"Religious Intelligence" is an Oxymoron for Brain-Dead Anglicans

Fuckwits rule the Church of England, as everyone with a scintilla of gray matter knows. Read the link above to understand why in England and the U.S., where gays and pervs run the Anglican & Episcopal Real Estate Companies, no one attends their services on prime real estate. And why their adherents [in the U.S.] have dropped from 3.8 to 2.5 million in the last decade. In the U.K., it is a government operation, so no one cares if the facilities are used or not.

In the rest of the world, where Anglicans actually practice religion and have some basic moral and spiritual values, the Church is actually expanding. Maybe the Perv-in-Chief in Westminster Abbey should go a little down-market.

Murdoch Biographer Torched by NYTimes Book Reviewer

Michael Wolff is easily the most repulsive creep on MSNBC or anywhere else, and SNL had a good time torching him and the ineffable cretinous excretion named Olberboy [played by Ben Affleck] when syncophant Wolff didn't quite lick the shoes of Keith-of-a-Thousand-Special-Comments with enough tongue action and cringing deference. Wolff must do something ineffable with Graydon Carter to merit a Vanity Fair job, since his writing style is more lavishly narcissistic than even Hitchens, who in addition has a brain. Here's a few snippets on Wolff from David Carr, the NYT cultural reporter:

Murdoch, for all his lack of an inner life, at least in this book, is an extremely engaging man to listen to. At investor conferences where other media titans drone on defensively, he is far and away the most fearless and factual. But not here. Wolff, who has the columnist’s tic of being far too struck by the fragrance of his own prose, draws attention to the Boswell at the expense of the Johnson.

[emph mine]
And another:

Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Here's another Carr introduction to one of Wolff's many lapses in accuracy and honesty:

Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong.

And then proceeds to shred any scintilla remaining of Wolff's "integrity as a reporter," of which he famously has none.

The reason for Wolff's persistent nitwittery and inaccuracy becomes clear in a later graph:

And Wolff also writes that The New York Times canceled a series on Murdoch after two articles were attacked by News Corp. Only two articles were scheduled, and none were canceled, according to the paper’s editors. Wolff prefers the purity of his constructs — one of which is that The Times is a deeply flawed artifact that is doomed to be crushed by the more nimble, less morally constricted Murdoch.

Und so weiter und so fort. Wolff's yapping lapdog attacks on Murdoch are effortlessly put down by Carr and the link above will demonstrate that the NYT, despite many lapses, still has enough self respect to impale an impostor like Wolff despite the fact that Murdoch is no friend of the Times. Wolff will predictably reply by saying that Carr is cadging for a job with Rupert's flagship newspaper in NYC, but I applaud the Sunday Book Review editor for putting Carr's putdown of the scurrilous narcissist Wolff right on the front page.

Che Guevara's [Only] Lasting Legacy

Humberto Fontova has a great article on the shallow little upper middle-class playboy-adventurer named Che whose exploits are invented and exploited by ultra-left degenerates everywhere.

Fontova displays in great detail the many incredibly inane eff-ups CG managed to get himself in before being cornered by CIA gunmen in a Bolivian jungle begging for mercy because "I'm worth more to you alive than dead" and then getting his just desserts from several automatic rifles that terminated him "with extreme prejudice."

Good riddance to bad rubbish, but one story in a local Miami newspaper a few months back on the sports page caught my attention. The paper was reporting that Cubans still on their island prison were hoping that Raul's taking power would mean that Cubans could play golf again. The backstory is that Che playfully challenged Fidel to a golf match, but forgot to lose. Che was an upper-middle class Argentine who could shoot a mean tee-to-green game, but after he beat the Bearded Whoremonger by many strokes, the upshot was that Castro closed all the golf courses on the island except one for diplomats. The Hairy Megalomaniac [who reportedly screamed at Khrushchev during the Cuban Missle Crisis to initiate a nuclear war regardless of the consequences] was, is and ever shall be one of the most autistic moral lepers on the planet, and if he couldn't play golf well, no one else on his Prospero's Cell would play at all---or so the Herald or Sun-Sentinel reporter attests.

I would have loved to interrogate CG after his capture in the same manner that he employed on Freedom Fighters caught by Castro's criminals. But of course, that would make the ultra-left whiners and loo-zers [Harry Reid, etc.] run to Amnesty International and the UN and file a lawsuit with putty-headed judges somewhere on the two Left Coasts.

But to my mind, a higher law dictates direct action.

What Passes For Analysis in the [Once and Future?] USSR

Igor Panarin has the ear of Vlad The Empoisoner Putin, I'll bet, with his frightful predictions of the imminent demise of the USA. This is not the first time that ignorant Eurotrash has predicted the US is a house of cards, since the rigid and sclerotic statist mentality cannot understand American freedoms, mistaking them for anarchy. Read the WSJ article for a few chuckles and raising-eyebrow exercises!

Free Republic prints the original Novosti article with this delicious extended hallucination:

Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."

On the fate of the U.S. dollar, he said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar. The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."

and then notes at the end:

Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare. [my emph.]

Looks like Tovarich Panarin needs to reassess his basic information input sources before fantasizing in public, but it should be a warning that know-nothing nudniks like Panarin are actually in positions of influence in Putin's attempt to Stalinize Russia after a KGB elite completes its takeover.

And that is less fantastic than Professor Panarin's lucubrations.

RIP: Samuel P. Huntington, a Political Science Giant Among Pygmies

Huntington is famous for a number of ground-breaking perspectives, well annotated and roundly criticized by ultra-left airheads like Edward Said, on the shifting realities on the ground of global political movements. PC leftists and "new" Democrats routinely castigate Huntington, who worked in the Carter NSC, for not reciting their rote anodyne nostrums and signing on to bogus "Davos Man" elitism. [SPH coined the term of the other-worldly haute politique of detached condescension practiced by the EU faineants [and their obsequious allies in the US MSM like Tiny Tom Friedman].

Most recently, Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order was a dose of realism and his knowledge of the persistence of ancient codes and antagonism into the post-Cold War order, contrasting with Francis Fukuyama's sunny and blithe Pollyanna tome, The End of History and the Last Man. 911 blatantly punctuated Huntington's thesis with a bloody exclamation mark!

SPH's masterful writings on The Third Wave and Hispanicization of parts of America earned him the enmity of know-nothing ultra lefties who will dutifully trash this Magister Ludi of late twentieth century political thinking.

Another Brain-Dead Column by Friedman, this one on gas tax hike

Tom Friedman is a total con man, writing books about the obvious while peddling snake oil and BS. His latest canard is a gasoline tax hike, to make our country more like the Europe this buffoon should move to. TF forgets, or is too effing stupid to know, that large countries the size of the USA, Australia, Canada [even Canada!], and Russia all have low gas taxes because of large distances to be travelled to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Such a practical thought would never enter the tiny mind of Arab-bashing Jew-boy Friedman, who brings the Saudis in as the comic book villain. He cites a left-wing moron to make his point:

There has to be a system that permanently changes consumer demand, which would permanently change what Detroit makes, which would attract more investment in battery technology to make electric cars, which would hugely help the expansion of the wind and solar industries — where the biggest drawback is the lack of batteries to store electrons when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. A higher gas tax would drive all these systemic benefits.

The same is true in geopolitics. A gas tax reduces gasoline demand and keeps dollars in America, dries up funding for terrorists and reduces the clout of Iran and Russia at a time when Obama will be looking for greater leverage against petro-dictatorships. It reduces our current account deficit, which strengthens the dollar. It reduces U.S. carbon emissions driving climate change, which means more global respect for America. And it increases the incentives for U.S. innovation on clean cars and clean-tech.

Which one of these things wouldn’t we want? A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”

Although the above paras are chock-a-block with received opinions and fixed ideas such as the totally discredited Global Warming Hoax, Friedman finally goes over the top to cite Mandelbaum's little socialistic tax-hike to boost "prosperity" when gas price rises have historically hindered prosperity and caused the economy to slow down.

Not that one of the prime freakshows on the NYT's Op-Ed page featuring cretins like Krugman and Herbert and the occasionally readable Dowd ever really thinks about anything. Read his recent line about the Jetsons and the Flintstones which trope he has used, according to WSJ debunker James Taranto, at least a half-dozen times in the last three years.

Always wrong, but never in doubt, Friedman sells books to half-educated housewives and males with housewives' brains.

Every con man has his day, but Friedman is the Bernie Madoff of journalism.

RIP: Global Warming Hoax [1988-2008]

Christopher Booker announces the demise of the late and unlamented Global Warming Hoax, because

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

such as the sudden disappearance of the Late Middle Ages Warming Period when French vines grew all over southern England and wine was produced in northern locations which now are sadly consigned to grain brews like beer and vodka! A fiddling with the statistics produced a hockey stick graph showing ever-increasing warming trend since the beginning of historically recorded weather observations. All this was engineered by politically-active "scientists" like a NASA fraud named Hanson and his Stanford colleague, demonstrating the havoc that can be wrought by snake oil salesmen with PhDs.

These two pranksters collected a cohort of conniving grant-hounds who were given money by moronic politicians like the buffoon Al Gore, who got a D+ on his only science course, one he took in Divinity School!! The Gore-bot is actually dumber than he sounds [if that were possible!], but clever enough and advised by political Ponzi scheme cabalists that if a critical mass of "climatologists" and other usual suspects could be suborned, the hitherto peripheral attacks at corporate capitalism might be forged into a frontal assault at capitalism itself, under the guise of "saving the planet." The dumbest people in the world, Norwegians, agreed and gave the Gore-bot a Nobel Prize for his illiterate windpuffery such as "the science is settled." Gore fits in with the crowd that in the '70s was howling at the moon about a new Ice Age and the advance of the glaciers---which will probably occur in about 10,000 years according to honest scientists, as we are now in the middle of an interglacial warming spell.

Don't count on clowns like the UN and the EU and "media pundits" to back off from the fake "science" that the Global Warming hallucination represents.

In for a penny, in for a pound..... the crooked politicians are blind being led by one-eyed "climatologists". Clear-eyed 20-20 scientists without special interests in grabbing grants for specious spurious pre-cooked chicanery financed by crooked pols and bogus organizations like the Democratic Party. And gullible RINOs like McCain, the fool who was so repellent that he allowed Obama to win Ohio even though Barack won Ohio with 40,000 FEWER votes than John Kerry, who lost the state to GWB by over one hundred thousand votes.

But John-Boy is now joining the great GW daisy chain to keep alive his slot on late-night talk shows and the occasional cameo in comic movies. I think this bozo has finally found his true niche, a stand-up comic.

So far, Obama isn't doing too badly, but if he listens to Robert Kennedy Jr., another political fraud, he is bound to be misled. Thank God he appeared to distance himself from Clinton's odious Veep.
UPDATECanadafreepress.com has a list of the worst Global Warming Whoppers among the lies and disinformation disseminated by the lying Luddites of the ultra-left GoreWhores:

“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:” The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008, Hurricanes, Arctic Ice, Coral, Drinking water, Aspen skiing

We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter—but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976–1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year in the last 100.

But sunspots had been predicting major cooling since 2000, and global temperatures turned downward in early 2007. The sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s thermometers since 1860. Today’s temperatures are about on a par with 1940. For 2008, the Almanac hired a new climatologist, Joe D’Aleo, who says the declining sunspots and the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean predict 25-30 years of cooler temperatures for the planet.

“You could potentially sail, kayak or even swim to the North Pole by the end of the summer. Climate scientists say that the Arctic ice . . . is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.” Ted Alvarez, Backpacker Magazine Blogs, June, 2008.

Soon after this prediction, a huge Russian icebreaker got trapped in the thick ice of the Northwest Passage for a full week. The Arctic ice hadn’t melted in 2007, it got blown
into warmer southern waters. Now it’s back. (Reference)

Remember too the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. Polish climatologist Rajmund Przbylak says “the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s” based on more than 40 Arctic temperature stations.

“Australia’s Cities Will Run Out of Drinking Water Due to Global Warming.”

Tim Flannery was named Australia’s Man of the Year in 2007—for predicting that Australian cities will run out of water. He predicted Perth would become the “first 21st century ghost city,’ and that Sydney would be out of water by 2007. Today however, Australia’s city reservoirs are amply filled. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun reminds us Australia is truly a land of long droughts and flooding rains.


“Hurricane Effects Will Only Get Worse.” Live Science, September 19, 2008.

So wrote the on-line tech website Live Science, but the number of Atlantic hurricanes 2006–2008 has been 22 percent below average, with insured losses more than 50 percent below average. The British Navy recorded more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes in the last part of the Little Ice Age (1700–1850) as during the much-warmer last half of the 20th century.

“Corals will become increasingly rare on reef systems.” Dr. Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, head of Queensland University (Australia) marine studies.

In 2006, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg warned that high temperatures might kill 30–40 percent of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef “within a month.” In 2007, he said global warming temperatures were bleaching [potentially killing] the reef.

But, in 2008, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said climate change had not damaged the “well-managed” reef in the four years since its last report. Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.

No More Skiing? “Climate Change and Aspen,” Aspen, CO city-funded study, June, 2007.

Aspen’s study predicted global warming would change the climate to resemble hot, dry Amarillo, Texas. But in 2008, European ski resorts opened a month early, after Switzerland recorded more October snow than ever before. Would-be skiers in Aspen had lots of winter snow—but a chill factor of 18 below zero F. kept them at their fireplaces instead of on the slopes.
*Sources:

Predictions of 25-30 year cooling due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation: Scafetta and West, 2006, “Phenomenological Solar Signature in 400 Years of Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere Temperature Record,” Geophysical Research Letters.

Arctic Warmer in the 1930s: R. Przybylak, 2000, “Temporal and Spatial Variation of Surface Air Temperature over the Period of Instrumental Observation in the Arctic,” International Journal of Climatology 20.

British Navy records of Caribbean hurricanes 1700-1850: J.B. Elsner et al., 2000, “Spatial Variations in Major U.S. Hurricane Activity,” Journal of Climate 13.

Predictions of coral loss: Hoegh-Guldberg et al., Science, Vol. 318, 2007. Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2008, issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, Nov., 2008.

Aspen climate change study: Climate Change and Aspen: An Assessment of Potential Impacts and Responses, Aspen Global Change Institute, June, 2007.

On to 2009 and we will hear once more from the Gore-bot that "the "science" is settled, but obviously Gore's mouthful is not sitting well judging from his flatulent orifice [his most productive one].

Anne Applebaum on Greek Mindless Violence

Greece remains the moral leper colony of the EU, and that's saying a lot given the caliber of cowardly insouciance normal to countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and France under Chirac [not omitting Deutschland with its sausage-eating cannibals]. She sums up the Greek situation vis-a-vis the EU:

...the riots' relative absence from European and North American front pages proves that—the rhetoric of European unity aside—not all European countries are taken equally seriously. Although they are members of the European Union, the Greeks' major contribution to European foreign policy is their stubborn insistence (for reasons truly too complex to repeat here) on blocking international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia unless it changes its name to FYROM—the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—an acronym that everybody else finds laughable. On the domestic front, the Greeks are best known for having faked the economic data they needed in order to join the euro currency.

I once spent an evening at dinner with the son of Greek PM Papandreou, head of PASOK, while he was Prime Minister and young Nikos explained to me and my Greek-heritage wife the way a system of corruption worked throughout Greece from the smallest town to the large regional capitals. He said the country was completely balkanized [Robert Kagan alludes to this in his book The Balkans and not in a federal sense or even local loyalty sense. Just atomized.

Applebaum elaborates:

There may also be other, more local, explanations for why these riots feel as if they are taking place so far away from mainstream events. Greek political scientist Stathis Kalyvas argues brilliantly that they are facilitated by Greece's unique political culture: In the years since it overthrew military rule, the Greek political class has come to treat civil disobedience, even violent and destructive civil disobedience, as "almost always justified, if not glorified." Rioting is a "fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage"; the anarchist subculture that thrives in central Athens is "abetted, and in some instances endorsed" by Greece's left-wing parties and mainstream newspapers.
And yet—even if Greece is unserious, even if anarchist subculture has uniquely deep roots in Athens, even if Greek corruption and youth unemployment are unusually high—it's a mistake to dismiss these riots as altogether peripheral. If nothing else, they show what can happen to a highly developed, post-ideological society where organized politics no longer interests large groups of people. One sympathizer says the rioters can be divided into three groups: communists, anarchists, and "younger people who like to think that they are anarchists but … don't know what they stand for. They are the ones who have been looting … they feel the only way to make themselves heard is to do these things."

Another describes the anarchist world of Exharia, approvingly, as "a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas." Yet another told a reporter that the tiny shops near the university deserved to be looted because they represent "the corporate machine." The thinking here isn't exactly sophisticated: This is a revolution, among other things, being conducted to the strains of Pink Floyd ("We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control"). Some are also blaming the weakness of Greece's mainstream social democrats, who, like social democrats elsewhere in Europe, have lately lost ground to the further left and are having trouble attracting young people. But I'm guessing the problem runs even deeper: The fact is that political parties in general are weak everywhere, and democracy is therefore weak, too.

The center cannot hold and a motley moron group like Pink Floyd floats like a pig over rioting looters exhibiting "Rage Against the Machine."

Happily, even the EU comical cavalcade of clowns is above the silliness of Greece devolving into its mindless constituencies. Wonder if Victor Davis Hanson can update his War Like No Other to update Thucydides on the civil strife going on now in the EU's leper colony.

Phony Joe and Spouseroo Jill Feed Homeless after $369 in annual donations to charity

Hairplugs eat away at politicians' brains and Joe The Fraud Biden is no exception....this tightwad with donations marched his poor wife to a homeless shelter to fake concern for the homeless. The fact that this dolt is ten times dumber than Sarah Palin is eventually becoming slowly evident and the MSM will have another reason to be ignored in the future.

Biden's phony smile and lying mouth both typify the Dem hypocrisy.....even the NYT's gasbag do-gooder Nicolas Kristof had to admit last week that the average "liberal" is just as phony as Biden, pretending concern for the poor and powerless while donating zilch. They want to get their hands on other people's money, for charity, for taxes, for their hedge funds like Bernie Made-off and will do anything to try to trick the voters into thinking they actually care.

And sometimes their chicanery actually works....! The Dem constituency is either barely literate or completely puffed up with the pretensions of academicide. The stupids won this time. Or, as in Minnesota, the criminal judiciary and criminal state government is stealing an election in broad daylight while the feckless Guv'nr Pawlenty sucks his thumb.

About Time to Pull the Trigger?

Read this link and ask yourself if it isn't time to eliminate not only the so-called "rogue" elements, but the entire superstructure of the Gaza genocidal enterprise whose feelings for the Jews and Israel mirror the Channel 4 "Christmas" spokesperson invited to spew vomit on a Christian celebration.

Take out Londonistan while you're eliminating the nearby terrorist enclave run by Hamas. You've got my vote.

UPDATE The lepers in Cairo are fuming that Israel answers incessant rocket attacks with overwhelming force. Why didn't the feckless impotent shemales in the Arab League do anything to curb Hamas? I see the EU and the UN are among the hyenas circling Israel as the culprit. Hope Obama stays as strong as GWB on defending a democracy living among oligarchic praetorian elite-run totalitarian states.

Palin Praised by Margaret Thatcher's Special Advisor

John O'Sullivan has been exiled to Radio Liberty in Prague, but writes about the media-assassination attempts on Sarah Palin, with Mrs. Andrew Sullivan leading the knickers-in-a-twist mafia and follows with a comparison:

They are far from identical; they rose in different political systems requiring different skills. As a parliamentarian, Mrs. Thatcher needed forensic and debating skills which her training in Oxford politics and as a tax lawyer gave her. Mrs. Palin is a good speaker, but she needs to hone her debating tactics if she is to match those of the Iron Lady.

On the other hand, Mrs. Palin rose in state politics to jobs requiring executive ability. Her successful conduct of the negotiations with Canada, Canadian provinces and American states over the Alaska pipeline was a larger executive task than anything handled by Mrs. Thatcher until she entered the Cabinet and, arguably, until she became prime minister.

Funny how Palin got bombarded while a cretinous hair-plug refugee who claimed Hezbollah had been evicted from Lebanon escaped all MSM scrutiny---even as he inserted his foot in his mouth with metronomic regularity.

I hope O'Sullivan's article helps the WSJ recover from having bi-yotch-in-chief ambassadress to the Upper West Side Noonan's ridiculous display of feminist bitchery. Yeah, and her pen-pal ditto-head K. Parker can insert her head up a place where the sun never shines!

Public Space Between Family Privacy and Government/State

The Pursuit of Glory is one of those rare history books which has a delight on every page, like Braudel's The Mediterranean. Author Tim Blanning quotes Marxists like Eric Hogsbawm and Walter Benjamin often, but doesn't show some leg except a bit with the papacy and the Catholic Church, but as a Brit, that can be excused. Early on, the author does note that medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode. The inventions of watches and timetables in Holland were beginning to make time a commodity.

A quote from a review brings up the novel introduction of "public space," which began in England as public opinion separated the privacy of family from the overweening interference of the state [with forced labor in England and corvees in France, to name a couple of examples of the tax-with-impunity interference which rarely returned actual benefits from the state.

""Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion." Countries where this public sphere was left free, as in Britain or the Dutch Republic, tended to be more politically stable than, say, France, where suppression ended in bloody revolution."

The book only covers 1648-1815, but the French Revolution introduced the "concierge" in each building in Paris to vouch for the political correctness of its inhabitants during The Terror and other revolutionary inventions. An early example of "public space" monitoring the opinions of the citizens of the state even in the familial household.

Nowadays, we see "privacy" becoming a rare commodity itself, as public space continues to invade the family in one way or another. However, "Time's Arrow" does not move forward, as we have seen many times since 1789, and that wheel of fortune keeps disobeying the Eric Hobsbawm and the other disciples of the worst economist in human history.

UPDATEReading Erich Heller's The Importance of Nietzsche, I was struck by the point Heller makes on p. 5 about the "Death of God" which Nietzsche called "the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger," as Heller puts it. EH goes on to say:

Note well the paradox contained in these words. He never said that there was no God, but that the Eternal had been vanquished by Time and that the Immortal suffered death at the hands of mortals."

Perhaps this is a paraphrase of the mini-thought above that "medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode." Heller goes on to quote Nietzsche's Will to Power to state:

The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries...For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intesity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection....Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist." [no. 2, 57]

And Nietzsche ain't talking about Global Warming or some natural catastrophe, a force majeure of nature. Heller expatiates on Nietzsche's vision of the aftermath of the Death of God and the seizure of power by "reformers of society."

...Men have become enemies, and each his own enemy. From now onward they will hate, Nietzsche believes, however many comforts they will lavish upon themselves, and hate themselves with a new hatred, unconsciously at work in the depths of their souls. True, there will be ever better reformers of society, ever better socialists, and ever better hospitals, and an ever increasing intolerance of pain and poverty and suffering and death, and an ever more fanatical craving for the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Yet the deepest impulse informing their striving will not be love and will not be compassion. Its true source will be the panic-struck determination not to have to ask the question "What is the meaning of our lives?"---the question that will remind them of the death of God.....Rather than allowing that question to be asked, they will do everything to smooth it away from the face of humanity.....For they cannot endure it and yet they will despise themselves for not enduring it, and for their guilt-ridden inability to answer it; and their self-hatred will betray them behind the back of their apparent charity and humanitarian concern. For there they will assiduously construct the tools for the annihilation of human kind. "There will be wars such as have never been waged on earth," says Nietzsche in Ecce Homo and in the notes to Thus Spake Zarathustra, "I foresee something terrible, Chaos everywhere. Nothing will be left of any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt!"

[emphasis in original text]

Heller goes on to say that the fragments above from the notes of his late years "give a surprisingly full diagnosis of what he termed nihilism, the state of human beings and societies faced with a total eclipse of all values." As Stephen R.C. Hicks correctly notes frequently in Explaining Postmodernism, although regarded as a hero by shallow postmodernist nihilists, Nietzsche is a deep humanist and abhors the destruction of values and even calls the clever nihilists "waeklings" and victims of a "slave mentality," as they rationalize their inferior positions in society [professors, journalists, petty functionaries, actors, community organizers, etc.] whose "curdled bitterness" curls up and lashes out at the strong, i.e., those whose values permit them to be happy and generous [read Nicholas Kristof's NYT editorial] instead of weakly whining that wealthy people should be impelled to give through taxes that which these weak hypocrites are unwilling to give themselves, although beating their puny sunken chests in self-praise of their own generous intentions. As Hicks notes:

Socialism is the historical loser and ... socialists...hate that fact, they....hate the winners for having won, and the ...hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate [as Nietzsche noted above,my comment]is a chronic condition [that] leads to an urge to destroy. ........ Postmodern thinkers hold that...everything has failed....

[p. 194, Hicks, op. cit.]
My guess as Obama keeps a centrist course in the current crisis, the ultra-left nihilists will continue to maintain their Chicken Little jeremiads as they display their slave mentality and their weakness, the weakness of loo-zers! Though they believe they are launching a crusade, their Pied Piper is the New York Times and they themselves are appropriately the tiny rodents being musically herded out of Hamelin [Gotham City]!

Caroline Kennedy the Elite's Sarah Palin?

Caroline Kennedy is regarded as unqualified to be a senator by 63% of New Yorkers, unless the poll which says only 37% think she is also has the usual "don't knows" to offset the skeptics. Only 16% believe that name recognition has nothing to do with her candidacy.

Sarah Palin was pilloried by the elites because the Upper West Side punditry which the Me Too boondock editorial hacks mindlessly echo whenever Pravda on the Hudson signals the Party Line feared and detested the Will of the People, which in poll after poll has demonstrated is against Open Border and for Offshore Drilling. Ditto Californians who are against gay marriage, but are opposed by "Those Who Know Better" and seek to overturn the popular will by judicial tyranny---the new tyranny of the minority now in fashion. The Oprahfied Nanny-crat Elites fear and hate any real will of the people.

I just finished a long set of bios by Graham Robb on the lives of Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo [and Arthur Rimbaud]. In chapter after chapter, whenever politics in France reared its head, Paris went left and the provinces went right. But the provinces, numerically ten times more populous than Paris, never seemed to have its will made writ of the land.

Methinks the USA is becoming a monarchy-without-a-king as our Founders feared, just like France and the backward autocracies of Europe.

So much for the US being a "democracy."

RINO Colin Powell Vents Colon on Rush Limbaugh

Colin Powell and F. Zakaria had a cabal out loud and C.P. outed himself as just another ex-Oreo.

I wonder if this doofus ever listened to Rush L. in the first place. Limbaugh is a symbol of what spineless libtards hate, and they never listen to his pearls of wisdom, preferring their own socialist bromides----proved by history not to work in any country with more than 20 million people. And where does this bogus RINO come up with his demographic delusionary predictions, unless of course he's counting [hoping for?] on a flood of illegal immigrants.

Zakaria is a clever fellow whose book is clogged with unforced errors due to reliance on dubious stats gleaned from a dishonest media. The guy should dig deeper before pontificating on issues like the Global Warming Hoax. No moral character, just a smart version of Al Gore.

Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [R.] Got Patrick Fitzgerald the Fed Prosecutor Job

Mark Shieldson PBS Lehrer News had an interesting pair of contributions today. Despite his tiresome class-warfare bitchery, Shields told Lehrer and Brooks that the person to thank for Patrick Fitzgerald's MOR prosecutorial zeal was former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [no relation] who insisted after the 2000 election of GWB that the chief Fed prosecutor in Chicago be an "outsider," citing the precedent of the fellow who finally nailed Al Capone, a guy named Eliot Ness.

In a strange coincidence back at the end of the nineties, my wife, daughter & I ran into Sen. Fitzgerald at a west-side gas station in Chicago on a trip to pick up a cat from a small town near Rockford where Dem superlawyer David Boies [who was to head the team that lost Florida on behalf of Al Gore in 2000] was born. I told Sen. Peter that my wife had worked for Sen. Sarbanes & told my nine-year old daughter, who is now studying Poli-Sci at UMiami, that the Cadillac SUV was being driven by a U.S. Senator.

Shields pointed out the honorable integrity of Peter Fitzgerald, a rare quality among Illinois politicians, and that Fitzgerald resigned on a matter of principle in 2004 and allowed Obama to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Patrick Fitzgerald, of course, did indict and convict Scooter Libby on a jumped-up case in Plamegate, but now is distinguishing himself by outing the stupid crook Blagojevich.

Just how stupid is Blago-bitch? Despite being elected to three terms to the House of Reps, the autistic Illinois guv'nr believes he has the power to appoint the successor to Rahm Emmanuel. [In another obiter dictum, Rahm and my daughter shared the same baby-sitter, albeit thirty years apart! Chicago politics tends to be chummy!] No, Rod, Congresspeople are always chosen by special elections, almost as dumb as Donovan McNabb not knowing that you can have a tie in an NFL game!]

Shields did come up with an interesting suggestion---appoint Patrick Fitzgerald Senator to close out the term, he has no political affiliations and could actually be better than a partisan like Atty Gen'l Lisa Madigan, now far ahead of "Candidate 5" who happens to be J.Jackson Jr.

And it looks like the flap over Blago and his clumsy feckless behavior has effectively eliminated Caroline Kennedy's chances to be appointed to Senator from NY to take over Hillary's seat. Or Bill Clinton's chances, as he has a few skeletons in his closet!!

Putin's Police State Plays "Beat the Press"

Another Journalist lies close to death in the murderous campaign the Putin "Neue Ordnung" is arranging for the working press as Vlad The Empoisoner again demonstrates that his hero Joe "Stalin" Djugashvili inspires him to extrajudicial executions that the American MSM, obsessed with its dervish hashish dreams, ignores---Bushitler is obviously behind this, but the MSM still can't find that journalistic link.

Florida, Oklahoma Two Runaway Trains Primed for Collision

Thus Sayeth Pat Forde in his ESPN analysis of the BSC National Championship, which will pit the Heisman final two QB candidates against each other in a "fight, not flight" brand of football.

Given U. Miami's current slump, Florida is my default team and Tebow an overarching casting choice for real-life superman. But I'm reading Sally Jenkins' book "Real All Americans" about the 1903 game between Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indians and Army. Football came out of the "muscular Christianity" movement of the post-Civil War Gilded Age shift from Parkman's 1890 loss of the frontier and the increasing mechanization and electrification of America. Walter Camp laid down the rules as "an exercise of social Darwinism and military science." Unlike rugby with its British honor system of self-policing, football needed referees as the unique American pushing the envelope required on-site adjudification on every play. In the 1890s, College football exploded into popularity in the same period baseball went big-time professional. But here's Pat Forde:

Thus we welcome two runaway freight trains to Titletown, where the head-on collision figures to be intense. Florida's average score since the Ole Miss loss: 50-13. Oklahoma's average: 60-29.

In addition to pairing two red-hot and dominant teams, there are some other juicy subplots to latch onto.

• Florida has played 1,053 games in its history, and Oklahoma has played 1,140. Yet they've never played each other. Let the two peacock-proud fan bases commence jawing.

• One coach, either Meyer or Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, will become the first to win a second BCS title.

Meyer returns to his second championship game in three years, continuing his even-year run as king of the football universe. In 2004, Meyer took Utah to an undefeated season and Fiesta Bowl victory, which earned him the upgrade to Gainesville. In 2006, his Gators trampled unbeaten Ohio State to win the crystal football. And now in '08 he's back again.

Stoops made his mark in the business sooner than Meyer, guiding Oklahoma to the 2000 national championship. Since then the Sooners have been annually excellent -- with the glaring exception of BCS bowl games. They've lost four straight, all of them with embarrassment attached.

• We could have a face-off of Heisman Trophy winners for just the second time. (Oklahoma was involved in the other one as well, when 2003 winner Jason White flopped against '04 winner Matt Leinart in a 55-19 USC romp.)

Bradford's ancestors may have had some of that Native American blood that made Jim Thorpe the greatest all-round athlete the US has ever produced. Tebow is a "one in a billion" combination of athlete skills and moral character. Alabama has a great team, and next year might bring a rematch, if both can survive the briar patch of SEC smashmouth defense and soaring offense. Oklahoma lives in a Big 12 where offense trumps defense and the there is a mismatch between the two conference divisions that, in Forde's words "(The only thing more lopsided than the Big 12 divisions is Quasimodo.)" Texas and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State all should be BCS contestants in a fairer world. I'll finish off with more from Forde:

"This," Meyer said, "will go down as one of the great wins in Florida football history."

It gives Florida a chance to play one more game of historic import this season, against an Oklahoma team that shares an attribute with the Gators. When faced with adversity, both chose fight over flight.

Franken Comedy in MN ain't funny

John Fund in today's WSJ has a short piece on how the dishonest porn lizard who commandeered Harvard students and used Harvard stationery to write one of his unfunny books [imagine if a Repub candidate had done that, he would have been Borked and Palinized by the ultra-left MSM right out of the race] is now in the race until a count of votes shows he's ahead, and then the recount stops.

Truth be said, Minnesota had two lousy candidates for Senator, both Jews from Brooklyn NY, and in a better world, the independent would have won. But between the two, Coleman is far less lousy than the putrid carrion-eating hyena [a female-dominated animal whose matriarchs are jammed full of testoserone] named Franken. Only a state who sent Jesse Ventura to the Governor's Mansion is loony enough to send a potty-mouthed libtard like Franken to the Senate, although this southern extension of Canada deserves one of the worst Senators in the country.

Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates

Richard Yates was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s favorite American contemporary novelist. Vonnegut told me so in a booze-soaked party in Sag Harbor after I mentioned that I had a long conversation with Yates a few years before when he was academic advisor at Boston U. for my sister-in-law and somehow ended up with me and my mother-in-law in their Lincoln, MA basement talking about everything. Christopher Hitchens, with whom I shared many booze-soaked afternoons in the Iron Gate restaurant across from where I worked at the Middle East Institute, reviews the movie coming out this Christmas in The Atlantic Monthly.

My memories of Yates were of a guy who wanted to understand the people he was talking to and about while he chain-smoked. His big failing was not getting the academic postmark of a college degree or even time at school after his stint in WWII. But I read Cold Spring Harbor and found he was a natural observer of human nature in the raw circumstances of everyday life. Christopher H. remains a sort of Dirk Bogarde of the mind, endlessly facile and epigrammatic, but not very substantial, as his review of the book [and it is evident that he probably hasn't seen the movie] skips along the surface---which given the subject of suburban life, is probably appropriate.

Why Great Britain is getting less "great" as it sloughs off democratic tradition

L'affaire Damien Green indicates how far the UK has gone down the road to Bureaucratic Authoritarianism as it lurches toward Bethlehem to be reincarnated as a socialist nanny-nazi bureaucratic prison just like its continental EU partners in mediocrity.

Gordon Brown would resign if he had a notochord. This jellyfish keeps drifting like a Portuguese Man O'War toward symbiosis with Vlad [The Empoisoner] Putin in Moscow.

Plum-Voiced Deepak Chopra Blames, Who Else?, USA for Mumbai Debacle

The WSJ has an article by Dorothy Rabinovitch describing several CNN interviews of the noted Indian GI tract expert who points to the USA as the cause of the bloodshed in Mumbai.

......commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. [my emph] Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Of course, Dr. Chopra has long ago abandoned complicated thought processes like "cause and effect" and of course, examining the fanatical religious woman-bashers and fundamentalist fascisms they adhere to. Perps' complaints and demands are never subjected by Deepak to the light of cold historical reasoning---that tedious obstacle to simplicity and reductionist Oprahfications on the road to Nirvana. Logic and reasoning hamper the good Doctor's serene reduction of complexities to a single unity. Larry King has already arrived at Deepak's end zone of continuous contemplation of the clash of opposites, always reducing such disturbances to the world's one and only source of evil, located in Washington D.C.

I for one believe Deepak should stick to cleansing bowels and ingesting garlic and ginger to facilitate our journey ere we shuffle off this mortal coil! Or perhaps he could be given a seat on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's meteorological Global Warming Cte. in the Obama Green Cabinet to help ward off the inevitable melting of the polar icecaps. Al needs all the advice and help he can get.

Gosh, Who Might be Responsible for the Subprime Mortgage Collapse?

Niall Ferguson gives a lucid enlightening excursion through "Planet Finance" and halfway through manages to unearth the culprits in the "subprime market meltdown." The article is a follow-on to his brilliant Empire Falls piece in Vanity Fair in 2006. Here is a punchline from his latest view from Mt. Olympus:

Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.

He also lays the original idea for low-cost mortgages at the door of the clueless eff-up Jimmy Carter, though there is a lot of blame---Barney Frank and his "husband" at Fannie Mae in the early 90's making the country assume the position for their perv gyrations in the housing market are left unmentioned.

In addition, derivatives and hedges based on math models that conveniently omitted the Crash of '87 and the Great Depression were employed to create another "Extraordinary Delusion [due to] The Madness of Crowds," as Ferguson quotes Mackay's 19th c. perennial classic which the tabloids and their ink-stained wretches perennially neglect. Sadly, many half-dead branches have been pruned and the proligate USA no longer will have China supporting its ridiculous spending habits.

The whole article is extremely clear and devoid of the PR-hack journalism of tabloids like the NYT. And Detroit is a human sewer that deserves Iverson and the Lions!

CHRC Commissars Will not retract Fatwa on Hate Crimes

Canada appears to be sliding into the Bureaucratic Authoritarianism that ensues when a critical mass of bureaucrats, lawyers, and the perpetually offended [insert other fanatical interested parties] combine to become an indigestible block of cement in the national GI tract.

Hopefully, the US will not be taken over by an Oprah-nanny army of little old ladies/shemales in tennis shoes with acute PMS of the mind.

IAEA Moron El-Baradei wants to reward Syria with a nuke reactor!

The Wall Street Journal asks at the end of its editorial why Condi Rice agreed to a second term for this obvious eff-up. Here's the gist of the editorial:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed last week that it had discovered a "significant number" of chemically processed uranium particles at a suspected Syrian nuclear site destroyed last year by Israel. The IAEA also reported that satellite images of the site taken prior to its destruction had the markings of a nuclear reactor.

"People and countries are innocent until proven guilty," the Egyptian told an IAEA committee studying the request, according to a transcript of his comments obtained by Agence-France Presse. "Technical cooperation programs to any member states should not be blocked, delayed or otherwise hindered for mere suspicion or unproven allegations."

Mr. ElBaradei has an interesting idea of what "mere suspicion" amounts to. Syria bulldozed the wreckage of the destroyed reactor -- the existence of which it has always denied -- shortly after the Israeli raid. It later limited IAEA inspectors to a single visit to the area, and has ruled out an IAEA request to inspect three other sites suspected of being part of a covert nuclear program. Those three sites were also landscaped by the Syrians after the IAEA requested visits, according to the agency's chief investigator.

By its own admission, the IAEA knew nothing about the Syrian reactor, much less of North Korea's involvement in it, until it was destroyed. For an agency charged with enforcing the nonproliferation regime, that's bad enough, if not altogether surprising. That Mr. ElBaradei should now abet Syria's nuclear ambitions -- even as it obstructs his own inspectors -- is astonishing.

It's obvious that the Terrorism-Abetting Arm of the UN named IAEA & its Al Qaeda Fellow Traveller Mohamed El-Baradei are dangers to international security as is the United Nation. Although the UN remains useful in keeping some failed states from spilling their murderous barbarism abroad, it actually aids terror states like Syria and Iran in achieving their goals. The obviously recessive product of generations of inbreeding named El Baradei simply wants Muslims to be able to build a bomb and the feckless spineless bureaucratic elites, including Ms. Rice, are content to allow the inbred Muslim degenerates a chance at building a bomb.

Let's hope Russky Nuke Cruiser Doesn't Spring Radioactive Leak!

Russian Tech lags far behind the West's for many reasons, but lack of safety measures is a major factor. When I was in Baku, I was warned not to eat the local Caspian Sea seafood because a sunken USSR nuke sub was on the bottom 18 miles offshore and leaking toxic nuke materials into the surrounding eco-systems.

Not to mention the problems with the Kursk and other Russian-model eff-ups over the decades [I just saw among the "destroyed in seconds" Discovery Channel show a couple of Soviet Air Show disasters, sparkiing this admonitory blog].

Perhaps rather than a military threat, the chief Russian menace to the region is to Venezuela as a public health threat!

"Reverse Ferrets" Huffington & Sullivan Ape their Mentor Murdoch

Slate has a nice piece describing the "volte face" that Murdoch's NY Post has done vis-a-vis Obama. Nowhere, of course, does Slate ever avert to the newly-converted ultra-lib opportunists like Arianna Huffington [nee Stassinopoulos] who once upon a time in the nineties strutted around posing at that time as a Republican-oriented conservative. Nor the tranny-in-training emo-boy Andrew Sullivan who formerly posed as a Catholic Irish homo conservative, but now is a senior bitch-boy on the gay-friendly far left.

Interesting how Palinomania continues on the far left's party line blog-vibe while she is now being treated more civilly by the serious media. And how rapidly rat-bitches like K. Parker jump ship when confronted with a job at the Washington Post.

No whores like old whores.....

Happy People Watch Less TV, "go to Church"

The NYT notes that a recent study concludes that people who describe themselves as "happy," one of the three basic rights as Americans we all have [life, liberty and the pursuit of......], watch less TV. After watching UMiami get slaughtered on ESPN last night, I can see why.

Seriously, the NYT naturally downplays the concomitant conclusion, that people who "socialize, go to church, volunteer..." are happier. Except for football and other sports, I watch little TV nowadays. The advent of High Def has made that more pleasurable, but my distaste for everything except Man From Mars and Gossip Girl remains strong, except for Jeopardy.

Maybe I'm happier than most....?

Dalrymple on Liberal Silliness

Theodore Dalrymple watches our society totter and crumble just as he observed the Brits disintegrate under the pressure of social engineering to produce social justice, which is an ever-receding target which will never be attained:

The Sunday before the American election, the Observer in London published an assessment of President Bush’s legacy by several well-known American writers. One of them, Tobias Wolff, wrote: “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”

Now, President Bush’s credentials as a conservative might well be questioned; but I take it nevertheless that he was elected preponderantly by conservative voters. Is there, in fact, a connection between being a conservative and having the selfish thoughtlessness (of the kind with which we are all familiar) that Wolff describes?

My guess is that there is no such connection, but rather the reverse. Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Which outlook is more conducive to good manners? It seems to me, a priori, the conservative rather than the liberal: for what can the daily personal conduct of a single man add to or subtract from the sum of human goodness or evil, happiness or misery?

Wolff himself supplies evidence in favor of my thesis. Acknowledging the meanness of what he is about to say, he writes, “When a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!” This reminded me of something I once heard from a man who organized international intellectual conferences in Amsterdam: the only people who ever complained to him about their lodgings were those who were most publicly concerned with social justice.

“That’s some of what the last seven years have done to this writer,” Wolff adds. So it’s not really his fault that he sees fit to express this ignoble thought to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It’s the last seven years that did it. If they had been fat instead of lean, he would have been sweetness and light, and would have taken the Texans to his heart.

Frauds and mountebanks like Tobias Wolff will always claim they became monsters because "someone turned them into one..." This entitlement monkey will probably thrive in the sewage of a society vulgar enough because of liberal pretensions and lack of boundaries to turn him into an affluent monster in the next four years.

"Qualis artifex perior" is what Wolff really means....

UPDATE The New Criterion has a much better take on Tobias's solecisms than I.

Dem Electoral Crime Wave Hits Minnesota Even Before Recount

The RICO Crime Spree known as the Democrat Party continues its election fraud---presumably employing non-existent Repub "fraud" to justify their high crimes and low-life political methods.

Minnesota is following the state of Washington which managed to steal a governorship in the 2004 election through massive "discovery" of missing ballots. The reason Dems commit these election crimes is that government to the Dems is everything----Repubs have the sensible attitude that it is a necessary evil, Dems believe it must grow until government dominates the economy and public life through Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, a creeping unaccountable power-grab by judges, "administrative law," and other ways to avoid the Constitution, which the Dems regard as an unnecessary evil.

Obama even admitted in a candid interview while he was a State Senator that "redistributive" social and economic justice should replace private property and that the Constitution was a flexible document that even the hyper-liberal Warren Court [Ike called appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice "the biggest mistake I ever made"] had not gone far enough to wrest property from those who owned it to "redistribute" property to those who deserve it, i.e., coincidentally traditional Dem constituencies!

The repulsive porn "comedian" Franken is even more ridiculous than Gov. Gregoire of Washington, who stole the governorate with the assistance of entrenched bureaucrats and criminal Dem operatives across the state. The Repubs have ignored gigantic voter fraud in states like Missouri and Wisconsin [the latter in both 2000 & 2004] simply because they won the presidency nation-wide. In the meantime, Dems like the execrable Bobo Boxer of CA were making fools of themselves by claiming that Ohio was not legally won.

The Dems will continue to use illegal and extra-legal means to circumvent the public will, as in the recent votes banning gay marriage, simply because these arrogant political commissars KNOW BETTER than the poor benighted voters! Prepare yourself for mysterious bureaucratic manipulations and more electoral fraud as the Red Star Tribune cheers on the vote stealers in MN to give that state a Senator as silly and stupid as the average inhabitant [I lived the worst four years of my life in MN].

WSJ Asks McCain to Demonstrate Honor Toward His Own VP Candidate

John McCain should call in the bizarre finger-pointing campaign his functionary/operatives in his recent campaign have been waging against Sarah Palin. The crapola comments emitted by the loser crew for McCain against Palin reflect the discredited MSM [the NYT loses over a thousand readers per week on a consistent basis] campaign to denigrate and slander a REAL conservative who lives her own family life and isn't a gaffe-a-matic buffoon like Joe Biden, whose silly comments finally consigned him to a penalty box for the last month of the Obama campaign. Obama, of course, says hardly anything and has no reporters vetting his possible illegalities with Rezko and his associations with unrepentant terrorists.

Instead it's a phony wardrobe scam that this fake-news brigade pushes forward because McCain aides are angry that she drew the crowds while J-Mack actually turned off conservatives.

The Rasmussen Poll says 62% of Republicans support her, with Romney & Huckabee & Jindal close to single digits. McCain was the candidate of the MSM, which then mousetrapped him with phony pieces in the soon-to-be-defunct NYT about Vickie Iseman & his wife----classy stuff & none of it true, just like the wardrobe hoax generated by former CBS newsie & current McCain advisor Nicolle {LNU] & her partners in disinformation Murphy & Noonan. The WSJ wing that favors illegal immigration got their boy Johnny as the Repub candidate, but couldn't stand a real conservative like Palin, who owns one house and has five kids & her first husband. The MSM females rarely have any husbands except the Ellen DeGeneres variety. No wonder they hate a good-looking smart female [who's been jumped on by the MSM while serial dunce Biden got a free pass]. But the WSJ now has the good sense to give Bill McGurn space in today's op-ed for a slam-down of the Rollins/Nicolle/Murphy/Noonan cabal seeking to discredit Palin;

Two weeks or so before the campaign was over, the first round of McCain campaign rumors alleged that Mrs. Palin was a "whack job," and characterized her clothes-shopping as "hillbillies looting Neiman-Marcus from coast to coast." More recently, she has been alleged to know as little about geography as Barack Obama knows about the number of states in the union (at one point, he put it at 57).

The unmistakable message here has nothing to do with Africa, the North American Free Trade Agreement or bathrobes. It is the campaign team's cry, "It's not our fault. How could we ever win with this woman on the ticket?"

The first point to make here is the most obvious: This is the language of losers.


Associated Press
This whole display calls to mind those embarrassing codas to each episode of "The Apprentice," when the losing team would sit before Donald Trump in the boardroom and then start blaming everyone but themselves for their failures. The apparent eagerness of Team McCain to indulge in this kind of fingerpointing is similarly unprofessional, and it raises an interesting question.

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign?

Let's stipulate that Mrs. Palin was not perfect. Regardless whose idea the Katie Couric interview was, it went badly and left some damage. The phone call she took from a comedian pretending to be French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy didn't help. Neither did her assignment as campaign attack dog, the traditional role for any vice presidential candidate.

Yet there are other, more salient points. In the treatment of Mrs. Palin by some of the McCain staff, there is the clear whiff of condescension. That's something a sitting American governor might understandably find hard to stomach coming from a bunch of young professional Republicans who have never themselves run for office.

Ultimately, of course, this will all pass. And if Mrs. Palin goes back and continues to do a good job as governor of Alaska, these attacks will likely only reinforce her outside-the-Beltway credentials to rank-and-file Republicans.

Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.

It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."

And what does it say when the campaign team of a man who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate cannot agree on (much less present) a coherent answer to why he should be elected president of the United States -- except that he's not Barack Obama?

Good questions, Bill. Especially in light of the perp/perv ultra-left loon squads on the blogosphere like Handy Andy Sullivan trying to justify their slanders of Palin 24/7. Methinks the girly-men doth protest too much.

In summing up, McGurn notes McCain's characteristic nice-guy approach to his Dem opponent while his wrecking crew trashes Palin. McCain had little in his national campaign to say that was positive about Repubs and should probably start a party of two with Lieberman. But here's McGurn's sum-up:

In Mr. McCain's moving concession speech, he wished "godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president." He asked his fellow Americans to join him in helping President-elect Obama bridge our differences and build a better, more hopeful nation.

It will be instructive to see whether Mr. McCain will now extend the same level of graciousness to Mrs. Palin that he has to Mr. Obama, by giving a public slapdown to the very public smears emanating from his own campaign team. We have no idea what Mr. McCain will do when he sits down with Mr. Leno tonight.

But there's no doubt what a man of honor would do.

Comment on MSM/McCainiac Campaign to Discredit Palin

The crapola media comments about Palin's purportedly "dragging down the Repub ticket" reflect the discredited MSM [the NYT loses over a thousand readers per week on a consistent basis] campaign to denigrate and slander a REAL conservative who lives her life and isn't a gaffe-a-matic loon like Joe Biden, whose silly comments finally consigned him to a penalty box for the last month of the Obama campaign. Obama, of course, says hardly anything and has no reporters vetting his possible illegalities with Rezko and his associations with unrepentant terrorists.

Instead it's a phony wardrobe scam that this fake-news blog puts forward on the word of McCain aides angry that she drew the crowds while J-Mack actually turned off conservatives.

The Rasmussen Poll says 62% of Republicans support her, with Romney & Huckabee & Jindal close to single digits. McCain was the candidate of the MSM, which then mousetrapped him with phony pieces in the soon-to-be-defunct NYT about Vickie Iseman & his wife----classy stuff & none of it true, just like the wardrobe hoax generated by former CBS newsie Nicole {LNU] & her partners in disinformation Murphy & Noonan. The WSJ wing that favors illegal immigration got their boy Johnny as the Repub candidate, but couldn't stand a real conservative like Palin, who owns one house and has five kids & her first husband. The MSM females rarely have any husbands except the Ellen DeGeneres variety. No wonder they hate a good-looking smart female [who's been jumped on by the MSM while serial dunce Biden got a free pass].

Gorelick Appointment Would Prove Obama Just Another Hack Pol

Jamie Gorelick has a career in government which has clambered down the ladder from failure to failure---and the NYT, a loser publication hemorrhaging thousands of readers a month naturally trumpets her candidacy for Attorney General.

But even the NYT has difficulty ignoring a couple of elephants in the parlor:

Carries as baggage: Her work at Fannie Mae, which had to be bailed out by the government in September as part of a $200 billion deal. Ms. Gorelick left the company just as it was coming under attack for huge accounting failures. She has also drawn criticism for her role at the Justice Department, in which she allegedly created an intelligence “wall” that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservatives called for her removal from the Sept. 11 commission, but her fellow members rallied around her and said critics were distorting her record. The criticism grew so heated that the F.B.I. investigated a death threat against her family, and President Bush had to intervene personally to stop the Justice Department from releasing sealed reports involving her. Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick’s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission.

Heh, "allegedly" as in a crime against the USA as it turned out, with Al Qaeda operatives finding the CIA/FBI turf battles leaving many intelligence boundaries unguarded. Ask the families of the 3000 9/11 victims if a total incompetent like Gorelick should be REWARDED for her lack of concern for American security. An Obama appointment would indicate that the naif young dude in the Oval Office hasn't got a clue about national security.

Although Gorelick appears to be the candidate of the wholly anti-American NYT, sensible candidates such as Janet Napolitano now serving as Governor of Arizona or Tim Kaine, Gov. of Virginia, would be interesting choices and avoid the stigma of Clintonian meddlesome interference in protecting the country from enemies who are still out there.

GWB never gets credit from America haters for defending the country from follow-on attacks after Gorelick and her Clinton-crowd cronies left the door open for a catastrophe like 9/11. Gorelick is just another grasping lawyer who should be prosecuted herself for the RICO crime spree malfeasance that the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac meltdown revealed. Instead, the soon-to-be-defunct NYT is touting this greedy eff-up for AG!

Michael Crichton Debunks Big Science Priesthood & Gore-brained nitwittery

Michael Chrichton was taken from us too soon. This great man understood the dangers of considering scientists and technologists as a priestly class, immune from temptations of fame, profit or power," as the Wall Street Journal puts it. Here is an except from "Aliens Cause Global Warming:"

"As the 20th century drew to a close," he warned, "the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact."

Michael was right on all three counts and accusations. Science ed sux. LIttle old ladies in tennis shoes and boy-bitch morons like Gore have seized on specious spurious bogus issues to promote [and inflate their bank accounts]. And the media is in full free-fall---a pitiful joke.

Rasmussen Exonerates Palin, "anonymous cowards" still lying about Sarah

Rasmussen has the goods on the agit-prop campaign to spew leftie-Noonan monkey vomit all over Sarah Palin.

The lefties & Rockefeller Repugs have colluded to try to destroy Palin from the start. The genocidal infanticide-loving Sapphic crones hate her having a child with Down Syndrome and the Repug-left RINOs hate her popularity with the vast majority of conservative voters. McCain lost all credibility when he suggested appointing Andrew Cuomo to head the SEC, apparently blissfully unaware that Cuomo helped CAUSE the meltdown by fanning the FanFred mortgage scam [which Barney Frank's "husband" was on the board overseeing as well as Rahm Emanuel and other RICO crime spree perps like Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Franky-boy Raines] while Andy was chief of HUD, working with FanFred to move worthless homes to worthless Dem constituents.

Palin is the only sane person among the final four top candidates, although Obama appears lucid at times. Biden was the biggest joke in the entire campaign [well, maybe Mike Gravel was, but Joe was near the top funnyman-fool]. McCain kept swinging haymakers like he was trying to hit a big pinata. Obama was helped by a pliant, even perv [Tweety-bird's leg shivers], media which refused to investigate the seamy underside of the Obama CV.

Palin and Huckabee and Jindal are the top three in my book, with P & J both POTUS material.

And it appears that Mark Salter has called the stories about Sarah Palin "lies" and wonders who can be behind the slanders and calumnies---maybe Murphy & Noonan & former CBS hack Nicole W? Plus Romney Uruk-Hai orcs-in-waiting?

Also, women are even stupider than most people thought. And the airheads pushed Obama over the top while believing the media was not biased---hmm... gotta rewire the distaff side to see if there are any short circuits.

Finally, GOP voters preferred Palin to McCain another Rasmussen poll divines. And all along I thought it was just me!!!

Apocalypse NOW!!! Can American Capitalism be Saved?

Dan Henninger has an excellent piece on the now-or-never November 4th showdown which the Democratic "Coup de Pouce" electorally will employ, if it is victorious, into an Enabling Act, such as the one in January 1933 which thrust another visionary leader forward to rescue his nation in parlous economic times:

....one sees something even larger at stake in this vote. One sees what Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher saw. The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of "the past eight years" but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America's idea of itself.

I don't agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

Like Obama's German model in 1933, opposition will be squelched [The oxymoronic "Fairness Doctrine" doesn't touch TV, press, only "talk radio."] A gigantic PUTSCH will engender in 2008 the sort of socialism-in-one-country which Obama's European intellectual forebearers put forward in 1933 in Germany and years before that with collectivization & forced famines in a "workers' paradise" east of Germany by a strongman named after a metal. Stalin.

Henninger doesn't say this, of course, and there will not be the vicious brutality Europeans have consistently demonstrated in asserting their political will throughout the 20th century. [Including Kaiser Wilhelm & Mussolini & other national experiments in social justice.] Henninger does say this:

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany and more U.S. newspaper articles than one can count have said that the crisis proves the need to permanently tame the American "free-market" model. P.O.W. Alan Greenspan is broadcasting confessions. The question is: Are the American people of a mind to throw in the towel on the system that got them here?

This would be a historic shift, one post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan's "Cowboy Capitalism."

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the United States made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Central States, pushed across a tough Western frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple -- the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth Cowboy Capitalism, are doing what we did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It's time to spread the wealth around."

What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced -- old Europe.

Yes, Nabokov had it right in Lolita: the dirty old European has soiled the young American---not young America seducing old Europe. And as in Europe, the cringing worker will be protected from those nasty economic forces that have made the USA the ultimate Faustian country, versus the Parnassian effete slackers living in the museum of a continent still stuck in a bell jar of early 20th c. class hatreds and bourgeois sensibilities. Here is more Henninger:

As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a final temptation.

In partial detail:

Obama's federalized medical insurance system starts the transition away from private medical care and toward Obama's endlessly promised "universal health care." This has always been the sine qua non of planting a true, managed-market economy in the U.S.

Obama's refundable tax credits are direct cash transfers from the federal government. This would place some 48% of Americans, nearly half, out of the income tax system. More than a tax proposal, this is a deep philosophical shift, an American version of being "on the dole."

His stated intent to renegotiate free-trade agreements such as Nafta is a philosophical shift. It abandons the tradition of a hyper-competitive America dating back to the Industrial Revolution, toward a protected, domestic workforce, as in Western Europe. The Democratic proposal to eliminate private union votes -- "card check" -- ensures the spread of a static, Euro-style workforce.

Eliminating the ceiling on payroll taxes changes Social Security from an insurance to a welfare program. Obama's tax credits requires performing government-identified activities, the essence of a "directed economy."

All this would transform the animating American idea -- away from creation and toward protection.

Many voters -- progressive Democrats, the asset-safe rich, academics and college students -- regard this as where America should go. They explicitly want America's great natural energies transferred away from unwieldy economic competition and toward social construction. They want the U.S. to reduce its "footprint" in the world. Monies saved by stepping down from superpower status can be reprogrammed into "investments" (a favorite Obama word) in a vast Euro-style hammock of social protection programs.

One wishes John McCain had been better able to make clear what the truly "historic" meaning of Tuesday's vote is. Once it's done, it's done.

McCain was himself a compromise candidate who always tried to split the middle to come up with a compromise----only too late has he realized that the class-warfare Democrats want no part of his McCain/Feingold public financing or other fair play measures this honorable, but somewhat clueless fellow succumbed to while the Dems are burying him with undisclosed foreign monies that will never be traced. And when McCain said Andrew Cuomo, a Dem FanFred RICO-scammer/partner, should be put in charge of the SEC, I realized that old John is simply one election cycle past electability.

Now Chicago's [Jurassic] Hyde Park will coalesce with NYC's Upper West Side & the California Left Coasters to work DC and the USA like a rented mule.

Cash will be raining onto the Dem slacker constituencies and will convert enough MOR layabouts into addicts at the federal crystal meth palace so that participatory democracy need not rear its head again..... The "Fairness Doctrine" will keep any discouraging words from turning the sheeple against their new shepherds.

Fouad Ajami Deflates the Tires of Redeemer Obama

Fouad Ajami and I first met in 1979, when he arrived in DC to start teaching at SAIS. He stayed in my DuPont Circle condo for a week and was reading The Raj Trilogy on India and Sigmund Freud. Fouad adored India as the perfectly tolerant society and was reading Freud to understand the strange spell this semi-fraud had thrown over psychiatry---except for C.G. Jung whom I told Fouad was the perfect antidote to Freud's family drama introspection.

Three years later, after I married Marilyn, my condo on N St., N.W, a different place in the same neighborhood near SAIS, became available and Fouad rented my place while I shacked up with my spouse in Wesley Heights. Fouad was "dating" the personal secretary of the Saudi Ambassador, a very attractive young woman, at the time and we had some social interactions [I had been Embassy Pol Officer in Jidda for three years and knew the Amb & a lot of her bosses in the Saudi Foreign Ministry.]

I sold the condo and we stayed in touch for a while, but one of our last meetings I recall vividly. Fouad had sent his son to Ann Arbor to study under Ali Mazrui, a famous African [Kenyan, I believe] intellectual, and I reminded Fouad of my three formative years in Ann Arbor in the late sixties. Fouad then opened up with an outburst of great praise, the only way to describe his observations, concerning the REAL America he had discovered in Michigan and the rest of the Middle West. [Shades of Sarah Palin!] Fouad said he now understood America's greatness and that the immense latitudes between New York & Los Angeles were not simply what he had imagined them to be---a combination of Europe & Anatolian countrysides.

Fouad has always been aware of the immense self-deceptions political cultures inflict on subject populations---and there is no other way to describe Obama's crowds except throngs begging for redemption after being brainwashed into believing they are GUILTY---of everything imaginable that flaky decadent intellectuals of the left accuse them of. Guilty of leaviing a carbon imprint merely by breathing. Guilty of productive labor while millions shirk and become stoned slackers. Guilty of consuming and gaining a bit of excess weight.

There are analogies in American history to the kinds of crowds Fouad notes flow towards Obama seeking equality. The Great Awakenings of the late 18th century and the early 19th centuries with their "burnt-over districts" in upstate New York spawned new millenarian cults [Joseph Smith par exemple] and a burst of religious fervor filled with missionary appeal that turned huge numbers of Americans into Methodists and Baptists----faiths underrepresented before. This religious tone gave Lincoln's greatest speeches their universal validity.

Perhaps Obama in his vague undefined and remote persona exemplifies another American Great Awakening, this time seeking protection by Big Brother and ushering in an era when War is Peace, Love is Hate, and Ignorance is Everywhere.

Perhaps the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book by Charles Mackay in 1841 which to this day is perhaps the most accurate description of what Fouad eloquently describes in Canetti's Nobel Peace Prize effort. In Mackay's quaint words which describe the ridiculous sight of the British Parliament debating Global Warming measures during the first October snowfall in London since 1922:

"Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome."

and Mackay's other great line is equally true as Americans go ga-ga about to vote in a fraud as fraudulent as Freud:

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"

The American people are straining at the McCain/Palin gnat while they swallow the Obama/Biden camel.

Oil at $50/barrel? Bye bye to Chavez & Putin & Ahmedinejad for a While

Energy & Capital has an excellent analysis of the world economy as it makes a flight to quality, making the yen and the dollar the two most desirable currencies right now in the world. Driving all this is the price of oil, denominated in US dollars and the weakness of the dollar made prices vault above $100. As the dollar strengthens, the converse is true and today's price of $65 may still have more juice to be squeezed before it hits what writer Chris Nelder says is a natural floor of $50/barrel.

Believe it or not, the US & Japan are the best placed countries right now, though bonds rather than equities may be the best bet for the next two years. And there is bad news for America's enemies, including [in my p.o.v.] Vlad the KGB Empoisoner, who has financed his aggression in Georgia [and perhaps next in Ukraine] due to windfall profits from the oil trade.

Also, if the US suffers from an Obama victory, this demagogue in short pants will be unable to inflict punitive taxes on oil profits, as they will have shrunk to the size of a peanut farmer's brain. No more Corinthian columns or grandiose trappings of POTUS redistribution of wealth, unless this clown wants to make a bad situation worse!

Legendary oil man Charles Maxwell, in a recent interview with The Money Show, noted that much of the world has fairly high breakeven cost points, which he cited as follows:

Saudi Arabia at $55/barrel; Russia at $70; Most of OPEC at $70-90; Iranians and Venezuela at $90

Therefore, at the most recent range of $62-65, oil is already at or below the breakeven cost for most of the world's remaining oil reserves!

It is not inconceivable that producers might produce at a loss for a short while. For example, some drillers will need to keep the cash flowing in order to meet regular payments on their next order of rigs, or risk losing their place in the rig delivery queue, with significant impacts on their future production schedules.

But at some point, oil producers will have to see profitability return, or they will lay down their rigs. (Numerous natural gas drilling rigs are already being idled in North America, due to the similarly depressed price of natural gas.) Eventually, the reduced supply will put the fire back under prices.

When that might happen, though, is hard to say. We must be somewhere near to a floor in oil, if we're already under the breakeven costs. If oil went back to $50, it couldn't stay there for long.

Read the entire article for an insightful excursion through the world's oncoming economic woes over the next few years. The strong dollar will keep oil prices down, And as the banks hoard their cash, rather than allowing the credit with the new infusions from DC to be the emollient of world trade, a seizing up may occur which is already leaving grain on the docks of US & other exporters as letters of credit [things Democrats don't understand] lose cred. As world trade continues to dwindle due to US protectionism [no Colombia FTA], the Dems archaic nineteenth c. economic philosophy will prolong the recession, allowing a rational economic administration to be elected in four years, unless by then the US has devolved into an authoritarian populist banana republic [Fairness Doctrine & other absurdities ensuring a tyranny of the minority].

Trial lawyers, media moguls politicos and other fingerpointers will predictably try to blame the productive part of the U.S. economy, ballooning the parasitic constituencies and dependencies of the Dem lumpenprole left. In sum,

What this all points to is a vicious feedback loop. As emerging economies struggle with trade deficits and reduced liquidity, borrowing costs rise, leading to more credit defaults, higher interest rates, and even tighter credit, which in turn slows down growth even more, causing businesses to shrink, and their creditworthiness to be further impaired.

This feedback loop will continue to drive down the price of oil and other commodities for the near future. This is why I have been saying for roughly the last two months that the trade in energy and commodities is simply broken, having more to do with the mechanics of global big money flows than fundamental business considerations.

Lower US and European demand for Asian goods will continue to put the hurts on Asian economies. Depressed growth expectations for China and India will feed back to the US and Europe in the form of lower equity prices, particularly in energy and commodities.

The withdrawal of European investors from emerging markets will slow them down even more. European banks lent $3.5 trillion to these economies—roughly 7 times what the US lent—and accounted for three quarters of loans to China and India, according to Stephen Jen, chief currency strategist at Morgan Stanley in London.

Yes, a world recession, and all caused not at all by the insane mortgage lending policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, husbanded into their CRA lunacies by Barney Frank's husband-of-the-moment back in the early '90s. Call the current recession around the world a delayed herpes irruption from that gift that keeps on giving, the Clinton Administrations of the late '90s!