I have a new piece up at Breibart.com called The Community-Organizer-In-Chief, Part One : The Alinsky Ethics that ties in some biographical stuff about Alinsky into a method he and his student-by-proxy Barack Obama both use; specifically taking the moral high ground as a head-fake to mask their raw interest in power for power’s sake.
I’ll be following up with more pieces at Breibart.com but also adding extra material that’s slightly tangential here on my site. If you want to learn some interesting insights about Alinsky that have practical payoff for the upcoming election, stay tuned.
It’s easy to mock things we don’t understand. The Left excels at this since their understanding of, well, most things is so limited. So it is to be expected then that rather than attempting to learn about the highly specialized sport of dressage, the Left descends into scathing mockery of Ann Romney’s “dancing horse”. As a thinking person, I find this obnoxious. As a horse trainer, I find it infuriating.
There is so much more to dressage than plopping on top of a “dancing horse” and riding it around the arena for a few minutes in time to music. Actually, I have only rarely agreed to take on the training of a competitive dressage horse because it is a lengthy and difficult commitment. A good dressage horse and rider team have years of professional training. It is not a hobby; it is a lifestyle. It requires serious dedication, great patience, and superior physical conditioning - both of the animal and the human.
While the graceful movements of a well groomed horse carrying a seemingly motionless rider look effortless, in fact it is something that requires strength and agility, both of the horse and rider. In order for the rider to get her horse to respond aids that should be imperceptible to spectators, the pair must be in harmony both physically and mentally. This process takes years of progressive training, starting with simple command of gaits and eventually culminating in the ability to perform complex choreography.
The rider must be able to use her weight, legs, and seat to cue her horse. This requires incredible strength and balance since she must aid her horse while when viewed from the side her ear, shoulder, hip, and heel are perfectly aligned and from the back she is sitting evenly on both seat bones. She asks her horse to move with very subtle body signals, which can be nothing more than shifts of her weight. The horse must be responsive, obedient, and energetic. None of this happens by accident.
Once a horse and rider have learned to move between gaits fluidly, work on the more difficult movements begins. The horse and rider are judged on how well they perform the following movements:
Extensions: The rider gives the command for the horse to lengthen his stride, usually at a trot. A horse performing this movement appears to be floating across the arena.
Pirouettes: The rider cues her horse to turn in place at a canter.
Piaffe: The horse trots in place in even rhythm. This is the movement with the highest degree of difficulty.
Lateral Movements: The horse first moves forward and then sideways, or part of his body sideways, depending on the cue from his rider.
Flying Changes: In this movement the horse appears to skip in a canter, switching the leading front and hind hooves.
Passage: Here the horse springs from one diagonal to the other while maintaining perfectly straight body line.
Counter Canter: The rider cues the horse to turn a bend on the incorrect lead.
When these movements are perfected, the result is as artful as it is athletic. Olympic level competition in dressage is much more than prancing about on a “dancing horse”. It is a very impressive accomplishment and is just as deserving of the respect given any other Olympic athlete.
Anyone who followed the Brett Kimberlin saga knows this basic fact: back in 1978, eight bombs exploded in the town of Speedway, Indiana.
Why did Kimberlin set off those bombs ?
He was trying to create a distraction.
The authorities theorized that Brett Kimberlin terrorized Speedway, Indiana with eight bombings because he wanted to distract from others crimes that police suspected he was involved in. These crimes included alleged child molestation and then the murder of a woman who was preparing to report Kimberlin for that molestation.
Here’s the sad truth: the distraction actually worked at a large extent. Kimberlin was never charged with the molestation because the person about to accuse him was killed. And Kimberlin was never convicted of the murder; partially because a key witness died before the case came to trial and partially because the authorities began infighting over the various crimes Kimberlin was charged with.
Now, let’s look at where we are today.
After the success of Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day, we’ve had some other major victories. There’s been mainstream media coverage and a court victory for Aaron Walker. Many people now know about Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, Brad Friedman and the other leftists who have engaged in an ugly new brand of online political warfare using a diversity of tactics.
It seems like justice might bne just around the corner for Team Kimberlin — but look at what else has happened.
A number of ‘bombs’ have gone off all around the story.
BOOM. Two new SWATings.
BOOM.Personal and professional attacks on many of the people exposing the truth about Kimberlin and company.
BOOM. Disinformation posted by sites claiming that they are trying to stop Kimberlin.
BOOM. Infighting that’s been encouraged by shadowy figures whose motivations aren’t clear.
BOOM. Faux ‘infighting’ that is really attacks that always seem to benefit team Kimberlin.
BOOM. Deliberate attempts to change the focus of the story from something of national imporant to a bunch of squabbling.
BOOM. Former victims of Kimberlin and company suddenly switching sides and attacking the people going after him.
BOOM. New charges filed.
BOOM. An noticible increase in fake accounts, vicious attacks, lies and distractions that - frankly - make the real story difficult to watch and even MORE difficult to report on.
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
Like Brett Kimberlin’s distraction bombings, these are events that can’t exactly be ignored. On the other hand there’s no doubt that dealing with them takes time, energy and focus away the subject of the investigation.
Which is the point. Distraction IS the whole point. Wearing down the investigation IS the whole point. Confusing the narrative and making the audience weary IS the whole point.
But let’s ignore the bombs for a second.
Here’s reality:
A small group of left activists including Brett Kimberlin, Brad Friedman and Neal Rauhauser have launched a war on effective conservatives and conservative organizations like Breitbart.com, James O’Keefe, Citizens United, the Koch Brothers. They are focused on issues like Occupy Wall Street, Voter ID laws and unions; all things that are part of Obama’s stealth initiatives to win the 2012 election by any means neccessary.
This IS about the fight against Obama in 2012. Don’t let the bombs distract you. Team Kimberlin doesn’t want to be exposed and they are using dirty, repulsive tactics to avoid the light that is being cast on them.
Much of this was pointed out to me by Mandy Nagy, who has been on the front lines of this fight every single step of the way along with people like Patterico and Aaron Walker and the other modern victims of Brett Kimberlin.
For their sake and for the sake of the 2012 election, PLEASE keep your eye on the ball here despite the bombs going off. Don’t lose the focus. Don’t get distracted. Don’t let Team Kimberlin win.
If you get confused and are having a tough tell telling the good guys from the bad guys just ask yourself: who stands with Mandy, Patrick Frey and Aaron Walker and who stands against them?
I’m about to release a book about how and why you should probably quit your job as soon as you can hot-tail it out the door. The book is called Permission To Quit and it will be available on the Kindle in a few weeks. Here’s a short excerpt from it about what a job really is.
To understand why you need to leave your job, you need to understand what a job really is.
A job is a cog.
More specifically, a job is just a cog that has a person inside of it. Each cog is an interchangeable part of a big machine. The machine is the store or shop or office or company and that machine needs some cogs to keep it running. If you’re in a job right now, you’re inside one of those cogs.
The key thing about the cogs is that they are interchangeable. Cogs are replaceable. They have to be. You can’t have the entire machine shut down forever when one part is removed. You need to be able to pop one cog out and put another one in its place.
Factories have line worker cogs and supervisor cogs. Restaurants have cook cogs and server cogs and dishwasher cogs and manager cogs. Offices have sales cogs and receptionist cogs and middle manager cogs and that guy who sits by the copy machine and nobody is sure what he does cogs.
No cog is irreplaceable. Of course, every person who fills up the cog is an individual and some do their jobs better than others but that doesn’t change the bottom line; the person in the cog may change but the cog remains the same.
If your favorite barista quits working at your favorite coffee shop, they will be replaced by a new barista by the very next shift. Maybe the new one will be a bit better or a bit worse but the whole business is actually designed to run just fine whether any individual barista is there or not.
The business isn’t based on individuals. It can’t be.
In order to create a consistent product or service, you can’t have too much individuality. When the customer orders a mocha cappuccino, it needs to be pretty much the exact same mocha cappuccino that they ordered yesterday no matter who made it. It needs to be the same tomorrow, too.
In the grand scheme of the business machine, that favorite barista of yours is just a cog and life goes on without them. They don’t matter. They can’t matter.
And if you have a job, you don’t matter either.
Gulp. Ouch.
This is a really hard pill for many of us to swallow because most of us have heard over and over again since childhood that we’re each a special flower. We want to believe it. We want to think that we’re important and that we matter and that our hard work makes a big difference.
Nope.
Wait, cheer up. It is more complex than that. We’ll talk more about this later, but actually you are quite a special flower and you are super important and you really do matter and you can make a big, huge, amazing difference in the world. Just not in a job.
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