New Paltz Journal II

I heard Krauthammer’s remarks about Wilders last night and thought that they were shallow and uninformed. Mark Steyn deals with it:

Wilders does not need to be lectured condescendingly about distinctions within Islam, because he lives with them every day. And he has concluded, notwithstanding Dr. Krauthammer’s views on the precise “minority” that identifies as “Islamist,” that Islam itself is the issue — and that, therefore, notwithstanding the “moderation” of the “overwhelming majority” of Muslims, the more Islam the less Netherlands in any recognizable sense. Are the gangs of gay bashers on the streets of Amsterdam “Islamist” by Krauthammer’s definition? Maybe, maybe not. But, either way, they make the running, and the rest of the community is either indifferent or quiescent.
….
The Continental political class does not want to debate the question of its ever more assertive Muslim populations, and so has decided to criminalize the debate. Geert Wilders lives under 24/7 security because Muslims (including the killer of Theo van Gogh) have pledged to murder him. Yet he’s the one on trial for incitement? The issue is not Wilders or his views, but the Dutch state and their ever more “extreme, radical, and wrong” views on core Western liberties.

First comes political correctness in speech, then criminalization. I doubt that I would find Wilders’ political views compatible with my own, if I knew what his more general views were. But he clearly knows the danger of appeasing Europe’s Muslim minorities: their vocal radicals think they get to kill you if you disagree with them.

A major new classic based on an already timeless classic…

Vanderleun had that one too.

Madam Vandam and I watched The Hurt Locker last night. I’ll say something about it later.

But I’ve already found the sequel…

Grabbed that from Vanderleun.

Even Thomas Sowell had to put on rose-colored glasses:

This is not another Great Depression, at least not yet, and the economy may recover on its own, if the government will let it. But Obama today, like FDR in the 1930s, cannot leave the economy alone. Both felt a need to come up with one bright idea after another, to “do something.”

The theory is that, if one thing doesn’t work, it is just a matter of trying another. But, in an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.

He’s right that this is not yet another Great Depression, but not for lack of trying to make it so. The gears of economic recovery are turning, but there stands Obama ready to throw in as many monkey wrenches as it takes.

The rose-colored glasses part: the assaults on the economy are intentional, not good intentioned acts gone wrong.

That’s why you see the President out there today clamoring for a new trillion dollar bureaucratic takeover of the U.S. medical industry that Americans do not want. Power is the goal. Not economic recovery. In fact, economic recovery would only get in the way.

Walter Williams:

Bill Gates is the world’s richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels. For example, I might wish to purchase sugar from a Caribbean producer, but America’s sugar lobby pays congressmen hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to impose sugar import tariffs and quotas, forcing me and every other American to purchase their more expensive sugar.

Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It’s a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.

The Oscar broadcast began with a tasteless song and dance number featuring the second-rate television actor Neil Patrick Harris. The key to being tasteless is being funny. Otherwise, when it happens at a Big Night event, it’s just bad home video on a large budget. Harris, who has the aura of a kitsch slob about him, fell flat, but it wasn’t a long fall.

That awfulness was briefly redeemed when co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin came out and roasted the big name celebrities in the audience. Mildly amusing.

The rest of the production seemed to have something wrong with it. The crowd shots found a lot of bored people. At one point a video showed a preliminary awards ceremony where Lauren Bacall and Roger Corman got some lifetime recognition thing, but when they were introduced in the live hall they only stood at their front row seats, like ancient stage hands invited to get their retirement watches, for a round of applause. Perhaps it was their own choice not to appear on the stage.

A tribute to horror films was put together like a case of the hiccups. It looked like something that had been left to the interns, but on second thought the interns would have done better. Only a true Hollywood genius could have made it that bad.

Mo’nique won for best supporting actress and gave a cryptic speech in which she thanked the academy for making the award about the performance not the politics. It was a great line, but did anyone know what she was talking about?

Jeff Bridges, who was a dependable off-beat star in the 1980s, finally got an Oscar as best actor.

Sandra Bullock got the best actress award. She’s up there with the great Myrna Loy, one of the highest compliments I could give. Haven’t seen her in the film she won for, but she hasn’t gotten a lot of great parts. I think that Hitchcock would have known how to use her talent.

The German guy, as expected, won for his excellent performance as a Nazi in Inglorious Basterds, a faintly humorous black farce from Quentin Tarantino.

Kathryn Bigelow won as best director, the first time a woman has won in that category, for her Iraq War film The Hurt Locker, which also won for best picture. Haven’t seen it, but will check it out on PPV. She beat the favorite in both categories, her ex-husband James Cameron, director of what looks like an awful megahit, Avatar. I’ve never watched his previous megahit, Titanic, so perhaps he operates in that range of blockbuster that doesn’t appeal to me by its very concept.

There were so many big wiggy Hollywood types missing from the affair that I suspected a shunning over something. Maybe they didn’t like Bigelow’s war film being in the thick of the competition. I understand it’s not the usual Hollywood antiwar propaganda.

Each year I try to shorten my attention span to keep up with these extravaganzas, but this year I think that I hit the Planck’s length of my attention span and it still wasn’t short enough.

He thinks it’s about making the U.S. a permanently left-of-center country.

In the last gasping bits of rationality left to her, that might be what Nancy Pelosi thinks.

But Obama is a radical anti-American. He wants to reduce the place to a third-world country via the post-industrial, post-service industry, post-sovereignty pathways. He understands that health care isn’t health care, but does not see it, as Mark Steyn suggests, as just the next stage of social-democratic government. Obama understands it as a mountain slide that will come down on a country that he is intentionally bankrupting. He hasn’t been trying to stimulate the economy. He’s doing all that he can to break it. He wants America broken, and he had to fool a lot of fools to get in a position to do that. And he’s still fooling them.

Obama is not worried that the American economy is slow to recover; he’s worried that it will recover. And he is doing everything conceivable to see that it doesn’t. Adding an unaffordable entitlement to already bankrupt entitlements; making energy unaffordable; raising taxes; harassing business; growing government while the economy shrinks; shrinking the economy while government grows; and most important of all, draining the wealth out of the middle class. Squeezing the last savings and remaining asset value out of them. He has the public employee unions living large in lean times, and their mission, from his point of view, is to scavenge whatever meat remains from the bones. It’s not for nothing that he has his buddy Andy Stern over to the White House so often.

Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics. But all of it is right there in plain sight. He is using the Presidency and the Congress to wage war against America. That is the meaning of everything that is right there in front of everyone. Of all the people I know only my friend the rogue philosopher Billy Beck understands the full meaning of government force used at this magnitude. And even he, with decades of study of Soviet totalitarianism at close hand for reference, is shocked at the pace of this war on America.

Nancy Pelosi might have a white wine and brie vision of European socialism for America. Barack Obama has the vision of Cuban socialism, with a lot less America in America than there is Cuba in Cuba. Barack Obama has the vision of Jeremiah Wright, and Obama is more radical than Wright. If you don’t know by now that everything Barack Obama has told the American people, and even his own party in the Congress, is a lie, you haven’t been paying attention. I’m not talking about everyday political lying; I’m talking about ontological lies.

We’ve seen this before, but not here, not like this.

Jonah Goldberg circumnavigating David Brooks:

I’ve long argued that the key to understanding David Brooks is that he hates the culture war.

I haven’t long argued it, because it never made it onto my long list of things to argue, but my position on David Brooks is that I don’t care what David Brooks thinks or writes. Now, the rejoinder, readily apparent, is that Brooks certainly doesn’t care what I think, so there. But the point is that given the expensive mainstream media real estate occupied by Brooks, where he hangs out as the New York Times’ idea of a good conservative, he’s deep down at about 350 or 400 on the list of writers anyone needs to read.

I don’t, alas, foresee the coming of a day that long. My time is better spent with writers like the savvy buccaneers who once performed molecular arguments in the Usenet battlespace. They won’t soon be eating shrimp from toothpicks at the Yale Club bar with David Brooks and pals, but I know that when they board an enemy ship they will not be returning with any prisoners.

Maybe it’s the nature of the Times’ op-ed page itself, which seems to transform modest talent into extremely modest talent, but them days is over when people swept into that place for their morning fix like it was a journalistic Starbucks. No one but the white guilt fetishists of the Upper West Side show up there with that sort of ardor, and even for them, I venture to guess, Brooks is merely a bemusement. Not even serious enough for the strenuously unserious.

This is not a time in American history for indulging in the intellectually light-loafered luxury of a David Brooks.

Taranto:

It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes–the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist. Or maybe this is like that episode of “Star Trek” in which crewmen from the Enterprise switched places with their counterparts from a universe in which everyone was the same, only evil.

Like Spock, the evil Krugman is the one with the beard.

You’ll have to hit the link and read the whole thing (it’s the top item) to get the joke. Needless to say, Krugman’s shifty-eyed sweaty animal spirits had to be in frothing mode to set it all up.

That’s what Jonah Goldberg is trying to be vis a vis the gag-inducing claim by Biden that Iraq could turn out to be one of the Obama administration’s greatest accomplishments.

I have no such desire to be reasonable. Obama played a treacherous game with Iraq as a presidential candidate. So did the nefarious zero man Harry Reid in the Senate. They both effectively invited insurgents to murder Iraqi citizens and our troops by holding out hope that surrendur wasn’t just an option but was immediately on its way.

As Vito Corleone put it, “And that I will not forgive.”

Ed Rasimus freebooted this:

Billy Beck:

Get those guns out of my face and I can be the sweetest person you ever met.

Unlike ordinary neurotic projection, it makes the person who is the object of it experience the self-loathing of the person engaging in it. Borderlines “use it” (it’s a primitive infantile defense, so how conscious someone is of using it is debatable) as a form of domination. It’s quite daunting for most people who are subjected to it. Not pleasant to be around. Being in the same room with someone who is engaging in it and some of the other primitive defenses, the minutes will pass like months.

I’m not a believer in any therapeutic model as the standard model of human personality, but it comes in handy from time to time.

On the other hand, as a writer, I use what I call “literary psychology” all the time. It’s not based in a therapeutic model, but is descriptive of mental dynamics. For instance, I could spot a crazy redneck woman wearing the mask of a homocentric food fadist man-hating feminist pretty easily. It’s like looking at an inside-out glove, but the thing that’s consistent between the real face and the mask is the spitting hate, and the confusion. It’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

…can take everything away:

Like many toddlers, Zak Hessey was a fussy eater who refused his mother’s healthy home cooking.

Concerned about his falling weight, his parents sought the advice of doctors. That simple act triggered a shocking chain of events that led to the youngster being put into foster care for four months.

Paul and Lisa Hessey believe in the long-term benefits of healthy eating and rejected advice to feed their two-year-old son high-calorie snack food such as chocolate, crisps and cakes.

To their horror, social workers put Zak into foster care ‘to assess his needs’ and allegedly threatened the couple with the loss of their parental rights if they fought the decision in court.

‘I was absolutely devastated, I broke down in tears,’ recalled Mrs Hessey, 48. ‘I was scared out of my wits. I phoned Paul to tell him and he just broke down on the phone.’

But they went to court and, after four months, Zak returned home with the blessing of social services, who accepted he had good and caring parents.

Did I just read that? The social services bureaucrats took the kid away for four months because the parents wouldn’t feed him chocolate?

Well, at least it wasn’t over anything trivial.

The bear is in no mood:

Finally: I don’t care one whit in the world what “Article 1 Section 8 of our constitution” says. Nobody ever asked me about it, and I am not interested to pay for delivery of your perfumed letters, you asshole. So; piss off.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Obama is the stereotypical great-aunt that sweeps into the Christmas dinner casually boasting about what she is going to do for this niece and that nephew, while most roll their eyes with the understanding that her credit cards are long ago maxed out — and more likely she will be hitting up relatives for loans. Americans don’t like magnanimity with other people’s money.

Hanson is good throughout that piece, but still, like almost everyone writing about Obama, he’s averting his eyes to some extent. This president is not just the Democrats’ version of George Bush. There’s something so wrong about him that it’s nearly impossible to miss. What that thing is has nothing to do with his race. In fact, he is helped by being nominally black. It distracts the mind and the eye from the more fundamental problem: the sense that this man has no respect for America or Americans and, worse, means to bring harm to this country under the mask of a political messiah.

Yes, he’s an amateur in the wrong sense of the word, he can’t lead and wouldn’t know where to lead if he could, he’s cheesy and deft at being cheesy, and he creeps out anyone prepared to look the situation in the eye. But that leads to something else. It leads to a burning existential reality: he is being reckless with our lives and our future and he does not or cannot care.