The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Four Haitians took off in a gray, Toyota Tacoma, two men, two women, each with a goose in their hands.

 

Facebook deletes Richard Dawkins

 

Democrat leader of the Hamas Caucus in the US House, Rashida Tlaib, says Democrat President Joe Biden supports genocide in Gaza

Genocide is fast becoming as obsolete as fascism.

 

When only Wikipedia gets it right about leftist terrorist and murderer Kathy Boudin, you know the world is truly upside down

 

Killing is saving

 

The Orwellian situation in Kabul right now began Feb 29, 2020 when Trump announced that the Taliban would be taking over the war on terror

 You read that right, the Taliban.

How did we not understand this 100% crackpottery for what it was at the time?

Down is up, evil is good, enemy is friend.

Starting at about the 3:15 mark.

The damage done to conservatism by Conservatism Inc. is Orwellian

The very essence of conservatism used to be all these things, American culture, history, nation, heritage, family and faith, spokes on the wheel of its organic whole. But the libertarians have co-opted all that away and replaced it with an ideology of materialism which has erased the memory of it to the extent that the two, conservatism and libertarianism, are now indistinguishable in the popular imagination.

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

CNN caught being Orwellian: Peace through violence

"Someone on the left thought 1984 was a policy paper instead of fiction unfortunately"

Seen here in the comments.

"No free speech for fascists" is incoherent and Orwellian

Charles C. W. Cooke, here:

“No free speech for fascists” is an incoherent, almost Orwellian, position. Happily – and on a routinely “bipartisan” basis – the Supreme Court concurs.

Open borders Republicans join hands with Democrats to extend Obama's Orwellian DACA overreach

Coffman

Remember, they're not "illegal immigrants", they're "childhood arrivals".

The Republicans named in the story here, where it is claimed there are up to 60 supporters in the US House Republican Caucus, are:

Senator Lindsey Grahamnesty Graham of South Carolina

Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado

Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen of Florida

Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida.

The House would need 290 votes to override a Trump veto of a bill exempting "Dreamers" from deportation for three years. In the Senate 67 votes would be required. A coalition of 194 House Democrats and 60 Republicans yields just 254 votes, not enough. In the Senate 19 Republicans would have to join 48 Democrats to override a Trump veto.

So Coffman wants to ram the bill through now, before Obama no longer has his pen and telephone.

To Tim Carney, the soul of the Republican Party in 2015 and beyond boils down to (mere) materialism

Here, without the mere:

"More broadly, the rising tide against Ex-Im exemplified a nascent Republican move away from corporate welfare. Marco Rubio led the fight to block an insurer bailout through Obamacare. Ted Cruz is leading in Iowa polls while unambiguously pledging to kill the ethanol mandate. Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and most of the rest of the field also feel compelled to inveigh against corporate welfare, even if they don't oppose it in every specific instance. There's a long way for the party to go, but they're at least marching in the right direction, because they're no longer always marching to K Street's tune. ... Dole, Lott, subsidized exporters and ethanol executives will have all the material blessings they need at Christmas. But conservatives will have a much stronger hold on the soul of the Republican Party than they did just 10 years ago, and that's something they can be happy about."

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"Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet." -- George Orwell, 1940

Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"

In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.

In America the right calls the right isolationist.

Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.

The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.

In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory. 

The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece. 

Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs. 

Seen here:

'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'

Newspeak from the Orwellian president: Ending ObamaCare would punish millions with higher costs of care

Oldspeak from the true born sons of liberty: ObamaCare has already punished millions with higher costs of care, when they can find it.

Here.

MSNBC dingbat tries to tell the world Animal Farm wasn't aimed at the Soviet Union

Her name? Krystal Ball.

(With a name like that shouldn't she be doing the weather somewhere, or maybe the traffic? No, I know! Market futures!)

Here she is in all her dimness, trying to frame George Orwell's fairy story as a screed against capitalism:

Animal Farm, hmm. Isn't that Orwell's political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they're the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?

Sorry, no. The original capitalist pigs were the communists, which is why the communists like "Krystal Ball" work so hard to make you think the opposite:

One publisher during the war, who had initially accepted Animal Farm, subsequently turned it down after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off. The publisher then wrote to Orwell, saying: "If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. "Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are."

In Orwell's London Letter for Partisan Review dated 17 April 1944 he stated how it was "next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed" because of the US, UK, Soviet alliance.

What's next from old Krystal? The OSS (formed in 1941) murdered Trotsky?

Matthew Continetti Thinks He Ought To Hear One Of The Oligarchs Complain About The Oligarchy

Here, in The Washington Free Beacon:

If the business editors of the [New York] Times were aware of the irony of lamenting the political influence of great wealth on one half of their page while handling it with kid gloves on the other, they gave no sign. “Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not,” says the article, before handing Cohen the microphone. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he said. Two paragraphs earlier, he had said, “My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities. I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

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Matthew needs to re-read that George Orwell line with which he starts the story, get his nose out of the Times and aim it in the direction of the Congress:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” 

I'll say.

The whole point of representation is that it be adequate to the task of balancing the influence of competing interests which all from time to time display the same shortcomings of human nature. Continetti's faith in the goodness of the Senate is shockingly naive. It especially misses the fact that the oligarchy it itself constitutes works hand in glove with the oligarchy of business by which it was captured long ago after state legislatures lost their right of electing them. The founders wanted the Senate to be an oligarchy of the interests of the states qua states, balanced by a House of the people which grew in size as the country did, but we willingly gave that up long ago when Senators became popularly elected and Congressmen fixed their number based on the population level of the 1920 US Census. Now every important issue hangs in the balance depending on what just one or two men or women can do in government, as when a Biden, a McConnell or a Boehner, a Pelosi or a Reid brokers some deal to get legislation passed. And almost always bad legislation.

Talk about oligarchy. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of government these days, there is one.

It is counterintuitive that in order for the people to have more control of their government, government has to be bigger, just not the part that's already too big, which it is precisely because the part that isn't anywhere near big enough is as small as it is.

Repeal the 17th Amendment, and expand the US House to its constitutional proportions: 10,566. It won't be perfect. It's not a panacea. Some measure will have to be taken to preclude the House and Senate from doing what they did before in concentrating power in their few hands. But there is no other alternative if we are to rescue ourselves from the miserable few who now tyrannize us routinely, as with ObamaCare. If we don't, the next step is a true tyranny of one.

It's 2014 But The Economy Is Falling Apart

Jeffrey Snider, here:

As much as these specialists of economic canon project their abilities as something like science, the reduction of economic benchmarks for success shows that it is nothing more than ideology, more closely operating as religion than science. Science is observation, leading to predictable and replicable results. Everything about the past five years is the opposite for the orthodox economist. Everything about the Panic of 2008 was as well - there was no predictability nor replicability in any of the orthodox models or theories. It is all blind faith.

The economy is falling apart, not recovering as you hear from every mainstream outlet. It is a false narrative given cover by the fact that the very definition of recovery has been altered into something that only a few years ago would be easily recognizable as dire malfunction. Even in the highly adjusted statistical economic accounts that show as such are now couched as if they are representative of the opposite, as their meaning has been subverted by this ideology. And where measures of economic accounts clearly diverge from that narrative, such as the labor force participation and the more recent decline in the labor force itself, it is ignored as irrelevant to the heroic monetary chronicle.

Total Credit Market Debt Has Grown Less Than 9% In The Last Three Years

The debt deflationary depression continues.

Total credit market debt owed (TCMDO), now unhelpfully renamed by the Federal Reserve "All Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability" and perfectly Orwellian in doing away with both information-rich terms "debt" and "owed", has grown 8.76% from the recent April 2010 low to April 2013, about $4.64 trillion.

To put that in context, there have been episodes going back to 1949 when this measure has exploded 50% in three years' time so that doubling times for TCMDO have been as short as 6 years. The longest periods between doubling have been around 11 years long, and since 1949 have averaged about 8 years. The last time the metric doubled was in July 2007, at just under $50 trillion. At almost six years out from that date, we could well have been close to witnessing the number double again to $100 trillion by now based on past experience, or certainly something like half the way there, say to $70-$75 trillion. But here we are instead, at less than $57.6 trillion. It's like we hit a brick wall, the brick wall of a repossessed house most likely.

Say what you will against such a debt-based economy, its fundamental immorality, unsustainability and limits, but that's the economy we have, where the real money in the post-war has been in growth in borrowing, not in the money supply. From this perspective we have entered a long debt-deflationary depression, to get out of which borrowing will have to pick up to at least the point where TCMDO doubles at the extreme of the post-war experience, say by 2018, 11 years on from 2007.

Unfortunately for us, if the last three years are indicative of the new normal pattern of very slow debt expansion, it will take until about the year 2042 for TCMDO to double again to $100 trillion, another 29 years, an unprecedented slowdown in the American way of life.

This is what Chris Whalen meant when he warned in 2010 of decades of economic shrinkage ahead.

Noted Lefty Calls Obama's Secrecy Orwellian and Tyrannical

Noted lefty Glenn Greenwald for the UK Guardian here calls Obama's secrecy about a CIA program to kill even Americans with drones Orwellian and tyrannical (he's right):

"[W]hat is missing from the debate is the most basic information about what the CIA does and even their claimed legal justification for doing it. The Obama administration still refuses to publicly disclose the OLC memo that purported to authorize it (they agreed two weeks ago to make it available only to certain members of Congress without staff present, thus still maintaining "secret law"). They conceal all of this - and thus prevent basic democratic accountability - based on the indescribably cynical and inane pretense that they cannot even confirm or deny the existence of the CIA program without seriously jeopardizing national security.

"This is a complete perversion of their secrecy powers. Even among the DC cliques that exist to defend US government behavior, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to defend what is being done here. The Obama administration runs around telling journalists how great and precise and devastating the CIA's assassination program is, then tells courts that no disclosure is permissible because they cannot safely confirm in court that the program even exists.

"Such flagrant abuse of secrecy power is at once Orwellian and tyrannical. It has the effect of blocking even the most minimal transparency on the most consequential question: the government's claimed authority to execute anyone it wants without charges, far from a battlefield, in total secrecy. It yet again demonstrates that excessive government secrecy is an infinitely greater threat than unauthorized disclosures. This is why we need radical transparency projects and aggressive whistle-blowers. And it's why nobody should respect the secrecy claims of the Obama administration or believe the assertions they make about national security. What else do they need to do to prove how untrustworthy those claims are?"