JUDGMENT - The Missing Moral Principle

Who is the Ragnar Danneskjold* of our time? Who is calling the destroyers of value to account?

We live in a time of a giant sucking sound. The WEST is flushing itself down the toilet.

Why? It cannot pronounce moral judgment. When I say "it," I mean that the culture is in such a weakened state that a strong pronouncement of moral judgment to true matters up would be shouted down as unseemly. Given this state, the strong pronouncement will have to be yelled through a din of naysayers. Someone will hear it anyway. I promise you, I will hear it if it can be heard.

I dedicate this piece to Bosch Fawstin. He's fearless, especially in his fingering the contradictions and inhumanity of the Muslims, and I love him for that. I really liked his entry into the Twin Towers Goes Global contest. Maybe now they can get why people don't want the Ground Zero Mosque.

Along this line, I've been thinking of all the "brands" that are being diminished because the people who speak for and work to enhance those brands will not pronounce moral judgment against Obama who, highly associated with them, is taking them down with him.

Here's some: Democrats, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Oprah, Unions, Blacks in general, and the USA. (The only one I care about supporting is the USA. The rest will have to earn my respect one man or institution at a time.)

Wouldn't it be something if a leader from Harvard came forward and said that he now sees, with Obama as its currently most famous product, the enormous cost of Affirmative Action? OR wouldn't if be astounding if a black leader came forward and said that it's time for blacks to stop acting like a "pack" that "goes along to get along" and call Obama to account for all of his violations of human freedom, the most precious of conditions for the people who knew and tell the stories of slavery? Wouldn't it be amazing if a Democrat denounced Obama for enacting policies destroying the economy stating that it is time to call him to account regardless that he is black? Or gosh, wouldn't it be something if someone would stand up for America and apologize to "the best within us" for "forgetting who we are," by letting Obama, our President, besmirch the ideal that quickens the beat of the human heart around the globe?

All of us are going to pay dearly for "going along" with Obama - the Con. Every brand associated with Obama will pay. Oprah has never been held as high as she was before she endorsed Obama. (It's interesting about Oprah. People loved her and were always talking about her when her program was geared to all people. Who is she now that Obama favors blacks over whites in instance after instance and she says nothing? Swiss cheese?)

Harvard and Columbia are being drug through the streets insofar as providing a solid education for real values. They are gaining the reputation of being an intellectual hot house that doesn't know what goes on in the real world.

Chicago and Illinois have been corrupt for a long time, but now they have taken on a real and dangerous quality that they didn't have before. Why? Obama thrived there.

America granted grace, which I don't think has been an entirely good thing since freedom is its own reward, to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. That's over. I called the grocery clerk to account where before I would have let her slide.

The thing that is so clearly missing in the public arena of our era is judgment. No one will pronounce it. No one will take action for a proper standard. No one in Congress is making a dent on the corruption that is overtaking our government. It is simply missing.

In the ever-present choice of wings or spine, we've chosen wings.

36"w x 24"h acrylic on canvas, 2004

Where is the spine. It doesn't exist in this soupy, slurpy world of words. Just words - words that mean nothing except to have you think they do. For every statement coming out of Obama's mouth, we have a video or audio clip of him saying the opposite. Insanity reigns. Obama, the Con, spins more words tonight in his Jobs Speech. Words, just words. Except they are costing us not only our treasure, but our moral vitality.

Obama may paint a socialist utopia, but we all know that it shall not happen. Never has, never will. Why would it? No one gives a damn. And, no one does because the government won't allow it. Who can care when you are regulated from morning 'til night and this plague is spreading faster than we can get rid of it?

All will stop when someone with a voice that can be heard pronounces moral judgment - the judgment that gives one's moral vitality a bracing jolt!**

Who among us possesses THE VOICE THAT CAN BE HEARD? That is who we are waiting for.

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*Ragnar Danneskjold is a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He was a pirate for justice. He calculated the amount a businessmen deserved from his production and trade, because he earned by trading value for value. Then he would attack ships which the government used to transfer wealth from America to People's States around the globe. (Sound like Obama?) When he got the wealth on board, he took it to a place where it was held in account for the producer of it. It became available to him when he chose to take his power back, go on strike and renounce being a sacrificial lamb.

**Ayn Rand is the only one in my lifetime that has done this. And she did it the hard way. She earned it.

Our Incredibly Shrinking President

(Today I would like to register a rename for this article. It should read, "Our Incredibly Shrunken President." It's clear to me that Obama has never had a stature that he could shrink. He's been operating from the premises he's operating from now for a long, long time. He is stricken with the incredible facility to be Alinksy incarnate. I think he is a monster, my category for his character. Allowing Louisiana, to the tune of blocking efforts to save her shores and her industry and then suing Arizona when the Federal Government's role is to protect her borders, is beyond the pale. This man, to me, is on the order of all the heartless dictators the world has known and I don't see how he can do anything except get worse. His work to keep America in a perpetual Jerry Springer drama as a way of life has me write him off as a misguided, evil human being. It's definitely unfortunate for us that he has so much power to wield, and I hope we get him out of office before he develops paranoia to a degree whereby he feels justified to act even more irrationally. He's definitely animating the forces to vote him out of office. July 6, 2010)
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Yesterday was a new low for President Obama. We are now witnessing the "chickens coming home to roost" on a host of his bad premises. This happened yesterday in his remarks about the oil spill.

First, and I think the most despicable, happened when he used his daughter to create an appeal to his listeners' emotions. He said his daughter said to him, "Plug the hole, daddy." That was theater, nothing more. However, it was revealing because he threw his daughter under the bus and ran over her privacy all in service of his "any means necessary" modus operandi premise. Because this statement came off as inauthentic, his use of his daughter opened her to public "use" in service of political points and who knows what else.

This morning on the Glenn Beck show, who, by the way, I'm liking more all the time (see next paragraph), he had a segment where his associate played the daughter, asking her "daddy, the President", all kinds of questions and offering her observations about the world. Obama opened his daughter to this. We can now look forward to a "do as I say, not as I do" upbraiding of Beck. I suppose this megalomaniac will attempt to ban free speech rather than apologize to his daughter and stop using her as pawn in his political power games.

Today I ran across this quote of Obama's about 9/11: "The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity." Yet, when it came to using his daughter as a pawn in his games, he forgot all of this and used her anyway. Obama is the disconnect that he names in his 9/11 remarks.

(About Beck: Beck is doing such investigative and historically integrative work. The last couple days he has been showing how the structure of the Progressive Administration of the "evil" (his description and one I agree with) Woodrow Wilson was picked up by FDR and now picked up by Obama, albeit using different particular forms for the same basic purposes in the latter two cases. Also, I give Beck a big medal of courage for the "teaching" he is doing. Really great. He's one of the amazing media people of our time. And my accolades are in spite of his ultimate grounding in God [faith] rather than in nature [facts] when he gets to the roots of his conceptual structure.)

The second thing O did was tell us his experience in his own bathroom, looking morning and night in the mirror at his constantly worried face. I was listening to his remarks for the facts I could learn about what is going on and what his plans are in relation to it. Instead I get this trip to his bathroom. (Faulty premise: The personal trumps our common values.)

Talk about whiplash. I wondered: "Where has this man's mind gone?" It is gone, I'm sure of that. He's not capable of knowing what is on purpose and what is not, and where his listeners are, and so he's now trying to enroll us that he, after all, is worrying about this problem. Sorry. Doesn't fly, Barack. We expect that. That would be normal and not mentionable.

(Makes you wonder if he had to say that. Is it because he isn't worrying about it? Or is he worrying that people who mean something to him are getting upset with him? Or maybe he really likes the oil spill and wants to use it to kill energy production in all traditional forms through taxation and regulation. I don't know, but his behavior raises such questions - especially when he is going off to Chicago over the weekend, playing golf, and generally living life as he always does - I'm sure justifying, all the while, that this current trouble requires getting away to clear his head. Actually I think he is doing that because he suffers from victim's disease - "I'm entitled." (Faulty premise: I'm somehow not constrained by the morality that mere mortals are constrained by.)

One thing I do know. THIS MAN IS NOT COUNT-ON-ABLE! He will never be there when the country needs him. Frankly, I think he's committing disloyalty to our country, our home, on a grand scale - treason - and he needs to be called to account as soon as possible.

The last thing he did was address people accusing him of not getting on the problem and causing a solution. He's been railing against BP and big oil, capitalist, and the all of it. So in his fear, he runs for the high ground only to see that it's not solid. (Faulty premise: Words is all that matter. Deeds and the meaning of words count for nothing.)

His answer is to declare that he and his Administration have been in charge of this matter from the first hours of its happening. So, if he's responsible, he owns it - all of it. So all the vituperation to BP and anyone trying to get the problem fixed is now useless by him when uttered in public. After all, it is only Barack being pissed at himself since he is the owner of it all. Woops!

Obama's mind is shot. There is no doubt about that. Our work is to maintain the grounding to be sure that we can see what is true and what is b--s---. True to a sociopath's nature, his job is to get us to think he is God and we don't know what we are talking about. Good luck. It's woolly out there.

A person, by the way, doesn't have to have a degree from Harvard or Columbia and in fact, one is likely better off if he doesn't have that. That's because these universities are notoriously intellectually corrupt, and in order to have power to produce results in the world depends on one's solidly grounded, conceptual structural. Then when some high blown guy comes along, one can hear where his assertions and underlying premises don't jive with the basics. Obama has no clue about this. Nada. He thinks we cling to our guns and our religion. Oh my.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend in this great country that still enjoys the bounty of the independent minds that have continued to create it.

Speaking into the Listening? Hell No!

When China's concern is the stability of the dollar so they get their money back, Obama has no idea what their concerns are. They had to ask. Here.

To get questioned about our domestic issues on the world stage is an embarrassment which Obama and the Democrats have caused. Rather like your neighbor asking you in public if you can afford something you are about to buy.

Obama then talks about how no nation should dominate another, delivering his view of a fantasy world. The thing he leaves out is that free trade does not operate on the principle of force and domination. If a company, a corporation or a country is dominant in the field, it is because they earned that position. Obama seems completely unaware that voluntary interactions and agreements can occur among men and that they are the basis for civilization. For him there is only force and that's why he is compelled to tell people they shouldn't do that.

Given his point of view I'm expecting the bows to get lower and lower until he finally just prostrates himself flat on the floor before any man who will give him an audience.





The man offends my sensibilities.

It's in the Listening, Stupid!

On Drudge tonight, there is a headline that Obama is getting skinny. Things aren't working. His approval ratings are going basically in one direction.


Why aren't things working? "I've got the skill. I know the art. But my smooth-talking isn't making the difference. Why not?"

"It's in the listening, stupid." Things are not working because Obama is not interested in what people are thinking and talking about. He wrongly believes that his power comes from the conversations he is speaking. They do not. He is completely controlled by the listening in the country, and if he is unable to speak into that, he loses the patience of his audience. And that is what is happening.

People are not stupid. Politicians and intellectuals of various types act as if they have some inside knowledge about life. When the government attempts to stimulate growth by borrowing and spending, for example, people know that it doesn't work in their lives so it isn't difficult to question whether this will work on a larger scale. When one loses a job, is it time to go borrow money? Whatever the hole one is in, borrowing money only makes it deeper. Wouldn't it be better to cut expenses, sell some things and create some operating room to produce a value that someone might pay you money for? Debt makes that process harder, logic tells me.

So unless a person is some kind of sycophant or wants to live in fantasy, he's going to be listening for how Obama and his Administration square themselves with reality. If, on the other hand, he hears Obama and his associates driving an agenda and not getting what the people are concerned about, then the people's experience is that they have not been heard and that Obama doesn't care about them.

Any ideas that fall on deaf ears go nowhere. One has to get what the ears want to hear and then his speaking will work wonders. But so far, the O is unwilling to find out what the ears want to hear. So they get more frustrated.

And, essentially, this explains the whole damn thing.

Obama is agenda driven. His powerful intention to push his agenda is what prevents him from hearing people's concerns. He seeks to dispell, even thwart, any attempts to reach him. When over a million people showed up on his lawn on September 12, he left town and acted like no one drove across country to Washington. He should have been down on that mall with his ear to the ground. Is it not clear that Obama is not interested in governing the people - all of them? But rather is scared of them and takes refuge in his toadies?

Reading a tabloid, Obama was reported to be smoking up to 2 packs a day. He's not getting the sleep he needs and is losing weight. He screams at his staff and makes impossible demands. At a recent public meeting a young boy asked, "Mr. President, why do people hate you so much?" Is this the question that is dogging him day and night?

Apparently Beck and Limbaugh are on O's enemies list. Why? He should be listening to them. They definitely do have their ear to the ground and know what is going on. That's why they have huge audiences - the very thing that Obama needs. Hmm. What's wrong with this picture, Mr. O?

Given that Obama is a personality, actually a celebrity personality, I could get why he would be concerned about such a question. As far as I can tell, he's never gotten any of his motivation from being a lawgiver nor a judge nor even a cop. He does like moralizing - those "I will always..." and "I will never..." statements - but his payoff is getting elected. He loves the attention and privilege (hotshot status) that comes with that. That looks to me to be the end of the story.

I don't see a President Obama who is on the side of humanity except in an old-fashioned, old country, anti-American kind of way. He takes sides and wants to take from one and give to another and revel in the power he has over people. He's not showing me any wisdom or even-handedness in the application of the law. He never mentions the subject. In the case of the Boston professor and the cop, he didn't even bother finding out what was going on. Rather, he immediately called the cop stupid and said that it is a known fact that cops profile blacks. This is the kind of thing that undermines the space people have for him. Those on the receiving end of those judgments don't like it and those on the other end get scared, not knowing where that kind of partisanship can lead.

But even with all of the negativity that he has drummed up over the months, he could change that quickly if he wanted. All he would have to do is set aside his agenda and start listening to people and their concerns. Seriously doing that, his solutions would likely start to dance with those concerns.

As it is, he's going to stress himself out and may even crack. If he's a puppet, which increasingly he looks to be, then he is not going to have any room to make adjustments. When Clinton learned this lesson after the Republicans took control of the Congress, he began to have some programs and policies that actually responded to what the country wanted and needed. But until he got the lesson, he was failing. Will Obama learn? Does he have the room to learn? Time will tell us.

Will The O grow? That is the question.

(Since writing this, I've seen two articles on listening. They are posted in the comments section. Perhaps O will begin to grasp this fundamental dynamic in any relationship. If not, the applause is going to thin out, man by man.)