New Paltz Journal II

This is good.

Scott Ott, the satirist who does Scrappleface, conducts a serious interview with Billy Beck about Bill Clinton quoting him anonymously. Billy in turn blames it all on me! No, I’m kidding. He notes my contention that we are right now in a cold civil war.

Billy, I should mention for those who will be shocked by his arch-libertarian outlook, is not a big fan of the U.S. Constitution. In the interview he calls it a “counterrevolutionary act.” My short explanation for that is that he believes that the Constitution created a framework for too much government, rather than effectively limiting it.

Billy is not, to my thinking, an “obscure blogger,” as Ott characterizes him. He’s pretty well known in blog circles and well respected, and I think that he’s an important critic of American politics at the most basic level. My views differ from his, but he’s one thinker (and I use that term with great care) who I always take into account. He’s a champion of individual freedom, and that’s what he’s been about since I’ve known him.

More: Billy’s take on the interview.

And More: Over to Soja.

A few years ago there was a big dust-up when two supposedly reputable scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a paper (and then published a book? I don’t recall if it went that far) about how the Israeli lobby was running and ruining American foreign policy. When I saw the paper, I noted about four flawed premises in the first paragraph or two. My comment was that the paper did not stop at being anti-Israel; it bordered on anti-semitism.

Today, this note at Commentary’s blog came along via Reynolds.

Mearsheimer’s language, in a speech, isn’t just beyond the pale. It’s beyond sanity, as he names “Righteous Jews” and then Jews who are “New Afrikaners,” essentially depending on whether they support Israel or not. Among the “Righteous Jews” is the revolting liar Noam Chomsky, who detests not only Israel, but the United States and the West in general.

One of the problems with people who think like Mearsheimer, and I lamentably include Pat Buchanan in that group, is that they mysteriously believe that history in the Middle East began in 1948 with the founding of Israel. No wonder that Mearsheimer could get the name Noam Chomsky out of his mouth as “righteous.” Chomsky is one of the world’s great extant decontextualizers of history.

And, no, I don’t think that Israel is a perfect society. I don’t think it’s a perfect society because there are no perfect societies. But the Palestinians followed the KGB off into the wilderness 40 or 50 years ago and now they’re stuck there with the help of fools all across the Left including, apparently, Mearsheimer, who appears to have now gone in for the full pound.

Peter Robinson interviews Mark Steyn.

That’s Part 5 of 5. You can click your way to the first four if you want more.

This one comes in two halves. The first about the U.S. model vis a vis the European model. The second about the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. That’s the more serious part, though the first one is important too.

Billy Beck explains in gentler philosophical terms the “shove it up your ass” rebuke to collectivizers by individualists that made America a nation of independent, acquisitive, castle-dwelling individual persons who changed the course of the river of history:

I also categorically reject the positive communist assertion that my life is available to their “camping trip” fantasies. I am not interested to “enjoy community” with anyone else at all except on my own terms and in action after my own values. The reciprocal of the principle is that I do not expect anyone else to live my values. Every individual human being holds sole responsibility for and authority over his or her own life, without any arbitrary assertions of “community” by others or their political ramifications, which in the case of socialism include force: the denial of individuals’ right to act on their own judgment.

The answer to Cohen’s question is as simple as his metaphor:

It’s because I don’t want to go camping with you, and — being an American and knowing what freedom is — I don’t have to.

I would add that the only communal unit that really counts in America is the one that the collectivists most urgently seek to obliterate: the family. That’s the place where individuals get the training they need to be scaled-up for the rigorous demands of being an American. And it’s the place that when you go there, they have to take you in, if the bonds of sentiment and love have been properly strung.

So, in America, family and freedom are inextricably woven as the fabric. The statists are sick with, you guessed it, the state, which they want to be their instrument of wish fulfillment. Look at the condition of the black family in America to see what happens as the state moves into lives like the drug that it is. It’s the future for everyone, unless it is stopped.

I could go on from there, but hit the link and read the rest of the maestro’s post.

Which is worse?

Bernie Madoff vs. Social Security.

More: Veronique de Rugy comments.

Thomas Sowell:

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States or in the 13 colonies from which the nation was formed.

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

I picked up that extended quote from the middle of Sowell’s column, so you have to hit the link and read it from the top to understand the “I don’t go sky-diving with blacks” line.

In noting that slavery was a world-wide phenomenon, Sowell is trying to break the spell of the decontectualized history that American students are constantly fed throughout high school and college, which in turn leaves them believing that America is a uniquely bad country.

America is actually a uniquely good country that had the usual serious flaws associated with all of humanity. What made it exceptional was being founded on principles that recognized the intrinsic dignity of human beings, which in turn gave it the vital impetus to fulfill and live up to those principles.

And those principles are the universal principles of natural law, not the principles of race and gender identity politics.

It began with his Big Lie in 2004 as he climbed on the national stage:

“Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us–the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of ‘anything goes.’ Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America–there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America–there’s the United States of America.”–state senator Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004

But the truth is that it was always going to be about identity politics:

“In the video message to his supporters, [President] Obama said his administration’s success depends on the outcome of this fall’s elections and warned that if Republicans regain control of Congress, they could ‘undo all that we have accomplished.’ ‘This year, the stakes are higher than ever,’ he said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by Democratic officials. ‘It will be up to each of you to make sure that young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again. . . .’ “–Washington Post, April 26, 2010

Once again, the key was always the church in Chicago. That’s why it had to become a taboo in the mainstream media. No honest person could say in good faith what was said in the first quote, from 2004, as he still sat in the pews of a church based in a racialist “theology.” Why did the media refuse to go there?

That came from Taranto (second item) via Reynolds.

The subject is a rant against the Tea Party movement by Ron Rosenbaum:

[N]otice how Rosenbaum capitalizes Socialists. It’s true that the National Socialists weren’t Socialists. But they were socialists. They believed in economic policies that intelligent and informed people everywhere recognize as, well, socialistic (redistribution of wealth, state control of capital, universal healthcare, universal education etc etc). Rosenbaum deliberately uses Socialist as a team name rather than a worldview, hoping that no one will know the difference. It’s akin to saying American conservatives don’t like democracy because they feud with the Democrats.

I disagree with Goldberg that we are not headed toward a form of dictatorship. As he amply demonstrates in his own book, Liberal Fascism, American governments can shift very rapidly into a form of proto-dictatorship, but also have a tendency to revert to “normalcy” after a spell. But I don’t think he would disagree that the structures of state control have now accumulated to the point where it’s very difficult to turn around without running into one form of state compulsion or the other. Unfortunately, the reductio ad Hitlerum argument so often used to express the sensation that accompanies these facts is an easy reach on the shelf of polemics and has been used into uselessness. Although, I must say, if you read the racialist “theology” of James Cone, you could be tempted to think the old reductio not so useless after all.

I might be the last person in America to be arguing that Obama’s twenty years in a “black theology” church should have disqualified him from consideration for the presidency, or even his seat in the Senate, but that’s because I hold the unusual and odd belief that you don’t belong to a church like that for the bulk of your adult life without knowing exactly where you are.

So, Goldberg might want to rethink his reset position on this sort of thing in the light of, oh, say, Cone’s teaching that whites are manifestations of Satan. And, of course, it is Cone’s teachings that are the foundation of the teaching of Obama’s church.

I’m unhappy to be seemingly alone in continuing to point that out, but I’m happy not to have the common fear of race that compels most writers to look away from these unpleasant facts.

A review of a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian in Germany during the rise and reign of the Nazis:

Since the 1960s, some of Bonhoeffer’s admirers have seized upon a phrase from one of his letters—”religionless Christianity”—to argue that he favored social action over theology. In fact, Bonhoeffer used the phrase to suggest the kind of ritualistic and over-intellectualized faith that had failed to prevent the rise of Hitler. It was precisely religionless Christianity that he worried about. After a 1939 visit to New York’s Riverside Church, a citadel of social-gospel liberalism, he wrote that he was stunned by the “self-indulgent” and “idolatrous religion” that he saw there. “I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out,” he wrote, “if God himself is still anywhere on the scene.”

Bonhoeffer became a double-agent for the German resistance, and was later executed for taking part in one of the plots to assassinate Hitler.

Perfect spirals, right on the hands:

For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.” Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the tea-party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare’s opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank’s sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank’s sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore.

So enough with all the punch-pulling about seditious, racist homophobes. It was time to go for broke and bring out Bill Clinton to explain why the tea parties are the new front in the war on terror. Don’t worry about Iran’s nuclear program, but if you meet a tea-party supporter waving some placard about the national debt, try not to catch his eye and back away slowly without making any sudden movements, lest he put down his placard and light up his suicide belt.

Hit the link and take it from the top, make a dozen copies, and send your kids to school with a few of them. It’s not just a lesson in wit and perfect pitch writing. It’s the bottom line on the trickeration of the thieves who presume they are above us.

I started this blog with the intention of giving a lot of time to local New Paltz topics. That worked for a while, but then the 2008 presidential election and the aftermath drew more and more of my attention, and local items got crowded out. In the meantime, the following for the blog became increasingly national. Plus, I didn’t want to deal with comments here.

A lot of good discussion went down at the local New Paltz Gadfly blog, but that has drifted into marginal issues and hasn’t bothered to carry a single item on the biggest local controversy going right now: the monstrous budget for the New Paltz Central School District. So, attention wanes over there, right when there’s a need for a place to discuss local matters.

So, in the effort to fill that gap, I’m launching New Paltz Journal: The Local Edition.

It’s a separate blog, and it’s going to be all about local stuff. The comments are on, and all who are interested are invited to comment. I don’t know how that’s going to work out, but let’s give it a try.

Local residents, including SUNY New Paltz students, are welcome. Anyone else with a clear interest in local New Paltz issues and events is welcome too.

Everyone make yourself at home over there and keep it clean.

There is no jauntier being on the planet than our beloved hound, C.J. Peckerwood. He puts the jaunt in jauntiness. He is a veritable top hat and cane on the swell promenade when it comes to how jaunty he is.

So, when he sank low this week and lost his jaunt, you can imagine what a crisis befell. Sullen he was.

I watched him for a couple of days and then I realized what it was. His neck was out. He had a stiff neck and could barely give his head the necessary morning wake-up shake.

Fortunately for him, I have had neck problems for decades and have mastered the art of getting things back into alignment.

So I went right to work on C.J.’s neck and after a day or two it was working fine again, his neck.

The jaunt is back. He’s the king of swing again. The crisis is over.

Timothy McVeigh was a psychopath, as was his chief antagonist:

The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it “is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours”. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.

The effect of CS gas on an unprotected infant exposed for only two to three hours is discussed in the report; in that case report, dating from the early 1970s, the child’s symptoms during the first twenty-four hours were upper respiratory; but, within forty-eight hours his face showed evidence of first degree burns, and he was in severe respiratory distress typical of chemical pneumonia. The infant had cyanosis, required urgent positive pressure pulmonary care, and was hospitalized for twenty– eight days. Other signs of toxicity appeared, including an enlarged liver.

Professor Stone’s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann’s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.

I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

You can argue, “Well, Bill Clinton only accepted the plan because it was the FBI bringing it to him.” The fact is that all sorts of plans get thrown on a president’s desk, many of which should never get that far. That’s when a sane person in the Oval Office comes in handy, because a sane person has swift and certain prudential judgement on a question like gassing children to incite emotions in adults that will theoretically produce a specific behavior by those adults.

But Bill Clinton could barely keep his mask of sanity on straight (the evidence for that goes well beyond his behavior with respect to Waco). Underneath that mask he had nothing even resembling a fully formed conscience. He was an exact parallel with McVeigh, who also wore a mask of sanity throughout the execution of his own deadly plan to exact vengeance for Waco (a mask not sufficient to pass muster with a group like the Michigan Militia, which booted him out). Informed as he was by the neo-Nazi novel, The Turner Diaries, McVeigh took the fantasy vengeance of that into reality in the face of government directed vengeance signed off on by Clinton. McVeigh wasn’t a critic of Clinton; he wanted to be his direct competitor.

The former Criminal President quoted Billy Beck.

We’re in a cold civil war right now.

Anyone think otherwise?

The governing class is bringing force harder and faster than ever.

Ordinary people are standing up and saying stop, and the governing class has now accused them of everything from racism to violence. Frank Rich of the New York Times compared the Tea Parties to Kristallnacht. Joe Klein accused Rush Limbaugh of sedition. Bill Clinton raises the spectre of Oklahoma City.

It’s a cold civil war, and it’s been taking shape, by my estimation, for about twenty years.

Call it also the war of those who vote for a living vs. those who work for a living.

Hit the link and read what Billy has to say. And I invite Billy to open the vault; he knows what I’m talking about. There’s no statute of limitations on it.

As for Bill Clinton, he’d better put some ice on that. People up there in the exalted media have been far too nice to him. But there are still a lot of yeoman veterans of the Usenet battlespace who know exactly what he is and can recite it from memory.

I’m two for two in the reader reviews at Amazon. Kevin Prigge offers a very gracious appraisal:

This book advertises itself as “A Thriller” and it delivers! What starts out as a seemingly simple detective story unfolds into a well-crafted tale of murder, intrigue and terrorism. This is an excellent book by a first-time author, and I hope to read more from him in the future.

Damn decent of Mr. Prigge to take a moment to say that. Appreciate it.

I’m going to crib the whole thing from The Corner because it’s such a beaut:

Over to You, Bill Clinton, Frank Rich, Joe Klein et al. [Mark Steyn]

Actually, there is a lot of incendiary hate out there — here, for example. The voiceover is by U.S. citizen (and spiritual mentor, most recently, to Major Hasan) Ayman al-Awlaki. He is explaining the rationale for killing identified individuals, including the creators of South Park.

Mr. al-Awlaki says things like, “Harming Allah and his messenger is a reason to encourage Muslims to kill whoever does that.”

Maybe he’d get a worse press if he were to stop pussyfooting around and explicitly incite violence by saying something openly hateful like “I’m becoming very concerned about federal spending.”