The Most Admired Woman in the World
She's baaaaaaaaaaaaak!

Today’s Headline Features at

http://www.lucianne.com/

Graham seeks delay to confirmation of Brennan

until Benghazi questions answered 

Senator particularly interested in the

Rice talking points

 

Health insurers jacking up rates by

double digits in advance of Obamacare 

Something monstrous this way cometh.

Middle-Class Backers Shocked

Obama Raised Their Taxes 

A classic case of you get what you pay for.

 

Planned Parenthood reports record year for abortions 

Dear Lord, we've lost this one.

Just 8% Now Say They Are Tea Party Members 

Some pollsters don't get what the Tea Party is.

Why So Serious?

Is Conservative Despair Justified? 

This will clear away some cobwebs...and some anger.

Bye Bye Christmas –– Hello Winter! 

 ETHEL SMITH at the Hammond Organ 

Plays Leroy Anderson's SLEIGH RIDE

As You've Never Heard It Before

A charming, lighthearted, absolutely first-rate piece of feelgood entertainment performed by a true virtuoso –– complete with bare midriff. Keep your eyes peeled, guys! This babe was hot in more ways than one.
ENJOY!

EPIPHANIAS –– AGAIN!

This time sung by Franz Crass, a bass

The same words. The same music, but somehow radically different.

It's not a question of which version is better, but of what qualities each brings out in Goethe's poem and Wolf's song. Part of the fascination of classical music is to learn to appreciate the different touches different artists bring to unvaried notes and text. 

EPIPHANIAS 

Poem by Johann Wolfang von Goethe

Music by Hugo Wolf

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf - soprano

Wilhelm Furtwaengler - pianist

EPIPHANIAS 

English Translation

The three holy kings with their star's bright ray —
They eat and they drink, but would rather not pay;
They like to eat and drink away,
They eat and drink, but would rather not pay.

The three holy kings have all come here,
In number not four, but three they appear;
And if a fourth join'd the other three,
Increased by one their number would be.

The first am I —the fair and the white,
I ought to be seen when the sun shines bright!
But, alas! with all my spices and myrrh,
No girl now likes me —I please not her.

The next am I —the brown and the long,
Known well to women, known well to song.
Instead of spices, 'tis gold I bear,
And so I'm welcome everywhere.

The last am I —the black and small,
And fain would be right merry withal.
I like to eat and to drink full measure,
I eat and drink, and give thanks with pleasure.

The three holy kings are friendly and mild,
They seek the Mother, and seek the Child;
The pious Joseph is sitting by,
The ox and the ass on their litter lie.

We're bringing gold, we're bringing myrrh,
The women incense always prefer;
And if we have wine of a worthy growth,
We three to drink like six are not loth.

As here we see fair lads and lasses,
But not a sign of oxen or asses,
We know that we have gone astray
And so go further on our way.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1810)

Talking with Liberals

I am continually faced with variations on the following scenario when attempting to converse with those who hold opposite convictions:

I look at a patch of lawn and see shades of green that vary according to the play of light and shadow. If I mention this to a liberal, he, she, or it is likely to respond in this fashion:

But how do you KNOW it's green? Perhaps that's only a misperception, an assumption or a conditioned reflex on your part. It's green because you BELIEVE it's green. 

What makes your belief any more valid than anyone else's? Could you PROVE scientifically that the lawn is in fact green? It could very well be tan, even brown, and in some lights I've known it to appear red, so your statement is at least partially, perhaps wholly, inaccurate. 

And what IS "green" anyway, but a biased, artificial linguistic construct concocted to further a particular point of view. Your idea of what is and is not “green" would never stand up in a court of law, and frankly it defies logic. In truth you don't KNOW anything –– you just rely unquestioningly on what you've been TOLD most likely by those even more ignorant than yourself. 

In all probability the sum total of ALL your knowledge is not knowledge at all but a tissue of SUPPOSITIONS and ASSUMPTIONS based on the outmoded perceptions and power-seeking ambitions of heavily flawed individuals. In other words you are where you are as a result of the blind leading the blind. 

You ARE blind you know. 

You don't even SEE a lawn. 

What you THINK you see may not exist as such. 

To me it's a playing field, a pasture, a meadow, a waste of unplowed soil that would better be used for growing crops to provide food, the development of low-income housing for the homeless, or halfway houses for parolees and the addicted. 

How DARE you be so unthinking, so unimaginative, so intellectually vacant and so NAIVE as to call a lawn a lawn ––and far WORSE to DARE to tell ME it's GREEN? 

The kindest thing I could say to you is that your thinking is SIMPLISTIC. The temptation to call you a SIMPLETON, however, is very great indeed.

YOU may not be a moron by clinical definition, but you most certainly ought to be categorized as a DOLT.

Then the conversation would degenerate even further from there, but I learned long ago to STOP LISTENING –– if only in defense of my own increasingly fragile grip on sanity.

~ FreeThinke

Affirmation

Has life defeated you? I rather hope

Defeatist rhetoric will die aborning.

Though seen by many merely as a warning,

Each bitter word will serve to weave a rope

By which we’ll hang ourselves when the despair

We manufacture with denunciation

Of all the grievous faults that plague the nation

Convinces us our world’s beyond repair.

What good could we expect to come from that?

Affirmation is the only answer

To the questions posed by social cancer.

Get up and dance –– don’t bellow through your hat.

Although The Axe inevitably must fall,

Cringing will produce no good at all.

~ FreeThinke - 1/4/13

SEEING WHAT’s IN FRONT 
of YOUR NOSE
A Sampling from an Ongoing Colloquy with Two Liberals

Well, dear friends, in the never-ending battle of one set of perceptions and assumptions against another this really does say it all:

"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

~  George Orwell

I couldn't agree more, but one deadly serious question hangs in the air:

How could it be that two individuals can gaze intently at ONE particular object for a protracted period of time, and see TWO entirely different things?

I've blithely explained it away many times by referring to the Parallel Universe Phenomenon, but that doesn't begin to explain it.

"For now we see through a glass darkly ..."

Will we EVER be able to comes to grips with the Truth -- whatever it may be?

Four authors have told us well in advance exactly what we are doing to ourselves:

E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops (1909)

Aldous Huxley - A Brave New World

George Orwell - Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

I find it highly ironic that these authors all considered themselves creatures of the left, [I'm not quite sure about Forster, who came from a more decorous age, but given the constrained circumstances of his personal life it seems likely].

At any rate, despite their acknowledged Marxian-Fabian-liberal-progressive-socialist orientation, the dystopian societies they described in brilliant, painfully evocative detail most closely resemble the nightmare worlds created by the Russian, Chinese, North Vietnamese, Cambodian, North Korean, and Cuban Revolutions.

It doesn't matter whether despotism parades under the banner of Communism, Fascism, Islamism, Puritanism or the Roman Catholic Theocratic States that produced The Inquisition, the Star Chamber, and hundreds of other murderous foul deeds.

TYRANNY is TYRANNY no matter what banner it parades under, and what the left advocates, however unwittingly, IS in fact TYRANNY, even if it is falsely crowned with golden haloes, clothed in white robes and outfitted with angels' wings.

I know you on the left can't see it, and so you are likely to say I am either insane or a vicious liar –– or both. The truth, however is that we are looking at precisely the same things, and each of us is seeing something that bears no resemblance whatever to what the other imagines he sees.

It's quite confounding –– or should be. We need to look more deeply into it.

Oh well, HAPPY NEW YEAR and the best of luck to everyone regardless of our differences.

~ FreeThinke

A LIBERAL BLOG HOSTESS ANSWERS:

FT, perhaps you don't see it when tyranny is promoted on the right?

A few examples:

The proposal by a rightwing conservative governor of Virginia to to have vaginal probes forced on girls and women by the state, which have absolutely nothing to do with any medical procedure.

The various laws passed by conservative governors in conservative states that make the legal medical procedure--abortion--more and more difficult for girls and women for whatever reasons they, their families, and their doctors deem necessary. That amounts to state-enforced pregnancies on girls and women.

The efforts by conservatives to use their religious beliefs to deny equal protection under our Constitution for our gay brothers and sisters to marry the person they love.

That too is tyranny of the state--the state imposing the will of the religious few on the many. A distopian idea if there ever was one.

There are many other examples of conservative ideas of state enforced transgressions on people's liberties.

ANOTHER ANSWER from YET-ANOTHER LIBERAL:

FT, You pose an excellent question, kind sir. How could it be that two individuals can gaze intently at ONE particular object for a protracted period of time, and see TWO entirely different things?

Let’s try to answer that, shall we?

First, what “particular object” shall we apply in this case? And then let’s identify the separate observations and frame them as well as possible into an understandable picture, and, then we can see how the two perspectives diverge and how the view from each perspective may shape the observations.

You see, without explanation, you reached quite a shocking and accusatory conclusion with “what the left advocates, however unwittingly, IS in fact TYRANNY”.

Is tyranny the particular object you have chosen in your question? Or is it the political satire of tyranny by the authors you mention?

This reminds me, there’s one sentence that strikes me at the moment.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Yes we know this satirizes Stalinism and dictatorships but...

Has our secretive and almost unrestricted “money is free speech” factor in our elections taken us to the point where some animals are “more equal” in the right to speech than others? There are many other examples of conservative ideas of state enforced transgressions on people's liberties.

Amen. The war on drugs is one of the most oppressive and enduring of these transgressions.

A few examples from Bush/Cheney come to mind as well. The 2000 election, overturning democracy, decided by conservative Supreme Court cronies of the Bush Cartel comes to mind. Torture, Warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, voter registration suppression, and poll access restrictions are a few more that pop up instantly. 

THE LIBERAL BLOG HOSTESS INTERJECTS:

Also, FT, there are very many Americans who are hopeful for the health and safety of this beautiful country BECAUSE Mr. Obama is our president.

FT RESPONDS:

"Also, FT, there are very many Americans who are hopeful for the health and safety of this beautiful country BECAUSE Mr. Obama is our president."

Of course, and THAT, dear lady, is PRECISELY the problem that afflicts our nation, and has placed her on The Critical List.

Our common Enemy is TOTALITARIANISM –– in ANY form. I have said that thousands of times over many years long before we met.

The difference between "my side" and "yours," if we must use such terminology, is what-appears-to-be fanatical, unswerving loyalty of the left to crypto-Marxist ideals, while we "on the other side" are fragmented in our loyalty to the one party that purports to represent "our" beliefs and goals, but in truth does no such thing.

We frankly detest the Democratic Party and most of its authoritarian accomplishments cloaked in the guise of benevolent "advances." The fruits of these machinations appear –– to us –– to be largely deleterious to the best interest of Americans who still want to remain free to exercise self-determination.

None of that means, however, that we wholeheartedly embrace the Republican Party. I, myself, believe the GOP has grown unduly complicit with the supposed "Opposition." The GOP appears to me to be weak, spineless, and suffering from hopeless confusion about the nature of its identity.

How many on "your" side would say that about your own party apparatus?

Not many, I suspect.

I don't wish to entangle myself in an endless dispute over whose brand of satire, scurrilous rhetoric, name-calling and outrageous caricatures are more offensive. It's a waste of time.

A key tactic of the left is to exhaust opposition by asking the same questions over and over and over long after they've been more-than-adequately answered. The technique –– and I see it as that, because few of you deserve to be called "stupid" –– is part of the Critical Theory dreamt up by Antonio Gramsci and brilliantly adapted by The Frankfurt School of which every leftist is an ardent disciple -- whether he, she or it REALIZES or ACKNOWLEDGES it or not.

This is why attempts to argue with "Progressives" –– or whatever you're calling yourselves these days –– usually end up in a shouting match. Leftist Utopians have rendered themselves impervious to the logic of anything that runs contrary to their aims.

It really is as simple as that.

Most of you treat every challenge as an "outrage." Which is, of course, an outrage in and of itself.

All the best to you anyway for 2013.

~ FreeThinke

THE LIBERAL BLOG HOSTESS SUMS UP:

FT: "ONCE MORE WITH FEELING:

"A key tactic of the left is to exhaust opposition by asking the same questions over and over and over long after they've been more-than-adequately answered. The technique -- and I see it as that, because few of you deserve to be called "stupid" -- is part of the Critical Theory dreamt up by Antonio Gramsci and brilliantly adapted by The Frankfurt School of which every leftist is an ardent disciple -- whether he, she or it REALIZES or ACKNOWLEDGES it or not.

This is why attempts to argue with "Progressives" -- or whatever you're calling yourselves these days -- usually end up in a shouting match."

FT: "TYRANNY is TYRANNY no matter what banner it parades under, and what the left advocates, however unwittingly, IS in fact TYRANNY..."

FT, you are aware, are you not, that using all CAPS is, in cyber talk 

actually "SHOUTING!?"

It appears that it's you, not any of the liberal/progressives here that is 

shouting while making a point.

Communist Goals for the United States Said to be Stated in The Congressional Record since 1963 (Thank you to AOW and Adrienne for the Reference)

I have to admit I did not check The Congressional Record from 1963 on to verify these statements, but whether or not they actually do appear there doesn't matter very much, because in reality these very "goals" have been accomplished pretty much as stated. Naturally "Progressives" would hail these developments and threats as "great leaps forward." We Conservative-Libertarians feel differently about it.
The unattributed background music is Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." Copland was a Jewish Communist from Brooklyn, NY, who also happened to be one of America's most brilliant composers.
If you feel you ought to take offense at our reference to Copland's Jewishness, you ought to read Radical Son –– David Horowitz's stunning exposé of his own background as a "Red Diaper Baby." 

~ FreeThinke

Mr. Bill from New Hampshire Speaks Out on Gun Control and Pending Tyranny

Are you aware that FEMA under Homeland Security has used natural disasters as an excuse to build “Emergency Relocation Camps,” and that Homeland Security now defines veterans, gun owners and those who openly express belief in the Constitution as “terrorists?”

Guns, cars, knives don’t kill people.  People using them do. Certainly driving a car has far greater risk of injury or death –– yet we don't ban cars or stop people from driving.

Why was it so important to have an armed militia (citizens) as the Second Amendment defining our freedoms?  It wasn’t for hunting or self defense although both are included.  It’s because the militia are citizens defending citizens from the government, least ways as it was understood in 1787.

Government is supposed to work for the people –– not the other way around.

We need to have reasoned debates on guns versus the emotional roller coaster presented by the government media complex. I refer to it that way since it has become an incestuous business where the unionized media reporters, unionized bureaucrats, and "elected" government officials in their private lives are effectively married thus eliminating any hope for objectivity. That is what has created the neutered Fourth Estate we must endure today. 

Originally meant to represent the People as the fourth check on government power, media has become our Pravda –– swearing fealty to the Powers that Be.

Most of the killers like the guy in Connecticut are insane and you can clearly see they are insane –– just look at the eyes. 

Rather than take guns away I would prefer to make it mandatory for every single person to be trained in managing a weapon through the schools. Less fear and more respect of lethal weapons would result.

Additionally, I believe teachers should have the right to carry in order to be able to defend themselves and their students in case of attack. 

The evidence shows that taking guns from law abiding citizens leaves them defenseless because the criminals will always manage to have guns.

In the UK, Norway, and Australia, all of whom banned guns years ago, there is hard evidence that when guns are banned, gun CRIME (not necessarily murders) increases as the criminals know they have no opposition when they use one.

Let’s concentrate on enabling people who have mental illness to be more easily committed to an institution by their loved ones –– or themselves.

Let’s take kids off Ritalin and the other behavior modification drugs prescribed for the convenience of unionized teachers in the public schools. Too often these drugs are a causative factor in this problem of violence.  

Today, drugs are being used by parents who have no time –– or interest –– in properly training and disciplining their children. This is particularly true of single parents who work.   

The cause of erratic violent behavior isn't simply from looking at violence or playing games like Dungens and Dragons. It’s the chemical imbalance caused by drugs.

I, myself, have played the "violent video games" and grew up in the never ending multimedia violence in movies and on TV. So have hundreds of millions of others. Yet the numbers of violent crimes involving firearms is relatively small given the size of the overall population versus the number of gun owners.

I don't find myself contemplating homicide at all. I believe I am no different than the other 99.9% of people who’ve had a similar experience.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Although historically I have not been not a gun owner, I desire one now to protect myself and family from the pending chaos being imposed upon us. 

Are you aware that FEMA, under The Homeland Security, has used natural disasters to create and now hire guards for, "emergency relocation camps?" That should give everyone pause. Homeland Security is defining veterans, gun owners, and those who believe in the Constitution as terrorists. With fully half the country truly fed up with The Obama Regime, the mental climate seems to be getting closer and closer to that of the late 1700's.

Criminals will always find access to contraband, because burgeoning black markets quickly emerge to supply what they desire. Look at history and this is clear.  Let’s calm down and hold a reasoned debate and not be slaves to the government-media campaign for tyrannical rule and ultimate serfdom for American citizens.

~  Mr. Bill from New Hampshire

Happy New Year?

HAPPY BLUE YEAR!

Headlines at DRUDGE

January 1, 2013

Baracula! Sucking the life's blood from our nation

GERONIMO!!!

Rand Paul slams 'spending bill'... 

Cliff frustration mounts among House Republicans... 

ALL TAX, NO CUTS...

Obama Blames Congress: 'A Little Too Much To Hope For'...

Audience cheers tax hikes on rich...

PRESIDENT DEMANDS MORE NEXT YEAR...

UPDATE:

Late Breaking News!
The Senate approved a last-minute deal to avert the feared fiscal cliff early Tuesday. The Senate package would put off budget cuts for two months.
It would preserve Bush-era income tax cuts for individuals earning less than $400,000 or couples earning less than $450,000. The measure now goes to the House. (CNN)

To a Glad New Year

Three Musicians 1 - Pablo Picasso, 1921

Toot the trumpets! Strike the strings and sing!

On your feet! Step lively in the dance!

Age and Youth alike are on the wing

Going forward: Time moves like a lance

Let loose by some celestial super strength

Amidst the muck and mire of our dozing

Driving us, reminding that life’s length

Never gives us room for much reposing.

Esurient? Appease the appetites

That feed the soul. The body, gross and vile,

Yields but sickly transient delights ~

Evoking ennui with a knowing smile.

Awake! A blessed New Year is at hand!
Resolve to love and give without demand!

Three Musicians 2 - Pablo Picasso, 1921

~ FreeThinke, 1996