When you compare him with Reagan

Post #55,694 by Ashton 10/9/02 7:28:34 AM Reply	When you compare him with Reagan then you and I have different ideas about what intelligence means (never mind "IQ" - that's an outright hoax). Reagan was an actor (as all of us are of course, on the daily stage) -- but that's All he ever was; he never was a thinker and: it showed, quite long before the official Alzheimers diagnosis. Like Billy too, his 'innovation' was handed to him by others - on purely emotional judgments as always. IMhO. Happened to hear a NPR rebroadcast tonight, Clinton's speech at [link\|http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/EPA/EngNews/02S/EN3S/clinton.html\| UCB] ~2/02. This is the one in which (post-remarks) a questioner asked, "Why does the Right Wing hate you so much?" Clinton hesitated about 1 second: "Because I won." Obv. the audience [Roared] liked him a lot, but then, these are just academics and we all know how easily led They are ;-) He expanded: referred to the Repub. long-term (successful) strategy of characterizing Democrats, Libertarians -anyone not Them- as "cardboard cutouts"; example named was Dukakis and the 'reverse plastic surgery' done on him. "They thought they owned the White House, that they should own it; no Democrat would ever be President again. I learned about this Big-Lie technique by watching my Rt-Wing Yahoo Gramma at work, fucking with language.. at an early age. Pity that this link hasn't the full text of the speech and the Q&A -- and the extemporaneous wit, detail in actual English. You seem already to have forgotten his original 'policy wonk' sobriquet: he carried around in his head more relevant facts about US History, government orgs and their roles and policies -- and how these factoids often fit together -- than: any President, hell maybe any other single person ever with such power. As to the frequent innuendo that he didn't Really.. give a shit about the very many world issues about rich/poor and the effects upon the US of our policies towards these; the paucity of our expenditures in 'foreign aid' VS those of other civilized countries - that calumny would have to be backed with more than random cynical slogans from folks just like my wacko Gramma. Sorry Dan, but I think your filters missed the rest of the man. Hearing this speech and contrasting it with Dubya/Cheney and the Hawks and low-life lower echelons surrounding them (listed in more detail in a post above IIRC?) -- was a stark reminder of just How insouciant is our current Exec. branch, and how inarticulate / impoverished of original thought. (BTW - in another aside he explained the nasty DC environment! Gave a balanced and sympathetic description of the demands on congresscritters: expected to read all the bills, give parties to attract people to quiz re those, fly home on weekends, and raise impossible amounts of $$ [natch it was about campaign finance reform NOW] -- said they are all sleep deprived.) I think he's spot-on. The patent nastiness cannot be missed, in any case. Anyway, enough of this. Yes the system is broken horrifyingly: we are seeing just Now where that might lead next. It is, like the fav academic phrase about a submitted paper, so screwed up it's not even wrong. I don't think 'we' have the interest, the brains-generally or the guts to repair it. Sorry you're young enough to have to put up with what I foresee. I put a mini-review (in Reviews, natch) of a book publ. in Paris early '39 = before Poland, by an ex-Nazi satrap from Danzig, Hermann Rauschning: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West Found this in a friend's bookcase a few weeks ago - a revelation (for me). It filled in lots of blanks. I feel that I now -finally- comprehend (!) what Hitler and the Nazis were about (at and Only at: just that inner circle - the rest were fed regular and abrupt 'changes of focus' as part of an actual program; the street was fed pure BS for an equally sinister but clear purpose, etc.) Reread Sinclair Lewis's It can't Happen Here and the above, if you have the time - and you'll see why I deem the present Admin and its massive Corporate agenda to be a prelude to the permanent? / long-term de-Constitution of America. This unless a lot more spirit manifests strongly and soon. There are some utterly vicious ones in this mix. You don't have to literally goose-step, you know. I think it not improbable that I shall be heading towards Canada in the foreseeable, if a few checkpoints are next passed. I'd like to be mistaken, but I believe dumbth IS rampant here. Ah.. if the Web had existed in 1933 ... ... Sorry for you and yours, though I hear Simon Fraser U. uses IT folk too :-) No, it's just coincidence and logic - that that was also the haven in the S. Lewis book.. Luck to all, Ashton The US is no longer a Constitutional Republic - not since the PATRIOT Act became its own lampoon (of and for all of us).
Post #55,700 by boxley 10/9/02 8:01:30 AM Reply	Well at least your the correct race for canada some of us wouldnt do well at all there. thanx, bill will work for cash and other incentives [link\|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html\|skill set] "Therefore, by objective standards, the leading managers of the U.S. economy...are collectively, clinically insane." Lyndon LaRouche
Post #55,737 by screamer 10/9/02 10:20:00 AM Reply	The book sounded familiar to me... so I looked at a few old syllabi that I had laying around from my Russian undergrad days. The Russian department at my school was the German/East Asian languages department and I took a few "fluff" courses like the history of the German cinema and the history of Russian cinema... I also took a course in German history (from Kaiser to the Fall). In any case, I wrote a paper in a Russian literature class comparing and contrasting Rauschning's writings with Dostoyevski and Lermontov and Tolstoy... When googling I came upon this link, not necessarily pertinent to this discussion, but fascinating... [link\|http://www.writerscramp.ca/the_mythos.htm\|http://www.writersc...e_mythos.htm] I haven't lost my capacity for critical reasoning, but have started to be intuitively taken in by the slogan "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything". Seduced if you will. Perhaps I'm a nihilist, but damned don't wish to be one. Dan Just a few thoughts, Screamer Living is easy with eyes closed misunderstanding all you see, it's getting hard to be someone but it all works out it doesn't matter much to me J. Lennon - Strawberry Fields Forever
Post #56,064 by Ashton 10/10/02 5:23:46 PM Reply	Quite a tour de force In Germany and Austria at the beginning of the 20th century, such publications as Ostara taught initiatory knowledge, and lodges such as the Germanenorden and the Thule Gesellschaft who were outwardly innocuous fraternal orders, such as most Freemason lodges, began to take in the intellectual and mystically inclined members of the upper social classes on the Continent. It was no accident that one of the inner circle, a Fraulein Sprengel, became the secret conduit from Germany leading to the formation of The Golden Dawn order in England. Hmmm - got an Engl. version of that Rauschning comparison? Small world still. OK we can raise the matters up a scale or maybe two.. Ostara was IIRC a seminal influence in Hitler's search for a 'model' (?) to flesh out whatever megalomaniac stuff was floating around in his psyche. There are lots of good refs in that link, if anyone wants to take on the grokking of human psyches. (That won't come from Sociology or Psych 101) Since such models relate to Everything Imaginable, so they relate to the mindset of Dubya, Cheney and the midgets surrounding these. Theirs is a black&white worldview and a Fundamentalist black&white religiosity - of the superficial kind.. Perfect match for an Authoritarian mind. (And $$ - never forget that $$ was each's lifetime prime motivator) - at least after the coke act had to be cleaned up, in one case. Political power and $$ are interchangeable - once you have all the money. It is a natural to move on to the next echelon of people-control beyond merely 'hiring them'). Whether or not Duby/Cheney and the 3% main wealth-owners succeeded in today's aim of achieving unconditional surrender of Congressional power: this cadre would be (my) natural enemy anyway - on grounds of their unremitting shallow view of the aims and possibilities of life, and their manifest disrespect for all which makes live worth defending. These are the examples one has to 'excuse' - ever to justify the proposition that "there is Beauty in homo-sapiens at their best.." Tough sell on days like these last. ecce homo ... Ashton neither shocked nor surprised - just disgusted at how little [even] the Congress! understands in 2002 of their raison d'etre!
Post #56,102 by boxley 10/10/02 10:43:38 PM Reply	Hey Ash? give me a day or two to check something and get back to you on the golden dawn stuff. Wierd shit from long time ago, maybe Ill take it off line. thanx, bill will work for cash and other incentives [link\|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html\|skill set] "Therefore, by objective standards, the leading managers of the U.S. economy...are collectively, clinically insane." Lyndon LaRouche

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