Simply wonderful stuff bubbling up from other bloggers over the last couple of days – rich, creamy bloggy goodness that I simply have to share … that is, if you have not already found it yourself.

The pretensions of our new aristocratic class, dissected for your pleasure, here

I think what has happened is that over the past few decades, the more traditional forms of conspicuous consumption have become less and less effective for wealthy snobs who wish to ostentatiously parade their privilege. It used to be that the rich could be content with having lots of fancy toys and whatnot. But nowadays, when basically anyone above lower-lower class can head to Wal-Mart and pick up a plasma TV, drive a nice SUV, or even get a mortgage to ‘buy’ a McMansion somewhere (at least before ’07), it gets harder and harder for the wealthy to parade their specialness and privilege in front of the rest of us. So it’s only natural that they have increasingly turned to the realm of political postures as their method of choice for distinguishing themselves from the masses. Indeed, in this light it makes perfect sense that leftist policies would be the ones most likely to harm, constrain and impoverish folks who are merely middle class (but not upper middle class).

(link found, courtesy of Chicagoboyz )

Where our new aristos came from, and what they want. Power, basically. But you already knew that.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

(Link found first through da Blogfadda, but this essay is now being linked everywhere, including a fascinating discussion at The Belmont Club)

From the Department of Take a Number and Get in Line – thoughts on hating Obama…

If anyone during the 2008 had implied, or even speculated, that Obama was capable of anything of the sort, he’d have been dismissed as a demagogue, a hater, even a lunatic. But today, after his abandonment of the state of Tennessee (also wracked by flooding), his betrayal of the Georgians, his pulling the rug out from under the Poles and Czechs, his dragging and cold response to the Gulf blowout, his insults to the UK, the GOP, the Supreme Court, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Dalai Lama, it scarcely raises a shrug. That’s Obama. That’s how he acts — with arrogance, superciliousness, and indifference. We can search the entire roster of American presidents, and we will not find a match. This is not the behavior of an elected chief executive; it’s the conduct of a divine right monarch, and a pretty inadequate one as well.

And finally, those poor, suffering, starving and water-deprived Palestinians of Gaza – they only just now got a new shopping mall.

In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”

Link courtesy of Rantburg