As IF Times

link Illinois Failures Go Nationwide Under Obama – IBD – Investors.com.

An eye opening article to some, but the issues are well known to those who follow these kinds of things.  When I am roped into a conversation which veers towards American politics, invariably I am surrounded by those who still believe that the Obama team has what it takes to turn the U.S. economy around.  It’s often a waste of time to have them point out ANY and I mean ANY policies implemented since election that have been effective in reviving the U.S. economy.

What’s interesting is that now, 2 years after election when policies clearly are pushing the U.S. deeper into all kinds of long term messes, the retorts have changed to profess that  time is what is needed to allow initiatives to work out.  While Canadians may be excused for naivete and adherence to ideological tenets, Americans should know better and this is not just partisan opinion.  The writer, Shlafly, clearly shows the results of what years of mismanagement and misguided policies can do to a region.

“…Illinois was the stomping ground for years for Obama, his top advisers Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, and his appointees such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. After they promoted themselves to Washington to run the country, other Obama associates who didn’t make the cut continued to run Illinois into the ground, as the Illinois unemployment rate jumped from less than 5% to nearly 11%…”

and,

“…Under years of Democratic leadership, Illinois has refused to honor its obligations, cut spending or trim its shockingly large deficit, which at $12 billion per year approaches nearly half its budget. As a result, Illinois’ credit rating has been downgraded and it pays a massive amount in interest on its loans…”

People have the unique opportunity to peer into the future like Ebeneezer Scrooge and can see the Ghost of What Will Be if this star studded team of ideologues is allowed to run the entire nation the way they’ve run Illinois for the past generation.  But to many ideologues, it’s as if none of this matters and this curious aspect of human psychology is fascinating as it is infuriating.  It’s as if reality is an abstract notion that only affects other people.  We’ve all heard of Stockholm syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome )wherein the hostages grow to identify and sympathize with their captors during  captivity.  It looks like this phenomenon is occurring on a massive scale but which future historians will dub Illinois Syndrome.

Or perhaps, it’s as simple as people just want to believe. Many years ago, one of the classic films of all time, The Music Man, featured Robert Preston playing the role of the con man who went from town to town selling dreams of musical talent to kids.  The underlying theme was  the boundless optimism of small town America and their faith in their fellow man.  Of course this was set during a much simpler time in America, but the boundless sense of faith in public figures still exists today despite well founded cynicism. 

It’d be a shame to see people’s good nature taken advantage of.

link Book Review: Last Exit to Utopia – WSJ.com#mod=todays_us_opinion

Not really an ‘as if’ article, but interesting from the perspective of it’s validity. It’s always been a puzzle to me that there is such a contingent of people willing to embrace the characters who represent the views of totalitarian regimes. There are idiots who wear Che shirts and Fidel hats etc etc which can only be explained away by either ignorance or willful stupidity. At this time, I’ve yet to see any great Mao fan clubs but I suspect that’s only because he didn’t sport a beard.

This is akin to turkeys embracing ax manufacturers and wearing Kitchen Aid T shirts. It must be hard wired into humans to need to be told what to do and it’s corollary, the need to tell people what to do. There must be some basic primal urge that compels people to willingly fall in line with whatever preposterous personality manages to capture the limelight.

How can this be? What is the point of education when you can’t even convince people that mass murderers are not a sympathetic lot? Anyone who has been to university is familiar with the now classic psychology studies by Philip Zimbardo in which people are asked to dial up varying levels of pain on another subject only because someone ‘in authority’ told them to. Amazingly, he found that the majority of subjects did what they were told.

The flip side of this phenomenon is ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ as in the case of Patti Hearst in which victims (originally) eventually became sympathetic to their captors.

What does this have anything to do with anything? Well this is the long winded way of pointing out the absurdities of events in the news. For those of you paying attention, there are rabid debates going on now regarding issues such as delivery of health care, of the effects of climate change, of news bias and so on.

Pay attention to some of the champions of the various issues. They are mad. And I don’t mean mad as in the ‘you sat on my glasses’ mad, I mean insane. Somehow though, they develop a following.

Exhibit A: ‘Filmmaker’ Michael Moore espouses the virtues of Cuba’s health care system in a recent film, waxing on how efficient it is. Do thinking people actually believe this? In a country where your status is measured by the volume of beans in the pantry, does he really believe that health care is efficient and plentiful?

Exhibit B: Nobel laureate Al Gore, inventor of the Internet has been pushing his vision of apocalypse to an ever swelling audience. His view of science has been pushed by politicians no more able to differentiate between a test tube and and a pie chart but will collectively decide for their constituents how to piss away billions and billions (i’ve lost track of how many) of dollars in saving the planet. And people believe them. Like the turkeys above, they put on their Kitchen Aid t-shirts.

You would be wrong to think I blame Al Gore. I resent him because I didn’t think of this first and made all the money he’s making. No, I blame the machinery behind this growing and now more apparent fraud. Anyone who’s ever seen this guy on TV knows that he has no more intelligence than a 7 iron. If he came to your door selling snake oil, you’d be yelling over your shoulder, ‘Honey, let Rover off the leash’. You’ve never seen this guy debate his issues in any meaningful way. Typically, an over the top presentation is made, supported with wild statistics and projections and the gullible audience laps it up and carries him out on their shoulders. Free t-shirts at the door.

It’s all comical except the tragic parts. Firstly, the elected representatives make their constituents spend THEIR money in support of this farcical vision. The other sad part is that entire industries are being created to capitalize on this quixotic pursuit and as part of their drive, they support the gospel through earnest pleadings in the media. It’s for the children. Meanwhile, as per a previous posting, we can see that global warming can be fixed by handing out a few hundred million condoms and judicious use of the words, ‘not tonight dear’.