Time to be a Man

In response to Obama's claim that Republicans will use race to stoke fear, Lt. Col Allen West, candidate for Congress in Florida's 22 District issued this release:

My advice to Senator Obama is to run as a Man and Leader, and the American people will evaluate you as such, not as a victim. This is a Presidential race, based solely on a capacity to lead the United States of America.

It is not about skin tone...however, perhaps we should come to expect these immature statements. It also seems rather humorous that the Presidential candidate who was supposed to be such a "uniter" and transcend race is the one talking about it the most.

If Senator Obama was confident in his abilities and character, he would not need to create a crutch for failure. Senator Obama has just tipped his hand, any criticism of him and his policies will be directly attributed to racism. I congratulate Senator Obama for taking race relations in America back some 30 years

Crocodile Tears

Laura Ingraham reports on this LA Times story:

POOR LITTLE GANG BANGER!

Cue the world's smallest violin, 'cause we've got ourselves a sob story of epic proportions. In saner eras, yesterday's front-page L.A. Times story about a 23-year-old Anaheim gang member would be confused for parody. Sadly, today it's just another example of the length many will go to excuse criminal behavior.

Jose Luis Muñoz, we are told, was raised by a single mother. And as if that weren't heartbreaking enough, we're also told Muñoz's childhood was not one of affluence. In 2005, Muñoz found himself running from cops for reasons the Times opts not to report. The pursuit ended with Muñoz being hit by a police cruiser. Naturally, he sued and won $2.5 million. After serving a jail sentence, the idealistic minds behind the settlement were excited, certain the cash would help Muñoz turn his life around. Not so much. Instead, he was arrested only months later for violating his parole for associating with other gang members. But don't blame Muñoz! As The Times reports:

Richard Ramos, a gang expert and author who grew up in Highland Park, agreed that identity and fitting in have a lot to do with Muñoz's recidivism.

"People who don't have money transform their lives all the time," Ramos said. "In this case, $2.5 million wasn't enough. To kids like him, identity and belonging are powerful forces that keep them in gangs. There has to be an inside-out transformation or a life-changing event to bring change. Gangs compete with your family for loyalty

.And rough upbringings are hardly a new excuse. Recall that in 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui -- aka the "20th hijacker" -- pleaded guilty to charges ranging from conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism to conspiracy to destroy aircraft and use WMDs. Before his sentencing, his attorneys offered a real tearjerker: his father was abusive, his girlfriend's parents never approved of him, his native France was intolerant of his Muslim beliefs ... of course he turned out to be a terrorist.

The only thing such excuse making serves to accomplish is to re-enforce in defendants' minds that whatever he's done -- it's not his fault. That's bad for society, and the convicted.

I Can Only Shake My Head

YouTube - IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT ENERGY SAVER LIGHT BULBS!

From Laura Ingraham

PRESIDENT POOH?

Sen. Barack Obama's top foreign-policy adviser, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, says the U.S. should follow Winnie the Pooh's lead when it comes to fighting al Qaeda. No joke. Here's what he said: "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."

The possible National Security Adviser to President Obama added that Pooh's war philosophy can be summed up thusly: if something is causing you too much pain, give it up and try something else.Tell that to the veterans of Belleau Wood, Sicily, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Mr. Danzig. Tell it to the Special Forces troops who may be tracking al Qaeda terrorists in Somalia, the Philippines, Afghanistan or Iraq right now.

Things worth doing, things that are vital to keeping this country safe, are often difficult and, yes, even painful. Danzig's hedonistic approach to foreign affairs is a signal that America is a paper tiger (Tigger?) because the leaders we elect are weak (Eeyores, all). And if America elects Barack Obama, our enemies just may prove that theory right.

Education Matters

If you don't think that what a child learns in school can be manipulated by the teachers and the society, this should give you pause.

Elian Gonzalez Joins Cuba's Communist Youth Union

Gonzalez Says He Would Never Let Down Fidel CastroHAVANA (CBS4)

― Eight years after a headline making international custody fight which ended with his return to his father in Cuba, Elian Gonzalez has joined Cuba's Young Communist Union.

In an article in Cuba's communist youth newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, the 14-year old Gonzalez said he would never let ex-President Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro down. He joined more than 18-thousand others who joined the group on Saturday.

In 2000, Gonzalez' mother was killed when a boat carrying them to the U.S. capsized in the Florida Straits. Elian, who was 6 years old at the time, and two other refugees were found clinging to an inner tube for survival. After his rescue the boy stayed with relatives in South Florida until a long tug of war over custody ended with armed federal agents seizing him from his great uncle's Miami home. Elian then returned to Cuba to be with his father.

Weekend Reading

Two very interesting columns in the Wall Street Journal were published in the past few days. If you wish to, please check out these columns from Peggy Noonan and Thomas Sowell, two of the best conservative thinkers in America today:

The Tragedy of America's Disappearing Fathers - WSJ.com

Declarations - WSJ.com

Senator Mc Cain, Wake Up!

Excerpt of an editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so dysfunctional need only review Congress's recent antics. Members have debated ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate's carbon tax-and-regulation monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for "price gouging" – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies.

Amid $135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we're insane and self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

At present, it is charitable to call Mr. McCain's energy ideas incoherent, and it may cost him the election.

Gas Prices

The Republican Whip, Roy Blunt, introduced this chart yesterday to the House of Representatives. Let us remember that he is the MINORITY WHIP and likely to remain so.

So, forget about it!!!
http://www.powerlineblog.com/GasChart51.php

The Pelosi Premium

William Katz at Urgent Agenda reports on this:

Investor's Business Daily gets to the heart of the gasoline-price issue in exposing the "Pelosi premium." We can solve this problem, but we're being stopped by environmentalism's fundamentalist fanatics:
The price of gasoline when the Democrats took control of Congress was around $2.25 per gallon.

The average price of regular gas crept over the $4-per-gallon barrier over the weekend, as measured by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

That represents a more than 75% increase in the retail price of a gallon of gasoline on Pelosi's watch. Call it the "Pelosi premium" we're all now paying.

It's a problem driven by domestic supply restrictions imposed by the Democratic Congress in the face of growing worldwide demand. The Democrats preach energy independence while they do everything in their power to prevent it. If the American people truly want change, this would be it.

And...

The U.S. Congress has voted consistently to keep 85% of America's offshore oil and gas off-limits, while China and Cuba drill 60 miles from Key West, Fla. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that the restricted areas contain 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

There are 3,200 oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During Katrina, not a single drop was spilled. More than 7 billion barrels have been pumped from these wells over the past quarter-century, yet only one thousandth of one percent has been spilled.


Katz: What is sickening here is that the very people who scream of their love for the poor are themselves gouging the poor, making them pay absurd prices for fuel in order to live their pure, aren't-I-wonderful, environmentally pure lives. Ask the independent cabbie in Harlem what he thinks of five-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. But, of course, these superior creatures in the environmental movement would never talk to a cabbie in Harlem unless he was hauling them to a fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Fascinating Woman

The governor of Alaska had been mentioned on this site much earlier. I wonder if we could be looking at a possible Vice-President here.

What are your thoughts? Am I goofy?

BeldarBlog: Would Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin be a grand slam as McCain's Veep?

Iowahawk for President

Funny, funny stuff. This guy is absolutely the best satirist on the web!! Take some time to read through three of his recent posts and add him to your "favorites" list.
iowahawk: And Then There Were Three
iowahawk: Canadian Radio Classics: Warman of the Mounted
iowahawk: Dear Barry

We Hope

The following is a sliver of an op-ed that former UN Ambassador, John Bolton, penned in the Los Angeles Times. However, I'm cautious. Much has changed since 1984.

It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world’s ills. In 1984, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick labeled people with these views the “San Francisco Democrats,” after the city where Walter Mondale was nominated for president.

Most famously, Kirkpatrick forever seared the San Francisco Democrats by saying that “they always blame America first” for the world’s problems. In so doing, she turned the name of the pre-World War II isolationist America First movement into a stigma the Democratic Party has never shaken.

This is yet another piece of history that Obama has ignored or never learned. There may be one more piece of history worthy of attention: In 1984, Mondale went down to one of the worst electoral defeats in American political history. We will now see whether Obama follows that path as well.

Steyn Time

Enjoy:

Mark Steyn on Barack Obama on National Review Online

An Important Distinction

Taken from an article by David Warren, a Canadian columnist:

I have myself observed this distinction between the Right and Left sides of mainstream electorates in most other Western countries: the Right tends to believe in facts, the Left to believe in “theories”; and as we advance through post-modern irrationalism, those theories become battier and battier.

The trend towards “global crazing” was not always there, however. If we go back half a century, differences between Liberals and Conservatives up here, as between Democrats and Republicans down there, did not hinge on “ability to discern reality.” On the facts of life; on moral, legal, and religious principles; on the need to keep government out of our lives and resist tyranny in any other form, there was broad agreement. A “very liberal” voter from the 1950s would pass for a “rightwing dinosaur” today.

This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland.

I have attributed this to many things, but chiefly to the effects of mass urbanization. People living in vast conurbations become disconnected from nature, and thus increasingly suggestible. The press of crowds enforces conformity, so that we get “school of fish” movements in public opinion. The individual fish believes that the direction of the school has been determined by “experts,” and anyway fears being eaten if he deviates from the consensus in any way.

Back to My Favorite Subject

How Are These Kids Going To Learn Such Things?"
By Ed Driscoll · June 05, 2008 12:24 PM · The Return of the Primitive

Andrew Klavan, the author of True Crime, adopted by Clint Eastwood for the big screen, albeit in a slightly bowdlerized form, visits an inner city fourth grade class, and comes away noting:

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

But where are these kids going to learn such things? It’s the stuff you just sort of absorb in a healthy, traditional, two-parent home, and that’s exactly what they’re missing. If they learn what they’ve lived, they’re done for—the girls too likely to “come out pregnant” like their mothers, the boys to be underemployed and maybe even do time.

You can’t legislate responsibility, either. Personal behavior in a free society has to be a matter of choice—choice without which there is no virtue—virtue without which a society can’t be free.
It seems to me that leaves these kids only one recourse: the culture. Where the institution of family is broken, only the surrounding culture can teach people the inner structures required for a life of liberty.

Many conservatives often seem to have given up on culture or not to care. There’s a strong strain of philistinism on the right. When we talk about “culture wars,” we usually mean preventing the courts from redefining marriage or promoting abstinence instead of birth control: culture, in other words, as the behavioral branch of politics.

Culture, in the true sense, is more than that. It’s the whole engulfing narrative of our values. It’s the stories we tell. Leftists know this. These kids get an earful from the Left every day. Their schools serve up black history in a way guaranteed to alienate them from the American enterprise. Their sanctioned reading list denies boys the natural fantasies of battling villains and protecting women from harm. Any instinct the girls might have that their bodies and their self-respect are interrelated is negated by the ubiquitous parable of celebrity lives. And I hardly need mention the movies and TV shows that endlessly undermine notions of manly self-discipline, feminine modesty, patriotism, and all the rest.

Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.
There may be more profitable businesses in the short run. The long run, as always, depends on the young. If you want to win their hearts, you have to tell them stories. I have reason to believe they’ll listen.

It's all part of the Great Relearning, especially important when the rest of culture is essentially ashamed of any history that's prior to 1968

For another fabulous article, please read the following from P J O'Rourke. Both humorous and sarcastically slamming the "silly left," you will enjoy his notes from his visit to the Field Museum in Chicago as it today, and how it was when he went there with his grandmother 50 years ago:

When Worlds Collide

The Messiah Speaks

Last night Barack Obama broke all records for campaign promises, with one of the most over the top self-aggrandizing statements ever uttered by a presidential candidate.

"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

He’s going to heal the sick and make the oceans part.

Ooohhkay.

A Good Rant

From Kathryn Lopez of NRO this morning:

We don’t need faux pioneers like Hillary Clinton. In her 2000 book, The Hillary Trap, Laura Ingraham wrote of Hillary Clinton: “If you think Hillary Clinton is a pioneer, if you think Hillary is a political genius, if you think Hillary is an innovator, you have been drawn into one big Clinton con job.” Ingraham wrote, “She wanted to be seen as the strong, assertive, mature feminist, but she advocated policies that were guaranteed to keep women as dependent on government, unions, and even the United Nations — as she was on Bill.”

We don’t need faux pioneers like Barack Obama. Tell me he’s a pioneer when he meets with Ward Connerly and embraces his Civil Rights Initiative movement, a successful effort to undo the damage big-government patronizing has done to civil rights.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about the importance of the damage the welfare state has done in urban America, to the family.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about protecting marriage.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about the effects of abortion on blacks in America. Americans need to be confident in American greatness — with its exceptional promise and opportunities.

Hope is here, it’s not contingent on an Obama win in November. We need leaders who share this confidence — leaders who don’t need Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to make them believe

Quote of the Day

" A TAXPAYER VOTING FOR A DEMOCRAT IS LIKE A CHICKEN VOTING FOR COLONEL SANDERS "

Being Old and Rich

That appears to be the only thing that will keep this woman from being thrown under the jail house floor.

Ain't no way that western civilization is going to wake up, is there?

Former screen siren Bardot convicted in race case - Yahoo! News

Let the Race Begin

My Old Party [William J. Bennett]

This is an astounding moment in American politics. You cannot credibly say the Clintons are a political dynasty the way, say, the Kennedys or Bushs are. But I think one has to say the Clinton rule of the Democratic party has been dynastic. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to have served two terms as president in two generations, the only Democrat to twice beat Republican nominees for president and his wife is a two term U.S. senator who will likely be in the Senate for years to come. Bill Clinton has been rated one of — if not THE — most popular person in the world, and yet Clinton rule in American politics ends tonight. Whatever it was the Republicans and so many independents did not like about the Clintons, we’ve learned the Democrats have had enough as well.
And thus the Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and political record.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate.

The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976.

Questions about all these attributes (from foreign policy expertise to executive experience to senatorial experience to judgment about foreign leaders to the instructors he has had in his cultural values) surround Barack Obama. And the Democratic party has chosen him.

A Longer Version

We have all probably seen a short clip of the new rant by the Marxist priest from Chicago's south side. Here is a longer version of his contorted views:

YouTube - Obama's Church: Hillary Cried Because White Supremacy Failed

A Peek Ahead to this Fall

Roger L. Simon points to a subject that I think will be quite an isue this fall in the general election campaign. Obama's ties to the ugly political machine in Chicago will have to be covered...even by his adoring press!

Obama the Greatest Machine Politician of Our Time?

Sounds like an exaggeration, doesn't it? But I'm not so sure. He and his cronies have already made mince-meat of the so-called Clinton machine, and we know Bill is no slouch in this regard.


No, Obama gets the nod for several reasons, not the least of which is he has been able to hide so brilliantly under the mantle of "new politics" when his style is as old as Boss Tweed and as monolithic as the Mayors Daley from his hometown of Chicago. But he's done Tweed and the Daleys one better because he's got the nitwits in the national press eating out the palm of his hand as well. Those bozos bought into the Politics of Hope crapola from the get-go.

Obama can go around accusing McCain of hobnobbing with lobbyists, being a warmonger, you name it, and they lap it up. Meanwhile they wouldn't dare print anything nasty about Barack, even when it bites them in the foot. Can you imagine what chance McCain would have if he had spent twenty years in a racist minister's church and then titled his book after a sermon from the minister? McCain would have had to retire to Fiji, but Obama is running for President, decimating his opposition.

Has there ever been a more brilliant, machine-like political move than that? And now there's the implication that Obama's campaign manager might have been...ohmygosh... a lobbyist in good old Chi-town? How much mileage is that going to get in the MSM?

Think it's going to make it to the front page of the NYT along with story about McCain's putative girl friend? I wouldn't hold my breath, but I might my nose.

An Instinctive Trust for Freedom

From Powerline comes this review of Vaclav Klaus' speech yesterday in Washington.

Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus addressed the National Press Club today, talking about his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, which has just been translated into English. Klaus speaks from a unique perspective, as an economist who lived under Communism and who places the current wave of environmentalist extremism squarely in that tradition. Introduced as a global warming skeptic, Klaus objected:

I'm just surprised to hear that I'm skeptical vis-a-vis environmentalism. I'm not skeptical. I am totally against it. "Skeptical" is an understatement which I would never, never use.

To my knowledge, Klaus's talk is not available online; sadly, we can't post it in its entirety. But here are a few highlights:

My today's thinking is fundamentally influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under the communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom and, as I remember quite well, wanted to command not only the people, but also the nature....

I do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old- fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar. Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality.

In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat; this time, in the name of the planet. Structurally, it is very similar. The current danger, as I see it, is environmentalism and especially its strongest version, climate alarmism. ***

My central concern is in a condensed form, as was mentioned by Madam President, captured in the subtitle of this book. I ask, what is endangered, climate or freedom? And my answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity.

The book was written by an economist who happens to be in a relatively high political position. I don't deny my basic paradigm, my economic way of thinking, because I consider it an advantage, not a disadvantage, by stressing that I want to say that the climate change debate, in a wider and the only relevant sense, should be neither about several tenths of a degree Fahrenheit or Celsius, about the up or down movements of sea level, about the depths of ice at north and southern poles, nor about the variations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The real debate is and should be about costs and benefits of alternative human actions, about how to rationally deal with the unknown future, about what kind and size of solidarity with much wealthier future generations is justified, about the size of externalities and their eventual appropriate internalization, about how much to trust the impersonal functioning of the markets in solving any human problem, including global warming, and how much to distrust the very visible hand of very human politicians and their bureaucrats.

Klaus defended freedom and indicted statism:

I know that you lived all your life in a world where you were used to discuss the market failure as a phenomenon. And there has been permanently attempts to correct some real or would-be market failures by government action, government intervention.

That was the spirit of the 20th century. I think that rational people and many American economists made a great contribution in this respect, started to study the opposite, started to study the government failure. And the issue is, is the market failure bigger and more dangerous than the government failure?
You may have your experience, but my experience with half-a- century in communism, I know that government failure is incomparably worse than any market failure. So, therefore, my position on any form, kind, motivation of government intervention is quite clear, to limit it as much as possible.

Ditto

The following column appears today on NRO. It is rather longish, but this is a good example of how so many of us older baby-boomers feel about our times. The counter-culture of the '60's just never got more than half of us. The problem is that the half who were part of the counter-culture became the teachers and administrators who have foisted their views on two younger generations of Americans.

When reading this, please remember that this old dog views both the past and our current events very closely to to the author's:

Kyle-Anne Shiver on Barack Obama on National Review Online

The Sun Sets

Mark Steyn Reports:

From The Church of England Newspaper:
If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore needs a share in any religious establishment to reflect this....

At all levels of national life Islam has gained state funding, protection from any criticism, and the insertion of advisors and experts in government departs national and local.

A Muslim Home Office adviser, for example, was responsible for Baroness Scotland’s aborting of the legislation against honour killings, arguing that informal methods would be better. In the police we hear of girls under police protection having the addresses of their safe houses disclosed to their parents by Muslim officers who think they are doing their religious duty.

While men-only gentlemen’s clubs are now being dubbed unlawful, we hear of municipal swimming baths encouraging ‘Muslim women only’ sessions and in Dewsbury Hospitals staff waste time by turning beds to face Mecca five times a day — a Monty Pythonesque scenario of lunacy, but astonishingly true...

The point is that Islam is being institutionalised, incarnated, into national structures amazingly fast, at the same time as demography is showing very high birthrates...

Today the Christian story is fading from public imagination, while Islam grows apace.

Strange to witness one of the oldest and most successful of nations commit suicide without even being aware of what it's doing

Oh, You Democrats

Another post from Roger Kimball:

Instapundit points to Ann Althouse who, investigating The New York Times on the West Virginia primary, comes to this melancholy conclusion.

“White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You’ve really made a nice place for yourselves.”

That about sums it up.

Who was it who pointed out that in the 19th century the Democrats were the party of slavery, in the 20th century they were the party of segregation, and in the 21st century they are the party of neo-segregation (aka, racial quotas, spurious multiculturalism, and the mendacious imperatives of political correctness)?

I don’t recall, but whoever it was, he was correct. The interesting rhetorical issue is why many people (which might, now that I think of it, mean just “many democrats,” i.e., professors, media types, etc.) believe that Republicans, who champion freedom and individual responsibility, are as a party more racist than Democrats.

A question that deserves more study.

Give Me that New Age Religion

An interesting post from Roger Kimble of the New Criterion.

Poor Kermit. He lived too soon.

Had he waited a few years, he would have found it all-too-easy, indeed almost mandatory to be green. “Environmentalism,” as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed years ago, “is school prayer for liberals.” It has that Award-Winning, Never-Fail, Left-Liberal combination of 1) providing its exponents with an ever renewable (and hence environmentally sound) source of self satisfaction (”I recycle/drive a hybrid/don’t use plastic/only bathe weekly . . . Do you?”) and 2) it is infinitely elastic: you can never be green enough.

There are always new prohibitions to impose, new causes to espouse, new ways to demonstrate your moral superiority over your neighbor. What great religion! The Green shall inherit the earth . . . .

The always-sensible Thomas Sowell makes a further pertinent point about the new Kermits of the world. “At one time,” Sowell observes, “to call someone ‘green’ was to disparage them as inexperienced or immature. Today, to call someone green is to exalt them as one of the environmentalist saviors of the planet. But it is amazing how many people are green in both senses.”

Indeed.

A Pathetic Congress

Mark Steyn writes brilliantly and, as always, wittily about the horse and pony show in Congress last week.

Your weekly Steyn! Enjoy.

Mark Steyn on Government Change on National Review Online

Defining Post-Modernism

From the International Herald Tribune comes this story on the president of France. I find him to be a fabulous subject when trying to define our "post-modern age."

PARIS: Serge Hefez is a practicing psychiatrist, and he has identified a new mental illness among the French: "obsessive Sarkosis" - an unhealthy fascination with President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name," Hefez said in an interview. "He's penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man - he's like a reflection of us in the mirror."

The French project themselves onto Sarkozy, Hefez said.

"He's the incarnation of the post-modern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic. And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme - that it's the individual who counts, not the society."

A year after taking office, Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere - at least in the world of television and print. The daily Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold for about $25.1 million.

Television covers Sarkozy's every gesture, both in homage and mockery, itself an effort to try to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the "pipolization" of political life - the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera, which Hefez considers an example of "democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw."

A Most Important Subject

John Hinderaker on his Powerline Blog reports on what the oil companies actually said to Congress when they were called by the Democrats to testify. The Democrats were looking for a way to place the blame on the oil companies, instead of where the the major problem of high gas prices actually lies. It is the Democratic Party.

While this is quite long, it is an extremely interesting post, and something you certainly not something you will read in your newspaper, or see on TV nightly news programs.

Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned top executives from the petroleum industry for what Chairman Pat Leahy thought would be a politically profitable inquisition. Leahy and his comrades showed up ready to blame American oil companies for the high price of gasoline, but the event wasn't as satisfactory as the Democrats had hoped.

The industry lineup was formidable: Robert Malone, Chairman and President of BP America, Inc.; John Hofmeister, President, Shell Oil Company; Peter Robertson, Vice Chairman of the Board, Chevron Corporation; John Lowe, Executive Vice President, Conoco Philips Company; and Stephen Simon, Senior Vice President, Exxon Mobil Corporation. Not surprisingly, the petroleum executives stole the show, as they were far smarter, infinitely better informed, and much more public-spirited than the Senate Democrats.

One theme that emerged from the hearing was the surprisingly small role played by American oil companies in the global petroleum market. John Lowe pointed out:

I cannot overemphasize the access issue. Access to resources is severely restricted in the United States and abroad, and the American oil industry must compete with national oil companies who are often much larger and have the support of their governments.
We can only compete directly for 7 percent of the world's available reserves while about 75 percent is completely controlled by national oil companies and is not accessible.

Stephen Simon amplified:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.
To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.

Because foreign companies and governments control the overwhelming majority of the world's oil, most of the price you pay at the pump is the cost paid by the American oil company to acquire crude oil from someone else:

Last year, the average price in the United States of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was around $2.80. On average in 2007, approximately 58 percent of the price reflected the amount paid for crude oil. Consumers pay for that crude oil, and so do we.
Of the 2 million barrels per day Exxon Mobil refined in 2007 here in the United States, 90 percent were purchased from others.

Another theme of the day's testimony was that, if anyone is "gouging" consumers through the high price of gasoline, it is federal and state governments, not American oil companies. On the average, 15% percent of the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4% represents oil company profits. These figures were repeated several times, but, strangely, not a single Democratic Senator proposed relieving consumers' anxieties about gas prices by reducing taxes.
The last theme that was sounded repeatedly was Congress's responsibility for the fact that American companies have access to so little petroleum. Shell's John Hofmeister explained, eloquently:

While all oil-importing nations buy oil at global prices, some, notably India and China, subsidize the cost of oil products to their nation's consumers, feeding the demand for more oil despite record prices. They do this to speed economic growth and to ensure a competitive advantage relative to other nations.
Meanwhile, in the United States, access to our own oil and gas resources has been limited for the last 30 years, prohibiting companies such as Shell from exploring and developing resources for the benefit of the American people.
Senator Sessions, I agree, it is not a free market.
According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.
The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified 40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict natural gas projects. I urge you to review it. It is a long list. If I may, I offer it today if you would like to include it in the record.
When many of these policies were implemented, oil was selling in the single digits, not the triple digits we see now. The cumulative effect of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S. companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.
As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.
The problem of access can be solved in this country by the same government that has prohibited it. Congress could have chosen to lift some or all of the current restrictions on exportation and production of oil and gas. Congress could provide national policy to reverse the persistent decline of domestically secure natural resource development.

Later in the hearing, Senator Orrin Hatch walked Hofmeister through the Democrats' latest efforts to block energy independence:

HATCH: I want to get into that. In other words, we're talking about Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. It's fair to say that they're not considered part of America's $22 billion of proven reserves.
HOFMEISTER: Not at all.
HATCH: No, but experts agree that there's between 800 billion to almost 2 trillion barrels of oil that could be recoverable there, and that's good oil, isn't it?
HOFMEISTER: That's correct.
HATCH: It could be recovered at somewhere between $30 and $40 a barrel?
HOFMEISTER: I think those costs are probably a bit dated now, based upon what we've seen in the inflation...
HATCH: Well, somewhere in that area.
HOFMEISTER: I don't know what the exact cost would be, but, you know, if there is more supply, I think inflation in the oil industry would be cracked. And we are facing severe inflation because of the limited amount of supply against the demand.
HATCH: I guess what I'm saying, though, is that if we started to develop the oil shale in those three states we could do it within this framework of over $100 a barrel and make a profit.
HOFMEISTER: I believe we could.
HATCH: And we could help our country alleviate its oil pressures.
HOFMEISTER: Yes.
HATCH: But they're stopping us from doing that right here, as we sit here. We just had a hearing last week where Democrats had stopped the ability to do that, in at least Colorado.
HOFMEISTER: Well, as I said in my opening statement, I think the public policy constraints on the supply side in this country are a disservice to the American consumer.

The committee's Democrats attempted no response. They know that they are largely responsible for the current high price of gasoline, and they want the price to rise even further. Consequently, they have no intention of permitting the development of domestic oil and gas reserves that would both increase this country's energy independence and give consumers a break from constantly increasing energy costs.

Every once in a while, Congressional hearings turn out to be informative

My Favorite Canadian Watchdog

COMMENTARYMay 21, 2008News from nowhere

So it will soon be legal in Britain to hybridize humans with other species, and grow humans from embryo for “scientific research” -- however medically unnecessary. Two free votes on Monday established this, in the House of Commons at Westminster. Neither was close. They defeated amendments to the Labour government’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, now certain of passage. The bill is advertised as the legal means to put Britain at the forefront of international biological research, as part of the government’s broad commitment to “make Britain a world leader in science and technology.”

Back in the 1940s, Germany and Japan were world leaders in medical research, thanks to what their doctors were allowed to do, to Jewish and Manchurian human beings, respectively. Countries with less “progressive” views on the requirements for research, risked falling behind. In putting it this way I am being what the BBC, and other liberal media, call “emotive.” And I could not reverse the charge, without arguing absurdly that “smugness” is an emotion.

In our contemporary version of Orwellian Newspeak, those who defend a position in logic and morals, that might well be unassailable, with any degree of passion, are “emotive” and deserve to be ignored. Whereas, those who advocate the most monstrous crimes in a cool and dispassionate spirit deserve, at the very least, to be spared the inconvenience of explaining their motives.

But no, I am not going far enough, in exposing this hypocrisy.The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown -- the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one -- is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

This in turn allows such as his unpleasant public health minister, Dawn Primarolo (one thinks of Miss Hardcastle at the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments , the “N.I.C.E.”, in C.S. Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength), to follow the argument through, and accuse those who are morally repelled by animal/human hybrids of actually willing that humans should suffer from incurable diseases. To be plain: emotional blackmail is being compounded with vile slander.

For Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures -- Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality -- has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

In every subsequent battle, in which the darker angel of our human nature has attempted to “push the envelope” forward, those who defend the sanctity of human life have fought a hopeless rearguard action. And now we have “advanced” to the cusp of the Frankenstein era, in which the wanton breeding and destruction of embryonic humans is taken for granted, along with the assembly of animal/human hybrids. My reader need not believe for a moment that it will stop there.

David Warren© Ottawa Citizen

This Makes Me Sick

From Fox News:

Boston’s Children’s Hospital bills itself as the hospital for children — and now it’s also the hospital for children who want a sex change, a procedure some critics are calling “barbaric.”

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at the hospital, has launched a clinic for transgendered kids — boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys — and he’s opening his doors to patients as young as 7.

Across the Pond

John Hinderaker at Powerline weighs in on what is happening in the UK:

The United Kingdom represents an interesting parallel to what is happening in our election season. In the U.K., the Labour party has been in power since 1997, when Tony Blair crushed John Major. British voters are now heartily sick of the Labourites, and recent polls show the Conservative Party leading Labour by twenty points, with the Tories at 45%, Labour at 25%, and the Liberal Democrats at 18%. Nearly all observers expect the Tories to sweep to victory when Prime Minister Gordon Brown is finally forced to call an election.

The Prime Minister's personal standing is even worse than his party's, with 17% approving his performance and 78% disapproving--a worse showing than Neville Chamberlain in 1940! The Conservative Party leader, in contrast, has a net 33% positive favorability rating.

We conservatives would like to think that this swing toward the conservative party in Great Britain is due to Englishmen reading Adam Smith, Hayek and Friedman, and seeing the light. But of course it isn't. British voters are unhappy about the same things American voters are--high energy costs, declining home prices, and so on. The difference is that the party in power in the U.K., which naturally gets blamed for these things, is the party of the Left.

It is inevitable that when a party has been in power for some years, irritations accumulate. That party will be blamed for pretty much any discontents that come along, and eventually voters become tired of the current "ins" and turn to the "outs." That's good news, for the moment, in the U.K.; bad news here, unfortunately

The Hard Left Plays Hardball

Victor Davis Hanson comments on what appears to have happened within the Democratic Party nomination this season.

Clintonian Pathos

After a lopsided victory, Hillary seems a mute bystander to the Obama / McCain exchanges.
Of course, there is irony in Bill Clinton whining about media bias against his wife's candidacy, when to suggest the reverse in the 1990s was McCarthyesque. Ironic too is to see the viciousness of the hard left—in Clinton war-room style—eviscerate Hillary. And more still to see the identity politics of race trump Hillary's 2007 gender card of our would-be first female President. And even more still to see Bill out crooned by a younger, far slicker version of himself.

But all that said, Hillary, the far more experienced and knowledgeable candidate and the better debater, does have a point—under any other rules than the byzantine system of her own party, she would be the nominee. She won all the key in-play states. And her recent margins in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, (and Kentucky to come) prove the momentum is still with her, despite a lack of cash and coverage. If she doesn't quite win the popular vote, her victories still more derive from plebiscites than Obama's caucus wins.

In the past other less successful Democratic candidates have stayed in the race far longer than she. Surely all that should equate to a tight race rather than a media stampede to have her get out in shame and defeat. Either one of two things—or both—is going on. Either the Democratic establishment and media, nursing hidden slights and pent-up grievances over nearly two-decades of Clintonian selfishness and hard-ball and now smelling blood, have finally and collectively yelled "No mas. " Or at this point, it matters not at all what Obama or his various embarrassments say any more. He is a new messianic piper, part old Adlai and JFK, and the Democrats are swarming to his tune.

It's now a question of pure emotion, not reason, and any poor soul like Hillary who stands in their way—well, suffers the fate of all disbelievers...

Steyn Weighs In

Obama's childishness was on display again this week. I have been waiting for Mark Steyn's response. Here it is. And, as usual, it is good.

Mark Steyn on Barack Obama on National Review Online

More Pessimism

This time from our columnist in Canada:

Israel at 60

Will Israel last another 60 years? Will Canada? Will the West? I believe the questions are closely related, and will begin by giving two quick answers.The first is, “I don’t know.”

Attempts to predict the future from the historical past have a track record around zero, and while it is true that history is constantly repeating itself, it is able to repeat itself in many different ways. On the present leadership performance of Israel’s complacent, incompetent, and probably corrupt prime minister -- and in view of the assembling forces dedicated to the country’s annihilation -- one might reasonably say that Israel will be lucky to reach three score and ten.

But as I’ve myself frequently argued, all trends are reversible.The second is, “It depends what you mean by survive.” If the world is still here -- and let’s not take anything for granted -- there is likely to be a little patch of land corresponding to that upon which Israel now sits. And if there are still Jews, it will still belong in their hearts, as it has done for millennia. It is not inconceivable to me that Israel might be annihilated, or nearly annihilated, and then restored. Such events are compatible with very large, planetary wars. They hardly bear thinking about.

But I insist, that Israel’s survival is tied to that of the West. She is our front line, an embodiment of unambiguously Western values. The enemies we have are common enemies -- Left-fascist ideology (formerly expressed as Communism, but now reorganizing around the “scientific materialism” of the environmentalist cause), and Islamo-fascist ideology (now called “Islamism,” to distinguish political from religious Islam, on the assumption that this can be done).

These are the two great contemporary Sirens, and each calls upon constituencies lodged deep in the West itself. The appeal of simplistic ideological movements spreads in the spiritual vacuum left by the recession of Christianity. But whatever dark forces answer to the command of these two great Sirens, there is agreement between the Left and the Islamists that Israel is the front line of the West, and that she is sufficiently isolated to be worth destroying first. There is moreover agreement between them that the ultimate target is “Amerika” and the whole “bourgeois, Judeo-Christian” order that has sustained our freedom and prosperity.

What happens if our enemies succeed? I would guess it is then Green versus Green, and the Islamist monster eats the Environmentalist monster, for the former is more wilful and ruthless.I risk being misunderstood at this point, for I am not exactly equating Osama bin Laden with Al Gore. Environmentalism, and the current “global warming” hysteria, is only a flag of convenience, just as the “class war” served the Left in a previous generation, and there are many alternative flags. Its root cause is a Gnostic, religious atheism: it forms and disperses and reforms like the mist. Whereas, Islamism is a unified and cogent force, with an instinctive recourse to violence.

To understand what I mean, the reader must consider almost any contemporary university campus, in which the radical political causes are quite various, but there is general agreement among radicals on each other’s agendas. That one must attack Zionist Israel, and conversely champion Oppressed Palestinians, is something every little half-educated campus ideologue knows he can take for granted.What has this got to do with the future of Israel? Everything.

For while Israel’s proximate enemies are Hamas and Hezbollah, and the unspeakable regimes in Iran, Syria, and elsewhere that control and supply these frontline terrorists, and are themselves pledged to Israel’s physical annihilation, and are assiduously building missile stockpiles for the task -- they have no chance of prevailing so long as the West remains united behind Israel. But for various reasons, the will to defend Israel is crumbling, and Israel’s enemies know this. She resides in a region where she is outnumbered 60-to-1 in population, and by a much greater ratio in land area or elbow room (with accompanying natural resources). Israel has no prospects on her own.

And this is where I feel least hopeful about the future. The desire to defend Israel is being sapped, across the West, by causes ranging from exhaustion with endless trouble in the Middle East, to the thirst for oil, to the rapid growth of Muslim immigration, and thus of an electoral constituency that tends to be extremely unsympathetic to Israel.But more profoundly, the Left-Islamist alliance -- forged in common opposition to everything the West stands for -- has made the abandonment of Israel a common priority across the spectrum of people who take their politics from fashion.

Alas, most of the West’s internal enemies, demanding the abandonment of Israel as first step, do not even know what they are doing. They are like parasites upon a host organism, and do not understand that when the host organism dies, they too will die.

David Warren

© Ottawa Citizen

Real Downer of a Day

Jerry Pournelle writes pessimistically this morning about what could easily be the near future in the coming current events. I'm afraid his chrystal ball is prescient. Last night, another easy Republican District in Mississippi was lost to the Democrats.

I have a number of letters about McCain and why we ought to vote Libertarian and "Send a message." I understand the argument.

The fact is that the Democrats will control Congress. If they also control the White House, we will have a series of legislative packages that will make the Great Society look like a libertarian government. In opposition the Republicans rediscover their principles; it's power they haven't been able to handle since Newt Gingrich was Speaker.

The country is in trouble. We have forgotten our founding principles, and we move inexorably toward a European style socialist state, with the only winners being an enormous bureaucracy. This will accelerate the economic decline.

The argument is to give the Democrats their head, and pick up the pieces after the inevitable crash. I think that overlooks the resilience of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect regimes. We haven't seen much in the way of reforms in Europe. The Democrats will create new bureaucracies that can never be dismantled: an example is the Department of Education. Reagan came into office determined to abolish it. Now it owns US education, and No Child Left Behind is entrenched. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is inexorable.

The country was reasonably well managed when we had a Republican Congress and a Democrat President.

As to the war: if we give the Democrats full control of the government, we won't get a sensible foreign policy: see Kosovo if you doubt that. We may get a disengagement from Iraq: the price will be high, in blood of those in Iraq who trusted us, and in honor. We may not. Disengaging from Iraq will not be a simple matter. A gradual withdrawal won't work well: as we pull out, the insurgents will be heartened. The result won't be pretty.

Sure, we can retreat. We have the military power to cut and run, get out and get out fast. The results of that will be with us for a long time. Recall the last helicopter out of Saigon?
I conclude that McCain as president is a far lesser evil than Obama would be. But there are those in whom hope springs eternal: who hold the view that Obama is not what all the evidence says he is, a left wing liberal intellectual with Chicago political connections and all the ethical implications that implies. Hope springs eternal.

Thus we have the choice: a Chicago machine politician with Harvard liberal beliefs vs. a country club Republican who feels entitled.

The post-Gingrich Republicans who invented "big government conservatism" have much to answer for.
=================
Nuclear Weapons and Iran, with

Wonderful Satire from David Kahane

Kahane believes that we should rescue Hillary from the Party of Slavery,Segregation, Secularism, and Sedition. Pretty neat stuff!

David Kahane on Hillary Clinton & The Right on National Review Online

Who are we to Judge?

My blood always boils when I read articles like this, and remember that at our very expensive universites where multiculturalism and tolerance run amuck, that this is certainly not worthy of us to judge.
William Katz into today's blog at "Urgent Agenda" writes:

IN THE REAL WORLD
Our election campaign is mild compared to other campaigns we may have to wage in the future. London's Guardian, a leftist paper I rarely quote, has a remarkable story about a man whose distorted view of Islam led him to murder his own daughter. It is this kind of mentality that we might have to fight all over the world, and it puts our election campaign in perspective. Who is best to lead us in this struggle?

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.


Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. 'They are men and know what honour is,' he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her 'relationship' with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months. But the young, impressionable Rand fell in love with him, confiding her feelings and daydreams to Zeinab, 19.

It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand's two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

Please notice the silence of the "feminist" groups. Please notice the lack of protest in our universities. After all, who are we to judge another culture?

We're thoughtful, intelligent human beings. That's who we are. And we have a perfect right to describe the above actions in whatever terms we wish to use, obscene or not.

An Eloquent Speech

John Mc Cain gave a speech this week and the following is a wonderful excerpt from it. To this old dog, this is what it is all about. Our schools and modern culture just don't allow us to think about the importance of these words any more:

There is a tendency in our age to accede to the spurious excuse of moral relativism and turn away from the harshest examples of man’s inhumanity to man; to ignore the darker side of human nature that encroaches upon our decency by subtle degree.

There are many reasons for this. Blessed with opportunity, and intent on the challenges of work and family, our own lives often seem too full and hectic to take notice of offenses that seem distant from our own reality. There is also the threat in a society passionate about its liberty that we can become desensitized to the dehumanizing effect of the obscenity and hostility that pervades much of popular culture.

It is in our nature as Americans to see the good in things; to face even serious adversity with hope and optimism. And yet, with so much good in the world, for all the progress of humanity, in which our nation has played such an admirable and important role, evil still exists in the world. It preys upon human dignity, assaults the innocence of children, debases our self-respect and the respect we are morally obliged to pay each other, and assails the great, animating truths we believe to be self-evident — that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — by subjecting countless human beings to abuse, persecution and even slavery.


Confronting evil has never been easy — in our age or any other. But the failure to do so affects even those who are complacent with our own blessings and secure in our human rights.

Accepting the degradation of values we believe are universal is to relinquish some of our own humanity.

America was founded on the belief in the inherent dignity of all human life and that this dignity can only be preserved through shared respect and shared responsibility. We can retain our own freedom when others are robbed of theirs, but not the sense of virtue that made our revolution a moral as well as political crusade, and which recognizes that personal happiness is so much more than pleasure, and requires us to serve causes greater than self-interest.

Best Statement of the Week

Daniel Henninger wrote earlier this week:

"The superdelegates are faced with choosing between the Clinton machine's brutal demographic math and thinking well of themselves. No contest."

A Prescription for the GOP?

Victor Davis Hanson posted this on NRO's Corner yesterday:

What's Wrong with Republicans?

On this great debate, I tend to agree with Mark Levin and others that conservatives should reach out with conservative principles better framed and presented, rather than change the message for the perceived advantage of the hour.

What the Republicans need is not an abandonment of conservative principles, but a smarter, more articulate defense of even more conservativism, not less.

E.g., Gas Prices? More nuclear power, hydro-, refineries, clean coal, drilling off coasts and in ANWR. And why? As a necessary bridge to next-generation cleaner and non-petroleum energy so that in the time lag, we don't empower our enemies, demand that others abroad who are less environmentally sound produce the oil we consume, and watch our hard-won way of life decline.

Taxes? Not hikes, since revenues went up, not down with past cuts, but more fiscal discipline to end the deficits. The problem was not tax-cutting, but wild-eyed spending that ran up debt and discredited tax cuts.

The border? Close it, not out nativism or racism, but out of respect for the rule of law, the tradition of national sovereignty, the need to promote integration and assimilation, the need to be more concerned with American entry-level low-paid workers, and a desire to help Mexico wean itself off remittances and make the tough-love decisions to modernize its archaic government and economy.

Judges? We need constitutionalists, because they alone follow the rules of the legislative branch and what is written in the Constitution, do not turn rarified, laboratory theory into the law that millions must suffer under, and bring respect to the judiciary sorely damaged by aristocratic elitists on the bench.

National Security? Not more U.N.ism, but careful explanations that both Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt jihadism, taken out odious regimes, and with patience will make the region safer.We need more reasoned and inspired explanation of just how the U.S. military allows the present globalized system of commerce and communications to survive, rather than asleep at the wheel reaction to cheap attacks on our foreign policy.

Ethics? Republicans by consensus in Washington need to be less tolerant of sleeze than Democrats, since conservatism and traditionalism are moral precepts. When they engage in tawdry sex, bribery, and influence peddling, they suffer the double wage of hypocrisy — in the manner supposedly men-of-the-people liberals like Kerry, Gore, Edwards, and the Clintons talk one way and live like 18th-century French kings.

In short, low taxes, secure borders, moral governance, sober government spending, ethical leadership, exploration and conservation of petroleum, and strong defense is what the American public wants — but those core principles have to be articulated hourly and can't be compromised. In an honest debate, Obama's alternatives to the above would be to turn toward more government, higher taxes, more bureacracies, more dependence of the individual upon the state, etc.

And I can't believe the public wants a prescription that historically simply doesn't work.
I think in their depression, the Republicans fail to see that their problems were not in their principles, but rather in the sometimes sleezy and sloppy way they advanced them — and even more often in the manner that they abandoned them — and as a result, they are apparently eager to compromise on them.

To the degree McCain can articulate the above, he will win; to the degree that he either cannot or believes the latest gurus that he must abandon them, he will lose. Moving toward a lite version of the Obamian/European "bipartisan"and socialist view of government and calling it a new conservatism is a prescription for utter disaster.

No one can out-Obama Obama.

Newspapers

David Warren's new column in the Ottawa ( Canada) newspaper. I like this guy!

It wasn’t the dinosaurs’ fault the asteroid hit them.

Okay, let’s back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call “the K-T boundary” (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990.

It then quickly became al-gorey “settled science” -- before being challenged with increasing confidence from many different angles.I have no axe to grind on that one. Really. I’m just using it as a metaphor.It wasn’t the newspaper’s fault that it was hit first by radio, then by television, then by the massive and continuing sub-literacy engendered by “progressive” education reforms, and finally by the Internet. I doubt even cockroaches could survive being successively hit by four asteroids.

Back to the dinosaurs. While it might easily be imagined that they were helped to extinction, it might also be imagined, even surmised, that various dinosaur species contributed materially to their own eclipse, if, as the Darwinists suggest, they were too big and stupid to compete. I don’t buy this, myself, but my reader is always welcome to accept any hypothesis that is superficially plausible, even if I think it is, like Darwinism itself, unnecessarily big and stupid.

Like many other things, evolution happens, and the fact that it has happened is beyond human remedy. There is (for better or worse) no magic wand that will restore the age of the dinosaurs, or turn back the clock to the heyday of newspapers a century ago.

Over the weekend, reports began to appear (in the deadtree New York Post, but mostly on the Internet) about the impending bankruptcy of one of North America’s major metropolitan dailies, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, known affectionately as the “Strib.” And in my postal mailbox this morning, the parrot-sheet of the union of which I am involuntarily a member, informs me in its headline that, “Newspaper biz, like icebergs, is cracking up.”

This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the evidence that daily print journalism (and most other forms of print journalism), are on deathwatch. I have been noticing the industry-wide relaxation of paid circulation and advertising revenues with morbid fascination for some time.

Verily, it is more than 15 years since I was myself first invited to speak to an audience about “the decline of the daily newspaper,” and asked to predict its future.Big newspapers have gone bust before; but the interesting thing about the Strib is that it’s the last big newspaper in a big town. It has been sold twice in the last decade, the second sale for half the price of the first, and now its principle creditors are hovering. The idea of a major city without even one major newspaper (of course, Minneapolis still has little papers) remains so unthinkable, that people assume Credit Suisse will find a way to keep the thing afloat.

The age of the great sailing ships was also prolonged by such optimism.Well-managed newspapers -- and there are a few, contrary to popular belief -- have been in the “adapt or die” mode for years. Many have moved audaciously and cleverly into the Internet, trading on their infrastructural strengths while shedding as much as possible of the overheads associated with a huge printing plant and distribution network -- “reducing their carbon footprint,” as it were. The physical paper itself gets thinner, and harder to find, but the enterprise becomes increasingly visible on laptops.

In my view (the view that always prevails in this column), our future need not be so grim. The idea of the news sheet remains essentially sound, judging by the success of the nasty little rags with which commuters are now scattershot in urban transit systems across the Western world. People still want something to read, that is portable and companionable and requires no technological savvy whatever.But those who can read want something to read, i.e. something intrinsically lively, informative, interesting, and even reliable and trustworthy and aesthetically satisfying.

This is where the decline in journalism itself is most felt, not only in newspapers but throughout big media. The content has become diffuse, predictable, boring. In particular, with the triumph of “professional” journalism schools, and the credentialism that followed, “mainstream” journalists have come to represent a single, tedious class.

Newspapers are now editorially staffed, overwhelmingly, by members of this one class, who think and sound like sociology majors, and express themselves in a jargon stream of pompous, preachy, preening, vaguely leftist and reptilian drivel.My suspicion is that an asteroid has now hit this class, and we await the emergence of something more lean, clean, warm-blooded, and mammalian.

Gaia Declares a Hudna

Alan Nadel on "The American Thinker" blog writes:

A desire to understand the universe seems to be hard-wired into our brains. However we need a worldview (from the German Weltanschauung which means, literally, "world view"). Continuing with the computer metaphor, a worldview corresponds to a disc operating system, a framework for receiving and processing data.

Worldviews have changed over the course of history.

The ancient Greeks thought that otherwise inexplicable events such as thunderstorms and falling in love were the results of whimsical actions of Zeus and Cupid, respectively. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed in a heavenly harmony that was replicated here on earth. Thus the sun ruled the sky just as kings ruled on earth; events such as comets or regicide, upsetting the proper harmony, were greatly feared

These ideas were replaced in turn by historical inevitability:

What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Despite the demise of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, Marxism is still held in reverence by academics in many countries, while the rest of us wait in vain for the intelligentsia to provide us with a new Weltanschauung.

Actually, the idea of historical inevitability preceded Marx by several hundred years. In the autumn of 2001, I developed a sudden interest in Islamic theology, and learned about the divinely ordained conflict between Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam:

[9.29] Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection....

[9.33] He it is Who sent His Apostle with guidance and the religion of truth, that He might cause it to prevail over all religions, though the polytheists may be averse.
However, it's permissible to declare a hudna
"If Muslims are weak, a truce may be made for ten years if necessary, for the Prophet made a truce with the Quraysh for that long, as is related by Abu Dawud" ('Umdat as-Salik, o9.16).

Still on the topic of historical inevitability: it is now settled science that anthropogenic global warming is imminent. So I was surprised to read, in the May 1, 2008 edition of the highly respected scientific journal Nature:

Antarctica's deep ocean waters are getting colder after years of warming (page 15)
and in the very same issue

Using this method, and by considering both internal natural climate variations and projected future anthropogenic forcing, we make the following forecast: over the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken... global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming. (page 84)

Also we may be seeing the smallest sunspot cycle in 100 years, and a possible reversal of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation into its cool phase.

What does it all mean? I need to develop a Weltanschauung. Let's see....a hudna is 10 years; the meridional overturning circulation (whatever that is) will weaken over the next 10 years; a sunspot cycle is just over 10 years; the Pacific Decadal Oscillation ...anyone see a pattern here?
Has Gaia declared a hudna?

As Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This is especially true when one states categorically that a certain outcome is inevitable.

Marx was almost certainly wrong about the collapse of the bourgeoisie; we can only hope that Mohammed was wrong about the universal Caliphate, and there is some recent suggestion that Al Gore was wrong about an imminent global warming catastrophe.

This Caught My Fancy This Morning

The easy way is too hard:

The easy way to make ethanol is to import sugar from Brazil and use that. Of course we don't and won't do that.

The easy way to bring oil prices is to drill offshore and on the North Slope. Of course we don't do that.

The easy way to bring electricity prices down (you can make fertilizer with electricity) is to build nuclear power plants, expensive but cheap compared to wars. Of course we won't do that. --

Jerry Pournelle Chaos Manor

Our Demise is Written

Pat Buchanan in "The Way Our World Ends" points out the sad demographic evidence that Western Civilization is the truly endangered species.

It appears that Western Man will not even outlive the cause d'jour polar bear!

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world’s population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth — a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany — will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans...

By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries...

Pakistan will add 84 million to reach almost 300 million, the U.S. population today. Afghanistan’s population will triple from 27 million to 79 million. Iraq’s will go from 29 million to 62 million.

The destinies of these nations will be beyond the capacity of an aging, dwindling, dying West to dictate. (emphasis my own)

Another Weekend

Time for another Steyn!
Mark Steyn on Barack Obama on National Review Online

Orwellian View

Today, in Slate online, Jeff Greenfield ties together a strain of political thought that had been around in much the same guise back in the 1930's as it is today. A very thoughtful piece:

What Orwell can teach Obama. - By Jeff Greenfield - Slate Magazine

A Solution to our Problems

Today's bright idea from the same twisted financial mind of one Johnny Debacle: Prop up the price of housing by making our mortgages out of corn. "Corngages!"

When America had (the desire to prop up corn prices) a need for cheap sugar, what did it do? Make sugar out of corn.

When America had (the desire to prop up corn prices) a need for an alternative source for cheap liquid gasoline? Turn corn (and pigs via piganol) into oil.

Now America has a floundering real estate market and the need for cheap domestic financing to prop it up. What should she do? Make mortgages out of corn. Turn what is plentiful into what is scarce. Simple...a green friendly and renewable source of mortgages...

The McCain Story

From William Katz at his blog site "Urgent Agenda" we get this short summation from an article that Karl Rove recently wrote.

Karl Rove, one of the best political minds in the business, has a remarkable column in today's Wall Street Journal. It may seem familiar to some, but much of it was new to me. Rove argues that John McCain must open up, become less private, this year if he is to win in November. He tells some of McCain's stories, stories McCain is reluctant to tell himself. What strikes me is the difference in lives lived between McCain and Obama. It is Obama who is the child of privilege, yet we're told he has a "great story." No he doesn't. It's McCain who has the great story, and has lived real hardship. Rove writes:

When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.
And...

For example, in 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.
Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. "I hope she can stay with us," she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.

I was aware of this story. What I did not know, and what I learned from Doris, is that there was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.
"We were called at midnight by Cindy," Wes Gullett remembers, and "five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport." Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care.

Rove concludes:

Americans need to know about his vision for the nation's future, especially his policy positions and domestic reforms. They also need to learn about the moments in his life that shaped him. Mr. McCain cannot make this a biography-only campaign – but he can't afford to make it a biography-free campaign either. Unless he opens up more, many voters will never know the experiences of his life that show his character, integrity and essential decency.
These qualities mattered in America's first president and will matter as Americans decide on their 44th president.

That's good advice, especially as Mr. McCain's likely opponent will be presented to the American people by the mainstream media as a gift from Providence, and maybe Providence itself.