Sometimes an old song you liked by haven heard in many years comes up on some radio station you happen to be listening to, and you bask in nostalgia. Some times this happens, and you cringe and wish you could travel back in time and beat the tar out of your younger idiot self.

I just heard Mother today. What a vile instance of self-righteous, victimhood! I can’t figure out how I managed to resist vomiting when I first heard this song, and how I could like it is an eternal mystery.

I can only hope that I just didn’t think about it because I liked other songs in the concept album–having to do with drafting young fathers and getting them killed, or public school, rather than about blaming one’s mother for one’s own giant deficiencies.

But it wasn’t just me. A whole generation imbibed this stuff. What were we thinking? Worse, what were we becoming?

“When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to collect his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge out to you. And if he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge. You shall restore to him the pledge as the sun sets, that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you. And it shall be righteousness for you before the LORD your God.” This verse occurred to me when I read and listened to this.

Mark Horne » 1 reason I am depressed this evening = spent day listening to talk radio.

Just to add something, not only are the importance of the Bush tax cuts in question, but the cause of the prosperity of the 80s requires some thought.  There is no question that Reagan’s policies were far better than Carter/Ford/Nixon/etc’s.  But Volcker’s willingness to put us through a recession to end the problems is also a huge deal.

Did we benefit from the anomaly of a Fed Chairman doing the right thing?

When Rush spoke at CPAC, he said virtually nothing about foreign policy. It gave me false hope. Needless to say, Fox News is worse (with the exception of “the freedom hour”!).

But even domestic policy comments are half delusional these days. This blog post summed up part of the problem, but it goes deeper. Every time I hear someone lauding the Bush tax cuts, I want to know if their data excludes the fact of tremendously low interest rates of the Bush regime–rates that caused a bubble that could only pop. Even if my hunch can be proven wrong, that work needs to be done. There are people far more skeptical of conservative claims than I am.

And then today I heard people singing the praises of Cheney. The same people who sneer at big-government conservatism laud the big-governor-in-chief. Bush destroys the GOP and we’re supposed to defend that legacy? How is nation-building and sending drone bombs into civilian-populated homes remotely conservative?

It is not. There simply is no conservative presence anywhere significant. Obama in the White House should be the beginning of great things for the GOP, but they are going to blow it.

Here is what I want to see as a real conservative movement:

Love of peace, hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the state governments toward the general government; a dread of standing armies; a loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizen; jealousy, Argus-eyed jealousy, of the patronage of the president.

Just dreaming.

I overall enjoy lewrockwell.com, but I’ve noticed something interesting. When discussing war, participants tend to be interested in talking about how the NT has primacy over the OT. But when the topic is resisting government through disobedience or rebellion, the NT isn’t appealed to all that much.

I wasn’t sure what this meant, but it led me to this video:

Because it reminds me that Matthew 6.25-32 was written to people under a much worse regime than Bush-Obama.

(here and then here, so far)

Top Senate Democrat: bankers “own” the U.S. Congress

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist

Goldman Sachs’ new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left Frank’s committee in September, will join Goldman as director of government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury Department. This is not Paese’s first swing through the Wall Street-Congress revolving door: he previously worked at JP Morgan and Mercantile Bankshares, and in between served as senior minority counsel at the Financial Services Committee.

So: Paese went from Chairman Frank’s office to be the top lobbyist at Goldman, and shortly before that, Goldman dispatched Paese’s predecessor, close Tom Daschle associate Mark Patterson, to be Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, himself a protege of former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin and a virtually wholly owned subsidiary of the banking industry. That’s all part of what Desmond Lachman — American Enterprise Institute fellow, former chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney and top IMF official (no socialist he) — recently described as “Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs.”

via Top Senate Democrat: bankers “own” the U.S. Congress – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

“You seem to think that you are defending this Hobbit hole from the enemy like you were the king defending his city against the forces of darkness,” said Gandalf to Frodo. The truth is that you are just hiding. You haven’t even explored all the halls here have you?”

Frodo shuddered. “I think the Halls I don’t use are not fit for much use. When I approach them I am sure I hear orcs creeping in the darkness.”

“Well,” said Gandalf sadly. “If you won’t even acquaint yourself with more of Westminster Halls than you are comfortable with, I suppose it is useless to ask you to venture outside and see the rocks and the green, Baggins.”

“Too much of a dangerous business,” muttered Frodo.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of my favorite novels and I need to re-read it. The plot was both hokey and epic. It needed to only be minimally interesting however (though it was much more than that) because it was a an anarcho-capitalist world. I loved it. I love the “hero” (Hiro Protagonist) and I loved the skater/message service girl (whose name escapes me) and I loved the horribly arrogant and impotant corporation that the Federal Government had become. I loved the “burbclaves” (suburban, franchised, “nations” [sort of:]). I loved that the whole thing sounded like a comic book (it was originally intended to be one).

The only thing about the set-up that bothered me was that the technology of the “metaverse” (3d, 1st-person, internet) seemed incomplete. Stephenson should have had people go ahead and plug in directly into the computer, rather than merely using visors and keyboards.

This closed out the cyberpunk era if I remember right. It wasn’t nearly as literary as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which started it all. But it was much more fun.

View all my reviews.