French PM says world ‘on edge of abyss’

PARIS/LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Friday the world stood on the “edge of the abyss”, gripped by a global financial crisis now threatening industry, trade and jobs worldwide.
Fillon’s words echoed a growing sense of alarm sweeping EU capitals ahead of an expected U.S. Congressional vote on Friday on a $700 billion bailout plan for the financial industry. Approval is far from certain. [snip]

Monsieur Fillon, the French economy has been in the cloacae since the German Chowder and Marching Society showed up in Paris a couple hundred thousand strong.

After that excursion into French diplomacy, France employed Marxist economics, which is why you are such an economic powerhouse today.
How about working on your end of the problem, like firing the dead wood and killing off the leech unions. France might even find productivity in that mess.

Listen to Sarkozy, You have a chance of getting out of the ditch.

The Art and Croissant devotees will flock to see this show before it starts its run on Broadway. Denver promises a riotous opening not seen in 40 years of theater.

He’ll dance his way into your wallet!

From under rocks and the backs of dank caves comes this crowd, like the living dead, all moaning:

Don’t settle for chump change: vote socialist!

Don’t be seduced by the hype. You can proudly resist the manipulations of the fat cats by voting for a bonafide socialist candidate. This beats voting for the lesser of two evils or “none of the above,” because you choose a real alternative. [snip]

The candidates of socialist parties call for ending the war now, full reproductive rights for women, pensions and healthcare for all, rights for peoples of color and immigrants and shifting the economic burden to the rich. [snip]

The only intricacy with this scenario is getting the rich to go along.
The amputation of the opulence from prior owners produces this quandary, who holds the appropriated hoard for the people? How does beneficent leaders solve this problem? Perhaps they become the rich.
Talk about permanent revolution; the peasants can perpetually rise up to remove the assets from the rich.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), running Gloria La Riva, is advancing some especially worthy demands, including a $15 minimum wage and an end to police brutality. If only PSL, which leads the anti-war group ANSWER, collaborated with others in the movements!

What, where are the free condoms, rubber tire sandals or shovels? How does $15/hour gibe with reducing the holdings of the despised rich? I suspect this needs more thought.
Does the end of police brutality cover those holding opposing views?

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) in California also has an anti-capitalist program, although not all of its candidates do. PFP will choose this time’s candidates in August.
Casting a vote for a candidate who is truly independent from the system will let you brag that you took a step fixing this murderous system we live under. Vote socialist in 2008!

Would not living under such a murderous system as ours, cause all the oppressed socialists to flee to a haven such as Cuba or Venezuela? We have no barriers to emigration. There they can live in idyllic life of shared poverty and ownership of a shovel.

California Communists

With businesses and individuals fleeing California for states with lower tax burdens, the senate in Sacramento is taking up a pressing issue: allowing the Communist Party access to the state’s public schools. Sure enough, a Democratic state Senator from Long Beach, Alan Lowenthal, who is a longtime professor of “community psychology” at Cal State Long Beach, has introduced a bill to allow Communist groups to use space in the schools and to allow Communists to teach in the schools.

As originally framed, the bill would have even removed the section of the California Education Code that states, “No teacher giving instruction in any school, or on any property belonging to any agencies included in the public school system, shall advocate or teach communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism.” [snip]

The land of Nuts and Fruits upholds it’s name. Where is that big quake that will make Nevada a coastal state?

You can read the whole article here, it isn’t too long. The schadenfreude quotient in this piece is delightfully high.
By the way, why haven’t we seen his fat face anywhere, pontificating his point of view?

Climate facts to warm to

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.
Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.” [snip]

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along. [snip]

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian’s Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald’s version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that “we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics”.

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: “Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. (emphasis added)[snip]

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age’s version of the essay. The attribution reads: “Copyright Ian McEwan 2008″ and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn’t there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at “absorbing inconvenient fact”?

With all the above going on, we get these fools:

At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world ‘on fire’

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio. [snip]
Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Yeah, like with the Gorbot, it is all about money.

Move on folks, nothing to see here, just a normal business day at Foggy Bottom. They’re pinking up for Spring.

State Department privacy breach

[snip]
Fresh off of apologizing for the State Department breach of privacy in Barack Obama’s files, Condi Rice has now informed Hillary Clinton that her files were breached, too. Via AP:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has told Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that her passport file was breached in 2007. In a statement from her Senate office, Clinton said she had been contacted by Rice. The State Department plans to brief Clinton’s staff Friday about the unauthorized breach. The development came just hours after the State Department fired two contract employees and disciplined a third for inappropriately examining the passport file of Clinton’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

Obvious point: This is bad. But it probably wouldn’t be wise for Hillary “Filegate” Clinton to make too much of a stink about this, don’t you think?
Obvious point, part II: The State Department is such a freaking joke.
Two State Dept. employees have already been fired and a third disciplined in the Obama case.
Who else is guilty of “imprudent curiosity?” [snip]

Question: Will all the other presidential candidates’ files be checked to see if they were breached?
McCormack “isn’t aware” of any other searches.
“For some reason, people at the working level did the right things. They confronted these employees who had accessed these files in an unauthorized way, but that information did not rise to senior management levels.” [snip]

Just who is BS’ing whom over this? Under a Bobama or Clinton regime, this type of “breach” would be required of the department. B. Hussein Obama is so far around the circle, he’s sniffing Stalin’s shorts. The Clintons practiced this “leadership” style at 1600 Pennsie Ave. for their time ensconced.
Governing with this type of oversight is precisely the form of dominion desired by the Democrat leaders. Big Government can do what it wants to whom ever it wishes. What do you think made Beria and Stalin so paranoid?

This clown has the density of an aerostat.

Barack Obama has put his religion back into the headlines, trumpeting the power and salvation of faith and asking a church audience in South Carolina to help him become “an instrument of God” and join him in creating “a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

YES, headed by King Obama I of course.
Why not a crucifixion to start the creatin’.
You’re tight, I have no intention of making nice to these idiots and their putative godhead.

But the Democratic contender’s talk on Sunday of breaking down religious and political differences has some critics questioning the Illinois senator’s own beliefs — and those of the man identified as his spiritual adviser — and whether his messages of spiritual inclusion and tolerance have remained consistent. [snip]

Obama has written and spoken about being inspired by the preaching of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and his calls to “spur social change.” [snip]

Baptized in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama has been an active member for two decades, regularly attending services with his family under Wright’s spiritual mentorship. [snip]

“If Barack Obama has really submitted himself to his church like he’s claimed, why does he have a different expression of faith from his own pastor?” asks Anthony Bradley, theologian and research fellow at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Aaahhh, because it’s convenient at the moment?

Presidential candidate condemns words but not ministry of former pastor

Translation: Don’t say this till after I’m elected.

In another sermon, delivered five days after the 9/11 attacks, Wright seems to imply that the United States had brought the terrorist violence on itself.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye,” Wright says. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back in our own front yards.”

In a later sermon, Wright revisits the theme, declaring: “No, no, no, not God bless America — God damn America!”

This is what one gets from the politics of inclusion; all the assorted misfits and mental defectives in one coop.

For more on this go here.

Anymore doubts on what he believes. Strike up the “Internationale.”

From a Michelle Malkin repost:

I have had the pleasure of speaking and debating alongside former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm. In Colorado five years ago, we took on an open-borders contingent that was pushing for the illegal alien ID card known as the matricula consular (which I’ve blogged about extensively here.) He’s a true maverick–a Democrat who has long presaged the self-destructive impact of open borders. In 2004, Dick Lamm gave a now-famous speech at one of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s conferences. The incisive speech, “I have a plan to destroy America,” went viral. I still have at least one or two readers e-mailing it to me every week. I’m reprinting it today. [snip]

I have a plan to destroy America by Richard D. Lamm

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan: [snip]

Go here to read this speech

And from this turkey:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” –Noam Chomsky, American linguist and U.S. media and foreign policy critic.

May I add, no friend of America.

Rhod made a statement about McCain and the politics of power. He zeroed in on the target and put a nice shot through the X-ring.

I wish to let someone else speak to this, give weight to the very bones of Conservatism and flesh out the corpus. This limns the philosophical essence of Conservatism, more importantly it delineates the Us from Them.

You are either here or not. This is White and Black. I hated to edit this and probably did a poor job of it. Sobeit! With luck you might be encouraged to read it in it’s entirety. At the bottom is the attribution.

Howard Roark’s Courtroom Speech

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. [snip]

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. […] From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. [snip]

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. [snip]

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. […] But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement. [snip]

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. [snip]

“Degrees of ability vary,[…] There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[snip]… The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off! [snip]

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. […]

From the film The Fountainhead (1949), by Ayn Rand

Political structures explained in a Vermont context

SOCIALISM: You have two cows. You keep one and give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes them both and provides you with milk.

FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and sells you the milk.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours it down the drain.

VERMONT STYLE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point that you must sell them both in order to pay the taxes to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow which was a gift from your government.

CORPORATE: You have two cows. You sell one, force the other to produce the milk of four cows, then act surprised when it drops dead.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

This last two definitions pertains to other states, seeing as the concepts are verboten in Vermont.

More collectible posters and campaign buttons are here at NER. We offer a head start on filling up your kitchen junk drawer.

Last time the Woodchuck ID’ed the GOP and gave you the new GOP Logo. the crashing silence from the RINO’s indicated acceptance of their new symbol.

Well, Chuckie’s new DNC Logo more aptly describes the manifold (two) socio-political philosophies of the dark side.

Presenting: The New DNC

Corporate Boat Race

American automobile company and a Japanese auto company decided to have a competitive boat race on the Detroit River. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day, they were as ready as they could be. The Japanese team won by a mile.

Afterwards, the American team became discouraged by the loss and their morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found. A Continuous Measurable Improvement Team of “Executives” was set up to investigate the problem and to recommend appropriate corrective action. Their conclusion: The problem was that the Japanese team had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, whereas the American team had 1 person rowing and 8 people steering.

The American Corporate Steering Committee immediately hired a consulting firm to do a study on the management structure. After some time and billions of dollars, the consulting firm concluded that “too many people were steering and not enough rowing.” To prevent losing to the Japanese again next year, the management structure was changed to “4 Steering Managers, 3 Area Steering Managers, and 1 Staff Steering Manager” and a new performance system for the person rowing the boat to give more incentive to work harder and become a six sigma performer. “We must give him empowerment and enrichment.” That ought to do it.

The next year the Japanese team won by two miles. The American Corporation laid off the rower for poor performance, sold all of the paddles, cancelled all capital investments for new equipment, halted development of a new canoe, awarded high performance awards to the consulting firm, and distributed the money saved as bonuses to the senior executives.

The Problem With Boys

By Marty Nemko

What changes would you recommend if I told you that African-American children were:

four to eight times as likely to be drugged with Ritalin and other stimulants, which pediatrician Leonard Sax, calls “academic steroids.”

reading much more poorly than are other students.

five times more likely to commit suicide.

two and a half times as likely to drop out of high school.

severely underrepresented in college and even more so among college graduates, thereby locking them out of today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, knowledge economy.

You’d likely invoke such words as “institutional racism” to justify major efforts to improve African-Americans’ numbers.

All of the above statements are true except for one thing: I’m not talking about African-American children. I’m talking about children of all races, indeed half of all children, half of our next generation: boys. [snip]

See if this article gives you the warm fuzzies.
It should make you put a Katuscha right into an editor’s bunghole and teachers’ lounge.

Nemko is co-president of the National Organization for Men: www.orgformen.org. He holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of California, Berkeley and subsquently taught in Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is also a Contributing Editor at U.S. News & World Report.

They “dropped out” by dropping into a counter-culture which was itself a creation of the capitalism they claimed to despise, and considered themselves courageous for having done so.  Except for some skirmishes in the Civil Rights struggles,  they never fought anything that posed a real danger, and only won where their opponents were too squeamish to resist.  

They rode the wave of post-war prosperity into professions and material ease as no generation before them, and believed they had something to do with it.  Act II, Scene III is upon them, and their play is almost over.   Their goals and expectations and  lingo are embodied in the person of Hillary Clinton.   Show them the exit, and consider the following:

Excerpt from “The Art of Non-Conforming” (1953) by British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. 

If I were to write…. the Confessions of a Non-Conforming Man, they would begin with an assertion that the mid-twentieth century, far from being a period of enlightenment, has been notable for credulity and servility to a quite exceptional degree.  It would be necessary, I should go on, to go back at least to the Dark Ages to find a generation of men so given over to destruction, supersitition, and every variety of obscurantism….

Questioning, thus,the basic assumptions of the age, the Non-Conforming Man cannot but find its pretensions particularly derisory.  Ironically, ignorance seems to grow with education and freedom seems to decay to the accompaniment of protestations and devotion to its cause.  Charlantanry, he observes, flourishes as perhaps never before…when the outworn and outmoded conclusions of a Karl Marx provide a dogma, and the partial, and mostly superficial observations of a Sigmund Freud have, like Marx in the field of history and economics, been furbished up into a philosophy of life which they were in no wise intended to become…

Civlization presupposes the integrity and inviolability of each separate human being, and it is contemporary neobarbarisms like Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, which have sought to destroy the individual in favor of the collectivity…the materialists, the power-worshipers, the demon-demagogues of our time, insist that individual men and women are of no account, and have no destiny of their own to work apart from mankind’s.

Against such a trend, the impulse not to conform constitutes a kind of resistance movement, whose practitioners, as the claims of collectivism augment, are liable to to be forced to become maquisards, living cautiously on the fringes of society, and only occasionally and discreetely disclosing their true attitude of mind.  Yet how important, how necessary they are! Without them, collective assumptions may pass unchallenged, and there may be no one to puncture the pretensions of established authority.

The basic failure of our time, future historians may well decide, has lain in the too ready acceptance of current orthodoxies, whether through fear of being suspected of rebelliousness and consequently punished, or just as a result of succumbing to mass persuasion.   The independent, non-conforming mind is visibly become rarer.  Conformity is more and more the order of the day, inevitably bringing with that subservience to prevailing fashions of thought, values and behavior, which prepares the way for - to use the sombre expression originated by Belloc more than four decades ago - The Servile State.

To a civilized and free mind any enforced orthodoxy must be abhorrent.  It is inconceivable that the last word should ever be said about anything, or that history should reach any sort of finality.  Non-conforming is a recognition that Man and all his works are inherently imperfect, and therefore susceptible to criticism, if not ridicule.  It is tremendously invigorating….As a habit of mind, it is greatly to be recommended.

…There is one last aspect of non-conforming which, naturally, appeals to me personally.  Non-conforming is the basis, the very fount, of all humour.  A totally non-conformist society never laughs - laughter itself being a kind of criticism, an expression of the immense disparity between human aspiration and human performance.  As such, it is intolerable to all orthodoxy-enforcers, from Torquemada to Stalin.

 The circus clown is made to look different from his fellow-performers.  He falls over, he stands on his head, he grimaces and rides absurd bicycles.  Yet what would a circus be without him?…..It is worth noting, too, that Shakespeare’s fools are given some of his most sagacious and poetic lines.  The non-conforming Fool proved, in the end, King Lear’s most tender, understanding, and faithful friend, when all the conformists had abandoned him to his fate.