good, we say so strictly from the viewpoint of our own perspective. Because we are blinded by vanity, we assume that everyone else sees everything the same way we do. But how can this be?

The 9/11 skyjackers targeted the twin towers. You might say they had a brief moment of celebration when they were about to hit their mark. Indeed, the whole of the Middle East celebrated along with them. They became martyrs, heroes to millions. If there is such a thing as 72 virgins, these are with them now. They are not in hell, eternally suffering. They have redeemed themselves; they have found salvation in achieving their purpose.

In fact, they have achieved even more than they had hoped for. Primarily because of 9/11, America today stands divided and bankrupt. It has become a political ruin. All her geo-political alignments are poised to collapse as well: UK, Israel, Western and Eastern Europe…

We know how these things happen. We hear them carefully delineated endlessly: the milestones that mark the fall of great powers. Yet, we can no longer defend ourselves against the onslaught; we cannot stop our plunge into the abyss. History is against us. Islamists and communists, by the sheer weight and momentum of history, are slated to win the next round.

I just finished reading the novel, ‘Disgrace’ by J.M. Coetzee. The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature for same. Given the Nobel committee’s proclivity to use its considerable platform to promote ideology, we can therefore assume that this slim volume can also be read as a political statement. Coetzee is South African. He writes about his country; his experience. He evaluates the changes that loom large in his part of the world: the end of apartheid; the chaos that ensues in the vacuum created by the forced departure of the old order. The protagonist is an academic – a teacher of traditions that have become irrelevant.

In an earlier thread I spoke of alternatives. J. M. Coetzee, the author of ‘Disgrace’ has left South Africa and moved to Australia.