Hatshepsut
Crusader
Ok. That's it!!!! No more reposting of moderately interesting articles to hash around. 
The Little Thread Which Grew - the Apollo '73 to Everything But
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Ted
Gold Meritorious Patron
Ok. That's it!!!! No more reposting of moderately interesting articles to hash around.
I enjoyed the article.
I also watch Glenn Beck and I listen to Rush.
And I enjoy Fox News.
And what else? I'll extend the list later.
Hatshepsut
Crusader
Going Hollywood
Thankyou Ted!
This is my baby brother who is an electrician in Orange County. He has always been an extra in films but had discontinued his efforts. Lately he has rekindled his ambitions to play the media game. He was in three commercials this year. Another comes out next month for Muscle equipment. He has been assigned a few more gigs. He finished his second as of late and is very pleased to report "They like me. They really like me!"
Carmelo posts family shots so here's one of mine.
Thankyou Ted!This is my baby brother who is an electrician in Orange County. He has always been an extra in films but had discontinued his efforts. Lately he has rekindled his ambitions to play the media game. He was in three commercials this year. Another comes out next month for Muscle equipment. He has been assigned a few more gigs. He finished his second as of late and is very pleased to report "They like me. They really like me!"
Carmelo posts family shots so here's one of mine.
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SweetnessandLight
Crusader
Well, doesn't he just look like a bundle of fun!!!
Glad he is working in the business again.
Glad he is working in the business again.
Hatshepsut
Crusader
He got tired of driving into LA. Then he started to get projects for developing reality shows. I guess he wants to maintain the contacts. All these cats put their names on a list and go for the initial interviews and just wait for the calls. The pay isn't great but the free lunch is good I hear. :wink2:
FoTi
Crusader
Hatshepsut
Crusader
He did. Now its just the 'agency'.
FoTi
Crusader
What's just the 'agency'?
Hatshepsut
Crusader
The department that posts the notices of 'types' needed' ...'amount paid'...'number to call.' I do not know who is keeping the cache of applicants on file for the casting department to look over. He told me his photos always have to be updated and sent in but I got no name for the 'entity' where he sends his stuff. :confused2:
FoTi
Crusader
He said he did this last gig through Central Casting.....is that the 'agency' that you are referring to? Central Casting is where all the extras call in for work.
I hope he gets something really good. Does he belong to SAG?
Hatshepsut
Crusader
Oh yeah. 
lkwdblds
Crusader
Dittos to Ted
Right on Ted! The pun is intended (using the word "right") Instead of Rush, I listen to Dennis Prager, my favorite radio talk show host. He is on at the same time as Rush in my area. I think that Glenn Beck has come up with a fresh approach in presenting the conservative point of view in politics. In doing this, he also unmasks the extreme left point of view.
The extreme left, funded by George Soros (spelling?) has an interesting dilemma. They cannot state what they actually believe or they would get a very small vote in all elections, perhaps 25%. Partly for this reason, they have to mouth platitudes that they do not actually believe in order to have a chance to win any given election. It is very easy to see through their propoganda. If you take what they are accusing their opponents of saying and doing, then you pretty much have their actual positions nailed down. I believe that they manufacture charges against their opponents, which are enthusiastically reported on by their captive mass media press. This is done to DEFLECT the public's attention so that the public will look elsewhere and never suspect that these false charges against others are actually identical to what THEIR core belifs are.
To me, Fox News is the least biased of the major networks. They definitely have a slant to the right which they totally acknowledge but, as their promo states, there is an actual attempt to be fair and balanced, and they almost always have one or more strong and well informed persons from the "left" present to give the opposing point of view.
The other news networks, all skewed fanatically to the left, claim that they are fair and unbiased and that they represent the mainstream views shared by the public. Most of their hacks, personified by Keit Olberman are slime. Others, such as Chris Matthews, are not pure slime, as Olberman is, but they claim to be neutral, and yet have an extreme left bias.
Lakey
Right on Ted! The pun is intended (using the word "right") Instead of Rush, I listen to Dennis Prager, my favorite radio talk show host. He is on at the same time as Rush in my area. I think that Glenn Beck has come up with a fresh approach in presenting the conservative point of view in politics. In doing this, he also unmasks the extreme left point of view.
The extreme left, funded by George Soros (spelling?) has an interesting dilemma. They cannot state what they actually believe or they would get a very small vote in all elections, perhaps 25%. Partly for this reason, they have to mouth platitudes that they do not actually believe in order to have a chance to win any given election. It is very easy to see through their propoganda. If you take what they are accusing their opponents of saying and doing, then you pretty much have their actual positions nailed down. I believe that they manufacture charges against their opponents, which are enthusiastically reported on by their captive mass media press. This is done to DEFLECT the public's attention so that the public will look elsewhere and never suspect that these false charges against others are actually identical to what THEIR core belifs are.
To me, Fox News is the least biased of the major networks. They definitely have a slant to the right which they totally acknowledge but, as their promo states, there is an actual attempt to be fair and balanced, and they almost always have one or more strong and well informed persons from the "left" present to give the opposing point of view.
The other news networks, all skewed fanatically to the left, claim that they are fair and unbiased and that they represent the mainstream views shared by the public. Most of their hacks, personified by Keit Olberman are slime. Others, such as Chris Matthews, are not pure slime, as Olberman is, but they claim to be neutral, and yet have an extreme left bias.
Lakey
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Ted
Gold Meritorious Patron
I forgot Dennis Prager. While I am at it I must add Ann Coulter to my list. I like her for her in-your-face, over-the-top, bust-you-out-of-your-now-I'm-supposed-to's stance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUc8nuo7HI
Enthetan
Master of Disaster
The article that Mary Miller's article refers to is at American Spectator.
The driving force behind the Tea Party movement is a sense of rebellion against the Republican Party elite.
Enthetan
Master of Disaster
An excerpt from Codevilla's article:
The Ruling Class
Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?
The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.
Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.
Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.
If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.
Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.
The Faith
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?
The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.
It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science." By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.
Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good men."
World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.
The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson's benevolent genius.
Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked by him). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have run America ever since -- turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.
As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved "scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)
The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
...
Enthetan
Master of Disaster
Nice Hats!
This speaks to point of the thread I started on "Government Stealth" that got shouted down by the "intellectualizers" on the board, who shouted their justifications of why the system is they way it is and accepted by them.
Our elected representatives are unconscionably derelict in their duty to actually pay attention to what is being generated as "ideas" and propositions that get "voted" on. They simply go with the flow of the system and pass stupid shit even without a true vote and, as cited above, without reading and knowing what it is they have passed into law.
R
I just posted an excerpt from the article that the Mary Miller article references.
The essence of the Ruling Class is not that they are necessarily smarter than the rest of us, but that they are connected. The important players know each other, and can do favors for each other, like persuading regulators to go easy on some people, and hard on others. Their real wealth is not expressed in their accumulated cash, but in their accumulated relationships, relationships cultivated for years or even generations among the players. Their wealth is not threatened by "tax the wealth" legislation, because their pet legislators have put loopholes into the tax code carefully crafted to exempt certain parties.
Enthetan
Master of Disaster
Right on, Lakey.
MSNBC is one of the "harder-Left" networks. Any place that would give a platform to raving moonbats like Olberman and Rachel Maddow cannot cast stones at anybody else for "bias".
Ted
Gold Meritorious Patron
Somes Got It, Some Ain't
Finally, a test where I am shown to be below average!
Narcissistic Personality Disorder: I scored 9. The average citizen scores 15. Many celebs score 18+.
Check it out.
http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm
Finally, a test where I am shown to be below average!
Narcissistic Personality Disorder: I scored 9. The average citizen scores 15. Many celebs score 18+.
Check it out.
http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm
FoTi
Crusader
- Status
