New Paltz Journal

Instead of the Greeks prevailing against the Persians 2,500 years ago, imagine a world in which Greece and its advanced society had been defeated and the Persian atavism had prevailed. Hellenic civilization would have been cut short. There would have been no Western civilization as we know it.

This July 4th, that’s pretty much what you have here in America. The United States has been overrun by an atavistic, and viciously revanchist, faction. Headed by a cadre of imbeciles with no respect for freedom and its history, let alone reality, the labors proceed, day and night, on the construction of the great cannibal pot.

You might think I’m joking, or exaggerating, or being foolish.

I’m not. I’ve said many times that the great desire of Europe and the Europistas in the U.S. was to see America dragged down into death with Europe. I always footnoted that with “but we’re still 15 to 20 years behind.” That difference is being erased, like crazy.

America, because of its unique character, will fall harder, faster. Once the élan has been sucked out of it, and that’s not far off now, the final cultural, economic, and political implosion will proceed apace. California and New York are already in the pot. That’s the two big traditional economic engines.

Fuck the lot of you who cheered this thing on. Stupid bastards.

I deliberately stretched out my reading of this book. From the beginning it moved along three different tracks for me, each track getting to me both viscerally and intellectually. The war fighting. The clarity of the apprehension of the things experienced. And finally the times.

The early 1970s had a clean light left to them. It was also a light where there was no chance of cutting the glare. That meant pain. To see clearly in those conditions was to feel pain. But you could get through it if you followed your gut. Ed is an instructor and a desk jockey in the Air Force at the beginning of Palace Cobra, five years past his first tour and a hundred missions over North Vietnam as a fighter pilot, and he wants back into the war. He is the same man throughout, but he knows he belongs in the cockpit of a jet. When I say belongs, I mean wired for it, needing it, and master of it.

I experienced Ed’s experience, and that is good writing. I should say that I experienced what he wanted the reader to experience. You don’t get the pain directly, that must be inferred. It’s a grumble, like a throbbing knee, in the background. It’s diffuse. And there’s no therapy available for it. It’s like aching for a woman who you know does not exist. Something you keep to yourself. (There’s a lost art.)

The eye for detail, the remarkable incandescent memory, the instantaneous life or death reflection, the almost perfect knowledge that strong individuals make great teams and that you want to fly with the best people possible, in the air with you, back on the ground, up the chain of command. Everyone must think five moves ahead, at least, or the waitress will quickly bring that big slice of death right over to you, the pilot.

The man and machine aspects of this are riveting, that’s all I’ll say. But that’s the least of it. There’s the sense of the aviator and his respect for the possibilities and limits of aviation. There’s the warrior who is in the plane to fight, not just out for a spin in the aircraft. There’s flying and then there is combat flying. Hostile ground radar locking onto you. Surface-to-air missiles on your ass and desperately trying to get up it. Anti-aircraft fire munching on airspace like steel teeth. The number of factors that must be mentally integrated at once is astonishing.

The eeriness of a night combat mission was rendered palpable. The deadly claustrophobia of darkness.

The real guys and the fakers. The warriors and the careerists. The politicians and diplomats for whom the warrior is an abstraction. And then there was Roscoe. All the warriors bent their will into one for Roscoe.

I was reading the second book first, as Ed was quick to warn me. I told him that I was going to war with the book I had. Now I’ll go back and read When Thunder Rolled, about the first tour.

Palace Cobra is close work all the way through. There is nary a word wasted along the way. It will focus your attention on things you might never have thought about, or thought you wanted to think about. These things are raised in sharp light into details. This is a book as well about thinking, memory, and the certainties of reality.

Kimberly Strassel thinks that the attempt by Warmists to label skeptics “deniers” brought the skeptics out and gave them strength.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

The Obama adminstration pretends to be oblivious to this, and nothing short of a glacier edging across the Beltway will move them off the annoited position.

It was nearly a decade ago, I’m guessing, that I turned my attention to the “global warming” question. I had no position on it one way or another and simply began looking into it. The skeptics made the better case then, too, but there weren’t that many speaking out. Richard Lindzen at MIT has to be counted as heroic simply for stating what was obvious to him as a scientist: that the data was thin, the consensus weak if it existed at all, and that politics had more to do with the “global warming” contagion than any of the science did. The late Michael Crichton also stood up and called the thing a hoax. There were others, but the thing that’s important to know is that these men were viciously attacked for their dissent, but they always made the better case.

Locally, in New Paltz, the level of sanctimony about “carbon footprints” and the like is unintentionally Monty Pythonish.

“What’s buried in that giant ceremonial earth mound, Don?”

“Well, the current thinking is that it’s our premises, and that it’s a safe place for them, should they explode.”

The Obama case.

Bruce McQuain’s blog is what I call a “process blog,” which means that Bruce and his associates follow the unfolding menace of the Obama administration in a steady, step-by-step, item-by-item fashion. Where McQ gets his energy from God only knows, but he is right on top of things.

It’s the place I go when I want to comment in company, and there’s a good crew of regulars over there.

Why, when McQ is right there in the exclusive New Paltz Journal blogroll, do I take special notice today?

Because of this post on the current state of the global warming scam. We’ve come a long way in debunking that hoax, and McQ has stayed on the case when a lot of others were scared off it.

He’ll never know how much I appreciate that, unless he reads this, of course.

The prophetic novel, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, does in fact seem more prophetic on this matter by the day.

The author of The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone is 78 today.

They are both inspired novels. I’ve read them probably seven or eight times each, which has to be my record.

Do they still hold water for me? Well, not in the way they once did, but they are still interesting and I’m very partial to the way they are written and constructed.

Wilson hit the world literary stage at the age of 25 with his non-fiction classic The Outsider, which “critics” seemed to like. Later, “critics” would alternately ignore or beat up on Wilson. He became a fringe writer for them.

He’s just come out with a new book (he’s written scores of books) this year, Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience, about one of his favorite themes. I’ll go order a copy right now. (Truthfully, it’s been sitting in the “buy later” area of the Amazon shopping cart for months.)

As an orthodox Roman Catholic, I have to caution that Wilson’s take on Christianity is off base and rather lazy and tired. I won’t get into that, but I note it. I first read him when I was an atheist, however, and he was key to reopening the question of meaning for me in a world I then viewed as absurd.

I wish I could sit down and talk with him, non-stop, for about ten days. That would be a good time, for me at least.

Poor guy.

It takes a lot of fame and money to make that much of a mess of yourself. But I’ll say this for him, he held on a lot longer than I would have. I might not have lasted a weekend with that much cash in hand. So, from that perspective I suppose I can offer a hesitant “well done.”

May God have mercy on his soul.

Beck has a good music guy’s take on Jackson.

A quick death for the sick!

It has been the plan all along. The government will control those damnable health care costs if it kills you.

One more time. “Universal” health care will be based on three proud principles of care.

1. Eugenic editing at the beginning of life, with an ever-increasing regime of genetic screening calling for an ever more encompassing application of “therapeutic” abortion. Why stop at Down’s syndrome? Isn’t diabetes far more costly to society? Who the hell wants all those diabetic and potential diabetic people clogging up the system for people who deserve to have health care?

2. Enthusiastic “duty to die” euthanasia at the end of life. Stop care, accelerate death, it’s the way to keep the costs in line. Then a quick trip to the oven. Would you like those ashes in the nickel-plated (looks just like silver!) box or is this laminated recycled cardboard gift box more your style? Actually, once the elders catch on, it will take an armed police escort to get them to go to the hospital. (You know, don’t you, that those home health care workers cost money, too.)

3. Rationed care for everyone in between. “Now wait your turn. You’re not the only one who needs an appendectomy this month.”

But thank God, at last, everyone will be “covered.” The healthy will be so relieved.

This is Roger Simon with a video report on early criminal negligence at the New York Times.

One of the big improvements in my life came when I stopped buying that thing. I look at the web edition to see what the enemy is up to, but the idea of paging through the paper edition makes me want to gag. I watched someone do it yesterday on a bus ride into Manhattan and I was reminded of what a pompous self-deluding ritual it is.

Simon’s report is a little goofy, but if you can see past the goofiness just consider that at least five million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin while Duranty accommodated the Soviet regime.

My comments this morning over at McQ’s place:

I have yet to find a focal point on the Iran side of this. At least nothing that isn’t being made up on the fly.

In terms of Obama, what you have is a bad faith presidency. Nothing can change that. It was conceived in bad faith and attained office in bad faith and has no possible modality other than bad faith.

In terms of Iran, millions of people disbelieved the election results and now the line is that this is no longer about the elections but the regime.

Now, if there’s one thing I rarely trust, it is mobs of people in the streets. What do they mean? What do they represent?

I say that as an admirer of the Iranian people. What I question is whether they can get anywhere politically desirable from where they are, and whether or not they will simply wind up with a new regime as calculating and regressive and not a whole lot less repressive than the one they have. Remember that [the] Shah, believe it or not, was a reformer. Could there be hope for a regime as pro-Western as the Shah?

What concerns me is that this is a little bit like cheerleading the “anti-globalist” demonstrators in Seattle a ways back. What, precisely, was their point? Could it even be said that they had a point to make that even had a reflection in reality? Or was it just rioting for the sake of rioting?

That “anti-globalist” movement was, by the way, instantly harvested by the “anti-war” movement directly after 9/11. My occasional attempts to get people to recognize that there was a direct North Korean link to the “anti-war” movement has never prompted so much as a query. So, pardon my skepticism about big time street demonstrations.

And I don’t think that what is happening in Iran is the equivalent of, or even close to, the final rising of the people of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Different world, different civilization.

Maybe I’m wrong and just being too skeptical.

My bottom line remains the Iranian nuclear program, by which I mean ending it, conclusively. If the “reform” doesn’t get to that, then I have no real interest in it.

The big problem here is that the national security interests and apparatus of the U.S. are now under the control of a “citizen of the world” who has subordinated those interests and that apparatus to his own interests. That is, a bad faith presidency here has truly global implications, none of them good, at home or abroad.

So, “we” (us Americans) should be wary of what “we” do in terms of any and all foreign policy, because it will all be done in bad faith by this bad faith presidency.

It kills the irony needed to unbolt minds.

Yeah, and in America those are bolts rusted shut.

I move now to Caroline Glick, whose new appeal to me is based on the fact that the other day someone who is in the first rank of the world’s idiots called her, approximately, “akin to a Jewish Nazi.” I’ve read her here and there for years and she is nothing of the kind. I don’t find her particularly angry either, but then a high accuracy rate on this subject is guaranteed to provoke anger.

Caroline Glick, writing about old bolts with an extra, and strangely fresh, layer of rust:

THE REAL OBAMA effect on world affairs relates to the US media’s unprecedented willingness to abandon the basic responsibilities of a free press in favor of acting as propagandists for the president. From Cooper - who pretends that Obama’s unreciprocated open hand to the mullahs is what empowered the protesters - to Newsweek editor Evan Thomas who referred to Obama earlier this month as a “sort of God,” without a hint of irony, the US media have mobilized to serve the needs of the president.

It is hard to think of an example in US history in which the media organs of the world’s most important democracy so openly sacrificed the most basic responsibilities of news gatherers to act as shills for the chief executive. Franklin Delano Roosevelt enjoyed adoring media attention, but he also faced media pressures that compelled him to take actions he did not favor. The same was the case with John F. Kennedy.

Today the mainstream US media exert no such pressures on Obama. Earlier this month NBC’s nightly news anchorman Brian Williams bowed to Obama when he bid him good night at the White House.

On Wednesday ABC News will devote an entire day of programming to advancing Obama’s controversial plan to nationalize health care. Its two prime time news shows will be broadcast from White House. Good Morning America will feature an interview with Obama, and ABC’s other three flagship shows will dedicate special programming to his health care reform program.

On the other hand, ABC has refused Republican requests for a right of reply to Obama’s positions. The network has also refused to sell commercial advertising time to Republicans and other Obama opponents to offer their dissenting opinions to his plans.

I think that there were some people out there who expected that this would end after the campaign, or maybe after the first few months. I heard Brit Hume last night predicting that it would, of course, end at some point. Well, I’m here to tell you that it isn’t going to end, at least not until his disapproval rating goes over fifty percent, and higher, and we’ve had another round or two of blaming it all on racism.

But so much damage has already been done, to the press as an institution, to foreign policy, to the structure of the economy, and most regretably to race relations. Yes, that last one, the saddest of all, over this rotten piker.

Dr. Sanity has the low-down on the malignant narcissism.

Jonah Goldberg has the burnt offerings covered.

Charles Kesler throws a few slides under the microscope in the pathology lab.

Jonah Goldberg:

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition. On health care, insurance companies and others repeat the mantra that they want to be “at the table rather than on the menu,” all the better to be positioned as a tax collector of the welfare state. General Motors and Chrysler have gone from being pimped-out prostitutes of the state to outright chattel more akin to the leather-bound gimp in Pulp Fiction, eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.

Goldberg still has the fresh sense of how the slate sky of fascism rolls in over the landscape of free enterprise from his work on Liberal Fascism, which I continue to recommend.

There’s a very funny, in the wry sense of funny, letter from the always charitable George Civile, who lives in Gardiner.

If you have sufficient local memory and get the jokes, you have to admire the self-restraint with which they are delivered.

My mother, bless her soul, always trying to find exemplars of the good, would have pointed to this letter and said something like, “see how nice Mr. Civile is.”

You’re a better man than me, George, but you already know that.

* Yes, that’s yet another new name for the New Paltz Times.

Paging Peter Weir: The weather is just right for a remake.

I recommend Russell Crowe for the Richard Chamberlain role, and a recasting of the story from the aboriginal myth to the burnt offerings of New Paltz, and I’m not referring to summer grilling.

Later P.S.: I saw the picture when it was first in U.S. theaters back in the late 70s. In fact, I saw it at a theater in Manhattan just off of Columbus Circle on a day when it was raining just like it is today, and just like it was raining in the film. So the effect was to leave the theater and feel as though nothing had changed from the film. That’s one of the peculiar effects of rain, of this kind, I guess.

Fernandez has this video (the first one, from the Air Force).

I’ll throw a wild guess on it: something like it is already deployed in the Iraqi theater. The little bit that gets talked about over there is mind blowing. And as counter-insurgencies go, that one went down pretty fast after Petraeus returned to lead the surge. Was there a prototype of this thing in his bag of tricks?