So I see on the news a Republican Congress critter responding to Obama’s new policy in allowing for Stem Cell Research.  And he says, “Making Americans pay for embryo-destroying stem cell research is not change we can believe in….it is politics.”

This made me wonder what else is not “Change We can believe in.”  The top matches at google?

War, Vilsack, Rick Warren, Lieberman, Offshore Drilling.
Obama, Blagoevich, Larry Summers, Private Transportation, Empress Jamyl.

I’ll wait to see when Stem Cell Research gets into the top 5 of changes we cannot believe in.

The oddest part of this article might just be the final sentence.

In December last year, an Iraqi television news reporter threw his shoes at Bush and called him a “dog” in Arabic, during a press conference in Baghdad. The act triggered a spate of copycat shoe-hurling incidents across the world.

What an odd little world we live in.  Well, us peon’s relative impotence can, we can only resort to throwing shoes.

A shoe was recently hurled at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while he was in the city of Urmia, an Iranian Web site has reported. The incident in the Iranian city was an apparent imitation of a similar attack on former U.S. president George Bush in Iraq last year. Urmia News, the Iranian site, reported that Ahmadinejad was in a car en route to an election rally when the shoe was thrown. Ahmadinejad was traveling to a local stadium where he was meant to deliver a speech ahead of upcoming presidential elections.

My Favorite detail comes next.

According to the report, a hat was also thrown at the Iranian president before his convoy sped away from the scene.

Let our “leaders” know and understand that they are not only threatened with the possibility of Shoes, but they also might be pelted with Hats as well.

As always, the Shoe-Throwing Revolution will Not Be Televised, but it will be blogged:

The incident was not reported by Iran’s major news outlets. But it has been widely commented upon in the Islamic Republic’s blogosphere, which is viewed as one of the most developed in the world. It is one of the key tools for disseminating information that contradicts the position of the regime. The government controls Iran’s traditional media.

The issue most likely currently on the stands now, though there’s a new issue that has supplanted it on the website.

We’re in that moment with this political ideology / tendency — such as the Weekly Standard’s brand of Neo-Conservatism and Republicanism — where they look over the political landscape, see a public not attuned with them, and declare them sheep.  It’s not entirely out of focus and damnable:  any thinking or semi-thinking person, I believe, is going to have an unholy and not entirely compatible combination of Elitism and Populism such that you can jump back and forth between haughtily from on high lumping the public as “Sheep” and then muck-ruck right on down in the mud and pull forth on behalf of “The People”.  What is interesting on that score in this magazine is this issue features an article on “Tito the Builder”, the ethnic adjunct to “Joe the Plumber”.  A search of this blog shows that “Tito the Builder” broached my consciousness just enough to have a single blog entry.  This, I suppose, is the Weekly Standard’s concept of herding the sheep (the masses) with a sheep — in Marxist terminolgy Tito the Builder would be a (God, the terminology is escaping me… look over this page and I’ll find it, perhaps get back to edit it in.)

The real kicker for this “Sheep” issue of Weekly Standard is the opening editorial.  It is an editorial entitled “Barack Obama’s America”.  It is written by none other than Alexis de Torqueville.  This is a clever little ploy, though not terribly original, where you find a historical text and pound your chest that it refers to the situation we have today, damned it.  Again, I can’t really fault them too much — I would do the exact same thing, certainly during the Bush Administration.  But it is worth noting that Alexis de Torqueville never wrote an essay entitled “Barack Obama’s America”, and thus the editorial is an editorial by the Weekly Standard on an Alexis de Torqueville essay — a bit post-modernist for a magazine that decries post-modernism.

Shuffle through the last controversy of Oprah’s Book Controvery, the fictional Holocaust Survior Memoir — partially defendedor at least explained here by one Ken Waltzer (controverisal as this will inevitably be) and given a ripping by one Ted Rall here.

Oprah narrowly dodged a bullet with another of her picks, the maudlin 1997 Holocaust memoir Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca. This purported tale of a young Jewish girl who travels through Europe in search of her parents before being adopted by a pack of wolves, a la Romulus and Remus, turned out to be less than authentic. Quelle surprise.

The “Feral Child” part was what gave it away.

The matter with James Frey is a bit easier to explain: dime a dozen junkie experience writes elaborate fiction which would sell less as fiction than as memoir.

The matter with Oprah’s Book Club is the matter with what she is drawn to, which encourage this.  Tell me if this book sounds interesting:

The Hour I First Believed opens in Littleton, Colo., on the eve of the shootings at Columbine High […]   Lamb invokes a relentless flow of tragedy, from Columbine to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina to Iraq, a hit-and-run, drug addiction, homelessness, kidnappings, lawsuits. Every environmental, political and psychosocial horror the United States has endured in the past decade, as well as every terror that sits salivating at the edge of a human life, is visited upon Caelum Quirk. It isn’t long before the book starts to feel like a horror flick at a summer drive-in, where the entertainment lies in trying to figure out what monster will leap out of the bushes next. It doesn’t make me cringe. It doesn’t make me ponder the effects of collateral damage. It makes me think of Dorothy Parker’s line every time she heard the doorbell ring: “Oh, what fresh hell is this?”

The author of two Oprah Book Club books tried a grab-bag of relentless prodding at all of the current day historic calamities burying about our cultural pscyes?  Okay, so it’s a touchy-feely universe Oprah inhabits — one that apparently encourages Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in picking at all available scabs – but Is This Art? Reviews suggest that this book is too long — that it’s too bad Oprah bestowed the honor of propping him up because now editors have less latitude to cut down his novel– to which my suggestion would be to simply rip out one tragedy and have a maximum real world big event limit of three.

I’m told that in this long diatribe that there is an attack on the “Solon”, the group of Europeans who were expelled from the Org and set up their own new think tank organization.  I suppose this is another little recent trend — Webster Tarpley was rebuffed (for private consumption at least), as you recall.  It is a tough slog to wade through this crap, but I guess that’s why we have people like “sancho“:

Until the mid-1960s, my public political role as such was all but rarely marginal, but the developments of that twenty-odd-year interval until that period of my more active role in economics-rooted political-intelligence activity since the mid-1960s, have come to show that my political commitment of the 1946-1965 interval, has turned out to have been necessary preparation for my increasingly significant role in becoming a prominent intelligence specialist during the course of the 1966-2009 interval to date.[9]

Since 1966, my associates and I have often taken abuse from those against whom I have fought for that cause. This abuse has included betrayal by those who, after they had descended to levels below the rank of former friends, went over to the adversary camp, out of such apparent motives as fear, greed, pleasure in perversion, or a combination from among such impulses—although I had done actually nothing of which anyone could justly say I should be ashamed in carrying forward the intention which I had adopted in Spring 1946. Such defections are an effect, a frictional cost, to be expected in any really serious political effort.

I can only suggest that he’s talking to himself in a job of rationalizations.   But let’s play a game with this one.  Skip past the meandering preamble to the text and spell out the names.  This “essay” is like a thousand before it, and — at his advanced age I’ll say like fifty more to come.  The Lyndon Larouche Organization has identified the following as the Agents in history who have sent the World into Dark Ages in the past, and who are now bent on sending the World into a New Dark Age.  Against them does the Larouche Organization pick up their swords and battle:

British asset and Venetian financier, veteran of London’s “Young Turk” operation, Volpi di Misurata,
official British fascists’ spin-off from the Fabian Society of H.G. Wells and his ilk, John Maynard Keynes,  Britain’s Winston Churchill and Italian protege Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson second-generation products of the British-directed Confederacy’s attempt to destroy the U.S.A, both the Bank of England’s Montagu Norman and Brown Brothers, Harriman), who were leading members of the same pack from among leading Anglo-American backers of fascism, President Harry Truman, [and] the lurking fascist circles inside the U.S.A., as they have been since the riots of 1968 and the election of President Richard Nixon, until now, which has been a principal factor in world politics since the interval of London’s appointment of Napoleon III, as it had been when the British Foreign Office’s Lord Palmerston inserted his asset, as the case of former Prime Minister Tony Blair suggests that intention,  such monstrously evil men and women as George Soros and Soros’s crony, Lord Malloch Brown, the historically pro-fascist American Enterprise Institute, Amity Shlaes, in the chatter around the pair of George Shult’z frankly fascist crony Felix Rohatyn-linked Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank,  the world’s currently biggest and most evil dope pusher, Lord Malloch Brown’s associate, the global drug-trafficker George Soros, similar to those of the, similarly, once triumphalist, Fourteenth-Century, Lucca-based, Lombard banking-house of Bardi, would happen as did the doom of the Don Giovanni of the Mozart opera, denunciation of the frauds which underlie the specific form of that same reductionist method of Paolo Sarpi which permeates and underlies the scientific fraud which underlies all of the doctrine of both Sarpi follower Rene Descarte, in turn, is echoed by that similarly a-prioristic, mechanistic echo of Euclid, which permeates the argument of the Eighteenth-century empiricists such as Abraham de Moivre, Jean D’Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Joseph Lagrange, and, also, by such typical Nineteenth Century science-misfortunates as the devotees of Pierre-Simon Laplace, Augustin Cauchy, Rudolf Clausius, and Hermann Grassmann. The Eighteenth-century empiricists and their followers, included such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, and, in the Nineteenth Century, Adam Smith’s avowed devotee, Karl Marx,contrary to the damaged Bertrand Russell creations John von Neumann and Professor Norbert Wiener,   the discovery which Issac Newton merely asserted, fraudulently, to be his own, a fraud which they (e.g., the Cartesians) continued, the U.S.A. can blame Arthur Burns and his (actually) pro-fascist miscreation, Milton Friedman,  the effect of the “Frankfurt School” corruption by what was known in Europe as the post-World War II Congress of Cultural Freedom, the existentialism of Martin Heidegger et al.,notable practical effect of this existentialist cult of [Martin] Heidegger, [Hannah] Arendt, et al., the malthusian legacy of Giammaria Ortes, Philip of Macedon and his Greek advisors, the influence of the systemic scientific incompetence of that follower of Paolo Sarpi known as Rene Descartes, impact of France’s Louis XIV,  leading to the replacement of the deceased Philip by Alexander the Great, had highly relevant, historically and strategically, links, by family ties, to the ancient maritime culture of a Cyrenaica which would be associated later with the great Eratosthenes, Prince of Wales Edward Albert’s circles the later Edward VII, Secretary Lansing,  Lord Palmerston’s backing of his London-created, Confederacy puppet,Prince Edward Albert, recruiting the Mikado, assassination of U.S. President McKinley, the assassination which made possible the Presidencies of two relevant sympathizers of the British-created Confederacy, Bertrand Russell’s continuation of H.G. Wells’ design for nuclear warfare, against the image of the 1782 victory of the United States in defeating Lord Shelburne’s, Jeremy Bentham’s, and American traitor Aaron Burr’s British Empire, especially since the installation of the London-oriented [Mikhail] Gorbachev regime,  operation had been steered by a leader of the Venetian intelligence service, Francesco Zorzi (aka Giorgi), an avowed enemy of the work of Nicholas of Cusa, operating within England under the cloak of marriage councillor to King Henry VIII, in concert with a Plantagenet Pretender (Cardinal Pole), Thomas Cromwell, et al.,  taken over, on a grander scale, by the founder of modern Liberalism, the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, with the assistance of his lackey, the hoaxster Galileo Galilei, to prevent the continuation of a valid form of modern science,  throw-back, in purpose, to the case of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Rene Descartes, and of such empiricists as Abraham de Moivre, [Jean Le Rondt] D’Alembert, and Leonhard Euler, imposed the revived lunacy of the medieval William of Ockham, form of moral depravity known as modern Liberalism, which would later culminate in the corruption expressed by Professor Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, Edward Gibbon, Marx, all contemporary adversaries of scientific truth, such as Britain’s Duke of Edinburgh today, who heads the anti-humanist World Wildlife Fund, Euclid, followers of the British Haileybury School, Fabian Society, avowed Satanist Aleister Crowley, Thomas Huxley who had launched H.G. Wells, Aldous and Julian, and also a third case, George Orwell,  was the circle which created the cult of LSD and kindred concoctions, The cult of “information theory” was a notable offshoot of Russell’s savagely anti-humanist Principia Mathematica hoax, were the cases of the Eighteenth-century empiricists who followed the leadership of Abbé Antonio Conti and Voltaire, such as Abraham de Moivre, D’Alembert, Leonhard Euler, and Joseph Lagrange, and the latters’ Nineteenth-century devotees, such as Laplace, Augustin Cauchy, Rudolf Clausius, and Hermann Grassmann. The mechanistic cult of Ernst Mach and the more radical, the Newton cult, the fraudulent notion of a “law of entropy” proposed by such as Rudolf Clausius, Hermann Grassmann, and Kelvin,  The person who believes in “human ecology,”  Lord Shelburne,  King George I,
, projected scheme of Philip of Macedon, from (most notably) Peter the Great; and, and world empires of the maritime type illustrated by the attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, by Pericles of Athens’ launching of the Peloponnesian War; the priests of the Mithra cult and the Octavian who would be later renamed Augustus Caesar. 

Got that?  Now, against them the Larouche Organization is working the tradition of a number of sources of light that have battled these Dark Age proponents.  I would have to slug through this thing again to fill in more names (specifically cited in this “essay”), but right of the top we have:
Franklin Roosevelt, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, Henry C. Carey, Nicholas of Cusa, Aeschylus, Cleopatra, Marc Antony, and Percy Shelley.

On a Jehovah’s Witness board, the convergence of prophecies brings them to the writings of Larouche, and here is a matter that will not die:

Mr Larouche famed for his impressive private intellegence network has got me wondering if his people scan the web for references to thier master. Laroche has been compared to Don Quixote on this DB, not least a few times by myself. An then his people release this cartoon with a Larouchian Quixote.

Actually a bit surprising, as a Quixote would suggest a “Tilting at Windmills” that minimizes the World Historic Role in defeating Paolo Sarpi on behalf of Abraham Lincoln.  But the Larouche Organization might want to get to work in trying to get “Watchman”.  A funny note there:

The thing I find interesting is that usually during the question and answer session there are always some cowardly politicians who send in an anonymous question or two.

For this little parlor game I always cite “An anonymous question from a Midwestern Republican Senator” querying about Iraq, an obvious reference to Senator Chuck Hagel — unidentified in part because it was an item of fiction.  A week or so later I see them release a “news” item on some speech of Chuck Hagel with comments from Larouche suggesting that Chuck Hagel has endorsed the Larouche Plan in Iraq — another Lie — I was paying attention in 2003, one key tenet of the “Larouche Plan” was that the thing MUST be named “The Larouche Plan” — which was something that Chuck Hagel was not proposing.
There are almost certainly countless examples like this, but I’m sort of not paying enough attention.

Apparently Larouche once proposed a Constitution for the nation of Canada.  Dig? 

1)  The free press would face censorship.

Ҥ5.4 Rights of Persons and Associations
The development and propagation of ideas other than irrational-hedonistic incitements is the subsumed purpose of society’s activity from day to day, together with the freedom to practice attempted contributions to the improvement of society and individual condition according to moral forms of ideas. The principle governing this is efficiently illustrated by the proper view of the meaning of “free press.” Freedom to communicate ideas is constrained by the law’s abhorrence of irrational hedonistic incitements and by the authority of truth. Any statement or interpretation of fact which is publicised orally after being contrived in good faith and promulgated to some morally acceptable purpose must be a privileged ‘ statement under the law, unless it be clearly defined as irrationalist-hedonistic incitement. This must be the only standard for proceedings in libel and slander under statute and civil law. Association is governed by the same principle of privilege as public communication, on condition that the practice of that association is not criminal under law, nor a violation of constitutional law.”
2) §5.3 Morality & Law
“The criminal mind and insanity are both expressions of “infantile regression.” The criminal is the irrational hedonist who asserts actions against the law in defiance of the lawful requirement that the person order behaviour by intent to submit to dictate of a rational conscience. The insane person is one who has disassociated his or her consciousness from significant aspects of rationally ordered reality in order to assert in practice the impulses of an infantile irrational hedonism. Both expressions of irrational hedonism are to be denounced as immorality, and their effects to be contained efficiently with aid of humane efforts to rid the person afflicted with infantile regressions of domination by infantile, or by irrational hedonistic impulses and beliefs.
(…)
There is no right to expression of or cultivation of irrationalist hedonism in a constitutional republic.”
Read also this: §5.4 Rights of Persons and Associations
“The development and propagation of ideas other than irrational-hedonistic incitements is the subsumed purpose of society’s activity from day to day, together with the freedom to practice attempted contributions to the improvement of society and individual condition according to moral forms of ideas.”

Well, I’ll take a look at it sooner or later, I guess.  Surely the highlights were taken out of context and if I were to parse on through it I’d see that they’re mitigated and explained into a much more humanistic offering.  For the good people of Canada.  I may have to take down my poster of Issac Newton and burn my membership to the National Wildlife Fund in anticipation of the Larouche takeover, after they claim Canada the United States will be only a matter of time.

I jumped in on Thursday and posted on new wikipedia material, the discussion pages at wikipedia providing the most naked look at what’s in the org’s head at any given moment.   (If there were a central hub I’d link to it on the sidebar, as it is one of the four most important online souces for Larouchian undertakings — I suppose the constant renewed and renamed sock puppet duo violates “Not a Battleground”, but wikipedia by now has to understand that every interested party in every topic views this site as a “battle-ground” — more secretive and tightly vested the more … for a good battle ground viewing, see the discussion in the entry for “Prohibition Party“).  On Thursday I was not aware that the Kenneth Kronberg page has been reignited — an undertaking which needs to be understood in the context of the two bizarre interjections of the “Crime of Molly Kronberg” into unrelated items relating to a HBPA failure and Ted Stevens conviction and in context of an internal memo calling on the membership to not write bad checks.  It all starts with this bit of wikedness:

This article appears to be written mainly by Molly Kronberg, and serves as a platform for her to scapegoat the Larouche group for her husband’s death, while exonerating herself.
Skip to the end here and this a bizarre statement:
It is worth noting that Hexham knew about the Avi Klein article no later than May 16, 2007[17], six months before it was published. Keinehexen (talk) 22:55, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

If I had to bet I’d say that Keinehexen did too.   I mean, Who didn’t? 
(Again I ponder that Avi Klein does not deserve to be perpetually associated with Larouche for writing one feature.  Well, hopefully he’ll come up with something of either broad interest or intense interest to a small group [such as this one] that wills supplant it — currently the google ordering contest between the “Earnest, Young, and Owing” and “Publish and Perish” is on the latter — the previous time I checked it was on “Earnest, Young, and Owing“.  I’ll continue to check on this whenever I’m edged over to discussion of Avi Klein.)

Well, that’s enough.