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.

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.

Roger Simon has gloomy comments on experiencing what used to be Independence Day in the new banana republic of Obamistan. The good news is that the paint on the left’s shoddy idol is already developing visible cracks.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and – no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up – I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama.

Takuan Seijo (presumably using an alternative reading of the name of Takuan Soho as his pen name), at Brussels Journal, finding himself inflamed by haute bourgeois Boston-area friends responding to sneezes with the blessing “Barack you!”, delivers the sort of brilliant, linguistically prismatic rant that only well-educated Russians can produce.

He is pessimistic to a Spenglerian degree on the fate of the West, which he finds incapable of self defense either politically or culturally against the moral jui jitsu of ressentiment employed by the left to justify the erection of the socialist Leviathan.

It is fun to ridicule the sheer lunacy of the Body Snatchers. But in fact, the yin legumes (feminized contemporary pod people -DZ) are part of a motivated and cunning coalition phalanx. That phalanx has a masterly grasp of tactics, the morals of a wolverine and the size of Leviathan.

The Looter Coalition can run circles around its opposition because of its multiple, interlocking rings. The opposition is comprised of single-issue groups: counter-jihad, anti-socialists, traditionalists, anti-secularists etc. This is like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon trying to beat the evil Han in the hall of mirrors. Until the mirrors are broken, the underlying unity of the foe cannot be seen. The foe therefore cannot be defeated.

Those who are counter-jihad are pummeled not by jihadis but by socialists. Those who are anti-socialist are pummeled not by socialists but by immigrant demographics. Those who are traditionalists are pummeled not by nihilists but by global capitalists. Those who are social conservatives are pummeled not by libertines but by the very symbol of rectitude, the Law. Those who are declining fertility activists will be defeated even if they succeed, for any number of Western children would still be compelled to spend 12 – 18 years turning into Pods in the Snatchers’ zombie farms. It’s in light of all this that I see the tactical retreat of Exodus.

When Reality becomes taboo, and fiction becomes an official totem, civilization has driven itself into a swamp. From then on, it’s the flotation coefficient of the lying totem versus the suction force of Reality’s swamp. That is a contest with only one possible outcome, as gravity and entropy work for the swamp.

Read the whole thing.

Roger Scruton argues for the superiority of Western Civilization on the basis of its possession of the faculties of irony and forgiveness, but warns that the arid landscape of multicultural liberalism can never fulfill the spirtual and emotional needs of humanity.

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.

Eric Felton reports that European vermouth maker Noilly Prat has decided to quit making the special dry-formula vermouth favored by Americans for modest use in the ultimate cocktail, the Martini. Only a far-sweeter and heavier, soi disant “traditional” formula Noilly Prat will be available henceforward.

First Obama wins the election, then this!

Felten quotes the poet Hugo Williams: “What a strange coincidence it is that everything always changes for the worse during the course of a single lifetime.”

Theodore Dalrymple, in New English Review, deplores the estrangement of contemporary art from tradition, technique, values, and beauty.

From having talked to quite a number of art students, it seems that art school these days resembles a kindergarten for young adults, where play is more important than work. The lack of technical training is painfully obvious at the shows the students put on. Many of the students have good ideas, but cannot execute them successfully for lack of technical facility. Indeed, their technical incompetence is only too painfully obvious.

It is very striking, too, how few art students have any interest in or knowledge of the art of the past. Do you visit galleries, I ask them?

No, they reply, a little shocked at the very suggestion, and as if to do so would inhibit them in their creativity or to condone plagiarism.

As for art history, they are taught and know very little. This is all part of the programme of disconnecting them radically from the past, of making them free-floating molecules in the vast vacuum of art.

It is true that they are sometimes taught just a little art history. I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.

‘The first year,’ she said, ‘we did African art. But now in the second year we’re doing western art.’

I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.

‘Roy Liechtenstein.’

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Roger Kimball in the January New Criterion:

It is often said that an anthropologist is someone who respects the distinctive values of every culture but his own. We in the West are all anthropologists now. It is curious, though, that proponents of relativism and multiculturalism should use ethnocentrism as a stick with which to beat the West. After all, both the idea and the critique of ethnocentrism are quintessentially Western. There has never in history been a society more open to other cultures than our own; nor has any tradition been more committed to self-criticism than the Western tradition: the figure of Socrates endlessly inviting self-scrutiny and rational explanation is a definitive image of the Western spirit. Moreover, “Western” science is not exclusively Western: it is science plain and simple. It was, to be sure, invented and developed in the West, but it is as true for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley as it is for the denizens of New York. That is why, outside the precincts of the humanities departments of Western universities, there is a mad dash to acquire Western science and technology. The deepest foolishness of multiculturalism shows itself in the puerile attacks it mounts on the cogency of scientific rationality, epitomized poignantly by the Afrocentrist who flips on his word processor to write books decrying the parochial nature of Western science and extolling the virtues of the “African way.”…

Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers—terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura of positive values, but in reality they are what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations. “Where conditions permit,” Gairdner writes, the strong step in:

either to impose a new regime or, as in the Western democracies, where overt totalitarianism is still unthinkable, to further permeate ordinary life with the state’s quietly overbearing, regulating role. Relativism is the natural public philosophy of such regimes because it repudiates all natural moral or social binding power, replacing these with legal decrees and sanction of the state.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Neal Boortz identifies yesterday’s election’s predominant theme.

I brought this up several months ago … a slogan for this election. “I want my mommy.” The phrase really says it all. This is not an election where the American voters were looking for someone to protect their freedoms. Instead, it was an election where people were looking for someone to take care of them. Self-sufficiency seems a bit old-fashioned right now. Why work so hard to be self-sufficient when candidates are falling all over themselves to provide the American people with womb-to-tomb or, if you will, cradle-to-grave paternalism. The voters who put Barack Obama into office bear little resemblance to the people who fought for independence 124 years ago. Colonists fighting for our independence actually left their bloody footprints along the icy roads of New York and Pennsylvania while marching to engage the British troops. Today we can’t even drum of a decent plurality of voters who will vote for liberty, let alone fight for it.

This has been a “what’s in it for me” vote. Are you going to give me health care? Are you going to make sure my job is guaranteed? Are you going to cover my child care costs? You aren’t going to make me pay taxes, are you? How about all those evil rich people? Aren’t you going to take some of their money away from them and give it to me? After all … I work for my money, they cheated and stole for theirs. Make them pay their fair share of taxes. Me? I’m tired of paying any share.

The big question for me today is whether or not freedom, economic liberty and self-sufficiency can make a comeback in America. Right now it seems that a dismaying number of Americans think that they are owed a living; that it is the government’s job to guarantee their economic security. Can we ever turn that around and return to a time when people accept the responsibility for their own lives and eschew the idea of using government as a tool of legalized plunder?

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Dear Lady) in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

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.

Jane’s Information Group launched last month a new intelligence service providing “Country Risk Ratings” evaluating the stability of 232 countries, non-contiguous territories and de facto independent political entities on the basis of two dozen security factors.

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.

TMLutas contemplates a recent news development, and concludes that proliferation of WMD among non-state actors is inevitable, and that the current aversion of members of the modern Western intelligentsia to violence is only likely to lead, in the end, to far worse violence.

When the generals start getting restless, they do things like this preemptive nuclear strike proposal. But why are the generals getting restless all over NATO? Amerca’s Gen. Shalikashvili, Germany’s Gen. Naumann, the UK’s Field Marshall Inge, the Netherland’s Gen van den Breemen, and France’s Admiral Jacques Lanxade are all serious military players of varying politics. These are not brash, unthinking chest beaters. What possessed them to intervene in this manner and damage their societies’ moral standing in the world (and thus their vaunted ‘soft power’) by proposing an updated, in your face, first strike policy, coupled with a much more active NATO and explicitly decoupling military action from the UN?

I can see no other explanation than a profound, international vote of no-confidence in the political class of the West by heavily experienced military minds that live, breathe, eat, and sleep the problem of defending us all from violent threats to our liberties and very existence. I am not even sure that the presentation of the plan in Bucharest in April is coincidence. After all, Romania is a very good example of how even dead broke powers with unstable, highly repressive regimes can extract uranium and enrich it while nobody takes the threat seriously. Had Ceausescu managed his internal repression better, Romania would be a balkans “hedgehog” today similar to the Swiss except with nuclear armed Scuds and a sociopath’s hand on the button. Romania’s Ceausescu era relations with North Korea were always very good. They also had friends across the muslim world.

The ‘peace faction’ that does not look beyond its own nose will be shocked, outraged, and redouble its efforts to neuter the military so it cannot be used. It’s as if they have never heard of feedback loops or their own part in this very pernicious one. Spelling it out explicitly, the peace factions have neutered the political process so even vigorous peaceful competition is impossible. After all, to draw a caricature of Mohammad, write an insensitive book, or film a blaspheming movie draw death sentences from which we have little practical defense. The best we can do is a sort of life-long semi-imprisonment, insecure in our lives and our possessions, never knowing when the knife will fall.

The “peace faction” ensures that persistent, responding, violent escalations cannot happen so we end up implicitly enslaved because, in the real world, others are willing to persistently bring to bear more violence than we are. We shrink from exercising our freedoms because of justifiable fear. And thus we lose them in a practical matter because the muslims (and in their success they will draw imitators) are willing to tolerate periodic violent episodes that spasmodically, ineffectively lash out at them more as a sop to western domestic factions that demand “a response” because a durable majority in so many Western countries has shrunk back from the military buildup necessary to generate “a solution”.

The only thing that is left in modern Western political discourse is to make the spasmodic response so terrible, so violent, that in that short political window when the West permits itself to respond at all will annihilate our enemies and form a sort of “solution” after all. And thus the general staff rebellion in the making.

What the general staffs across the West see is the death of Western supremacy of violence…

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.