Ron Paul Ripped Off: Sarah Palin at the Tea Party Convention

Ron Paul may have been reaching for his political wallet this week, and been finding that it was gone, or at least all the Federal Reserve notes had been removed from it (or does Congressman Paul only carry a bag of gold around?), as Sarah Palin addressed the Tea Party Convention in Nayashville, Tayhniseey. Now, Silverwolf is not in the habit of listening to politician’s speeches, unless the politician is Ron Paul, but he does try to listen to one or two speeches of anyone who might just end up as the Chief Executive of the Land, and so he was once again suckered into listening to Sarah Palin’s address to the Tea Party Convention. With near disastrous results.

Sometimes, you make the industrial-strength Sri Lankan a little too strong, and the tannic acid can make you nauseous, or even make you puke, and so it was that Silverwolf was running for the door, and made it to the garden just in time to not stain the Axminster, after hearing Sarah Palin’s 59 minute performance.

If this woman ever runs for the Presidency as a Republican, you can bet on even Obama being re-elected, for never has Silverwolf heard so much phony pablum and vacuous generalities coming from one politician at one time, mixed with a sickening pandering to patriotism and religiosity.  Palin might have a chance at the White House, for the same reasons that Bush II got re-elected, but Silverwolf thinks Palin will turn off virtually all Democrats and so many moderate independents, as well as virtually all Libertarians, on her social agenda, that Obama will be viewed as a “sane” alternative.

What Palin is attempting to do is to rip-off the support which Ron Paul and the Libertarian and Republican-Libertarian alliance built up during the campaign and especially during the townhall meetings and ensuing “Tea Party” demonstrations. She is attempting to hijack what is essentially a Libertarian political impulse into a Conservative one, and the recitation of Saint Reagan in her speech three or four times shows that she is a reactionary, and not a Capitalist revolutionary.

Palin shows her hypocrisy by correctly criticising the stimulus spending, saying we must cut spending, and then talks immediately about “jumpstarting” energy projects. In other words, she wants to shift the wasted spending back from useless job programs or giveaways to local contractors to graft-filled corporate energy giveaways, a la Enron, and a massive expenditure on nuclear energy. No talk of letting the free-market decide or come up with the solutions, but rather, in ten just minutes, a turnaround from talk of cutting spending and balanced budgets to talk of massive new energy projects which will require massive new spending. Yet few in the audience seemed to perceive the contradiction as they gave her standing ovation after ovation.

On the positive side, Palin did mumble the required Bush mantra about free-markets, though we didn’t hear her say “Abolish the Fed in order to have really free markets and a sound currency”. But apart from those vague Hallelujahs to the free-market, which are required lip formation by all Republicans, there was a big nothing. Yet Palin, when she’s not lapsing into that corny, twangy, syllable-droppin’ talk which we suppose she thinks is how all rural America speaks, can deliver a series of cogent sentences, which make it sound like she can make sense consistently for five minutes. And she has a look of earnest directness and intent behind the eyes, which might be misinterpreted as intelligence. These parts of her speeches seems to instill a certain confidence in the listener, and perhaps that is why so many at the convention gave her a standing ovation.

But then again, as Ron Paul said to Judge Napolitano the other day, every Tea Party group has its own character, and given that the folks present for Palin’s speech could afford to travel to Nayashville, rent rooms, and buy the dinner it looked like they were consuming while Palin spoke, perhaps they are not the most representative group to illustrate the “true spirit”, whatever vague nothingness that may be, of the “Tea Party Movement”.

Another sickening difference, and one that will lose her the election, is her constant bringing of religiosity into her political speech. Now, it is well known that Ron Paul is a devoutly religious man, yet you will hardly ever find him talking about “God” or the Creator in his speeches, except perhaps in the realm of Natural Rights backing for the principles of the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Ron Paul talked less about religion and invoked it less than probably any other major candidate who ran for the presidency, yet he was probably the most truly religious of the group. If we genuinely believe in Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state, then we should confine our religious talk to the church realm where it is appropriate, and not the state realm, where we are dealing solely with government’s duty not to infringe on the Rights of the Individual. There are enough churches and civic organizations in America to handle any religious impulses which the populace may feel, without bringing those schemes within the realm of politics.

Silverwolf can’t help feel that Ron Paul has been ripped-off by Sarah Palin and the Conservative Bush-business-as-usual wing of the Republocrats, for we know that her stands on civil liberties, foreign non-intervention, and corporate stimulus are diametrically opposed to those of the baby-plucker from Texas. If the Republicans run Palin next time, they will lose almost certainly. If they run Ron Paul, the Democrats, and Socialists worldwide, will have the philosophical fight of the millennium on their hands, and Ron Paul, because of his probity, common sense, and integrity of voting record, will win. That’s what the American public wants, a clear choice, as has been demonstrated by the Tea Parties so far, and that’s what they will get if they nominate him.

When it comes to Ron Paul, Sarah is palin’ in comparison.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

There Is a Free Lunch at The Mises Diner

One of the most common dictums thrown at one in America when one is growing from pupdom to wolfdom is “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” You hear this not only from cynical socialists, who feel that no Capitalist would ever give away anything for free unless he expected a higher return by the action, but also from hardboiled business types, who think that if a deal sounds too good, there’s always a catch in it, and who think that all other businessmen think exactly as they do.

But this duo of sceptics would be contradicted not by any swindling capitalist or even greater swindling socialist, but by the most pro-Capitalist, pro-free-market outfit in America: the Mises Institute; for what the Institute has done is not only made available copies of many of the classics of the Libertarian-Austrian School of Economics philosophical-economic outlook for free, but now, in the last few weeks, added a whole new raft of recordings to be inspected with a circumspect ear (to mix metaphors). These latest jewels of scholarship include two series of lectures delivered by Professor Murray N. Rothbard at the NY Polytechnic Institute in 1986, an excellent reading of A. J. Nock’s “Our Enemy, the State” by Jock Coats of Oxford, essays of Herbie Spencer, as well as readings by Jeff Riggenbach, who is also an excellent reader with a rich, resonant voice. (Herbie Spencer, known as Herbert to his friends, was a late 19th century British Libertarian-leaning essayist, who, according to Rothbard, became more statist as he aged. You can see this in the upper half of his face, which became like a human being later in life, while the lower half retained its wolf-like hirsuteness.) And the cherry is a brief, crisp recording of a short lecture Mises gave during an interlude in the US Steel corporation’s program in 1962, in which he explains why the free-market is so different from the old monarchies and church-dominated societies. (The reason is, if you’re curious to know, because instead of expropriating wealth by looting or taxation, which the king or church-priesthood had done is olden times, the free-market requires that a man serve his fellow men in some useful capacity by expending energy, and he will only be able to garner a living if he can fulfill some useful need. Therefore, his wealth is dependent on the consumer, not on legalized looting, and each consumer must, in turn, find something to turn his hand to so that he may procure the wherewithal to secure those commodities he needs for survival, or wants as fripperies. Thus the consumers, and not the kings, priesthood, or even the businessmen, are the real kings in a true free-market economy.Like Rothbard, Mises could make pellucid murky economic problems with a comparatively short, understandable explanation.)

The two Rothbard series of lectures feature one on a history of America from 1870 through King Roosevelt II from an Austrian School economic perspective, and several on the basics of economics like Value, and the Determination of Prices. These constitute the brown rice and beans (bread and butter for you junkfooders) of economic understanding, which can then be applied to the gallimaufry of American political history. Rothbard’s technique of historical analysis, which always asks “Qui bono?”, who benefits from a specific piece of legislation?, is one that logically explains not only the vast giveaways of the public’s wealth that were doled out to corporations during the 19th and 20th centuries, but the current massive giveaways by Obama, Geithner, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Frank, and that whole gang of “experts”, well paid at the public university’s feeding troughs, who said that the sky would fall if we didn’t bail out the megabanks, AIG, and Detroit. The same lies, the same “sky is falling” arguments, and it’s a hundred and forty years later. The same liers; the same gullible public quickly gulled, like the flocks at the seashore, with a few crumbs of bread that will be piled on the backs of the unborn. Socialists don’t give a damn about the unborn slaves that will have to slog for years to pay off the debt that they are building up right now so that those corporations they say are too big to fail can continue to give their enormous bonuses. They are the sadistic torturers of the unborn.

But the new items on the menu should not blind one to the solid, staple fare that Mises has in the pantry of its archives. There, for example, is Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty”, perhaps the first book any would-be neophyte Libertarian should read, perused aloud in excellent rendition by Jeff Riggenbach. No need to strain the eyes now, you can listen to it while taking the (subsidized) public transport, or while waiting to have your genitalia examined by a lusty Brunehilde at the airport. Thank goodness we Americans still have a “Right to Privacy”, eh what?

Anyway, there is plenty of ”free lunch” for us Capitalists to stuff our brains with until bursting at the Mises Diner. Fortunately, unlike the fare at many other Brain Diners, there are no brain-clogging cholesterols of lies, no mind-hardening triglycerides of Leftist propaganda, no simplistic schemes like the money crank’s idea of printing up money and handing it out as a solution to shortages, or the Georgeist’s taxing land only. There is only economic truth, amazing in its simplicity after baffling economist theoreticians for over 2000 years, explained in the Woody Allenesque, quickfire, pace of Professor Rothbard, and always sprinkled with lots of humourous quips which usually are pretty good.

So don’t let the cynics give you any of their guff. At the Mises Diner, there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

Measures 66 & 67: Oregon Socialists Slit Their Own Throats

The Socialists of Oregon mailed to the polls Tuesday, and decided to slit their own throats. In a vote of roughly 53-47%, they decided to raise taxes on individuals making over $125,000/yr, and raised the basic corporate fee from $10 to $150 with additional taxes based on gross volume of trade, and not net gains. These looting mechanisms, known as measures 66 and 67, will enable the state’s pampered workers, who can retire after 30 years with 80% of their paychecks, to continue to leech off of the state’s independent workers and businessmen, who must support these state apparatchiks in their opulent retirement. Likewise, they will make it much harder for any fledgling corporations or small business start-ups taking the corporate route, instead of the sole proprietor route, to get off the ground. But such considerations count for little in the mind of the Socialist, whose main concern is how to loot the commodities he wants from those who produce them, or produce the money that can procure them.  By doing it through the law, or through so-called “democratic” methods (actually 59% of the electorate voted of whom 53% voted for these measures, or 31.7% of the populace imposed these taxes on 100% of the populace — that’s their so-called Democracy), he can assuage the fact that he is nothing more than a looting thief, a highwayman now dressed up as a concerned state citizen, wanting to make sure everyone pays their so-called “fair share”. He beautifully typifies the mentality of the looter described by Frederic Bastiat, back around 1850, when he wrote “Some persons consider that plunder is perfectly justifiable if only sanctioned by law.” Well, Silverwolf saw some of the campaign literature on the pro-looting side and it said, for example, that “only 447 households in our county will be affected by the new income tax”, as if the fact that the plundering was confined to a small number of people made it completely justifiable. We well know the effect of such “morality” on the morality of the average citizen, and in this case it cozens him into an attitude that, yes, it’s quite alright to loot people of 11.8% of their income, (making it the highest state income tax in America unless Silverwolf is mistaken, quite apart from the federal income tax), as long as they are “wealthy”. Apart from being immorally Un-American, in that it violates the rights of one narrow segment of the population, and ultimately the right of every Individual not to be robbed by the collective, it also conveniently overlooks the fact that “wealth” is not being taxed, but income. The wealthy individual, with several million dollars worth of real estate, but with a miniscule cash income will not be affected by this law, while the $10,000 waitress who buys a winning lottery ticket and wins a quarter-million will be taxed as if that is her usual annual salary, and not just a once in a lifetime fluke. And of course, the wealthy always have their legal tax dodges like buying treasury bills whose interest is not taxable by the states, or tax-free state bonds, or municipal bonds which are usually free of state and federal taxes. So in these ways, despite all the feel-good class-hatred rhetoric whipped up by the Democrat hatemongers and their state workers/union backstops, the tax burden gets shifted to the middle class, because even with the new looting mechanisms in place, you can be sure that in a year or two the state will again be decrying the huge budget deficits that will once again arise, like a recrudescent cancer, whenever vast numbers of state bureaucrats are living off the fat of the middle and working classes. Then they will say that they have to raise taxes on the middle class too, so that everyone can “pay their fair share”. But that showdown has been postponed for a year or two. Yet when it comes, the taxpayers will be much poorer, due to inflation and these higher taxes on businesses, who will pass them on to the consumer. And then when the government and union Socialists cry “wolf”, the voters will cry back “Silverwolf”, and cut off their testimonials, fiscally speaking.  The Libertarian Revolution is out there brewing and stewing in people’s entrails; Silverwolf can sense it. And like the revolution that swept Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall, this Libertarian Revolution will sweep away the structure of the Wilson-FDR model that has dominated American politics for almost exactly a century, and do it with amazing rapidness. Silverwolf believes the economic ideas of Ron Paul and the Austrian school will emerge victorious in a couple of years, as people see the continued failure of the current Keynesian Demo-Repub government bureaucracy, and realize the chaos that Keynesian economics has brought to America.

As an additional observation, it’s interesting to note that in their rush to greed, the Socialists have cut their own throats in another way, and that is by taxing corporations according to their gross sales volume, and not their net profits. Now this is not something a Socialist is going to think about, and it probably never occurs to his little grey cells, but what he is doing is taxing high-volume, low-margin sellers, who create competition and keep prices down, at a higher rate than low-volume, high-priced sellers, who are essentially price-gouging. So the Socialist in his stupidity is rewarding the price gouger who feeds inflation, and punishing the low-cost wholesaler who is the consumer’s best friend. And they will pay for this extra bit of stupidity at the checkout counter and the cash-register. Except, why should they worry, the welfare check gives them the cash, so no need to shop for the lowest price, and the food stamp card covers the vittles, so let’s buy it at the convenience store while prices are high and lines are short, and let the workers and the businessmen stand in line at he discount supermarket to save their nickels. “It’s just like those greedy, profit-oriented, penny-pinching businessmen to worry about saving a dime, while we elevated Socialists are well above the money problem.”

That is until inflation strikes. And the Libertarian Revolution at the polls.

If Oregon Socialists want to slit their own throats, that is their right. But it’s too bad that while slitting their own throats, they have to slit the throats of all the other people in the state.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

Hugo Chavez vs. the U.S. Dollar: Micturating Into the Wind

Some people like to micturate into the wind. And some like to do it in the currency markets. And that’s really quite fine if they’re doing it with their own money. But when they are doing it with the life savings of the poor of an entire nation, in order to gratify their own grandiloquent self-conceptions, or in order to prove a politico-economic point which cannot be proven, then the tragedy imposed by the will of one man upon an entire people turns monumental. This is what Hugo Chavez has done to the working poor of Venezuela, in order to prove a Marxist point, and stick it to America, his (supposed) Capitalist opponent to the North. Bloomberg reports that Chavez has been massively selling U.S. dollars to artificially strengthen the Bolivar against the Yankee sawbuck, but after initially strengthening, the Bolivar has lost back 5%. Chavez, with the typical economic intelligence of the Communist, is massively selling dollars right when the U.S. dollar is  embarking on a long protracted strengthening, catalysed by the trifectal fillips of a sinking stockmarket (safehaven status), the coming necessity of higher interest rates to seemingly (and unsuccessfully) control inflation, and the coming scramble for dollars to service the massive amount of debt that has been underwritten in U.S. dollars. But Hugo Chavez will ignore these realities, thinking that his influence (and oil wealth) is so massive that he alone can move the currency markets. His is a “corpus gordo” about to take his place amongst the littered graveyard of traders and politicians who thought they knew better than the currency markets how those markets “must” go. He will continue to micturate into the wind of the currency markets, further impoverishing the Venezuelan people with inflation as big capital flees the country (Bloomberg reports $93 billion has left the country since 2005), while increasing unemployment because of the suddenly less competitive Venezuelan exports, due to any temporary increase in tthe Bolivar. Add to this that a stronger dollar usually means lower commodity prices, and that Venezuela is basically a commodity-export economy, and you have a formula for a very wet blowback as Chavez continues to micturate into the wind. It wouldn’t bother Silverwolf too much if the ureal mist only flowed into the face of Big Brother Hugo, but unfortunately its stinking drench will encompass the entire Venezuelan populace. This is the tragedy of Marxism, that economic misery is imposed on millions by government bureaucrats, destroying the labor of years, and the wealth of human energy and care that was invested in the currency. In the old days, they called it “theft”.

Hugo Chavez: another in the long list of histories arrogant micturators.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwww! — Silverwolf

Pathetics Row, KGO, San Francisco

It comes as no surprise to Silverwolf that the economic and political ignorance in the San Francisco Bay Area can elect charlatans and charlatanettes like Speaker Pelosi, Gavin Nuisance, and Willie His Royal Highness Brown, when he considers the pathetic line-up of economic and political pablum that is served up most nights on radio station KGO. While the station  maintains a nominal adherence to a wide panoply of political prejudices, its typical night is liberally sprinkled with Liberal and so-called Moderate Demagogucrats, the folks that have been working so hard to brainwash the American public into the lie that there is a principled difference between the Dems and Repubs. Considering that these people are being paid good, soft, unsound, U.S. federal reserve notes to flap their lips for a ten hours, its a shame that it is done in the cause of obfuscating the understanding of the American public, instead of leading it into the light.

In reverse order of appearance, we start off with that former Republican, now longtime super-Liberal Ray Taliaferro. Silverwolf has long ago discussed his reverse racist hypocrisy during the presidential campaign of ‘08 (that’s 2008 for you historians of the future). But to now hear Taliaferro have to come up with nightly justifications of Obama’s obvious Fascism, and to hear him completely ignore or gloss over Obama’s vicious assaults on Habeas Corpus, his promotion of involuntary servitude in the form of a national service requirement, his escalation of the war, and his utter kowtowing to the corporate interests in America, as if he were not part of them, is really a disgusting display of sin by omission by Taliaferro. The years of whining about Cheney and Bush have given way to a deafening silence as Obama continues essentially the exact same policies as Bush, and fulsome praise when Obama occasionally gets one right. When it comes to political integrity, Taliaferro is completely lacking. Another running dog for the corporate Fascists, who worked extremely hard during the campaign to put their agent in power. Thanks Ray for the War and the Fascism. Looks like you were wrong again, and we who supported the Peace and Civil Rights candidate, Ron Paul, were right. Again.

Next up is that master of political obfuscation, John Rothmann. Now, Rothmann is an interesting speaker, and has many cogent political observations to make. His choice of topics too is usually highly topical. But since guessingly 80% of his callers are preaching to the choir, their quality of economic analysis is usually lacking. Typically, some woman who seems to know exactly what is wrong with every aspect of the government, will call in and tell us that profit needs to be taken out of the medical profession, the usual leftist call that would lead to a horrendous shortage of doctors and nurses. One wonder why else people would go through the arduous horrors of medical school, and the arduous discipline of maintaining a surgery, or are doctors supposed to be saints, and not be interested in money, unlike every other working person in this society, from the bus driver to the plumber, who is working solely for the profit motive? And there are no shortages of busdrivers and plumbers.

Of course wrong-way Rothmann has been pushing the Clinton corporate-healthcare bill as “better than nothing”. Rothmann uses the Marxist/LBJ argument that if they can just get their foot in the door with this new massive intrusion of the government into the most private lives of the citizenry, that it can be expanded later and made even more intrusive when the political climate is more responsive. Well, Ron Paul warned us this was exactly what the Collectivists would attempt, so we saw this forkball coming and dropping, a la Elroy Face. Rothmann, ensconced in his Bay Area  Liberal cocoon, completely missed the vast anger that welled up in the American public at the Townhall meetings, an anger generated by that public suddenly realizing that this new healthcare boondoggle that the Democrats were forcing down their throats as fast as they could be induced to swallow it, was going to choke a lot of folks to death, economically speaking. No, Rothmann’s only wish was to get this massive new inflationary program underway, no matter how bad it was, because that is part of the agenda that Rothmann believes should be part of government. He talks about a “flexible” Constitution; you can see why it is so essential to talk thusly, because the Constitution was designed exactly to prevent the kind of government impositions on the Citizens that this Healthcare Bill imposes.

It shouldn’t surprise us that wrong-way Rothmann was on the staff of, and supported, Richard Nixon when he was in the White House, but finally woke up, and supported George McGovern. One must wonder about the native intelligence of Rothmann, who is a virulent anti-Nazi for obvious reasons, when one considers that Nixon was instrumental in getting key Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators into America, where most of them lived happily for several decades. Yet Rothmann was on the staff of this anti-Semite. Thirty years later, and Rothmann, in spite of all his political exposure and knowledge of American history, is still on the wrong side of the fence. Well, at least he and Silverwolf stand shoulder-to-shoulder in our opposition to that most fundamental abridgment of Libertarian values, the Death Penalty, or legalized judicial murder carried out by the Leviathan State.  Rothmann, to his credit, has long argued against this abomination, as has Silverwolf. But we have yet to convince the whole world.

Perhaps most pathetic of all the contestants in Pathetics Row is Gene Burns, if only because Burns had the most to promise, but seems to have burned it. Burns, whose political positions seem very similar to Rothmann’s, was once a Libertarian, and was, in fact, seriously considered as a powerful candidate from that party for the presidency. Listen to Murray Rothbard as he praised Burns back around 1990 as a great speaker, and an up and coming light in Libertarianism. What happened?

Now Burns seems to be nothing more than an Obama and Democratic apologist, ignoring, like Taliaferro, all the horrendously anti-Libertarian legislation (indefinite prolonged detention without charge) that our anti-Constitutionalist new President has floated in his speeches to make these abominations more palatable. Obama is a master of the propaganda of the word; like Clinton he uses words to create impressions which he can then backtrack on by saying he meant something else, and that his words had been misconstrued.

A mountain of bullscat, and these Democratic apologists act as if it’s a bed of roses. How pathetic!

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwww! — Silverwolf

Silverwolf Officially Declares the ‘Eldritch Project’ “A Failure”

Silverwolf’s muzzle is truly drenched today as he comes to the sad and long-procrastinated realization that his famous “Eldritch Project”, which he initiated two and a half years ago with such gusto, has come to a crashing halt. It is, Silverwolf must admit, a failure.

We all know with what high hopes Silverwolf attempted to modify the English language, while at the same time seeing if the power of the internet was so great that it could alter the common use of English heard around the world. This was the aim of the Eldritch Project, an attempt to introduce the rather obscure word “eldritch”, meaning “weird”, as a frequently used term in both worldwide spoken English, and international internet usage. This jolly old adjective, probably of Scottish origination, was employed by Robert Louis Stevenson, amongst others, in his “Master of Ballantrae”, and Silverwolf, for some unknown and still unexplained reason,  was seized with a frenzy of fervour to bring this word to the attention of the world internet consistory.

But today, Silverwolf must admit that the project is a dismal failure, an utter repudiation of his vainglorious and rather pompous dreams of affecting worldwide English by effecting a change in parlance. But no go. Not even a “close but no cigar”.

Therefore, Silverwolf, with dewdrops streaming from the lachrymal glands, sadly closes the books on the “Eldritch Project”. Our thanks to all the half-dozens that participated. At least we tried to graft some life onto the moribund  world literary grapevine.

Well, there’s always “slubber”.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

Massachusetts: A Lunger in the Collectivist’s Eye

Tonight, the Libertarian Spirit in America has delivered a good lungerful right into the eye of the Collectivists. Those who spat on the lives of millions of Americans, as if their pronunciamentos would have no effect on those on whom they were imposed, are finding the lungerful is coming right back at them. They thought they could force millions of Americans to pay tribute to their almighty corporate interests to the tune of several hundred dollars a month for life, and that none of them would protest, and all would collaborate in their own destruction like sheep. All those millions who didn’t bother to vote, or voted for the Dems, never dreaming it would cost them their food money and higher income taxes, suddenly realized that voting Democratic, — or not voting at all — could cost them very dearly indeed; a sure cure for political indifference.  Then the Tea Parties erupted, in large part because they were first initiated by Congressman Ron Paul, who had educated a vast segment of the electorate so well during his campaign for the Presidency, that they knew exactly what was being done to them. This was the original impetus behind the Tea Parties and their anger, although Ron Paul certainly wouldn’t approve of interrupting or talking over someone trying to make a statement, as happened at many townhall “meetings”. The fact that the moribundi of the Republican Party tried to hijack those Ron Paul Tea Parties as their own was inevitable, but it should not detract from their originator. And even if the hijackers are mainstream Republicans, we should not shun their alliance if we see eye to eye on these issues.

The Democratic politicians, living in their ivory towers with their vast Congressional and outside incomes, completely divorced from the misery which their inflationary policies are creating for the average American, have been given a rude awakening, although they are the sort that are constantly and eternally in denial, because to deny the validity of their political ideology would be to deny the validity of their own lives, and all they have been engaged in for the last thirty years. They can’t handle that reality, or the reality that trying to ram Fascism down the throats of Individualist Libertarians will always fail in America, and that is why they will find yet another excuse as to why they lost in Massachusetts. The fact that they lost because they are Fascists and bullies, who want to stick their noses deep within the lives of every member of the community, exactly as religious Fascists want to, will never be admitted to. But reality will sink in when there is mass defeat, and an alienation of voters that will last for many years.

The prospects for a Libertarian Party, or political wave, have increased greatly in the last few hours. After two and a half years of hell, since the first risings of the Obama-Clinton Fiasco during the campaign, America has been on a downhill trajectory. Now the ground is leveling out, and Silverwolf believes the trajectory for Individual Liberty may be up, for the first time in perhaps two and a half centuries.

One-two-zero-two-zero-one-zero. A mystical combination of the most basic numbers; the essence of the digital revolution. Is it also the date of the initiation of the Libertarian Revolution, first in America, then in the rest of the world? We hope so, and it is certain something most devoutly to be howled for.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

Bogarde’s Rocket: Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

Perhaps one of the earliest vehicles that helped launch the film-acting career of Dirk Bogarde was his excellent performance in “Cast a Dark Shadow” (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert. In this film we can see all the characteristic strengths of Bogarde’s acting in protean form: the shifting in and out of working-class accents, the ability to charm and dissemble convincingly, the “losing control” of one’s emotions when pushed too far, all these are included in the character of Edward “Teddy” Bare, the evil protagonist of the film.

Basically, the film concerns Teddy Bare’s successful murder of his wife, a woman twenty to thirty years his senior (played by Mona Washbourne), for money; a successful murder attempt which backfires when “Tedeh”, as his first wife calls him, finds out that she left him no money, only the house they live in, although she was on the brink of re-writing her will so that Teddy got the filthy lucre too. Unfortunately for him, he murders his wife the day before she calls in the lawyer to change her will, a decision her barrister strongly councils against. But Edward doesn’t know this, so his successful attempt lands him nothing but the house, but “not a sausage” muneratively speaking.

So Edward sets about finding a new, well-heeled older widow, and finds her in the person of Freda Jeffries, played very strongly by Margaret Lockwood. Thinking he’s found another treacly pushover like his first wife, Edward tries to stampede her into buying a piece of property, but the strong-willed Mrs. Jeffries, now Mrs. Bare the Second, will have none of it, as equally she will have none of “Ed” sleeping in a separate room, as he casually suggests. (The transition from his first wife Monica’s “Tedeh” to his new wife’s straightforward “Ed” is a subtle but revelatory mutation.) As she puts it, she’ll go “pound for pound” with her new husband, but nothing more. As she laughing jokes before they are married, she had been tempted a couple of times to re-marry, but then she discovered that her suitors were “more interested in the money-bags than in the old bag”. The fact that she can laugh so heartily at this joke shows Mrs. Jeffries is not only a good sport, but also a realist. And Lockwood gives such a strong, believable performance throughout that one would have to say she actually steals the best acting award from Bogarde in this flick. And one can see why Hitchcock pegged Lockwood for her role in “The Lady Vanishes”, although “Cast a Dark Shadow” affords her a much wider range of acting situations to display her talent. And director Lewis Gilbert doesn’t lose the opportunity to capitalise on Lockwood’s legs, as did Hitchcock in that early scene from “The Lady Vanishes” where Lockwood prominently displays her nice appendages while standing on a chair. Here, Gilbert photographs Lockwood from a low angle, with her legs crossed, and we start to gather that Edward Bare was not wholly without carnal motives when he hitched up with Lockwood. But looks are incidental to the acting talent which serves Lockwood well in this film.

Bringing up third place in the Thespian honors is Kay Walsh, who gives a straightforward, realistic performance so different from her later role as a neurotic medium in “Seance on a Wet Afternoon”, Bryan Forbes’ little masterpiece, which co-starred Richard Attenborough in a character that looked and acted very similarly to his performance in “10 Rillington Place”. And rounding out the cast are Robert Flemyng as the lawyer who sees through Bare’s game immediately, and Kathleen Harrison as Amy, the maid, who is about as bright as paint — dull, matte latex.  But Silverwolf digresses.

The final scenes, in which Lockwood realizes she has married a cold-blooded killer, and the final denouement which gives the reader a certain “schadenfreude” as evil reaps its own reward, leave the satisfied feeling one should feel at the end of a detective novel (the film is based on one by Janet Green) or thriller film. And the genre differs from the typical whodunit, in that the audience knows early on who the murderer is, and the main question is: will he get caught and if so how? This is a technique used frequently by Georges Simenon in his psychological novels, which has become quite widespread in mystery-detective-thriller literature, and which probably originated with Dostoyevsky in “Crime and Punishment”.

Before going we should also mention the highlighting of Lita Roza, the former singer with the Ted Heath Orchestra, in the nightclub scene, a chanteuse whose brief appearance  matched her brief career in films. But what is of interest in her performance is not her herself, but the performance of the bald-headed extra in the slightly out of focus background, who nods his head approvingly, seems to speak to some invisible companion as he points out the singer with his cigar, and smiles. Truly a stunning performance from an extra, so subtle that most viewers will miss it, and one of the best efforts by an extra since Silverwolf saw that hog run out of the roadway as the gang of outlaws galloped into town in Michael Winner’s “Lawman”. But Silverwolf digresses again.

All in all, one must say that Bogarde’s performance in this film shows him as an artist way ahead of his age in maturity, a quality one sees in many top-drawer actors. Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Tom Courtney all exhibited a similar feeling of mastery in their acting at a very early age. In modern times one can sense this quality also in Dominic Monaghan and Honeysuckle Weeks. But in Bogarde’s case we can plainly see that extraordinary acting talent that launched him into that vaunted circle of the top British actors of the 60s to 80s period: Lawrence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, and Tom Courtney (and please forgive Silverwolf for leaving out the legions of other incredible actors that seemed to spring up like mushrooms after a warm rain in the British Theatre and Cinema). In fact, the role is probably a bit too thin and confining for Bogarde (as mystery characters are prone to be) but it still gives him a wide scope to show his acting talents.

So, if you want to take your mind off your short positions in the stock indexes and the currencies for a few, brief, blissfully worry-free hours, Silverwolf would strongly recommend you take a decko at “Cast a Dark Shadow”, one of the early booster stages of that extraordinary acting phenomenon known as Dirk Bogarde.

Hoooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

May I Strip-Search Your Wife and Daughter? Why, Sure!

The gutless, pusillanimous wimps that American men have turned into can well be illustrated by the passivity with which American males are now letting their mistresses, wives and daughters be strip-searched at American airports by complete strangers. It is a development that is most amazing when you ponder what would have been the reaction of the typical middle-class American male of, say, 1958. The idea that some stranger was going to visually inspect his wife’s and daughter’s genitalia because a government bureaucrat said so would seem most amazing to him, and would have probably elicited a right-cross to the jaw that would have been admired by Sonny Liston. But the modern castrati of America, brainwashed in the Collectivist kindergartens set up under the so-called Capitalist Reagan and the pathetic Bush-Clinton-Bush sequel to the fiasco, and feminized by the ubiquitousness of plastics and the high level of estrogen in municipal drinking-water supplies due to the widespread use of birth-control pills, will willingly let their women be stripped and visually raped, and themselves be symbolically cuckolded, rather than say boo to the government men. The fact that corporations will be making a mint on the taxpayer selling these egregiously overpriced visual-rape machines to the government so that they can dose everyone with a little extra radiation, this fact will be overlooked, as will the victory to the terrorists of getting to expose every single American’s (heathens and infidels) genitals to a dose of radiation. Our government is making sure the terrorists destroy our civil liberty by destroying it for them.

And all this in response to the fact that the government, with the smoking gun in its hand of the underpants bomber, did absolutely nothing. Yet that same government now says, trust us, we must strip your women and gloat on them to be safe, and you will go along with it, whether you like it or not.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah reported in his recent article in Newsweek that he had to argue with TSA personnel to get a patdown instead of going through the machines, which was his right according to the TSA’s own rules. That is the level of competence that the hiring of TSA personnel has achieved, that a Congressman must fight for his Constitutional Rights with a bureaucrat who may not even have a high school diploma. Welcome to the U.S.S.R.

So when it comes to flying with your womenfolk, Silverwolf’s advice to American men is, walk.

Or lope. With four legs, we Silverwolves can cover a lot of ground in a day by loping. You humans ought to try it.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww! — Silverwolf

A New Year, A New Decade: Something To Be Thankful For

Given the perennially saturnine and lugubrious tone of most of Silverwolf’s blogs, he thinks it only meet that he commence this decade’s scrivening on a hopeful, thankful note. And therefore he has decided to write a joyous blog.

So reader, as you begin this new decade, Silverwolf would like to respectfully request that you give thanks for your non-situations.

Be thankful, oh reader, that you are not one of those animals who is waiting in line to have its head smashed in, or throat cut, or a blowtorch applied to its skin “to improve the flavor” as is favored in South Korea, and quite a few Asian countries. Be thankful that you are not bleating out the last few minutes of your life in terror, as you hear the cries of the other victims, and smell their blood. You are surrounded by the Human Beings, and they are far too cunning, and far too well developed, anatomically, with their hinged thumbs, their upright stance with locking knee-joint, and their over-active, highly complex brains, to be evaded, once they have decided to murder you. Very few animals manage to escape over the walls of the abattoir compound, so don’t hold out any hope for yourself if you find yourself in this situation. But of course, oh reader, if you are reading this, you are not finding yourself in that situation — lucky you.

And be thankful too that you are not one of those animals, those cats, dogs, and monkeys, that are being tortured day-in and day-out, in the labs of the pharma companies, and government-sponsored universities, in useless experiments, which are highly lucrative for the experimenters, the lab techs, and the dog- and cat-traffickers. You really need to be thankful on this one, oh reader, and I certainly hope that after you die, you won’t come back to consciousness as an animal in a lab experiment.

And be thankful, oh reader, that you are not a mother seal watching her babies being clubbed and skinned in front of her eyes, so the Canadian Socialist Miscreants can get a little bit richer. (Anything for a Loonie! is the motto above the border.)

And be thankful, oh reader, that you are not amongst that quarter of the globe’s populace that slaves from dawn to dusk for one or two U.S. dollars a day, while in America people pay that much for an apple, or the equivalent of a year’s hard labor in the 3rd world just to see a doctor for seven minutes. It is truly Rome and the Provinces all over again, and Rome is America/Canada and Western Europe.

And be thankful, oh reader, that you are not confined to an iron lung for the rest of your life.

And don’t forget to be thankful, oh reader, that you are not one of those 130,000 forgotten ones rotting away in the political prison camps of North Korea, according to the BBC. 130,000 people abandoned to a miserable fate while the Clinton’s kowtow to the Communist despots, and implicitly recognize the legitimacy of their tyrannical rule by giving their “State” aid.

And be thankful, oh very thankful, oh reader, that you are not one of those poor souls down South who got caught with their pants down during the current Arctic blast to the East, stretching yea unto the water-logged depths of southern Florida. Your pump burned out deadheading against the frozen pipes, then the electric company goes down, and you won’t have power for a week, while you didn’t warehouse enough wood against such a freak storm, and what you did have got drenched in the snow, the pump installer tells you there are 300 people awaiting instillation ahead of you, the wholesalers run out of pumps, and there’s only three months of winter and cold ahead of you. Such people are suddenly forced to live like Wolves, though of course we Silverwolves are used to that, and actually enjoy it. But then, we don’t mind lapping pondwater (it really is tangy) though most humans have a finicky aversion to drinkly thusly, which we put down to a peculiar, delicate, preciousness which we have noted in so many humans, and which we find ostentatious and repugnant. We Wolves will drink anything, eat anything (except of course meat, fish, or poultry, or cheese containing rennet and junk food) and some of us vegan renegades have even been leading a movement to get Wolves to go completely vegan, with some success. Of course, we still hear rumours of Wolves attacking lambs and sheep in America, in places like Montana, but we put that down to human propaganda, and the lamb-industry lobby. (In America, it’s anything for a Baaah-ck). Any Wolves that would attack a little sheep or an innocent lamb are regarded by us Silverwolves as a sort of Taliban amongst us, and we do hereby solemnly excommunicate them from the Wolverine religion.  But we find ourselves highly incredulous as to the veracity of these reports of Wolves attacking lambs. Ha! it’s preposterous!

And be thankful, oh reader, that you are not one of those innocents waiting to be executed in China, so that your body parts can be sold for profit. (Behind the Great Wall the motto is, anything for a Renminbi!) Or one of those innocents waiting to be executed in Huntsville, Texas, because your defence lawyer fell asleep during the trial.

And be thankful, oh reader, that you are not one of those factory-working girls in Bangladesh, sewing a whole month for $30, or those countless millions in India, cleaning latrines by hand, or threading bidis 16 hours a day. And in America, the government will pay you if you refuse to take on such work.

Finally, oh reader, be thankful that you are not anyone else other than whom you are, for that is obviously the way it was meant to be, since that is exactly as it turned out. And would you really want to be somebody else?

As unsatisfactory as we may seem to ourselves, is there any human being who would really want to completely change personalities and character with anybody else? Silverwolf thinks not.

And finally, oh reader, be thankful that you have a cerebral cortex and the divine gift of Consciousness that enables you to read this. Does not that gift of Consciousness make it all worthwhile?

Hooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf