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Africa over Europe, with Libya as the plug: you can’t fight gravity!
As you’ll recall, the 2011 destruction of the internationally recognized Libyan government by United States airpower in effect pulled the plug that had been bottling up 1.1 billion Africans from draining into Europe. Col. Gaddafi had contracted with Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi to limit transit through Libya of sub-Saharan Africans. But the murder-by-sodomy of Col. Kaffafee by roving bands backed by the U.S. military removed that impediment to the current mass migration.
With a demographic inundation of Europe by Muslims, Africans, and Muslim Africans looming (absent clear-eyed pro-European leadership), it’s worth listening to what a key international player — the President of the United States — has told us in his own words about his deepest feelings regarding Europe and Africa.
Thus, this passage from Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama may be of historical rather than just literary interest:
I FLEW OUT OF HEATHROW Airport under stormy skies. A group of young British men dressed in ill-fitting blazers filled the back of the plane, and one of them–a pale, gangly youth, still troubled with acne-took the seat beside me. He read over the emergency instructions twice with great concentration, and once we were airborne, he turned to ask where I was headed. I told him I was traveling to Nairobi to visit my family.
“Nairobi’s a beautiful place, I hear. Wouldn’t mind stopping off there one of these days. Going to Johannesburg, I am.” He explained that as part of a degree program in geology, the British government had arranged for him and his classmates to work with South African mining companies for a year. “Seems like they have a shortage of trained people there, so if we’re lucky they’ll take us on for a permanent spot. Best chance we have for a decent wage, I reckon–unless you’re willing to freeze out on some bleeding North Sea oil rig. Not for me, thank you.” I mentioned that if given the chance, a lot of black South Africans might be interested in getting such training.
“Well, I’d imagine you’re right about that,” he said. “Don’t much agree with the race policy there. A shame, that.” He thought for a moment. “But then the rest of Africa’s falling apart now, isn’t it? Least from what I can tell. The blacks in South Africa aren’t starving to death like they do in some of these Godforsaken countries. Don’t envy them, mind you, but compared to some poor bugger in Ethiopia–”
A stewardess came down the aisle with headphones for rent, and the young man pulled out his wallet. “’Course, I try and stay out of politics, you know. Figure it’s none of my business. Same thing back home–everybody on the dole, the old men in Parliament talking the same old rubbish. Best thing to do is mind your own little corner of the world, that’s what I say.” He found the outlet for the headphones and slipped them over his ears.
“Wake me up when they bring the food, will you,” he said before reclining his seat for a nap.
I pulled out a book from my carry-on bag and tried to read. It was a portrait of several African countries written by a Western journalist who’d spent a decade in Africa; an old Africa hand, he would be called, someone who apparently prided himself on the balanced assessment. The book’s first few chapters discussed the history of colonialism at some length: the manipulation of tribal hatreds and the caprice of colonial boundaries, the displacements, the detentions, the indignities large and small. The early heroism of independence figures like Kenyatta and Nkrumah was duly noted, their later drift toward despotism attributed at least in part to various Cold War machinations.
But by the book’s third chapter, images from the present had begun to outstrip the past. Famine, disease, the coups and countercoups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks–if Africa had a history, the writer seemed to say, the scale of current suffering had rendered such history meaningless.
Poor buggers. Godforsaken countries.
I set the book down, feeling a familiar anger flush through me, an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target. Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose. Was I angry at him? I wondered. Was it his fault that, for all my education, all the theories in my possession, I had had no ready answers to the questions he’d posed? How much could I blame him for wanting to better his lot? Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa; an assumption that in his world at least marked a progress of sorts, but that for me only underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.
I’d been feeling this way all through my stay in Europe–edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers. I hadn’t planned it that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality.
And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine–stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation–I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there.
Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness?
Has anyone ever asked the President if the main result of his Libya policy, the current Camp of the Saints in the Mediterranean, strikes him as a bug … or as a feature?
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
You gotta give it to him, though. Some of it is beautiful prose, possibly one of the best writer-presidents America has had, perhaps even the best one.
I am partial to The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
Now wait just a second… are you putting him in the same class as Theodore Roosevelt? Or Thomas Jefferson? They weren't ghosted, either. Some folks think Lincoln could write, as well. It's been decades since I read Reagan's book-length essay on abortion (and I may be confusing some of it with Ron Paul's similar tome), but I remember being impressed with it.
This sounds like what T.N. Coates would write after smoking a big spliff.
Politics aside, Bill Ayers is a good writer.
Style strikes me as Huey Newton rewritten by Mister Rogers.
https://screen.yahoo.com/mr-robinsons-neighborhood-000000373.html
Has anyone ever asked the President if that result were a bug — or a feature — of his policy?
If asked, would you expect him to tell the truth?
I tend to believe the stories of him being a college Marxist. (You didn't build that!) I would think he'd rather redistribute money to Africa than relocate them, but who knows? Unless he's changed, I can't see him believing chaos in Africa is inevitable without white leadership. From a Marxist worldview, there must be some oppression keeping them down.
Brits don’t actually speak the way Obama records here. It’s a fair attempt, granted, but the idioms are lifted from movies and TV shows and probably a generation out of date (assuming the incident is set in the 1980s). (Hopefully your British readers can back me up on this.)
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend – Obama’s fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama’s book so the rest of us don’t have to.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/05/obamas-uncle-and-the-liberatio.htmlReplies: @German_reader
http://www.amren.com/news/2015/09/new-campaign-aims-to-boost-numbers-of-latino-and-black-homeowners/
Where have all the home loans gone, long time passing?
When will they ever learn?
So Europe is an empty vacuum waiting for nature to fill it up with z-bamas?
And even Brad Pitt is too late?
“Politics aside, Bill Ayers is a good writer.”
Style strikes me as Huey Newton rewritten by Mister Rogers.
https://screen.yahoo.com/mr-robinsons-neighborhood-000000373.html
First time I’ve actually read an excerpt from the book, despite Steve posting from it several times in the past. I’m surprised by how good the writing is. Wasn’t it ghostwritten by Bill Ayers though?
Libya was on the hit-list way before Obama:
I once read a story, which may have only been a story, about The French Academy, founded for the establishment of French literature, which at one point had passed over for patronage Moliere, but later erected a special statue of him in its central plaza, and the statue bore the inscription: “Nothing is wanting to his glory; but he is wanting to ours.” Of course the emblematic thing about that statue is that you don’t know if the inscription was a joke or not, because we’re talking about the French.
Thinking of that somehow makes me sad to see France the way it is today, humbled by a would-be Muslim terrorist on a train, beholden to three Americans heroes, and suffering under an avalanche of foreigners. I don’t see the French too haughty today, and I find myself wanting to see the French be proudly French.
I wish there was something more discriminating than the pendulum.
Umm, no. It would seem like that, if you were limited to reading Breitbart and American Thinker. There is no evidence for it, Ayers, himself claimed to be “joking” when he made the “claim.”
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
Those were my thoughts also after reading that excerpt. There’s no way that Obama had that conversation with a British man. I doubt this is even a composite, like the girlfriend allegedly was, I’m thinking it’s made up out of whole cloth.
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
The “pale, gangly youth” talks like a middle-aged Graham Greene character from the 1950s. For a taste of this absurdity, American readers can imagine listening to a modern teen speaking like a hardboiled Sam Spade in perfect sentences.
You really think teleprompter Obama has (had) it in him to write a 404 page book? Bill Ayers wrote 70-100% of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Proven to my satisfaction by Jack Cashill who spent a few years decoding the true authorship. He had the book digitized to aid him in word and phrase searches and finding correspondences with Ayer’s own books.
Chance that Obama had that run in with pimple faced British teen?? I’d say 14% tops.
Can anybody speculate as to the real reason behind the Libya war?
A middle east in total disarray prevents the formation of an alliance of states hostile to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other little gulf sheikdoms along the Arabian coast.
Not to mention the fact that chaos offers opportunities for profit and consolidation of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @Dave Pinsen
From a review:
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c6d6-Book-review-Toppling-Qaddafi-Libya-And-The-Limits-Of-Liberal-Intervention-by-Christopher-Chivvis
Sarkozy, a key figure, was egged on by the absurd charlatan BHL.
BHL has Intello long hair and habitually lets us admire his 'sexy' chest hair.
The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson asked him why Libya:
“Why? I don’t know!” he said. “Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against a dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”
The Irish comedienne Samantha Power jumped on the R2P bandwagon to boost her career and wrote a crap, empty book about it Problem from Hell that sold well. She persuaded Obama to go all in.
(R2P was described by its proponents like former Oz foreign minister Gareth Evans as a genius new concept to rival the Treaty of Westphalia but was really just a badge that progressives and neocon types could pin on before doing whatever they felt like.)
JW123,
A middle east in total disarray prevents the formation of an alliance of states hostile to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other little gulf sheikdoms along the Arabian coast.
Not to mention the fact that chaos offers opportunities for profit and consolidation of power.
More importantly, the destruction of strong, independent states eliminates possible challenges to Israel from a conventional military and sophisticated weaponry (including biological) and a source of funds and weaponry to non-state actors.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
Am I alone in reading the (admittedly vivid) part re: crossing the Spanish plaza then flashing back to Roy Batty’s death speech from Blade Runner? Now I see why sentimental souls can’t get enough of this guy’s image
The poor American negro surely found a lot of money to bum around Europe for an extended period. Far better than what I ever did in my life.
Isn’t that bit about European civilization and how it “wasn’t mine” lifted from Baldwin? I’ve read the Obama book and I’ve never read any Baldwin, but I remember an excerpt of his I saw somewhere that says much the same thing only Baldwin, despite his inherent bitterness (I imagine as a gay black man born long before the sexual revolution he actually understood what it means to be alienated from one’s surroundings, but I digress), makes peace with it, whereas O, ever mindful to craft the image of himself bearing his alienation like a cross, almost disdains it. This despite the fact he’s half white! It could be his, but he rejects it to later rhapsodize about grandma’s hut in Kenya and the barbershop back in Chicago (though he never managed to spend much time in either, I notice). What a dick. What a profound…dick.
And how does Obama’s obsession with blood inheritance square with the left’s environmental blank-slatism and race as social construct tenets? Raised in a white culture and enjoying all its benefits, it seems to me all he has to hang his selected identity on are his African features. Did they ever hamper him beyond the profound indignity of someone asking to touch his hair once?
“Politics aside, Bill Ayers is a good writer.”
“Style strikes me as Huey Newton rewritten by Mister Rogers.”
Has anyone ever done a literary forensics of these black militants from the 1960 era to see how much of their stuff was ghost written for them?
Cleaver, Jackson, Newton. Etc.
Wow, what a great question.
I vaguely remember a few vague attempts having been made at a little of that but I don't think there is any readily available comprehensive analysis.
I remember reading "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim and thinking, really, is this a 170 IQ black man as the author claims who has mastered pimping to later realize how horrible it is and having turned away from it? Perhaps, perhaps not.
A good counter-reference or "sanity check" as engineer Robert Pease would have said, is a contemporaneous Holloway House title I read as a kid, and still have, called "Honolulu Madam", allegedly the autobiography of a former Hawaii prostitute and madam named "Iolana Mitsuko" (Holloway House being the publisher of the Iceberg Slim oeuvre). It is basically-upon a rereading now, by my fiftysomething self- a racial exposition on the situation of native and Japanese people in 1940s-1950s Hawaii interspersed with stilted sex scenes almost certainly written by a man trying (and not terribly well succeeding) to write as a woman. It does not have the ring of being written by someone with "Mitsuko's" alleged educational background. It would be interesting to have a forensic analyst compare and contrast it to Beck's writing and also to see if there was any such real person in Hawaii by the name of "Iolana Mitsuko". It claims to be an autobiography, and does not state that the author's name or any others in the book are pseudonyms, which would be understandable but I would think should be stated clearly.
Certainly, we know that most material allegedly written by Martin Luther King was either heavily plagiarized or heavily redacted, edited, and reworked by King's handlers. Whether this is also true of a few, most, or all of the black militant writers of the 1950s and 1960s is something I have no idea of, not having heavily read their work. As the OP says it bears some study.
I do know, however, that most white militant/white nationalist/white 'supremacist' writings are in fact written by their alleged authors, and in most cases I can pretty well spot whether something was written, say, by Revilo Oliver (key giveaway is the vocabulary and use of British English spellings in many cases), by William Pierce, by Kevin Strom, or by George Lincoln Rockwell. I can generally also identify writings by "Kurt Saxon" (pseudonym of survivalist writer who intersected with both Pierce's National Alliance and Anton LaVey's Church of Satan), by Eric Thomson (National Socialist and inventor of the term "ZOG"), by Harold Covington und so weiter. All are (highly) idiosyncratic writers with a certain vocabulary and style.
Also in previous jobs, I had to read a lot of work reports and statements written by, primarily, underclass or working-underclass black employees and again generally certain elements stand out, even on those where spelling, punctuation and general idiomatic style do not transgress normal usage.
A pretty good guess is that here is an enormously productive field but one which is a certain quagmire of career quicksand for anyone who approaches it, so that it is left alone not because no one suspects something is not right here but rather because people versed in the art know full well that it is indeed not right and that it is career cyanide to get involved with it.
Hillary wanted to wage a successful war to campaign on. Like W supposedly told someone, you can’t be remembered as a great president without winning a war. She saw the chance to get it done ahead of time. Why Obama assented to it is the question I have.
“Has anyone ever asked the President if the main result of his Libya policy, the current Camp of the Saints in the Mediterranean, strikes him as a bug…or as a feature?”
If you have to ask then you already know the answer.
We are living at a decision point that is every bit as consequential, if not more so, as any in the last century. Western culture has voted for hedonism, self-righteousness, and for demographic and cultural suicide – the result of an ideology in which so many are brainwashed that is every bit as fanatical as communism, nazism, or the worst religion.
The CIA always gets the best ghost writers. Say what you will about Yalies, but they are a literary bunch.
I am partial to The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
I don’t know, but it’s probably the same reason the Carter administration sided with the Ayatollahs against the Shah.
Obviously, we should have elected John McCain in 2008. For McCain, you see, having no particular emotional or ancestral ties to the African continent, would therefore never have bombed Libya. Not in a million years.
If you're trying to extoll the diplomatic prudence of Democrat leadership in general, spin while you can: it'll be harder not to laugh once Obama's Libya architect is in the White House again, bombing aspirin factories for a source of "Meet the Press" talking points.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Undocumented Shopper, @Anonymous
Muammar Qaddafi, like anyone else who has paid attention lately was worried about the US Dollar. Uncle Sham has been generous to a san andreas size fault and never pays any of his debt back. This is only possible because the US Dollar is the World Reserve Currency which other countries use to trade with each other since most countries use different money. Qaddafi was no friend to America obviously, but since giving up that whole terrorism thing after Reagan bombed his house with F-111s, he was making big bucks shipping oil to Europe. However, he was tired of the inflation wiping out part of his fortune in US Dollars, and wanted to switch Africa to the Gold Dinar. OMG! Qaddafi was a libertarian who wanted hard currency! Shortly after he introduced that plan, suddenly everyone noticed after 25 years he was a ruthless dictator and the US and NATO Air Forces started bombing his troops who were fighting rebels led by Al Queda. Was it a coincidence? Was Jack the Ripper actually Nessie a sixty foot sea serpent from Scotland? We may never know the answers to these questions…
OT: Texas SAT scores lowest in more than 2 decades
I disagree.
1.) COL Kathafee was going to take gold only for his oil payments, not petrodollars. Bankster elites don’t like competition for their fiat currency. (http://bit.ly/1EGEOa6)
2.) COL Gaddafi beat down muslim extremists. The current admin and the deep state both believe muslim extremists to be useful cudgels against other countries in the region, not radicals who should be crushed by those who favor law and order in their own countries.
3.) COL Qadaffy stopped illegal inflitraitors from flooding Europe. The US Deep State now sees an advantage to those same people infiltrating Europe.
4.) COL Quathafee didn’t want his country being used as a way point for the CIA to arm Al-Qaeda in its fight against Syria so Qatar can build an LNG pipeline through Syria. The Saudis also want a friendly puppet installed to spite the Iranians and the Qataris. He was removed, and the arms flowed freely. The same forces we armed are the same ones we are now technically fighting. Which makes us, in theory, aligned with the Syrians. Which we definitely are not, since we support the Saudis. And the Qataris. Even though they fund the radicals. Whom we are fighting. Phew.
In short the Libyan war was a looting expedition by the elites that blew up in their faces. Now they get to choke on the bill.
There’s no idelogy here, don’t give the guy more credit than he’s due. If we could closely examine his brain cell flickering to and fro (take ‘fro’ for example) like a firefly below the moon one night, over a vast radiant beach, like a child is like a flower, it’s head just floating in the breeze…
There’s nothing there, move along nothing to see here.
To destabilize the region. Same reason we went into Iraq, same reason we demanded Egypt be turned over to the muslim brotherhood, same reason we want Assad gone.
Lift your left hand, palm facing you, then make the middle finger sign, keeping your thumb along your index finger and not crossing over it. Now look at upside down Africa. The heel of the thumb is the Arab Peninsula, the thumbnail Somalia, etc. I wonder why I never caught that one before. Maybe because I don’t see Africa turned upside down on a regular basis.
The wikipedia claims that Libya is in the middle of a war:
“Libyan Civil War (2014–present): The Second Libyan Civil War is an ongoing conflict between four rival organizations seeking to control Libya…”
I guess there’s no reason for this one to make the news.
August, 2015, has not been uneventful:
It does make you wonder. Just who is launching anonymous airstrikes? Is the NYT on the case? I wasn’t the anonymous who did it!
There was a book published recently called “Toppling Qaddafi” by Christopher Chivvis of the Rand Institute, which is non-partisan and is one of the premier foreign policy and national security think tanks and has close ties to the military.
From a review:
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c6d6-Book-review-Toppling-Qaddafi-Libya-And-The-Limits-Of-Liberal-Intervention-by-Christopher-Chivvis
5.) Lockerbie. The whole thing is a mess. Some combination of Libya didn’t do it, Libya had to pay off or buy western officials to get out of sanctions, etc. The COL turned out to be too much of a loose cannon, surprise, surprise. His son Saif got bottled up in some tiny town as well.
Well written. A piece of history. White men don’t talk to black men that way anymore.
If you have to ask then you already know the answer.
We are living at a decision point that is every bit as consequential, if not more so, as any in the last century. Western culture has voted for hedonism, self-righteousness, and for demographic and cultural suicide - the result of an ideology in which so many are brainwashed that is every bit as fanatical as communism, nazism, or the worst religion.Replies: @rod1963
Nice summation of what has happened in the West.
Europe also wanted Qadaffi’s $60 billion in frozen assets and his oil. They got his assets which promptly vanished, as for the oil no one gets it now.
In short the Libyan war was a looting expedition by the elites that blew up in their faces. Now they get to choke on the bill.
If asked, would you expect him to tell the truth?Replies: @duderino
The thing with Obama is that I never know whether his words are related to his thoughts or are an artistic creation of what he wants us to think he thinks. Thinking back to his 08 comments about being a Rorschach test, the guy knows that there’s a purposeful gap between his public image and self identity.
I tend to believe the stories of him being a college Marxist. (You didn’t build that!) I would think he’d rather redistribute money to Africa than relocate them, but who knows? Unless he’s changed, I can’t see him believing chaos in Africa is inevitable without white leadership. From a Marxist worldview, there must be some oppression keeping them down.
The “Plaza Mejor”: where and what is that? And mustn’t he mean swallows instead of “sparrows”? The embarrassingly mistaken specificity reminds me of some of the authorial shortcomings of David Foster Wallace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Mayor,_Madrid
It is a very rushed itinerary. He visited France, England, Germany and Spain over only three weeks. That requires a big budget and an odd willingness to spend a large part of the time in trains and buses and not much time to enjoy himself.
Who goes to Paris and after three days says "Been there done that, time to take an expensive 15 hour train ride to Madrid"?
The Englishman on the plane prattling on to Obama about the glories of Apartheid South Africa sounds like an obvious straw man. Not that I am complaining.
OT:
From the Guardian:
Burning Man founder: ‘Black folks don’t like to camp as much as white folks’
Larry Harvey discusses lack of racial diversity and the allegation that Silicon Valley bosses in luxury camps are destroying the festival’s egalitarian ethos
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/04/burning-man-founder-larry-harvey-race-diversity-silicon-valley
“Google to fix ‘anti-semitic bug’ which claims that ‘Jews control Hollywood’”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3222375/Google-fix-anti-semitic-bug-claims-Jews-control-Hollywood.html
“Google is working to fix an anti-semitic bug which automatically suggests ‘the Jews’ when the internet search engine is asked: ‘Who runs Hollywood?’
The baffling answer is returned due to Google’s complicated algorithms which return a particular page on what it deems to be the most relevant to a person’s question…”
It really calls the whole algorithm into question, doesn't it?
Unless the algorithm is actually correct....
OK Google, is Tibet part of China
OK Google, what did Mohammed look like
OK Google, how many women have gold-medaled in the decathlon
etc.
Wow. Unbelievable how that man remembers conversations. Either he must have a photographic memory or this is all edited and therefore semi-fiction.
.
Now wait just a second… are you putting him in the same class as Theodore Roosevelt? Or Thomas Jefferson? They weren’t ghosted, either. Some folks think Lincoln could write, as well. It’s been decades since I read Reagan’s book-length essay on abortion (and I may be confusing some of it with Ron Paul’s similar tome), but I remember being impressed with it.
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
Agreed–I don’t believe much of what he says or what he has written or what he has professed to have written.
You’re kidding, right? It’s flatulent self-regarding drivel. And his attempt to render the Brit’s conversation would be embarrassing from a fourteen year old.
Alert! Ultra-rare poll on immigration without absurdly biased prompts released!
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/01si63uzmv/tabs_OPI_Border_Fence_20150902.pdf
Republicans support a Mexico border fence 87 to 8.
67% of Republicans “strongly support” a Mexico fence, while 1% strongly oppose.
There is a typo in the book or Steve’s excerpt. He means Plaza Mayor, or “Old Square” in Madrid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Mayor,_Madrid
It is a very rushed itinerary. He visited France, England, Germany and Spain over only three weeks. That requires a big budget and an odd willingness to spend a large part of the time in trains and buses and not much time to enjoy himself.
Who goes to Paris and after three days says “Been there done that, time to take an expensive 15 hour train ride to Madrid”?
Everyone knows that the (current) people of Europe are completely against mass immigration. The elite politicians and academics are pushing it on them. Whose side are they on?
I read some pbs.org article saying,
Maybe if the indigenous people of Europe are overwhelmingly against this destruction of their homeland, the noble leadership shouldn’t be “working on ideas” to make it happen, they should be working on ideas to stop it?
And it still baffles me that the liberal media academic outlets are putting all the pressure on White Christian areas to accommodate, but are giving nations like Qatar a complete pass. Qatar funded much Syrian upheaval, is filthy rich, and gets a complete pass. The liberal world ignores the aggressive anti-refugee policy and physical borders of all the non-white nations of the world in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
Additionally, it would seem wise for the government to pass this off to regular citizens of Austria and Germany to help, and not guarantee mass assistance and official welcome centers. This is nuts.
There is no way Obama wrote that. Read anything he wrote before either of “his” books were written and you can tell that is someone else’s prose. He is a lie and a fraud. On a side note, when I first visited Europe, I did not feel I belonged either and that in no way surprised me. I am an American and grew up in the U.S., why would I feel at home in Europe – especially France?
No, it totally sounds like him.
I'm sure someone brushed it up, but editors do that with all books and articles.
It is him because it sounds so bogus. Zero candor and all calculation, however, one that pretends to be candor.
DREAMS would have us believe that Obama is sincerely peering into his own psyche and soul, but it's just him peeking into the minds of sucker white readers and playing with their anxieties by pushing the right Goldilockian buttons that sound just a bit angry(thus proving he is no Tom) but sufficiently mainstream(thus non-threatening). It's the empathy of a sociopath. T Obama's credit, he knows the white mind better than white people do.
It's classic Oprah's Book of the Month material.
PS. Though Obama certainly wrote the book, that account on the plane is suspect. It sounds too much like a 'teachable moment'.
Good to regard Hugh Kenner’s maxim: we are always blind to the styles of our time. Who knows what the future will say, but I suspect past generations would read that passage and above all note a deceptive ability to accidentally dramatize self-delusion. How could someone so aware of their emotions be so unaware of their assumptions? Is he serious? That’s a main reason DeQuincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater is so well done—he wrote striking realism because he could write above his emotions about his self-delusion. He always knew what his assumptions were, and states upfront that the book was only worth writing because his abiding interest was philosophy. The fundamental point about Obama’s writing is that the clarity of his prose actually obfuscates the direction of his thought.
"Style strikes me as Huey Newton rewritten by Mister Rogers."
Has anyone ever done a literary forensics of these black militants from the 1960 era to see how much of their stuff was ghost written for them?
Cleaver, Jackson, Newton. Etc.Replies: @Former Darfur
Has anyone ever done a literary forensics of these black militants from the 1960 era to see how much of their stuff was ghost written for them?
Wow, what a great question.
I vaguely remember a few vague attempts having been made at a little of that but I don’t think there is any readily available comprehensive analysis.
I remember reading “Pimp” by Iceberg Slim and thinking, really, is this a 170 IQ black man as the author claims who has mastered pimping to later realize how horrible it is and having turned away from it? Perhaps, perhaps not.
A good counter-reference or “sanity check” as engineer Robert Pease would have said, is a contemporaneous Holloway House title I read as a kid, and still have, called “Honolulu Madam”, allegedly the autobiography of a former Hawaii prostitute and madam named “Iolana Mitsuko” (Holloway House being the publisher of the Iceberg Slim oeuvre). It is basically-upon a rereading now, by my fiftysomething self- a racial exposition on the situation of native and Japanese people in 1940s-1950s Hawaii interspersed with stilted sex scenes almost certainly written by a man trying (and not terribly well succeeding) to write as a woman. It does not have the ring of being written by someone with “Mitsuko’s” alleged educational background. It would be interesting to have a forensic analyst compare and contrast it to Beck’s writing and also to see if there was any such real person in Hawaii by the name of “Iolana Mitsuko”. It claims to be an autobiography, and does not state that the author’s name or any others in the book are pseudonyms, which would be understandable but I would think should be stated clearly.
Certainly, we know that most material allegedly written by Martin Luther King was either heavily plagiarized or heavily redacted, edited, and reworked by King’s handlers. Whether this is also true of a few, most, or all of the black militant writers of the 1950s and 1960s is something I have no idea of, not having heavily read their work. As the OP says it bears some study.
I do know, however, that most white militant/white nationalist/white ‘supremacist’ writings are in fact written by their alleged authors, and in most cases I can pretty well spot whether something was written, say, by Revilo Oliver (key giveaway is the vocabulary and use of British English spellings in many cases), by William Pierce, by Kevin Strom, or by George Lincoln Rockwell. I can generally also identify writings by “Kurt Saxon” (pseudonym of survivalist writer who intersected with both Pierce’s National Alliance and Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan), by Eric Thomson (National Socialist and inventor of the term “ZOG”), by Harold Covington und so weiter. All are (highly) idiosyncratic writers with a certain vocabulary and style.
Also in previous jobs, I had to read a lot of work reports and statements written by, primarily, underclass or working-underclass black employees and again generally certain elements stand out, even on those where spelling, punctuation and general idiomatic style do not transgress normal usage.
A pretty good guess is that here is an enormously productive field but one which is a certain quagmire of career quicksand for anyone who approaches it, so that it is left alone not because no one suspects something is not right here but rather because people versed in the art know full well that it is indeed not right and that it is career cyanide to get involved with it.
David Maraniss’s big 2012 biography of Obama has a bunch of his letters to a girlfriend around age 22-23, and they’re in roughly the same Creative Writing 302-style as “Dreams from My Father:”
“Manhattan streets are broad and bumpy; the cool crisp grey of fall glows on the teeming faces of the midtown rush; the drunk slides back and forth on his subway seat under the gaze of the neat older woman knitting her mauve yarn; the pigeons comb the cobblestones on Riverside, white and grey and plump …”
http://www.vdare.com/articles/global-elites-and-the-first-black-president-maraniss-s-barack-obama-the-official-story-reve
Yet a guy who writes like this (and who, one must presume and is led to believe, reads a lot) pronounces “corps” as “corpse”. He said “the Navy signal corpse”, not in just one speech but in two that I know of. The guy is a liar and a fraud.
“There is no way Obama wrote that…he is a lie and a fraud.”
We both know your actual argument is basically: blacks are stupid (low IQ’s), so there’s no way Obama could’ve written that. He went to Columbia and Harvard Law School? Oh, just affirmative action, reverse racism…take a deep breath, ok? He’s just smarter than you. It’s ok.
Ayers wrote it. He admitted it after both of them first said that he didn't know Ayers he was just a guy who, 'lived in my neighborhood'. Etc. He is a liar and lazy. That doesn't make anyone else on earth a liar or lazy. Just Obama.
I happen to agree with you. The beauty of the prose often has little to do with clarity of thought. Anybody who’s read Allen Ginsberg can attest to that.
If you are troubled by the relative poverty and backwardness of sub-Saharan Africa, pouring sub-Saharan Africans into Europe is a way to ameliorate that in two ways at once. It will make the individual Africans who migrate to Europe richer, and it will make Europe poorer and take it down a peg.
Similarly, if you are troubled by the continuing inequality of income, wealth, etc. between blacks and whites in the U.S., a half century after the Great Society, one way to tackle that is to bring whites down by making everyone on the bottom half of the economic ladder poorer. The jobs report released Friday offered some encouragement if that’s your goal, as the workforce participation rate is at a 38 year low, with 93 million working-age Americans out of work.
An added bonus of creating more poor whites is it increases popular support for various welfare programs.
It is becoming clearer every day, piece by piece, that people are be offshored from US war zones and Africa in to the First World. What's the next piece of the Strategic Grand Plan. Is this what PoppyBush meant when he spoke of "A New World Order" back in '92?Replies: @IA, @TWS, @Dave Pinsen
It ‘could’ be his, but that is far easier said than done. Race is a chasm that few manage to cross, so I don’t blame him for falling short – or being unwilling to try. I like neither Obama himself nor his race, but in this I find him faultless. Not at all a dick.
That makes me think Obama actually was the author.
, what a horrific mean spirited comment. Sailer and this crowd on a bad day are kinder people than you.
In this passage, Obama seems to be angry because his thoughts were starting to wander off into forbidden territory: perhaps, Africans have better living standards in white ruled countries; and perhaps, African rulers are just as (if not more) exploitative and rapacious than European colonialists (Orwell’s Animal Farm is applicable here). But as a black leftist, Obama rejected these troubling thoughts, and he reaffirmed his dogmatic beliefs: Western civilization is somehow responsible for all the Third World’s problems; and the achievements of Western civilization should really be attributed to non-whites because they were exploited and oppressed by the white man.
Barrack Obama writes descriptions of Brits and the way we talk like an old fashioned minstrel show portrays black Americans….
Take from that what you will.
I’ve gotten the sense that Obama’s not really interested in intervening and fighting wars in the Middle East; it’s just something he has to do as president (someone who believes in non-intervention, like Ron Paul, would not get anywhere near the White House). I think his views on race and the third-world, as presented in his autobiography, really come out in his domestic policies. In other words, he’s only really interested in inviting the third-world to America and declaring war on America’s “racist past”; he doesn’t seem that interested in a neo-conservative/liberal hawkish foreign policy for the Middle East (Sub-Saharan Africa might be a different story, though).
I read a bunch of Graham Greene novels in the 1970s. He was big. He was a leftist Catholic. Obama was working for some kind of quasi-Catholic leftist organization in Chicago, so people like Father Pfleger were likely big on Greene.
You don’t hear much about him anymore the way you hear about Orwell and Waugh, but he was quite good. I read the first 50 pages of Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” in 2004 and was impressed. (I didn’t finish
I read a bunch of Graham Greene novels in the 1970s. He was big. He was a leftist Catholic. Obama was working for some kind of quasi-Catholic leftist organization in Chicago, so people like, say, Father Pfleger were likely big on Greene, although Greene hardly needed a personal introduction: he was big in the papers in the 1980s as a friend of Castro and the like.
You don’t hear much about Greene anymore the way you hear about Orwell and Waugh, but he was quite good. I read the first 50 pages of Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” in 2004 and was impressed. (I didn’t finish it, but that was my fault not Greene’s.)
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American
A cracking novel about people who interfere in other countries with the best of intentions. One of the most satisfying novels I have ever read, even if I don't like Greene's politics. Greene was thrown out of Vietnam because the French thought he was spying for the British. Which he more or less was. The films don't do the book justice.Replies: @5371
You want to know what Obama's thinking? Go ask his drug using buddies or his golf buddies. Don't read anything he's supposed to have written. He let stand that he was born in Kenya for Christs sake for twenty years. He doesn't write it or read it.
Just not buying that he wrote all of it. Some? Sure. Creative direction? Sure. Possibly even final edit? Sure. But do you really think Obama wouldn’t want his vanity project to turn out as polished as his midnight blue suits?
Indeed. The question is, with the tax base so bloated on the bottom, as you describe, how does the elite imagine financing all these people? Only so much more debt and financialization trickery can go on before TdoodooHTF. (Unless there is a plan for that we don’t have an inkling about yet. Maybe that’s what TPP etc is for — exploiting overseas minerals and natural resources to finance the poverty at home in First World sucker countries.)
It is becoming clearer every day, piece by piece, that people are be offshored from US war zones and Africa in to the First World. What’s the next piece of the Strategic Grand Plan. Is this what PoppyBush meant when he spoke of “A New World Order” back in ’92?
My sister just got back from Bogota, Colombia, where she visited a hospital on business. It was gleaming, modern, and had spaceship doors that opened and closed with a "whoosh", she said. Locals told her it was a private hospital for political and business leaders. There's another tier of quality hospitals just for the police and their families. The lumpenproletariat has a much lower quality of care in the third tier hospitals.Replies: @Marat
I am British and have been in Switzerland for a number of years. Switzerland has wages that are DOUBLE those of Germany, France or Austria. But why aren’t the migrants coming here? Because they know if they come here they will be deported. The Swiss have a no-nonsense approach to immigration.
Legal immigration in Switzerland (mostly from the EU) is very high. “Immigrants” or foreigners make up 30-40 per cent of the Swiss population but it is truly a paradise on earth. You only have to cross the border into France on a weekend to feel the difference.
I don’t care what anyone says, I find his writing style to be irritating and yuk inducing. The plane conversation strikes me as being made up. He’s just one big fake. Then again, most of our leaders are fakes, aren’t they?
Are you parodying Perfect Eloi?
He could have bought the Kindle version for $9.99 and saved himself a couple of years.
1) I have my doubts about the authority of such artificial-analysis "style similarity" experiments. At current level of sophistication, it's fine for catching an 8th grader who lifts from Wikipedia. However, forensic-level it's decidedly not. I've never seen software that catches known historical ghost-writing, without tampering with the routine anyway. The choice of pattern database colors the process of a computer algorithm's primed comparison, and for the sake of getting usable "matches" bigger is not always better. On the comparatively simpler problem of plagiarism, how precisely does it check? If you fed "I, Claudius" and "The Manchurian Candidate" into a Bayesian evaluation model incorporating some prior "training" how much tinkering & revision is needed before it catches the plagiarized passages (and concepts) in the latter work? Unless the Obama critic has peer-reviewed the digital analysis method with John Searle or Daniel Dennett or the like, I don't think it adds much to his case to claim a piece of pseudo-scientific computer proof.
2) Obama authored 2 heavily-edited books, and not much else when he had ample chance to do so (if I'm correct about him I find that I identify with the personality type: impressed by the art of writing and possessing a literary bent but rarely connecting internally w/ a need for self-expression; he's somewhat cerebral but not an artist). Thus I don't read a whole lot into the dialogue verisimilitude for the pimply English white guy he clearly dislikes in that well-established passive-aggro manner of his. Barring the discovery of early manuscripts of Dreams From My Father, lol, I'm going to assume the written passage itself was punched up 2 or 3 times by a middle-aged female editor who later became a huge J.K. Rowling fangirl. Obama's "characters" are always kinda secondary and uncompelling anyway, so to a certain extent he's just invented them all.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Clyde
Must be the Joos.
It is becoming clearer every day, piece by piece, that people are be offshored from US war zones and Africa in to the First World. What's the next piece of the Strategic Grand Plan. Is this what PoppyBush meant when he spoke of "A New World Order" back in '92?Replies: @IA, @TWS, @Dave Pinsen
LGBT to defeat Russia. Biggest threat by far are white orthodox Christians.
I remember this quote being attributed to Billy Jeff.
wait, why would a guy who studies geology have the accent of a chav?
Didn’t our old friend Saddam make some noise about a gold dinar as well?
A middle east in total disarray prevents the formation of an alliance of states hostile to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other little gulf sheikdoms along the Arabian coast.
Not to mention the fact that chaos offers opportunities for profit and consolidation of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @Dave Pinsen
A middle east in total disarray prevents the formation of an alliance of states hostile to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other little gulf sheikdoms
More importantly, the destruction of strong, independent states eliminates possible challenges to Israel from a conventional military and sophisticated weaponry (including biological) and a source of funds and weaponry to non-state actors.
Bullshit or not – you decide!
It’s interesting that we no longer hear about how eloquent a speaker Obama is — except, of course, on those occasions in which he speaks about how racist our society is. Thus, his speech on the Charleston murders was, of course, depicted as hugely moving; but that praise could as well have been written in advance.
But I have always been struck by how unmemorable is everything that has ever come out of his mouth, or from his pen. Where’s the great line or great passage one associates with Obama? He can’t even seem to hire good speechwriters.
Though it might originally have come from Fauxcahontas.
“There is no way Obama wrote that. Read anything he wrote before either of “his” books were written and you can tell that is someone else’s prose”
No, it totally sounds like him.
I’m sure someone brushed it up, but editors do that with all books and articles.
It is him because it sounds so bogus. Zero candor and all calculation, however, one that pretends to be candor.
DREAMS would have us believe that Obama is sincerely peering into his own psyche and soul, but it’s just him peeking into the minds of sucker white readers and playing with their anxieties by pushing the right Goldilockian buttons that sound just a bit angry(thus proving he is no Tom) but sufficiently mainstream(thus non-threatening). It’s the empathy of a sociopath. T Obama’s credit, he knows the white mind better than white people do.
It’s classic Oprah’s Book of the Month material.
PS. Though Obama certainly wrote the book, that account on the plane is suspect. It sounds too much like a ‘teachable moment’.
Sign me up for the team that thinks the Obama passage is awful. To my mind, that’s narcissistic, sensitive-adolescent, arrested-development Ivy-undergrad level writing. It’s J.D. Salinger reincarnated as a politician. Prestigious northeastern colleges turn out thousands of kids who can write like this every year. I don’t get the commenters here who find the passage beautiful.
Nice catch, forgot about that one.
Bernard-Henri Lévy. Samantha Power.
Sarkozy, a key figure, was egged on by the absurd charlatan BHL.
BHL has Intello long hair and habitually lets us admire his ‘sexy’ chest hair.
The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson asked him why Libya:
“Why? I don’t know!” he said. “Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against a dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”
The Irish comedienne Samantha Power jumped on the R2P bandwagon to boost her career and wrote a crap, empty book about it Problem from Hell that sold well. She persuaded Obama to go all in.
(R2P was described by its proponents like former Oz foreign minister Gareth Evans as a genius new concept to rival the Treaty of Westphalia but was really just a badge that progressives and neocon types could pin on before doing whatever they felt like.)
“That was my first instinct — to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American
A cracking novel about people who interfere in other countries with the best of intentions. One of the most satisfying novels I have ever read, even if I don’t like Greene’s politics. Greene was thrown out of Vietnam because the French thought he was spying for the British. Which he more or less was. The films don’t do the book justice.
It is becoming clearer every day, piece by piece, that people are be offshored from US war zones and Africa in to the First World. What's the next piece of the Strategic Grand Plan. Is this what PoppyBush meant when he spoke of "A New World Order" back in '92?Replies: @IA, @TWS, @Dave Pinsen
They’re taking homes from Germans now for the criminal invaders. Wait till they start that shit here.
Let’s not forget who wrote this. Bill Ayers. Obama couldn’t write anything as the editor at the law journal.
You want to know what Obama’s thinking? Go ask his drug using buddies or his golf buddies. Don’t read anything he’s supposed to have written. He let stand that he was born in Kenya for Christs sake for twenty years. He doesn’t write it or read it.
No the argument is that Obama is a lazy under achieving drug user who smoked his way through high school and never wrote a thing as the editor of the Law Review. Typically the editor writes quite a bit.
Ayers wrote it. He admitted it after both of them first said that he didn’t know Ayers he was just a guy who, ‘lived in my neighborhood’. Etc. He is a liar and lazy. That doesn’t make anyone else on earth a liar or lazy. Just Obama.
You forgot to factor in the black activist magnifier effect. Obama is being relatively honest in these passages about (among other things) his resentment towards whites for being, well…just white. Finding emotional honesty and thoughtful introspection among black activist authors is kind of like finding a Rolls Royce in a used car lot in Cleveland ; it seems a lot more extraordinary than it would had you discovered it in the places where it’s usually found. You wouldn’t bat an eye if saw it driving around Beverly Hills. Hence, the magnifier.
You should thank Bill Ayers for this sea yarn.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3222375/Google-fix-anti-semitic-bug-claims-Jews-control-Hollywood.html
"Google is working to fix an anti-semitic bug which automatically suggests 'the Jews' when the internet search engine is asked: 'Who runs Hollywood?'
The baffling answer is returned due to Google's complicated algorithms which return a particular page on what it deems to be the most relevant to a person's question..."Replies: @Cloudbuster, @Anonymous
Now, if Google is claiming their algorithm is incorrect here, why should we believe the algorithm is correct on any other particular result of a Google search.
It really calls the whole algorithm into question, doesn’t it?
Unless the algorithm is actually correct….
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
I agree, As an Englishmen- and they are the only “Brits” qualified to comment, the language struck me as false. Perhaps his racist girlfriend is shacked up with his uncle who liberated Auschwitz.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/05/obamas-uncle-and-the-liberatio.html
He had a “great emptiness” in him.I guess he tried to get that emptiness filled.Fill it up go the rim so to speak.Overflowing and dripping down the side…OK I’ll stop.
I can just see Michelle reading this.Her eyes would roll so hard they’d ache for hours…
“On August 14, Anonymous multiple airstrikes were conducted on Sirte after the massacre committed by ISIL. The air assault lasted for half an hour targeting multiple areas in Sirte..”
The world’s full of mystery air forces these days I guess.
I have no idea what the war in Libya was about, but here’s a theory that might be as good as any.
Gaddafi was deposed by the West because he was too weak a dictator, at least with respect to keeping his Islamists inline. He wasn’t doing nearly as good a job in running his country as Algerian military intelligence was doing running theirs, for instance. (Of course, it helped that he had been an old Cold War foe, and Nato can blindly fight old Cold War foes without any thought — or justification, really — required.)
The largest number of Islamic State in Iraq (al-Qaeda) foreign fighters were coming from the Benghazi area. So we were to a significant extent already fighting Libya (or at least Libyans) in Iraq. Gaddafi apparently was okay with letting his Islamists carry on, as long as they left the country to fight.
One argument against this theory was that the real opening of the all-out war in Libya was when Nato took out much of Gaddafi’s equivalent of the Republican Guard in one air strike. These were his real loyal co-ethnics who could defeat any force in Libya because they had a good number of Italian Palmaria self-propelled howitzers, which have a firing range of about 20 miles. He didn’t need an air force, he could just pound the opposition from afar. They were getting in place to defeat the Islamists in Benghazi. (Second Battle of Benghazi: “…The battle marked the start of a United Nations-mandated military intervention in the conflict…”.)
Why would we attack Gaddafi just as he was starting to try to clear the Islamists out of Benghazi? Maybe simply because all his really loyal forces were in one place with no air cover and it was just easy to do. Break Gaddafi’s power in one stroke and install someone hopefully like the Algerian military who would really crack down, not just let his Islamists go fight the West.
So the war was just another campaign against the Islamic State.
If this is the case, the war probably happened because the Pentagon was aware that the war on the ground in Iraq against what became the Islamic State was being lost and would continue to be lost unless the fundamental problem was changed. Somebody had probably done the calculation, or played the war-game, and similar to the Pentagon about 1967 with respect to Vietnam, realized that at the current casualty rate; the influx rate of foreign fighters; the political situation; and Libyan demographics, the war in Iraq could be sustained by the Islamists indefinitely.
See “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq:
2007 West Point Study Shows Benghazi-Darnah-Tobruk Area was a World Leader in Al Qaeda Suicide Bomber Recruitment”:
So the campaign in Libya might somewhat resemble the campaign in Laos in 1971 at the end of the Vietnam war (Operation Lam Son 719, a “spoiling attack”.)
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
Funny, I inferred as much myself while reading. Like most things involving Obama, truth takes a back seat to the narrative.
“There is no evidence for it, Ayers, himself claimed to be “joking” when he made the “claim.””
Yeah, because it’s normal to claim to have ghostwritten a book for a friend. Maybe Obama really did write his book himself, but it’s really quite odd for a someone to joke around by claiming to have ghostwritten a friend’s/colleague’s book.
As best I can make out, Obama’s reaction to Europe is about him, not Europe.
Is it surprising that as someone whose black father took off to another continent when he was an infant and who is half European-American but considered black by most people that he felt the way he did?
Under the circumstances, for his trip to Kenya and thoughts about his father to be uppermost in his mind seems natural to me. That Obama felt restless and unsatisfied by his stopover in Europe seems natural to me too.
Actually this excerpt left me wanting to read more and to find out how things turned out.
I think US policy on Libya was not primarily a result of anything Obama thought. It was a lot more about our hopes and desires for a different Middle East. There were a lot of decisionmakers here and in Europe who thought it would be a good idea to support the Arab Spring with more than words.
There’s some current Republican Presidential candidates who talk about “American exceptionalism” who seem to be all but promising us to get the US into a lot more wars in the future. I do not understand why so many Americans support that idea. Do they not realize when politicians say America has to “lead” by putting boots on the ground in this conflict and that conflict or we will look weak that more billion and trillion dollar wars will be the result?
Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning!
He pulled the stopper and Africa poured into Europe. Then the Libyan weapons were shipped to Syrian rebels. Then the Middle East poured into Europe.
FIN
Of course Ayers wouldn’t admit to ghostwriting DFMF. A critical element of Obama’s appeal to leftist poseurs was the conceit that he’s a literary prodigy. The Left loves to conceive of its leaders as super-genius philosopher-kings who will magically fix everything with their giant brains, and that’s the template they fixated on with Obama.
But nothing the man has ever said in public has given me the slightest reason to believe that he’s actually capable of even the middling level of intellectual insight on display in that excerpt. To all appearances, he is strikingly banal and incurious.
That said, Steve makes a credible case based on Obama’s letters to his girlfriend, so I guess the jury’s still out.
Trump is an exception, but the rest of them are like McCain. As bad as Obama is, at least his Middle Eastern meddling is done on the cheap, without sending ground troops.
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American
A cracking novel about people who interfere in other countries with the best of intentions. One of the most satisfying novels I have ever read, even if I don't like Greene's politics. Greene was thrown out of Vietnam because the French thought he was spying for the British. Which he more or less was. The films don't do the book justice.Replies: @5371
[Which he more or less was.]
Yes. In Greene’s autobiography he describes how General de Lattre accused him to his face of being a spy, and adds what seems like a vigorous refutation of the charge. One needs to read the passage carefully to see that there is in fact no denial.
I realize that my last two paragraphs seem to be connected but I did not mean that. I think our response to the Arab Spring and the general idea of “American exceptionalism” and constantly sending troops abroad are not the same things. Sorry
There’s a difference between a theoretical McCain administration’s war designs & what it could actually pull off during a Reid-Pelosi Congress. Another obstacle would be the anti-war “movement”/media fad, a supposed force of nature that evaporated once the polished Benneton boy was in charge. Consistently the whiteliberal synthetic romance with Blackus Aurelius has not only shielded generic R2P nitwits of the Susan Power/Sam Rice stripe, it’s also created or saved the jobs of saboteurs like Victoria Nuland. Though it looked doubtful for a moment Obama truly has reclaimed U.S. foreign policy for the messianic-imperialist team.
If you’re trying to extoll the diplomatic prudence of Democrat leadership in general, spin while you can: it’ll be harder not to laugh once Obama’s Libya architect is in the White House again, bombing aspirin factories for a source of “Meet the Press” talking points.
The technique was designed and tested by Clinton: you start a war without congressional approval, then you accuse your of opponents of being unpatriotic. Next, you give the sheep orders to bleat "we must support our troops!"
I don’t get the impression that Obama cares much about foreign policy. Why did Obama intervene in Libya? It’s likely “he” didn’t, but just let his SoS go off and do whatever she wanted there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3222375/Google-fix-anti-semitic-bug-claims-Jews-control-Hollywood.html
"Google is working to fix an anti-semitic bug which automatically suggests 'the Jews' when the internet search engine is asked: 'Who runs Hollywood?'
The baffling answer is returned due to Google's complicated algorithms which return a particular page on what it deems to be the most relevant to a person's question..."Replies: @Cloudbuster, @Anonymous
This is Sisyphean, right? Goofle used to put a bolded “Special Note” explaining themselves on (potentially) embarrassing results pages; hilariously, the A.I. note would also appear for innocuous searches like “jewish deli” or “jew’s harp.” If they’re going to curb the algorithm from offending anyone, in this golden age of offense, when does it begin eating into the usefulness of the product, i.e. a dynamic web assistant-service efficiently pointing users to information or goods they’re genuinely interested in? Once the censorship factor starts hitting you in the face, it changes the way you search, thus weakening or at least distorting the operation of the underlying mechanism from G’s revenue point of view.
OK Google, is Tibet part of China
OK Google, what did Mohammed look like
OK Google, how many women have gold-medaled in the decathlon
etc.
If you're trying to extoll the diplomatic prudence of Democrat leadership in general, spin while you can: it'll be harder not to laugh once Obama's Libya architect is in the White House again, bombing aspirin factories for a source of "Meet the Press" talking points.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Undocumented Shopper, @Anonymous
But Yosemite Sam McCain would have been thinking up places to bomb himself, while Obama waits for his staff to come up with ideas of places for him to bomb.
President McCain might be bombing Hungary by now.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/05/obamas-uncle-and-the-liberatio.htmlReplies: @German_reader
If I recall correctly, on another occasion Obama claimed his uncle was among the liberators of Treblinka…which is even more idiotic because the Germans demolished Treblinka death camp during the war and there wasn’t anything to liberate in ’45.
I’d say Hussein lacks much of a work ethic (lots of support for that), thinks himself above petty grinds like writing books (ditto), and most importantly, he’s an empty suit whose single greatest qualification for the presidency is Affirmative Action. So, it seems at least likely that his books were ghost-written, and absolutely certain that having books ghost-written for him is 100% in-character. But no, he’s not too stupid to have written them. And he probably isn’t nearly as smart as you seem to think he is (seems a silly argument to link to an idea like Dave’s, since anyone can take it up); the upper bounds of his IQ have been pretty well-estimated here in previous arguments, at 130 (TL;DR version: he didn’t make it past National Merit Scholarship semifinalist (IIRC)).
(Hussein can put all of this to bed by releasing his records, something he’s gone to court to oppose, again IIRC)
I don’t remember seeing your refutation of Cashill’s analysis. Eventually someone with impeccable credentials and pedigree will analyze Obama’s writing (probably after he’s left office), and my guess is Cashill will be proven right. And an educated guess is all it is, though I’m much more confident in my prediction that someone will put his supposed work under the microscope.
Is it really all that hard to imagine that his books were written by one of the legion of more-qualified, white leftist writers? Is it really all that hard to imagine them being delighted at the prospect of propping up a “clean” black for the cause? Is it really hard to imagine leftists lying to get God’s Work done? Do you find Hussein such a known quantity, so genuine, so earthy, and so obviously not invented, that you can’t wrap your head around him benefiting from ghost writers (lol)?
This can happen when what you read is at a higher level than the conversations around you; nobody uses the word, so you’ve never heard it pronounced. Though as mundane a word as “corps” would seem to be a poor example; I remember making the same mistake, and being corrected, at age 9 or so.
p.s. I shouldn't neglect the possibility that this was a normal upper Midwestern pronunciation with which I was merely unfamiliar, thus putting the joke on me if ever I find myself in Grossay Point riding in a ChevroletteReplies: @The Last Real Calvinist
But that's nothing. I've had a history professor who pronounced Yalta as "Yat-la" among other howlers, and even more egregiously a lecturer in global political economy who pronounced Keynesian as "Keneezian." Both were native English-speakers. These guys may have been dyslexic but how the hell did they manage to become professors without ever hearing these words pronounced properly?
Bad as that is, I think it's even worse - or harder to live down - to incorrectly write words you've only ever heard spoken. A classic example of this is writing "walla" for voila - and yes, I've done that. (It has to be on that level though - it can't just be a simple spelling error.)Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
I think what Dmitri meant was, there’s no evidence he’ll ever admit to believing. The edifice of “Affirmative Action” probably isn’t monumental enough, never mind leftists’ abiding love of lying.
The left’s environmental blank-slatism and delusion of race as social construct take a distant back seat to the left’s devotion to “who-whom?,” so it’s probably no big deal. It’s non-Jewish whites who are policed.
Seems not nearly socialist, naive, and PC enough for a young Brit in the 80s (maybe that’s why Obama made him an oil worker), but I’m just going by vague impressions over the years.
The poor bastards patching this are gonna have their work cut out when AI comes along.
Don’t forget to roll in their delusion of racial cognitive equality (and their resulting overcompensation). Taken together, we get the absurd conversations about Obama’s intellect. First leftists say he’s a genius. Then sane people say no, he’s not all that, he’s within the typical range for a president (120-130). Then the leftists run around with their wigs off claiming we’re calling him stupid because he’s a negro. Then we point out that we just said he isn’t a genius, not that he’s stupid. Then lefties reset their memories and we have the conversation all over again.
On the other hand, it’s completely normal for a liar, who adheres to an ideology based on lies, to pull a “wink-wink nudge-nudge” non-admission admission to having ghostwritten the president’s biographies.
If you're trying to extoll the diplomatic prudence of Democrat leadership in general, spin while you can: it'll be harder not to laugh once Obama's Libya architect is in the White House again, bombing aspirin factories for a source of "Meet the Press" talking points.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Undocumented Shopper, @Anonymous
When a president wants to start a war, no Congress can stop him.
The technique was designed and tested by Clinton: you start a war without congressional approval, then you accuse your of opponents of being unpatriotic. Next, you give the sheep orders to bleat “we must support our troops!”
Obama in his 20s wrote short stories about himself, and had his friends read them. They thought they were okay but they don’t seem to have advised him to quit his day job. I would imagine that some of those drafts made their way into Dreams from My Father.
As a Creative Writing-type prose stylist, Obama is competent but undistinguished. Literature as a career is a steep pyramid, and there was never much evidence that he would ever be quite good enough to, say, get a string of stories published in The New Yorker. There’s not a lot of money in being good enough to get published in little journals that nobody except other short story authors read.
As a nonfiction analytic prose writer, he’s competent too. He wrote up essay questions and answers for his U. of Chicago race law classes, and they are fine.
But most of what he writes has been moderately to extremely dull because he doesn’t want to say anything too interesting or, heavens, controversial. He’d rather draw attention to the gracefulness of his personal thought processes than to any conclusions he reaches.
You can’t say that his career strategy of being an attractive “blank screen,” of emphasizing his theoretical potential rather than the ideas he has actually achieved, has worked out badly for him.
I think he meant that the critic blogger ran the Obama text through a Bayesian/brute-force “plagiarism checker” software like Copyspace, except modified with the input constraint to compare Dreams From My Father against given works of Ayers (I’d be surprised if the bulk of his earlier writings have been scanned into digital format, but he’s definitely churned out a lot of prose in the electronic era).
1) I have my doubts about the authority of such artificial-analysis “style similarity” experiments. At current level of sophistication, it’s fine for catching an 8th grader who lifts from Wikipedia. However, forensic-level it’s decidedly not. I’ve never seen software that catches known historical ghost-writing, without tampering with the routine anyway. The choice of pattern database colors the process of a computer algorithm’s primed comparison, and for the sake of getting usable “matches” bigger is not always better. On the comparatively simpler problem of plagiarism, how precisely does it check? If you fed “I, Claudius” and “The Manchurian Candidate” into a Bayesian evaluation model incorporating some prior “training” how much tinkering & revision is needed before it catches the plagiarized passages (and concepts) in the latter work? Unless the Obama critic has peer-reviewed the digital analysis method with John Searle or Daniel Dennett or the like, I don’t think it adds much to his case to claim a piece of pseudo-scientific computer proof.
2) Obama authored 2 heavily-edited books, and not much else when he had ample chance to do so (if I’m correct about him I find that I identify with the personality type: impressed by the art of writing and possessing a literary bent but rarely connecting internally w/ a need for self-expression; he’s somewhat cerebral but not an artist). Thus I don’t read a whole lot into the dialogue verisimilitude for the pimply English white guy he clearly dislikes in that well-established passive-aggro manner of his. Barring the discovery of early manuscripts of Dreams From My Father, lol, I’m going to assume the written passage itself was punched up 2 or 3 times by a middle-aged female editor who later became a huge J.K. Rowling fangirl. Obama’s “characters” are always kinda secondary and uncompelling anyway, so to a certain extent he’s just invented them all.
“Actually this excerpt left me wanting to read more and to find out how things turned out.”
Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning!
He pulled the stopper and Africa poured into Europe. Then the Libyan weapons were shipped to Syrian rebels. Then the Middle East poured into Europe.
FIN
Personnel is policy. Next you’ll tell me McCain would have unfurled executive amnesty for all the 19-year-old illegal strivers this close to getting their healthcare billing/Salesforce.com A.A.s — wow, really dodged a bullet there! Enemy-of-My-Enemy ’16, ’20, ’24 ad infinitum
I’m skeptical of Obama-is-an-idiot narratives just as I was of the Bush-is-an-idiot narratives that preceded them. However both men are undeniably lazy and owe their prominence to their ancestry rather than their personal abilities and exertions.
A middle east in total disarray prevents the formation of an alliance of states hostile to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other little gulf sheikdoms along the Arabian coast.
Not to mention the fact that chaos offers opportunities for profit and consolidation of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @Dave Pinsen
If you go back 30 years ago, when the Middle East was in much less disarray, no such alliance formed then either. I don’t think it explains current policy.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/The%20Zionist%20Plan%20for%20the%20Middle%20East.pdf
It is becoming clearer every day, piece by piece, that people are be offshored from US war zones and Africa in to the First World. What's the next piece of the Strategic Grand Plan. Is this what PoppyBush meant when he spoke of "A New World Order" back in '92?Replies: @IA, @TWS, @Dave Pinsen
Once you’ve got a de facto one-party state, bought with immigration and generous government benefits, you can reduce costs by throttling back on those government benefits, at least to those not in preferred groups. The reality is you can’t have Scandinavian-style social democracy with Central American-style demographics.
My sister just got back from Bogota, Colombia, where she visited a hospital on business. It was gleaming, modern, and had spaceship doors that opened and closed with a “whoosh”, she said. Locals told her it was a private hospital for political and business leaders. There’s another tier of quality hospitals just for the police and their families. The lumpenproletariat has a much lower quality of care in the third tier hospitals.
1) I have my doubts about the authority of such artificial-analysis "style similarity" experiments. At current level of sophistication, it's fine for catching an 8th grader who lifts from Wikipedia. However, forensic-level it's decidedly not. I've never seen software that catches known historical ghost-writing, without tampering with the routine anyway. The choice of pattern database colors the process of a computer algorithm's primed comparison, and for the sake of getting usable "matches" bigger is not always better. On the comparatively simpler problem of plagiarism, how precisely does it check? If you fed "I, Claudius" and "The Manchurian Candidate" into a Bayesian evaluation model incorporating some prior "training" how much tinkering & revision is needed before it catches the plagiarized passages (and concepts) in the latter work? Unless the Obama critic has peer-reviewed the digital analysis method with John Searle or Daniel Dennett or the like, I don't think it adds much to his case to claim a piece of pseudo-scientific computer proof.
2) Obama authored 2 heavily-edited books, and not much else when he had ample chance to do so (if I'm correct about him I find that I identify with the personality type: impressed by the art of writing and possessing a literary bent but rarely connecting internally w/ a need for self-expression; he's somewhat cerebral but not an artist). Thus I don't read a whole lot into the dialogue verisimilitude for the pimply English white guy he clearly dislikes in that well-established passive-aggro manner of his. Barring the discovery of early manuscripts of Dreams From My Father, lol, I'm going to assume the written passage itself was punched up 2 or 3 times by a middle-aged female editor who later became a huge J.K. Rowling fangirl. Obama's "characters" are always kinda secondary and uncompelling anyway, so to a certain extent he's just invented them all.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Clyde
Did Obama make up the “book” about Africa he gave up reading, too? It sounds an awful lot like Los Angeles Times’ Nairobi correspondent David Lamb’s “The Africans,” which was published the year before his trip.
If Obama were inclined to make up things, you’d think he make up more interesting thing …
(Hussein can put all of this to bed by releasing his records, something he's gone to court to oppose, again IIRC)
I don't remember seeing your refutation of Cashill's analysis. Eventually someone with impeccable credentials and pedigree will analyze Obama's writing (probably after he's left office), and my guess is Cashill will be proven right. And an educated guess is all it is, though I'm much more confident in my prediction that someone will put his supposed work under the microscope.
Is it really all that hard to imagine that his books were written by one of the legion of more-qualified, white leftist writers? Is it really all that hard to imagine them being delighted at the prospect of propping up a "clean" black for the cause? Is it really hard to imagine leftists lying to get God's Work done? Do you find Hussein such a known quantity, so genuine, so earthy, and so obviously not invented, that you can't wrap your head around him benefiting from ghost writers (lol)?This can happen when what you read is at a higher level than the conversations around you; nobody uses the word, so you've never heard it pronounced. Though as mundane a word as "corps" would seem to be a poor example; I remember making the same mistake, and being corrected, at age 9 or so.Replies: @Godwin Daily, @Anonymous, @silviosilver
This girl I knew was the daughter of a fairly high-up judge in Michigan, I think appellate, whose husband was a confidante of John Engler (N.B. while the latter indicates zip, class-wise, I still rightly or wrongly view upper-echelon magistrate as a somewhat g-loaded post). Anyway one time I met her mother and she in hubby’s direction referred to the parking lot valet with a hard “et” (rhymes with wallet). This was so funny to me that I remember nothing else about her other than that I was trying to work Swiss ski lodges and gunfire trajectory angles into the conversation however improbably.
p.s. I shouldn’t neglect the possibility that this was a normal upper Midwestern pronunciation with which I was merely unfamiliar, thus putting the joke on me if ever I find myself in Grossay Point riding in a Chevrolette
So is he more Zelig, or Chance the Gardiner?
Death camps are like summer camps. They all look the same, and are easy to confuse.
It used to be a common idea that pronouncing a rare word (and in Obama’s decidedly non-military world “corps” is a rare word) confidently but wrongly was actually a sign of being well-read. The speaker had seen the word before, so he did not show any hesitation or stumble at encountering an unfamiliar word, but he had only seen it in books, never heard it spoken aloud, and it turned out his internal pronunciation had been wrong all these years. Whether this makes any sense or is merely a cover story for bad pronouncers is something I am not competent to judge.
“Has anyone ever asked the President if the main result of his Libya policy, the current Camp of the Saints in the Mediterranean, strikes him as a bug … or as a feature?”
Oh come on! Like we don’t already know the answer to that! Actually BOTH answers! The lie that Obama would tell to disarm White people and the TRUTHFUL answer!
Indeed.
How many years have we been hearing about “corps”? Are there any new examples since then?
He got to Kenya and found out … it’s like the South Side of Chicago!
It’s really Obama discovers HBD! I’m guessing that ever sinse then he’s on board the program of grievance out of simple racial solidarity, but deep down not really a true believer. He knows too much and the knowledge eats away at him leaving him ill at ease. The only escape–more golf.
My sister just got back from Bogota, Colombia, where she visited a hospital on business. It was gleaming, modern, and had spaceship doors that opened and closed with a "whoosh", she said. Locals told her it was a private hospital for political and business leaders. There's another tier of quality hospitals just for the police and their families. The lumpenproletariat has a much lower quality of care in the third tier hospitals.Replies: @Marat
Maybe that’s where ObamaCare comes in.
1) I have my doubts about the authority of such artificial-analysis "style similarity" experiments. At current level of sophistication, it's fine for catching an 8th grader who lifts from Wikipedia. However, forensic-level it's decidedly not. I've never seen software that catches known historical ghost-writing, without tampering with the routine anyway. The choice of pattern database colors the process of a computer algorithm's primed comparison, and for the sake of getting usable "matches" bigger is not always better. On the comparatively simpler problem of plagiarism, how precisely does it check? If you fed "I, Claudius" and "The Manchurian Candidate" into a Bayesian evaluation model incorporating some prior "training" how much tinkering & revision is needed before it catches the plagiarized passages (and concepts) in the latter work? Unless the Obama critic has peer-reviewed the digital analysis method with John Searle or Daniel Dennett or the like, I don't think it adds much to his case to claim a piece of pseudo-scientific computer proof.
2) Obama authored 2 heavily-edited books, and not much else when he had ample chance to do so (if I'm correct about him I find that I identify with the personality type: impressed by the art of writing and possessing a literary bent but rarely connecting internally w/ a need for self-expression; he's somewhat cerebral but not an artist). Thus I don't read a whole lot into the dialogue verisimilitude for the pimply English white guy he clearly dislikes in that well-established passive-aggro manner of his. Barring the discovery of early manuscripts of Dreams From My Father, lol, I'm going to assume the written passage itself was punched up 2 or 3 times by a middle-aged female editor who later became a huge J.K. Rowling fangirl. Obama's "characters" are always kinda secondary and uncompelling anyway, so to a certain extent he's just invented them all.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Clyde
You are way too dismissive of Jack Cashill’s deconstruction of Obama’s first book showing that Bill Ayers wrote most of it. Someday, when you have the time, you can take a look at Cashsill’s work.
It reminded me of Keith Richburg’s devastating “Out of America”, but that came out a decade after Lamb’s book.
He was mīzl’d!
The past tense if to misle, ie, misled.
IIRC, Kennedy was accused of not having written a book attributed to him. He denied this and even threatened people with libel lawsuits over it, but years after his death it turned out the claims were true after all. I think he wrote the introduction and closing chapter but everything else was ghostwritten.
IIRC, Kennedy was accused of not having written a book attributed to him. He denied this and even threatened people with libel lawsuits over it, but years after his death it turned out the claims were true after all. I think he wrote the introduction and closing chapter but everything else was ghostwritten.
So how should we interpret Malcolm Gladwell’s “Igon Values?”
I suspect the geological student on the plane comes from the same place as the racist girlfriend - Obama's fertile imagination.
Thanks, Steve, for reading Obama's book so the rest of us don't have to.Replies: @Barnard, @AshTon, @e, @Bill Jones, @Anonymous, @jimmyriddle
There’s good chance the kid was a graduate of the Royal School of Mines – part of Imperial College. And that dialogue seems reasonably like an RSM oik from the ’80s.
More importantly, the destruction of strong, independent states eliminates possible challenges to Israel from a conventional military and sophisticated weaponry (including biological) and a source of funds and weaponry to non-state actors.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
Israel hasn’t faced an existential conventional military threat in 42 years. No need to tear Syria apart to prevent that.
At the time Ayers made the joke/comment, the rumor was already going around that he had ghostwritten Obama’s book. Making a puckish riff on that would be entirely in keeping with the sense of humor of Ayers’ milieu and generation. (Which doesn’t mean he didn’t help write the book, just that the “claim” doesn’t count for much.)
If you're trying to extoll the diplomatic prudence of Democrat leadership in general, spin while you can: it'll be harder not to laugh once Obama's Libya architect is in the White House again, bombing aspirin factories for a source of "Meet the Press" talking points.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Undocumented Shopper, @Anonymous
“Though it looked doubtful for a moment Obama truly has reclaimed U.S. foreign policy for the messianic-imperialist team.”
I think Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was perhaps a pre-emptive action on the part of Europeans to try to put pressure on Obama to refrain from adopting a U.S. foreign policy for the “messianic-imperialist team”. They might have felt it was one of the few weapons they have to influence U.S. foreign policy, especially since the E.U. increasingly seems to be the U.S.’s bitch. (Okay, this might be a bit hyperbolic.)
I didn’t read DFMF, but I thought that his girlfriend in the book (or maybe it was a different girlfriend from the ones the letters were written to) was actually a composite of several girlfriends that he had had. If that’s true, then the letters to her might be a composite of actual letters written, as well.
Maraniss’s biography documents Obama’s life up through age his mid-20s with numbing thoroughness.
(Hussein can put all of this to bed by releasing his records, something he's gone to court to oppose, again IIRC)
I don't remember seeing your refutation of Cashill's analysis. Eventually someone with impeccable credentials and pedigree will analyze Obama's writing (probably after he's left office), and my guess is Cashill will be proven right. And an educated guess is all it is, though I'm much more confident in my prediction that someone will put his supposed work under the microscope.
Is it really all that hard to imagine that his books were written by one of the legion of more-qualified, white leftist writers? Is it really all that hard to imagine them being delighted at the prospect of propping up a "clean" black for the cause? Is it really hard to imagine leftists lying to get God's Work done? Do you find Hussein such a known quantity, so genuine, so earthy, and so obviously not invented, that you can't wrap your head around him benefiting from ghost writers (lol)?This can happen when what you read is at a higher level than the conversations around you; nobody uses the word, so you've never heard it pronounced. Though as mundane a word as "corps" would seem to be a poor example; I remember making the same mistake, and being corrected, at age 9 or so.Replies: @Godwin Daily, @Anonymous, @silviosilver
According to Cashill, Obama didn’t finish DFMF by the original deadline given to him, so it’s possible he might have needed a ghostwriter to actually finish the book.
From Cashill, “With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
“According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html#ixzz3kvj0VRb1
It’s plausible to me. I mean, I don’t have time to pay attention to what people like Qaddafi are doing, but if he threatened the dollar’s supremacy, that would be reason for the USG to take him out. The hegemony of the dollar is what allows the US empire to extract tribute.
(Hussein can put all of this to bed by releasing his records, something he's gone to court to oppose, again IIRC)
I don't remember seeing your refutation of Cashill's analysis. Eventually someone with impeccable credentials and pedigree will analyze Obama's writing (probably after he's left office), and my guess is Cashill will be proven right. And an educated guess is all it is, though I'm much more confident in my prediction that someone will put his supposed work under the microscope.
Is it really all that hard to imagine that his books were written by one of the legion of more-qualified, white leftist writers? Is it really all that hard to imagine them being delighted at the prospect of propping up a "clean" black for the cause? Is it really hard to imagine leftists lying to get God's Work done? Do you find Hussein such a known quantity, so genuine, so earthy, and so obviously not invented, that you can't wrap your head around him benefiting from ghost writers (lol)?This can happen when what you read is at a higher level than the conversations around you; nobody uses the word, so you've never heard it pronounced. Though as mundane a word as "corps" would seem to be a poor example; I remember making the same mistake, and being corrected, at age 9 or so.Replies: @Godwin Daily, @Anonymous, @silviosilver
Yeah, I’ve botched a few pronunciations in my time too. Most embarrassing was pronouncing mystic as “my stick,” and being corrected by an older cousin in front of the whole family.
But that’s nothing. I’ve had a history professor who pronounced Yalta as “Yat-la” among other howlers, and even more egregiously a lecturer in global political economy who pronounced Keynesian as “Keneezian.” Both were native English-speakers. These guys may have been dyslexic but how the hell did they manage to become professors without ever hearing these words pronounced properly?
Bad as that is, I think it’s even worse – or harder to live down – to incorrectly write words you’ve only ever heard spoken. A classic example of this is writing “walla” for voila – and yes, I’ve done that. (It has to be on that level though – it can’t just be a simple spelling error.)
But that's nothing. I've had a history professor who pronounced Yalta as "Yat-la" among other howlers, and even more egregiously a lecturer in global political economy who pronounced Keynesian as "Keneezian." Both were native English-speakers. These guys may have been dyslexic but how the hell did they manage to become professors without ever hearing these words pronounced properly?
Bad as that is, I think it's even worse - or harder to live down - to incorrectly write words you've only ever heard spoken. A classic example of this is writing "walla" for voila - and yes, I've done that. (It has to be on that level though - it can't just be a simple spelling error.)Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
Back in the 1970s a lot of people learned how to pronounce big words from watching William F. Buckley Jr. on TV: e.g., “inimitable.”
Has anyone here ever touched or asked to touch a black man or woman’s hair, or seen or heard anyone of their acquaintance do the same? I haven’t.
Frederick Forsyth has admitted being an MI6 agent.
Yes that Englishman sounds like an American stereotype not a real person.
Obama’s problem is he has allowed himself to be dragged into various disastrous foreign policy decisions because he is weak, with Libya by Hillary despite strong reservations from the deep state. He is at heart an isolationist.
Give Obama his due: “You didn’t build that.”
Though it might originally have come from Fauxcahontas.
Israeli foreign policy is to balkanise the Middle East into as many sectarian cantons based on religion/ethnicity as possible.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/The%20Zionist%20Plan%20for%20the%20Middle%20East.pdf
The opposite. Someone who has heard a word but either not read it or never connected the two. In this case an indication the word was never encountered in formal combined spoken/written instruction (e.g. college). Also a good clue he does not know what he is talking about. How much advanced math is learned exclusively verbally?
I tend to the reader’s problem so sympathize with Obama a bit, but corps seems like an odd word to mispronounce in adulthood (did he never see a marine corps TV ad or news segment?). I’m pretty sure I made that mistake as a child, but it did not persist even though mistakes like this seem to have some stickiness to them.
But that's nothing. I've had a history professor who pronounced Yalta as "Yat-la" among other howlers, and even more egregiously a lecturer in global political economy who pronounced Keynesian as "Keneezian." Both were native English-speakers. These guys may have been dyslexic but how the hell did they manage to become professors without ever hearing these words pronounced properly?
Bad as that is, I think it's even worse - or harder to live down - to incorrectly write words you've only ever heard spoken. A classic example of this is writing "walla" for voila - and yes, I've done that. (It has to be on that level though - it can't just be a simple spelling error.)Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
Bivouac, Phoebe, Wilkes Barre – I was surprised by the pronunciations of all of these words/names when I was young.
p.s. I shouldn't neglect the possibility that this was a normal upper Midwestern pronunciation with which I was merely unfamiliar, thus putting the joke on me if ever I find myself in Grossay Point riding in a ChevroletteReplies: @The Last Real Calvinist
Actually, if you’re a fan of Downton Abbey or other British period dramas, you’ll have noted that the Lords and Ladies of the best breeding indeed did (and I believe still do) pronounce the word ‘VAL-ett’, with the accent on the first syllable, and a hard ‘t’ at the end.
Is it possible she was sufficiently posh to have heard the word pronounced in context in England, or among Anglophilic upper-crust types?
President Jimmy Carter famously called himself a “nucular engineer.”
“Profiles in Courage” – widely believed to be written by Theodore Sorensen. Also, his undergraduate thesis “Why England Slept” was published as a book and widely believed to be ghostwritten.