The Anti-Gnostic

Grrl power

2012-01-26T23:22:00.006-05:00

The Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, apparently had a run-in with aboriginal protestors today. The video is here.

Aesthetically, Ms. Gillard is unattractive and awkward, never married and infertile at this point. I presume she got the position based on sheer competence, and it would be considered terribly sexist of me to judge her by any other standard.

The job of Australian prime minister strikes me as pretty posh, but then a mob of Aboriginals starts banging on the windows of the exclusive restaurant where you're speaking. So then Prime Minister Gillard must flee...

...in the arms of a man, of course.

In this picture, you see the dumb bitch has lost her shoe:

I use the term "dumb bitch" advisedly, because that's exactly what would pop into a man's head when the shit is hitting the fan and we have to move NOW only to find that some implement designed for form rather than function is flopping off, slowing the woman down and making her more prone to injury.

This underscores an earlier point of mine: that weaker members of Western society have to rely on predominantly white men with unfashionable attitudes to protect them, or even to help them down some steps.

Obviously we do women a great disservice by forcing them into roles for which they are so manifestly unsuited, like being a riot cop. This is pure gnosticism: that the biological gender differences can be transcended through the force of correct, feminist ideology.

Again, the feminized social democratic elite relies on men with the capacity to do ugly things, and the corresponding reactionary attitudes, to protect them from barbarism. Then they exploit their cocooned existence by demeaning the very men who keep barbarism at bay, mocking their values and blaming them for every social ill.

When such men decide that the current elite are no longer worth the pay to protect them, the job of government official will become a lot less attractive for women like Ms. Gillard. In fact, even with a Roman phalanx of men still around and willing to crack skulls for her sake, she doesn't seem to be enjoying her job very much.

Christopher Roach's response to the State of the Union

2012-01-25T13:53:00.001-05:00

Real Industry Is Sometimes Dirty

From MansizedTarget.com

Liberals such as President Obama seem to live in a kind of fantasyland where we can have an economy built exclusively on the “knowledge jobs” like advertising, marketing, law, media, communications, programming iPad apps, consulting, etc. These jobs favor high IQ and not-so-high-IQ but highly credentialed people like the Obamas. They disfavor the working class. For example, Obama has shut down the Keystone pipeline. He has apparently by executive fiat banned all uranium mining on federal lands in northern Arizona. He has sent government money to money-losing enterprises like Solyndra while doing a great deal to hurt the old school, dirty industries of yesteryear like the oil business.

Hidden away from the urban knowledge economy is another world. It hasn’t gone away, but the knowledge class is increasingly ignorant of it. It’s a dirty, dangerous world of combines, mines, factories, sweat, industrial accidents, and tough men. Look around. The fruits of these jobs are everywhere. The plastic in your computer is from the petrochemical industry. The electricity, a result of the confluence of factories and coal mining for the most part. The gasoline that lets you get to work and take weekend roadtrips is the tail end of a long chain that may start at a wellhead in North Dakota or Texas or Nigeria for that matter.

Making these important foundational economic activities more expensive or completely prohibited will not help the country. It will not help the knowledge economy. These things will still get done, but they’ll done by others, overseas...

Like I say, the Left is for "the working man," but only so long as he's working in China or India, not that everybody's clamoring for living- wage, fair-trade iPads. The Left is pro-environment, or more accurately, pro-US national parks and pro-eco tourism in Costa Rica. The fact that now somebody else has to do something with industrial effluent from making stuff for knowledge-working Americans doesn't get a lot of mention. Incidentally, are any young, idealistic Americans aspiring to the STEM degrees that might give them expertise in these areas? Have any of the thousands of NGO's and their clueless volunteers in Haiti ever got to work on a sewage system for the place?

Leftists like Obama seem more about saying the right slogans and feeling the right feelings. They don't have much to offer for the dirty work of actually getting to advanced living standards. Obama makes speeches about everybody being healthy and having a not-too-hard job making disposable income doing...something. And he just assumes with this cargo-cult mentality that regulations and tax dollars will make it so. He doesn't grasp the whole historical process of capital accumulation, risk-taking and competing property rights that get us there, and require markets to sort out, and a net tax-paying sector to fund all his grand schemes.

What the Left left behind

2012-01-19T23:59:00.003-05:00

Some causes the Left has quietly tiptoed away from:

1. The working class. The split appears to have come to a head with the 1970 Hard Hat Riot in New York. Since then, tax and monetary policy has been manipulated to offshore most blue-collar work, and to "inshore" Third World labor to raise the supply of domestic blue-collar workers.

2. Ethnic nationalism. You really don't see Black Power salutes any more. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gets his own millenium, but Malcolm X is sure as hell not going to get a thirty-foot statue on the Washington Mall. And Orthodox Serbians? Hungarian Catholics? NATO can't wait for an excuse to bomb them into the Stone Age.

3. Environmental advocacy. Here is a fairly typical jeremiad. Note the passive voice, as if deforestation and fauna extinction are just happening in Africa, like an earthquake or tidal wave. I don't hear anybody lecturing China or India on their appalling industrial practices. David Gelbaum's purchase of the Sierra Club is well-documented. National parks in the American Southwest are becoming no-go zones. Mother Jones, Audubon and other environmental groups don't seem to be covering these crucial topics.

4. Anti-war. Low-grade warfare to spread democratic values has been constant since the Clinton administration, and the military is devolving into a gay-friendly, pro-female, affirmative action pageant. (Let me know if you need to see photographic evidence). Fortunately for the Trotskyites (in both the Democratic and Republican parties), straight white males are still there to fly air support and staff the Special Forces and merc outfits.

5. Economic populism. Anybody see ANY Democrats of prominence out there on the pickets with the Occupy movement? Does anybody remember any prominent advocates for the Left arguing against TARP and the other bailouts of 2008--the greatest propping up of asset values and wealth transfer in US history? Apparently, the only objection from liberals like Paul Krugman was that the bankers just didn't become outright government employees. Speaking of which, protecting the collective bargaining privileges of government employees appears to be as far as the Left's economic populism extends.

So if it's not the working class, ethnic nationalism, the environment, war or economic opportunity, what's it going to be? Well obviously, the pivotal and fundamental Issue Of Our Time is the right of the people to engage in sexual deviancy.

Memento Mori

2012-01-17T00:16:00.002-05:00

Harrison Ford--what the hell?

I rarely watch TV, but for various reasons I was present when the Golden Globe awards were broadcast last night. Harrison Ford was the presenter for best drama. Mr. Ford is 70 years old. I am 48, and watched the great Mr. Ford in Star Wars, Blade Runner and the Indiana Jones movies.

In 2010, he was in production for 'Cowboys and Aliens.' Here is a scene from the final cut and wrap for that film:

The picture at the top of this entry, and the following observations from the linked entry, are of Mr. Ford on January 15, 2012:

Both Indiana Jones and Willie Scott were at the Golden Globes last night. From the look on Harrison Ford's face, I'm assuming there's only a 30 percent chance that he would remember Kate Capshaw. Actually, by the look on Harrison's face, I would bet money that Ewan McGregor could have convinced Ford that they were in "Star Wars" together.

Harrison Ford presented Best Picture Drama and, literally, he could have Tweeted his presentation. Ford said 17 words, which translated into 97 characters. He could have even added a #goldenglobes and a #its420somewhere hashtag.

I have a number of family members at or around Harrison Ford's age, and his speech and manner were what I would expect of a comparatively much older person. In fact, this very weekend my parish hosted the redoubtable Bishop Antoun, and he presided over lengthy services and gave a fiery sermon after the Liturgy, telling us why we needed more attendance at Matins, Vespers and the minor Feasts. Then his Grace attended the banquet in his honor, singing hymns as he walked into the social hall and standing to greet and converse with the numerous people who came to his table during the meal. To all appearances, he will be lecturing us on Orthodox practice for at least the next ten years.

Geriatric symptoms can appear quite suddenly and mercilessly, even in people with a great deal of wealth and resources at their disposal.

Memento mori.

Today is born of a Virgin, He who holds the whole Creation in His hand.

2011-12-25T12:44:00.005-05:00

Today Is Born Of A Virgin

Coventry Carol (remembering the Slaughter Of The Innocents, 16th cent.)

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
By, by, lully, lullay.

Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young to slay.

Then, woe is me, poor Child for Thee!
And ever mourn and sigh
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

Great Britain

2011-12-23T09:10:00.005-05:00

Transsexual pushes cross-dressing lawyer under a train

A transgender man who pushed his cross-dressing lawyer friend to her death under a Tube train has been jailed for seven years.

Senthooran Kanagasingham was undergoing sex-change treatment when he killed solicitor David Burgess, known as Sonia, at King's Cross station in London.

The 35-year-old, who was known as Nina at the time of the attack, was a close friend of the solicitor who had befriended him at a bar and often visited her Soho flat.

Just an hour before Sonia was pushed infront of the train the leading human rights and immigration lawyer had taken Kanagasingham to a doctor because she was so worried about his mental state.

Brian Altman QC, prosecuting, said shocked rush-hour commuters had seen Kanagasingham push Sonia from the back.

A note found in Kanagasingham's rucksack said he was 'broke, depressed and suffering from gender dysphoria'.

He told the court Sonia was 'gender-variant' and had not wished to have surgery to become a woman, but to all intents and purposes outside her professional life, lived as a female.

This was 'accepted and embraced' by everyone, including her three children...

In case you're confused (understandable), the cross-dressing lawyer is referred to as "she" and the man undergoing sex-change "treatment" (as it is euphemistically called) is referred to as "he." Click the link for pictures of the couple, if you wish.

The Guardian refers to David Burgess as the country's "renowned" and "most celebrated" immigration lawyer.

Jews, hedge fund managers and homosexuals agree...

2011-12-21T23:11:00.004-05:00

Ron Paul cannot be allowed to win the Republican nomination

First, Sailer's post, to put things in context. In summary, the New York Times decided to dust off an old hatchet job on Ron Paul from The New Republic, now that he presents a clear and present danger of winning the Iowa primary.

The comments thread is pretty solid paleocon/libertarian, but it's always interesting to see what brings out the rabble on iSteve.

Aaron in Israel says,

Come on, Mr. Sailer. We all know that the word "racist" is wildly overused. Still, there is such a thing as racism (or bigotry), and the newsletters are racist (or bigoted). "The blacks," come on.

Even in the early 1990s it was known that AIDS wasn't transmitted by saliva. The author probably knew that, but lied anyway.

There's a huge difference between pandering to "rednecks" (Murray Rothbard's word) who are bigots, and using bigotry to pander to rednecks. Especially for someone who wants to be president, i.e., president of all citizens - blacks, white rednecks, etc.

Thank you, citizen of a Jewish supremacist nation-state for telling us how to run our country. How does one deal with "the blacks," do tell?

This one's my personal favorite:

The opposition to Ron Paul is not all about his views on the Middle East. He wants to abolish the Federal Reserve system and go back on the gold standard. There is no significant body of economists who think that is a good idea; it was from conservative economist Milton Friedman's research that the world learned monetary theory, and how a properly functioning central bank can avoid both depressions and periods of runaway inflation. We have avoided both for the past 30 years, since Paul Volcker killed double digit inflation during 1979-81. As a fixed income hedge fund research director, I cannot imagine the global bond markets functioning properly without a central banking system in the USA. From my perspective, Paul wants us to unlearn everything we have learned over the past 75 years about making capitalist economies function effectively.

It's unanimous: the geniuses who engineered the greatest episode of capital destruction and rent-seeking in history believe that Ron Paul would be a disaster.

Finally, the sodomites weigh in.

"When everybody knows (or at least has been told, over and over) that AIDS can be transmitted by heterosexual sex as easily as by homosexual practices."

Because it does, ignoramus. Actually, the mucous linning of the inner vulva is MORE susceptible to being penetrated by the HIV virus then the linning of the anus. The reason why there is less contamination in heterosexual intercourse is because straight couples usually wear prophylactics whilst gay men usually don't.

And this is none of your damn business! Gay men can have as much sex as they want with as many partners as they want, and you don't get to give your opinion on it.

Sailer is one cynical, callous liar. He wants to restrict the freedom of homosexual men because he deems them inferior to heterosexuals, but he pretends to want to restrict it because he "cares" about them and don't want them to die to AIDS. Yeah, right...the guy is a conservative, pro-traditional family, anti-gay marriage and we are supposed to believe he wants to restricts the freedom of gays because he doesen't want them to catch AIDS. Yeah, right...Sailer would probably love if all gays would disappear from off the face of the Earth, so don't pretend like you care about them.

Clearly, if Ron Paul is elected President, a deviant, childless, unhygienic sector constituting a full two to five percent of the population would disappear from off the face of the Earth. My only question is, can we clone the guy?

Happy Turkey Day

2011-11-24T14:00:00.002-05:00

The moral bankruptcy of conservatism

2011-11-19T13:13:00.005-05:00

40 years of ultimatums, from Dalrock.

in the case of the gender war feminists have made an unspoken agreement with traditional conservatives:

You hold him down while I rob him.

Not only have Social Conservatives agreed, they were so eager to assist that they even volunteered to create an alibi for the crime. Whenever anything goes wrong with the heist, conservatives loudly blame men.

Feminists sternly tell us that 40 or so years ago women looked to their husbands as the rightful leader of the family. Men and women both married young, and with generally little previous sexual experience. Marriage was almost universally seen as a partnership for life.

Now women are actually proud to call themselves sassy. Lack of self control is now a virtue for women, and is openly celebrated in very young girls. This new high attitude woman however doesn’t come with the increased ability which would back it up. Women are being told they should delay marriage until they are at least 30, and many are following that advice. Yet after waiting so long to marry, women are now as likely as not to decide that they either don’t want to be married or have married the wrong man. Those who do stay married are very likely to feel justified to deny their husband sex and generally usurp his traditional role as head of the household. In the years prior to marriage women no longer feel that they must abstain from sex. Social conservatives have signed off on removing slut shaming, with the pretext that women’s preferred form of promiscuity is more moral than mens and any women who are slutty are merely innocent victims of the men they have sex with.

Prominent social conservatives like Peggy Young Nance and Bill Bennett are exhorting men to put down the video games, the porn and the beer and "man up" to marry all those modern American women. The assumption seems to be that men have some a priori duty to incur student loan debts, enter the corporate meat grinder, compete with the 1 million plus new Americans we import every year for housing and job opportunities, and marry a woman who is (1) in head-to-head economic competition with him, and (2) on the downward slope of attractiveness and fertility. The idea that any man would ever ask, "Why?," and "What's in it for me?" seems never to have entered anybody's head.

Large numbers of men can’t marry until their mid to late thirties. At the same time they are surrounded by large numbers of promiscuous attractive women being as true to themselves as they can possibly be. Men in this position have three options:

1. Stay celibate by choice.
2. Stay celibate or close to celibate due to being rejected by hypergamous young women.
3. Learn how to have sex with the hordes of young women riding the carousel.

This isn’t a question our society has spent much energy wrestling with. The underlying feeling is; who cares, so long as they man up and marry these women once they are done riding the carousel. It turns out however that the men themselves very much do care. This is an extremely long time we are expecting men to go before marrying. During this time we have the unspoken expectation that they will work their tails off to be ready to act as a provider while not getting too used to being single. Each decade we have pushed the envelope a little further, and we expect each new generation of men to simply suck it up a little more and fill in the gaps. One can argue that they should have beat another man to the punch and married one of the small number of chaste young submissive women who were looking to marry. But this is just shuffling the deck chairs around. At the end of the day this will only determine which men marry in their early to mid 20s and which ones are forced to wait it out; the overall numbers won’t change because the change is being driven by the choices of women, not men.

The game-changer in all this, it turns out, are the choices of men.

Social Conservatives and Feminists have been pretty happy with this deal for the last 40 years. What could possibly go wrong? Now along come men like Roissy and Roosh who say to young men not only do you not have to spend your youth in grinding celibacy, but you don’t need to sign up to marry a brassy sassy career gal slut who just as likely as not will deny you sex and/or take you to the cleaners while ripping your children away from you. They will teach young men how to pass the decade or so they would otherwise wait for their wife to tire of slutting around. Even better, they will teach them how to have all the sex they want with the youngest, prettiest women, all without having to knock themselves out career wise. Feminists and Traditional Conservatives gave men lemons; Roissy and Roosh taught them how to make lemonade.

Who reading this doesn’t understand that this was absolutely bound to happen? Why is anyone surprised at this? After 40 years of cumulative one sided demands (and concessions), men now see another option. Feminists and Traditional Conservatives are furious. How dare they choose something else! But they are the ones who turned marriage from a lifetime partnership to a way women can defraud men. They are the ones who told women to slut it up in their 20s and told men to wait for marriage until the women were done. They were the ones who denigrated the status of husband from leader of the family to cowering scapegoat. All I can say is they should get used to it. If it took 40 years of one sided demands to get here, it could easily take as long to move back to equilibrium (assuming it does).

The male marriage strike has started. The only thing that will break it will be the eventual return to patriarchal society. In the meantime, the movement-conservatives, with their wars to extend voting rights and feminism to Middle Eastern women, continue to reveal their moral bankruptcy.

Righteous effing James Garner

2011-11-01T22:58:00.003-04:00

Jim Rockford speaks to OWS.

From MyPostingCareer.com

Stupid, greedy and evil

2011-10-26T21:07:00.006-04:00

A trifecta of bad policy, from Dr. Housing Bubble:

I.

It should be abundantly clear and obvious that the government and Wall Street want nothing more than to keep home prices inflated and are sticking out a giant middle finger to the majority of Americans. You might have missed the glorious news that our stunningly cunning Senate decided to reinstate the heightened loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA (aka the entire stinking mortgage market). Of course the lobbying arms of the housing industry went gaga for this policy even though it keeps prices further inflated in bubble states like California and New York.

II.

Since our politicians care so deeply about working Americans, they are also examining a push at giving residential visas to foreigners looking to buy at least $500,000 in real estate. Forget about the fact that the median home in the U.S. costs more like $170,000 to $180,000.

III.

Then we have the Federal Reserve artificially keeping mortgage rates at historic lows and you hit the trifecta of housing welfare for expensive bubble ridden states while the overall economy falters.

The US is becoming a banana republic. In a banana republic, two simple rules guide economic policy: the poor cannot become the rich, and the rich are protected from becoming poor. The income tax, for example, is not a tax on being rich but a tax on becoming rich. The estate tax is not a tax on old money but on new old money, because the only thing Old Money hates more than New Money is New Old Money.

In the US banana republic, cash-rich foreigners get to bid prices up on housing, because what they're actually bidding on is citizenship. Hugely expensive homes must stay hugely expensive instead of hugely affordable, which is where the market has been trying to push them for the past three years. Savers who don't have the means or the desire to navigate the Wall Street casino are given no choice, because the Fed's casino barkers get to levy negative interest on their savings if they refuse to play.

It gets worse: student loans turn the aspiring middle class into lifelong debt-slaves, the huge alphabet soup of tax-deferred accounts acts as a giant sluice gate to Wall Street for Other People's Money. The hidden threads in this tapestry of tax, fiscal and monetary policy are the twin designs of keeping the money flow headed upstream and the barriers to socio-economic mobility fixed. Americans, as this commenter notes, are thrown into competition with the global poor for wages and with the global rich for housing.

Every action provokes reaction, and the US banana republic faces existential threat from an angry, desperate middle class. This threat has been considered and an appropriate policy response implemented: the American middle class is to be replaced with a compliant Third World peasantry.

Thanks for the memories

2011-10-25T20:53:00.010-04:00

How many times in your life have you met someone, shaken hands, exchanged pleasantries. Then, later, you hear that they are dead and a sudden pang strikes you: I met that person, pressed his flesh, spoke with him.

What passed through the minds of these men when they heard Gaddafi had been killed? Did they recall when they met him, plenipotentiary to plenipotentiary, negotiating trade and other protocols? Did they recall how his voice sounded, his handshake, whether he was a pleasant guest or host?

The first three pictured with the Colonel, did they worry much over the ceremonial farce, knowing that they were just biding their time, and when the moment arrived, would assist in in his overthrow and lynching, and negotiate oil deals?

Democratic leaders can hide devious plots behind pleasantries and turn to war and assassination as callously and capriciously as the most tribalist dictator out there.

In memoriam: Col. Moammar Gaddafi

2011-10-24T21:33:00.007-04:00

A man who embraced the modern American ideal.

America is not only for the whites, but it is for all. Who is the American? The American is you, me and that. When we go to America we will become Americans and there is no a race or nationalism called America and the Americans are those Africans, Indians, Chinese, and Europeans and whoever goes to America will become American. American is for all of us and the whole world had made and created America. All the people all over the world had made America and it shall accordingly be for all of us. I will never feel ashamed when I claim for my right in America and it will not be strange when I raise my voice in America."

George H.W. Bush says much the same thing in the linked entry, but one enjoys a Presidential pension and the other was bombed out of his capital city and killed by a mob.

Over and over again, we are told that America is a propositional nation to which anybody can belong. But as iSteve poster Baloo has pointed out, no thought is ever given to the ethnicity that developed the proposition and understands it, nor is there any recognition of the fact that a nation can have a proposition, but a proposition cannot be a nation.

Along these lines, there is still weeping and gnashing of teeth over the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim Yemeni cleric who nonetheless satisfied some technical criteria for US citizenship. But really, what other result follows from a bureaucratric state, totally detached from any notion of patrimony? 'America' is a global proposition, and its governors act globally to defend it. If Gaddafi threatens this global proposition, he will be assassinated. If al-Awlaki threatens this global proposition, he will be assassinated. If David Koresh threatens this global proposition, he will be assassinated. A citizen's good standing in the global proposition depends solely on administrative criteria which can be re-defined or ignored on bureaucratic whim.

The outrage should begin with the fact that American citizenship has become so debased that it warrants no particular consideration.

Dems to OWS: You're on your own, Jack

2011-10-19T17:22:00.006-04:00

Wall Street to Dems: you can't have it both ways

After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent email urging supporters to sign a petition backing the wave of Occupy Wall Street protests, phones at the party committee started ringing.

Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.

“They were livid,” said one Democratic lobbyist with banking clients.

The execs asked the lawmakers: “What are you doing? Do you even understand some of the things that they’ve called for?” said another lobbyist with financial services clients who is a former Democratic Senate aide.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, like the larger Left, is fundamentally incoherent. Do they really think all that vast welfare state infrastructure and social engineering would be possible just from current tax revenues? Do they realize the degree to which all levels of government in the US are reliant on Wall Street's leveraged financing schemes? Are they aware that a slight majority of voters with income over $200K voted for Obama?

Come to think of it, I haven't seen Obama or any other Democrat of much weight out there on the pickets.

It's funny and kind of sadly predictable how these movements degenerate into the typical hippy Marxist cornucopia: "free" medical care, END RACISM!, etc. The policies actually causing the harm--inflation, artifically low interest rates, rent seeking--are all stupidly (or deliberately) ignored.

Also, this is pretty funny too:

Autocephaly and the Orthodox Church in America

2011-10-17T21:12:00.007-04:00

From the American Orthodox Institute (9/10/2011):

...TNH: What is the position of the Patriarchate of Moscow on the issue of the Orthodox Diaspora?

Hilarion: In the Russian Orthodox Church we believe that in the Diaspora it is possible to establish Canonical Orthodox Churches if there is agreement in the Orthodox populations of the particular countries. On this basis we granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970. But now the Orthodox churches are coming closer together and we are commonly decided that the granting of autocephaly should be a matter of Panorthodox concern and that Tomes of Autocephaly should be signed by all the Primates of All the Orthodox Churches. In fact we agreed on a different model from that which existed before. We also agreed to establish Episcopal Assemblies in the Diaspora to facilitate cooperation among the different jurisdictions.

TNH: With this new decision are you saying that the Ecumenical Patriarchate no longer has the historical and canonical privilege of being the only one to grant Autocephaly?

Hilarion: This seems to be the consensus of all the representatives of all the Orthodox churches, that autocephaly should be granted with the agreement of all the Orthodox Churches. It can be proclaimed by the Ecumenical Patriarch, but the Tome will be signed by all the Primates.

To my distant, uninformed ear, this sounds like, we should never have granted the Tome. The next step would be Moscow's agreement with the other Patriarchates that the Tome was not originally theirs to give. The persistence of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad suggests revocation is a matter of time.

Inconvenient Truths, from 1982

2011-10-15T12:39:00.008-04:00

NY Times: New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials

...Epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control have done studies among homosexual men with and without the immune disorder but matched in age, background and other characteristics. After testing for more than 130 potential risk factors, they found that the median number of lifetime male sexual partners for affected homosexual men was 1,160, compared to 524 for male homosexual men who did not have the syndrome. The study also found more use of sexual stimulants and illicit drugs among the GRID patients.

As further evidence against simple contagious spread, epidemiologists note that the syndrome has not spread to other family members, hospital workers or researchers on the disease...[emphasis added]

The HIV/AIDS cover-up is now in its third decade.

Gnosticism: the facts--rampant drug use and exponential sexual contacts--are inconvenient and impolitic.

The facts must be suppressed, distorted, concealed because they contradict the gnostic ideal: sodomy is just a preference, normative ideas about sex are just more repressive patriarchy.

How to Prepare for Communion

2011-10-15T11:53:00.002-04:00

A very good reference from the excellent Notes on Arab Orthodoxy blog

Yep. That's it all right.

2011-10-14T08:30:00.006-04:00

The Mises Institute discovers what causes crime.

H/T anon.

Please help Georgia agri-business

2011-10-06T07:49:00.007-04:00

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports multi-million dollar losses due to Georgia immigration enforcement, none of which goes beyond the federal criteria for residence in this country.

The immigration debate is faith-based. Robert Solow won a Nobel prize for modeling the fact that higher capital per worker leads to higher output per worker. But when it comes to immigration, too much is never enough. Producer inputs per worker must fall to Third World levels and somehow we all get rich. Why doesn't this magic formula work in the Third World?

Apparently these companies have no solution to E-Verify other than to let crops rot in the field. Surely the Southern planters would agree: there is no economically viable way to grow cotton without slave labor. Oh, but then this got invented.

A commenter on the AJC thread sums things up nicely.

I believe that we have already settled the plantations owner’s right to use slave labor. They simply changed to a lighter color slave and now pay them what it used to cost to house them – a thin veil if you ask me. I do believe that those who remain reliant on this labor should fail – smaller and local agribusiness’ will take up the slack quickly.

Bad day at the office

2011-09-19T21:27:00.005-04:00

UBS trader Adoboli held over $2bn loss

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/258a38d2-df6a-11e0-845a-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1YS5PV3KG

The revelation that a trader in “Delta One” – an area of derivative trading activity that is one of the only remaining ways for banks to take big bets with their own money – could cause such a catastrophic loss has prompted calls for fresh restrictions on investment banks.

“Management doesn’t understand what’s going on in the Delta One desks,” said Terry Smith, chief executive of Tullett Prebon, the interdealer broker. “If you sat down with a CEO and asked them to please explain what happens they would try but they couldn’t give you an accurate answer because they don’t understand.”

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said the trading losses were a reason to “sharply scale back” investment banking at UBS.

“The key area of damage in our view is reputational and extends beyond the investment bank, into UBS’s private banking business,” the Wall Street bank said in a note to clients.

Analysts had forecast net profits of about SFr1.3bn ($1.5bn) for the quarter, but are now revising their outlook. UBS shares, down nearly 85 per cent in the past five years, fell 10.8 per cent to close at SFr9.75 in Zurich.

UBS’ investment banking division has only just begun to recover from near-disastrous losses during the financial crisis. Some stability has returned at the unit under Carsten Kengeter, the former Goldman Sachs executive who joined in 2009.

The bank’s last annual report said that “increased risk taking” had been authorised since 2010 “for incremental trading activity.”

How does this sort of thing happen? How can a 31-year old non-fiduciary expose a company to $2 billion in risk? Presumably the amount he could put in play was capped: $10 million, $20 million(?). Do derivatives carry that much leverage, or was he given just ridiculous amounts of money to play with? Even rinky-dink local governments and professional service firms nab employees for petty pilferage but the cream of international finance can't keep a leash on their traders.

These are the the institutions it's our patriotic duty to bail out, by the way. The rich are no longer allowed to become poor.

New tag: OPM (Other People's Money)

Good ol' Warren Buffett

2011-09-19T20:41:00.003-04:00

Guy Somerset at Taki's takes him down a peg.

Buffett never tires of proclaiming he pays lower taxes than his employees. His constant exemplar of a secretary makes $60,000 annually—a respectable salary, yet not particularly generous as contrasted against running paperwork for one of the planet’s most active executives. Buffett himself makes approximately $46 million per year. And this is how the man who would care for all Americans provides for his own? Noblesse oblige begins at home, Warren...

Warren doesn’t state whether he is to assume any extraordinary liabilities of this country’s non-paying by utilizing the line on the American tax return whereupon one can voluntarily contribute beyond what is assessed. He is encouraged to make use of this assumption with all due haste so long as he donates his money and not our own.

Yet most infuriating about the entire debacle of debate is that in this Punch and Judy show in Washington, each continues to refer to the measure as making people “pay their fair share.” In this general notion, the author is in complete agreement. But we tend to disagree about who is not already paying that “fair share.”

What of the over 50% of American citizens who pay no income taxes whatsoever? Is zero percent their “fair share”? If so, one begs to differ. These are the very people who most avail themselves of social services of every kind. Not only do they pay nothing to begin with, they proceed to strip the system bare of the very things which those unpaid taxes so readily provide.

Like the author says, the problem is not that taxes aren't high enough, but that there are too many net tax consumers. Yet Buffett, a man of undeniable business acumen, seems unable to identify a single area of government waste.

Mike Krieger at Zero Hedge also puts the Buffster in perspective, commenting on his $5 billion stake in Bank of America. And make no mistake, the man is not running a charity.

So back to Buffett. The truth of the matter is, as I and other have exposed these last several years, is that he essentially runs a financial services company. When the system itself was threatened the status quo was threatened. Buffett stepped in and became a government agent once he saw the writing on the wall. He did not step up for America. He did not step up for the people. He stepped up for himself and his legacy. He stepped up to save the status quo because he is the status quo. All of this raises a very serious issue in America right now and one that needs to be dealt with in the next crisis (which has arrived) or we will never be able to recover into the world’s most vibrant and dynamic economy again. A lot of people lament the lack of upward mobility in the U.S. right now and I share those sentimentshare those sentiments. However, equally important is downward mobility. What makes the concept of America unique is not merely the concept that the poor can become rich but that the rich can become poor. It is this second part that is the most dangerous to social cohesion when it disappears. Unfortunately, the system that we have today of an unholy alliance between Wall Street, Washington D.C. and the multi-national corporations (including the military industrial complex of course) stands there holding onto all the levers of power to serve as gatekeepers of their own empires.

I've emphasized the money quote in Krieger's essay. What we euphemistically call "the system" has become unfair at a fundamental level, in that not only are the barriers to upward mobility so high but that the elite are insulated from their errors.

Roissy's return

2011-09-01T09:46:00.007-04:00

As Chateau Heartiste, and a look at Sinead O'Connor

Then:

Now:

Sinead drew some attention because she's apparently prepared to go the extra mile for sex at this point. Nubile looks and fertility having long since been overdrawn, her currency in the sexual marketplace is now kink.

Gnostic society tells women they are just like men: that they have the same choices as men; that they should be judged by the same standards as men; that they have the same biological timelines as men. Women therefore need not worry about capitalizing on their peak of attractiveness and fertility. Go to grad school, don't just get a job--get a career, hold out, maintain your standards: tall, wealthy, athletic, powerful, famous. There's plenty of time. Forty is the new twenty! You can always settle down with Mr. Right [i.e., George Clooney] once he gets tired of immature [i.e., younger, hotter] women [and he will, he will] and is ready to let you quit work and spend thousands of dollars trying to coax your aging eggs into a healthy brood. Right? Right?

They

2011-08-13T09:33:00.003-04:00

An astounding rant from Taki's.

They bring tens of millions of 7th-century Muslim immigrants to 21st-century Europe and then clamp down on Europe for resisting the unnatural graft.

They bring tens of millions of subliterate irredentist Mexicans to American territory conquered from Mexicans and then call “racist” those who notice that the Mexicans are subliterate irredentists.

They funnel 200 different peoples onto the same already-crowded patches of Europeans’ (or ex-Europeans’) land insisting that we are all the same and then invent multiculturalism and voting in 25 languages.

They import grasping poverty from the Third World and then are perplexed when the poverty grabs what it can purloin from its hosts’ public treasury.

They pillory Enoch Powell in 1968, only to wake up to smoldering England and bands of “youths” beating, stabbing, and robbing Britons in 2011.

Enoch Powell, indeed.

And there's more:

They export America’s industrial base to Asia and then debate why there is unemployment.

They pump trillions of conjured dollars into an economy staggering under a crushing burden of conjured dollars and then assert with a straight face that trillions more conjured dollars are needed because “recovery” has stalled.

They lend to the banksters at 0% and then borrow from them at 4%. Prattling of a “strong dollar,” they convert the world’s strongest currency into history’s largest Ponzi scheme and a cautionary tale told to Chinese children.

They put a black commie rabble-rouser in the White House and then are shocked when the economy tanks and their pet minorities along with it.

They hail the black commie rabble-rouser as The One Who Will Bring Us Together and then do the three wise monkeys when the Second Coming leads to Beat-Whitey Fridays all over the land.

They build $100-million schools for 85-IQ blacks in Harlem and $578-million schools for 89-IQ “Hispanics” in Los Angeles and then moan that the “achievement gap” continues and trillions more must be spent.

They bring down every public institution to the level of black achievement and then hire Ph.D.s to opine why every public institution is not achieving and America is lagging.

There is no end to the madness, nor to the mad schemes to deny the madness and to hunt down and silence those who notice the madness.

A combination of stupidity, lunacy, and gnostic malfeasance on this scale is unprecedented in history. The scope of the ultimate catastrophe to which this is leading may also be unprecedented—which is saying much, because the precedents include the fall of Rome and the fall of the Weimar Republic.

He's right. The end of the secular democratic experiment will be a watershed event.

Nationalism

2011-08-08T21:23:00.005-04:00

An excellent statement on the subject, from Roland at saloforum.com.

The real historical significance of nationalism consists in its imposition upon heterogeneous populations by absolutist governments. The transformation of Europe from a vast complex of interconnected private properties, across which an individual from any region could freely travel, to a collection of territorial nation-states signals an abrupt change in political association. The real historical significance is the conscious eradication of more localized and often overlapping forms of communal identities in favor of the creation of mass, territorially-defined artificial identities. I don't think it's useful to simply speak of a uniform "nationalism" throughout history without looking at the particular forces behind each instantiation.

Multicultural societies can only exist in the absence of government-owned borders and civil rights laws, which take away the safe harbors from which people may interact or not interact as they choose.

And in response to this,

Normann, I am afraid this is incorrect. The European Scandinavians will run round giving them Vitamin D, dole money, social welfare, free housing, free religious schools, and a lot more, paid for by a diminishing band of middle class sucker-whites.

You will suddenly wake up to find there are large 'no-go' areas in Oslo where even the police are scared to enter, where Sharia Law prevails, and which the Left will parade as 'vibrant testimony to how people of different cultures can really, really live together'.

I think on your way back from the US, you should visit the UK, where major areas have effectively been ethnically cleansed of whites.

You will not read the truth in the media, you must see for yourself.

Breivik is wrong

2011-08-02T23:23:00.003-04:00

Scandinavia will not be overrun by dark-skinned Muslims.

From this iSteve commenter:

It is very true that Norway's current immigration and assimilation policies are unsustainable, and there will be a national debate once a decent period of mourning has passed. I don't think that Somalis are being deliberately imported, though. Indeed, "new Norwegians" of Pakistani origin would like very much to restrict the immigration of Poles (never gonna happen, since Poles are entitled to seek employment in Norway under the EEA Agreement). Besides, the majority of Poles are skilled in building trades, unlike illiterate nephews from the Punjab. Taxis are one thing, but there are still lots of kitchens to be remodeled.

What I find ludicrous is the idea that somehow Norway will be overrun by darked-skinned Muslim Somalis and Pakistanis (or Hindu Tamils, for that matter). By and large, non-Western immigrants in Norway occupy very vulnerable occupational niches. They are also adapting very poorly to life at 60 degrees north and higher (which thanks to their skin pigmentation they can do absolutely nothing about). All the sequelae of vitamin D deficiency are endemic in these populations, as one would expect: diabetes, obesity, weak bones and skin problems. And I am referring to those who immigrated as adults. Their Norwegian-born children will suffer the same debilities, only at an earlier age. Where we see the "March of the Penguins" on city streets in immigrant neighborhoods in Oslo, in 20 years, Norwegian-born "niqabi girls" will be hobbling about town with canes. The will have a very hard time carrying babies to term.

Mother Nature is a hanging judge, and there is no appeal.

The Republic is saved

2011-08-02T21:50:00.003-04:00

The US government can now take on more debt to pay its bills and service existing debt.

When you and I try this, creditors say we're insolvent and red flags go up all over the place. This is no different than the schlep in the credit card doom loop, gambling that the leverage will buy him time until he can turn things around. Won't work for the schlep, won't work for the government.

The Left is in an absolute froth over this purely political theater, reported in nauseating detail through the completely uncritical eye of mainstream media. Folks, the crisis is the debt, not the debt ceiling.

The US is in the last of all bubbles: the market for sovereign debt. Treasuries are at negative real yields. Does anybody seriously believe 2.6% annual will stay ahead of prices over 10 years?

Shell-shocked banks and funds are piling into Treasuries as a safe haven, bidding down yields on the bet that they can always unload the securities on somebody. This is the same "greater fool" theory that's been around from Dutch tulip bulbs to dot-com to housing. Eventually the music will stop and somebody will be left holding a pile of bonds they can't unload for anywhere near what they paid for them. The Fed will attempt to be the buyer of last resort and unleash hyper-inflation. The Chinese, OPEC and domestic pension funds are real creditors who expect to be paid with real dollars. The day of reckoning approacheth, and all the accounting legerdemain and economic jargon in the world can't stop it.

Two Dooms

2011-07-25T23:42:00.004-04:00

Norway

1. The Norwegian Left now has its Reichstag fire and will exploit it for all its worth. Gun control, "tolerance," increased spying on Norwegians by their own government, all will be frantically and continuously broadcast to the populace.

2. All change occurs at the margins, and Breivik is on that very satanic edge. Everybody has their breaking point and envelope of what they are capable. Breivik hit his and, being intelligent and disciplined as well as horribly, brutally manic, inflicted an appalling toll. The good news, and the only good news, is that most people aren't Breiviks or Unabombers or Timothy McVeighs.

Between these two dooms there is not a lot of common ground for a political center to control the outcome.

An event that was reported and quickly passed on by the press was the destruction of Serrano's "Piss Christ" by Catholic young people in Avignon. Americans are fed a very careful diet of stories from Europe designed to impress them with how enlightened and content Europeans are. But then you hear about places like Avignon and Norway and it turns out not everybody is on board for the Great Neo-Liberal Project.

Europe has been behaving itself for over 60 years thanks to the heavy-handed presence of a US hegemon that has made clear the party line on globalism. The money for that arrangement is running out on both sides of the pond: Europe's welfare-state pie is shrinking and the US can no longer afford its vast, trans-global military.

When the Europeans erupt again (as they have done periodically for their entire existence), I don't think it will be to defend globalism.

For God's sake won't someone put this poor animal to sleep?

2011-07-25T23:31:00.003-04:00

Campaign launched to heal paralyzed lion in Brazil

Heroic Avignon

2011-04-28T22:32:00.004-04:00

Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ' vandalized

...[O]n Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

The gallery director, Eric Mézil, said it would reopen with the destroyed works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do". He said there had been a kind of "inquisition" against the art work.

The Guardian/UK article notes the vandals were between ages 18 and 25. There is hope for Europe yet.

The Western social democracies preside over a tyranny of rights, whereby the supposed right to desecrate sacred icons exacts a corresponding duty to tolerate the deviant, the obscene and the repulsive. The cost of protecting such expressions is socialized among a tax base that includes individuals who would not otherwise pay a cent to protect such displays. This is a point that eludes many anarchists: protection of rights bears a cost, and that cost will be set by the market. The right of children to the inviolability of their persons, for example, would be defended even by strangers with no thought as to cost, even of their own lives. The purported right of artists to offend religious sensibilities, not so much.

Pat Buchanan offers some related thoughts, back in 2006.

Why the welfare state can't work

2011-04-12T21:57:00.007-04:00

From this iSteve thread:

I'm sorry, it is you (and unfortunately Steve) who do not understand the medical insurance business, and by extension the medical business.

There are many layers of confusion here, so let's take a look at some facts.

1) Most people lose money on insurance, because most of the time insurance doesn't pay out more than it takes in.

2) Thus, a "good" policy is a catastrophic-coverage-only, high-deductible policy, where most payments are out of pocket. This is a policy that protects you against the downside risk, but where you lose a lot less on average.

3) This is because the purpose of insurance is to protect yourself from *catastrophe*, not to make routine purchases.

4) For example, if you went to Best Buy and whipped out your home insurance card to get a new flat screen TV, everyone would look at you as a crazy man. "Don't you know that home insurance is only for fires and floods, and not for routine purchases?"

5) And so it should be with health insurance, because you'll actually -- *provably* -- pay less with a high deductible plan for all but catastrophic conditions.

6) Indeed, the most innovative and technologically advanced areas of medicine are ambulatory areas in which people feel that markets are "ok". These are paradoxically the most trivial areas: lasik, plastic surgery, dermatology, dentistry, even veterinary medicine.

7) Why are these areas so advanced? Because people pay cash money, because they choose based on quality, and because they are *able* to choose -- i.e. they aren't being wheeled up to the hospital in a gurney in a no choice scenario.

8) Moreover, with every technology ever, from cars to cell phones to air travel to computers, things that start out expensive become cheaper when enough people demand them. With medicine it seems to bite more that money means differences in care. But at the end of the day doctors, patients, nurses, drugs, ambulances...all that stuff means real resources, and a refusal to do explicit computations just results in massive waste as costs are shunted to a place where no one looks at them.

9) How insane is it, for example, that in this age of internet shopping that you can't do comparison shopping on a hip replacement or a physical on the internet? It has to do with the irrationality that surrounds the concept of paying for the most valuable service of all: for someone saving your life.

10) Now let's consider the elderly. The big problem here is that there IS going to be a catastrophe that hits them with probability 1. It's called dying from being old.

11) If you know anything about medicine, you know that futile care is a ridiculous proportion of healthcare expenditure.

12) Now, in the abstract everyone is all about taking care of the elderly. Witness eh's bleeding heart:

"Were they to offer profitable policies to old people, the premiums would be unaffordable."

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let's take those evil capitalists are out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. ...
Now we are in the realm of social justice. Which sounds so nice in the comments section. Until eh answers the question: how much of his children's money does eh want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others?

Because, eh, you can spend ALL of your money on futile care. Literally every last penny.

So now eh says, "well, of course there have to be limits".

And here we come to the nub of the matter.

This is h-bd land. We are adults. We understand hard facts.

One of those hard facts is that until Aubrey de Grey really gets on the hop, people *are* going to die.

The question is whether they die when THEY and their family run out of money -- localizing the catastrophe -- or whether every single one of them is connected to a public purse that they can draw down without consequence.

Because draw it down they will.

You see, for most of us, if our own mother was on a deathbed, if we had the ability to tax and steal from Joe and John and James to keep her alive we wouldn't think twice about it. Because even if took a million dollars in stolen tax money a day to keep her alive, well, hell, then I guess they'll just have to work harder.

The problem, of course, is when everyone thinks this way.

Because what quickly happens is that once you've given the government access to that giant pool of money, they make damned sure that no one ANYWHERE is spending that money other than them...and then too only for the express purpose of the vote-buying schemes that our esteemed host has bought hook, line, and sinker.

That money is not spent for saving any more mothers.

Not for actual care.

Not for innovative treatments.

Not for anything other than the necessary minimum to keep up the facade, to buy people's votes.

But hell, what does it matter, right? At least now we're all equal. Equally poor in health. We've defeated the Magic of the Market. We can now allocate scarce resources not through merit or money, but through queues and connections and politics.

Like this:

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/10/17/lance-armstrong-and-bill-clinton-help-fred-baron-get-tysabri/

Biogen Idec is running an early-stage trial of the drug in multiple myeloma, but Baron doesn’t meet the criteria to participate.

Baron’s a prominent donor to the Democratic party, and many of his powerful friends, including Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton, made appeals on his behalf. And the family agreed not to sue if anything goes wrong.

Ultimately, his doctors at the Mayo Clinic worked directly with the FDA to find a “legal basis” for giving Baron Tysabri. The deal was announced on Baron’s son’s blog late yesterday. The details remain unclear.

Fantastic work, all of you. We've now taken the profit out of health care. No more profit motive to encourage ambitious young geniuses to develop miracle drugs rather than program social networks.

Instead it's just pure politics.

Sailer's post is actually about how the GOP is preparing to insure its electoral defeat by cutting Social Security and Medicare, entitlement programs for which older white voters have paid for decades and now feel, well, entitled to them.

It is an awful dilemma. The State, having assured the taxpayers that their geriatric needs would be met, must now breach its covenant with its citizens. As several commenters noted, there is no way out.

... As a society we are suffering tremendously because we forgot that the best retirement program is to have 6 children and teach them how to be prosperous and then stay on the good side or at least a few of them.

I have my own fantasy of a nice little country that extracts the minimum taxes necessary to fund its military and maintain the social safety net. I'm sure that has been the selling point trotted out by every welfare state politician since Bismarck. But inevitably it seems, net tax consumption increases, birth rates fall, the culture shifts to high time-preference, and the State inflates the currency and runs deficits--further distorting the productive economy--to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

The Camp of the Saints

2011-03-31T14:45:00.005-04:00

Disaster

This is not "immigration." This is conquest, without a shot being fired.

Moving next door to Libya, I predict Gaddafi's endgame:

Free boat ticket for all rebels to France and Italy.

That's why NATO's all over this one, because right now Sarko and Berlusconi are shitting bricks.

Note that the linked pictures depict what happens when the rebels win.

The New York Times is all over it...

2011-03-22T12:23:00.005-04:00

A Libyan fight for democracy, or a civil war?

Fledgling rebel government's behavior so far offers few clues to movement's true nature

TRIPOLI — The question has hovered over the Libyan uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?

The answer could determine the course of both the Libyan uprising and the results of the Western intervention. In the West’s preferred chain of events, airstrikes enable the rebels to unite with the currently passive residents of the western region around Tripoli, under the banner of an essentially democratic revolution that topples Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

He, however, has predicted the opposite: that the revolt is a tribal war of eastern Libya against the west that ends in either his triumph or a prolonged period of chaos.

“It is a very important question that is terribly near impossible to answer,” said Paul Sullivan, a political scientist at Georgetown University who has studied Libya. “It could be a very big surprise when Qaddafi leaves and we find out who we are really dealing with.”

The behavior of the fledgling rebel government in Benghazi so far offers few clues to the rebels’ true nature. Their governing council is composed of secular-minded professionals — lawyers, academics, businesspeople — who talk about democracy, transparency, human rights and the rule of law. But their commitment to those principles is just now being tested as they confront the specter of potential Qaddafi spies in their midst, either with rough tribal justice or a more measured legal process.

Like the Qaddafi government, the operation around the rebel council is rife with family ties. And like the chiefs of the Libyan state news media, the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

Skeptics of the rebels’ commitment to democracy point to Libya’s short and brutal history. Until Colonel Qaddafi’s revolution in 1969, Libya could scarcely be considered a country, divided as it was under its former king into three separate provinces, each with myriad tribes of rural, semi-nomadic herders. Retaliatory tribal killings and violence were the main source of justice.

[Continued at link -- Via MSNBC]

Shouldn't we have been asking these questions before we committed air and naval support and fired about $100M worth of armaments? Isn't that why Congress is supposed to deliberate and debate and then issue a declaration of war?

One of Lawrence Auster's correspondents points out that the mainstream conservative view is now one of endless low-grade war for "democracy," with such factors as location, geography, resources or, I'd add, actual benefit to the American nation-state being secondary.

This strikes me as part of the further feminization of war (begun in the decidedly male Bush I and II administrations) towards empathic, open-ended (i.e., never won) goals such as humanitarian relief, nation-building, human rights, etc. Sure enough, Obama has his very own female troika advising him.

I'm reminded of Madeline Albright's strangely personalized campaign against Serbia--to make the world safe for Albanian Muslims. Is anybody asking who we're making Libya safe for? And if they'll be an improvement over an aging, increasingly withdrawn Qaddafi or his unpopular, incompetent sons? Or if any of this is even our business?

Confident, arrogant or frightened?

2011-01-28T10:33:00.004-05:00

French President Sarkozy, via Ad Orientem:

France and Germany will never turn their backs on the euro, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said in his most robust defence of the troubled single currency to date.

Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told speculators to be prepared for big losses if they bet against the euro. “[Germany’s] Chancellor Merkel and myself will never – do you hear me, never – let the euro fall,” he said.

“The euro is Europe. And Europe spells 60 years of peace. Therefore we will never let the euro go or be destroyed… To those who bet against the euro, watch out for your money because we are fully determined to defend the euro.”

Questions, Nico. Questions.

Have private French and German citizens been consulted about their purported greater duty to Europe?

Have the Turkish, Middle Eastern and North African peoples who will shortly constitute the French and German majorities agreed to work harder, accept less benefits and pay more taxes for the sake of "Europe?"

How does Southern Europe feel about Franco-German dominance? How does Eastern Europe feel about this?

How much longer will Americans pay to have their military garrisoned overseas to preserve "60 years of peace" for Europe? In particular, when Mexico and parts of the US Southwest slip into anarchy, where will US military priorities lie?

The lie of college football

2011-01-13T22:32:00.005-05:00

Auburn And The Opiate Of America, from Alternative Right.

In 2007, then-Stanford University head football coach Jim Harbaugh (now of the San Francisco 49ers) made statements about his alma mater, the University of Michigan, that cast aspersions on the school’s practice of admitting substandard students in order to compete in the Big Ten Conference. Said Harbaugh,

Michigan is a good school and I got a good education there… but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they’re in, they steer them to courses in sports communications. They’re adulated when they’re playing, but when they get out, the people who adulated them won’t hire them...

College football (and basketball) offer Black Americans opportunities to attend schools like Michigan that their academic records and performance on SAT/ACT tests would never grant them, even with affirmative action. Blacks make up only six percent of National Champion Auburn University’s 23,000 undergraduate body, for instance; they comprise around 80 percent of the football team’s starting lineup. Black people, who would seem to have little in common with many of the institutions for which they play, become heroes to students, alumni, and fans alike. Universities, in turn, rely on athletes like Auburn’s Cam Newton—and, by all indications, pay them handsomely—in order to bring in hundreds of millions in revenue each year.

Read the article in its entirety at the link. Richard Spencer and Paul Kersey tell an uncomfortable truth. College football allows erstwhile conservative, white sport fans to salve their consciences rather than acknowledge the hard reality: most black athletes have no business attending college and are in fact horribly disserved by it.

College football is an opiate for America, particularly Red State America, a way of recasting the world in an egalitarian image. Cam Newton, Michael Dyer—and Michael Vick—are exalted. And the White Americans who cheer them on are hardly willing to contemplate the reality of what they’re watching. Jim Harbaugh only hinted at it.

The solution is for the NBA and NFL to adopt minor leagues and let college athletics return to its roots as a purely amateur pursuit among academic rivals. Unfortunately, we are light-years past the point when any common sense could have prevailed.

Breaching the social contract

2011-01-13T21:48:00.007-05:00

The inter-generational compact within families is that the adults will take care of the children through years of dependency, and when the youngsters become adults in their turn, they will take care of those who formerly took care of them.

Beginning with Chancellor Bismarck in 1884, the State took one of its periodic Great Leaps Forward and inserted itself into this social contract, and proposed to underwrite, through taxation, the care of the elderly. But every government action crowds out private action: if the government says you can just pay part of your income into the social security fund rather than saving it yourself for the future needs of your and other older family members, most people will take it at its word. What could go wrong?

Of course, from the perspective of 2011 we see: practically all the welfare states' social security funds are permanently bankrupt, as the taxation and anti-family culture of the welfare state takes its awful toll.

The British state has responded by repealing the 65-years "default retirement age," that is, the age at which an employer could fire a worker without penalty. The government despite its earlier promise must now renege: the State simply cannot afford so many pensioners and must apply the policy levers to keep the elderly in the work force. But having put itself and us all into this jam, we are not so easily got out, as the inter-generational and inter-familial ties that bound older and younger family members have been displaced.

Alex Kurtagic at AltRight observes,

[T]he phrase 'ageing population', because it is refers to a generalised phenomenon driven by several causes, conceals the unwillingness of the government to make the economy more family friendly: indigenous Europeans are delaying starting a family, having smaller ones, or not having them altogether, partly because of the cost relative to their incomes—resulting from, on the one hand, pressure from the consumer culture, and on the other, inflation, predatory taxation, and labyrinthine regulation—is seen as too high. (Another factor is Marxist feminism.)

Also concealed is the implicit realisation that the levels of immigration that would be required to close the fiscal gap is high enough to risk serious social disturbance and a significant rise in support for anti-immigration parties: one way of increasing the workforce without importing or creating new citizens is to allow existing citizens to work for longer.

By painting this legislative development as an act of government generosity, the report also misrepresents the facts. The desired implication is that the government is now 'allowing' those eager to work to do so for longer, and 'forcing' employers not to retire and not to deny employment to workers above a certain age. It fits in with the equality discourse that permeates modern culture. But the reality is that working past 65 is not a choice for many (because many hate their jobs), but a necessity. As we well know, Western governments have incurred unpayable debts and, as predicted by Kotlikoff years ago, they have decided money printing is the only way out: they cannot raise taxes nor cut welfare programmes enough without causing a revolution. The consequence is, of course, inflation, and neither incomes nor pensions being able to keep up with the devaluation of the currency. Most workers will increasingly have to work until they drop, occupying progressively more menial positions as age takes its toll.

I suspect other Western countries with default retirement ages still in place will be forced to follow. They may at first extend the retirement age, but they will eventually 'liberalise' or 'relax' employment legislation and it will be sold to the public as a way to keep active and boost the economy, just as it has been done here.

Westerners were sold a lie: that the secular State could eliminate the vagaries of family ties and provide a dignified retirement for the elderly. And having had the rug yanked out from under them, and their children laboring under their own tax burdens, the elderly must now go to work.

The powers that be are outraged!

2011-01-11T20:16:00.004-05:00

Poisonous Politics, from Pat Buchanan at Taki's.

Elements on the left are now connecting the dots—the words of Palin and Fox News—to the deeds of accused mass murderer Jared Loughner.

This is not political hardball. This is political dirt ball.

Do any such dots exist in reality? Or only in the embittered minds and malevolent motives of those unreconciled to the defeat they suffered on Nov. 2?

Undeniably, political rhetoric is hotter than it has been since the 1960s and ought to be dialed down. But Barack Obama, talking tough in 2008 about how he would deal with Republican attacks, himself said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. ... Folks in Philly like a good brawl.”

In 2010, Obama called on Hispanics to join him and “punish our enemies.” Harry Reid in 2009 called Tea Party critics “evil-mongers” who disrupt town-hall meetings with “lies, innuendo and rumors.”

It is easy for journalists to imply or impute a causal connection between hot words and horrible acts. Simply twin the two in a story, or ask an interviewee if he thinks these words and those deeds are not connected. And then let the public imagination do the rest...

From the comments:

[Tom:] I don’t know anything about this particular congresswoman, but I find it ironic that the elites are up in arms over 1 nut taking a few shots at a member of congress, when our elected officials and their handlers are swimming in innocent blood. And their answer to the situation is to circle the wagons and threaten the American population with further erosions of our civil liberties. In the end, that could well be the legacy of this whole incident. Either way, it shows that the two political parties and their monied handlers really stand together against the people who elect them.

I also love how it is the fault of average Americans for the “heated rhetoric” that supposedly caused this incident. The elites are far more radical, paranoid and violent than the population at large! These people use the U.S. military (which they and the children rarely serve in) around the globe with disasterous results, force radical demographic and social change at home that few want, destroy our economic/employment base and spend massive amounts of money that will have to be paid through generations of higher taxes, with practically no input from citizens, and claim to be surprised that they are disliked! I’m not advocating violence, but what do these people expect? Average Americans are at least as alienated as the radical left was 40 or 50 years ago.

And why are there separate laws for shooting at a national politician or government worker? Are the penalties stiffer?

War is the ultimate act of political violence, and our elites don't think twice about starting unjustified wars of aggression that kill untold numbers of innocent soldiers and civilians, waste massive amounts of money and cause unnecessary damage. I don't advocate political violence, but I also understand that our elites, and the politicians who do their bidding, are not innocent are niave. Sometimes they get shot at, too. Unfortunately, actual innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire, whic is the real tragedy.

And another one:

[Bb]: "Undeniably, political rhetoric is hotter than it has been since the 1960s and ought to be dialed down."

But it won't be. Never before have the stakes been so high. We have an obtrusively "in-your-face" government, run on debt to the detrement of the citizens' wealth (and to the benefit of the well-connected), full of increasingly insular politicians and their hirelings, whose disdain towards "petition for redress of grievences" has grown into an air of untouchability.

Well, this past weekend, some nutjob touched 'em.

True Grit

2011-01-10T22:22:00.006-05:00

The Coen brothers continue with their relentless message that civilization is inimical, or at least not conducive, to human morality. In the frontier, Rooster Cogburn protects the weak and dispenses justice according to the reward of the wicked and the innocent. In secular civilization, he is a carnival attraction. In frontier morality, for example, a man who does not recognize the special status of women by getting to his feet is trash meriting the same contempt as men who rob children of their fathers. I'm reminded of the scene in Gone With The Wind when Mammy chides the carpetbaggers for their overt approaches to Scarlett. The Coens place special emphasis on Cogburn's and LeBoeuf's status as Confederate veterans as well.

So, two Jewish men remain devoted and rigorous filmographers of Anglo-American history and culture, and from a perspective strikingly different from most of their Hollywood peers.

Convert growth in Orthodoxy

2011-01-10T08:59:00.004-05:00

New converts flocking to an ancient church. From Ad Orientem.

Like many of his parishioners, Father Richard Petranek came to the Orthodox church in search of the past.

After 30 years as an Episcopalian priest, Petranek converted to the Antiochian Orthodox Church and leads a new but growing parish in west Houston, filled almost entirely with converts to the ancient faith.

"Most people come for the stability," he said. "The same thing that is taught today in the Orthodox church was taught 500 years ago, was taught 1,000 years ago, was taught 1,500 years ago."

At a time when most mainline Christian churches are losing members, Eastern Orthodox churches — which trace their beliefs to the church described in the New Testament - are growing, both in Houston and across the United States.

The numbers are still small: the 2010 U.S. Orthodox census estimates there are about 32,000 active Orthodox churchgoers in Texas and just more than 1 million nationally, although other estimates are higher. But the number of U.S. Orthodox parishes grew 16 percent over the past decade.

In Houston and its suburbs, the growth has been more dramatic, fueled by immigration from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, along with an increasing number of converts.

The Orthodox tradition includes Greek Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and the Orthodox Church in America, among others.

"We were amazed the church still existed, and it had never changed," said Lana Jobe, who with her husband, Lloyd, left a Baptist church to join Petranek at St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church four years ago. "That was so important to us." ...

Much as I enjoy reading about this, I can't refrain from some minor carping. There is a superficial feel to this article, although that may be due to a reporter out of her element. What these individuals must internalize is that Orthodoxy is not, so to speak, the denomination that has it all figured out (No women priests! Use real wine!), or interprets the Bible CORRECTLY, even though we do.

Orthodoxy is the Faith; the very Church, founded when the Holy Spirit descended on Christ's followers after His ascension. The Apostles were her first priests and bishops, then their successors, and so on to the present day.

The Church, the Bride of Christ, is the way she is because she can be no other way. You have not found the one group that really gets it. You simply were not in the Church, and now you are in the Church.

People who come to the Church because it's the group that's "right" (like I kept trying to tell my liberal friends!) or because it's "traditional" (They wear robes! Incense!) will wash in, see the inter-ethnic squabbles, the corrupt hierarchs, the obtuse, incompetent priests, and then wash back out and on to the next American-christian fad.

The end of facebook

2011-01-06T23:17:00.004-05:00

Among other things its founder, Mark Zuckerburg, was named Time's Person Of The Year.

Richard Spencer at AltRight explains:

...Facebook’s recent re-design has transformed each profile into even more of a consumer preference survey just waiting to be data-mined—one now is encouraged to define one’s self by which professional sports team one roots for, which corporations one “likes,” etc. Facebook is ultimately a cluttered mess, with numerous redundancies, unhelpful features, and comment boxes suitable only for scattered, snarky one-liners and little else. It is quickly becoming the opposite of the intuitively functional web—losing its clean, Ivy League aura that originally helped its triumph over the ghetto-fied MySpace.

The kicker to all this is that Facebook has really no barrier to exit. There’s little stopping its hundreds of millions of users from stampeding to the exits, transforming the current Babylon of social media into something resembling the mysterious ruins of the Friendster civilization.

There are other articles predicting the demise here and here.

As Spencer notes, Facebook is losing its original, functional aesthetic as its programmers begin to design for the third-party advertisers who actually pay for the bandwidth. Facebook suffers from the AOL curse of being first-with-the-best in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry. Demand for equity appears high now, but I'm thinking Zuckerburg better roll the IPO out sooner rather than later. A social network is ultimately just a medium. Will the income stream from ads (how many of us have actually clicked and purchased from a hyperlink?) and beta-issue games support a fifteen to fifty BILLION dollar valuation?

Facebook may ultimately be just an echo of the old dot-com bubble. I question whether we can pay our collective bills as a nation of graphic designers and software developers who don't actually make anything.

By the way, here's a sarcastic post on iSteve--what were the best films of 2010? that had me cracking up all day:

the social network: I simply liked the movie's heartening message:

1) Jewish American princesses are wonderful, heroic women (even if they changed their name to Albright).

2) Asian girls are whores! Jewish men should avoid them.

3) Light-skinned and dark-skinned Jews should work together to crush WASP competitors and new aspiring minorities (Indians).

The other Chrysostom

2011-01-05T15:06:00.005-05:00

Meet Theodore Williams from Columbus, Ohio.

God grant him many happy, prosperous years.

It takes a platonic village

2011-01-04T16:50:00.005-05:00

The happy, henny klatch:

NYT: Four women, one dad make 'twiblings' born days apart - Parenting - TODAYshow.com

Where to start? How about with this creature's pudgy, whipped, practically invisible husband-thing, Mr. Turkey Baster, slouching around in the background. She spends his money on a series of IVF treatments, then decides on surrogacy for not one but two eggs and not one but two surrogate carriers/wet nurses. She also apparently requires the services of some person called a doula and a nanny. Then she refers to herself as a 'mother.'

Some interesting excerpts:

I was 41 when, after a gazillion not-quite-right relationships and a broken engagement, I met Michael, the man I would marry. He was five years younger; socially, it didn’t seem like an important age difference, but in terms of fertility, it turned out to be.

So, two decades wasting her sexual market value on "a gazillion" different men and this is it, the crown jewel, the piece de la resistance: Beta Tubby-Hubby.

Knowing that, I was still taken aback by how discouraging one adoption agency was about our prospects for “competing” against other couples. “Most birth mothers do prefer younger women,” the woman informed me. “But you’ll get a letter from your doctor, certifying you are in excellent health for the social worker anyway.”

“Right,” I said, thinking about the arthritic condition that caused the chronic pain I had been struggling with for many years.

Neurotic. Addicted to painkillers.

But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was damned if I was going to let biology unbless us. And I knew if we let biology become Mother Nature, we actually would be damned.

Yes lady, that's correct. Nature has already determined you would be an unfit mother.

The nurse urged me to stick with it. “We don’t want you to feel like you can’t nurse,” she said. I suddenly felt cross. Did she really think I couldn’t handle the reality that my body was not producing milk after it didn’t give birth to my baby? I knew she was trying to be supportive, but her concern made me feel diminished, as if she thought the truth of my infertility were unbearable (yet so easily disguised with plastic tubing). I looked down at my breasts, and they looked awfully small, whereas Melissa’s were enormous, dripping with fecundity, like a relic of a fertility goddess. I ditched the tube.

I felt similarly when Violet was born five days later and another perfectly nice nurse presented us with the hospital’s certificate to commemorate her birth, on which there was no mention of Fie. It wasn’t a legal birth certificate (our lawyer obtained a “prebirth judgment order,” which meant that a legal birth certificate would come in the mail, naming us as the parents) but a sentimental keepsake with a blank space for the baby’s name followed by the words “born to” over a pair of baby footprints. When the nurse came back in, I insisted she reprint it and include all three of our names. Just at that moment, Fie knocked on the door from her adjoining room to complain about her birth certificate, which had been doctored just the opposite way, to exclude mention of us.

“I was just trying to make everyone feel good,” the nurse said, backing toward the door, flustered.

“We feel good about the truth,” I said firmly. And I wanted people to reinforce — not undermine — that feeling.

Oookay.

I once felt a prick of an unpleasant emotion. It was the week the Fairy Goddonor came to Portland for the egg retrieval. Over tapas one night, I watched her and Michael laughing and suddenly felt unhappy. I poured myself more wine, but instead of dispelling the feelings, it made me feel more alone. “You were so quiet at dinner,” Michael said as we got into the car. He turned to look at me. “Are you not feeling well?”

“Is it weird that you’re having babies with her instead of me?”

“I’m not having babies with her. I’m having babies with Melissa and Fie.”

The conversation dissolved into laughter. That was the thing about our conception: there were too many players to be jealous of any one.

I predict more wine and more painkillers.

Newsflash:

2011-01-04T00:04:00.001-05:00

Mexico is a failed state

Criminal cartels, hopelessly corrupt police and military, Iberian elites lording it over Aztec peasantry...Who knew?

New Year's in Egypt

2011-01-01T15:35:00.010-05:00

Car Bomb Kills 21 at Egyptian Church via Ad Orientem

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (AP) — Christians clashed with Egyptian police in the northern city of Alexandria on Saturday, furious over an apparent suicide bombing against worshippers leaving a New Year's Mass at a church that killed at least 21 people. It was the worst violence against the country's Christian minority in a decade.

The Interior Ministry blamed "foreign elements," and the Alexandria governor accused al-Qaida, pointing to the terror network's branch in Iraq, which has carried out a string of attacks on Christians there and has threatened Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Christian community as well.

Egypt's government has long insisted that the terror network does not have a significant presence in the country, and it has never been conclusively linked to any attacks here. If al-Qaida was involved, it raises the prospect of a serious new security threat within Egypt. (continued at link)

I am going to suggest that there is no 'foreign element' and this attack was not directed by Old Sammy Bin Laden in his super-secret underground fortress in Pakistan. Events indicate a pan-Islamic opinion that there is no compelling reason for Christianity to be preserved in their lands. At worst, Christians will be slaughtered in their very houses of worship.

If Muslims don't believe in multi-culturalism in their own lands, why do we grant it to them here?

If diversity + proximity = violence elsewhere, why do we assume things will be different here?

God rest the souls of His Coptic faithful.

Dennis Mangan's dangerous ideas

2010-12-22T00:08:00.006-05:00

Mangan links to an article by Richard Thaler at The Edge which asks,

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

Mangan provides excerpts from the following Edge contributors:

Greg Cochran answers:

I would guess that most basic anthropological doctrine is false — for example. the 'psychic unity of mankind'. but then most practitioners don't really pretend to do science.

The doctrine is, of course, gnostic in that it presumes a mind/body dichotomy, a non-corporeal, uniform human 'essence' which justifies equality of outcomes. Edge contributor Judith Harris takes a related stab:

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. In other words, people tend to resemble their parents. They resemble their parents not only in physical appearance but also, to some degree, in psychological characteristics.

The question is: Why? Two competing answers have been offered: nature (the genes that people inherit from their parents) and nurture (the way their parents brought them up). Neither of these extreme positions stood up to scrutiny and they eventually gave way to a compromise solution: nature + nurture. Half nature, half nurture. This compromise is now an accepted belief, widely held by scientists and nonscientists alike.

But the compromise solution is wrong, too. Genes do indeed make people turn out something like their parents, but the way their parents brought them up does not. So nature + nurture is wrong: it's nature + something else.

As one of Mangan's commenters points out, we know that brain development is greatly affected by early sensory inputs. Abandoned animals and children are mentally stunted. However, we also know that different people respond to the same environment in different ways, so Harris's hypothesis seems to have some merit.

Mangan then lists his own examples of currently held beliefs he predicts will be proven erroneous.

I haven't read all the contributors' answers, but I'll throw out the lipid hypothesis (or cholesterol hypothesis) of heart disease, although the belief is still widely held by many. I'm certain that it's wrong, and put my money where my mouth is by living accordingly.

I'm less certain about HIV as a cause of AIDS, but I do believe that the theory will have to be at least seriously modified.

Another one: exposure to solar radiation is unhealthy, and that one should avoid it to prevent cancer. Still widely held.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming: nothing but a fad.

To the extent that economics is a science - that is, to not a great extent - Keynesian economic theory is wrong, the Austrians are right.

This strikes me as a pretty good list. Low carb has withstood everything the USDA has thrown at it. AIDS appears 'sticky' to unhygienic practices that put a heavy load on the immune system, and people who do not engage in those practices remain resistant to HIV despite dire warnings that 'we all are at risk.' Has HIV actually been isolated?

With respect to solar radiation/skin cancer, I think Mangan is overlooking the pretty obvious evolutionary adaptation of melanin content.

Global warming: How can a compound, CO2, which comprises 0.039% of the atmosphere and which retains less heat than more abundant water vapor be responsible for global warming? We are told that the glaciers and polar ice caps are melting which means they are absorbing heat, like a cold turkey placed in a hot oven. Do the numbers balance? Is there that much 'excess' heat, and again, how can it be due to a trace atmospheric compound? The AGW hypothesis reminds me of the astrologer's fallacy: the movements of celestial bodies light-years away are believed to exert more influence on human development than, say, the actions of the obstetrician. Why is CO2 and not solar activity or urbanization the object of inquiry?

Keynesian theory: In 1990, the world saw the essential, inevitable failure of Marxism. Keynesian policies are not far behind. Deficit spending, money printing, suppression of interest rates, all efforts to 'prime the pump' during recessions are, at bottom, just loans taken out against future productivity. Eventually you run out of future.

The larger social trend that merits comment is how the alleged anti-science of the Roman Catholic theocracy has been adopted by the secular humanist establishment.

The North American future

2010-12-16T13:00:00.003-05:00

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

... We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens...

Interestingly, this was linked by Christopher Manion at the scrupulously "you can't see borders from space" crowd at lewrockwell.com. Manion asks, "...there are over two billion people in the world who live on less than two dollars a day. How many, I wonder, do we want to invite in?"

Most libertarians argue loud and long that borders are tyranny, nobody owns them, people have a right to travel (actually, they don't), ad nauseum. When reality catches up with their ideal, it appears they don't like what they see.

So, to answer Mr. Manion's question, "Not so many that you have to live with the consequences."

+Philip wields the hammer:

2010-11-04T17:19:00.004-04:00

1. Tells bishops shut up, send money

2. Releases +Mark to the OCA

3. Fires a parish priest

Brief history, +Philip, Metropolitan and head of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America, enthusiastically welcomes converts into his jurisdiction and promotes his local Church's autonomy by obtaining the enthronement of diocesan bishops. Turns out converts want the Orthodox Church to be, well, Orthodox and Bishops just might act like Bishops, equals in a conciliar Synod rather than locums who just do the Metropolitan's bidding. Some frantic machinations in Englewood and Damascus and, hey presto, the Bishops are no longer Bishops.

The Antiochians in America are in for a long, painful shake-out but this is not really an Arab vs. convert issue. Many Arab sons and daughters of the Church are appalled by the Metropolitan and his uncouth and heavy-handed manner. Archimandrites in the Patriarchate are beginning to weigh in.

Some choice comments from Mark Stokoe's site:

The truth is that Met. Philip's days are numbered because of his age, and the Toledo Diocese will get a thorough scrubbing once the new metropolitan is in place. Frankly, Met's supporters do not have a candidate who will keep things as they are. Whether you pick Joseph or Basil or Alexander or someone from the old country (don't rule that out), none of them will permit the shenanigans of the Philip era to continue.

So, I recommend that the gloating over Mark continue, because all it does is reenforce to the rest of the Archdiocese how much the Midwest needs a flush out.

A friend told me he thinks Philip will last just long enough to watch the Toledo diocese go back into schism rather than grow with the rest of the Archdiocese. They have been the longest hold-outs to the liturgical renewal in the rest of the Archdiocese. Mark tried to move them forward, but they have resisted with all their might. In the end, Philip will see his greatest accomplishment go up in flames, because he didn't feed them. The rest of the Archdiocese has grown, and they are stuck in the past.
#10 anonymous on 2010-11-01 21:40 (Reply)

In terms of succession planning, we really need to move away from the notion that the current and some future Metropolitan is rightly some kind autocrat ruling a pusillanimous, fearful and subservient synod, clergy, and laity. Rather, in orthodox tradition, the office of Metropolitan is conferred upon the bishop of the first see and he is the honorary chief of a synod of peers. The fact that the AA had evolved from having a single bishop-Metropolitan may create the illusion that autocracy is the norm in our ecclesiology, it is not. The same model applies to the patriarchies and their synods. Neither ought they rightly be autocratic pontiffs.

We need to keep the notion of "first among equals" in our sights. We need to reshape the notion of obedience to include the notion of responsibility. People ought not disconnect their brains and defer all responsibility to some autocrat ruler. The people have the responsibility to live out their faith in their lives and also to discern right from wrong. People do this anyway but usually it's too little, too late. Without consistent practice of such principals, we end up in crisis mode.

If we don't move toward a strong unified continental synod of real bishops whose loyalty is rightly to the people and clergy in North America, then we'll continue to struggle with interference from abroad for too far into the future. We'll continue to struggle with personality-based power plays at home.
#10.1 MWP on 2010-11-02 05:21 (Reply) You are absolutely correct.

The diocese was making progress, but the old guard who wants gambling and belly dancing instead of Vespers, Orthros and Liturgy seem to have gotten their way for the moment.

They need their exalted egos constantly stroked for running the Bingos and Texas Hold'ems

The door is now open to return to the ghetto clubs (I refuse to use the word church in this instance).

Well for those who want to be ORTHODOX there are CHURCH OPTIONS.

For those who want the GHETTO, you can now try to pay the bills on your $3.00 a week.

....
#10.2 anonymous clergyman on 2010-11-02 05:52 (Reply)

When I wrote my comment, I did not know about Fr. Moretti. I think that his treaatment is indicative that this is not an Arab-Convert battle as certain people claim, since the visiting clergy from Syria I've met all wear riassa and hats in public, even here.

When the "Toledo People" say "Arab," they mean a certain kind of not quite American yet not quite Arab. It is an in-between culture which is not part of the Archdiocese's real growth and so is becoming a shrinking minority. The bishops, even Met. Philip for the most part, know this is the case and have shifted their dioceses towards a more Traditional liturgical approach that appeals to converts and new immigrants alike.

I think met. Philip will likely do some symbolic moves to appease the Toledo crowd, then he will go back into his shell and continue to ignore all but his closest friends as before.

Let's not forget that the next metropolitan will get all of Philip's official powers to do with as he pleases, plus the full support of the Synod of Antioch. He will also have a lot of under-employed seminary grads to put in parishes where the old priest forgets who the new boss is.

The Toledo Ghetto will not last. The Holy Synod is aware of what is going on, and they will back the new metropolitan in changing everything. All we need to do is remain faithful and keep breathing.
#10.2.1 anonymous on 2010-11-02 09:03 (Reply)

Let the winnowing begin ...

Update: Mexican anarcho-tyranny

2010-10-01T12:53:00.004-04:00

Pirates shoot US man in Mexican waters

Looks like Mexicans take their borders pretty seriously. Why don't we? Mexican cartels are already fighting for territory in San Diego and Phoenix. The tribalist tsunami, now much more prominent than Enoch Powell's "cloud no bigger than a man's hand", is headed our way and naive, idealistic Americans with their credit cards and jet skis do not stand a chance.

Fred Reed discovers anarcho-tyranny

2010-09-28T12:56:00.005-04:00

And doesn't like what he sees.

If Mexico were not next to the world’s most ravening drug market, it would be a corrupt, but functioning and reasonably successful upper Third-World country. If this were not so, Mexico would not have the huge number of American who have come here to retire. But the country cannot withstand a drug business that, by a common figure, brings the traffickers forty billion dollars a year. The money means that the cartels can buy heavier armament than can the government, as well as buy heavier officials on either side of the border. (It is an American conceit that corruption exists only in other countries. Tell me another story, Grandpa.)

It is getting out of hand. The killing of policemen, judges, and mayors is now common. Journalists die in droves. After the murder of another of its reporters, El Diario, the major paper of Ciudad Juarez, published the following editorial, addressed to the drug lords:

“We bring to your attention that we are communicators, not mind-readers. Therefore, as workers in information, we want you to explain to us what you want of us, what you want us to publish or stop publishing, what we must do for our security.

“These days, you are the de facto authority in the city, because the legally instituted authorities have been able to do nothing to keep our co-workers from continuing to fall, although we have repeatedly asked this of you. Consequently, facing this undeniable fact, we direct ourselves to you, because the last thing we want is that you shoot to death another of our colleagues.”

This is astonishing. It is worse. A blue whale singing Aida would be merely astonishing, but here we have the editors of the major newspaper of a substantial city stating candidly, with perfect clarity, that the narcotraficantes, not the national government, exercise sovereignty over the city. The federal government understandably denounced the editorial. No capital wants to be told that it does not control its territory. But this is exactly what the paper said.

As Fred notes, part of the problem is a criminalized drug market that funnels inflated black market profits to gangs who use the proceeds to out-gun and out-bribe the Mexican government. We all know the libertarian response: de-criminalize drugs, deprive the gangs of their black market profits, and order gets restored. After all, we legalized payday loans and when was the last time you got kneecapped by a loanshark?

I suspect, unfortunately, the problem runs a little deeper. In the first instance, to say the problem is that drug markets are criminalized leaves some questions begging. There are black markets in many things, including marijuana on college campuses, but you don't read about college kids beheading people and dissolving the bodies in lye over marijuana distribution. Thus, a more comprehensive statement of the problem is that drug markets are criminalized so they end up controlled by criminals. The assumption that the traffickers would respond to de-criminilization by trading their AK-47's for laptops and marketing consultants strikes me as awfully optimistic, but maybe not.

I think the problem goes a little deeper, and what we are actually seeing is the visible part of a civil war between Mexico's urban Iberian elites and its rural Meso-American peasantry. This, by the way, is exactly the situation in Afghanistan, where US-funded viceroys pretend to govern the rural, opium-growing tribal areas. Fred, of course, recognizes this and so does former State Department employee Matthew Hoh.

In other words, Mexico = Afghanistan and folks, this one is going to be fought right here.

UN's International Court of Justice declares multiculturalism a spent force

2010-07-23T19:42:00.004-04:00

Just kidding. What they actually said was Kosovo was legally entitled to declare its independent and sovereign status from Serbia. The NATO powers and Kosovars are taking the advisory opinion and running with it, practically ready to give this impoverished region that's half the size of New Hampshire a seat on the Security Council.

Now, I'm actually one of those people who thinks one United States is too few--there should be fifty state sovereigns, and for that matter, why not five hundred? Of course, Kosovo is a free-rider, pathetically dependent on foreign aid and third party maintenance of the public order. There are probably American counties more autarchic than this landlocked region of Albanian Muslims.

One wonders why the UN/NATO elites have decided to grab this particular tiger by the tail. Maybe they read Pat Buchanan and have just decided to go with the flow.

Addition to the blogroll

2010-07-16T21:26:00.003-04:00

Roissy a/k/a Citizen Renegade

I have been reading Roissy for the past two years. He is a PUA who, for the most part, dispenses advice on pumping and dumping women. Beneath the bluster and decadence is a very substantive, traditionalist message. All men, single and married, are well advised to read his posts. Vox Popoli is a fan, and conservative, monogamous 51-year old Steve Sailer links him.

Roissy is one of those people despised in turn by the Left for his reactionary opinions and by the Right for his (purportedly) dissolute lifestyle. Anybody demonized by all sides of the political spectrum is usually worth a listen in my experience.

Game is the equalizer for men seeking female sexual partners in feminist society, and it works whether a man seeks a one night stand or his partner in the marriage sacrament. Game is a tremendous affront to the ruling cultural Marxists who insist, in the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary, that men and women are fundamentally the same and that human evolution has ceased.

Save the burqas...

2010-07-14T19:36:00.003-04:00

pleads Rod Dreher, via Serge.

The ironic part of Dreher's plea for tolerance is that such conundrums were simply not an issue for the Christendom of Dreher's historic Faith. It is only a problem for Christians under the heel of an Atheist State that, as Dreher believes, could turn on a dime on his creed. So it turns out the real problem is a secular globalist government that puts us on the horns of these particular dilemmas. And let's be honest, Dreher's real motivation is not fear of religious persecution, but fear of professional and personal ostracism from criticizing the State's multicultural agenda.

And just how far is Dreher willing to take this? Today the Sikh who enforces in-marriage with physical violence, tommorow our nuns? Today the Congolese animist who sacrifices albinos, tomorrow our nuns?

France is a secular democracy. The dar al-Islam is antithetical to secular democracy. France is trying to force Arab and African Wahabbists and Shi'ites to become citizens of equal standing with native French, because the alternative is Muslim ghettoes which are no-go zones for everybody else.

The Great Gamble of the West is that Muslims will show reciprocal tolerance in those areas where the West allows them to become a market-dominant majority. Perhaps this may work with urbane Syrians (who, by the way, keep a heavy and ruthless hand on Islamic fundamentalists). Otherwise, I'd prefer those who wish to make that gamble do so with their own patrimony.

All of this begs the question why Western governments decided that this particular Great Leap Forward had to be made in the first instance. In inviting Muslims to our shore, we buy into a triangular conflict which we did not have to purchase.

I wonder what the martyred emperor Constantine XI Paleologos thinks of all this? Or perhaps God in His mercy has spared him the knowledge. I think I'll ask Rod.

Clean, safe jobs Americans won't do

2010-07-08T22:00:00.004-04:00

American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation

GRAFTON, Mass. — After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder...

I stopped reading there and perused the comments. As one person noted, there are plenty of folks named Park, Abdallah, Gomez, etc., who will take that job in their teeth and run with it.

And people like Scott Nicholson will be begging them for a job emptying the trash cans.

What a great idea

2010-07-08T21:54:00.003-04:00

Let Treasury Rescue the States

HERE in California, where people tiresomely boast that the state’s gross domestic product exceeds that of all but seven nations, I keep expecting a ballot initiative demanding admission to the Group of 8 industrialized nations. I’d consider voting for it, too; then maybe Washington would work as hard to synchronize its economic policy with Sacramento as it does with Tokyo and Berlin. The lack of coordination within the United States — and, equally important, the failure to recognize the states as macroeconomic players — helps explain our sluggish recovery.

To make matters worse, several states have country-sized G.D.P.’s, but none has the macroeconomic tools of an independent country. Every state except Vermont has some sort of balanced budget requirement that prevents it from weathering a recession by running up big deficits to keep teachers employed, students in college, welfare payments flowing and construction humming. Nor can New York and California stimulate their economies by, say, printing more currency. Instead, states are managing huge budget crises with the only tools they have, cutting spending and raising taxes — both of which undermine the federal stimulus.

That’s why the best booster shot for this recovery and the next would be to allow states to borrow from the Treasury during recessions. We did this for Wall Street and Detroit, fending off disaster. It’s even more important for states.

Here’s how this would work. States already receive regular federal matching grants to help pay for Medicaid, welfare, highway construction programs and more. For instance, the federal government pays a share of state Medicaid costs, from 50 percent to more than 75 percent, depending on a state’s wealth. The matching rates were temporarily sweetened by last year’s stimulus.

But Congress should pass legislation that would allow a state to simply get an “advance” on these future federal dollars expected from entitlement programs. The advance could then be used for regional stimulus, to continue state services and to hasten our recovery.

The Treasury Department, which writes the checks to the states, could be assured of repayment (with interest) by simply cutting the federal matching rate by the needed amount over, say, five years. Of course, when Treasury eventually collected what it was owed, the state would have to cut spending or find new revenue sources. But that would happen after the recession, when both tasks would likely prove easier economically and politically...

How much 'road' do people think is left for us to kick the can down? How many shell games before the debt markets run out of suckers? Absolutely nuts.

Bailout, middle America style

2010-06-01T22:34:00.005-04:00

Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras, foreclosure is becoming a way of life — something they did not want but are in no hurry to get out of.

Foreclosure has allowed them to stabilize the family business. Go to Outback occasionally for a steak. Take their gas-guzzling airboat out for the weekend. Visit the Hard Rock Casino.

“Instead of the house dragging us down, it’s become a life raft,” said Mr. Pemberton, who stopped paying the mortgage on their house here last summer. “It’s really been a blessing.”

A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.

This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.

“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.” ...

Eventually these individuals will have to declare bankruptcy and go lick their wounds in an apartment.

...and realize it's not such a bad thing.

...and take comfort in the fact that that's where General Motors, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan/Chase, and their individual directors and officers should be floating belly-up right now.

This is why things will be different from now on: more and more Americans are realizing that cash flow is not necessarily wealth, that debt is slavery, and that they can get by with much, much less.

And it doesn't stop there. The gild is off Wall Street's lily. For the elderly, a stock of canned goods and cheap ammo, not to mention silver coin, is as likely to appreciate as much as the computer entries that say you own 1/1,000,000th of a mutual fund that owns 1/100,000th of Wal-Mart. For the young, they're going to realize the numbers just don't add up over time for the 401k and the exurban house--might as well rent in town and buy metals and CD's. The New Deal's intergenerational social contract is broken: Social Security and Medicare are bust. Even municipal pension funds are up in smoke. Individuals will start withdrawing from the system--immigrants have worked under the table for decades, and they'll be joined by Millenials who have no other choices.

The beast--the money-making machines for the elite--will be starved one way or another, and it's about damn time.

New tag: TANSTAAFL

2010-06-01T22:22:00.005-04:00

Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model

Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada's provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system.

Ontario, Canada's most populous province, kicked off a fierce battle with drug companies and pharmacies when it said earlier this year it would halve generic drug prices and eliminate "incentive fees" to generic drug manufacturers.

British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit -- an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee [the horror-consumers actually paying for their consumption].

And a few provinces are also experimenting with private funding [gasp!] for procedures such as hip, knee and cataract surgery.

It's likely just a start as the provinces, responsible for delivering healthcare, cope with the demands of a retiring baby-boom generation. Official figures show that senior citizens will make up 25 percent of the population by 2036.

"There's got to be some change to the status quo whether it happens in three years or 10 years," said Derek Burleton, senior economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

"We can't continually see health spending growing above and beyond the growth rate in the economy because, at some point, it means crowding out of all the other government services.

"At some stage we're going to hit a breaking point." ...

Undoubtedly, the Canadian government will propose importing more tax fodder who, it is assumed, will (1) never get old and sick themselves, and (2) happily pay for the medical bills of stupid white people.

Glorious multiculturalism

2010-05-20T23:16:00.004-04:00

Group Backs Ritual ‘Nick’ as Female Circumcision Option

The group in question being none other than the American Pediatric Association.

In a controversial change to a longstanding policy concerning the practice of female circumcision in some African and Asian cultures, the American Academy of Pediatrics is suggesting that American doctors be given permission to perform a ceremonial pinprick or “nick” on girls from these cultures if it would keep their families from sending them overseas for the full circumcision.

The academy’s committee on bioethics, in a policy statement last week, said some pediatricians had suggested that current federal law, which “makes criminal any nonmedical procedure performed on the genitals” of a girl in the United States, has had the unintended consequence of driving some families to take their daughters to other countries to undergo mutilation.

“It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm,” the group said.

This reminds me of an old shopworn argument for welfare: if we don't pay these people just to sit around, then they'll mug us! Not, of course, how about you--welfare recipient--worry over testing our limits and being grateful for the fruits of a civilized nation.

In similar fashion, we give Muslim pediatricians the okay to 'nick' an infant girl's genitals because, heaven forbid, these people might leave! What on earth would we possibly do without them? Can anybody even imagine the hell on earth that would be a society without people who want clitorectomies performed on their infant daughters? Has there even existed such a strange, utopian land where the question of what degree we would harm an infant girl's genitals never came up? Where? When?

Some questions it is not even within the mind of man to comprehend ...

How to deal with high seas piracy

2010-05-13T09:59:00.004-04:00

Freed Somali pirates "probably died" - Russian source

Ten suspected Somali pirates captured by the Russian navy last week may have perished after their release, a defence source in Moscow has told reporters.

Marines seized them during a dramatic operation to free a hijacked Russian oil tanker far from shore, killing an 11th suspect in the gun battle.

They were released in an inflatable boat without navigational equipment.

Within an hour, contact was lost with the boat's radio beacon, the defence source said.

"It seems that they all died," the unnamed source was quoted as saying by Russia's Interfax news agency.

Russia initially said the 10 pirates would be taken to Moscow to face criminal charges over the hijacking, but they were released instead because there were not sufficient legal grounds to detain them, the defence ministry in Moscow said.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which Russia is a signatory, gives sovereign nations the right to seize and prosecute pirates.

Western officials were very surprised when the Russian authorities dropped plans to put the pirates on trial in Moscow, the BBC's Richard Galpin reports from Moscow.

Now there is even more surprise the pirates were set adrift in the Indian Ocean to make their own way home, he adds.

Surprised? The Russian government acts swiftly and decisively to defend the interests of the Russian people. Only a hyper-lawyered elite who are openly antagonistic to their own nations would be 'surprised.'

Greece, and everything else

2010-05-11T22:04:00.006-04:00

From Stefan Molyneux at freedomainradio.com, via mises.org.

There are no footnotes to Mr. Molyneux's comments. Corrections welcomed.

Greece has a long and complicated history with democracy, but the future of Greek democracy will be short and brutal.

Largely as a result of 400 years of savage Turkish occupation, Greeks retain an innate distrust of and hostility towards the State – as one Greek said: “We never had the Enlightenment because of the Turks.”

As a result -- and this is no different in America -- political power has only been maintained through outright bribery of special interest groups. Chief among these are the military-industrial complex, born out of military rivalry with Turkey, which costs over €14 billion, or 6% of GDP. Naturally, nearly 80% of the Defense Ministry budget is spent on administrative costs and payments to Army staff.

20%-30% of the entire Greek population works for the government; they cannot be fired, and many are allowed to retire with a pension in their 40s. Tens of thousands of unmarried or divorced daughters of civil servants collect their dead parents’ pensions, and pension outlays are projected to rise to 12% of GDP, over four times the EU average. Some civil servants receive bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and even arriving to work on time - and all workers get 14 monthly salaries a year, the result of a plan to keep monthly wages -- and so future pensions – low.

Two weeks extra salary is paid out at Easter, and also during the summer -- the 14th salary is paid to government workers at Christmas. Until 2008, the government owned Olympic Airways, whose employees and their families were allowed to fly around the world for “free.” It was only able to sell the money pit after lavishly paying or rehiring almost 5,000 employees. Overall, the Greek government owns 74 companies, mainly utilities and transport firms, most of which are overstaffed and bleeding money. The state rail company warehouses over 9,000 people and reported 2008 losses of 800 million Euros.

Nebulous and pointless committees infest government payrolls -- one committee is supposed to manage Lake Kopais, which actually dried out in the 1930s.

Greece was able to gain entry to the European Union by cooking its books and hiding debt through swap agreements, with the help of US financial services firms. Greece then continued to fake its budget numbers until 2008, when it ran out of money, and revealed that its deficit was four times larger than reported – 14% of GDP. It is important to note that this GDP measure is completely misleading, since the government does not have access to the entire GDP – it's like planning to pay down your debts by using your pre-tax income and ignoring your interest payments. The Greek public sector consumes about 40% of GDP, which represent a cost to the state, not an income, while taxation rarely rises above 50% – so at best only 10% of the GDP is available to address the debt, which basically means that debt levels are in reality 10 times the numbers commonly reported.

Like all doomed governments, Greece imagines that it can “grow itself” out of its fiscal crisis, referring to the fantasy that the Greek economy grew by almost 4% per year between 2003 and 2007. However, even if these numbers are true - and the source is not at all credible – this was due largely to massive infrastructure spending for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and consumer borrowing as a result of easy credit -- even before this crisis, Greece was a major beneficiary of EU aid, equal to about 3.3% of GDP. If past growth was an illusion, future growth is an impossibility.

What about increasing government income? There is little room to raise taxes; the top income tax rate is already 40%, and the sales tax is 21%. In addition, 44% of salary is taxed for Social Security, with employees paying 16%, and employers paying 28%. These ridiculous tax rates, combined with a historical mistrust of government, have created an enormous black market and a culture of tax evasion. In one wealthy Athenian neighborhood, 324 residents admitted on their tax forms that they owned pools, while satellite photos revealed almost 17,000 pools. More than half of the doctors in a trendy neighbourhood claimed incomes of less than $40,000, while a quarter claimed less than $13,000, and so were tax exempt.

It is an axiom of statism that compulsion and control must always expand, and the current bailout of Greece is an inevitable result of the long-term subsidization that has already occurred. S&P has already downgraded four Greek banks to junk status. Euro zone banks are holding about 75 billion Euros of Greek bonds (about $97.5 billion). French and German banks are holding about 34 and 20 billion Euros respectively, so a noticeable amount of their capital is at risk. A retreat of investors from the debt of Greece, Spain, and Portugal could lead to high interest rates, declining investment, and slow economic growth in Europe. This will affect countries, including the U.S., that export to Europe.

Greece’s dismal economic performance has in part occurred because it is already being bailed out by the EU, and has been for the past 11 years -- first because Greek bonds are priced relative to the economic strength of the EU as a whole, rather than its own basket-case economy, and second because the European Central Bank accepts Greek government bonds as collateral. European banks that buy Greek government bonds (paying higher interest than German bonds, because of the additional risk) use these Greek bonds to obtain a loan from the European Central Bank at 1% interest.

Without a doubt, and with no possible alternatives, the EU is doomed, and Greece is just the start of the avalanche. Since wages and social benefits constitute 75% of total (non-interest) public spending, the Greek government will attempt to stave off the inevitable by targeting public wages and pension bills. Daniel Gros, an eminent EU economist, argues that for each 1% of GDP decline in Greek government spending, total demand in the country collapses by 2.5%. If the government reduces spending by 15% of GDP — the initial shock to demand could be well over 30% of GDP. These sorts of transitions from public to private employment can work in a low tax, low regulation environment -- think of the millions of soldiers returning from the Second World War -- but the Greek economy is crippled by suffocating state controls and crushing taxation.

Firing government workers provokes violent, expensive and destructive conflicts, raises short-term costs for severance packages and legal battles, and the resulting unemployment destroys income tax receipts, and raises welfare and retraining costs.

What is rarely mentioned is the basic economic reality that every EU nation is currently running enormous deficits, carries catastrophic debt levels, and so has no actual money to give to Greece. Germany remains the strongest European economy, but German voters, already weary from decades of bailing out Eastern Germany, will find themselves hard pressed to muster the motivation to cut back on bratwurst in order to pay for the sundrenched retirements of Greek public servants. England is beyond useless, since its own budget deficit is poised to surpass Greece’s as the worst in the European Union.

The entire European Economic Union is a house of cards, with governments all loaning money to each other in order to hide their true deficits from potential bond purchasers. Bailing out Greece with imaginary fiat currency is not a solution to a problem, but only a brief respite, designed so that those at the top of the political class can finish their looting before escaping the collapse.

This is not rocket science. Debt to get out of debt is just kicking the can down the road. Does anybody seriously believe the Greeks are going to scrimp and save and work to pay more taxes? This is not a bailout of Greece; it is a bailout of Greece's creditors. The Greek people have no stake in this bailout.

The US is fundamentally no better off. School boards, municipalities, and states are billions in debt. At the top of the heap, the Fed is flat out monetizing debt and even then, month after month, the Treasury is stuck with billions in unsold tenders.

There is simply too much sovereign debt for the markets to soak up at the current rate of interest. So ...

1) interest rates must be allowed to rise in order to attract bidders, or

2) the world's central banks must inflate to absorb the debt at below-market prices.

Option 1 means a classic bust (another one), as credit is choked off and the economy heads down a deflationary spiral. Option 2 means ruinous inflation and large sectors of the economy going underground to escape confiscatory taxation and a depreciating dollar.

Either way, this sucker is going down.

Dirty, dangerous jobs Americans won't do

2010-04-24T13:33:00.006-04:00

We are frequently told that we need millions of immigrants because Americans won't do dirty, dangerous work. Has anybody who ever wrote this phrase done any research to confirm its accuracy?

Oil rig explodes off the Louisiana coast.

Seattle-based fishing vessel goes down in the Bering Sea.

West Virginia coal miners discuss their profession.

Perhaps the trope should be changed to "dirty, dangerous jobs effete journalists won't do." Then we could just tally up the number of effete journalists and make that our annual immigration quota.

The Grand Old Plutocrats

2010-04-21T20:26:00.003-04:00

The Republicans ride to the defense of Goldman Sachs, via Vox Popoli.

In a just world, Goldman Sachs would be floating belly-up in bankruptcy court.

Actually, in a just world, Goldman Sachs' facilities would be razed to the ground and its principals thrown into the street as their houses are pillaged, in front of their weeping families and mistresses.

Pat Buchanan is impolite

2010-04-21T19:27:00.007-04:00

Mr. Buchanan lays out an uncomfortable hypothesis in his column today.

New Tribe Rising?

“Is white the new black?”

So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of Beyond the Pale, his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing “the slow birth of a people.”

Sanneh is onto something. For after a year of battering as “un-American,” “evil-doers” and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as “the real Americans,” Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.

Ethnonationalism—the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart—is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.

Ethnonationalism is the preeminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his “Disuniting of America,” Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.

It has happened before—and here.

In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama.

In 1754, the 13 colonies consisted of South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king.

But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act and the Quebec Act, by 1775 a new people had been born: the Americans.

“While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.”

In 1770, New York colonists had erected a statue of George III in Bowling Green in grateful tribute for his repeal of the Townshend taxes. In July 1776, they pulled it down and melted it for lead bullets after Washington read his soldiers the Declaration of Independence portraying George III as another Ivan the Terrible.

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.

Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other...[Continued at link]

The Left, with its refrain of collective white guilt may yet see some unintended consequences of their agenda. As Buchanan implies, 'white American' is not a distinctive ethnicity. But so far as I know, when it comes to affirmative action and Title VII no distinctions are being drawn for the Irish, Greeks, Italians, Slavs and others who have come to the US, prospered and assimilated (the polite term for ethnic out-marriage). Canada further subdivides its citizens with the epithet of visible minority. All of this is to say that, if there wasn't a logically coherent and distinct group known as 'white America' before, there will be shortly.

When one ethnic group insists that another ethnic group owes them for ancestral grievances, then doubtless some or most members of the target group will object, and conclude that, as individuals, they don't stand a chance against the collective assault. A predictable response is for them to embrace a group interest against the forcible transfer of their wealth.

These are the awful social forces that are unleashed when the government dabbles in social engineering and redistributive justice. A society with a 'night watchman' government, that is, a government limited solely to the protection of property rights, would not have these kinds of problems. People would intermingle or not as they wished. The democratic State's heavy handed regulations take away the safe harbors that make a multicultural society possible.

Endgame

2010-04-13T09:52:00.003-04:00

Via Ad Orientem

Interest Rates Have Nowhere To Go But Up

... Last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note briefly crossed the psychologically important threshold of 4 percent, as the Treasury auctioned off $82 billion in new debt. That is nearly twice as much as the government paid in the fall of 2008, when investors sought out ultrasafe assets like Treasury securities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the credit crisis.

Though still very low by historical standards, the rise of bond yields since then is reversing a decline that began in 1981, when 10-year note yields reached nearly 16 percent.

From that peak, steadily dropping interest rates have fed a three-decade lending boom, during which American consumers borrowed more and more but managed to hold down the portion of their income devoted to paying off loans.

Indeed, total household debt is now nine times what it was in 1981 — rising twice as fast as disposable income over the same period — yet the portion of disposable income that goes toward covering that debt has budged only slightly, increasing to 12.6 percent from 10.7 percent.

Household debt has been dropping for the last two years as recession-battered consumers cut back on borrowing, but at $13.5 trillion, it still exceeds disposable income by $2.5 trillion ...

As interest rates rise, the economic activity enabled by artificially cheap credit ceases. The central bank's 'boom' is inevitably followed by the 'bust.' Malinvestments are liquidated, asset prices fall to realistic levels, and prices again reflect supply and demand rather than the false signals of the Fed's and the Treasury's monetary games. This is bitter medicine we have avoided for a long time, so the correction will be that much more difficult. Americans are still in way too much debt, and the exotic vacations, McMansions, and SUV's must go. But anecdotally, I see a lot of over-extended people still in firm denial of reality.

So, with ever more debt sloshing around the market, we can no longer deny economic reality and interest rates must go up. Bernanke is out of tricks and the correction will happen, and there is nothing that the Fed's Ivy League economists in their marble palaces can do about it.

Incidentally, alot of that high-powered money injected in the waning days of the Bush administration went into sovereign and municipal debt. That is the next bubble in line to be burst. (Again, HT to Ad Orientem).

There are now so many false signals and externalities built into the US financial sector that it is impossible to determine what any asset's 'real' value is. People are still grimly shoveling money into their 401k's and hoping the fund managers in their tailored suits and German cars will shepherd all those billions in OPM as prudentially as they would their own. (Right? Right?). For myself it's humble gold and silver coin, and I really couldn't care less about all the 'sure things,' or 'next big things' touted by anybody's brother-in-law's cousin's friend, much less the biz school grad twenty years my junior at the Fidelity branch. Americans are about to get disabused of the notion that they can get rich owning itty-bitty bits of gigantic funds that own percentages of derivatives of securities issued by multi-national corporations. Who are all those Late and Early Boomers going to sell those 401k shares to, each other? What's the real rate of return going to be on that money after inflation and the deferred taxation on fund withdrawals?

If England Had Remained Catholic

2010-04-08T23:19:00.006-04:00

Public veneration, processions, true feast days, and all the rest.

... Piety is here taken as both negative and primitive, but in Catholic cultures it has an earthy wisdom to it, as Lady Antonia Fraser, the historian and biographer of several of the key Reformation figures, explained to me: "I put my mind back to what I loved about the Catholic Church as a 14-year-old convert, and in fact it's what I still love about it more than 60 years later: it was the religious use of the seasons, the acknowledgement and celebration of the seasons of the year via the feasts of the Church including the penitential seasons. So I still date my letters with such things as ‘22 November, Feast of St Cecilia', which of course celebrates music, to say nothing of Candlemas, just past, which was originally the feast of the lambs, transformed by the Church. So in a Catholic England we would still have all this holy roistering."

But perhaps conjuring up a picture of a still-Catholic England doesn't only have to be a labour of imagination or the result of a trip to out-of-the-way places such as Walsingham. Last year a reliquary containing the bones of the 19th-century Catholic saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, came to these shores. Public veneration of relics, while still commonplace in Catholic Europe, hasn't been seen on any scale in Britain for 500 years. Yet more than 300,000 people queued up to stand in front of the elaborate wooden box (some of Thérèse's bones are on view in Lisieux, but the reliquary was sealed) and many were visibly moved by the experience.

That visceral dimension to Catholic culture was also on display at the National Gallery in London at the start of the year in The Sacred Made Real, an exhibition of extreme Spanish religious art. It is hard to imagine it even being staged 20 years ago, but numbers attending the show exceeded all expectations. A British taste for the trappings of Catholicism that has lain dormant for five centuries may just be reawakening.

The same point, of course, was made in 1997 following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when public grief was unrestrained. In its aftermath, the hard shoulders of British highways now boast plenty of the sort of roadside monuments to those killed in car accidents that have long been a feature of Italian autostradas and Spanish mountain passes. Like Walsingham, they could be seen as prompts to reconsider one of the great "what ifs" of our history.

The Anglophile world truly cries out for the orthodox and catholic Faith.

Obamacare

2010-03-31T22:53:00.006-04:00

In typically American fashion, we will be getting the worst of public and private medicine. The progressives are not getting their cherished socialized health care; they are getting socialized health insurance. There is nothing for any principled person of whatever ideological persuasion to support in our government's latest Great Leap Forward.

Bill Sardi at LewRockwell.com puts 'health insurance' (there's actually no such thing) in perspective.

1. All health insurance plans promote irresponsibility. People just run to the doctor and believe their doctor is responsible for keeping them healthy, not themselves.

2. Health insurance is a ponzi scheme, with the young and healthy paying for the old and chronically ill and those with poor health habits, though I should add that smokers actually cost insurance plans less money over the long haul since they die sooner.

3. With a large pool of money available, the insurance pot gets raided and doctors and hospitals overcharge since there is no market control. There is nothing the plan won't pay for, no matter how expensive, because the desperate public will demand it. You learn your mother has breast cancer. You will stop at nothing to see she gets the most advanced care, and the more her disease progresses, the more you will demand something be done, even unproven treatment.

4. High-tech care caused Americans to falsely believe their healthcare system is the best in the world, and they want more of it. Fancy imaging technology (cat scans, MRIs), unproven but less invasive particle beam radiation treatment, robotic surgery – all are in huge public demand. A Rand Corporation study showed high-technology is the main driver in the high cost of health care.

We are living a fantasy to believe American government can provide all the high-tech medical care that is available (example: latest New York Times article suggests $5000 disease gene testing for all).

5. About 85% of Americans have health insurance. To provide insurance to the remaining population, largely illegal immigrants, places financial and manpower strains on the delivery of health care that the industry is not prepared for. It was Winston Churchill who said: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."

6. Because other countries provide universal health insurance is only to say the bills are paid. This represents provision (welfare) for doctors and hospitals. The system rewards treatment, not cure. Modern medicine has substituted markers of poor health, such as cholesterol, PSA, blood pressure, rather than true end points, such as survival or being drug free.

While many Americans envy countries that offer universal health care, most universal health care plans will soon fail. The National Health Service in Britain is about to implode.

The day is fast coming when health insurance schemes collapse and self care becomes the order of the day. But many Americans aren’t ready for this.

Certainly many Americans are angry at the passage of Obamacare. But a man I met at a Postal Annex store said he needed the insurance coverage and welcomed it, as he has problems with his joints and diabetes. He wanted the medicines that only the insured can afford.

However, Obamacare, or even the pre-existing healthcare system, would not make him any healthier. But this man, along with many other Americans, has no perception of this.

Drugs will be prescribed for him that calm symptoms but never restore health and in fact may create new diseases. Some drugs cause the very disease they are intended to treat.

Obamacare pays more doctor and hospital bills, but it will also increase utilization and overall costs and it burdens the economy with higher health insurance premiums. AT&T reports Obamacare will cost them an extra $1 billion a year. For the 85% of Americans who were already covered by health insurance, Obamacare is a step down in availability of care. But recognize, the system is collapsing and unaffordable regardless of the insurance scheme in place.

Continued at link.

Hipster libertarianism

2010-03-29T22:30:00.008-04:00

In a recent essay, occasional LRC columnist C.J. Maloney praises the AK-47 as the Automatic For The People. Yeah, baby!

So next May Day, assuming you remember it at all, take a moment to honor the memory of the millions slaughtered over the lethally stupid idea of communism, but give a nod to God’s great mercy, to His mysterious way that willed that very same idea to birth the AK-47. It gave to the working masses the ability to defend themselves from the more virulent strain of politicians; it is the sword of the common man. Of all the firearms yet dreamed up by mankind, it is the automatic for the people.

But don't go calling Homeland Security, folks. This denizen of New York City, the most highly taxed, highly regulated municipality in the country assures us today that Americans are way too feeble and stupefied to engage in armed rebellion.

Today, give me liberty or give me death no longer rings true, the typical American is content to put up with any outrage because he’s so ideologically stripped as to no longer have any idea he should be outraged. Harboring a completely materialistic view of politics that equates material comfort with freedom, he’ll bear any assault on liberty with timid submission so long as the hi-def cable stays on. The intellectuals fare no better in this regard, as they are the very ones who spread the ideas that made hi-def cable more important to us than trial by jury.

In the event of rebellion, the American people would lack any leadership with the ability, or even the urge, to guide them back to liberty. Even if the occasional outrage morphs into a tea party, the vast majority of Americans, lead by the intellectuals, take most assaults with quiet approval, and for now I thank God for it. To go to war is something even the most ignorant savage does with relish; but to start a revolution requires the ability for calm, rational thought and a manly courage to risk it all that does not currently exist in this country. Where once our forefathers shot at government troops marching through the Massachusetts countryside towards Lexington and Concord, today we are a frightened little flock that goes to pieces at the thought of Goldman Sachs suffering a well-deserved bankruptcy. 2010 America does not possess what successful revolutions are made of.

Now, you would think this ball-busting, revolutionary giant of a man would go on to describe what short work he would make of the government. But not to fear, for Maloney pulls himself back from the brink:

So, thank you all who sent me a kind invitation to share a mess kit and a fight, but when you Thomas Jefferson wannabes grab your AK-47s, pull on your surplus camouflage uniforms, and go rushing off into the mountains please count me out and don’t wait up. I’ll be watching the slaughter from afar, Barcelona perhaps, Amsterdam more likely, and doubtless I’ll wish good luck and God speed to you all.

As of right now this country is simply not prepared for secession, civic disobedience, or rebellion; and under the current regime they all would be considered the same in the eyes of the ruling elite. Any move in that direction would be setting you up for a hopeless task; to free a people that neither wish for liberty or could handle it if won.

Read the op-ed pages and editorials of any newspaper, glance at the comments section to any Internet news site, and listen to the interviewed "man on the street," read our intellectuals’ monthly journals and agree; modern America is too uncivilized and savage for freedom.

If you wish for a change back to liberty, forget your rifle – grab your pen.

Apparently the plan now is to give the bureaucrats the mother of all ink stains. This is the sort of stuff that convinces me most libertarians are useless as agents of change. For the most part, they are cossetted individuals far more concerned with maintaining their hipster lifestyle than the dirty work of abolishing the State. And when I say 'dirty work,' I mean shouldering a firearm and presenting as credible a threat to parasitic government as it presents to us.

Now, I should acknowledge that many of us like Maloney and other Gothamites not privy to fully vested trust funds would take quite a hit if one day the people decide that they Have Had Enough. I don't see lawyers such as myself, for example, having much marketability in organic society. Fortunately for him, as Maloney himself tells us, he will have long since turned tail and run to high-tax, high-regulation, high-subsidized, politically-correct Amsterdam or Barcelona. Solidarnosc, brother.

How to run an NFL team

2010-03-09T09:40:00.003-05:00

Falcons welcome Robinson, ship Houston to Lions

... "This is something I've always dreamed about growing up in Athens, Ga.," Robinson said. "This was the first professional team that I wanted to play for. I'm home. This is where I need to be. Here is where I'm most comfortable."

Blank, general manager Thomas Dimitroff and coach Mike Smith (FSY) courted Turner in similar fashion before he signed a six-year, $34.5 million deal with $15 million guaranteed in early March 2009.

"We want to create an environment where a player really wants to be here, not because of the contract, but because ... of our culture, our coaching staff and the resources we make available," Blank said. "It's a credit to our organization that whom we would argue was the top cornerback available this year in free agency made only one stop."

Several years ago, I heard a Falcons player interviewed on local sports-talk. The hosts were asking in goggle-eyed, frat-boy amazement why he had a home way out in the suburbs instead of in town with the clubs, the scene, a posse, etc. His response was he didn't need the temptation because, "Mr. Blank doesn't put up with it."

Rebuke from Fr. Touma

2010-03-09T08:19:00.002-05:00

From Notes on Arab Orthodoxy

Archimandrite Touma (Bitar) on Nationalism and Orthodoxy

... Likewise it shames us that the Church in America becomes a group of branches for the national churches in the Old World. The national Orthodox churches have become in some American cities something closer to ecclesial or even political embassies for their mother churches or for the countries that they are in! Do you not see that it is not true Orthodoxy that gathers us together in America, but rather egoistic nationalisms within pagan tribes?! We understand that in some churches services are held in national languages for recent immigrants, but what about those who have been in America for fifty or more years?! Do we not see that hearts are not united and hands are not joined together in the service of God and that goals are not coordinated in order to witness to Orthodoxy and that no one pays attention to proper Orthodox churchliness? Every man for himself! Do we not see the churches being exploited for tribal or political or economic ends?! Why is there one church for the Antiochians (that is, Lebanese and Syrians and Palestinians), and another for the Greeks and another for the Russians and another for the Romanians, all only a few minutes away from each other?! Why can we not join together in worship and love and frequent teaching, since we are all within one Orthodoxy and one earth and one language?! Why can we not cooperate to preach Orthodoxy within a milieu that is hungry for it?! Why this fragmentation? Why this distance between hearts?! Is it too much to ask for Orthodoxy to be our sole umbrella, rather than nationalisms and tribalisms?! Vain, ingrained nationalisms in the American churches are not from God—they are against God! They are the causes of schism and weakness and despair and scandal for the Church of Christ, especially for the youth, the newly-illumined, and those being guided to Orthodoxy! Nationalisms, in all their forms, must be combated in every possible way in America so that the Church remains the bride of Christ alone! Orthodoxy of Spirit and Truth never aligns itself with nationalism! Either we lead every thought towards obedience to Christ or Orthodox nationalisms will entrench the worldly church in this world and we will cease to exist as a Universal Church!

The forces in American Orthodoxy are increasingly centrifugal, a horrible witness, and in the face of a crumbling Protestantism. Truly, "the laborers are few."

This Lebanese abbot has spoken on the American situation before, and on the Antiochian archdiocese in particular. It would be interesting if he succeeded to the Patriarchate, if God wills it.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

2010-02-16T22:07:00.005-05:00

Like this guy:

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The UK Daily Mail, via LewRockwell.com

Government Motors

2010-02-16T21:43:00.004-05:00

U.S. Safety agency seeks documents on Toyota recalls

The document request, which is considered rare for NHTSA, could lead to a civil fine of up to $16.4 million if Toyota is found to have violated regulations. The last major fine of an automaker involved General Motors paying a $1 million penalty in a windshield wiper recall in 2004, according to government safety regulators.

Next week, Toyota and NHTSA officials are expected to go before congressional leaders for hearings on the recalls. Some lawmakers have questioned how quickly Toyota and safety regulators reacted to problems in vehicles and allegations that 34 deaths occurred in connection with Toyota sudden-acceleration problems.

Unmentioned by the Washington Post is the fact that the U.S. government is a GM shareholder and direct competitor with Toyota, and will use such methods to hamstring competitors as are at its disposal.

The auto industry has seen its share of "sudden acceleration" claims. The incidents often result from operator error. The Toyotas may have an actual mechanical flaw, but I haven't seen any reporting on what the defect actually is.

David Stockman comes in from the cold

2010-02-11T08:55:00.003-05:00

Great stuff from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan.

How Politics Caused Fiscal Disaster, from minyanville.com.

My proposition today is that we’re in a fiscal calamity caused by the further, and perhaps, final triumph of politics. Admittedly, I issued this very same forecast awhile back -- 23 years ago to be exact. But I’m not reluctant to try again. Having read Grant’s continuously since 1988, I’ve learned there’s no shame whatsoever in being early -- even often!

The Triumph of Politics was published early, mainly in the unflattering sense that I’d not completed my homework. I was hip to statist fiscal and regulatory evils, but had only dimly grasped the Austrian masters’ wisdom on money; that is, in printing money backed by nothing, central banks inherently threaten prosperity. So today I’ll add the proposition that fiscal decay is the inevitable step-child of the very monetary rot that the Austrians -- Mises, Hayek, Rothbard -- so deplored.

...

The “panic of 2008," therefore, wasn't a random policy error, nor was it caused by the machinations of overly-bonused bankers. In fact, the massive quantities of unsupportable debt and the vast malinvestments in housing, banking, shopping malls, office buildings, and Pilates studios, too, which came crashing down last September, were rooted in history’s other star-crossed rail car. That was the gilded club car which in November 1910, had secretly whisked away Senator Nelson Aldrich and his coterie of Morgan, Rockefeller and Kuhn Loeb bankers to a duck-hunting blind on Jekyll Island, Georgia.

The truth is, the monster that was hatched there -- the Federal Reserve System -- has always been an instrument of politics; that is, the politics of the speculative classes, whether domiciled on Wall Street, Main Street, or the Agrarian plains. Let the political chatter get fevered enough about unfairly “low” prices for goods, grains, or labor and there's invariably been a new theory and willing maestro at the Fed to print-up some easy credit.My thesis today is that monetary rot underpins fiscal decay, but that’s not to gainsay the complicity of Capitol Hill and the White House in the march to budgetary ruin -- particularly the complicity of the type of Republican Whiggery which emerged after the 2000 election.

The truth is, just as the Great East Asian Deflation called for monetary hardening, not ease, it also warranted a large increase in national savings -- including public sector surpluses. But by then there had been assembled in Karl Rove’s political assault camp, a coalition of the neo-cons, the social-cons, the tax-cons and the just-cons. None of them gave two hoots about real fiscal discipline.

The neo-cons postured as big-time thinkers, articulating a lofty policy case for an American Imperium. But unlike real imperialists, the neo-cons had nothing to say about the crucial issue of war finance.

Indeed, since DOD couldn’t seem to keep a pipeline open in the planet’s second richest oil province, the neo-cons couldn't even fallback on the imperialist’s traditional gambit of looting the colonies. Obviously, the real answer was a war tax -- especially since the war at issue was an elective. But that idea was anathema in Karl Rove’s assault camp, so the neo-cons simply ignored the fiscal consequence of the multi-hundred billion annual drain on the treasury their policies entailed. War finance, it seems, was relegated to the GOP’s all-purpose folklore -- the myth that lower taxes and more growth would cover any fiscal hole.

The tax cons, for their part, did not even think about fiscal policy; they issued Papal Edicts. Consequently, a kernel of truth -- the notion that lower marginal tax rates are economically beneficial -- became ensnared in a body of debatable doctrine, even outright claptrap.

Foremost among the latter is the alleged absence of a correlation between deficits and either interest rates or real growth. Fine. If that’s the test, let’s abolish taxes completely and put the Federal government on a regimen of 100% bond finance.

Likewise, the tax-cons have shamelessly misapplied evidence that a lower capital gains rate did generate higher revenue. True, these cuts sped the realization of gains already extant, but that has nothing to do with the revenue impact from lowering or raising rates on 95% of what we actually tax; that is, accrued payrolls and earned income.

Not technical quibbles, these points highlight the folly of elevating tax-cutting to the status of religious writ. Indeed, unwilling to cut spending by so much as a single veto in eight years, the Bush Administration needed to get revenue raising on the table as a matter of pure math. But the tax-cons, having totally befuddled what passes for GOP fiscal thinking, were able to drive the herd in just the opposite direction, slashing Federal revenues twice more during the Bush fiscal debauch. The profound financial danger, therefore, is that there's no longer in the United States a conservative fiscal opposition even worthy of the name.

Moreover, this fiscally perilous condition continues to be exacerbated by the tattered remnants of Karl Rove’s political assault camp. The social-cons, relentless as ever in their bible-thumping and immigrant-bashing, help to elect real socialists, as often as not. And the just-cons continue to turn fiscal responsibility into a bad joke. Last election, 85% of the American people were against the abomination called TARP. But on that central issue, the Republican standard bearer went radio silent while chattering endlessly about appropriations earmarks. But taken together, those 8,000 earmarks add-up to just 15 hours of annual Federal spending. The needless bailout of Wall Street engineered by Bubbles and the Henry "Hammer" Paulson, by contrast, destroyed forever any residual will to control spending that remained on Capitol Hill.

So basically, this thing won't end until it ends. The US government's bonds continue to be sold at an artificial discount, as the Fed outright monetizes the debt and shell-shocked banks loan to the federal government rather than the private sector. Eventually, the twin trade and fiscal deficits will be unsustainable at current rates of interest. The economic activity (such as it is) from the bailout and stimulus will be liquidated in its turn, and Bernanke's bag of tricks will be empty.

Has feminism run its course?

2010-02-09T23:01:00.003-05:00

From the Weekly Standard, via iSteve.

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

In mandating equality of outcome for women with respect to men, the welfare state and Title VII eliminate the socio-economic justification for marriage, which is really just a social contract to ensure that men take care of children and the women by whom they sire them. Without the specter of destitution, women can indulge their sexual impulses--female prudery is a myth, by the way--in hopes of eventually landing the Big One, as in the pathetically fanciful Pretty Woman. (The male equivalent, also starring Julia Roberts, is Notting Hill.) Of course, as the author of this essay notes, there are only so many alpha males and females to go around. The end result is a race to the bottom for women seeking to outbid each other for the affections of alpha men.

The strict 'alpha-beta' dichotomy is a little too crude for what is really a complex hierarchy. Generally speaking, all but the most dysfunctional men can become proud and independent at some level, and will pragmatically settle on somebody, and can draw on millenia of collective experience in doing so. Women, by contrast, are very new to this game.

Of course he couldn't ...

2010-02-03T22:37:00.005-05:00

... keep his twitchy, social-engineering fingers off the military, that is.

Christopher Roach blogs about Obama's repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'

The new policy will allow open service by gays. This will be a big change, but, more important, this will usher in a whole host of related and very negative changes. Judging by the umpteenth sexual harassment seminar our forces endure on a biweekly basis, open service will probably lead to demands for changing the military’s “homophobic” culture through indoctrination of one kind or another. Those uncomfortable will leave. They will be ostracized and eventually punished for the very cultural conservatism that leads them to join the military. Those who remain will be those who lack the courage of their convictions, if they have any convictions at all.

I love the phrase coined by Lew Rockwell (a socially conservative anarchist): 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' will become a policy of 'Never Shut Up.'

Mr. Roach is entirely correct. The social conservatives who make up the bulk of troops doing the actual fighting will stop enlisting. Why risk life and limb for an elite who despise your values?

Who will defend the Empire now? It's going to be affirmative action generals, female helicopter pilots, and aesthetic-obsessed gays versus the young, straight men who will join sheriff's departments, splinter groups, or do their four years and go the merc route. In any fight, my money's on the latter group.

Invite the world, invade the world

2010-01-04T20:27:00.003-05:00

A brief reflection from Steve Sailer on Yemen.

Government solutions are guaranteed to be uneconomic. The private sector equivalent would be the consultant who negotiates a retainer of $5,000 a month until the problem is solved. More to the point, the US government intervenes in the disputes of foreign tribes, invites the protagonists from both sides here, and 'solves' the resulting conflict by erecting a vast, welfare-warfare apparatus which perpetuates what it was intended to address.

Americans also need to acquire some perspective on terrorism. In the first place, terrorism is a comparative drop in the bucket of pathologies inflicting harm on US society. Terrorists are criminals, not the Mongol horde (for the time being). In the second place, if we are going to be an empire then terrorism is a cost of doing business--don't like it, don't practice empire.

Speaking of empire, it occurs to me that the elites' Open Society is just window dressing for domestic imperialism. Previously, the elites sallied forth to exploit the labor and resources of Third Worlders in their homelands. Now, with the elites' homegrown welfare/funny money schemes running short on tax fodder, they just import Third Worlders here.

A bad month for the conventional wisdom

2009-12-02T19:42:00.005-05:00

First, anthropogenic global warming gets exposed as an agenda-driven scam.

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation.

Then, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis gets kicked in the teeth.

The discoverer of HIV speaks out.

The takeaway from all this is that layer by layer, via science departments concerned more with 'diversity' than merit, government grants, and other externalities, a meritocratic society is being dismantled and replaced with a who-you-know-not-what-you-know one. High IQ individuals will be diverted towards chasing fashionable chimeras while real, tangible problems like superbugs, metastatic cancer, and rising levels of ambient mercury are ignored.

UPDATE: A detailed summary of the leaked "Climategate" data appears here.

Decline and fall of the State, continued

2009-11-23T22:55:00.003-05:00

The State is running out of real criminals to prosecute.

Facebook friend turns into Big Brother

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer has nearly 400 friends on Facebook. He got an offer for a new one about a month ago. “She was a good-looking girl. I usually don’t accept friends I don’t know, but I randomly accepted this one for some reason,” the 19-year-old said.

He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking.

The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies. But he did plead no contest in municipal court Wednesday and will pay a $227 fine.

He was among at least eight people who said Wednesday they had been cited for underage drinking based on photos on social networking sites.

Pat Buchanan's very good question

2009-11-18T22:31:00.003-05:00

Is America Serious?, from TakiMag.com.

Are we at war—or not?

For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?

Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies—that he may not be guilty.

And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

Whether one believes Khalid is guilty as sin or pure as the driven snow, the trial is a mockery: procedure for the sake of procedure. If Khalid is guilty, he is a non-citizen enemy of the American state and should be shot just as Wehrmacht and Imperial Japanese soldiers in World War 2 were summarily shot. Pretermitting the question of his actual innocence, if he really is entitled to due process protections, then his treatment to date mandates that he be set free at once.

Americans have a strange, impractical faith in 'process.' How, for example, would Americans rid themselves of dictators like the Ceausescus? The obvious answer is to drag them out of their luxurious chambers and shoot them in the courtyard, not put on an elaborate trial to enrich and employ lawyers and bureaucrats (the outcome of which, by the way, is as predetermined as any drumhead court-martial).

Americans like to think that they have a revolutionary creed, but in fact, their own Revolution was just a power struggle between the American States and the British State. America has no real tradition of popular overthrow of the government; its one populist secession movement, the War Between The States, was crushed by the federal Union. The American people identify wholly with the US government, and a document which is nothing more than the government's corporate charter, the US Constitution, takes on almost Biblical stature. Thus, even the most ruthless enemies of the American nation are deemed entitled to scrupulous Constitutional protections. This is not noble; it is ludicrous, and suicidal.

Decline and fall of the State, continued

2009-11-16T19:04:00.003-05:00

Plea for UN Troops in Mexico

Mexican business leaders have appealed to the United Nations to deploy peacekeepers just metres from the US border to help stem the rampant violence of the country's drug cartels.

The request from business groups in the border city of Juarez raises the prospect of blue-helmeted UN soldiers patrolling the US border.

It follows the failure of more than 8500 Mexican soldiers and special forces police to bring the bloodshed under control.

Ciudad Juarez, separated from the Texan city of El Paso by a short bridge over the Rio Grande, is the centre of Mexico's drug cartel turf wars and has one of the highest murder rates in the world...

More than 8500 Mexican troops have been sent into the city since February in an operation that had initial success. The troops are still patrolling the city and training police recruits. But the violence has returned and almost 2000 people have been killed this year, the bodies of torture victims often dumped in the streets, in a city of 1.5 million people.

A decent hypothesis would be that the Mexican federal troops have been infiltrated, bribed, or had their identities compromised.

The American elite are willfully ignorant of Mexico, preferring to focus on the macro effects of cheap labor while not thinking too long or too hard on the question of why not even Mexicans want to live there. If Barack Obama and his Cabinet members had any sense, they would be shifting National Guard troops to the Mexican border to contain the coming anarchy rather than deploying them 6,000 miles away to protect lackey regimes.

But they don't, so they won't.

Schools are prisons

2009-11-12T22:42:00.003-05:00

Of course they are, via LewRockwell.com.

They have wardens, guards, trusties, gangs, inmates, and coerced attendance. Just like actual prisons.

Of course, this psychologist's happy vision of 'play-learning' and educational co-ops would likely vanish in the face of a more hard-edged reality of vocational apprenticeships and struggling family businesses.

Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?

2009-11-12T20:54:00.005-05:00

Maybe, according to some sports physiologists.

The helmet, and padding in general, sets off an interesting 'arms race' among athletes, much like evolutionary selection pressures generate astonishingly potent snake venom on the one hand, and equally astonishing prey resistance to reptilian toxins on the other. Encasing an athlete in foam and acrylic and putting a steel cage in front of his face changes football from a contact sport to a collision sport, and the result is we have traded separated shoulders for brain injury.

I remember the standard techniques from high school football: head-up, and lead with the face. Removing all that armor would lead to some highly refined shoulder tackling in no time, same as if everyone was forced to drive from the hood of their car.

I recall two instances from high school football. In one, I got up from a blocking drill against someone twice my weight seeing a green tint to everything. In another game situation, I got double-teamed on an offensive sweep and had a lovely mild concussion. Football games are pretty interesting when you've had all sense of time and tactile sensation knocked out of you.

On the other end, I was in a practice scrimmage against another school at safety. The linebackers spun the running back around, and I stuck my helmet right in his back. He went down in a heap, and I'm sure he had a cracked vertebra.

Rugby in college, lots of musculo-skeletal strain, but no closed head injuries, although it's still a pretty violent sport.

World gold supply runs out

2009-11-12T20:25:00.003-05:00

Hyperbolic, actually, but it does appear that at current prices, all the marketable gold is above ground.

From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph UK.

The point to take from this is that the net exporting nations are hedging heavily against the dollar.

We're doomed

2009-11-09T08:11:00.001-05:00

From the Anglican Curmudgeon

Anglican Curmudgeon: Putting It All Together. Some thoughts on this later.

Obama declares no thinking allowed in wake of Fort Hood massacre

2009-11-07T11:03:00.004-05:00

Obama says don't jump to conclusions

That's right, folks. I mean, let's not be hasty here. This had nothing to do with Major Hasan being a member of a demographic cohort that we have declared our intractable enemy. And don't dare question why we choose sides in overseas conflicts, then invite the protagonists from both sides here. Above all, let's not dwell on the facts that an Arab Muslim who badgered his combat veteran patients, denounced the US campaign against Arab Muslims, made what are euphemistically being called 'radical' postings on the internet, was given every opportunity to remain in the military.

Glorious multiculturalism

2009-11-06T22:09:00.005-05:00

An Arab Muslim who argued passionately against the US's overseas campaign of terror against Arab Muslims is told of his pending deployment in support of this campaign. Then he goes on a shooting rampage. "Military, families left to wonder why," agonizes MSNBC.

You can either invade the world or you can invite the world. You can't do both. The level of cognitive dissonance in public commentary is just astounding.

More from Steve Sailer

2009-11-04T21:17:00.003-05:00

"Man Men," at TakiMag.com

Sailer reviews the popular 'Mad Men,' and weighs whether the show's producer, Matthew Weiner, is a reactionary subversive. He ultimately and unfortunately concludes Weiner is not, and makes some great social commentary along the way.

... Weiner maintains plausible deniability in Mad Men by methodically depicting how unenlightened the upper-middle class WASPs of a half century ago were. We in the audience are scandalized to note, for example, that even the most respectable parents in 1960 devoted more time to socializing with other adults than to obsessively overseeing their offspring’s next leap up the steep slope of the meritocratic pyramid.

Moreover, many families in 1960 can afford a home on just one income. As Betty Friedan noted, housewives are imprisoned in their suburban homes, escaping in Mad Men only, well … any time they feel like it.

Worse, firms pay married workers more than equally productive single ones, in violation of all the tenets of Friedan and Friedman. Employers back then felt they had a “duty to society,” a concept with which our advanced cultures are no longer familiar.

Even more shockingly, the employees at the Sterling Cooper ad agency knock off work right at 5:15 PM each day. They appear to have some weird Depression-era relic of a notion of solidarity among American workers: that if the bosses want more work done, they should hire more workers.

Didn’t they understand back then that cheap wages and expensive land are what made America great? ...

While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.)

The kicker to the joke is that Mad Men, despite being set in New York, is filmed in LA, where Latinos have been imported in vast numbers to fill the servant jobs that today’s upper-middle class whites no longer trust blacks with. Yet Hispanics are even more invisible to the Hollywood elite today than blacks were.

Steve gets in a jab at feminism as well.

Consider the interview in Variety in which Weiner is asked a standard question: “How much of the show’s take on gender roles is rooted in your own upbringing as someone born in 1965?” In response, he wanders around for 867 words trying to explain, without being so lucid that gets himself Larry Summersized, that he’s learned—the hard way—that feminism is flapdoodle. In his strained verbiage, though, there’s one cogent sentence that explains much of Mad Men’s appeal to contemporary women:

“What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”

Sailer also notes that Weiner is married with four sons, which leads to my observation that the personal lives of the elite often vary a good deal from the lifestyles they insist everyone must scrupulously tolerate. In fact, the liberal elite are often downright conservative (at least publicly) in their personal lives. This modern iteration of noblesse oblige wouldn't be so bad but for the fact that it's accompanied by shelves upon shelves of laws designed to smack down non-elites who lack the wealth to insulate themselves from the effects of progressivist social policy.

Good thread at iSteve

2009-11-02T21:44:00.007-05:00

Dog Smarts

Animals are a really awkward problem for the Left. The hippies cling to their Darwinist creed, until it leads to some rather impolite conclusions about the animal known as homo sapiens.

Canis lupus familiaris presents the Left with that conundrum in spades: a sub-species shaped for behavioral characteristics via artificial selection as deliberately as a man selects his occupation. And it gets worse from the Left's perspective, because apparently certain behavioral characteristics are associated with certain phenotypes as well.

About twelve years ago, under a unique set of circumstances, I visited a pit bull breeder who showed me his six-week whelps. The bitch and sire were both isolated behind eight feet of chicken wire. The whelps were on three feet leads staked six feet apart.

These people were breeders, not dog fighters. I was told, in a very matter of fact tone, that the dogs were bred for 'hot,' 'super-hot' and 'dynamite' levels of aggression. Their son demonstrated the object of the enterprise by taking two whelps off lead and rubbing their heads against each other. The pups responded not with play behavior as normally observed between littermates, but with predatory snarling and attempts to grip and tear. The whelps are staked at six-feet intervals so they won't slaughter each other.

Six week-old pups.

There goes my gig at the New York Times...

2009-11-01T22:53:00.005-05:00

... because I could never write about people like this in such a deferentially neutral tone (via TakiMag).

NY Times: Parental Lifelines, Frayed to Breaking

For the past five years, Ernie DiGiacomo has been able to count on parents to guarantee the $1,500 to $2,500 rents he charges for the 15 apartments he owns in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he called renters who had missed payments, he often heard, “My parents will send you a check.”

But in the past six months, the parents are pulling back financial help, he said, and as a result, he has watched more renters move out.

“Most of them are moving back with parents,” Mr. DiGiacomo said.

I mean, truly, the next Great Depression has hit:

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.

“They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”

Capping off this world record for density of idiots-mentioned-in-a-single-article, meet our intrepid local househunters:

Mr. Weinstein has been advising two brothers in their late 20s who wanted to buy a $700,000 apartment with $250,000 from their parents. But their parents’ investment portfolio has lost so much value that they now can give only $50,000. Since the brothers make about $45,000 a year each, they are now shopping for a $500,000 apartment.

The parents still wish they could help, Mr. Weinstein said, but “right now, they’re in a situation in their life where they need to ensure their own security.”

It is an adjustment that many have to deal with. Eric Gross, 26, a construction worker, was going to buy, with help from his father, a $600,000 one-bedroom condo with city views at Northside Piers, a luxury building, he said.

But his father, who works in the auto industry, said he had to reduce his contribution. “He’s pulling back the lifeline,” Mr. Gross said.

So Mr. Gross is scaling back, shopping for a $300,000 apartment, said his real estate agent, Binnie Robinson of AptsandLofts.com.

These children in their 20's and their parents are about to get a very loud wake-up call. Investment returns calculated in real dollars over the next decade will not support these foppish lifestyles.

Matthew Hoh's resignation letter

2009-10-31T09:02:00.006-04:00

A scan of the document is here (via the Ochlophobist). It is a very good letter, and reading between the lines, I suspect Mr. Hoh would have liked to say a lot more. The third page contains as frank an admission as you are likely to see by a US government official: Afghanistan is not really the problem; the root is a violent religious ideology with an established presence in the West.

Undergirding our continued presence in the Afghan money pit is the assumption, by both of what passes for 'the Left' and 'the Right' in this country, that inside every Pashtun and Tajik tribesmen is an occidental social democrat just waiting to get out. Thus, we shower Afghanistan with schools, voting booths and hospitals to treat all the natives we bomb, when the cold reality is Afghanistan will become a progressive democracy only when the US military is let off the leash to clear the place for American colonization. Afghanistan is Afghanistan because it's populated by Afghans, and you can substitute any country and peoples you like for that axiom.

The swipe at Mexico is rather breathtaking as well. Way, way under the radar of the LA/NYC/DC axis, the same dynamic is playing out: indigenous tribesmen are in open revolt against a corrupt, urban, US-backed elite. Unlike the Afghan conflict, this one will be coming home to us.

I wonder if Matthew Hoh has been reading William Lind?

The Return of the Great Depression

2009-10-29T20:16:00.004-04:00

A new book by Vox Day.

I don't know that I'd use the big 'D' word, but some things I think we are going to see revealed as 'new' truths:

1. Mortgages with a term over 15 years make no financial sense.
2. Mortgages for any amount over two to three (more like two) times annual income make no financial sense.
3. College, for the most part, makes no financial sense, nor do the loans that pay for it.
4. Car loans make no financial sense.
5. Renting, and boarding houses, are actually not a bad idea.
6. The projection of rates of return in real dollars for practically all 401k's is wildly overstated, and even more so after accounting for taxes on withdrawals.

There are others, but those are six that come readily to mind. There is a whole super-structure of economic activity that assumes we have way more discretionary income than we really do. A 'depression' is nothing less than the liquidation of the 'bubble' economy down to the level of the 'real' economy, that is, the economy that's actually supported by the pool of real savings.

More vaccine skepticism

2009-10-29T19:47:00.003-04:00

Via Karen DeCoster at LewRockwell.com:

Gardasil researcher drops a bombshell

Dr. Harper began her remarks by explaining that 70 percent of all HPV infections resolve themselves without treatment within a year. Within two years, the number climbs to 90 percent. Of the remaining 10 percent of HPV infections, only half will develop into cervical cancer, which leaves little need for the vaccine.

She went on to surprise the audience by stating that the incidence of cervical cancer in the U.S. is already so low that “even if we get the vaccine and continue PAP screening, we will not lower the rate of cervical cancer in the US.”

There will be no decrease in cervical cancer until at least 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, and even then, the decrease will be minimal.

Apparently, conventional treatment and preventative measures are already cutting the cervical cancer rate by four percent a year. At this rate, in 60 years, there will be a 91.4 percent decline just with current treatment. Even if 70 percent of women get the shot and required boosters over the same time period, which is highly unlikely, Harper says Gardasil still could not claim to do as much as traditional care is already doing.

Of course, this is only a "bombshell" to anyone who didn't wonder why a virus that most people's immune systems deal with quite adequately requires mass vaccination at all. It's also worrisome that the mere label of "women's health!" has become at least as galvanizing as "for the children!" in setting public policy. The government and politically correct establishment (cynically abetted by Big Business) issue these hysterical mandates, which are then swallowed whole by the mainstream press, without a single pause for any critical thinking.

Taibbi rocks the house

2009-10-24T11:02:00.004-04:00

Taibbi continues his great series deconstructing the 2008 financial bust. His latest, Wall Street's Naked Swindle, dissects the practice of naked short-selling and its role in the 2008 financial bust.

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."

Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. "I've seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000," says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. "But they did nothing to stop this."

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push — especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.

Most people are familiar with the practice of short selling, and of course, Taibbi explains it better than I can:

The basic premise of a normal short sale is easy to follow. Say you're a hedge-fund manager, and you want to bet against the stock of a company — let's call it Wounded Gazelle International (WGI). What you do is go out on the market and find someone — often a brokerage house like Goldman Sachs — who has shares in that stock and is willing to lend you some. So you go to Goldman on a Monday morning, and you borrow 1,000 shares in Wounded Gazelle, which that day happens to be trading at $10.

Now you take those 1,000 borrowed shares, and you sell them on the open market at $10, which leaves you with $10,000 in cash. You then take that $10,000, and you wait. A week later, surveillance tapes of Wounded's CEO having sex with a woodchuck in a Burger King bathroom appear on CNBC. Awash in scandal, the firm's share price tumbles to 3½. So you go out on the market and buy back those 1,000 shares of WGI — only now it costs you only $3,500 to do so. You then return the shares to Goldman Sachs, at which point your interest in WGI ends. By betting against or "shorting" the company, you've made a profit of $6,500.

Such a practice has a legitimate role in a free market, bringing bloated, over-valued companies to heel. What Taibbi goes after in this article is the practice of shorting shares you don't actually have, with the result that there are multiple claims to the same shares, and this enables all sorts of market manipulation that a fully-capitalized player would be unable to pull off. It's actually just like our current fractional reserve banking system, where the banks juggle an upside down pyramid of claims to the same bank assets, be they land holdings, mortgages or depositor dollars. Of course, as Taibbi acknowledges, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were rotten to the core with absurdly leveraged financial instruments. But what happened here was not the workings of a fully capitalized and transparent market.

By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like Bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs. Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we'll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked — and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.

This was a brokered bloodletting, one in which the power of the state was used to help effect a monstrous consolidation of financial and political power. Heading into 2008, there were five major investment banks in the United States: Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Today only Morgan Stanley and Goldman survive as independent firms, perched atop a restructured Wall Street hierarchy. And while the rest of the civilized world responded to last year's catastrophes with sweeping measures to rein in the corruption in their financial sectors, the United States invited the wolves into the government, with the popular new president, Barack Obama — elected amid promises to clean up the mess — filling his administration with Bear's and Lehman's conquerors, bestowing his papal blessing on a new era of robbery.

And the practice is not limited to stocks, as hedge funds and banks routinely do the same thing with mortgage-backed securities, Treasury bonds, commodities futures, and on and on. The bottom line is that the US economy is mostly just about moving piles of money around--a bizarre, cargo-cult type of economy where we're all supposed to get rich brokering deals instead of actually making things and selling them.

All of this is only possible of course because, so far, the rest of the world is obligingly sending us our dollars back for investment, and we have a lender of last resort in the Treasury and Fed linebacking the whole rotten structure.

Infectious Lies

2009-10-19T21:04:00.003-04:00

Robert Klassen, at LewRockwell.com:

... Bird Flu came along in 1997. SARS followed in 2002. Both came from Asia with great fanfare and dire predictions of a pandemic, which failed to materialize. Did these viruses come from labs? Were they natural? We’re not likely to find out.

This year we are confronted with swine flu, a novel combination of pig virus, bird virus, and human virus. This time the advertising has been coordinated and relentless, and miraculously a vaccine has been released in the nick of time. This drama reads like a script.

I came to the conclusion that every aggressive assertion announced by a bureaucracy was a self-serving lie many years ago. The FDA is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, and duly lies in their interest. The NIH serves the interests of several cartels, including the AMA, controls medical research, and only releases results that favor its predetermined conclusion. But this only scratches the surface of government deception.

...

I wonder about the increasing frequency and ferocity of the lying. It reminds me of the psychopath who is finally trapped by reality and is desperately trying to avert attention to another subject. Meanwhile, we do have real problems that are not being addressed at all.

MRSA has been killing thousands of people annually for years, yet it is not labeled a pandemic, which it is, and the bureaucrats yawn and tell us to wash our hands. Meanwhile, hospital patients are incubating even worse antibiotic resistant bacteria, VRSA, VRE, C.diff, and TB. Influenza might make us sick, and might kill us, but these bacteria will not only make us sick, they are sure to kill us. Why is there no hue and cry in the media about this threat to public health?

I have come to wonder whether vaccines, like antibiotics, have reached a point of diminishing returns, and now serve mainly to put selection pressures on viruses to evolve into more potent strains.

Lindsey Graham returns to his vomit

2009-10-14T11:33:00.006-04:00

In May 2009, Lindsey Graham declared, "We are not going to build a party around libertarian ideas. Ron Paul is not the leader of this party." A breathtaking statement, considering its delivery mere months after neo-conservatism's total electoral defeat. In retrospect though, Graham was just getting an early start making the short, happy journey back home to Trotskyite social democracy.

Graham seems to have a particular burr under his saddle for Ron Paul and libertarian politics, warming again to this theme here: Graham: GOP not going to be the party of angry white guys.

And if there remained any doubt, this statement from a Republican politician establishes the dialectic from now on. Low taxes and limited government are policies espoused only by loathsome, racist white guys.

One expects this sort of thing from Democrats, but to hear a white Republican senator tell it to his own electoral base is just absurd. Who does he think is going to vote for his prissy old ass when those 'angry white guys' are a demographic minority? More importantly, who's going to pay for all the swill Graham and his new Democratic overlords will be ladling out when those angry white guys are a demographic minority? On second thought, don't bother answering.

It's all enough to make this white guy, well, angry.

Killer Groupies

2009-09-30T00:04:00.006-04:00

Steve Sailer links to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Even in his death row cell, satanic serial killer and rapist Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker,"receives bags of mail. And of the dozens of people who try to contact him each year, officials say, about 90 percent are women.

It's not just Ramirez who gets the attention, nor is Scott Peterson alone in the way he attracted admiring women even after he was sentenced to die for killing his wife and unborn child.

Death row prisoners often join the horde of grooms married in group ceremonies such as the one planned Saturday at San Quentin State Prison.

It's a phenomenon that's little understood and seldom studied: Women who fall hopelessly in love - or at the least become wildly infatuated - with the most feared killers.

From the comments thread:

Steve,

I've been a regular reader of yours for years and have posted, always anonymously, for that same time, especially now.

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I may be your only reader who can honestly say that her mother did fall in love and have an affair with a murderer while he was in prison.

It's an extremely interesting story, of course, but I'll try to keep it brief as I don't have much time. I want to touch on who she was and which men did, and did not, find her attractive.

Much of the folk wisdom about alpha/beta and dad/cad has some truth, but there is a lot that is missed. From experience, I can confidently tell you that the "missed" parts will not be welcomed.

My mother was very beautiful, though well past her prime and in her '40s; she had been captain of the cheerleader's squad in h.s. She was surprisingly intelligent with an I.Q. in the 140s. She was also very liberal socially: she was pro-choice; pre-marital sex was fine; and divorce was fine; even if it was only because the woman had put on some weight. She believed that when one wasn't happy one needed to take whatever measures necessary and an intact family just wasn't something that should be so enshrined as holy. Families are nice, but not that nice. She had always been faithful to her three husbands and cooked them two meals a day (they were at work during lunch) and very good ones at that. She was never in love with them though, despite her affirmations that she was; I picked up on this at an early age.

Who did she attract? In short, men like her. With the exception of my father, her first husband, they were all socially liberal men with the same views. The difference between her and them, until she met the prisoner, was that while they were selfish, they didn't quite match her. She always did the leaving. My father stood out with his conservatism and high intelligence, but was not a brave man; he wouldn't stand up for or defend anything or anyone.

So up to this point, most of your readers will be nodding their heads in recognition of this pattern.

What they miss is that she was far more liberal than the average woman. She was, as the cliche goes, turned on by the excitement of this aggressive prisoner. For a person to willfully overlook all the warning signs is by definition someone who doesn't live in reality, a liberal.

I will be brutally honest. Some of the bloggers who write about game and all remind me so much of her admirers that I got to observe close up as a teen-ager: they love the bad and loose woman and want her to be "bad" with them and then miraculously become faithful Suzie homemaker. As such, they are liberals. The good girls are "boring" and "repressed".

Other bloggers are much wiser and realize that that such a woman doesn't transform, but they completely inverse the situation when it comes to themselves and can't understand why they can't find a good woman; I believe they put it thus, "There are no good women". That's for another time :)

BTW, which men did not come around: well-to-do conservative men who fought for whatever they believed and whomever they believed in.

I believe this happened with my mother: she had a tragic childhood, with a dash of MacKenzie Phillips type stuff, and slutted it up as did many other baby-boomers. She met my father and cleaned up her act and hoped to fall in love with him. He was a timid type and if she said she regretted her past, hey, who was he to judge? He wanted so desperately to believe she would be a good wife and mother, all evidence to the contrary. I believe she never realized and accepted how unattractive she made herself by her promiscuous ways and social liberalism and was so delusional that she felt she could do better than this weak, but loyal man. She left and did worse. She left again and did even worse. She fell for Mr. Murderer who, finally, was the person who outdid her in being a psychopath (not hateful, but careless with others emotions). Today, she is alone, in her fifties, and has been for years.

Years ago, a very nice girl I was steady with told me that a female friend of hers had been corresponding with an inmate, and had invited her to go along for a prison visit. Solely out of raw, 20-year old male instinct, I forbade it. In later years, having been exposed in a small way to that bizarre sub-culture, I am sure glad I did.

What is money?

2009-09-29T23:27:00.004-04:00

Gary North explains,

Let us return to the original question: What is money? The best answer to this continual question was provided in 1912 by the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. In his book, "The Theory of Money and Credit," he provided an answer in six words: money is the most marketable commodity. He had in mind gold and silver coins, but his theory encompassed any commodity that can or has served as money in history.

By defining money as the most marketable commodity, Mises integrated monetary theory with general economic theory. His theory of money was an extension of his theory of the free market. He rested his case for the free market on the right of private ownership.

It follows that attempts to fix the price for the time-preference for money, i.e., the rate of interest, will introduce the same distortions as attempts to fix the prices for medical care, labor, steel, or any other commodity. The Federal Reserve board members are engaged in the same Sysiphean task as the Soviet Gosplan.

The problem with the Republican party

2009-09-29T22:10:00.006-04:00

From TakiMag.com:

Still the Stupid Party by Tom Piatak,

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Bill Clinton said this when asked if the “vast right wing conspiracy” that Hillary claimed was the source of all the Clintons’ political troubles was still around: “Sure it is, it’s not as strong as it was, because America’s changed demographically, but it’s as virulent as it was.” In other words, because mass immigration is decreasing the white share of the electorate, opposition to liberalism is decreasing. In fact, as all the outrcry over the “racist” nature of the tea parties shows, the future promises to be one where the mere fact that a policy position is held mostly by whites is likely to make it suspect, if not toxic. If the Democrats have figured this out, why does the GOP keep nominating for President men who haven’t?

To which Kevin DeAnna responds,

Conservative explanation—Because social acceptance, as designated by a left wing elite, is more important than winning. As Burkeans, we must bow before established elites, even if they hate us. What’s important is that we lose slowly so people don’t get upset.

Libertarian explanation—Because admitting the existence of cultures, nations, peoples, families, religions, and ethnicities is collectivist and one step away from Stalinism.

Kevin DeAnna has previously eulogized movement conservatism, i.e., the Republican party. And truly, this has been the problem all along: how does one reconcile conservatism with the modern ideal of universal suffrage? If control over the levers of State power is determined by majority vote, the battle for the State necessarily means you must cede the battle for the larger Culture. The Republicans, perforce, chose the former path and are losing the war. Libertarians are similarly aligned with a high time-preference, libertine majority. In short, electoral politics are a dead end for conservatism at this point.

A 9/11 Memorial

2009-09-12T12:16:00.004-04:00

The Real Heroes Are Dead, the incredible life and death of Rick Rescorla.

Read it all, and then watch the only known video footage of Rick Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, recorded at the World Trade Center on July 28, 1998:

Voice Of The Prophet

Gnosticism, continued

2009-09-11T20:44:00.011-04:00

When Someone Is Raised Female And The Genes Say XY, Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

Experts say Semenya should be allowed to race as a woman and they cringe at how her case is exploding publicly in the news media. They worry about psychological scars. Two years ago, a star female track athlete who tested male attempted suicide.

Unless she took some illicit substance, Semenya is a female with a birth defect, simple as that, said Dr. Myron Genel, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at Yale University. He was part of a special panel of experts convened by the International Association of Athletics Federations in 1990 that helped end much, but not all, genetic gender testing.
...
Dr. Louis Elsas, chairman of biochemistry at the University of Miami and a member of the IAAF panel with Genel, said he had hoped the genetic gender testing issue was over after the 1996 Olympics, when most major sports abandoned regular testing. He recalled having to talk to a female athlete and reveal that she had XY chromosomes and that she'd be infertile. It's something that shouldn't splash onto television, newspapers and the Internet, he said.

"It's a severe emotional trauma," Elsas said.

The concern that women with XY chromosomes have a competitive advantage "is malarkey. We don't segregate athletes by height," said Genel, speaking from an international endocrinology conference in New York that has sessions on intersex issues.

Remarkable stuff. And why is Semenya a "female with a birth defect?" Isn't he (XY chromosones, male shoulder and pelvic structure, elevated T-levels, etc.) a male with a birth defect: undescended testes and a malformed penis?

One last money quote:

Simpson, associate dean at Florida International University, said the issue should be simply whether men are masquerading as women. Semenya is clearly a woman, he said.

"Clearly?" With no mammary glands, uterus or ovaries? And XY chromosones? One wonders to what lengths Dr. Simpson would have men go to prove they were not female. And this is from a man whose specialty is medical genetics.

Modern worship of the gnostic ideal prevents even extremely intelligent people from admitting what science and their senses tell them: Semenya is a man with undescended testes and malformed genitals. This is apparent from even the most superficial observation of his physiology and mannerisms. (Just click on the pictures to get the full frame. The Fox Sports photo gallery is here).

And the statement that XY chromosones don't confer a competitive advantage can only be described as breathtaking; there is simply no such thing as "women with XY chromosones."

And here's a picture worth at least a thousand words.

Postscript: I'm going to add Steve Sailer's wonderful tag for such items, political correctness makes you stupid.

The Photo

2009-09-09T20:22:00.008-04:00

I don't understand the uproar over this photo by AP reporter Jenny Jacobson:

The main objection I read in various comments was that the photographer should have respected the privacy of LCpl. Bernard and his family. I am not sure where such arguments come from. LCpl. Bernard, God rest his soul, was a public employee hit by enemy fire in a war funded by taxpayers. I think he and his family can legitimately insist he not be photographed in the trauma unit after all of his clothes have been cut off. But short of that, the people funding the war and voting to approve its continuance should be able to calculate the cost from, among other sources, the visual depiction of young men reduced to bleeding, spastic flesh. There is a lot further that such photographs can go, for that matter.

One particularly deluded commenter I read was outraged that Joshua's family had been robbed of any belief that their son had died quickly and painlessly. Folks, weep instead for the fact that this son of America died without offspring, and weep also over his last moments of appalled shock that his young life was being snuffed out.

Another common sentiment was that the photographer should have deferred to the notion that LCpl. Bernard was "fighting for our freedom." At best, one can say he died so that Islamic militants trained in Afghanistan wouldn't make their way over here. Now, the objective merits of that statement aside, why haven't we stopped at a few training bases in Afghanistan that were destroyed eight years ago?

Isn't the real source of the problem the Open Society's insistence that, as it chooses sides in overseas inter-tribal conflicts, it simultaneously welcomes the protagonists from both sides over here?

And forbids its members from carrying the most basic tools for self-defense on to airplanes?

And will sue folks like the Bernard family into the dirt if they reject the premises of the Open Society?

This gets back to my question of last month: when does the Christian, homeschooling Bernard family realize they are sending their sons to die for an entity that hates them? And what happens then?

Christ our eternal King and God, You have destroyed death and the devil by Your Cross and have restored man to life by Your Resurrection. Give rest O Lord to the soul of Your servant Joshua who has fallen asleep, in Your Kingdom where there is no pain, sorrow or suffering. In Your goodness and love for all men, pardon all the sins he has committed in thought, word or deed, for there is no man or woman who lives and sins not. You only are without sin.

For You are the Resurrection, the Life, and Repose of Your servant Joshua, departed this life O Christ our God; and to You we send up glory with Your Eternal Father and Your All-holy, Good and Life-creating Spirit, now and forever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

The delegitimization of the State, continued...

2009-09-03T22:31:00.006-04:00

Here's a story, with photos about the hi-jinks of a merc company retained by the US government to guard its main operating base, excuse me, its "embassy," in Kabul.

Now, there are several things going on here (and I'm not there so I don't know) but I'm guessing what it really boils down to is this: there are no serviceable females for these lads for miles in either direction. Any European or American honeys who might otherwise qualify are behind ten feet of concrete block being swooped by CIA and State Department staff. And what is also very likely, there is a two-inch thick binder full of rules that keeps the mercs from getting within ten feet of Afghan women who would party-hearty for some cash and cheap beer. And food. And medicine. And some diverted building materials. And a shot at convincing one of these saps to marry her and take her to the US so she can increase her lifespan by 20+ years.

And any tub-thumper out there who doesn't like how this is sounding, let me suggest we shouldn't be in the business of wars for gnostic imperialism to begin with.

Of course, I'm happy to concede that my guess as to what this really boils down to is just plain wrong.

Maybe the State really is reduced to paying homoerotic thugs $100K a year to guard its imperial palaces.

Maybe it really can't find enough competent men among its 2.3 million active and reserve troops to accomplish the task.

Or maybe the State is just spreading the wealth around rather than oh, I don't know, paying its E-3's more than $20K a year.

But in any event, the State is proceeding apace towards anarcho-tyranny, with its gang of homoerotic thugs taking their place among all the other gangs of homoerotic thugs victimizing peaceful folk.

"You Dogs!"

2009-09-02T06:29:00.003-04:00

From Jeff Snyder, on LewRockwell.com:

Jeff Snyder's essay takes its title from Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," wherein a French aristocrat utters the phrase to a crowd that gathers after his carriage runs over a child. Dickens notes that the aristocrat acts out of a sense of complete impunity, reinforced by the seemingly cowed state of the lower classes. What happened next, as we now know, was the French Revolution.

Mr. Snyder makes the point in his turn that the American elites are engaged in an increasingly blatant and massive expropriation of wealth from taxpayers and downstream dollar-holders.

It is not morning in America.

Within the last year, the Treasury Department has bailed out AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and forced Bank of America to acquire Merrill Lynch while promising that Treasury would take care of Merrill’s losses on its mortgaged-backed securities. The Federal Reserve, a government-sponsored private bank, has provided hundreds of billions in credit support to faltering or insolvent banks. Details not provided. With letters from voters to Congress running hundreds to 1 against, Congress approved $700 billion in TARP funds for the Treasury Department to purchase banks’ toxic assets. It now turns out that no one can say, or is willing to say, how the first $350 billion or so of those funds were used or to whom they were paid.

To deal with the toxic assets it is purchasing in order to save the banks, the Treasury Department created a program under which companies can form public-private enterprises (PPEs) to buy pools of these assets from the Treasury and resell them. The Treasury or other government agency set up for this business will put up 7%, the private company will put up 7% and the PPE can obtain 86% government financing to purchase these toxic assets at a discounted price determined by the FDIC. The financing is nonrecourse, so if the PPE does not make enough money to repay the loan, the private company is not liable for the deficiency, and the losses are absorbed by the taxpayers. The result is that, after the taxpayers absorb the initial losses in value on the toxic assets in an amount determined by the FDIC, for 7% of the discounted value down, the private company in the PPE gets the chance to make a profit reselling the same toxic assets that it or its comrades in finance helped create in the first instance. Is this a great country or what?

The Administration forced a cram down of General Motor’s creditors and, with 67% of the American people opposing the plan, acquired a substantial ownership interest in GM and bailed it out. The federal government is now in the car as well as banking businesses.

With only about 37% of the American people supporting it and 43% opposing it, Congress passed a $787 billion spending spree bill to caffeinate the zombie economy. It’s money we don’t have. By its own estimates, the federal government is going to run a deficit this year of about 1.6 trillion dollars, and projects a ten-year estimated budget deficit in excess of $9 trillion. That’s on top of our existing national debt, and doesn’t include the interest costs the government is going to incur to pay on the bonds it issues to obtain that money.

The theft is so massive, in fact, that it is economically unsustainable. And one must wonder, as I have, how long the parasitic elite can rely on the forbearance of their hosts. The obvious answer is, "Not forever," and Mr. Snyder's clever tie-in is that in pre-Revolutionary France, the unsustainable state of affairs persisted, until the day it didn't. A tipping point is surely being approached, and upper class snickering at the illogic of Medicare beneficiaries raging against socialized medicine becomes quite irrelevant.

[A]fter a year in which the members of Congress have continually disregarded the voters’ wishes and committed them to trillions in debt to save the rich, the members of Congress, on return from the capital to the provinces this summer, have been caught unawares, completely surprised at the vitriol that has been directed at them in this summer’s town hall meetings. Some of the voters are calling them socialists or fascists, and waving the swastika at them! Some of the voters are spluttering with rage, are incoherent, or saying contradictory and stupid things, like telling their representatives that they don’t want government involved in health care, but don’t take away our Medicare! The folks at Comedy Central are having some fun with that. Look at these morons rage! Ah oui, c’est très amusante, cela!

Not everyone sees this as a source of hilarity or, like some pundits, a reason to bemoan the sad, infantile state of political "discourse" in this country. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente, citing the anger at this summer’s town hall meetings, says that we are in the early stages of "The Second American Revolution." Whether it is true remains to be seen, but the prediction certainly echoes a vibrant chord of dissension running through the tenor of the times.

Celente’s name for the developing conflict is potentially misleading, in that it suggests, by implicit reference to the mythology of our first revolution, that the eventual outcome may be more freedom, not less. But as Bertrand de Jouvenel pointed out in his examination of the growth of power, historically, revolutions have always resulted in greater centralization of power, greater control over society’s resources by the state and greater tyranny, as some strong man or group found a way to harness and ride the rage to a new position of command.

The fact of the matter is that for all their illogic and incoherence, the protesters are more right than wrong.

Is the anger we see in town hall meetings limited to Congress’ attempt to reform our health care system? Are some of these people mad just because Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have whipped them into a frenzy about socialism? Yeah, it’s possible, but then again, why were they able to do that? Some commentators have noted that the anger is being fueled by people’s anxiety and uncertainty over their jobs and what’s going to happen to them. No doubt that there’s something to that, but I suspect that it has a lot more to do with something they are not uncertain of at all, some fundamental truth that’s just been really rammed home, namely, that whatever happens, they’re the ones who pay. They’re the ones who must not only bear their own losses but recompense the losses of the architects of the disaster. They’re the ones who must adjust and whose income and lives must diminish, so that those who are too big to fail continue to receive their due, and can continue to live in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. They’re the ones who are supposed to be consoled by President Obama’s assurances that "our best days are ahead," apparently coming right after they’ve finished paying a few trillion dollars to assure that our financiers’ best days continue to be right now.

And if you think these people are mad now, just wait until it becomes clear that tax-deferred 401(k)'s and defined-benefit pensions are a sucker's bet, on top of the already bankrupt Social Security and Medicare funds.

Snyder concludes,

The final aspect of Dickens’ portrait that I wish to highlight is the blindness of the upper classes to the coming bloodbath, and the apparent unshakable security of their position almost right up to the day it breaks. They have no sense that they are pushing people closer and closer to the brink, and never have the slightest doubt but that they are secure in the power that their position and wealth confers, and their insulation from the conditions of the rest of their society. As Dickens portrays it, even at the edge of the precipice, there is still no sign of their danger or impending doom, and it seems that things will just go on the same way forever.

We see this in the second part of the chapter, where a Marquis’ carriage runs over a small child in the streets of Paris, and the carriage stops to secure the horses. A crowd forms around the Marquis’s carriage, but Dickens notes that "[t]here was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger." The Marquis is imperial and speaks to people in the crowd, but does not doubt for one instant the security of his position. Nor would he have any cause to do so for, as Dickens notes, "[s]o cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised." It seems such people could never rise up to overthrow anything. The people have been brought so low, so reined in that they have no option but to continue paying, carrying and kowtowing to this predatory and useless class. But the reader knows, as the Marquis does not, that this is an illusion, that the pressure is growing, that the tighter the controls, the worse they are treated, the harder they are squeezed, the greater the coming explosion will be. The reader knows, as the Marquis does not, the dam will soon break and these people, silent and cowed today, will be part of a bloodthirsty mob tomorrow.

The facts that there are no rumblings of revolt, no outbreaks of hostility, no displays of anger, that the people are as subdued and tractable, as fully under thumb as ever, are absolutely no indication that all is well, that matters are not coming to a head. This, of course, is what makes the disconnectedness and self-absorbed, self-regard of the upper classes all the more dangerous and, ultimately, fatal.

Dickens sees that, for those living at that time, the French Revolution was not a gradual, unfolding series of events, each more clearly foretelling the horror to come, but a sudden, complete rupture of the social order, cataclysmic, like an earthquake. The ground is solid, permanent, fixed and unmoving; nothing is more stable or certain. Yet underneath the pressure is building until one day it reaches a point where the plates suddenly slip. The earth moves, a chasm may open beneath one’s feet, and the landscape is forever altered.

It is because Dickens shows life shortly before the Revolution proceeding the same as ever, that the concluding words of his chapter are so powerful: "all things ran their course." The aristocrats are attending their Fancy Ball and "the rats," meaning the people, "are sleeping in their dark holes." Nothing has changed. There are no new developments that give cause for concern. Life is proceeding in the same way, everything is as it should be, all’s right with the world and it’s bright and wonderful and marvelous. Yet, as readers with the hindsight of history, we know where this course leads, and how it ends.

In November 1989, I along with everybody else watched the newscasts of Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall. I remarked to my roommate at the time that the Soviet Union would be gone in five years. He said ten. It took less than two.