I would that he could have learned this lesson at a price less than the ultimate one: barbarians gonna barber.

You can't really play the Romans 5 card, emphasis mine:

. . .without noticing the symmetry of having one man finalize that group punishment for all mankind, before or since. Furthermore, one chapter over:

Everyone's flesh gets paid the same wage: a final heartbeat. But for the punishment to achieve true universality, we'd all have to die at once. But this punishment is not universally administered; we each get our reward as individuals. Those who've internalized what life really means (i.e., Jesus Christ) needn't fret that final heartbeat. Or the fables of the secular priesthood, like anthropogenic global warming (or whatever the current focus-group/choir-approved term for the lie is), life beginning at some arbitrary, lawyer-defined moment, or whatever tale the dirt-diggers (I mean 'experts') are spinning this week about when/where/why early humans were tooling around. God bless them all. I wish that there was some other course one could steer in life and reach joy. I grasp that mine is insufficient for you, and hope you find mercy, in the final analysis.
(a) I haven't really 'won' anything, in a secular sense: there is no competition.
(b) While I flatter myself an eternal winner, in a non-secular sense, there is scant value in winning ugly.
(c) Peace.

In recent months, Barack Obama has crossed an important threshold. He has always shown contempt for his opponents; now he shows contempt for his supporters. He has quit pretending to be a leader, and more or less quit pretending to be a president. On the right and the center, he has become a joke.

Was the man ever, at any point, anything other than a campaigner? I have two words for anyone who hasn't been seeing through BHO the entire time, the second of which is "you".

Usually I'm a morning glory, but not today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5554597&cid=47707717

Jeremiah Cornelius, sadly, needs training:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5554597&cid=47707835

Emphasis mine:

A hundred years ago, the first group of progressives concluded that this country needed to change in a big way. They argued explicitly for a refounding of the United States on the grounds that the only absolute in political life is that absolutes are material and economic rather than moral in nature.

That's one of those statements that leaves one rubbing the chin. It seems plausible on the face of matters. However, having taken one's eyes off the Almighty, much is possible. As someone wicked once said:

. . .All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

Bill Whittle is excellent, as ever:
https://www.billwhittle.com/firewall/struggle-stupidity

What hooey:

Yeah, the Hindus and Buddhists are all, "Wut?"
"When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas" is a hoot because at least a good chunk of the Enlightenment thinkers considered themselves Christian.
"...feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie." Yeah, there was that extended Bourgeoisgeddon, to roughly the extent the ancient world had "death throes". Charlemagne thought he was just reforming Latin, and would have balked at the idea of these "death throes" that Marx is making up. It sounds as though Marx may have bought off on Edward Gibbon's biases, directly or not.
This is to say nothing of my contempt for Marx's view of private property. What a used car salesman. The Communist vanguard inevitably, invariably, with enough irony to float an Iowa-class battleship, becomes the aristocracy standing in the ashes of the bourgeoisie. The only thing to be done with this foolishness is to reject it, and haul it out with the kids for a cautionary tale about liars.

So I pulled a pile of dreck (The Communist Hooeyfesto) into the Kindle app on my 'Droid phone.
This is supposed to be some classic of political thought? Really? For 33% through this noise, I have to say that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a better read. I mean, if you're going to smear someone falsely, Jews or burgerboise, one recommends a more diabolical approach to lying.

No, it is not. The mental effort of binning individuals into abstract chess pieces, so that he could move them around some imaginary chessboard, happened mostly in the mind of Marx.
It's an appealing fable, and many have swallowed it whole, to their detriment. As Alinsky would later codify the central axis of the Commie Hooeyfesto:

There will be no improvement until people recognize tawdry plays and gently rebuff them. I hope God had mercy on Marx. While I reject his ideas, I don't want to play his game.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5519563&cid=47653361

France

I'll give half credit here. Conservative do believe in national defense, but the Wilsonian craving for Team America: World Police is a Progressive notion.

Oh, I keep forgetting that 'profit' is the new 'bestiality'. Got me there. Can I say 50 "I H8 capitalisms" on my condom rosary for penance?

When people support "equality of opportunity", not the Socialist "equality of condition", how do you even construct this statement? Is that from the widely discredited Piketty?

Let's expand that. Doesn't this really mean "suppression of worker's rights to pay dues to a union, so that corrupt union bosses can buy politicians to further jack things through the roof"?
What workers really need is fewer regulations, so that they can go start their own businesses.
That said, it's understood that Socialism is truly anti-individual, and it's deemed better that worker's souls be warmed by a few more thousand pages of regulations there on the plantation, as opposed to enjoying the liberty to succeed or fail on their own merit.

One of my favorite /. rivers of effluent enjoys contending that Pres'ent Obama, in spite of every straight-line Progressive/Democrat/Socialist play in the feckless rodeo clown's book, is a "conservative".
This /.er seems to contend that, as the owner of the definition of Socialism, (s)he can refute the empirical truth that Obama's collapse into authoritarianism is the inevitable end-state of sucking all power into the State.
An example of the kind of derangement of which I speak (to paraphrase) is: "Obama must be a conservative, because if John McCain had won in 2008, McCain would have signed the Affordable Care Act with gusto."
Conversely, the empirical reality that Obama's magical thinking (e.g. that the mere repetition of the word "jobs" would beget employment) which would work if Obama were actually a Socialist, has failed, so Obama must no be a Socialist.
I guess my /. buddy, by demonstrating such intellectual clutter, underscores h(er|is) personal Socialist purity.

Once one grasps that #OccupyResoluteDesk is, was, and shall remained totally phoned-in, these seemingly counter-intuitive results become obvious.
Not that the GOP effort to don anything different will rise above shag-all.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5491981&cid=47605147
Couldn't actually work in any facial hair reference this time. It's hard to be topical, work in shaving, rhyme something, and keep it terse. I forgive myself.

ESR:

I'm mostly an ESR fan; he at least can argue rationally, and calls it like he sees it. This is a respectable style.
The only problem I have with the "Rabbit" characterization is that actual rabbits tend to reproduce, whereas these degenerate statist creeps tend toward confusion about the genitals in particular, beside life in general. When these intellectual dead heads have gone on, we can look back on the rubble of this day and (hopefully) communicate the Rabbit fallacies to the young, minimizing their idiotic impact.

My question is: Given the thorough, systemic, nonstop falsehood involved in all stages of ObamaCare, from wee intellectual tumor through full bureaucratic metastasis, how does anyone expect any good to come of this? How does it begin to be possible to trust these clowns to do anything whatsoever, including delivering any aspect of health care? When they are done, and give it all a "My bad", and then peddle their real goal, Single Payer, by what miracle shall they have become trustworthy?