So the last of the loony Euro aristocrats have confirmed Obama's deification, giving him the Nobel peace prize just a little too soon

The confirmation of the deification is also its demise. Too much special pleading, especially when it comes before the great sacrifice, even destroys the authority of would-be gods. The Norwegian lady doth protest too much.

It's times like this when the desperate papering over of reality, like the last days of a Ponzi scheme, becomes obvious to even many diehard believers. The reality of human mimetic desire and conflict reasserts itself in brutal ways and it soon enough becomes clear that men who think one builds peace by destroying alliances and national cultures, abandoning the people to imperial pretensions, blaming everything on a scapegoat (the Burning Bush!), and standing down militarily in the face of some very real rivals - one a rather complete Other with a project to destroy the modern global economy - will have to face the new dawn. History waits for no one, however much we attempt to sacralize a dieing vision, and i think today we are seeing the last gasps of a certain phase in the ongoing Gnostic delusion about the nature of humanity. However, in crisis, opportunity exists for those who must rebuild themselves.

Great comments on how the Norwegians have really put Obama in the bind, at Belmont Club.

I am a little amused that yesterday I somehow "thought" to blog on Churchill's speech responding to the Munich agreement and Chamberlain's "peace in our times". How a propos. Everyone should read that speech from top to bottom for a refresher in the human capacity to believe in a fantasy, or just to give up in the face of hard human realities that entail inescapable conflict and the need to stand up - with others, bonded not just by will but by a shared, loved, reality - or give in. A few weeks ago, I half wrote another post anticipating this day. I didn't finish it so I may as well start cannibalizing it. It ended with a quote from Eric Voegelin that seems appropriate again. Voegelin illuminates the failure of the lonely, elitist, would-be-world-controller with a "Gnostic" will to seriously transform reality through force of personality and asking others just to sign on to "the dream". Writing during the Korean War, in The New Science of Politics (1952), criticizing the various "Gnostic" political religions that think they have achieved some rarefied insight, some systematic and controlling knowledge, some expertise, some insight into reality that mere wingnuts will never know, and that will allow an elect to imagine and shape the future, Voegelin already saw what we all should now know the "internationalist" dream of peace in a UN- and expert-mediated world has become:

The prehistory of the second World War raises the serious question whether the Gnostic dream has not corroded Western society so deeply that rational politics has become impossible, and war is the only instrument left for adjusting disturbances in the balance of existential forces.

The conduct of the war and its aftermath unfortunately are apt to confirm this fear rather than to assuage it. If a war has a purpose at all, it is the restoration of a balance of forces and not the aggravation of the disturbance; it is the reduction of the unbalancing excess of force, not the destruction of force to the point of creating a new unbalancing power vacuum. Instead the [American] Gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarized Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilized our own army. The facts are trite, and yet it is perhaps not sufficiently realized that never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage. And again, as in previous contexts, it is necessary to warn that phenomena of this magnitude cannot be explained by ignorance and stupidity. These policies were pursued as a matter of principle, on the basis of Gnostic dream assumptions about the nature of man, about a mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order, about the possibility of establishing an international order in the abstract without relation to the structure of the field of existential forces, about armies being the cause of war and not the forces and constellations which build them. and set them in motion, etc. The enumerated series of actions, as well as the dream assumptions on which they are based, seem to show that the contact with reality is at least badly damaged and that the pathological substitution of the dream world is fairly effective.

Moreover, it should be noted that the unique phenomenon of a great power creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage was accompanied by the equally unique phenomenon of military conclusion of a war without conclusion of peace treaties. This rather disturbing further phenomenon again cannot be explained by the baffling complexity of the problems that require settlement. It is again the dream obsession that makes it impossible for the representative of Gnostic societies to formulate policies which take into account the structure of reality. There can be no peace, because the dream cannot be translated into reality and reality has not yet broken the dream. No one, of course, can predict what nightmare of violence it will take to break the dream, and still less so what Western society will look like au bout de la nuit

Gnostic politics, thus, is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare. This system of chain wars can end only in one of two ways. Either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened.

I see this is a warning not just to the left-liberals Voegelin was directly criticizing, but also to a kind of "right-wing" reaction to them, one that has itself grown up in the Gnostic culture and is variously indebted to it, and that attends the rise of Obama with a mix of conspiracy paranoia, fear, over-done loathing, and a desire for a conflict that will reveal to those with eyes to see the truth of this reality that at present only a few keen seers can divine. But, as Voeglin argued, turning to conflict, without first attending to the totality of human and historical reality, turning to a desire for battle without seriously pursuing questions of how various kinds of "armies" are created, motivated, and supplied, is a sure-fire recipe not for the victory of an orderly reason, but for more destabilizing conflict.
(HT: Catfur)

Churchill, 1938; Coren, 2009

At a time when Obama is embracing the idea of limiting freedom of speech at the United Nations, lest Islam be offended by its critics, let us not pretend that there is any guarantee of peace, international order, and civility that the UN can any longer provide.

The Munich Agreement:

We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands with which we shall no doubt be invited to comply. Those demands may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty. I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press, for it will be said - indeed, I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, in part direct but more potently indirect, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.

Do you have a question for Jennifer Lynch, Head, Canadian "Human RIghts" Commission?

If so, check out BCF's post for ideas on how to send them along to the Parliamentary Committee that may yet have her as a witness:
Blazing Cat Fur: Questions for Jennifer Lynch of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on Section 13 (1)

I think your questions should provide the Committee with documented information and not be too pointed about what they must ask; give them some room to come to their own understanding of the scandal. So far, I am so unimaginative, all I can come up with is: "Ms Lynch, when are you going to put a stop to the racism at the CHRC in respect to Section 13 prosecutions?"

Get out (of) your pens!

Blazing Cat Fur (Arnie) reminds us:

The CHRC has mounted a Kamikaze effort [in appealing the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision in Warman v. Lemire, which declared Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act unconstitutional] to defend the odious Section 13 (1). It is imperative that we ask those organizations who support 13 (1)'s repeal to seek Intervenor Status in the upcoming judicial review of Warman v. Lemire .

Do your bit, write the organizations listed below, where appropriate ask if they plan to seek official status at the judicial review, offer to assist if at all possible with a donation. Nag Harper, nag Nicholson nag your MP, nag the members of the Justice Committee. Send a letter to the editor of your local daily, or write your favourite columnist.

This is your fight, take a swing and make it count for Free Speech. Let our opponents know that we will not negotiate and we will not beg for what is rightfully ours.

Blazing Cat Fur: Rally the Troops for Free Speech - A campaign for intervenor status in the Judicial Review of Warman v. Lemire

Now Marc Lemire, for all his work in uncovering the outrageous police-state-cum-loony-tunes conduct at the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission may not, on his own dime and lawyer's mind, be able to put forth the best, or most complete, of legal briefs as to the inherently unconstitutional nature of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. (I say inherently because if taken to heart, no people could actively covenant, in the basic human logic of constitutionalism, with a law over their heads saying they could be legally accountable - fined or banned for life from discussing certain topics - for merely saying something that in future might be construed as making some group look bad...) What's more, Lemire's personal history, his involvement in white nationalism, does not make him the best poster boy for convincing liberals that our "Human Rights" act is not itself a tool in the fight against totalitarianism but is rather an example of what Charles Taylor calls "nomolatry" or "code fetishism", an idolatry that becomes itself a form of scapegoating violence through a lust to identify and punish various social losers/code breakers whose words in some far corner of the internet are built up into horrendous thought crimes to serve the desire for a righteous war against black-hatted evildoers.

So, there is a need for other parties to intervene in the CHRC appeal of Warman v. Lemire. And to that end, we need to be encouraging, with letters and potentially dollars, those organizations to which the court might grant intervenor status. Cat Fur has addresses; he even suggests we write the fans of Section 13 to tell them politely to give it up! Faith in our constitution of citizen self-rule Cat Fur has; let's catch and iterate his sign. Put your name to a letter.

Blazing Cat Fur: Rally the Troops for Free Speech - A campaign for intervenor status in the Judicial Review of Warman v. Lemire

Good line

David Warren:

This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern "liberal" mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America's status as the world's pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the "new physics" of hope and change.

Lament for a nation

Canadian "Human Rights" Commission to appeal Warman v. Lemire

However, what the courts think of Section 13 is less and less important. Canadian public opinion, as reflected in the MSM and on the internet is heavily opposed to Section 13. As such, the law cannot stand in a free society and representative democracy, as long as the political parties continue to hide from the debate and refuse to make a public and election issue out of what is only a political hot potato if you are among those who fear you must pay the moral blackmail of the institutionally-entrenched, but not representative or responsible, victimary left.

It remains to be seen, however, which agents of the state will recognize that they live in a free society and representative democracy. If the government has had any role in encouraging the CHRC to appeal the Warman v. Lemire decision, it needs to be denounced for its inability to make a public stand and/or take responsibility for changing what is widely and rightly perceived to be an atrocious law. If the CHRC is appealing on its own initiative, it's time these power-hungry bureaucrats were shut down.

Canadian Human Rights Commission :: Resources :: What's New

UK Neighbors Engaged In Illegal Babysitting

Here's a story I wasn't expecting to see: West Michigan's bias against babysitting was preposterous enough, but it seems positively libertarian when compared to the rules babysitters have to follow in the UK.

Whether it's because statist busybodies who have so little faith in themselves project their own inadequacies onto the rest of their nation, or whether they believe themselves possessing the rare wisdom to form laws that result in "perfect" societies, the end result is the same: ignoring the possibility of genuinely good neighbors, and winding up with nonsense like "illegal" babysitting:

The government has ordered a review of the case of two police officers who were told they had to stop looking after each others' children or face prosecution.
Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd, from Milton Keynes, was warned by Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills] that she could be prosecuted if she did not end the "illegal" reciprocal arrangement with her friend, DC Lucy Jarrett.
The women, both 32, have taken turns looking after each other's daughters twice a week for the last two and a half years while they worked a ten-hour shift at Aylesbury police station in Buckinghamshire.
... New legislation means that people who baby-sit for more than two hours at a time or on more than 14 days a year should be registered and follow childminder rules, including undertaking first aid training and following the so-called "nappy curriculum" for under-fives.
According to the education watchdog, the rules apply in cases where parents receive a "reward" for the child care – which can include money or simply free baby-sitting in return. Ofsted is now in discussions with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) about the interpretation of the word "reward".
...
DC Shepherd said she had received a surprise visit from an Ofsted inspector who said she had received reports that an illegal childminding business was being run. Despite explaining that the arrangement was between two friends who were helping each other out, DC Shepherd was told that she was breaking the law and had to stop immediately. "I was stunned, completely devastated. I spent the whole day crying because I couldn't see how I could continue working," she told the Mail on Sunday.

The Third Family

“I think of you as if you were my own brother”, we say as the highest compliment we can offer a friend. There’s no greater accolade than to compare a close friendship to that of the stronger bonds of family: “You’re like a son to me…”

We get to choose our friends, and not our family, yet… I wonder if we tolerate the offensive faults and sins of friends with the same forbearance we often extend towards our family. Sibling accepts the bad with the good when they embrace sibling, to a degree that probably escapes them when it comes to the same sinful fallibility we may find in our friends. A parent’s forgiveness of their children’s faults is often only outmatched by a child’s acceptance of the imperfection of their parents, and the consequences of that fallibility on their lives… again, a mutual respect often eluding the mutual attraction of friendship.

Friendships are wonderful, but ultimately it’s a different, separate kind of strengthening bond than the one offered by family. A second, chosen, family, to raise us in ways that birth families do not.

This weekend I had occasion to experience the blessings, yet again, of a third family, the one that takes the best of each and adds something new of its own: one’s church family.

A “church family” consists of those who worship alongside us, at church. Different than the friendships developed at work, or at school, where colleagues become “chums”, attracted as they may be by mutual interest. The collegiality of the support at church touches a part of us far deeper than that, because the shared sense of mission surely goes much, much deeper than at any job.

It touched me deeply this weekend, that’s for sure, as I tried in vain to find the right words to say to someone I know through church, an older gentleman whose ailing wife passed away recently, after a lengthy and painful illness. We got to know each other in the casual way one meets people through church: the same faces in the same places at the same times every week, familiarity leading to a feeling of family. A church family.

Each week’s quick greetings after church might have been short in duration but they nevertheless cast long shadows from their repetition, especially towards the end as the news would grow worse each time.

This week there was only one to greet, the worst having finally happened. Not for the first time, the worst being the best that could happen, given the grim circumstances.

I didn’t know quite what to say as we each approached for our usual greetings. I had often prayed for them both, keeping the example of his quiet strength in memory throughout the tough times I myself repeatedly went through during this past summer from hell. I owed him a lot, and I held these thoughts in mind as I took his hand in mine, placed my other hand on his shoulder, and smiled.

It was as if he heard what I was thinking, and from behind his eyes I saw a sign of someone being genuinely helped from hand after gentle hand touching him that day, as each caring gesture gave him that much more renewed courage to smile in his turn. In his voice I heard someone seemingly able to hear prayer after silent prayer said on his behalf every week for a year. “Thank you”, he said to me through the kindest of smiles, the only words that ended up being needed in our brief time together this week.

Even though a lifelong love had come to an end, his loss was less than it could have been, thanks to the shared presence of his children, his family of friends, and his third family:

his church family.

Babysitting Without A License

Has neighborly kindness been outlawed in Michigan? A West Michigan woman has been threatened with a $1,000 fine and 90 days in jail... for babysitting her neighbors' children:

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors' kids, or face the consequences.

"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.

... A DHS spokesperson would not comment on the specifics of the case but says they have no choice but to comply with state law, which is designed to protect Michigan children.

But, who will protect the children from the road to hell paved with the good intentions of the Department of Human Services?

[Hat Tip to RSM at The Other McCain]

PuOrwell

Even a genius like Orwell could not have imagined Canada in the age of the "Human Rights" Act. The latest news is that the Canadian Human Rights Commission, in an apparent purification ritual, is now investigating their erstwhile crusader, Richard Warman, for hate speech, not apparently moved by the recent decision of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that the hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act is unconstitutional. Instead of turning on themselves, questioning their own self-righteous conduct, disbanding, and seeking redemption for their years of working with those who post hate in order to better prosecute the websites they have targetted, the CHRC crowd now seems to want to investigate the long-persecuted Marc Lemire's claim that Warman posted hate speech on Lemire's white nationalist site. It looks like Warman, the logical outcome of a law that allows busy bodies to police speech that might one day promote "hate", must become the regime's scapegoat. How ludicrous does this all have to get before the government has the courage to take a stand and shut all this nonsense down?
CHRC investigates Richard Warman for hate speech - Ezra Levant
Blazing Cat Fur: I love the irony but I really don't want to see Section 13 (1) rehabilitated

Radio Memories: Gratitude, Family and Patriotism

"My father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."

This expression of gratitude became a familiar conclusion throughout twenty-five years' worth of curtain speeches for one very gifted entertainer's theatrical performances. He was a legend in his own time, at the turn of the 20th century, and hopefully the light of his life's work can continue to shine through our century as brightly as it did through the last.

George M. Cohan's love of country was only eclipsed by love of family, and as I've studied his life over the years his example has often made me wonder about how we may increase the love of one through love of the other, and if either are ever really that separate...

Our Sunday series of posts on Radio Memories, devoted to the glory days of radio drama, the theater of the mind, returns this week with a bang: a biographical broadcast dedicated to that theatrical sensation, that American musical legend,

George M. Cohan.

Wading through YouTube, or similar online archives, will reveal just how much of our recent cultural heritage seems to have been preserved; movies, music, television shows... you name it, it seems to be there, somewhere, ready to be relived anew. Yet, back up a generation or two, and the gaps tend to far outweigh the surviving artifacts of the significant influences that so shaped and entertained the modern mind at the turn of the 20th century.

Some of this historical record was doomed to disappear, given its nature. Vaudeville, such a treasured slice of life for so many decades, has gone the way of all live theater: when the curtain comes down the art lives on only in memory.

Maybe, like life itself, this fleeting quality lends the theatrical performance much of its perceived value. Unlike most other media, it's here-today-gone-tomorrow... just like we are, who make up its audience.

We can watch a filmed version of a stage act, but... "it's just not the same". We can read the dusty playbills and fraying programs from a century ago, listing the great stage performers, and wonder at the magic of an Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George M. Cohan. What must it have been like, to witness Live? Often enough their stage work was preserved upon film, or record; but, "it's just not the same".

These ghosts from our past are well represented by the Yankee Doodle Boy himself, George M. Cohan. Such a famous celebrity in his day, yet today reduced to anonymity, known primarily for his patriotic contributions to America's musical legacy.

When people my age know him at all, it's perhaps through the wonderful James Cagney biographical film, Yankee Doodle Dandy, a cinematic tribute that Cohan himself lived to see before cancer brought down the final curtain on his career in that wartime year of 1942.

That career saw over 10,000 stage appearances, the writing of 500 songs (according to his autobiography; 1,500 songs, according to the experts at Wikipedia), making his first appearance on the stage at the age of eight in 1886, retiring after appearing in his last play in 1937.

At his peak he was as famous for his love of family as we was for the patriotism behind songs like "Over There" and "You're A Grand Old Flag". He wore that love as openly as his love of country, maybe more so.

Mary Ramsey, lifelong friend of the Cohan family, remembers:

"One sweet thing about George M, while his mother was alive, there was never a day went by when he didn't either see her at her apartment, or call her on the phone when he was out of town, he would never miss calling her. She always had heard from him, every day."

Secretary Ida Kohn remembers:

"He was a very gentle person, kind, and very well-mannered, of course... It was so sweet and charming of this man, who was so famous in the American theater, to refer to his father, with such humility, as 'my Daddy'."

Precious little survives from his legendary days on the American stage; for reasons that can be heard in the embedded program below, Cohan only made 7 (!) records of his songs throughout his life. Fortunately, through the hard work of radio producer Joseph Meyers we can hear George M. Cohan in a forum that can truly make us value the treasure that he left us. Mixing hobby and employment, Meyers built a remarkable radio series, called Biography In Sound, dipping into his impressive collection of rare recordings as well that of the archives and news gathering services of NBC. The series came just as radio was following vaudeville into the cultural fog of yesteryear, each week interviewing family, admirers and colleagues of famous statesmen, stars, athletes, poets, writers, from Woodrow Wilson to Babe Ruth to WC Fields to Clarence Darrow to Carl Sandburg to... George M Cohan.

The Biography In Sound episode broadcast on March 5, 1957, offered a stirring tribute entitled "They Knew George M Cohan". The concluding 15 minutes include rare excerpts from an April 1938 dinner, put on by the Catholic Actors Guild on behalf of the great song and dance man.

It was a very humble showman who took to the microphone that special night:

"This gathering here, tonight, it's more of a tribute to the memory of my father than anything else. And of course that makes it doubly thrilling to me..."

For the rest of his speech, I invite you to sit back, dim the lights, and rekindle the flame of the flickering candle of memory, of the relationship between love of family and love of country... and love of life.

You're a grand old flag,
You're a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
You're the emblem of
The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev'ry heart beats true
'neath the Red, White and Blue,
Where there's never a boast or brag.
But should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.

Previous Radio Memories posts:

Fibber McGee And Molly: The Scrap Drive
D-Day Broadcasts (from June 5, 1944)
Red Skelton: Vacations
Frontier Gentleman: Gambling Lady
Information Please: Guests Walter Duranty and John Gunther
The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

This Pretentious CNN Anchor Doesn't Know As Much As A Late-Night Comedian

Who is Wolf Blitzer?

"Wolf, things have not worked out as well as you would have hoped for, I'm sure...", consoles off-screen Jeopardy game show host Alex Trebec.

A recent Celebrity episode of the long-running tv quiz program revealed that the modern-day Ed McMahon, Tonight Show sidekick Andy Richter, seems to be a bit more aware of his facts and figures than long-time CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer.

Among the challenging questions that plunged his final score into its eventual negative numbers...:

Wolf thought this was fettucine:

Wolf believed that the answer to this question was "Jerusalem"...

The highlight video assembled at Gawker.com is hilarious, and if you have time you can enjoy the full episode at YouTube, part one here and part two here.

Bruce Bawer just spoke in Montreal

Blazing Cat Fur sent the notice around, but I didn't get the live feed for the Bawer conference up in time. But here's the link to the videos (in English with a few introductory words in French):





And here is the French-language introduction of Bawer by PointdeBascule's Marc Lebuis:

Amoral ACORN

Have you been following this story? The shocking series of undercover videos being served up daily at Andrew Breitbart's Big Government.com continue, chapter by ugly chapter, exposing some pretty ugly truths: employees at ACORN have been quite willing to condone under-age prostitution.

Posing as a pimp boyfriend banker trying to set up his prostitute with a brothel filled with 13-year old prostitutes trafficked illegally into the country from El Salvador, in order to raise funds for a future congressional campaign, newsmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles keep piling up video evidence of the amoral practices of ACORN employees in branch office after branch office across the US.

After dropping in on ACORN headquarters in Baltimore (video here, transcript here), Washington DC (video here, transcript here), and New York (video here, transcript here), this morning we were teased with a fragment of the team's sting operation in San Bernadino, California. This one left my head spinning:



ACORN has issued a different kind of response to the latest video. While the community organizers in Baltimore who helpfully offered tax advice for running a brothel with under-age girls got fired for their behavior, ACORN attests that their California employee was only playing along, especially when she claimed that she had killed her husband:

"I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephan Colbert does – saying the most outrageous things with a straight face."

I keep re-writing, and re-thinking, my conclusions to this latest development. Is it more likely that she is crazy enough to admit crimes like murder, to two total strangers, or that she would spend so much time acting the fool for total strangers? Surely, it's the latter proposition that is the most possible, however improbable that it may sound.

Andrew Breitbart is no dummy: surely he would have checked up on this woman's outrageous statements, to the degree that one could, before posting his video? Especially given the litigious threats ACORN made last week, when the first videos were released? Does Big Government.com know whether in fact her ex-husband is still alive? Was she ever even married in the first place?

Seeing as we're being offered a daily dose of this macabre moral soap opera, I guess we have to wait and tune in again tomorrow, for the next installment...

Just received, a misdirected? text message:

Hey i'm trying to take out the web piercing cause i have a dentist appointment.
And can't unscrew it.

Anyone got advice?

Students cheer as normal wins...

Sept. 11

This would be a good day to take an hour and listen to Gil Bailie's July talk to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. It is exemplary of the kind of moral striving and frank, courageous, informed and irenic talk we all need to pursue if the West is to save itself from its own decadence and from its religious-political rivals who take from what remains of the legacy of Western freedom, science, and free economies, but have, to be blunt, as yet little to offer the cause of this freedom's renewal and survival.

The talk is found in three audio files currently at the top of this page.

Not just Rubes from Poland

Why Are Jews Liberals?---A Symposium: Commentary magazine has an interesting round table on Norman Podhoretz's latest book. Many good answers are given to the question, though all deal with the relation of Jews either to Judaism or to the non-Jewish world; none deals with the difficult subject of Jew-on-Jew relations in the old Europe of limited Jewish opportunities, or in the New World; and part of the answer to (secular) Jewish liberalism surely lies there. Anyway, a couple of neat quotes, first from Jeff Jacoby:

...troubadour Shlomo Carlebach after a lifetime of visiting American campuses: “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.”

“Just-a-human-being” liberalism, secular and universalist—there is the dead end into which the flight from Jewish separateness has led so many American Jews. To call it a dead end is not to deny its allure. Much of liberalism’s appeal lay in making Jews feel good about themselves, secure in the conviction that they were part of a broad and enlightened mainstream. Liberalism freed them from the charge of parochial self-interest that had so often been leveled against Jews. It replaced the ancient, sometimes difficult burden of chosenness—the Jewish mission to live by God’s law and bring the world to ethical monotheism—with a more palatable and popular commitment to equality, tolerance, and “social justice.”

And from David Gelernter:

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s book asks an important question, and the text answers it: Jews are religious by nature, and having mostly abandoned Judaism, they have taken up the “Torah of liberalism” instead—as an ex–wine connoisseur who has lost all sense of taste but is still thirsty might switch to cheap gin.

Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits

A 65-year old counter-protestor had the tip of his pinky finger bitten off by a pro-Obama supporter:

“It all started with their difference in philosophy over healthcare reform,” said Senior Deputy Eric Buschow of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.
...
A witness picked up the detached fingertip after the suspect spit it out and drove it to the hospital. Buschow said doctors told the victim that they could not reattach the fingertip because of the high risk of infection.

The speculations in the accompanying comment thread are sometimes... interesting:

20 bucks says the victim was wagging his finger in front of the guy and was warned to stop several times. i bet he deserved it.
the anti-reformers do not know how to have a discussion about this topic. they have to get in your face anytime they are trying to make a point. just shows how ignorant and how intolerant they really are as people.
Posted by: james September 03, 2009 at 10:53 AM

The person who "deserved" to lose a finger for his beliefs was later interviewed about the altercation, and by the calm humility he displays here, I wonder just how "in your face" he was in "making a point" to the Obama supporter at the rally:

A mere statistic

Grandson sues to clear Stalin over killings | Oddly Enough | Reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Josef Stalin was in the dock on Monday when a Russian court held a preliminary hearing in a libel case brought by his grandson over a newspaper story which said the tyrant had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens.
[...]
"We want to rehabilitate Stalin," he told Reuters. "He turned populations into peoples, he presided over a golden era in literature and the arts, he was a real leader."

A phrase in the article saying Stalin and the secret police committed grave crimes against their own people caused particular offence, Zhura said.
[...]
Gilded words of praise for the dictator were unveiled last week on the marbled halls of a central Moscow metro station and Stalin was voted Russia's third most popular figure in history in a nationwide poll last year.

Russia buried last August Soviet-era dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sent to a Gulag (labor camp) for making a joke about Stalin, in a religious ceremony which bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral.

But in the public arena in today's Russia, there is very little talk about the millions of Soviets who perished in Gulag labor camps or from famine during Stalin's rule.

Recent Russian teachers' manuals have described Stalin as an effective manager who acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to modernize the Soviet Union.

What those who can't live with nasty historical reality further miss, it seems to me, is that Stalin's death toll keeps on rising. A Russia that has "modernized" with very little in the way of a shared covenant that works to guarantee the individual's freedom - and no such covenant can exist without people first recognizing the impossibility of any big man long keeping a moral order - without which success in the now single global economy is unlikely to be very great, is a society likely fated to suffer great resentments and continue to fade into a rather childless oblivion.

But maybe that's just why many Russians can't face the reality of Stalin: they can't accept that doing what it took to defeat the Nazis at their own game was no guarantee of "the people's" survival, sad to say. But why isn't that obvious by now?

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Refuses to Apply the Law

While the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has no authority to make constitutional rulings, Athanasios D. Hadjis has nevertheless ruled, in Warman v. Lemire, that he will refuse to uphold that part of the law, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, that deals with "hate speech" given the Tribunal Member's own personal understanding of the Charter of Rights and of the Supreme Court's Section 13-affirming Taylor decision. Hadjis is washing his hands (not only of the bad law but perhaps of his own previous involvement in the invidious "human rights" game) and kicking the can to the politicians and, possibly, the higher courts. Will freedom of speech in Canada be served by the ultra-cautious PM Stephen Harper (Mackenzie King the II) or by the power-hungry Michael Ignatieff (the wannabe Trudeau the II). Now that Ignatieff is stating a blanket refusal to vote with the minority government in Parliament, Canadians may have to pick their Prime Ministerial poison in a fall election.

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal

[290] In my view, it is clear that Taylor's confidence that the human rights process under the Act merely serves to prevent discrimination and compensate victims hinged on the absence of any penal provision akin to the one now found at s. 54(1)(c), as well as on the belief that the process itself was not only structured, but actually functioned in as conciliatory a manner as possible. The evidence before me demonstrates that the situation is not as the Court contemplated in both respects. Thus, following the reasoning of Justice Dickson, at 933,one can no longer say that the absence of intent in s. 13(1) "raises no problem of minimal impairment" and "does not impinge so deleteriously upon the s. 2(b) freedom of expression so as to make intolerable" the provision's existence in a free and democratic society. On this basis, I find that the Oakes minimum impairment test has not been satisfied, and that s. 13(1) goes beyond what can be defended as a reasonable limit on free expression under s. 1 of the Charter.
[...]
V. Conclusion
I have determined that Mr. Lemire contravened s. 13 of the Act in only one of the instances alleged by Mr. Warman, namely the AIDS Secrets article. However, I have also concluded that s. 13(1) in conjunction with ss. 54(1) and (1.1) are inconsistent with s. 2(b) of the Charter, which guarantees the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The restriction imposed by these provisions is not a reasonable limit within the meaning of s. 1 of the Charter. Since a formal declaration of invalidity is not a remedy available to the Tribunal (see Cuddy Chicks Ltd. V. Ontario (Labour Relations Board), [1991] 2 S.C.R. 5), I will simply refuse to apply these provisions for the purposes of the complaint against Mr. Lemire and I will not issue any remedial order against him (see Nova Scotia (Workers' Compensation Board) v. Martin, 2003 SCC 54 at paras. 26-7).
"Signed by"
Athanasios D. Hadjis

He "simply refuses"; that has the nice ring of civil disobedience, doesn't it? But will anyone in government try very hard to notice? In any case, I think a tentative "congratulations" to all those who have been fighting Section 13 is in order.

Blazing Cat Fur of course is keeping track of all the relevant links

The Best Advice...

...is often the simplest.

I was standing in church, and felt a nudge on the arm; I turned to see my friend looking at me, concerned. "Hey", he whispers helpfully, "Smile."

So I did.

And suddenly things didn't look, or feel, so bad anymore.

For a while. A moment respite. But that was enough.

Ready now for tomorrow.

Smile and maybe tomorrow
Youll see the sun come shining through, for you

He's back!

Due to his sudden disappearance last October, and after several months of unexplained non-activity, I had placed an "in memoriam" next to our sidebar link for Wolf Howling. I just clicked on the link and find GW has been back since April, when he commented briefly on his recovery from some major medical problem. More great reading! and all the best to GW.

Radio Memories: The Sound Of Teamwork

Back by popular demand: our Sunday offering of Radio Memories, a weekly recollection of the dearly-departed artistic medium of radio drama… the theater of the mind.

This week I need some laughs, so we’ll be tuning in to the delightful comedy series Fibber McGee and Molly.

Husband and wife vaudeville team Jim and Marian Jordan appeared on radio, in one capacity or another, from 1924 through 1959. Their run as the big dreamer Fibber McGee and long-suffering wife Molly was one of the highest-rated shows of its day, a fact I feel able to vouch for anecdotally, since every time I’ve chatted with seniors about their memories of old radio drama, they all fondly remember listening to this program, often citing it at the top of their list of favorites. If I condensed all their memories into one single remembrance, it would go like this:

“He would have a closet filled with junk”, they would explain to me, “and when it opened you would imagine all the crazy mess as it tumbled out. Your mind did all the work, you see.”

The ingenuity of sound effects maestros like Frank Pittman (who started the closet gag) and Virgil Reimer (who turned it into an art form all its own) would be tested by this running gag like never before, a test of their patience as much as it was of their imagination. A collection of boxes, cans and increasingly varied objects would be precariously perched on a makeshift mount best described as stairs; on cue the sound effects man would give the top shelf a calculated nudge, and one pile would fall upon the next, and the next, and the next, creating audio chaos. A weekly terror gripped the sound effects technician, however:

What if the delicately staged apparatus accidentally fell on its own, before the proper time??

I remember reading in Robert Mott’s memoir, Radio Sound Effects, that Virgil Reimer turned the closet sound effect into a visual gag as much as an audio one, creating a moment of surreal performance art on stage for the sake of the studio audience assembled for the broadcasts; the preposterously decorated stairs of bric-a-brac prepared for the closet gag would be given prominent space on display for the audience to see, and savor. And what a sight in must have been: the conclusion of the effect would frequently be greeted by the audience with approving applause in addition to laughter..!

This sharing of comedy glory was not at all a common approach to working with sound effects; quite often comedians would fret about being upstaged by the audience’s fascination with the prosaic work of the sound effects crew, opening fake doors, closing gimmicked windows, ringing phones and all the other busy work they had to do each program. Reportedly the more insecure comedians on other programs even hid their sound effects technicians behind a curtain, in order to hog all the live audience’s attention for themselves. I can sympathize with why they felt the threat; when I was 12 I got to attend a radio broadcast of Canada’s comedy show The Royal Canadian Air Farce, and the lone sound effects man off on stage left was as riveting to follow as the four comedians as they bobbed and weaved at their microphones on stage right. The sound effects man could pull out an eggbeater or some strange device to provide the son juste, and it would completely overshadow all the clever dialog and funny timing in evidence at the other end of the stage.

No such fragile egos or insecurities from Fibber McGee and Molly, aka Jim and Marion Jordan. Their biographies reveal a reassuringly normal married couple from the Midwest, who kept their success in perspective even when theirs was the top show in the ratings; they never “went Hollywood”. I have a fun old book on radio comedy published in 1945, “There’s Laughter In The Air”, by Jack Gaver and Dave Stanley, that suggests the Jordans kept themselves busy off-stage, so that the temptations that came with stardom would not dominate their lives:

The Jordans live now on a modest ranch near Encino, California, a few miles outside of Hollywood… Jordan served two terms as president of the Encino Chamber of Commerce. He owns a thousand acres of grazing land near Bakersfield, California, where he raises blooded Polled Angus cattle. He also owns a firm that makes sand-blasting machinery, and a bottling plant.

Not bad for “mere” comedians..!

An unsung hero of this series has to be its prolific writer/director, Don Quinn. In an era when radio comedians often leaned on teams of four or five writers, Quinn wrote each half-hour show by himself. (Well, almost: he relied on his wife to correct his terrible grammar...) From the same 1945 book quoted above, we who struggle with our writing skill can read with envy how he approached crafting each week's Tuesday night broadcast:

Quinn and the players usually get together Friday afternoons to discuss the next show. On Saturday he plays around with whatever idea is decided upon and then on Sunday really gets down to writing, usually from 9 pm through the night until dawn. The cast has first reading Monday, and it had better sound good to Quinn because if he doesn’t like what he’s written he’ll toss the whole thing in the wastebasket and sit up all Monday night fashioning a new script.
“I will not willingly sell a bad show,” he says.

But he's also quick to point out the real secret of the show's success... the shared sense of mission:

“The reason for the success of the Fibber McGee and Molly show – and I can call it successful because of the Hooper and Crossley surveys – is that everyone cooperates. There is no bickering. There are no jealousies. The sponsor gives us an almost free hand, even in the writing of the comedy commercial…”

The supporting actors included Harold Peary, whose character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve made radio history by becoming the first spin-off show in 1941, eventually giving the original show a run for its money at the top of the ratings. (Gildy started our Radio Memories series last Christmas, which you can listen to here.)

Peary is gone by the time of the April 7th, 1942 broadcast I've selected as this week's offering, but in his place is a character performed by Bill Thompson, who cast a much longer cultural shadow, albeit through indirect means. His mushy-voiced henpecked husband character named Wallace Wimple, showing up after the middle commercial in this episode, is recognizable to audiences today, perhaps, due to the similar voice he lent to a long-running theatrical cartoon character. When radio drama began to be eclipsed by television, Thompson found steady work supplying voices for all kinds of cartoon characters, especially for Disney.

Judging from the available behind-the-scenes anecdotes, the McGee show was one where there was room for everyone to make a contribution; therefore I thought it would be ironic to pick an episode centered around an historical event where the opposite happened; an unfortunate occurrence that shows what inevitably befalls us when "experts" decide they know what's best, deliberately snubbing the potential input of people with practical experience but few officious credentials.

In early 1942 the Germans' Operation Drumbeat sank so much American shipping that it caused a gasoline and rubber shortage on the East Coast. Rationing went into effect for that region, and President Roosevelt's bloated New Deal-era bureaucracy so bungled its implementation that it spelled electoral doom for the Democrats in that year's mid-term elections. Shortages were exacerbated when the Japanese effectively cut off 90% of the US' rubber supply, through the conquest of Malaya in the outreaches of the Pacific. The alphabet soup of agencies had not gotten around yet to properly inaugurating the US's own synthetic replacements for rubber; the resulting shortage was severely damaging to the war effort.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (whose son later served in the Clinton White House), grandly declared that one million tons of rubber could be salvaged from American garages, backyards and attics. Despite sotto-voce assurances to the contrary by such figures as Arthur Newhall, a former rubber manufacturer then working for the War Production Board (WPB), a very public and patriotic campaign was launched to collect the nation's scrap materials (as you can hear from this week's Fibber McGee and Molly show, embedded below), but unfortunately to little effect. As recounted by Thomas Fleming in "The New Dealer's War: FDR And The War Within World War II":

The drive was a fiasco. At the end of five frantic weeks, in which the president made a statement and Ickes ran around like an out-of-control windup toy, the nation had collected only 335,000 tons of scrap rubber. Ickes was reduced to trying to confiscate the rubber mats on the floors of the Interior Department buildings. The Public Buildings Administration blocked him, saying it would lead to an epidemic of broken hips when people started falling on the slippery marble floors. In a last gasp, Ickes was caught stealing a rubber mat from the White House. Compounding the petroleum czar’s folly was his apparent ignorance of the fact that rubber mats were made from recycled rubber and were useless in the production of tires.

[pages 141-142]

As a result of his investigations into the handling of the rubber shortages, a somewhat obscure Missouri Senator named Harry S Truman [ghost]wrote an article in American Mercury magazine provocatively entitled, "We Can Lose The War In Washington". As chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the War Program, he was infuriated by the self-defeating maze of bungling bureaucracy erected by the White House. By his own party. A true team player, he put the nation's interests ahead of petty partisanship, and endured a lot of criticism for his integrity. This was the public's first real glimpse of the man who would soon inherit all this mess when he is propelled from the vice-presidency to the office of President of the United States of America in early 1945.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and possibly losing the spirit that sparked this post. That's a sign that it's time to dim the lights and sharpen the mind, to the sounds of one of radio's most humble, and successful, teams: Fibber McGee and Molly.

A list of our previous Radio Memories offerings may be found here.

"Springtime for Hamas and Palestine..."

I've often responded to the delusional hatred of Israel, stemming from white guilt at observing scenes of Palestinian suffering, with arguments like "yes, well, of course Gaza is a hell hole, but this is the fruit of a culture that has spent sixty years doing little but brooding how to destroy its more successful rival".

A recent column from Spengler has me rethinking my rhetoric: is it smart to acknowledge the hell hole in an attempt to move the argument on?

... data confirm that Palestinians enjoy a higher living standard than their Arab neighbors. A fail-safe gauge is life expectancy. The West Bank and Gaza show better numbers than most of the Muslim world
[...]
Without disputing Obama's claim that life for the Palestinians is intolerable, it is fair to ask: where is life not intolerable in the Arab world? When the first UN Arab Development Report appeared in 2002, it elicited comments such as this one from the London Economist: "With barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can." Life sounds intolerable for the Arabs generally; their best poet, the Syrian "Adonis" - Ali Ahmad Said Asbar - calls them an "extinct people".

Palestinian Arabs are highly literate, richer and healthier than people in most other Arab countries, thanks to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the blackmail payments of Western as well as Arab governments. As refugees, they live longer and better than their counterparts in adjacent Arab countries. It is not surprising that they do not want to be absorbed into other Arab countries and cease to be refugees.

If the Palestinians ceased to be refugees, moreover, it is not clear how they would maintain their relatively advantaged position. They cannot return to farming; for all the tears about bulldozed olive groves, no one in the West Bank will ever make a living selling olive oil, except perhaps by selling "Holy Land" products to Christian tourists. Apart from tourism, the only non-subsidy source of income the Palestinians had was day labor in Israel, but security concerns close that off. Light manufacturing never will compete with Asia, and surely not during a prolonged period of global overcapacity.

An alternative is for the Palestinians to continue to live off subsidies. But why should they? Why should Western taxpayers subsidize an Arab in Ramallah, when Arabs in Egypt are needier? The answer is that they represent a security concern for Western countries, who believe that they are paying to limit violence. That only makes sense if the threat of violence remains present in the background and flares up frequently enough to be credible. One cannot simply stage-manage such things. A sociology of violence in which a significant proportion of the population remains armed [is necessary].
[...]
About one out of four Palestinian men between the ages of 20 and 40 makes a living carrying a gun.

That is, the economic structure of "pre-state" Palestine is heavily skewed towards the sort of institutionalized means of violence that is supposed to disappear once a state has been established. This is absurd, and creates a double disincentive for the Palestinians to maintain a low boil of violence. Just how this violence-centered society is supposed to make the transition to an ordinary civil society is an unanswerable question.

Once the problem is diagnosed with this kind of clarity, the solution becomes obvious:
# Cut Western support to the Palestinians with the aim of reducing living standards in the West Bank to those prevailing in Egypt, as an incentive for emigration.
# Demilitarize Palestinian society: offer a reward for turning in weapons, seize them when necessary, and give newly-unemployed gunmen employment weaving baskets at half pay.

Like many obvious solutions, this one never will be put into practice.

Well gee, Spengler, basket weaving, when there's so much more money in Jew hatred?

The Palestinians cannot form a normal state. They cannot emigrate to Arab countries without accepting a catastrophic decline in living standards, and very few can emigrate to Western countries. The optimal solution for the Palestinians is to demand a state and blackmail Western and Arab donors with the threat of violence, but never actually get one.

But does Obama want what's optimal for the Arab cousins of Bill Ayers and the ACORN mob? What's more, can the Palestinians really be so rational given their "sociology of violence"? What about their religious imperatives to destroy Jewish power?
Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

p.s. if anyone wants to adapt the lyrics, leave a comment

Does Palin=Babbitt? If so, how? Questions for our times...

There haven't been a lot of posts here lately. The contributors need a rest, for various reasons. But one of the reasons, perhaps the most difficult, lies in a sense that we are not always on, or close enough, to the same page.

But maybe I'm wrong, or maybe we can only know by working things through with some dialogue. To that end, I thought I'd reproduce a comment I just made at Breath of the Beast.

First, just to frame it, I'm wondering if some of the thinking at this blog, for example, may be more libertarian or antagonistic to all forms of shared, collective, authority and the sacred than I would like. Certain epistemologies expressed might, while nominally expressed in the name of freedom, have too much in common with the worldview of the contemporary nihilist left - all truth is reducible to the will to power - for my liking.

Anyway, here, slighlty revised, is what I wrote in respone to Yaacov's post where he discusses the current despair many conservatives in America feel in respect to both political parties and towards their government, and where he also discusses how he was belittled by academics who, in idolizing their own occupational detachment from the marketplace, think it fit to criticize anyone who would suggest that the proper ends of intellectual life are not in the intellectual or political life itself, but are tied to the need to increase value and reciprocity in the marketplace. I agree that increasing human reciprocity in the marketplace is our primary ethical concern. But, on the other hand, I don't think that we can get there by simply belittling all those who value the need for outside-the-market morality. Here's the comment:

Have a look at Virginia Woolf's letter on "middlebrow". You'll see that the (proposed) alliance of the elitist and the plebe against the middle dates from at least the period, in the wake of WWI, where high culture entered into a despair and nihilism and pushed away the middle classes who, if they had not often been at the cutting edge of high culture nonetheless had until then aspired to keep up with it. But in the 1920s, a distinctive "middlebrow" publishing industry and associational culture arose, setting the terrain for highbrow rants against "Babbitry" and the "booboisie". Those graduate students belittling you were just mindlessly recapitulating 1920s sneers.

If we want - and we do need - a class of politicians who can lead with productive moral values, it is not enough, I think, to suggest that they just give us good laws and then get out of the way. They do have a necessary oversight role in watching, measuring, negotiating, regulating our unfolding freedom. It is a mistake to think we grow freedom by diminishing politics and the institutionalizing, in government, of our political negotiations and decisions.

Take, for example, the current financial debacle. Writing loans to people with no income, no jobs, no assets and then repackaging and selling those loans so their real toxicity can't be seen, so that financial players can win big commissions and bonuses while forestalling the inevitable day of reckoning, is either outright fraud or the most bizarre confabulation of magical thinking in the minds of many thousands of financial people. The continued unwillingness of the banks to mark their bad "assets" to market value is also, it seems to me, a form of accounting fraud being played on their investors.

I tend to think it wasn't a mass psychosis of magical thinking, that America has just been witness to a massive fraud, a massive ponzi scheme, that thousands of people involved in the financial industry must have been more or less aware of in its build up. And how many have even been investigated, let alone charged, by the legal-governmental authorities? Zero (charged, I believe). No, "government" has been actively trying to paper up the fraud lest we lose entirely our confidence in the present Wall St.-Washington system and have to go through a massive dislocation in finding ourselves again.

But there is no denying, it seems to me, that the reason this massive fraud was made possible is because the rather "laissez-faire" financial industry (when regulated, poorly regulated by the controlling types in government) proved itself full members of the human race, i.e. immersed in original sin, and corruptible. Somewhere along the way the economic players needed to be accountable to political players, via government. Instead, a mix of laissez-faire ideology and left-liberal cronyism that tied together Wall St. and political interests "ruled".

Laissez-faire cannot be the guiding ideology of real freedom. Real freedom involves having a hand in ruling yourself, and your neighbors' public conduct, in tandem with your fellows in a self-ruling democracy. It does not mean thinking there can ever be a society where the market simply polices itself with no political/public negotiation and regulation outside the market. Just try to imagine a market where you could buy every form of insurance, company information and "credit checking", every necessary piece of contract law, to mitigate against the risk of corruption in those with whom you were in trust relationships (perhaps keeping in mind how the bond rating agencies have just proven themselves readily corruptible by the logic of the marketplace). At some point you would always come to realize that you ultimately rely on a kind of disinterested, potentially self-sacrificing, morality that cannot be articulated in any purely economic logic. And this would entail more than the rule of law (though of course that would be indispensable) because there are always novel situations in which forms of "grey market" immorality are not going to be foreseen by the law. In short, there will always be a need for an economic insider who goes political, who breaks with the economic players and hence his own self-interest to say "look what is going on, this is wrong, WE have to do something about it".

Freedom requires some kind of partial closure to the economic free market through a political marketplace. Unless we take up this claim seriously, and see where it takes us in conceiving a truly ethical, if not "moral" economy, for the years ahead, the left will always have a great political advantage over those of us who truly want not to control (as does the left) but to find rulers who help maximize our freedom. Shouting at tea parties is not enough. The forces of freedom must become full players in politics and government. And that can only start with building up the narratives that give people the reason and desire to so involve themselves.

What is primitive man?

He who thinks he can kill Jesus, in 2009, or the lowest peasant in the land?

DHAKA, Bangladesh, August 4 (Compass Direct News) – At the urging of local Muslim leaders, police in western Bangladesh have tortured a pastor and two other Christians for legally proclaiming Christ.
[...]
“Police told us, ‘We will teach you in the camp how to forget your Christ,’ while dragging us to the vehicle,” said Rahman.

Police blindfolded them after reaching the camp and took them to three separate rooms.

“I heard blood-curdling scream from other rooms,” Rahman said. “I was sitting on the floor blindfolded. I could not understand what was happening around me. Later several police came to me and one of them kicked me on the back of my head, and my head ricocheted off the wall. They also kicked my waist.”

Ordering him to say how many people he had converted to Christianity in the Muslim-majority nation, the commander said he would kick him a like number of times. The official told him to call out to Jesus, saying he wanted to see how Jesus would save him, Rahman said.
[...]
Police officers told Rahman to admit that whatever he had done in his life was wrong, he said. When they sent them to Boalia police station early the next morning, dozens of Christians arrived to try to obtain their release.

Police, however, were reluctant to release the detained Christians.

“Some Christian villagers then said, ‘We are also criminal because we believe in Christ like Habibur Rahman and the other two Christians,’” Rahman said. “They told police, ‘If you do not release them, then arrest us and put us in jail.’”

Police did not release the three Christians until 9:30 that night.

The next day, June 10, thousands of Muslim villagers demonstrated in front of a local government office called the Zamzami Union Council chanting, “We want a Christian-free society,” and “We will not allow any Christians in Cuadanga.”
[...]
There are 176 Christians in the area where Rahman works as an evangelist and pastor, he said.

“The local government council chairman told me two times not to come in this area,” Rahman said. “He said, ‘There is no Christian in this area, so why do you come here to make Christians?’”

Local Muslim villagers have since refused to give work to area Christians, most of whom are day laborers dependent on obtaining daily jobs to survive.

Which covenant, whose freedom, will you defend?

Kudos to Jonathan Manthorpe

Discussing his column last week that discussed the Anthropogenic Global Warming "denier", Ian Plimer, Jonathan Manthorpe shows he's not bullied by the high priests of the first global religion:

There was too a healthy crop of letters from scientists who, while quarreling with some of Plimer's arguments, basically agree with him that the Earth warms and cools in natural cycles, and that human activities have little or no impact on these changes.

But the disturbing letters were from the scientist believers in man-man global warming.

I have met a lot of unpleasant people in the course of my life, but I have never seen such a torrent of nasty, arrogant and downright stupid abuse as has been aimed at me this week by people who aggressively sign themselves "PhD" as though it were a mark of divine right that is beyond challenge or question.

If a man can be judged by the character of his enemies, the letters I have received from scientists this week has significantly raised Plimer in my estimation.

Wednesday Hero

When the extra-ordinary becomes ordinary: here's a wonderful example of our amazing ability to continually adapt to life's given circumstances.



The combing, the chopsticks, the cooking... I'm having trouble deciding which single act amazes me the most... probably the sewing.

By ending with the family playing a game of cards together, the video concludes on a fitting note: we can't control the cards we're dealt, but we can choose how we play the hand.

Aristotle, Free Food, And The Illusion Of Intelligence

I ran across this interesting passage from Aristotle over the weekend. From Book One of Ethics:

Since in every case a man judges rightly what he understands, and of this only is a good critic, it follows that while in a special field the good critic is a specialist, the good critic in general is the man with a general education.

That is why a young man is not a fit person to attend lectures on political science, because he is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject-matter.

Besides, he tends to follow his feelings, with the result that he will make no headway and derive no benefit from his course, since the object of it is not knowledge but action.

It makes no difference whether he is young in age or youthful in character; the defect is due not to lack of years but to living, and pursuing one's various aims, under sway of the feelings; for to people like this knowledge becomes as unprofitable as it is for the incontinent.

Aristotle's observation on the value of life experience seemed the perfect commentary upon this video, featuring a young lady as sincere as she is enthusiastic, delivering an (impromptu?) address to a 2008 Santa Cruz City Council meeting. [I'm having trouble embedding the video, for some reason, so you'll have to follow the link. Fortunately I had made a transcript of the speech shortly after I first heard the audio broadcast over last week's Northern Alliance Radio Network talk show. I let myself miss the occasional "umm" and "uhh", otherwise I hope the transcript is pretty accurate..:]

Young Speaker: Well, the crops are, um, growing very well, and they’re organic and have pesticides and I think that we should make a perfect pesticide for the crops, that is good for people, and uh, healthy, and keeps the crops preserved, because, we need the FOOD, because it’s food and stuff, and organic food is good also…
Um… and the businesses downtown really need to lower their rent, because if the rent was lower those people would really have their own businesses, they have enough stuff, they’re very good at making things, they’re experts, they’re really good…
And we can really be a community, and make good things, and, um, sell them in our stores, that it can be a California thing, it can really work out, because we can be rich in cotton, and mining metals, and silkworms, and we can make things, things like cars, the machine can make it for us. And we can have the community, and the city, and San Francisco things, and put them in a store…
On the East Coast they have slaves, they believe in slavery, and Made In China, but, on the West Coast, the new West Coast, we don’t believe in that, we believe in the union, and that’s what we are….
In the Bush administration, which is really good, he has government funding for small business owners…
You can grow every type of fruit and vegetable you want, that’s how they do it. They have fruit trees, and vegetable trees, that’s where fruit and vegetable comes from…
You freeze the fruit and vegetables, and it’ll last forever. You can put, you know, broccoli or strawberries in the freezer and it’ll last forever. If you don’t, you know, it might go bad in a bit…
People, we live in California, this is our home, this is where we live…
Growing food is so good, for the people, because, it’s free. All’s you have to do is pay the farmers. And pay for the land. But, why do we have to pay for the land, the land’s free, it’s new land, you know, I mean do we have to pay for the land, do we have to pay rent; the food’s free. So we should just sell it… at the farmer’s market.

City Councillor: [laconically] Thank You. Next speaker…

It probably won't seem like it, but I'm really not trying to make fun of the young lady; Lord knows this is probably what I sound like half the time I try to make myself sound smart. I think, in fact, I have much to learn from watching the video; it's helped to bring into clearer focus some half-formed ideas I've been writing about, off-and-on over the years, on what it means to actually be intelligent.

Starting with the recognition of how valuable the simple act of conversation can be as the backbone to one's education. I wonder how many of the holes in this young lady's knowledge base arose from never having anyone really test that knowledge by honestly discussing her ideas with her... what intellectual poverty it must be, to be surrounded with friends and family (and teachers) who completely agree with everything you believe. The hallmark of civility, the art of agreeing to disagree, is sadly becoming a lost art, it seems, through being increasingly unpracticed, and therefore unappreciated. ("As Iron Sharpens Iron, So One Man Sharpens Another." Proverbs 27:17)

The fame (or should I say, infamy) of this video suggests the next lesson: the contribution that humility makes in the march towards intelligence. Presumably the young lady in the video knows by now how many hundreds of thousands of people around the world have watched her speech since she gave it last year. (I guess I'm contributing to her humiliation by posting it here... sorry about that) I hope the sometimes cruel comments and mocking criticisms don't end up discouraging her from picking herself up and trying to fill some of those holes in her education. This, I think, is the key to the second most important facet of being "intelligent": the acceptance that improving our intelligence comes with a heavy price tag... it costs us the illusion of our infallibility.

Fortunately, if the necessary lesson in humility is learned early enough in life, the gift of time can counter-balance the follies that come with youthful vanity. Believing that, however, requires what I have grown to consider the single most important facet to intelligence: the ability to have faith, the imagination to believe that no matter how far we fall, how little we may become, how deeply we end up regretting our choices in life... we have within us the potential to always renew our self.

Un-Critical Mass of self-righteous twits inflames Vancouver Craigslist

Critical Mass, the mob of cyclists who commandeer city streets the last Friday of every month, blocking traffic, disrespecting the rules of the road, and generally showing contempt for motorists and pedestrians, sometimes getting in fights and generally infuriating those caught in their web, has been garnering a lot of negative talk in Vancouver, notwithstanding their apparent ability to garner sympathy from or morally blackmail Mayor Gregor Robertson by fraudulently invoking the name of cycling advocacy (the police are tacitly assisting the CM civil disobedience by warning motorists to stay clear of downtown on the unhappy Fridays; the police presently intend to do nothing to stop the event).

I noticed one message on the Craigslist bicycle sales page calling on cyclists to respond to a CBC article on which there were a lot of anti-Critical Mass comments. The Craigslist poster assumed the bike traders would be pro-Critical Mass. But I have yet to see any follow-up message in support, and I have now seen about ten anti-CM comments (though someone is flagging some of the comments for deletion, as, I suppose, politics is not Craigslist's raison d'etre. However the original comment is not yet deleted.) Most cyclists see Critical Mass as doing little but increasing the level of resentment that is directed at cyclists, thus endangering all of us.

Anyway, I thought one comment was worth preserving, testifying as it does to the power of bicycles to save us from nihilism, up to a point - coarse language follows:

I work for a living,I graduated from Emily Carr art school,I love bikes more than any other monetary posession,I have more handmade bikes than days in the week,I got my first Sex Pistols record in London in 1977,,,Fuck you Fixie welfare asshole tatood squeegie Twatts making car drivers hate me even more......

I'm not sure how to read this ode to hard work, private property, and punk rock, but I was just thinking that Dag is maybe going to have to rethink his ontology of the "death hippie".

A "Fixie" by the way is a single or fixed-gear bike, as used in velodrome track sprinting, and which is now a trendy item on the road among a certain young crowd apparently more interested in racing than coasting or breaking.