More representation for the people does not equal "bigger government and more politicians"

The last thing most Americans want is a bigger government and more politicians, yet the solution to the zero-sum redistricting game is to create more seats for the House of Representatives.

More.

The founders of this country wanted representation to GROW with population. The original formula, never ratified, would have entitled every 50,000 Americans to one representative in the House. You know, one who might actually know who the hell you are and what you think, elected by funds raised from you and not from special interests a thousand miles away?

Mostly Republicans stopped this constitutional process in 1929 by act of Congress, fixing representation at 435 in the US House. But the impulse to Congressional supremacy over the other branches of government has ever been bipartisan.

Now, the "ideal" House district represents 761,000 people. All it takes is an oligarchy of 218 to decide the fate of hundreds of millions, whose leader is a shadow president popularly known as The Speaker of the House who can serve year upon year while the real president is limited to two terms.

Such an awful outcome was never intended by the framers.

The resulting system has turned politics into a binary pressure cooker without a relief valve, threatening to explode in another civil war at any moment, if contemporary doom and gloom political rhetoric on the extremes of both sides is to be believed. 

In fact thousands upon thousands of Congressional staffers and lobbyists run everything and write the legislation, not the people through their elected representatives.

Politics is a fact of life. Aristotle taught us that man is a political animal.

Denying that fact is the surest route to the barbarism of civil war, or the present system of legislative tyranny which has saddled the American people with $30 trillion of debt. 

A bigger House is actually a smaller government where you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Mark Krikorian hits on the sorry truth about Trump and Elise Stefanik

MAGAworld pans Stefanik :

...

“She ties with a couple other Republicans for the worst career voting record on immigration in New York,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the anti-immigration Center on Immigration Studies, ticking off a few of her previous positions: a yes on H-2B visas, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, and the Hong Kong Refugee bill, and a no on Trump’s child border separation policies.

“Obviously, Republicans in New York are likely to be more liberal, just because that's the environment they're in,” Krikorian said. “I think everybody understands that. But even by the standards of New York state Republicans, she's bad on immigration.” ...

Krikorian, whose institute is not weighing in on the conference chair election, noted that while Cheney’s downfall was sparked by her criticism of Trump, what had truly tanked her was her ideology, bolstered by her family name: The Wyoming congresswoman’s neoconservative beliefs have no place in today’s GOP.

Stefanik’s positions weren’t much more palatable to the party base, in Krikorian’s view.

“Trump, in his gut, does think we should get out of Afghanistan, he does think there's too many illegal aliens coming over the border,” he observed. “It's not that he doesn't believe any of that stuff. It's just that he's kind of a narcissistic guy. And if people flatter him, he's for them, regardless of what they believe. And so the question is: Do you go for Trumpism? Or do you go for Trump?” 

The system which protects us from tyrants has done so only because we are, when all is said and done, still loyal to it. There was never any danger of a tyranny from Trump, who was easily the weakest president in living memory.

But Trump's character is clearly of the sort Aristotle warned us about. The thing is, we do little worrying about the proliferation of wretches like Stefanik who eventually make the rise of actual tyrants, dangerous men of strong, determined, and ruthless character, more likely.

"And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for they love the virtuous, but flatter none."

It's been a bumper crop of stupid lately from the PhDs, from Boston University to Hillsdale College

Ibram Kendi of Boston University for The Atlantic completely slaughters the meaning of the traditional Latin motto of the United States, perhaps the most basic thing everyone used to remember from civics classes, and Ben Winegard of Hillsdale College doesn't have the foggiest idea that "contingency" is a philosophical concept derived from Aristotle by way of St. Thomas Aquinas (contingent being), and that Gould is actually arguing against egalitarianism.

You don't have to be Rush Limbaugh to be a big fat idiot these days.

Could be just about anybody, and too often is.

Beware dumbasses . . . everywhere.

The author of Bronze Age Mindset and its review by Michael Anton both seem to miss its thesis actually unfolding in our time

Are the kids (alt)right?:

To paraphrase Woody Allen (whom, I hasten to add, BAP does not quote), life wants what it wants. What does it want? At the upper reaches, among the higher animals (BAP is relentlessly hierarchical), what it wants is mastery of “owned space.” “Owned space” is the most important concept introduced in Part One and the key to understanding the rest of the “exhortation,” if not necessarily the rest of the book. BAP argues that life, fundamentally, is a “struggle for space.” All life seeks to develop its powers and master the surrounding matter and space to the maximum extent possible. For the lower species, this simply means mass reproduction and enlarging habitat. For the higher animals, it means controlling terrain, dominating other species, dominating the weaker specimens within your own species, getting first dibs on prey and choice of mates, and so on. BAP sees no fundamental distinction between living in harmony with nature and mastering nature. All animals seek to master their environments to the extent that they can, and the nature of man, or of man at his best—the highest man—is to seek to master nature itself. Not in the Aristotelian sense of understanding the whole, nor in the Baconian sense of “the relief of man’s estate” via technology and plenty; more to assert and exert his own power. Indeed, BAP posits an inner kinship between the genuine scientist and the warrior; he calls the former “monsters of will.” ...

Early modernity actually offered the higher types vast opportunities to explore and conquer new space. Thus bugdom is not caused or defined by science and technology. To the contrary: science and tech at their best can form a kind of frontier that allows for man’s higher motives to find vent when and where space is constrained. For BAP, science in modern times is, or should be, a manifestation of the will to conquer space.

Sheesh, ever heard of SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic? The highest men are already there, diligently working to master heaven itself.

Stop the preening and get with the program.

Aristotle thought man was uniquely a political animal, Richard Spencer thinks man is merely an animal

And, of course, Richard Spencer is a very intelligent imbecile.

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. 

-- John Donne

Trump as state capitalist: Once was a one-off, twice is a Freudian slip

Trump's brain has no room for the individual qua individual, only for the individual as representative of a brand. The higher reality, the organizing principle of society is the group and the corporation, without which the individual doesn't exist. In that sense he's a good Aristotelian:

Tim Cook is Tim Apple, Marillyn Hewson is Marillyn Lockheed.

Good dog: Battle Beagle has been thinking about Aristotle

The excerpt comes from Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance by Guillaume Faye (Arktos, 2011).

George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who doesn't vote and won't vote, epitomizes everything loathsome about libertarians

It's hard to choose just one thing he says here which is objectionable, since it's all objectionable, but I'll pick this one:

"When I look at voters, I see human beings at their hysterical, innumerate worst. ... [C]onsorting with bad people hurts you deep inside. Politics isn't utterly hopeless, but it's mostly hopeless. The only way I know to escape this darkness is to focus on the tiny corner of the world in my control and make it beautiful and pure. Call me anti-social if you must. Unlike your candidates, at least I'm honest."

Professor Caplan does not know himself, which these days seems to be a requirement of elites and a major cause of modernity's manifold discontents. Clearly he thinks himself above us as if he were a god when he is actually nothing but a wild dog. I pity his students, and his children.

[M]an is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless" man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war') inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. ... [A] man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. ... For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony.

-- Aristotle, Politics 1.1253a 

Keith Koffler says Obama really went to Vegas to play golf: round number 204

Here:

Is This The Real Reason Obama Announced the Order in Vegas?

President Obama today is playing golf at the Shadow Creek golf club in North Las Vegas, reputed to be the nicest golf course in Vegas. It’s 55 degrees and mostly sunny.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The object of government in a tyranny is the good of one man only." -- Aristotle

News networks to help Obama by not broadcasting his unconstitutional plan to break the immigration law

There's no sense in riling up the people unnecessarily over such a trivial issue, after all. Note that this blackout includes so-called conservative Fox News Network, which is co-opted by its open-borders libertarian owner, Rupert Murdoch (Australian-American naturalized in 1985).  

"If anyone assumes the government by fraud [hello ObamaCare] this is a tyranny. ... To preserve a tyranny ... guard against everything that gives rise to high spirits." -- Aristotle

Ebola Virus Divides America: Alinsky's Rule of Polarization as practiced by Obama comes straight out of Aristotle

Most of these ordinary safeguards of tyranny are said to have been instituted by Periander of Corinth, and also many such devices may be borrowed from the Persian empire. These are both the measures mentioned some time back to secure the safety of a tyranny as far as possible [including] . . .  to set men at variance with one another and cause quarrels between friend and friend and between the people and the notables and among the rich . . ..

-- Aristotle, Politics, 5, 1313ab

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

-- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

$82,077: What you need to make to afford the median existing home price in May 2014

The median sales price of an existing home in May rose to $213,400 from $201,500 in April.

In May you needed to make $82,077 for that home to be affordable to you.

In April you needed $77,500.

Housing affordability is generally calculated by multiplying your salary by 2.6.

Just 10.5% of individual wage earners made $80,000 or more per year in 2012, which means the vast majority of Americans must settle for homes which are priced in the bottom half of the market. Two people each making the median wage in 2012 of $27,519.10 could afford a home priced at no more than $143,100, which was the typical price of a suburban home in the collar communities of Chicago in . . . 1993, over twenty years ago.

"And it is a device of tyranny to make the subjects poor, so that a guard may not be kept, and also that the people being busy with their daily affairs may not have leisure to plot against their ruler. Instances of this are the pyramids in Egypt and the votive offerings of the Cypselids, and the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus by the Pisistratidae and of the temples at Samos, works of Polycrates (for all these undertakings produce the same effect, constant occupation and poverty among the subject people); and the levying of taxes, as at Syracuse (for in the reign of Dionysius the result of taxation used to be that in five years men had contributed the whole of their substance)." -- Aristotle, Politics, 5, 1313b.

Obama Befriends Illegals: ICE Arrests Plummet 40% Since 2011, 870,000 Deportable Aliens Remain Deep In Country

. . . and these Republicans support him.

The Daily Caller reports here:

Since June 2011, when the first of the Obama administration’s “prosecutorial discretion” policies were put in place, the [Center for Immigration Studies] report adds, interior ICE arrests have declined by 40 percent. ... ICE reports that there are more than 870,000 aliens on its docket who have been ordered removed, but who remain in defiance of the law.

To paraphrase Aristotle, citizens have the back of the king but a tyrant relies on foreigners for protection.

Real Median Income Falls 4.4% Under Obama, 6% Since 2007

You talkin' to me?

Way to go, Brownie!

Story here:

The median, or midpoint, income in June 2013 was $52,098. That's down from $54,478 in June 2009, when the recession officially ended. And it's below the $55,480 that the median household took in when the recession began in December 2007. The report says nearly every group is worse off than four years ago, except for those 65 to 74.

-------------------------------

"It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants." -- Aristotle, Politics

John Kass: Obama Played The Race Card On Purpose To Divide America

John Kass, Greek-American, channels Aristotle here in the Chicago Tribune:

Obama pronounced the killing as racially motivated, though he didn't use the words. He didn't have to, such is his prowess. It was so smooth that few noticed. He put the killing in a racial context, and that was enough. ... Race was established by the president of the United States, and by other political and media actors. It's a cynical business, about money and power, about keeping divisions between American tribes. There are the black tribes that see Martin in the context of the old civil rights struggles and leverage, and white tribes that see Martin being used to pummel them with racial guilt. ... Yet none of this tribalism has anything to do with what happened the night Martin was killed. Politicians don't worry about that. They're experts at the game of tribes, and a tribal America is what nourishes them.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The tyrant should endeavor that the whole community should mutually accuse and come to blows with each other." -- Aristotle, Politics V 

Obama And Holder WANT The Country Divided Over Race Relations

It's one key to maintaining their power:

"What has been already mentioned is as conducive as anything can be to preserve a tyranny; namely, to . . . endeavour that the whole community should mutually accuse and come to blows with each other, friend with friend, the commons with the nobles, and the rich with each other."

-- Aristotle, On Tyranny

NRA Grades Dem. Pestka Better Than Rep. Amash In Michigan 3rd

Don't believe it? See for yourself, here.

Michigan Democrats are making hay with this. A four-color direct mail piece arrived in my mailbox today highlighting the fact, mailed from the party office in Lansing.

Amash's beef with the NRA is principled, based on his belief, which is correct, that the Commerce Clause of the constitution is not the basis for legislation for interstate reciprocity for concealed carry. The McDonald decision is another example of a "victory" for gun rights which was wrongly decided, but the NRA nonetheless cheered. The NRA is not infallible, and Amash is right to point it out, but in the political contest against the foes of gun rights, his trumpet makes an uncertain sound.

But while Pestka scores better than Amash with the NRA, you'll notice there's no endorsement by the NRA. That's because NRA members think they know Amash is a friend of gun ownership who just hasn't yet persuaded the NRA to improve its constitutional interpretation.

One might be tempted from this to think Pestka is an alternative to consider instead of Amash, especially since liberals haven't been too happy with Pestka for once voting to de-fund abortion providers, something Amash recently couldn't bring himself to do, alienating social conservatives, including me (a specialty of libertarians like Amash). See the HuffPo story, here. But Pestka now regrets his vote. His record is being used opportunistically.

Amash continues to defend his vote against de-funding Planned Parenthood because singling out PP for defunding is unprincipled, thus favoring others who still get funding. To which we say, so what? There is tons of spending in government which is unprincipled because it picks winners and losers, and is otherwise simply wrong. To err on the side of picking losers by cutting them off isn't a failing, it's a start! The journey to a clean room begins with one moldy sock.

We shouldn't make the good the enemy of the perfect as Amash does now and again. It's a lesson learned from life experience, which Amash hasn't had enough of yet. That's an argument against investing young people like him with political power until they are ready, something Aristotle understood long ago, and our Founders understood when they enshrined age requirements for office in the constitution. The young are to be tested and tried as they climb a ladder of offices, an idea which derives from the old Roman cursus honorum, with which the Founders were intimately familiar. A good boy is just that. It remains to be seen if he turns out to be a good man.

Not all matters are susceptible of resolution by appeal to the constitution. It is not an infallible holy book which dropped from the sky for our instruction in everything, as much as we rightly submit to it. For example, the constitution is now schizophrenic because it allows those aged 18 to vote, but only those aged 35 to serve as president. It is probably only theoretical that one day there could be a dearth of people in the country old enough to serve as president, or that there might one day be a surplus of people serving in Congress under 35. Nevertheless in the former case the pressure to change the constitution to lower the age requirement would fly in the face of the Founders' wisdom, experience and judgment on the matter. In the latter it could happen that the death of the president and vice president might mean a too young speaker of the house would be next in line to the presidency, in violation of the constitution.

We adhere to the spirit of the constitution, but to which part? Shall we make the 26th Amendment the enemy of Article II. Section 1, or the other way around? Shall we stifle youth and enthusiasm utterly, or channel it and shape it?

Not everything is reducible to the letter on the page, or to a single principle one only imagines superintends our deliberations. What were once thought remedies on later reflection turn out to have been mistakes, which only the good mind can conclude. 

Imported British "Conservative" Condescends To Instruct Us About Communism

John Derbyshire

Here:

"But Barack Obama was never about the downtrodden masses. If he associated with revolutionaries such as Bill Ayers, it was only to feed off them and advance himself. Once he’d advanced, they went under the proverbial bus, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama. ...

"To be a real communist is to make a serious commitment to a cause. Communism is a hard dogma, completely at odds with the soft-handed girlish narcissism of a late-20th-century American leftist such as Obama, who has never risked, fought, struggled, or suffered."

Well, by this standard most businessmen, and most people who work with and for them, aren't real Americans either because the only thing they're committed to is the advancement of number 1. Nor are they real capitalists, but fascists, ever seeking preferments in law to protect their fiefdoms. Nor are they real Christians, eschewing renunciation of the world and service to the poor.

Serious commitment to anything hardly exists anywhere at any time for very long. There are only degrees of commitment, the few outstanding examples of which momentarily intrude upon our attention, as when devotees of a 7th century bandit religion would just as soon blow them- and ourselves to smithereens as live another day.

Just because Obama is a hypocritical communist fellow-traveler doesn't invalidate classifying him as one. After all, Obama also claims to be a Christian but believes things about the unborn and human sexuality which many a Catholic bishop would say destine him for hell, but people still say he is a Christian. Obama's lavish expenditures on his own presidency, which mark him out as a tyrant according to Aristotle ("the good of one man only"), stand alongside his belief in redistribution of income, in spreading the wealth around, in the same way that his friendship with and fundraising among the rich coexists with his sustained inveighing against them because in his opinion they do not pay their fair share in taxes.

The real problem with calling Obama a communist isn't that it isn't true but that the term doesn't exhaust the possibilities. What is instructive about Obama is that he is a blend of enthusiasms and idealisms, a character Herbert Hoover would have recognized as in the mould of FDR who admired the strong men of Europe, who were at once fascist, Nazi and communist. Obama may be a dilettante communist, but you'll still get an alphabet soup of statist experiments at his dinner table. 

But, of course, communist purists would demur at this point, Stalin having been an "aberration". Yet we still call Stalin a communist dictator and his rule a communist dictatorship even though Stalin's partnership with capitalism and people like Henry Ford arguably aligned Stalinism more with fascism than with communism.

Over time the terms lose their adequacy, primarily because they are invented by human beings who will do nothing if not disappoint, eventually. There's a word for that, but like "communist" the word "sinner", to quote our British instructor, is just not "ironic enough for our very ironic age".

Chicoms Have Biden's Back: "The guards too of a king are citizens, a tyrant's foreigners."

So says Aristotle in the Politics.

And Medvedev has Obama's back.

Slum Lord Obama: Lower Class Self-Identification Grows 28 Percent Since 2008

Story here.

Is Obama intentionally impoverishing the middle class as a means to overthrow the constitutional republic? You don't have to be a Marxist to think so.

"When there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end." -- Aristotle's Politics