Hanson Essay

Greg kept sending me this essay by Victor Davis Hanson, of  Pajama Media.  This time, I didn't manage to delete it sight unseen, so I was obligated to read it.  I recommend it.  It is light in style but is profound in its observation. (Nothing, I haven't been saying in hyperbole.)

I mentioned PJTV long ago.  PJTV is simply brilliant and so professional you wonder how it started. It is a must see TV, especially Klavin - who is this guy?  In addition, we now have GBTV where you will find news the major media seems to miss.  For example, the Iraqi refugee in St Louis who was pro Israel so, of course, he was kidnapped by muslims and had a Star of David carved into his back.  He is no on the run with his family, no job, no home.

Imagine, if tea party member stopped and asked a muslim for directions!  As if y Google search just now, there are NO MAJOR MEDIA reports of this story.  This photo is from the sister of GBTV:  theblaze.com.

 PJTV and GBTV are the future.  Mr. Obama knows that and this is why he is so intent on controlling the Internet. I mentioned the Russian President yesterday mused Obama must be "insane" for being worried about the Internet at the recent cabal of nations, while the world was on the brink of international war, starvation, and little things like that.

There is little chance the czars will be able to accomplish this before it destroys the Marxists 2012 elections. Hence, it will prompt an in-your-face violence now.  It has already started with the flash mob racist attacks upon white people.

Real Clear Politics:

Van Jones, president of the progressive organization Rebuild the Dream, joins The Last Word to discuss what Washington should be doing about jobs. Jones calls the US' deficit problem "phony" and made up.

"Hold on to your hats, we're going to have an October offensive to take back the American dream and rescue America's middle class," Jones told MSNBC's "The Last Word."

Jones warns of an "American Fall" like there was an Arab Spring.

Jones was President Obama's "green jobs czar" until he resigned in fall of 2009.

The avowed Communist Van Jones was so bad he was even forced out of the Obama government. He made no attempt to be  Not to worry,  he works a Princeton, the former quality university.  (Yes, Professor Jones of Princeton is a "truther.")

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September 18, 2011
The California Corridor
Some Lessons on Government Largesse From the New Frontier
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

The Great Warpath

This summer it has been a softer, modern version of living in a cabin on the Great Warpath circa 1740 near Albany or Montreal (in this regard, take a look at Eliot Cohen’s new book Conquered into Liberty on the origins of the American way of war), readying oneself for the next break-in — so our inland “California Corridor” has become from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

More specifically, I have been on the lookout around my farm for a predatory, nearly new, grey/silver Toyota truck that drives in and then speeds out — always a day or so before the nocturnal theft. He’s clever, this caser — and audacious too, like a wily Sherman tank prowling through the hedgerows. (Why, if poor, is he not home growing a tomato garden or scouring the roadside for the ubiquitous tossed aluminum cans and plastic bottles?)

On three separate occasions from June to August, I have had copper wire stripped out of pumps, the barn ransacked, and the two locks pried off the shop and various things stolen. (Why did they steal buckets of 1900 antique bolts and square nails and leave alone a drill press and grinder? Ease of recycling? Ignorance?)

When Metal Grows Legs

One of the stranger things in the California Corridor is to periodically walk around a barnyard and notice: “Hmm, that set of rusted furrowers is gone? Hmmm, what happened to those sections of 2-inch pipe? Hmmm, didn’t I have an old compressor next to the shed? Have I got dementia, or wasn’t there once upon a time three metal ladders leaning against the shop?” It is as if they became animate, grew legs, and quietly walked off in the sunset.

Hippo Regius

Twice I ran into the barnyard to see the truck, with its two gangbanger youths, peel off in clouds of dust. (And, yes, as a CSU ex-professor, I know the party line: the dominant culture neglects/exploits/oppresses/fill in the blanks the “other” to such a degree that he sometimes must lash out, or, on occasion, to find validation, might just do something illegal like steal buckets of antique nails, or illogical, like in poverty buying a new truck, and thus so disturbs/finally wins the attention of those with privilege and their self-constructed norms. Been there and heard that for thirty years).

The Toyota is always around when theft occurs, and always speeding off when anyone spots it. Rural California is also like North Africa circa 420 AD: the few family farms left are mostly fenced or walled, the dogs large, the owners armed — trying to survive against organized Vandal attacks. All we need are mosaics in the courtyard portraying happier times as a testament to future archeologists. Maybe a “Cave Canem!” on the doorstep.

I know of no neighboring farm that has not been broken into or fought/scared off such intruders. (fracting and melting down the scattered marble blocks for lime whitewash.)

Then and Now

So it is that in 1935 poor people scraped and saved to cast a bronze plaque for their Depression-era new city hall, and in 2011 rather more affluent people ripped it off to melt it down for a layaway payment on some chrome rims or another round of meth.

Civilization ends when the pampered beneficiaries of the hard work of the now dead have the luxury of ignoring how hard it was — and is — to build shelter from the elements, to erect public buildings from scrub, to grow food and sprout farms from sage. Our contemporary criminals are protected from the elemental struggle and so have the indulgence to gnaw away at civilization’s veneer — and we, in our conspiratorial silence about them, likewise forgot that to keep still about the destruction of the work of others is to be complicit in it.

Jaws on Wheels

Seven days ago, I left to teach here at Hillsdale for my month vacation. My son, back home on the farm — he often rushes out armed when trucks come into the driveway at night — called. He mentioned in passing that the Toyota was back, Jaws-like circling around the farm in short bursts of speed to see if anyone was there. (The modus operandi in the rural California hinterlands is to drive into a farm, check if anyone comes out, if so, either peel out or even stay put to “inquire” about a “rental” or “work.” If no one comes out, then break a window, grab a TV or computer and speed off. Also: Please do not suggest, “call the sheriff”; I have and even “filled out a report” over the phone, no less. Enough said. And yes, I probably should sell the 140-year-old farm and move away, but also probably won’t. Why leave and give in to barbarism? There are still far more good than lawless people in the valley.)

Stealing Up For a Truck?

My point in this long excursus? Note the description “late-model Toyota.” I think it is a Tacoma, maybe 2009-11, so not a cheap truck by any means.

Earlier another youth drove in without seeing me mowing the lawn. I ran up; startled he stammered, “Hey, mister, I’m only looking for scrap metal to buy.” (What is it with the national epidemic with good wire or scrap metal?)

I’ll pass on his shoulder to finger sleeve tattoos, the ink drops under the eyes, the shaved head, wife-beater T-shirt, the inked-in but impressive religious icon tattooed on the neck, and the whole nine yards. As I wrote earlier, I immediately noticed brand new hot-water tanks, still in their labeled cardboard containers, in the bed of his truck. They seemed very “metal” to me, but not very “scrap.” Words were exchanged and he backed out.

Here’s the point: he too drove a brand new truck, this one a custom-painted fire-engine red Dodge, hopped up, with an expensive stereo blaring.

Chrome-rimmed Poverty?

Where are we going with this?

Yes, I confess once more to the same destination as the flash mobs and the London riots. What we think in the West now as too little is far too much. Both these thieves could trade in their multi-thousand-dollar trucks for cash to buy food, rather than steal the property of others and cause mayhem to make their payments. Heck, the rims alone are worth $1000.

(Thieves and gangbangers create a climate of general fear; they ruin the sense of tranquility, and they betray 150 years of collective labor of the now dead to create civilization from near nothing. Shame on them. Americans should not need to have armored rural mail boxes.) To suggest that they could do without the trucks or go without the dole, is not — channeling the president’s most recent speech warning against anti-government zealots — the same as wanting children to suffer from mercury poisoning or to render us helpless against the healthcare industry or to destroy government and want to start over from scratch.

More Federal Cash to the Rescue

So it is too with the federal government. In 2008 the housing market collapsed due to Wall Street speculation in sub-prime paper, dishonest banks, and real estate agents pushing mortgages and houses, and to be fair, either stupid or greedy unqualified house buyers who, late to a doomed game of musical chairs, thought even they, as the music ended, could find cheap loans, buy a home, earn thousands in instant “equity,” borrow against it, and get “free” cash.

But the glue that held the entire amorphous mess together were federally-guaranteed loans backed by Freddie and Fannie, agencies that were guided by congressional politics and not market worries — and themselves skimmed by incompetent bureaucrats who ended up millionaires. Take away those multibillion-dollar guarantors, and the market would have precluded the unqualified, the Wall Street roguery would have been neutered, and the inevitable housing bust would have been serious rather than catastrophic.

They Borrowed All For Us

Then there was George Bush’s 2008 multitrillion-dollar “stimulus” that “saved” the country, but destroyed the real progress he had made from 2006 to 2008 in addressing mounting debt. Then there was Barack Obama’s “second” $800 million “shovel-ready” stimulus. Now, of course, discredited Keynesians post facto decry its timid minuteness — but go back to January 2009 and read the op-eds. Then there was ebullition that Obama had taken the big dare and gone “big.” Only spending of that magnitude, we were lectured, would save us — as in funding “millions of green jobs” and “investments” and “infrastructure.” It was a weird time of Van Jones’ fakery, and preachy assurances/warnings from Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, and Summers. Pelosi et al. were even bragging that there was no need to read the vast borrowing bills before they were passed.

Money, Money Everywhere — and Not a Drop of Prosperity

We know that, like the first stimulus, the second went into the hands of those who were pretty well off; if banks and Wall Street profited the first time from conservative largesse, the second left-wing version enriched pseudo-green soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, pension funds, municipal and state employees, unions, and environmental bureaucracies.

Now we are supposed to be saved by Stimulus III. At nearly $500 billion in a single year, it may prove the largest single year payout in history. And we are assured it will not go to Wall Street, big banks, green companies, broke city and state governments, and “shovel ready” projects, but instead be “invested” in “work” programs fixing “infrastructure.” (Note the president no longer can use words and phrases like “shovel ready,” “green jobs,” or “stimulus”; they have all gone the way of sermons on “civility.”)

But does anyone dare imagine that what got us into this mess in 2008 and kept us stuck through 2011 are these huge federal programs that distort market forces while piling up trillions of dollars in debt, destroying rather than enhancing personal initiative? Both employers and workers are losing incentives, the former better off are ossified in fear of losing something, the latter worse off calcified in assurances of getting something.

Subsidizing Stasis

Maybe it is a fine and noble thing that the Obama administration vastly extended unemployment insurance. And, bravo, that nearly 50 million are now on food stamps. But a tragic voice from the past warns us that the more we diminish human incentives and guarantee a sort of cushioned permanent poverty, two things result: one, fewer people scramble to find productive work; and, two, envy sharpens as they begin to turn on their benefactors as being cheap, or mean-spirited in never giving quite enough to ensure parity with “them.” A cherry-red new truck or silver Toyota is never quite what others might have.

Epitaph

The problem with those who invaded my farm this summer was not poverty, but too much — at least in the sense of driving late-model trucks as they sought to destroy the lives and tranquility of others to get things that, by the very fact of their mode of transportation, they did not need. For the last two years, I have witnessed two constants: late-model cars in the valley shopping centers, an epidemic of obesity apparent to the naked eye, majorities on plastic food stamp debt cards, without apparent work in mid-morning, and a general unhappiness in the check-out lines that the government, state, city, etc. is not doing enough for them. All that is coupled with a media message of a cruel, heartless society that needs to do more for its oppressed — and a popular culture that damns any so witless and heartless for pointing the contradictions out.

Welfare on Top and Bottom

The welfare state, aside from being broke, is eroding initiative and warping reality — both for the elite at the top, like the executives who just milked a half-trillion dollars in sweetheart loans from some idiotic “green” bureaucrat, to the late-model truck drivers robbing productive farms to pay for their stereos and hydraulic-lifters.

So when the president speaks of “millions of green jobs” and “bringing jobs home,” I worry.

You see, I wish it were true, but I have doubts. I can imagine an employer offering to open a new state-of-the-art plant, but I fear only for millions in guaranteed federal loans, to be justified on some faddish green or “put people first” con.

Then I see someone like “sons of bitches” Jimmy Hoffa, or the Seattle longshoremen, or an NLRB plant-shutting academic nincompoop entering the picture to “have labor do its part.” And I don’t know what we are going to do to get those working, like the late-model truck-driving thieves — would such idle promise to be innovative, show up on time, be honest and disciplined, be familiar with written blueprints and warnings about their lathes and grinders, and be more productive than their competitors overseas?

And so I ask myself: “Is all this more efficient, more productive than what the Chinese offer?” “Will our solar panel or drill press be better built and at a cheaper cost and more durable?” “Have we justified our standard of living that allows us to slack while others toil?” “Is there a limit to the borrowed subsidies?” “How many engineers, brain surgeons, and savvy mechanics is California — near last in its high school test scores — producing that are better than those found elsewhere?”

Reality Cannot Be Reinvented

The tragic voice now shouts, not whispers: “Of course, this is not sustainable, you idiot! You must put real hope of profit and greater fear of loss into the employer who is freed to sink or swim on his own, a sense of challenge in the heart of the scrambling workers, and end the subsidies that allow someone to steal as a pastime to custom paint his truck cherry red and lift his truck bed up and down with a button, while the government gives him cash for his food and shelter.”

We are in a weird predicament where too much is not enough and the medicine is worse than the malady — and saying just that earns one ridicule.

It is not Barack Obama’s fault; he is a mere totem, just the overdue dividend of our long ago collective investment.

Again, if he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.

Announcements

On this topic of decline or slogging through: Rome collapsed in the West in the latter fifth century AD, although the series of Gothic invasions posed no more of a threat than what both the republic and empire had thwarted many times over the prior 700 years of Roman history. In contrast, in the East, Constantinople fought off invasions from the north, east, and south and persevered for another millennium. That contrast raises the question about the nature of external threats and internal inability to meet them — when and why do unlikely civilizations survive and likely ones no survive? I’ll talk about that on Monday, October 3, in Boston at 6 p.m. at a convention sponsored by the Retirement Income Industry Association [1]. On another note, be sure to look into a counter-commemoration conference [2] protesting the “anti-racism” so-called “Durban III” symposium, to be held across the street from the UN in New York on September 22. If one collates the new axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey, Hamas, and perhaps revolutionary Egypt, then Israel is back to 1967, but this time with enemies energized not by sclerotic Sovietism, but radical Islamism. What is eerie is that Israel remains a constitutional state, while its neighbors turn to theocracy — while the West, and increasingly the US, blames it for these metamorphoses.

---

URLs in this post:

[1] Retirement Income Industry Association: http://riia-usa.org/conferences/default.asp

[2] counter-commemoration conference: http://www.durbanwatch.com

©2011 Victor Davis Hanson

Ninth Inning?

Just a few items to reenforce your resolve to prepare. I had to write this. 


I suggest you read this blog very carefully and consider what to do. Go to the actual blog, if you are reading the email.  There may be little time left and being unconscious is not cute. 


The collapse coming in Europe will actually help our dollar, for a minute or two, but we are no longer talking about defending yourself against a double-dip recession. (Peanut butter.)


You are aware of the racist flash mobs attacking white people, hoping to generate a reaction that would require the national guard to step in, and that every socialist and wannabe says all discourse is racist if it does not involve Marxism, but consider very current news:


1.  A simple BBC interview.


2.  The VIX is an index of volatility in the stock markets. A great way to make money in turmoil.  I went to look at it today and see I was two months too late. Look at the chart, via the link, for three years history to see the crash of 2008.  Normally, over 20 one needs to consider a growing danger.  

3.  Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.:  "Considering the history of violence within the Teamsters union, it's not surprising that Jimmy Hoffa Jr. would say of the tea party that he and his union members need to 'take these son of a bitches out,'" declared Rick Berman, executive director of the Center for Union Facts, or CUF, adding that "it shouldn't be considered an idle threat, either."   Read more:Hoffa's call to 'take out' tea partiers deemed 'no idle threat'http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=342185#ixzz1ZCisMQIW

4. President Obama has urged people to take to the streets.  You can hear it every day. Listen. A few months ago, he told an audience how nice it would be if he did not have to deal with a Congress.  

5. Initial reports circulating in the Kremlin today about the G-8 Summit being held in Paris state that an angry President Medvedev has accused both American President Obama and French President Sarkozy [photo top right] of being ‘completely insane’ for their attempting to monopolize the agenda with their plan to ‘control the Internet’ while the West teeters on the brink of economic collapse, the world is fast running out of food, and the revolutions in the Arab world threaten all-out global war.

LAST AND THE MOST TERRIFYING:

6. Sep 27, 2011 7:39:00 PM

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Generation Opportunity, a national organization engaging young Americans ages 18-29 to encourage greater participation in the democratic process, is calling on North Carolina Governor Bev Purdueto apologize following a comment she made today at a Cary, North Carolina Rotary Club in which she suggested that Congressional elections should be suspended.

There is no question that Obama is out and most of the identifiable maniacs are out in next year's election.  Indeed, I have no doubt that Obama has already been told he has to withdraw this year so that the Democratic party will not be destroyed in the general election.  This would explain why the Marxists, statists, oligarchs, and fascists are all in.  He is a narcissist and does not want to leave. We are in the U.S. putsch.  (Photo of the Defendants following the  Beer Hall Putsch.) 

There is no question that Governor Purdue was floating a trial suggestion:  skip the elections. She said elections are a distraction to the important work that has to be done.  She repeated her belief that we should suspend elections.  Within no time, her staff says it was a joke. Very funny. Say something treasoness twice and explain it. Very John Stewart. Later,  in tonight's rapid radio news I heard some official saying conservative bloggers should stop publishing. 

There is no longer a sole anti-American incident to complain of, we are dulled by deluge.  We accept stupidity as an excuse for treason. I no longer feel like I am crying in the wilderness, as I was two years ago, but I do have to point out the pace of the Obama gambit is quickening.  There is little time left to undo our republic and the Marxists are all in.

Paulson, who made his billion betting against the real estate market in 2008 recently said he figures gold would get to $4,000 per ounce. This morning at 4 a.m. EST silver was $27 an ounce in Hong Kong.  By 10 a.m. EST it was $33 in New York. Wild swings, like the stock market in the last two weeks, are very bad indicators that people are in a panic mode. It is the uncalm before the storm. 

As usual, the media is in its defense of the Democrat's mode, we are all in our denial mode, and we perk up when there are phony stories from Europe about saving Greece or the Euro.  This is where we are right now - in the pause as people pray Europe will save itself. Don't be one of those people. 

This is the eve of destruction.

Send this blog around to those you wish to warn.

Big Day

Remember:

Then remember:

     1.  Presidents appoint a blind trust to handle their estates to avoid ethical violations.
     2.  Any public servant cannot make decision concerning a company they are invested in.
     3.  It is a crime, an impeachable one, to attempt to have a witness alter his testimony.

Graphs chart a million words

Nice try, but inflation is considered so these are "constant dollars."

When I was in college, I remember every year the education grant from the feds went up, I forget what we called it.  Anyway, wouldn't you know it, the tuition went up exactly the same amount.  This was a good thing, as it provided a way to hire all sorts of teachers of inexplicable subjects who could educate generations of more inexplicable teachers.

Two Things

1.  We are on the cliff, now.  Europe has made a last ditch attempt to shore up the hillside while, at the same time, organizing an "organized" default of Greece.  How did they shore things up - they got the U.S., you, to protect Europe through the Federal Reserve.  Did you vote for this? (Meanwhile, Soros is calling for a world currency).

This could all sound complex, but in a nutshell, Greece is toast, Italy is turning brown, Spain is in trouble.  Germany is fed up.  European money is now coming to the U.S. shoring up our dollar, but this will be short term event.  So, don't think we are in that mythical rebound of the economy.  We are talking a week or so for dominoes to fall in Europe.  As to the impact here, I always guess too short in time periods and, after all, banks and governments are doing their best stick fingers in the dikes.

So, think endgame.  At best, a mini panic with stocks spiking, business winding down, and more layoffs.  Probably, to my view, a second recession. At least, the slow motion collapse will end idiot monetary interference based upon a long dead English bureaucrat.  Did you notice the President called for MORE printing of money as a plan to stop the result of printing money?  (It seems to me, the real forces that run things are moving to have Mr. Obama announce he is not running by years' end. Watch the news, the pressure is mounting everyday by merely reporting the crap that is going on and, now, being outraged.)

If you are keeping dollars, you may as well get some and stuff them in your pillow to cover the worst case scenario of bank holidays.  This is only a remote threat, but it is real and the idiots who deal with world finance make things worse every day.  You won't lose any interest by having cash (come on get some "junk silver,") as there isn't any and the dollar devalues daily, anyway.  (Buy coffee and cords of wood.) The goal, now, is to survive the next few years without permitting the growth of a fascist state, which is, after all, the point of the way we are handing the crisis.

The only financial plan I could suggest is get a small mortgage at a low fixed rate and buy silver.

Keynes is laughing in the afterlife.

2.

Saturday 9/17, 1pm to 5pm EDT - 
Watch this important event live online at: 
http://aapsonline.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30a32513ae04f5445c95f3239&id=51b6211ddd&e=90fa94b30e

Scroll down for full agenda and list of speakers!

The Lehigh Valley COALITION for Health Care Reform Proudly Presents a Constitution Day Educational Workshop.

Everything You Wanted To Know About ObamaCare
(but Didn't Know Who to Ask)

1 to 5 p.m. EDT
Saturday,
September 17, 2011

Watch this Constitution Day workshop ONLINE
or join us IN PERSON at:

Gerald White Pavilion of the University Center,
DeSales University
2755 Station Avenue, Center Valley, PA 18034

 

CLICK HERE to download an event flier you can print to hand out to your colleagues and patients, or post in your doctors' lounge.

Click here for a map to the event location.

Watch the event live online at: 
http://aapsonline.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=30a32513ae04f5445c95f3239&id=3ed714efd5&e=90fa94b30e

Agenda & Speakers:

Doors Open at Noon

1 p.m. - Welcome and Introduction The Nuts and Bolts of ObamaCare - What Happens When? Donna Baver Rovito, Chair, Lehigh Valley Coalition for Health Care Reform

A Constitution Day Question - Is ObamaCare Constitutional? How ObamaCare Affects Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania House RepresentativeDoug Reichley (PA-134th)

How ObamaCare affects Families, Children, and Seniors and Why Doctors Oppose It. Elena R. Farrell, D.O., Docs 4 Patient Care – PA Chapter Co-Founder

How ObamaCare affects Personal Liberty, Taxpayers, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Deficit. K. Nicholas Pandelidis, M.D., Docs 4 Patient Care – PA Chapter Co-Founder

How ObamaCare affects Businesses, Workers, Job Creation, and the Economy. Samuel Denisco, Director of Government Affairs, PA Chamber of Business and Industry

Break - Light Refreshments

How ObamaCare affects Doctors, Patients, Access to Care, Quality of Care, and American Medical Innovation. Richard A. Armstrong, M.D., F.A.C.S, Chief Operating Officer, Docs 4 Patient Care

What YOU Can Do to Help Defeat ObamaCare - Three Grassroots Efforts Right Here in PA. Pennsylvania Health Care Freedom Act (HB42) -Terrence O’Connor, Esq.

Nullification - William Taylor Reil

Health Care Compacts - John Morningstar

One More Time -IS ObamaCare Constitutional? Federal Efforts to Defund, Repeal, Replace ObamaCare. Speaker: Rep John Shadegg (AZ-3), Retired

Replacing ObamaCare: Why Separate Reforms Can Win the Day. John F. Brinson, Chair, Lehigh Valley Tax Limitation Committee

Effective Solutions - What Would Be Better than ObamaCare? Alieta Eck, M.D., President Elect, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), Co-Founder, Zarephath Health Center

3:50 p.m. - Break, Breakout Sessions with all speakers, Visit Exhibits

4:10 p.m. - Panel discussion, Questions from the Floor and Online Viewers. Moderator: Donna Baver Rovito

4:55 p.m. – Closing

Doors will remain open until 6 p.m.

In between Hegelian stages

Rod and I were sending cryptic messages back and forth and he mentioned "liminality."  The word comes from the "limen," or threshold in Latin, and was invented in 1909 by an anthropologist, which explains the spelling.  For good measure, Rod linked me to the wiki for it.

I cannot brush it off as drivel, but I do brush off anthropologists.  The term is more jargon to explain what is obvious. It applies to the time when, in cultures unlike ours which foster the development of adults, a young person is torn away from one perspective (I posit: mom) and transitions into adulthood.  In most cultures this was in the 14 to 16 years of age area, generally speaking.  Now, who knows?

The theory says once you break away from mom, you are without touchstones (not really true) and are flopping around in a communal condition, subject to new concepts, until you cross the threshold.  Of note, the aborigine "walkabout" seems the opposite, you go off by yourself and try not to die.  Anyway, since we have been funding anthropology departments for generations, many people have written about the concept, inventing new jargon along the way.  Eventually, someone says something useful, we will see below.

Hegel is known for his description, which seems simple but is a powerful knowledge, of change:  thesis - antithesis - new stuff.  The new stuff becomes a new thesis, so the cycle continues. Greg has pointed out that the left, regarding the cycles of history, is adept as screaming out new antithesis, though crazy, result in a new set of affairs. The normal people feed wonderful about being nice to the crazies, but all along the crazies are changing the normal people, especially their children. This is why sending your children to public school is unacceptable, especially where parents are too busy to actually think about their children's souls.

Do not doubt the sophistication of the left,it is just their first assumptions about the meaning and structure of life that are peculiar, unless you are a touchy-feely person who does not believe in God or a strong basis of ethics, and all the stuff that comes from that, such as honor and acceptance of a moral codes and the dignity of the individual. The "social sciences" have provided the left with many manipulative tools which they freely and secretly use because they know we need to be changed.

They use the findings of sociological and psychological researchers as tools. Notice the other day President Obama said in a speech "pass this bill" sixteen times.  This is very poor rhetoric, but that was not the point, it is NLP pushing the audience. The problem is the media is no longer part of the con and the repetition was noticed and mocked. Mockery kills the trickster.

So, in between the Hegelian phases, we can see liminality (sic).  From the wiki is an important recitation of an example for you consideration:

Communism

In Reflexive Historical Sociology, Szakolczai elaborates on the classification of “Soviet-type Bolshevism” as an example of the third kind of permanent liminality:

The communist regimes in Europe and Asia were all established under one very special kind of condition: the end of a world war. If all wars are liminal situations in which the cycle of mimetic violence escalates beyond measure, then the closing stages of a world war, and especially the process of reconstruction that starts after such massive warfare, can be conceived of as a rite of reaggregation. The singular specificity of communist regimes, however, was to play continuously on the sentiments of suffering, revenge and hatred, prevent the settling down of the negative emotions, stir up the worst in human feelings by submitting a population…first to an endless civil war and then to a period of forced and unintelligible terror. Communism was a regime in which the Second World War never ended.^[83]

The liminal period that began at the end of World War II allowed the communists to take power “and unfold a characteristic self-sustaining mechanism, turning the entire mechanism of crisis solution into reverse gear: tricking and fixing an entire country into the position of the outcast for generations to come, first in the original Russian case, itself a miming copy of the French Revolution, and then in its East European satellites”.^[84] It was the conditions of “disorganization, depravity, and suffering” present following the war that allowed the communists to rise to power, as “the normal mechanisms of social and political order [had] become so weak that even the miniscule forces that a Communist party [managed] to mobilize [was] enough to grasp power”.^[85] In the wake of the war, “populations had already suffered immensely due to economic or political crises, but then, beyond that, with the establishment of communist power, the entire past, the history, identity, and memory of these countries were demolished, until a new and total imprint was stamped upon them through cunning thinking and trickery, forming a new type of ‘objective’ existence”.^[86]

The communists pursued a “revaluation of values” in order to reinforce their own system. The trickster used the technique of “flirting” to achieve this, meaning the “systematic teasing of the population with an imminent state of bliss”.^[87] By using this technique, the communists “were able to perform the feat of maintaining adherence to their policies by a significant minority of the faithful while keeping hidden what was actually going on as well as the resulting fear and disappointment”.^[88] Horvath and Thomassen cite Hungarian communist party and state leader Mátyás Rákosi’s political speeches to the public as an example of the importance of the trickster’s political communication. Such speeches “communicated a shared liminal condition, as messages sent out to evoke the sympathy of other defenseless human beings in the same position of the outcast”.^[89] In these speeches, Rákosi also provided a justification for the need of communist rule: “The speeches promise relief from pressures to worry and concern by substituting it with their own version of vigilance that is centralized and mechanical, and where the communists can serve as guides”.^[90]

Another aspect of the communist strategy of seizing power involved the “overplaying” of the identity “between their position as the outcast and the general state of the population”.^[91] Immediately following the war, the communists had to “render identical two different types of motivations: the normal, healthy attempt at reconstruction and the redressing of social grievances at the political level, and the attempt by the communists to satisfy their own fascination for recognition and appeal that had already become chronic, short-circuited and endless due to long decades of repression”.^[92]...

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While a "permanent liminality" is inherently illogical, go along with the discussion that keeping people in fear and and in crisis is a tool. You cannot hold anthropologists to logic.  The tricksters of history, the lost-souls who act as a virulent virus, such as today's 'Progressives,' fascists, Nazis, Marxists, the Cloward-Piven advocates, the Frankfurt School, and so on, all know and act on this.  (Of note, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were schooled in Cloward-Piven philosophy.  Obama took a job as a community organizer, oh, which is part of the movement. Hilary was offered the same job and declined.)

Watch the news on major channels for a week (and do not buy anything from a sponsor) and you will see the constant state of fear being presented. Think about the recent decade and all the things we were told to be afraid of - and of the government that will protect us. This is not "bad news is news" this goes far beyond facts and creates a sense of crisis.  Big Brother is alive and is approaching from the left.