Brendan O’Neill, like yours truly, finds the Roman Polanski left-right skirmish a competitive exercise in narrative-framing with a lot of posing.

(T)he worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of victimology to make their case. For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis… (Remember, Roman Polanski raped a child, Salon, 28 September 2009 ). For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker (Roman a Clef: Wanted and Desired, Documentary.org, 2003). Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (The outrageous arrest of Roman Polanski, Washington Post, 27 September 2009 ) (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)

This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood, the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority – to the extent that Polanski’s pretty cowardly fleeing of America in 1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the emotional horrors of Auschwitz.

L’Affaire Polanski has become a Culture War that dare not speak its name, a pale and dishonest imitation of the debates about values and morality that have emerged at various times over the past 50 years. As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of 30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as desperate political observers have instead turned Polanski into either a ventriloquist’s dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of letting off some cheap moral steam.

David Zincavage, failed to disclose when he editorialized against the Polanski extradition, that he is married to Karen L. Myers, who has seen several Roman Polanski films. She also alerted me to Brendan O’Neill’s article.

Gore Vidal is now so old and crotchety that he’s becoming amusing again.

In this interview with the London Times, he has unkind things to say about nearly everyone from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, whom he predicts will be deposed by military coup(!). (I almost hope so, Gore, I thought, reading that one.)

Americans in general come in for the roughest treatment. Alas! we are all just a bunch of ignorant, uneducated yahoos, and unlike certain authors, we are generally not rich, famous, and descended from a prominent political family able to take credit apparently both for founding the airline industry and bringing Oklahoma into the Union.

Interestingly, Gore Vidal is lucid enough to recognize that homosexuality is a matter of acts, not of identity. He might have said more of interest on that subject so near to his own heart, but after remarking “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He refused to elucidate on how he thinks they are different.

Vera Lengsfeld (on the right) with well-known image of Angela Merkel in evening gown

Vera Lengsfeld, a 57-year-old Christian Democrat candidate facing a difficult race in a Berlin district against a Green incumbent, aroused controversy by producing and distributing the above poster, which informs voters: “We have more to offer.”

From the Telegraph.

You thought teaching small childen to sing Obama’s praises was ridiculous? Well…

Community organizers attending a Gamaliel Foundation International Leadership Assembly held December 4, 2008 in Washington, D.C. conducted a mock funeral of existing American health care, and a large portion of the crowd during a litany actually prayed to Barack Obama (who once worked for Gamaliel in Chicago).

2:00 video

Willam M. Chace, in the American Scholar, identifies the decline in study of the Humanities in general with the internal collapse of the English Department following the overthrow of the idea of the canon.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the near bankruptcy of the discipline is the silence from within its ranks. In the face of one skeptical and disenchanted critique after another, no one has come forward in years to assert that the study of English (or comparative literature or similar undertakings in other languages) is coherent, does have self-limiting boundaries, and can be described as this but not that.

Such silence strongly suggests a complicity of understanding, with the practitioners in agreement that to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases. No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable. In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform. With everything on the table, and with foundational principles abandoned, everyone is free, in the classroom or in prose, to exercise intellectual laissez-faire in the largest possible way—I won’t interfere with what you do and am happy to see that you will return the favor. Yet all around them a rich literature exists, extraordinary books to be taught to younger minds.

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—“Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions,” and “Shakespeares.” The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Donoghue, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson last December that “our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” And Harvard’s well-known Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt also told the Crimson that the substance of the old survey will “trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature.” But under the proposal, there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves. Greenblatt puts it this way: students should craft their own literary “journeys.” The professors might have little idea of where those journeys might lead, or how their paths might become errant. There will be no common destination.

As Harvard goes, so often go the nation’s other colleges and universities. Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

Roman Polanski

The director Roman Polanski is a significant artist of international stature. He is also 76 years old. More than 30 years ago, Polanski had sex with an underage girl in California. The judicial proceedings which took place at the time were improperly influenced by the superfluity of media attention focused on a famous Hollywood director entangled in a sex scandal.

Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired made it generally known that Polanski accepted a plea bargain which put him behind bars in very unpleasant circumstances “for psychiatric evaluation” for 42 days in Chino State Prison. After which time, according to the deal made with prosecutors, Polanski was supposed to be let off without further incarceration.

Newspaper reports, however, inflamed public opinion about the case, and Judge Laurence Rittenband arbitrarily decided to void Polanski’s plea bargain and impose an exemplary sentence, essentially sacrificing the unlucky director for the gratification of the tabloid mob. Polanski was temporarily at large when he learned of the judge’s intentions, and prudently fled into exile in Europe.

Polanski was certainly guilty of a form of sexual misbehavior which, depending on the overall circumstances, can be prosecuted as a serious crime. But consensual sex with underage girls is only “rape” in a technical sense. Michelle Malkin is making a regrettable spectacle of herself striking ridiculous moralistic poses, calling Polanski a “perv,” and describing sensible persons disinclined to support wasting government time and resources on seeking pointless vengeance on an old man a generation after the fact “crime-coddling apologists.”

This kind of naive legal absolutism rests on a childish fantasy that human acts, their legal status, and the outcome of judicial proceedings are matters of black and white, that good people, like Michelle Malkin and the rest of us on the Right, are always in favor of enforcing the letter of the law. I’m not. Laws (like our immigration and drug laws) can be ill-considered. Courts are sometimes corrupt. They are sometimes mistaken. Laws can be wrongly or simply arbitrarily enforced. After 30 years, some laws are no longer worth enforcing, some cases are no longer worth punishing.

The young woman who had sex with Polanski, now middle-aged, has said publicly that she thought she was being exploited by the court at the time, that she forgives Polanski, and that she finds the idea of re-opening the case against him embarrassing to herself and her family. So whom do we need to be avenging?

Patterico, who actually works at the same Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has gone even more loco with the same law-and-order zealotry.

He is raving about a conflict of interest in Anne Applebaum editorializing in favor of clemency in a stale and aged case involving an internationally renowned artist who is elderly, who has made significant cultural contributions, and who has himself been more than once a victim of terrible injustices. Anne Applebaum, you see, is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. Polanski is a Pole, and Poland is protesting his arrest, so Patterico thinks her editorials need to be accompanied by a warning of undue influence from the Polish Government. Lord!

I personally think conservative righteousness, outrage, and pettyfogging argument is more appropriately reserved for graver issues than a case of Hollywood hanky-panky from thirty years in the past. And, until Utopia is achieved and we have a perfect legal system administered by angels, applying a flawless legal code in every case with precision accuracy and scrupulous evenhandedness, I think we can skip all the rah-rah law-and-order nonsense.

Sometimes the law is an ass. And the day the US undertook to extradite Roman Polanski over a roll in the hay that occurred during the opening days of the Consulship of Jimmy Carter is one of those times.

Four modern violins by Michael Rhonheimer and one Stradivarius made in 1711

Material scientist Francis W.M.R. Schwarze believed that biotechnology could modify contemporary woods to possess the acoustic properties found in the centuries-old violins produced by masters of violin-making’s Golden Age.

Schwarze used varying amounts of fungal decay to modify the density of the woods used in two violins built by Michael Ronheimer. An acoustic tone test was then arranged at the annual Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen (forestry conference).

English violinist Matthew Trusler would play the same piece on five violins, in a blind test including a Stradivarius worth two million dollars built in 1711, two Rhonheimer violins built of untreated wood, and two Rhonheimer violins built from wood subjected to varying amounts of decay.

Science Daily reports the astonishing result: Schwarze’s biotech defeated the workmanship of Stradivarius.

Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin “Opus 58” to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that “Opus 58” was actually the strad! “Opus 58” is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.

Francis W.M.R. Schwarze, et. al. Superior wood for violins – wood decay fungi as a substitute for cold climate

ABSTRACT:

Violins produced by Antonio Stradivari during the late 17th and early 18th centuries are reputed to have superior tonal qualities. Dendrochronological studies show that Stradivari used Norway spruce that had grown mostly during the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar activity when relatively low temperatures caused trees to lay down wood with narrow annual rings, resulting in a high modulus of elasticity and low density.

The main objective was to determine whether wood can be processed using selected decay fungi so that it becomes acoustically similar to the wood of trees that have grown in a cold climate (i.e. reduced density and unchanged modulus of elasticity).

This was investigated by incubating resonance wood specimens of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) with fungal species that can reduce wood density, but lack the ability to degrade the compound middle lamellae, at least in the earlier stages of decay.

Microscopic assessment of the incubated specimens and measurement of five physical properties (density, modulus of elasticity, speed of sound, radiation ratio, and the damping factor) using resonance frequency revealed that in the wood of both species there was a reduction in density, accompanied by relatively little change in the speed of sound. Thus, radiation ratio was increased from ‘poor’ to ‘good’, on a par with ‘superior’ resonance wood grown in a cold climate.

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It is possible to listen to this kind of comparison oneself. Ruggiero Ricci played the same opening of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (1866) on 15 important violins, including examples by Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivarius, on a record titled The Glory of Cremona, currently regrettably out-of-print and expensive.

But all 15 Ricci performances and 3 additions are available via YouTube vidoes, linked here.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Barrister explains to our liberal friends why so many Americans are reluctant to believe a Government-run health system would be better.

I do not think it’s so much because people want freedom and choice (altho they do) as it is because people have no confidence in government entitlement programs (which the Dem plans are all about, ultimately). Why?

Social Security – bankrupt
Postal Service – bankrupt
Welfare – had devastating unintended consequences for which the nation still pays and from which the nation continues to suffer (eg huge rates – up to 70% – of single motherhood among beneficiaries)
Medicare – bankrupt
Medicaid – bankrupting the states
Government-run (ie union-controlled) schools: are people thrilled with them?
Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac – bankrupt
The “stimulus” – a failure, but it did create 25,000 new government jobs!

The future tax consequences of the above are daunting to people, and the idea of adding another trillion or so frightens the heck out of people who are thinking about their own well-being, their kids’ futures – and also about the nation’s. ...

Abundant, high quality, and fairly expensive medical care is one of the great blessings and privileges of a prosperous society, and thus an important economic engine. Why kill it? People want these things.

Do Americans want to be grown-ups, or children? It’s our call.

My liberal classmates, I find, are simply members of a religious cult whose object of worship is the state. Everything enlarging state income, power, and authority is good. Anything you want done, just turn it over to the federal government.

The government is to them rather the the genie in the lamp. Want poverty eliminated? Want free health care for everyone? Want a perfect world? Just rub the lamp, let those democrats pass an appropriations bill, and voilà! your friendly government genie grants your wish.

They actually believe that the same government that buys $435 hammers, $640 toilet seats, and $7600 coffee makers, the same government whose lawmakers can neither read the healthcare bill they’re voting on or arrange to have it put on-line, is going to streamline delivery and make health care cheaper and more efficient. Pure insanity.

I knew it all along. Barack Obama is not a US citizen. He is a space alien, probably a robot. Eric Spiegelman has the proof. He compared 130 photos of Barack Obama posing with UN dignitaries at reception recently in this 0:21 video. Can that smile possibly be human?

How did a state with as many things going for it as California manage to go broke? Unions, Environmentalism, and a politics consisting of trying to have it both ways, Troy Senik explains.

California politics has given expression to the public’s contradictory political impulses. Liberals have won their campaign for bigger government and runaway spending, and conservatives have usually succeeded in keeping tax hikes at bay. The Golden State’s signature optimism may be to blame: How else to explain the delusion that Californians could be taxed like libertarians, but subsidized like socialists? The result, of course, has been a fiscal crisis addressed with slashed spending on public services and increased taxes in the midst of a deep recession — a recipe for yet more discord and trouble. In a grim irony, Californians are now being taxed like socialists and subsidized like libertarians.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

New USMC recruiting commercial.

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

Smith & Wesson 686P

Hand gun enthusiast Nutnfancy has a new 43:22 video out.

Nutnfancy is a modernist, a semiauto guy really, the sort of person who wants a magazine with enough rounds to deal with an assaulting Zulu impi, who prefers double action shooting, and who wants a Picatinny rail to hang lights from on his guns, but this time he is reviewing the Smith & Wesson 686P, the S&W Performance Center L-frame .357 Magnum revolver with the 7-round cylinder.

He is an intelligent critic though and rather insightfully, I thought, recognizes the S&W 686P as Smith’s version of the much-admired, but unfortunately discontinued, Colt Python, and proceeds with a head to head comparison.

I am not especially interested in this model. I already own two other S&W .357s, but Nutnfancy does quality reviewing, and I found this one entertaining enough to watch anyway.

Wired tells us Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) film accurately predicted a system put on-line in 1985 by the Soviets that would assure an automatic Soviet response to a Western first strike.

The Cold War ended years ago, but apparently the Russians never turned off their Doomsday device.

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

Read the whole thing.

Metal detecting is a popular working man’s hobby here in the United States as well, but Americans can expect to find some coins or possibly Civil War relics. In Britain, there is a lot more history, and a lot older and more valuable treasure lying right in the fields.

The Daily Mail has terrific coverage of a spectacular new find.

The largest haul of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found has been discovered by a metal detector enthusiast on farmland in Staffordshire, it was revealed today.

Experts say the hoard, which is at least as significant as any other treasure from the Anglo-Saxon era ever unearthed, is worth millions and could have belonged to a king.

The discovery of at least 1,345 different items, thought to date back to the seventh century, is expected to redefine perceptions of the period.

Terry Herbert, from Burntwood, Staffordshire, came across the collection as he searched a field near his home with his trusty 14-year-old detector and is now in line for a seven-figure sum.

It had been hidden for more than 1,300 years but was recently thrown up by ploughing and amazingly, some was just sitting on the top of the ground.

Experts have already examined the 1,345 items but another 56 clods of earth have been X-rayed and are known to hold more metal artefacts, meaning the figure is likely to rise to around 1,500.

At least 650 are gold, weighing more than than 5kg, and another 530 are silver, weighing around 1kg. This is far bigger than previous finds – including the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk.

Many of the items in the hoard are warfare paraphernalia inlaid with precious stones, including sword pommel caps and hilt plates.

Experts say it is the best example of Anglo-Saxon workmanship they have ever seen and may have belonged to Saxon royalty, possibly the King of Mercia.’

Archaeology expert Leslie Webster, who used to work at the British Museum, said: ‘(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.’

It was officially declared treasure by a coroner today, which means the haul will now be valued by committee of experts before being offered for sale.

They may take more than a year to value the collection and, given its scale, the financial worth will be massive.

Once a valuation and sale is complete, its market value will be split between Mr Herbert, who is unemployed, and the owner of the farmland where it was found.

Roger Bland, head of portable antiquities and treasure at the British Museum: ‘I can’t say anything other than we expect it to be a seven-figure sum.’

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

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The gold-proud of warriors, trod the mould grassy, exulting in gold-store.—Beowulf (William Morris translation)

You can gloat over the treasure hoard looted from those puny Christians, just like a true follower of Odin, at the Staffordshire Hoard web-site.

I was hearing complaints about Obama’s UN Speech all day yesterday. Rich Lowry gives the president’s performance one of its most negative reviews.

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher.

Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial.

“No nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” Obama intoned. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.”

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?

Between America and the world, Obama adopts a happy medium. It is in this sense only that he is a centrist.

“For those who question the character and cause of my nation,” Obama said, “I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.” In other words, he’s the redeemer of a nation sunk in war crimes (we condoned torture), high-handedness (we ignored the United Nations) and hypocrisy (we promoted democracy selectively) prior to the ascension of his blessed administration.

Read the whole thing.

Text and video at HuffPo.

This video recorded around June 19, 2009 at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey shows young students being taught to sing a pair of songs praising President Obama.

This interesting performance was arranged in connection with Father’s Day.

2:24 video

Song 1:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Yes

Song 2:

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say “hooray!”

Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!

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Obama obviously did not write the songs or arrange for them to be composed, but it can hardly be denied that the teacher(s?) responsible in New Jersey were responding to a personality cult and a political style which has been recognizable since the appearance of Barach Hussein Obama (Mmm, mmm, mm!) on the national political stage. It is a style a lot more compatible with backward Third World Communist dictatorships than with the American Republic.

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Fox News story

I think Gateway Pundit was the original source of the story.

Rick Trebino of Georgia Tech seems a little frustrated by the process.

Hat tip to William Laffer.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Belshazzar’s Feast, c. 1635, London, National Gallery

The phrase they are probably going to need most will be: “And would you like fries with that?”

Electing radicals from the democrat party’s Marxist fringe has consequences, and the Telegraph reports that the Obama Administration’s “Just turn on the printing presses!” economic policies are probably going to have some very nasty ones.

The Telegraph quotes a new report from Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC)’s currency chief that says the handwriting is on the wall for the United States.

“The dollar looks awfully like sterling after the First World War,” said David Bloom, the bank’s currency chief.

“The whole picture of risk-reward for emerging market currencies has changed. It is not so much that they have risen to our standards, it is that we have fallen to theirs. It used to be that sovereign risk was mainly an emerging market issue but the events of the last year have shown that this is no longer the case. Look at the UK – debt is racing up to 100pc of GDP,” he said

Crucially, China and rising Asia have reached the point where they can no longer keep holding down their currencies to boost exports because this is causing mayhem to their own economies, stoking asset bubbles. Asia’s “mercantilist mindset” of recent decades is about to be broken by the spectre of an inflation spiral.

The policy headache was already becoming clear in the final phase of the global credit boom but the financial crisis temporarily masked the effect. The pressures will return with a vengeance as these countries roar back to life, leaving the US and other laggards of the old world far behind.

A monetary policy of near zero rates – further juiced by quantitative easing – is completely incompatible with circumstances in most of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Divorce is inevitable. The US is expected to hold rates near zero through 2010 to tackle its own crisis.

What is occurring is an epochal loss in the relative wealth and economic power of the old G10 bloc of rich countries compared to rising regions of the world. The euro, yen, sterling, Swiss franc and other mature currencies will be relegated along with the dollar in this great process of rebalancing, but the Greenback will bear the brunt.

Yes, Virginia, we’re talking about the End here: the end of the US dollar as world reserve currency, the end of the whole post-WWII era of American economic, cultural, and military ascendancy, including economic decline, retreat from no longer sustainable overseas responsibilities, the inability to support a first class military, and a whole new American way of life centered on decline, pessimism, and yearning for the permanently vanished good old days.

They may not have understood it at that time, but that is what they voted for.

You can rely on liberals to start looking for the exit.

The New York Times tells us that King Obama is making his decisions with the counsel of the court clown.

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.
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Hugh Hewitt recognizes how serious a choice Obama is making.

The idea of rejecting the proposals of the new commander on the ground less than six months after his appointment is bad enough, but to do so because Slow Joe Biden has a bright idea is truly terrible.

The president’s domestic agenda is in a shambles and his ratings are plummeting to near record levels for a modern president in his first year in office. His global warming hysteria of yesterday adds to the idea of a rookie being handed unvetted speeches—like the one in Congress with the man who died from denial of treatment, except he didn’t—and rushing off to his next media event.

Thousands of Americans died because of the Taliban’s partnership with al Qaeda, a partnership that endures. Hundreds more have died pushing the Taliban-al Qaeda alliance deep into the remote mountains of the region. General McChrystal’s report asserts that with the right forces, stability can be achieved, and within an acceptable number of years.

The choice facing President Obama is a defeat and vulnerability to more terror plots and a second mission back when one occurs, or the acceptance of the commanding general’s recommendations. This isn’t hard. The fact that Joe Biden is on the other side makes it even easier to tell Secretary Gates to proceed with the McChyrstal plan.

Probably, Obama and Mr. Vice-Blowhard-Doofus are thinking that the day is not far off when their own leftwing base will find stabbing American forces in the back one more time absolutely irresistible. So Obama is giving serious consideration to trying to avoid the misery of Lyndon Johnson by resorting to the cowardice of Jimmy Carter.

The Stanford Review, that university’s student conservative newspaper, is looking for a few good women.

Jessica Palmer found the ad on a NYU Social Psychology page under Multiculturalism. It looks like a recruiting tool which the Stanford Review has been using for several years.

David Malki’s original Electroplasmic Hydrocephalic Genre Fiction Generator 2000 design.

Liam Cooke’s working model

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The New York Times reports that cooler temperatures are getting in the way of international agreements required to forstall climate change.

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

The Times goes on (hilariously) to explain that recent cooler temperatures are just an irrelevant phenomenon that proves nothing, but that “scientists” (the plural proves to be one particular scientist) know better.

Current cooler weather, the Times gravely advises is just a “normal variation.” Long term global warming is still firmly underway. Of course, all this ignores the fact that the Global Warming hypothesis came into existence after the Impending Ice Age hypothesis collapsed due to several years of warming weather.
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A Missing Person Report

Statistician William M. Briggs takes us to a police precinct in Manhattan.

“Hey, Sarge. Got a lady here who wants to file a missing person report…Sarge?” Officer Hannigan stood in front of Sergeant Fitzgerald’s desk and rustled a sheaf of paper just loud enough so that it didn’t sound intentional, but with enough force to still be heard.

Sergeant Fitzgerald was dozing and he started at the noise, but long experience enabled him to remain mostly still. He did not want his junior to know he had been asleep, so he counted to three then slowly made the sign of the cross and said, “Amen.” He then let his watery eyes find Hannigan’s.

“Uh, sorry, Sarge.” Hannigan was new enough not to have seen this act before. “But I got this strange call and I didn’t know what to do.” Fitzgerald raised both eyebrows a millimeter. “This lady wants to report a missing person, only…”

Enough consciousness had seeped into Fitzgerald’s limbs that he was able to slap the table. “Now, young Hannigan. Nothing could be easier, sure. You have the right forms?” A nod. “You’ve asked the right questions?”

“I have.”

“Then there is no problem.” He shifted his weight and turned his attention inward.

“But Sarge, the answers made no sense!”

Fitzgerald sighed and knew that sleep was banished. “Well, then. Let’s have it. Who’s missing?”

“Global Warming.”

“And what’s that, then?” A shrug was his answer. He sighed. “How long has it been missing?”

“Lady said about eight years, maybe nine.”

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone admires the liberal establishment’s recent efforts to marginalize dissent.

I would submit that the president’s call for an end to “bickering” and the charges of racism by some of his supporters are the natural reflex of people who are not used to hearing people disagree with them and who are determined to shut them up.

This comes naturally to liberals educated in our great colleges and universities, so many of which have speech codes whose primary aim is to prevent the expression of certain conservative ideas and which are commonly deployed for that purpose. (For examples, see the Website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends students of all political stripes.) Once the haven of free inquiry and expression, academia has become a swamp of stifling political correctness.

Similarly, the “mainstream media”—the old-line broadcast networks, The New York Times, etc.—present a politically correct picture of the world. The result is that liberals can live in a cocoon, an America in which seldom is heard a discouraging word. Conservatives, in contrast, find themselves constantly pummeled with liberal criticism, on campus, in news media, and in Hollywood TV and movies. They don’t like it, but they’ve gotten used to it. Liberals aren’t used to it and increasingly try to stamp it out.

Read the whole thing.

If we study the vocabulary of the American elite, we find that strange things have happened to the English language. Slavish conformity of thought, readiness to bow to conventional opinion, credulous acceptance of popular alarms, willingness to embrace crude simplifications, and firm refusal to question supposed authority and pretended expertise are continually cited as evidencing sound judgment and good education. Skepticism and questioning the authority of media culture is, on the other hand, extremist, polarizing, and ignorant. Our contemporary political culture basically turns language inside out. The most craven conformist mouthing empty platitudes (Albert Gore) is praised for wisdom and bravery, and anyone attempting to subject a received prescription to scrutiny or analysis (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh) is intrinsically unintelligent.

Roger Kimball comments with distaste on the Obama Administration’s communication plans revealed by Big Hollywood’s NEA as Propaganda Ministry scoop.

“This is just the beginning.” Who could doubt it? Reading through this transcript, I was struck by two things. One was the aroma of self-intoxication. These bureaucrats and artists and activists are utterly besotted by the contemplation of their own virtue. They know what’s good for the country, and what’s good for you, and they’re willing to devote themselves ceaselessly to making it happen.

The second thing that strikes one about this transcript is the aura of menace that floats just behind the talk of passion, pushing the president’s agenda, connecting with “labor unions, progressive groups,” etc., etc. As Yosi Sergant’s pep talk suggests, these people regard legal obstacles not as boundaries to be observed but as impediments to be overcome by “tactics,” a word that frequently appears in the transcript.

There is a German word for what we are witnessing at the NEA and elsewhere in the Obama administration’s effort to push its agenda. It is Gleichschaltung. It means two things: first, bringing all aspects of life into conformity with a given political line. And second, as a prerequisite for realizing that goal, the obliteration or at least marginalization of all opposition.

A little ACORN humor.

0:58 video

Reuters quotes the head of the Russian General Staff asserting that, despite Barack Obama’s surrender to Russian objections to basing US missile defenses in Central Europe, Russia is intending to proceed with placing new offensive short-range missiles in the Kaliningrad Oblast.

Russia’s top general said on Monday that plans to deploy missiles in an enclave next to Poland had not been shelved, despite a decision by the United States to rethink plans for missile defense in Europe. ...

President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a land-based missile defense system has been welcomed by Russia, which had threatened to deploy short-range Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad if the United States refused to drop the plans.

The Kremlin always said Russia would only deploy the missiles as a counter-measure if Washington went ahead with its missile shield. Moscow said the shield threatened its national security and would upset the strategic balance in Europe.

On Saturday Russian deputy defense minister Vladimir Popovkin said in an interview that “naturally we will scrap the measures that Russia planned to take” in response to the shield and specifically named Iskander deployment as one of them.

When asked about the matter on Monday, the chief of Russia’s general staff, Nikolai Makarov, said: “There has been no such decision. It should be a political decision. It should be made by the president.”

“They (the Americans) have not given up the anti-missile shield; they have replaced it with a sea-based component,” Makarov told reporters on a plane from Moscow to Zurich.

The general was accompanying President Dmitry Medvedev on a trip to Switzerland.

Herbert London, at PJM, attacks the philosophy of Envy underlying the agenda of the American party of the left.

Whether it is the socialism espoused by the Nazis or the socialism of the former Soviet Union or the socialism that is emerging in the United States, there is one overarching sentiment, however different socialism in these three societies may be. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the contributions and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin.

The Nazis saw the sin as a Jewish conspiracy, the Soviets saw sin as exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and what is emerging in the United States is the sin of the wealthy.

In the Obama administration greed is considered the sin that must be opposed. But greed, whatever its deficiencies, is, as Adam Smith pointed out, an incentive for the promotion of capitalism which, in the aggregate, has a salutary influence on the economy. To combat greed, the socialists emphasize envy. Since equality is the goal, even trivial differences in income are exaggerated and the progressivity in the tax system is employed as a blunt instrument to impose equality.

Lincoln said “you can’t make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.” But President Obama seems to believe that wealth is invariably related to the wages of sin and must be controlled or, to use his language, “spread around.” To make sure this happens, government must expand and, in so doing, the private sector will inevitably contract. That explains why socialism, which purports to represent the interests of the average person, ends in overwhelming government control or outright tyranny. ...

President Gerald Ford put this matter in perspective when he noted “that a government that can give you everything you want will be large enough to take everything you have.”

Read the whole thing.

Ryan Grim, at HuffPO, spills (a day before the book’s release) some of the interesting bits from Bush Administration’s speechwriter Matthew Latimer’s new tell-all Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor.

While Karl Rove was appearing on Fox News and writing op-eds as an independent political analyst, he was privately smearing Democrats. “Karl spread rumors through the White House that one of Obama’s potential vice presidential running mates—and a United States senator—had beaten his first wife. ‘Karl says it’s true,’ the president assured a small group of staffers. Then knowing Karl, he quickly added, ‘Karl hopes it’s true,’” reports Latimer.

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too “condemnatory” and said, “I’m not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can’t get married.” (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “adamantly opposed” any reference to jailed Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour when Bush traveled to Egypt to promote freedom. She won.

Bush, it turns out, is like millions of Americans: “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” he said.

Laura Bush, says Latimer, “was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn’t much of a secret.” ...

Bush on Jimmy Carter: “If I’m ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away.”

24-year-old Kseniya Simonova moved the audience of the Ukraine’s Got Talent (Україна має талант) television program to tears with her sand painting depicting the impact of the German Invasion during WWII on the lives of ordinary Ukrainians. She won the competition, and the YouTube video of her performance has attracted more than 2 million viewers.

8:33 video

The
Telegraph explains the story of the animation.

Michael Medved, back at college, used to be a liberal. Michael got wiser as he grew older.

Some partisans on the left… (resist being described as unpatriotic), insisting that they love the United States just as much as any right winger. The distinction, progressives regularly aver, involves their affection for a perfected America that might, through hope and change, come into existence sometime in the future, or else their nostalgic reverence for an America that once was, but ceased to exist through some malevolent influence (greedy businessmen, the religious right, conniving conservatives, take your pick).

Anyone with a modicum of experience in human relations will tell you that a devotion based on what your love object might become, or may have been in the past, is a suspect and toxic form of affection. If, in a moment of insecurity, a wife asks a husband, Honey, do you love me? the last thing she wants to hear is, Actually, I love the idea of you if you changed completely. In other words, its not advisable to tell the woman in your life that you’d adore her if she’d only lose fifty pounds, submit to liposuction and breast augmentation surgery, get a new set of gleaming white caps for her teeth, and complete a post graduate degree so she’d offer more intriguing conversation.

Roddy MacKenzie leads at the moment on Triton Light in the Banbury Cross and Foxboro Farms Maiden Hurdle, but Jacob Roberts (3rd from the right) on Maximize went on to win

Karen and I were working yesterday at the Blue Ridge Fall Races a charity event held annually the last three years for the benefit of our local hospice organization.

Click on the above picture for a link to Karen’s preliminary photo essay

photo: Karen L. Myers

click on photo to link to photo essay

Our 11-week-old puppy, Uhlan, is a Tazy, whose mother is from Kazakhstan and whose father was bred in St. Petersburg, one generation removed from Kazakhstan.

Tazy is just the preferred name in Kazakhstan for the local version of Saluki, known earlier in the West as the Persian Greyhound.

Tribal dogs like ours are prized by sighthound enthusiasts for their strong natural hunting instincts. Karen’s photos of Uhlan in action demonstrate that this puppy may be a little too keen.

Paul Marshall reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West in the Wall Street Journal.

In his reflections on Europe’s slide into a sort of secular suicide, Mr. Caldwell notes the key role played by that most religious impulse: guilt. He argues that the dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was “repentance for two historical misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.” Over the decades, guilt has festered into “a sense of moral illegitimacy” and a “self-directed xenophobia” that now shapes the continent’s response to immigration.

Originally, the reasons given for encouraging mass immigration to Europe were economic—a means of remedying Europe’s purported labor shortage and, eventually, of bolstering economies obliged to fund generous pension plans. Immigrants “would emerge from the desiccated and starving hamlets of the Third World and ride to the rescue of the retirement checks and second homes, the wine tastings and snorkeling vacations, of the most pampered workforce in the history of the planet,” Mr. Caldwell writes. Such economic rationales proved to be chimeras, though. Nowadays, with majorities in many countries consistently opposed to immigration, a new justification has had to be found: the flat assertion that immigration and asylum policies are “nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on,” or perhaps even discuss.

Except that there is nothing “purported” about a domestic labor shortage in modern Western countries.

Free education and social mobility afforded the respectable portions of the former working classes a ready path to white collar employment. Egalitarianism and the doctrines of the left supplied excuses to avoid manual labor for the ineducable, and generous social welfare policies assured that those who would not work would still have color televisions.

The consequence has been everywhere in Europe and America a drastic shortage of manual labor of domestic origin, and massive Third World immigration to fill the gap.

We are much luckier in America. We get Roman Catholic Hispanic immigrants, who are highly assimilable. Europe is getting hostile Muslims.

John Hinderaker listens to another democrat apologizing for America.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world. ... The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said. America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,’ the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Arnold Kling sees the culture wars spinning further and further out of control and experiences despair.

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand. However, I think, also, that the progressive elite is making a last stand. My guess is that doubts are mounting among many independent voters about whether they want such a highly-charged politics. I am sticking with my bet that the Democrats will hold onto their House and Senate majorities as well as the Presidency through the elections of 2016, but relative to six months ago I feel that I am depending more on Republican incompetence than overall political trends to win that bet.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

Debkafile, which reported August 29th a leak (apparently from Polish sources) that plans were underway to substitute defense facilities in Turkey and Israel for those originally intended to be sited in Poland and the Czech Republic, is now telling us that Obama has made a deal to site US missile defense systems on a Russian military base in Azerbaijan (!).

DEBKA also, with a note of contempt, reveals that the Israeli based systems is already in place and “working perfectly.”

DEBKA characterizes the Obama Administration’s move as a “surrender to Moscow.”

As Wired’s Nathan Hodge explains, Barack Obama is completely reconfiguring US missile defense plans in deference to Russia’s self-proclaimed right to point loaded and ready-to-fire weapons of mass destruction at neighboring European countries.

President Barack Obama yesterday announced that he would scrap George W. Bush’s plan to park missile-defense interceptors in Poland and place an X-band radar in the Czech Republic. Speaking yesterday to reporters, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the new rationale.

“Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles,” he said. “We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors. These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.”

In addition, Gates noted the Navy’s considerable test success with the missile-shooting Standard Missile-3 (pictured here), which has seen eight successful flight tests since 2007. Sea-based interceptors, he said, offer a much more flexible option than a fixed site.

Intriguingly, the new plan might include deploying an X-band radar to the Caucasus — the region sandwiched between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea — to keep an eye out for missile launches from Iran. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright said stationing a radar in the Caucasus might reassure Russia, which was vehemently opposed to the Bush administration’s plan to place assets in Eastern Europe.

“The X-band radar is a single directional,” he said. “In other words, when you put it down, it points in a single direction. And it will be very clear that it is pointing south towards Iran.”

It’s easy to speculate about which countries in the region could potentially host an X-band radar. The United States has close military ties with Georgia. And neighboring Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, has received U.S. funding for the construction of radar installations.

The idea of stationing an X-band radar in the Caucasus, however, is not new. Back in 2006, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) published a fact sheet that said mobile sensors for ballistic missile defense might be placed in an unnamed country in the Caucasus. The agency subsequently scrubbed the fact sheet to remove any mention of possible locales, although MDA spokesman Rick Lehner told me at the time that the region would be a “good location for a small X-band radar to provide tracking and discrimination of missiles launched from Iran.”

————————————————————
Ben Smith, at Politico, says: There has to have been a behind-the-scenes deal here, involving a major change in Russian policy toward Iran in return for so enormous a concession, doesn’t there?

Republicans talked of President Obama “appeasing” Russia,” “betraying” Poland, and bringing back the Carter administration. They didn’t like his decision Thursday to scrap plans for a missle defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic, and they dusted off some vintage Cold War anti-communist rhetoric and endorsements of missile defense to express it.

Obama and his aides cast the decision as almost a technical one. But for a president who has said repeatedly that he wants to return U.S. foreign policy to the hard-headed pursuit of national interests rather than scoring ideological points, it was also tangible evidence that he meant what he said.

Some members of Obama’s own party, however, had a simple question for the administration: if this was a return to realism, and a concession to Russia’s long and vocal opposition to the missile program, what, exactly, was the U.S. getting in return for fundamentally changing it?

And almost certainly, the answer leads back to Iran.

“If it turns out that the Russians now are willing to take a very tough stand on the next round of sanctions on Iran – for instance, in the Security Council — then you can say , ‘Hey, it’s a trade and it’s a good trade,” said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If the Russians don’t deliver something pretty substantial back, it does raise questions about what do they think they were achieving.”

He liked unilateral disarmament back then, and it would not exactly be surprising to find that he likes it now, too.

————————————————————
In fact, Russian press statements, with a certain ill-concealed glee, actually dismiss the idea of some kind of bargain with contempt.

RIA:

Russia’s NATO envoy has cautioned against “childish euphoria” over recent Washington’s decision to scrap plans for a missile shield in Central Europe. ...

“We are already hearing voices in the West…that it is a huge concession to Russia. But I wouldn’t want us to become overwhelmed with some kind of childish euphoria,” Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with the Vesti television late on Thursday.

The diplomat said Washington had simply corrected its own mistake and had chosen a more flexible and efficient approach to its global missile shield allegedly aimed against the ballistic missile threat from Iran.

The Washington Independent admiringly quotes a good line from Harvard’s Rory Stewart aptly summing up the approach of both the current and previous adminstrations on Afghanistan.

Rory Stewart, the Afghanistan-war skeptic who heads the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, has one advantage over his fellow witnesses at this Senate panel: he’s better with quips. Stewart compares the Obama administration’s twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with “an angry cat and a tiger,” after Brookings’ Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.’s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

“We’re beating the cat,” Stewart said, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”

A Kern County Animal Control crackdown on unlicensed pets targeted 83-year-old Dottie Elkins over her dog Wolf.

Unfortunately, the dog authorities spied sitting near her door was a stuffed toy.

1:45 MSNBC video

Hat tip to Smartdogs for the better link.

In New Republic, Jonathan Chait, uses the purported review space for two new biographies of Ayn Rand—Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (to be released October 27)—to deliver instead an attack on Rand and her philosophy of which Ellsworth Toohey would be proud.

Admirers of Rand will enjoy reading this relatively sophisticated analysis of her influence, and will probably also perversely enjoy (in the mode of intellectual pathologist) the ingenious and sophistical rhetorical ploys Chait uses to defend his own leftism.

We’re really squabbling over nothing, Chait explains in a particularly artful pair of paragraphs. Accept Chait’s numbers (if you do, come see me about a bridge I’m selling), and it all becomes clear: the difference between conservative and liberal tax policies amounts to a tiny, scarcely significant, percentage.

Most of the right-wing commentary purporting to prove that the rich bear the overwhelming burden of government relies upon the simple trick of citing only the income tax, which is progressive, while ignoring more regressive levies. A brief overview of the facts lends some perspective to the fears of a new Red Terror. Our government divides its functions between the federal, state, and local levels. State and local governments tend to raise revenue in ways that tax the poor at higher rates than the rich. (It is difficult for a state or a locality to maintain higher rates on the rich, who can easily move to another town or state that offers lower rates.) The federal government raises some of its revenue from progressive sources, such as the income tax, but also healthy chunks from regressive levies, such as the payroll tax.

The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent—slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush.

Excellent reading for train rides through Rocky Mountain tunnels.

On liberal editorial pages and across the left-side of the blogosphere, conservative opposition to drastically increased government spending and Health Care Reform proposals, dissent at Town Hall meetings, and last weekend’s massive protest in Washington have all been diagnosed and interpreted as “anger” and “extremism” on the part of “White Males.”

David Harsanyi admires the left’s preemptive definition of political opposition as racism.

Who dictates what level of anger and dissent is allowable? Who decides what a clandestine racist sign looks like? Maybe someone like MSNBC’s Carlos Watson, who wondered if “socialism” was really about the nationalization of industry and hyper-regulation of the private market, or if it was just “becoming the new N-word.”

None of this has anything to do with the left’s paranoid belief that America is an inherently racist nation. It’s just that if you oppose more government dependency and expansion, you might as well be a Confederate infantryman. No, it doesn’t matter what you say, because we know what you really mean.

Read the whole thing.

Former conservative Mark Lilla, in Chronicle of Higher Education, welcomes the University of California at Berkeley’s opening of a “Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements” (which is obviously destined to link Edmund Burke, William F Buckley, Jr., and Adolph Hitler in a common pattern of pathological aversion to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful), expressing guarded optimism over the possibility of its getting “professors and students to discuss ideas and read books that until now have been relegated to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”

The unfortunate fact is that American academics have until recently shown little curiosity about conservative ideas, even though those ideas have utterly transformed American (and British) politics over the past 30 years. A look at the online catalogs of our major universities confirms this: plenty of courses on identity politics and postcolonialism, nary a one on conservative political thought. Professors are expected to understand the subtle differences among gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, but I would wager that few can distinguish between the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, three think tanks that have a greater impact on Washington politics than the entire Ivy League.

Why is that? The former left-wing firebrand David Horowitz, whom the professors do know, has a simple answer: There is a concerted effort to keep conservative Ph.D.’s out of jobs, to deny tenure to those who get through, and to ignore conservative books and ideas. It is an old answer, dating back to the 1970s, when neoconservatives began writing about the “adversary culture” of intellectuals. Horo witz is an annoying man, and what’s most annoying about him is that … he has a point. Though we are no longer in the politically correct sauna of the 1980s and 1990s, and experiences vary from college to college, the picture he paints of the faculty and curriculum in American universities remains embarrassingly accurate, and it is foolish to deny what we all see before us.

Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That’s why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.

Contra Horowitz, the blackballing of conservatives and conservative ideas is by now instinctive and habitual rather than self-conscious, reflecting intellectual provincialism more than ideological fervor. I recall being at a dinner in Paris in the late 1980s with a distinguished American historian of France who had gathered her graduate students for the evening. The conversation turned to book printing in the early modern era, which she was studying, and the practice of esoteric writing, which was more widespread than she had imagined. I mentioned that there was a classic book on this subject by Leo Strauss. She searched her mind for a moment—this was before the Iraq war made Strauss a household name—and then said, “But isn’t he a conservative?” In a certain way he was, I said. Silence at the table. She smiled that smile meant to end discussion, and the conversation turned to more-pleasant topics.

Nonetheless, Lilla quarreled with David Horowitz’s “anti-intellectual” “dumbing down” indictment of exactly the same liberal dogmatism and intolerance he himself recognizes in an obviously more becoming and appropriate rueful tone which differs from Horowitz by its passive acceptance of the situation.

But even Lilla’s comparatively timid public recognition of the left’s tyrannical regime within most American universities provoked liberal pooh-pooh-ing in a follow-up exchange.

Bruce L.R. Smith, nearly inadvertently, finds real world practical considerations making denial just a bit awkward.

Lilla states that there is not a single conservative at Columbia University. I can assure him that this is not so. In 2000, I returned to Columbia after a 20-year hiatus as a fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. Over the next five years I renewed friendships and acquaintanceships with many colleagues (and met new ones), some of whom can fairly be called conservatives. Perhaps I will prove Lilla’s point by forbearing to mention them by name, other than myself.

Marc Garlasco moved from targeting terrorists for the Defense Intelligence Agency to a role as senior military advisor for the leftwing Human Rights Watch.

Garlasco’s new job made him some enemies, and the extensive criticism (example) of Israeli military actions in Garlasco’s reports ultimately provoked some unexpected retaliation.

Omri Ceren, a USC grad student blogging at Mere Rhetoric, on September 8th, exposed Garlasco as a German WWII militaria collector, explicitly associating criticism of Israel with a penchant for collecting Nazi war trophies.

The following day, a Tel Aviv daily, Ma’ariv, quoted the blog posted, describing Garlasco as “a compulsive collector of Nazi insignia and memorabilia.”

Garlasco wrote in his own defense, September 11th, on Huffington Post:

I’ve never hidden my hobby, because there’s nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren’t fascinated by military history. Precisely because it’s so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things. Thousands of military history buffs collect war paraphernalia because we want to learn from the past. But I should have realized that images of the Second World War German military are hurtful to many.

I deeply regret causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts (including American, British, German, Japanese and Russian items). Other comments there might seem strange and even distasteful, but they reflect the enthusiasm of the collector, such as gloating about getting my hands on an American pilot’s uniform.

But it appears the politically correct stiletto strike to the kidneys remains one of the most devastatingly effective techniques for incapacitating an opponent in the modern era.

The New York Times today announced that HRW was suspending Garlasco.

A leading human rights group has suspended its senior military analyst following revelations that he is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, “pending an investigation,” said Carroll Bogert, the group’s associate director.

“We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know,” she said.

Reason TV 1:11 video

Hat tip to John Cole. Thanks, John. It’s a good one.

Bertha Lewis, ACORN Chief Organizer, explains that independent filmmaker James O’Keefe’s videos showing Baltimore ACORN employees offering assistance in applying for a federal loan to be used to import underage girls for prostitution are unfair.

Lewis asserts that some ACORN offices may not actually have been helpful, and charges the filmmaker with committing an unspecified crime of some kind by subjecting ACORN’s staffers to this kind of test.

9:50 Baltimore video 1

8:15 Baltimore video 2

The James O’Keefe videos appear at the Big Government blog.

We are their Willy Horton for 2009. We are the boogeyman for the right-wing and its echo chambers. If ACORN did not exist, the right-wing would have needed to create us in order to achieve their agenda, their missions, their ideal, retrograde America. This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen. I am appalled and angry; I cannot and I will not defend the actions of the workers depicted in the video, who have since been terminated. But it is clear that the videos are doctored, edited, and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist “filmmaker” O’Keefe and his partner in crime. And, in fact, a crime it was – our lawyers believe a felony – and we will be taking legal action against Fox and their co-conspirators.

But it seems that more videos, made in Brooklyn, New York, show that that employees at that ACORN office, too, were willing to assist tax fraud in aid of underage prostitution.

Fox News

9:37 New York video 1

6:05 New York video 2

Andrew looks smug in his Atlantic logo illustration. It’s nice having friends in high places.

Remember George W. Bush?

We used to have a president so rigidly righteous that he actually refused to pardon Lewis Libby for defending his own administration and thus becoming the target of a special prosecutor and winding up convicted of perjury (in a case where no crime was really ever proven to have occurred) by a DC jury.

Now we have Barack Obama, who is not like that at all.

Intimidate voters, brandishing billy clubs in Philadelphia? You don’t get prosecuted if you were an Obama supporter. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will overrule career prosecutors for you.

Are you a governor or state official taking campaign contributions in exchange for contracts? If you’re a democrat, you are OK. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will drop the investigation.

Suppose you are a homosexual leftwing blogger, who also happens to be a non-US-citizen, in danger of getting into trouble with immigration if you are convicted of a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana on a Cape Cod Beach? You have a Get Out of Jail Free card, if you are, as Andrew Sullivan is, a faithful defender of Barack Obama and his policies. The US Attorney’s Office will go right on prosecuting non-Obama-supporting-bloggers coming before the court for the identical complaint, but will shock the court by giving you a special pass.

Andrew himself is declining to comment on the advice of counsel.

Boston Globe

Some News Agency

John Hinderaker has a comment.

Yesterday’s mass protest against federal spending was estimated by the comparatively neutral Daily Mail as made up of “up to two million.” US Parks and Recreation estimated 1.5 million.

All this was not even front page news for the New York Times, for whom the numbers involved dwindled to mere “thousands.” The Washington Post more generously acknowledged “tens of thousands.”

The astonishing demonstration of massive popular opposition to socialism naturally proved a problem for the left’s commentariat. The preferred discounting technique was demonstrated by Think Progress: point to Confederate flags, identify expressions of opposition to Barack Obama as “racism,” describe open expressions of conservatism as “offensive” and “radical.”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon dismisses all opposition to Obama as illegitimate, coming from people with heretical and unacceptible views, worthy only of contempt and dismissal.

What I find amusing is the leftist Greenwald’s claim to proprietorship of “the country’s core founding values.” Since when was the left in favor of the framer’s republic of federalism, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government?

Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right—and that’s been true for a very long time now. It didn’t just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don’t really believe in the country’s core founding values and don’t merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren’t part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn’t any truer then than it is now. All one has to do is review their behavior during the Clinton presidency—to say nothing of the Bush years—to see that none of this is remotely new. Nothing they’re doing to Obama is a break from their past behavior; it’s just a natural and totally predictable continuation of it.

Daily Finance:

A woman from Northern China has just taken delivery of what has reportedly become the most expensive dog in the world for which she paid 4 million yuan, or about $600,000. ...

The millionairess has reportedly been searching for the perfect dog for years. This dog, which she spotted in Yushu made the grade. “Gold has a price,” she said, “But this Tibetan mastiff doesn’t.”

In China, this ancient breed goes by nicknames such as “Miraculous Beast”, “Number One Dog” and “Antique Dog.” Buddha and Genghis Khan kept them as companions. Marco Polo wrote of seeing them in the Orient. They are fabled to play a huge part in maintaining ecological balance (both spiritually and physically) in their native habitat, the Tibetan Plateau, where sadly, they are now quite rare. They are reputed to be one of the oldest breeds still in existence and archaeological evidence suggests they served as guard dogs in China as early as 1000 B.C..

With fewer than 160 pure bred descendants of the original Tibetan mastiffs currently in existence, these dogs are certainly rare. ...

Chinese dog-watchers are certainly a new phenomenon in a land where keeping dogs as pets was banned under the reign of Mao Zedong who described dog owners as time-wasters. Large dogs are still outlawed in Beijing where it is illegal to register a dog larger than 35 cms (13 inches). Dog ownership in general is reserved for the wealthier population in cities like Beijing, where the annual license fee can run as high as 1,000 yuan or ($150) – an astronomical sum for the city’s blue collar workers (textile workers’ salaries averaged averaged less than 20,000 yuan or $5,689 in 2008).

A month ago, I used the above photo of Mr. Patrick Burns (Burns is the ugly one in the middle) to illustrate a rejoinder to one of his postings defending the intimidation of their owner and the confiscation and imprisonment of eleven hounds belonging to a Philadelphia basset pack.

Last night (talk about l’espirt d’escalier!), Patrick sent me an email with a link to his blog, where, in a fashion worthy of 3rd grade, he accuses me of theft, for using his photo. Burns, by way of retaliation, it seems, also “stole” my Twitter photo (colored green like that of many conservatives on Twitter as an expression of support of the recent pro-democracy insurgency in Iran) using it on his original posting, and even as the basis for an extra web-page demonstrating just how crazy he really is.

In that posting of his, Patrick claims to have sent me some kind of previous demand about that photo, but I never received any such thing.

I wrote Mr. Burns back last night, offering him NYM’s (generous) standard photo use fee. If he declines to accept payment and continues to insist on my removing his photo, I suppose we’ll just have to do without it.