Anne Merritt complacently describes a list of skills which today’s millenials are apparently content to go without. Her list includes using a standard transmission (no real sports cars for you, kiddies!), cooking anything from scratch (no real food either), building anything, fixing anything, penmanship, and even sharpening a knife.

Compare the late Robert A. Heinlein’s opinion of minimal masculine competence.

A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
———————————————
SHARPENING A KNIFE

The best method is to use a flat stone. Ideally, to do a really excellent job on a very dull knife, you want three stones: in order of coarseness, a coarse carborundum, a soft Washita stone, and a hard black Arkansas stone, but you can pick up a flat rock off the ground and use it if you have nothing better.

Wet the stone. A light machine oil is best, but water, even spit, will do.

Take your knife and pretend that you are trying to cut a thin slice off the stone, cutting away from you. Do one side and then the other. The angle you want is quite effectively approximated by pretending to be cutting a thin slice off the stone.

Obviously, if you have coarser and finer stones, you start with the coarse and end with the finer stone. Hard black Arkansas
stones are expensive, but you can produce the finest finished edges with one of those.

High-end custom knife makers, like Randall, commonly supply small medium India whetstone in a pouch outside the sheath. One little India stone of that sort is basically adequate.

...for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
—John Keats

In the New York Times, Princeton’s professional ethicist supreme Peter Singer admires the work of antinatalist South African philosopher David Benatar:

Schopenhauer’s pessimism has had few defenders over the past two centuries, but one has recently emerged, in the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” One of Benatar’s arguments trades on something like the asymmetry noted earlier. To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her. Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.

Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.

So why don’t we make ourselves the Last Generation on Earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction! ...

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

Friedrich Nietszche (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883-1885, prologue, §5) predicted with complete accuracy that the result of nihilism would be Benatars and Singers.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—so asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

“We have discovered happiness”—say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,”—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon
reconciled—otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

“We have discovered happiness,”—say the last men, and blink thereby.

Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson interviews Mark Steyn about his recent book: America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It and the end of the Post-WWII Global Order.

38:19 video—long, but strongly recommended.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

[W]hat are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain. ...

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

There are certain little details that bring home to traveler the fact that he really is in a foreign country. One of these which frequently strikes Americans is the way, in European countries where the citizens are typically completely legally disarmed, the cops stroll around carrying machine guns.

The American thinks of his own police armed normally only with a pistol, and feels something akin to the way the Edwardian Englishman did about living in a country in which police officers only carried a truncheon.

Well, the recent Moscow subway bombings provoked New York City authorities to leap into action and dispatch an elite squad of officers with helmets, goggles, and fully automatic M16 assault rifles to ride the city’s subway trains.

That will show those terrorists! Try reaching under your clothing to detonate your suicide vest, and that Hercules squad stormtrooper will pull his goggles down, check to see that his body armor is securely fastened, and then spray the entire car with high velocity .223 rounds. After that, it won’t even be necessary to use the bomb.

I find the machine gun-toting cops on New York subways development symbolically appropriate. We are, after all, now just one more European-style welfare state committed to cradle to the grave benefits for everyone. We prefer equality to opportunity and growth. The state is our keeper. Our cops should all have machine guns. The state is our master and they are its representatives. They require enormous firepower to keep all of us in line.

New York Post

The New Yorker reports on negative reactions from a variety of Old Blues to that noxious and appalling “That’s Why I Chose Yale” recruiting video.

Some samples:

Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75, son of the late William F., Class of ’50, paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” ...

James Goodale, Class of ’55, and a former general counsel for the Times, made it through all seventeen minutes—more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery—before reporting that the production seemed “intended for an audience that I couldn’t divine.” He added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.” ...

“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’ ” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No, they’re not.’ And I was depressed.”...

“It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles. I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

John Rogers, Class of ’84, and the English department’s resident Milton scholar [reacts:]

It’s the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. ...

Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this. ...

Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parents can’t understand. ... This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: ‘I can speak with more quotation marks around my nouns and verbs than you.’

IvyGate review: “That’s Why I Chose” to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

Embarrassed Y’10 Says:

This is embarrassing. Absolutely embarrassing.

“1 in 4, maybe more” just became “1 in 2, probably you”

Had this been released before I enrolled, I very likely wouldn’t be here.

Absolutely horrendous.

Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and other Labour panjandrums, revealed recently, in a column in the Evening Standard defending Labour immigration policies, that Labour ministers encouraged massive Third World immigration out of a desire to change the character of the British nation, as well as in order to insult the political right while enlarging its own constituency. Labour’s policy was deliberately concealed from its own supporters, because it was recognized that many core Labour voters would not approve.

SkyNews:

Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain over the past decade, a former Downing Street adviser has claimed.

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural, at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Mr Neather worked as a speechwriter for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

“Mass migration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural,” he wrote in in the London Evening Standard.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if it wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

—————————————————
It is difficult to read all this, which is obviously perfectly true, and grasp that changes in fashionable opinion mysteriously came to pass resulting in our living in a time in which it is only too probable that the people able to rise to the top leadership positions in Western societies are highly likely to have a deeply negative view of their own country’s history and institutions, and even of their own people. So negative a view that they would be committed not to the preservation of their own country’s values, institutions, and character, but to their elimination.

Scott Johnson strongly recommends Charles Krauthammer’s crucial new essay in the Weekly Standard, supplying an even better alternative title: The Will to Cower.

The single most important essay on the Obama administration’s first year is Charles Krauthammer’s “Decline is a choice.” It presents a sort of unified field theory of Obamaism, usefully collecting evidence to advance the argument that Obama’s domestic and foreign policy positions work together to support the decline of American power.

As Krauthammer more broadly puts it: “The current liberal ascendancy in the United States—controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture—has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.”

This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed, even if it is a civilization that has granted them something that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs, which is a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.

If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannot survive.

Liberalism additionally fundamentally misunderstands our current Islamic adversaries, Scrutin argues, erroneously trying to fit their motivations into a simplistic Marxist schema of economic motivation and animosity.

The vague or utopian character of the cause is therefore an important part of terrorism’s appeal, for it means that the cause does not define or limit the action. It is waiting to be filled with meaning by the terrorist, who is searching to change not the world but himself. To kill someone who has neither offended you nor given just cause for punishment, you have to believe yourself wrapped in some kind of angelic cloak of justification. You then come to see the killing as showing that you are indeed an angel. Your existence receives its final ontological proof.

Terrorists pursue a moral exultation, a sense of being beyond the reach of ordinary human judgment, radiated by a self-assumed permission of the kind enjoyed by God. Terrorism of this kind, in other words, is a search for meaning—the very meaning that citizenship, conceived in abstract terms, cannot provide. Even in its most secularized form, terrorism involves a kind of religious hunger. ...

Islamist terrorists are animated, at some level, by the same troubled search for meaning and the same need to stand above their victims in a posture of transcendental exculpation. Ideas of liberty, equality, or historical right have no influence on their thinking, and they are not interested in possessing the powers and privileges that their targets enjoy. The things of this world have no real value for them, and if they sometimes seem to aim at power, it is only because power would enable them to establish the kingdom of God—an aim that they, like the rest of us, know to be impossible and therefore endlessly renewable in the wake of failure. Their carelessness about others’ lives is matched by their carelessness about their own. Life has no particular value for them; death beckons constantly from the near horizon of their vision. And in death, they perceive the only meaning that matters: the final transcendence of this world and of the accountability to others that this world demands of us.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

I always marvel when I read a fashion article like this one in Newsweek.

Fok-Yan Leung doesn’t look out of place at the local field-and-stream emporium. His Maine Guide Jacket is nearly indistinguishable from the coats his fellow Moscow, Idaho, residents have on, and its maker, Woolrich, has been a wilderness staple since 1830. But despite the duds, Leung is actually a Harvard-trained researcher at a nearby university—not a grizzled Gem State native on the hunt for a new Winchester. And his jacket isn’t your average Woolrich. It was produced by an Italian company. It was designed by Japan’s Daiki Suzuki. And, as part of the luxe Woolrich Woolen Mills spinoff collection, it sells for $500—four times the price of a comparable Woolrich garment. “If the guys here found out, they’d be like, ‘He’s flipped his lid’,” says Leung, who also manages Styleforum.net. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

Introducing haute Americana, one of the most powerful—and paradoxical—forces in men’s sportswear. Until recently, men like Leung would’ve skipped the Woolrich for a skinny Dior suit. But in recent years a number of tastemakers, many foreign, have dedicated themselves to reviving iconic American clothing for a hip new audience. Some have collaborated with classic U.S. brands on revitalized products (see: Suzuki and Woolrich). Some have stocked hunting garb in their big-city boutiques. And some have actually begun to reproduce emblematic gear—Wayfarers, Penfield vests—to exacting standards of authenticity. The result—on ample display in places like Brooklyn, N.Y., and Portland, Ore., where certain streets now resemble catwalks crowded with bookish lumberjacks—is a subset of prosperous peacocks paying a premium for garments originally meant for mining or fishing, then wearing them to tapas bars and contemporary art installations.

Affected? Absolutely. Still, how we dress says a lot about who we want to be, and that ache for authenticity—or, at least, the aura of authenticity—is revealing. For the foreigners who instigated the fad, sturdy American gear has long evoked a distant, idealized culture. ... With the recent decline in our security, industry and standing, that nostalgia for a prelapsarian America (and the durable domestic goods that defined it) seems to have settled over the stylish set here at home. “Ironically, it’s largely because of overseas interest that Americans can now wear real American stuff,” says Michael Williams, a fashion publicist who covers Americana on his blog, A Continuous Lean.

Like articles of military uniform adapted as fashion statements, outdoor and equestrian garb have become another occasion for sartorial Walter Mitty-ism on the part of an urban community willing to pay premium prices for artificially distressed blue jeans.

My parents and grandparents, who actually had a life, would be appalled at both the routine enjoyment of a budgetary surplus available for this sort of overpriced grasp at self definition and the need for purchasing an identity different from one’s own. Who knows? If we live long enough, we may come to see “Coal Miner Chic” adopted by residents of the coastal enclaves of sophistication, complete with knock-off carbide lanterns and specially imported coal dirt.

His inauguration will be the most expensive ever and by an enormous margin: four times the cost of George W. Bush’s last. Most people I know are worried and feeling the impact of the bad economy, but the democrats are going to party like it’s Ancient Rome.

Oh, well, it’s just your tax money.

Newsmax

Give these to your kids and they’ll all grow up to write Symbolist poetry. Four for $10.

Hat tip to David Pescovitz.

As we see above, the inhabitants of Christendom used to have no scruples about expressing their opinion of Islam and its founder.

New York Slimes story

Can anyone imagine an American general during the late 1940s apologizing to local Germans for a private in his command using Hitler’s Mein Kampf for target practice? Can anyone imagine a similar apology being made to the Japanese for a Marine shooting up a photo of the Emperor?

And can anyone imagine US news organizations from coast to coast publishing reports treating an incident of this kind as a major news story, vehemently reproaching a US soldier serving in harm’s way overseas for insulting the enemy, and turning a trivial personal expression of opinion at a shooting range into an international brouhaha, specifically in order to embarrass their own country?

Of course, the treason of the media elite finds its expression in this particular incident upon the foundation of an almost even more objectionable habitual moral cowardice which precludes ever affirming one’s own nation, country, race, religion, culture, or cause over that of the Other. All the American left can do confronted with a hostile enemy or a rival religion is apologize and cringe.

I’m not sure New York City, and similar ideological enclaves, wouldn’t be better off if an army of Muslim primitives swept down and occupied them, beheaded a few, and imposed a more manly (if barbarous, bigoted, and primitive) faith on the rest. It would at least be a step up from their current sniveling political correctness.

Contemporary European culture will be manifested in all its glory later today when a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera opens in Erfurt, Germany.

Telegraph:

A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York’s World Trade Centre.

It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators.

The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi’s ‘A Masked Ball’ has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik.

He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience.

It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre,” he told reporters before Saturday’s premiere. “The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don’t have anything anymore.”

Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.

Some of the cast are dressed in soldiers uniforms, or in the red white and blue of Uncle Sam, or in day-glow pink Elvis costumes, slashed to the waist. Many, however, appear to spend their time on stage not wearing anything at all.

They include dozens local pensioners, recruited by the opera house in Erfurt, eastern Germany, to appear naked wearing nothing but plastic Mickey Mouse masks.

“It’s a very beautiful, poetic scene,” said Guy Montavon, the theatre’s general manager.

He said that 60 eager amateurs were keen to appear naked before an audience for the premiere, but only 35 made the final cut.

The staging deliberately toys with images that are extremely sensitive both in the US and Germany.

Foreign audiences may find naked singers cavorting in front of the iconic ruined mesh of World Trade Centre metalwork most provocative.

In Germany however, a female singer with a painted on toothbrush moustache performing a straight arm Nazi salute appears particularly conceived to outrage.

The original 1859 production of the opera was sadly impacted by Roman censorship, which forced the change of the opera’s setting from 1793 Sweden to colonial Boston, and reduced the rank of the assassinated ruler from king to colonial governor. One has to hand it to Herr Kresnik. He succeeds in making one feel that there is a definite place in Europe these days for some old-time Roman censorship.

The London Times reports that the US failed to make the top cut, coming in as number 22. Vatican City was at the top of the list. And Labour Britain (7) beat out Switzerland (17).

Switzerland lost points for some sort of deficiency in “social achievements,” presumably meaning it didn’t have enough Socialism.

The US did so poorly because of “the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans” and “the threat posed by the flow of drugs across the Mexican border.”

What a bunch of Euro-wussies they’ve got at Jane’s! These are the guys assessing the merits of different weapons systems?

Americans are safer than Europeans precisely because we own guns, and can in an emergency shoot the criminal, repel the invasion, or overthrow the government. Sophisticated Americans, particularly those of us who were at Woodstock, look upon recreational drugs as “the doors of perception,” or an alternative form of weekend conviviality, not as a threat to national security. Those Jane’s analysts really need to go over to Amsterdam and undertake some first hand research.

They don’t like guns. They don’t like drugs. The list of “security factors” was hidden behind a subscription barrier, but I suspect that sex and Rock & Roll must have been in there, too.

We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s “head,” the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body?

In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia.

Read the whole thing.

It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Remembering will help us in several ways. First, it will show us that the greatest asymmetry in our struggle with radical Islam is not one of arms or organization or even of ideology in any simple sense, but one of morale in the deepest sense. Second, it will provide an insight into the state of civil-military relations in our own country, which is a growing problem many of us refuse to acknowledge. And third, it will show us why some kinds of wars—“in-between” wars, I call them—have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

He compares certain contemporary Americans to one of Joseph Conrad’s characters.

the Martin Decouds of this world, the brilliant sneerers who analyze everything into oblivion. Martin Decoud is a character in Nostromo, Conrad’s 1904 novel about an imaginary Latin American country, Costaguana, in the throes of upheaval. Decoud has studied law in Paris, dabbles in literature, writes political commentary and all-in-all, as Conrad explains, is an “idle boulevardier.” Decoud speaks much, but acts only when he is faced with a political crisis that impinges on his own welfare. Yet when he finds himself alone on an island off Costaguana, he gives in to despair, even though he has been assured of rescue. The “brilliant” journalist Decoud, the “spoiled darling” of his family, “was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed.” Despite Decoud’s virtuoso conversation and commentary, in a crisis, Conrad tells us, he “believed in nothing.” Decoud doesn’t represent any particular philosophical position or point of view; he is there to remind us that cleverness should not be confused with character.

Good essay. Read the whole thing.

To gauge the extent of the demise of Europe, look no further than the story of the male gorilla that escaped at a Rotterdam zoo last month. After managing to get over a moat, the 400-pound primate brutally attacked a woman who had been visiting the zoo regularly to see the animal. Because female gorillas establish prolonged eye contact when they want to mate, biologists concluded that the woman was responsible for the attack. Taking moral relativism to its illogical conclusion, the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium now has signs warning visitors not to stare at the apes.

Americans tend to regard their national character as comprising such things as freedom, independence, individualism, and self-reliance…

In fact we no longer have these qualities and probably never will again. Generally we now embody their opposites. Modern society has become a hive of largely conformist, closely regulated and generally helpless employees who depend on others for nearly everything. The cause is less anything particularly American than the technology that governs our lives. The United States just moves faster in the direction in which the civilized world moves.

Character springs from conditions. Consider a farmer in, say, North Carolina in 1850. He was free because there was little government, self-reliant because what he couldn’t do for himself didn’t get done, independent because, apart from a few tools, he made or grew all he needed, and an individualist because, there being little outside authority, he could do as he pleased.

All of that is gone, and will not return. Freedom has given way to an infinite array of laws, rules, regulations, licenses, forms, requirements. Many make sense, may even be desirable in a complex world, don’t necessarily make for a bad life, but they cannot be called freedom. Various governments determine what our children learn, whether we can paint the shutters, who we must sell our houses to, who we can hire, what we can say if we want to keep our jobs, where we can park, and whether and how we can build an outbuilding.

People who live infinitely controlled lives become accustomed to such control. Obedience becomes natural…

Individualism has withered under the pressure of the mass media and a distaste for eccentricity. Self-reliance died long ago. We depend on others to repair our cars, grow our food, fix the refrigerator, and write our operating systems. The habit of reliance on others has reached the point that even the right of self-defense has come to be regarded as wrong-minded…

Most poignantly, we are become a nation of employees, fearful of losing our jobs. Prisoners of the retirement system, afraid of transgressing against the various governing bodies before whom we are helpless, unable to feed ourselves, we are at least comfortable. We are not masters of our lives.

Dense populations and the complexity of machines and institutions lead inevitably to regulation, which leads to acceptance of regulation and therefore of authority, which becomes part of the national character. This we see. In my lifetime the change has been great. In rural Virginia in the Sixties, you could walk down the road with your rifle to shoot beer cans, swim in the creeks without supervision and life guards and “flotation devices” approved by the Coast Guard, and generally be left alone. Now, no. Regimentation has grown like kudzu. We obey. The new generation knows nothing else..

At the moment we see a great increase in regulation in the guise of preventing terrorism. Other pretexts could have been found and, I suspect, would have been: fighting crime or the war on drugs or something. The result might have been a drift rather than a headlong rush toward control. But sooner or later, technology determines politics. The computer, not the Constitution, is primary.

I suspect that the concern about terrorism is just a particular manifestation of a growing obsession with safety. Not too long ago, Americans were a hardy breed—foolhardy at times, but the one comes with the other. Now we see attempts to eliminate all risk everywhere. Cities fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and remove diving boards. We require that bicyclists wear helmets, fear second-hand smoke and the violence that is dodge ball. Warnings abound against going outside without sun block. To anyone who grew up in the Sixties or before, the new fearfulness is incomprehensible.

The explanation I think is the feminization of society, which seems to be inseparable from modernity. The nature of masculinity is to prize freedom over security; of femininity, security over freedom. Add that the American character of today powerfully favors regulation by the group in prefe4rence to individual choice. Note that we do not require that cars be equipped with seat belts and then let individuals decide whether to use them; we enforce their use. The result is compulsory Mommyism, very much a part of today’s America.

Does technological civilization inevitably lead to totalitarianism? Certainly the general fear, in combination with technology, makes a sort of soft Stalinism easy. Just now we move toward national ID cards, smuggled in by linking records of drivers’ licenses. Passports, scanned and linked to data bases, provide a record of our travels. Security cameras proliferate. Some of them read the license plates of all passing cars. Email can be monitored, phones easily and undetectably tapped. Now the government is experimenting with X-ray scanners for airports that provide near-pornographic images of passengers. Whether these will be used for dictatorial ends remains to be seen. Historians may one day note that surveillance, when possible, is inevitable.

What then is the national character today? I think we are first an obedient people. We submit. We are comfortable with authority, and seem to be most comfortable when we are told what to do. We prize security, safety, and predictability. Increasingly we accept being treated like convicts at airports and elsewhere. We want to be taken care of. We can do few things for ourselves. We expect government to decide much that was once regarded as outside of government’s ambit. And we are to the marrow of our bones incapable of rising against the creeping tyranny.

Too bloody true, alas!

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

In 1972, more than three decades ago, Danish lawyer and part-time politician Mogens Glistrup had an idea that brought him instant fame. To save taxes, he proposed that the Danish army be disbanded and an answering machine be set up in the defense ministry that would play the following message: “We capitulate!” Not only would it save money, Glistrup argued, but it would also save lives in an emergency. On the strength of this “program,” Glistrup’s Progress Party managed to become the second-most powerful political party in the Danish parliament in the 1973 elections.

Glistrup had the right idea, but he was a number of years premature. Now would be the right time to set up his answering machine.

Read the whole thing.

After Heidegger, a whole run of thinkers from Gadamer to Derrida have contested the claims of the Enlightenment to embody a new age of self-conscious history. On the contrary, they say, all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. For them, criticism of prejudices is nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection. For them, the chimeras of certain men of letters who were keen to make a clean slate of God and revelation, were responsible for plunging Europe into darkness. In an abominable dialectic, the dawn of reason gave birth to nothing but monsters (Horkheimer, Adorno)...

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go…

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

A century ago, when England sent the youth of its urban clerical classes to fight the Boers, they were found generally to be unable to shoot a rifle, ride a horse, read a compass, make a fire, or survive in situations of deprivation in the out-of-doors. Baden-Powell created the Scouting Movement, and a host of late Victorians embraced “muscular Christianity,” in the hope of doing something to diminish the excessive impact of the domesticating impulses of modern urbanism and the modern bureaucratic corporate society. They obviously failed, disastrously.

Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”..

I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything.”

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

“It happens,” the filmmaker said, “so it’s part of who we are.

Maybe of who you are, Devor.

As far as I’m concerned: “He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”

Get ready for next year’s cinematic sensation, Funeral Parlor.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

Marco Evaristti, edgy Chilean artist, at his latest exhibit in Santiago has served up meatballs made from his own fat.

Foxnews.com:

“Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless,” said Marco Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated last Thursday night around a table in Santiago’s Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

“The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result,” he said, explaining the point of his creation.

“You are not a cannibal if you eat art,” he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

Santiago Times:

Six years ago, artist Marco Evaristti scandalized the Chilean art world when he displayed live fish in working blenders. The opening of his new exhibit at the Animal Gallery in Vitacura is likely to cause just as much sensation, hype and criticism when visitors are invited to eat meatballs made with Evaristti’s own fat.

The Chilean-Danish artist, who underwent liposuction for the work, describes it as a criticism of the plastic surgery market. The meatballs are canned and available for purchase; two cans have already been sold to collectors for US$23,200 each. Evaristti claims that the meatballs are not only delicious, but contain less fat than supermarket meatballs.

President Bachelet and poet Nicanor Parra were invited to enjoy the dish at the opening. Neither has given a response so far. The artist assured that he, if no one else, would enjoy the meal.

Another controversial piece consists of six fake faeces covered in gold taken from the teeth of Jewish holocaust victims…

Exhibit details:
Galería Animal
Alonso de Cordova 3105
Vitacura
M-F 10:00-8:00
Saturday 10:30-2:00
Until January 27th.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

African American conversions to Mohammedanism are, in reality, preposterous examples of flamboyant identity display, pitifully evidencing the historical illiteracy and downright bad taste of the conversos. Christianity, the European religion and cultural identity being rejected by the rebellious black man, twice abolished Slavery. Slavery has always been a fundamental institution in Islam, was spread everywhere that religion flourishes, and exists throughout the Islamic world (sometimes faintly terminologically concealed) today.

The most famous African American converso, the illustrious boxer, changed his name from that of a renowned American Abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay to Muhammad Ali, the name of more than one prominent slave-trader.

There is something which provokes distinct psychic unease at the very idea of the rise of the influence of Islam in the United States to the point where the first representative of that lamentable sect will be taking his place in the Congress of the United States, in the same house where Randolph, Webster, and Clay once sat. How can America’s culture and identity have grown so flaccid and deracinated that even a parasitical and malcontent urban welfare community would abandon its own identity and traditions in time of war, in order to elect a coreligionist of the 9/11 hijackers?

There’s a lot more which is illuminating and agreeable in the culture of Japan than in that of the True Believers, but it is difficult to imagine even the most delinquent and corrupt congressional district of the WWII era sending a Shinto-ist to Congress to take his oath on what? a sharp katana? or a bale of rice?

I find the image of an unsympathetic translation of the Alcoran, once perused with ironic skepticism by Mr. Jefferson, translated by time into the hands of a former Catholic convert to superstititous creed of the enemies of the West amusing, to say the least. Offering Jefferson’s Alcoran to Mr. Ellison-Hakim is rather in the character of inviting the newly elected Count Dracula to take his oath of office upon an early tract on vampire-hunting.

But, consequently, for more than a decade now, a retail-inventory model of tailoring libraries’ holding to books frequently checked out has been supplanting the idea of the town library as cultural repository of the classics. Librarians have (for years) been busily purging infrequently-borrowed canonical classics in order to maximize shelf space for high demand choices, i.e., current best-sellers and career references.

The Washington Post just noticed.

You can’t find “Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings” at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or “The Education of Henry Adams” at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s “Final Harvest”? Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.

It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region’s largest library system is taking turnover to a new level.

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves—and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone—even if they are classics.

“We’re being very ruthless,” said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. “A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.”

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books.

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

When American society allowed “professional” forms of credentialization to replace liberal education as the means of entry to a career as librarian (just as was the case with primary and secondary level teaching), educated people vanished from the profession, being replaced by the dimmest species of fonctionnaires and bureaucrats.

So, instead of serving as the place the poor kid can access the important books and educate himself for free (as so many American writers and intellectuals in the past have done), the modern local library has become a tax-funded way for cheapskates to get their hands on the latest Grisham or Stephen King, without actually paying for it. My former town library in Newtown, Connecticut, back in the 1990s, had already purged the English poets in order to make space available to offer popular movies on videotape, in active competition with Blockbuster.

You think you’ve seen French appeasement at its worst. Then they go and do something like this.

Last year’s French riots were triggered by the deaths of two “youths,” who fled a police ID check, broke into an electrical substation to hide, and were electrocuted when they touched something they shouldn’t have.

Last Friday officials and residents of Clichy-sous-Bois, scene of some of the worst rioting, dedicated a monument to these two disenchanted fleeing criminals.

What would Godfrey of Bouillon have done?

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture…

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible…

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

A Muslim police officer has been excused from guarding London’s Israeli Embassy after he objected to the duty on ‘moral grounds’.

PC Alexander Omar Basha – a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Diplomatic Protection Group – refused to be posted there because he objected to Israeli bombings in Lebanon and the resulting civilian casualties of fellow Muslims.

In a move which has caused widespread astonishment at Scotland Yard, senior officers in the DPG agreed that that PC Basha should be given an alternative posting.

The officer, who carries a gun, is now thought to be guarding another embassy.

Critics accused Met chiefs of bowing to political correctness, saying the decision set a dangerous precedent.

If a particularly-observant Pathan PC claimed a moral obligation to behead Salman Rushdie, would he be granted compassionate leave to go and do so out of respect for his conscience? Perhaps British thugs also will soon be accorded the same cordial recognition by the Government of their own distinctive religious traditions, and will be permitted to strangle the occasional commuter in honor of Kali.