In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Obama insisted that we must “bear witness” to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that’s fine. It is, after all, what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it is easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and to promise to “never forget” the sins of others and our own good deeds.
But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea — not quite live via satellite, but close enough — where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?
It’s a good question, but the column raises the uncomfortable question: what should we do about that psychotic state?
I’m always curious, after reading an op-ed that says not one vaguely fresh thing, and doesn’t even manage to say stale things with charm, why the author bothered. Mr. Boies does not need the money, and he cannot possibly think that this op-ed will change one person’s mind. He doesn’t really need the publicity, as his objective is to change the American Constitution through the courts rather than through the people. Perhaps he’s trying to increase the chance that Obama will nominate Ted Olson to the next open SCOTUS seat? Perhaps he really is so vain as to simply enjoy seeing his name in press? Or maybe he just gets his kicks by calling his countrymen bigots? Who knows.
So thanks for the heads up Dave. I’ll keep an eye out for whatever activist court they stumble in to in their attempt to undemocratically remake American law to their own liking. It must be fantastic to know that you’re so much smarter than the American people.
Those who thought it was possible, in the face of raving post-modernism and anti-semitism on the left, to elect a pro-Israel Democrat to the White House . . . and particularly those who thought that Jeremiah Wright’s most famous parishoner was that Democrat . . . well, they were wrong.
Of course, this is, remarkably, a campaign pledge that he backtracked on during the campaign, so I guess he’s not breaking his word now. One would hope that the few remaining pro-Israel Democrats would see what their party really thinks of Israel and leave it. But they’ve been continent in being tools for this long, so I don’t suppose this will be enough to open their eyes.
Apollo posted this at 12:24 AM HKT on Monday, July 20th, 2009 as Arafatistan, CHANGE!
A recent Pew Research Center poll of 2,969 adults found that Americans, on average, would like to live to 89; the current life span is 78. One in five people would like to live past 90, while 8 percent would like to pass the century mark.
Only 8% want to live to be 100? Hell, if I don’t live to be 200, I’m going to be the crankiest 150 year-old you ever met.
Apollo posted this at 11:41 PM HKT on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 as Science!
I see we’re getting a new surgeon general, Regina Benjamin. But tell me, how is President Obama able to find someone with such amazing credentials in the backwoods of Alabama, while he still can’t find a single guy from Wall Street who can create a job?
Guess who said it. Thomas Sowell? Charles Krauthammer? Guess again.
Hubbard posted this at 5:41 PM HKT on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 as Uncategorized
Replacing Dick Cheney with Joe Biden was like replacing Silent Cal Coolidge with Chris Tucker. In this respect, Biden is the anti-Cheney.
But just as Cheney’s rare public appearances told us what the Bush administration was really thinking, so do Biden’s appearances tell us what’s reallg going on with the Obama regime. James Lileks does a nice job on detailing this:
Biden said “We misread how bad the economy was.” This one is a bit different to explain away, since the administration billed itself as having super-genius comprehension of the problem and the necessary solutions. Now, many suspect, President Obama finds himself staring at a portrait of FDR, murmuring “Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.”What Biden meant to say, in his puckish way, that they misunderstood what an economy is, and how it works. Piling up a mountain of proposed taxes, mandates, regulations, do-nothing programs and pork unseen in such dimensions since Pink Floyd floated a dirigible pig over an outdoor concert might, in fact, prevent recovery.
So do not criticize him; applaud his palaver, and hope for more. Biden’s “gaffes” are anything but — they’re simply what the administration is really thinking. Truer words have never been babbled.
Read it all, and be glad that we have Biden to tell us what’s really going on in the White House these days.
Hubbard posted this at 5:02 PM HKT on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 as Politics
I’m sure there are some things in this world more monstrous than this, but I have a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head. That’s probably one of the many reasons I’m not a ruling cleric in Iran.
Apollo posted this at 12:44 PM HKT on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 as Veiled Threats
I think Mickey Kaus is spot-on as to why the current healtlh care “reform” movement will fail: it’s pitched as penny pinching, as opposed to improving the fairness of American society. Considering the gratuitous wastes of money that this president has engaged in, this seems like a very weird place to draw the line. If we can waste hundreds of billions on bailouts and “stimulus,” why not burn a few billion on experimental drugs? That sounds much more likely to produce a positive result.
And, aside from any ideological opposition to socialized medicine, the way this is being pitched makes it sound like an objectively terrible idea. If someone were told that they had to give to another person the decision about what treatments to allow, and the only options were a business or a government bureaucrat, who on God’s green earth would choose the latter? Both will make mistakes, but only with the business will mistakes actually lead to a negative result for the decision-maker.
Let me rephrase that slightly. Imagine if a new health insurance company opened up shop with the marketing slogan, “We’ll save you money now, but you won’t get cutting edge medicine when you’re sick.” No one would opt for that plan. And this plan, objectively doesn’t even save money.
Apollo posted this at 3:32 PM HKT on Friday, July 17th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Health Care
Just about everybody who looks at the data agrees that people are having fewer children. The debate gets interesting when people try to determine why this is so. What to do about this is almost a Rorschach test for judging what motivates the commentator. Some examples.
Young people raised by relatively prosperous Baby Boomers know that if they reproduce in their early twenties, it is possible — even likely — that they’ll be unable to afford their children all the same advantages they remember. Even among my Catholic high school friends who married young and desire children, there is a widespread practice of waiting many years to do so, a period that is one of financial and emotional preparation. The middle class notion of what it means to be a good parent is simply much higher today than it was in the past. I’m uncertain about whether these trends are demographically problematic, but let’s imagine that they are. It is quite possible that later marriage and child bearing is bad for society as a whole, but good for the vast majority of individuals who do it.
Take away: delaying marriage and childbirth is thoughtful and perhaps a good thing, but we need to figure out how to balance the individual and society.
Conor disagrees, but I believe he is disagreeing out of impressions formed, as he writes, “In my experience.” I’d suggest Conor consider that the experiences he and his friends have gone through in recent years, while fascinating in their own way, are not a broad enough sample group to evaluate how children and marriage are viewed in 21st Century American life (were I to rely only on my own experiences, one would assume the American family is thriving and reproducing at an astounding rate) . . . .
When people get married and have children, they transform from being a potential society to being real societies, creating a cycle of productivity and inheritance that allows individuals to succeed and surpass their parents, and forming a community of stability and support that dramatically reduces the demand for larger government to provide for the health and economic needs of the young (as poverty is feminized), the infirm (as caregivers disappear), and the aging. Increases in the number of unwed and childless individuals necessitates demand for expanded social programs and governmental authority to take the place of family.
Take away: we adults are getting married, but the irresponsible (who cannot be true conservatives) aren’t.
[I]mmigration increases the population density, which raises land prices, which both makes non-Hispanic whites more Democratic and discourages those Hispanics who successfully assimilate to the norms of local non-Hispanic whites from becoming as Republican.Formerly Republican California supplies the classic example of both processes at work.
Non-Hispanic whites became sharply less Republican as their marriage and fertility rates plummeted.
Back in 1990, California still had a higher white fertility rate than Texas. But during the Nineties the birthrate for California white women dropped 14 percent and their years married plummeted to the third lowest in America, behind only ultra-liberal DC and Massachusetts.
In Texas, however, which has much more available dirt and only about half as many immigrants as a percentage of the total population, white fertility rose 4 percent.
Texas, which voted Democratic in four out of five Presidential elections from 1960 through 1976, is now the mainstay of the GOP.
Meanwhile, those California Hispanics who succeed in assimilating fully now find themselves in a state where most role models vote for Democrats for President.
So, Hispanics in California have stayed well to the left of Hispanics in Texas—where the white elite is fervently Republican.
Take away: High immigration leads to fewer children.
All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man’s anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: “The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death.” Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.
The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. . . .
For today’s Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe’s morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.
Take away (apologies to Hilaire Belloc): Western Civilization is the faith, and the faith is Western Civilization. Western Civ must return to the faith, or it will perish.
Time to speculate about the future. In sum, we will have more people with lower future time orientation (i.e., the temperament to save for a rainy day and delay gratification for greater future gain), more impulsiveness (great for knocking up broads, not so great for building and sustaining first world levels of civilization), and more distrust of societal institutions in favor of tighter familial bonds (great for aspiring warlords and corrupt kleptocrats, not so great for maintaining a loyal national military or respect for the law or a basic sense of fairness).
In possibly what will turn out to be the juiciest irony in all of human history, feminism and its co-ideologies of deceit may usher in an America that looks more like a patriarchal Middle Eastern caliphate of their worst nightmares. The realization of the matricentric utopia that feminism has been clamoring for these last few generations will undo the very foundation upon which the rancid ideology was able to prop itself.
Human nature does not offer us a bottomless chest of treasure. Few are exempt from trade-offs, and no society can have everything its heart desires. To restore American greatness and comity of its people, feminism and its cousin -isms will have to be rolled back. This will mean women will sacrifice their earning power and some career freedom. The alternative is what we have now — economically independent women, freed from shame and the restrictions of their biology by the pill and abortion, following their vaginas straight into soft polygamy, state-supported single motherhood, and grossly unjust payday divorce settlements.
Now I will tell you how to save America from this fate. The answer will surprise some of you:
More PUAs [Pick up Artists]
Take away: More sex and sluts, please!
It seems as though the proposed solutions tend to dovetail rather neatly with the proposer’s worldview: he doesn’t need to change, but the world needs to be more like him.
Question: how does one design an experiment to test these various hypotheses? Anybody can point the correlation of trends, but how do we prove causation?
Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM HKT on Friday, July 17th, 2009 as Kulturkampf
As someone who hates the stupid show of fealty to racial interest groups, and as someone who suspects Barbara Boxer’s middle name rhymes with Witch, that was thoroughly gratifying.
Apollo posted this at 1:15 PM HKT on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 as Race
I just did a lesson in West Coast Swing. Neat stuff, and I have progressed from not knowing what I’m doing to knowing what’s what and doing so incompetently. Progress!
Chesterton quote: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Interestingly, I’ve gotten to the point where I have relatively little trouble asking men to dance, but women are trickier for me to ask. One more thing to play around with.
Orwell: “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”
Politics is getting to me these days. It’s a slow motion trainwreck. Both sides deserve to lose—and they’re doing that. I realize that trends inevitably end, but being patient eludes me. Better to focus on other things.
Florence King: “Another kind of conservative would get drunk. This is easy because we don’t drink liberals’ sissy concoctions; it takes forever to get drunk on wine coolers but we can get there on a few belts.”
I seem to be losing my taste for wine and beer and even my old standby, whiskey. People are starting to think that I’m in AA when I go out and get Diet Coke with lime.
La Rochefoucauld: “Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”
When I’m too old to set a bad example, please do me the courtesy of not reminding me.
Eric Hoffer: “Facts are counterrevolutionary.”
The counterrevolution is coming. It’ll be interesting to watch.
I recognize I’m sorta slow in reading about this, but that has to be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. Obviously what the senator did sounds wrong, but what sort of “freak” is David Brooks for letting it go on, then telling the story anonymously in a manner that makes it sound like it was all the senator’s doing. It takes two to allow groping to continue for extended periods of time.
One of the reasons that I stopped seriously considering journalism as a career path is that I found I didn’t like journalists. They’re gushy about the people they meet, they become shameless flatterers when their access is threatened, and there’s a strange neediness to them, of the sort that Brooks ascribes to politicians. But politicians couldn’t be politicians if journalists weren’t journalists; a senator spending dinner with his hand on Brooks’s thigh is, I think, actually a good visual representation of the relationship between the two groups.
Is there nowhere in American life that Obama will not show up? Baseball has been screwing around with the All-Star game for a few years now, much to its detriment, but this is the worst. I want to watch baseball, and I don’t want to hear the president as I do so. That strikes me as a pretty wholesome desire.
Apollo posted this at 9:16 AM HKT on Monday, July 13th, 2009 as CHANGE!
The desire of those on the Left to personally destroy their political opponents is never satiated.
And any comparison to the attacks on Anita Hill are inapt. Hill leveled personal charges against Clarence Thomas that were outside his duties as a judge. It was a she-said, he-said, and obviously in a situation like that, the characters of the individuals involved are important for gauging the truthfulness of the accusations.
But Ricci’s entire experience with Sottomayor has been in the courtroom. He busted his butt, he did well on his test, but then he was denied justice so he appealed. And when he appealed, instead of finding an appeals court panel that was open-minded and willing to apply the law, he found a couple of ideologues, one of whom was Sonia Sottomayor, who saw in his case not a man fighting for justice, but an opportunity to turn their policy preferences into binding precedent.
Ricci’s character has nothing to do with that story. Even evil men – and I’ve no reason to believe that Ricci is an evil man – should be able to go to our courts and receive a fair application of the law. The only relevant issue is Sottomayor’s scandalously injudicious handling of the case. Attempts to make this about anything in Ricci’s past reveal nothing besides the weakness of the Sottomayor nomination. The only people who can defend her are some people who say – because they know, because there’s never any doubt about how Sottomayor will decide a case – that she’ll vote their way.