Author Archives: Countrylawyer

Hearts of Oak, Indeed

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. . . and arms that could probably twist my neck off in about the time it takes . . . well, to drag, disassemble, shift across about 30 feet of air, re-assemble, and fire three times a field gun (complete with limber) the barrel assembly of which weighs just shy of 900 pounds.

This is cool.  This is way too cool.  The Brits may have starved their navy of money and veneration, but in a country where there’s no place more than roughly 90 miles from the ocean in any direction, there will always be a Royal Navy, and ‘Er Majesty’s tars will always be among the toughest bastards on the water. 

I still remember seeing a Royal Navy frigate operate with our U.S. battle group in 1988.  An American destroyer captain, if he wants his career to flourish at all, will try — with very, very good reason, let it be said — never to get within five miles of an aircraft carrier.  Let’s be honest, exactly how much sea sense can you expect when you put a pilot in command of 100,000+ tons of floating steel?  Lemme tell you, though, that RN frigate plastered herself alongside Forrestal, it looked like less than 1,000 yards distance, and she just hung there.  I ought to add that Forrestal, on that cruise, IO/MED/LANT 2-88, was about the very worst-driven ship it was ever my misfortune to attempt to work with.  I got a very profound respect for the Royal Navy watching that little frigate drive.

Is this a practical exercise in seamanship?  Of course not.  Is Great Britain safer by one jot because there are honking great sailors who can man-handle wood, steel, and lines like this?  Nope.  But as long as she can produce sailors who do stuff like this, for fun, there will always be a hard kernel on which she might yet again build a navy that will, if not rule the waves alone any more, in all events maintain her rightful place in the world and command respect for the White Ensign wherever it flies.  Long may it.

Sauce for the Gander

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In reading various comments here, there, and about, regarding America’s single most imprudent national election in living memory (you’d have to go back to 1920 to find a comparable one, and I doubt there are many alive who can recall it), one thing struck me about several comments originating with female friends of mine.  It was the assertion that the GOP had “pissed off” the women, and Tuesday’s election was supposed to be a needed corrective to that error.  The specific subject matter of the outrage dealt with — hang on there — contraception.  What a surprise!

I’m not aware that anyone within the GOP presidential ticket took any position relative to the legality of any form of contraception, or even abortion at any level.  So far as I’m aware it was absent as a platform plank.  There was a late-breaking story that 30 years ago, when Mitt Romney was a private citizen and an official in his church, he discouraged a woman from having an abortion.  Horrors.  I am unaware that Mitt Romney as presidential candidate took any position on it.  Of course, Bill Clinton, who of all recent presidential candidates was the most likely personally to give rise (no pun intended) to a specific issue of whether any particular victim female who caught his eye might need an abortion after enjoying his gubernatorial or presidential ministrations, as candidate and as president publicly allowed that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”  That was of course just fine with women voters.  He’d rape you, of course, or maybe just send the state troopers around to suggest that your upward Arkansas government career might run through a specific hotel room on that evening, but at least he’d see to it that you wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath “in a back alley.”

What a friend of the downtrodden.

About all that I’m aware that the GOP headline ticket, either its candidates or their surrogates, made any stink about was things like requiring the Roman Catholic Church to underwrite abortion and/or contraception in violation of the tenets of the church.  [FYI:  If your health insurance group is over about 150 members you’re self-insured in any event and so yes, paying “insurance premiums” to fund abortion is funding abortion, directly.]  This was a “war on women,” it seems.  Asking an adult sufficiently physically able as to engage in the procreative act to pay herself (ignoring that for a goodly number of those women there will be one or a small range of males who might be asked to chip in to underwrite the fun) the $25 or so per month is just so far beyond the pale that we’ve got to re-elect . . . well, I don’t even want to allude to him . . . rather than run the hypothetical risk of being so asked.  Now, I’ve seen numbers bandied about as low as $9 per month, but hell, assume it’s $150 per month and that’s still less than you’d spend on a nice dinner and a movie to get yourselves in the mood to need that little pill in the first place.  It’s less than you’d spend on the weekend down at the river, running his bass boat up and down, drinking shitty beer and layin’ out in the sun before heading back to pop a couple of steaks on the grill and settle in for a night of whoopie.  I don’t have a great deal of recent pricing information on the subject.  It’s been a dozen or more years since female contraceptives were an issue in our little house in the big woods cookie cutter subdivision.  The wife taken allergic to them and so for several years we supported the latex industry, until a few years ago I addressed the issue with a degree of finality represented to me as medically absolute.

But seriously, being asked to pay for your own jollies is a war on you?  Daring to suggest that sucking a beating human heart from your womb may have moral implications on both sides of the argument is indistinguishable from shutting you up in some pestilential medieval ghetto?  It’s so unspeakable that we need to put back into office a man whose administration has declared an intention to bankrupt the coal industry, to make electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket” (his words, dear children, not mine), to aspire towards European gasoline prices, to cheerlead for the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking over entire nations seriatim, to cut a deal with a nuclear Iran, to . . . well, it just goes on and on.

One of the principal arguments advanced against granting women the franchise (or better stated, no longer refusing it to them) was that those crazy ol’ women, you know, with their “monthlies” an’ all, why, if you let them vote they’d jes’ all go plum crazy and vote (I’ll not bother with the sundry genteel proxy statements and euphemisms) their genitals.  The counter-position was that no, women were not that stupid, or at least no more stupid in that regard than men.  And so forth.  And so over time the franchise was extended (bearing in mind, ladies, that in each case it was extended by necessarily male voters).

The first presidential election women were able to vote in, nation-wide, was that 1920 election.  There is at least quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that Harding captured a huge portion of the female vote because he was so good looking (or at least give up to be good looking by the standards of the time).  But in truth I think he’d have won if he’d looked like Abe Lincoln and had the geniality of Andrew Jackson.  After eight years of wars, rumors of wars, drafts, thousands of dead boys, influenza epidemics, Leagues of Nations and on and on, Harding ran on a platform of putting the genie back in the bottle.  And pretty much everyone bit down on it, hard.  So I’m not going to tax the fairer half of America with the most corrupt administration until the present one.

In truth, I’m not aware of any significant evidence that women validated the arguments against letting them vote for several decades.

Until now.  Since February, 2009 we’ve never had below 7.8% unemployment in any month.  For most of that period it’s been above 8%.  The labor force participation rate is below 65%, its lowest in 35 years.  Record numbers of Americans have been out of work for at least a year.  Record numbers of Americans are living on food stamps.  Private sector jobs are evaporating like the dew.  We’ve sat on our haunches and watched as Iran progresses towards nuclear weaponry, and vigorously pushes its plans to obliterate from the map the only democracy, our only ally, in a part of the world that like it or not is critical to our national well-being.  Our federal government has successfully asserted the power to force each one of us to purchase whatever it decides we ought to buy, whether we actually require it or can afford it or need the money for something else.  An entire generation of American young adults cannot afford to establish an independent existence of their own.  We’re $16 trillion in the hole with no bottom in sight.  Federal spending already exceeds 24% of GDP (it topped out at around 27% . . . during World War II).  We’re “borrowing” 40% of every dollar the federal government spends . . . but we’re “borrowing” 90% of that from . . . the Federal Reserve.  We’re just making up our money supply.  We’re headed towards Zimbabwe, folks, and triple-digit monthly inflation.

And yet by all indications none of the above was sufficient to outweigh in the minds of millions of women voters the threat that they (and/or their males) might be asked to pay freight for their jollies.

Sauce for the goose; sauce for the gander.

I have three boys, the oldest of whom will be 18 sometime during the term of Dear Leader’s immediate successor.  Assuming the ball hasn’t already gone up by then, which is to say assuming that Europe hasn’t torn itself apart in an orgy of collapse, recrimination, and violence; that a Russia offered “more flexibility” by this administration hasn’t taken advantage of that to subvert the societies of our few remaining friends; that there has been no nuclear exchange in the Middle East, then it will do so, shortly thereafter.  It escaped most folks’ notice, I’m sure, but there was a tiny squib in Tuesday’s paper, with a quotation from the Israeli government.  They just went ahead and came out and said that Iran was not going to be permitted to achieve nuclear capability, and that if no one else would stop them, Israel would.

My boys will be asked to fix the situation permitted if not actually encouraged by Dear Leader.  They and millions of other boys just like them will be the ones patrolling down the road, hoping that this seemingly derelict vehicle isn’t the one loaded with a remotely-detonated 500-pound bomb.  They’ll be the ones coming home maimed in body and soul, if they come home at all.  All you women, and your precious daughters, will never have to sign up to be drafted into the combat arms.  Your daughter will never hump a 200-plus pound combat load up some godforsaken hillside at the ass end of nowhere, wondering if there’s some grimacing jihadist putting a cross-hairs on her forehead.  You will never go to sleep each night praying that this night is not the night you get The Phone Call that your daughter didn’t come back from that patrol.

Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan, where the woman gets three telegrams in the same day, each one telling her that a different one of her four sons has been killed in action?  That actually happened.  But you will never get a telegram like that about your daughter.

I’m going to assert my right to vote my genitals, just as you do.  This is the line I draw in the dirt:  There is not one single goddam thing that can happen your uterus or your daughter’s uterus that is worth a single drop of my sons’ blood.  Not.  One.  Drop.

 I assert that I will vote for anyone, from any party, on any platform, who can hold out reasonable hope that my sons will not come back to me in bags, or missing chunks of the flesh I once held in my arms.  That, grown to honorable manhood, those same bright faces and smiling eyes, those little forms I watched dashing about the campsite, or scrambling up and down the basketball court, or carefully stacking the building blocks on the living room floor, will not be returned to me a mass of mangled blood and bone, or haunted by visions that will torment them into their old age, to awaken screaming at night, to blight my grandchildren’s lives.  That they will not be ground into apathetic drudges, standing in government hand-out lines, wondering if this month they will clear the bills and maybe put a bit by for their children’s future.  That if they survive the world which the present administration seems so keen to call into existence, there will be honest work for them, work which enables them to look the world in the eye and say, “I am a man; here is my ground; here I will defend myself and my family.”

I will vote for those people no matter what they say they will do to you and your uterus, and your daughters’ after you.  If for you all other issues are off the table once the conversation turns to keeping your legs crossed, for me all other issues are off the table when the conversation turns to whether I will one day be handed a neatly folded flag as I watch my son lowered into the ground.

And as you shiver in the dark, unable to afford the electricity to light your misery or the gas to heat it, staring at your plate of beans which is all you can afford on the only work you can afford the gasoline to drive to, you can jolly damned well look at the grocery bag of money on the floor in the corner and wonder whether tomorrow it will still be enough to put a quarter-tank of gas in the car and buy a loaf or two of bread and some more cans of beans (if they have them on the shelf at the only grocery store left in your part of town).  You can also listen to your 25 year-old daughter moan on the couch in your basement, where she still has to live because she likewise can’t find a job that she can afford to drive to.  You can hope that whatever it is that’s causing that pain right under her ribcage isn’t anything so serious that she won’t last until the closest doctor’s appointment she could get, eleven weeks away at the “free clinic” which is all that you’ve been told by the rationing board she qualifies for, and then hold out for the next three months until she can see the “specialist.”  Maybe by that time you’ll have saved the gas money to get her there, too.  If your car hasn’t fallen apart by then.  It’s a pity, isn’t it, that there are no more mechanics around; the last one finally gave up when they told him he was going to have to pay a surtax on every air filter he sold.

You can hope that you’ll somehow find the money to pay the “energy tax” on your house because you couldn’t afford to install the “certified green” windows and replace the roof with a “qualified environmental surface” last year.  The last time you were required to “upgrade” to the newest technology, four years ago, you just managed it.  But that was before they defunded the office where you used to work because your Congressman didn’t vote the administration line on that one bill.  When they closed that you lost your job.  Your ex-husband won’t be able to help either; he’s been out of work so long he’s quit even pretending to look.  So far as you know he’s bartering odd jobs for food and clothes here and there.  When his car died it was too far for him to walk from the housing project where he lives, so you haven’t seen him in months.  Your daughter last saw him the night she almost got mugged walking from his door to your car; they’d have caught her, too, if someone else hadn’t busted out your driver’s window to steal the radio while she was inside asking if he didn’t have an extra $400,000 this month so she could buy some new shoes before the weather gets cold.  So she didn’t have to fumble with the door lock and got away.  That time.

And you can console yourself that at least your (and her) contraceptives are paid for, and if that good-for-nothing hard-ankle she runs with (because being 25, living at home, sick, and all but unemployable, he’s the only one who’ll have her) knocks her up, you can, if you get an appointment in time and if you can afford the $75.00 per gallon gasoline, drive her to the “free” abortion clinic.

Update (10 Nov 12):  Quod erat demonstrandum.

Sometimes You Can Actually See How Deep the Rot Goes

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. . . when you come across something like this PBS quiz.  They pose you twelve super-generic questions and from that want to tell you how “conservative” or “liberal” you are.

One of the considerations when launching a blog (even before the question, “Who would give a damn anyway?”) has to be the entry-level question of what will I ever think of to write about, on a daily or more frequent basis?  The law of ideal gases applies outside the laboratory, after all.  We’ve now got — what? — 500-odd television channels, yet you can wear out both thumbs trying to find something on worth watching, unless you short-circuit the process and go to a channel where all they do is run old stuff.  If you’re willing to confine yourself to perusing distillations of the very best of 60 years of television and the very best of 80 years of movies then yes, you probably can find something to watch.  But if you want something new, something fresh?  The same amount of quality has expanded to fill a vastly increased space, with the result that the individual molecules are that much farther apart.  And if all those tens of thousands of people in Entertainment, who have years’ experience and billions of dollars of money washing about the industry, cannot reliably come up with something that a person of average-or-better intelligence would pay attention to except under compulsion, what is the likelihood that a lone blogger, somewhere between keeping the office doors open, the pantry reasonably stocked, the clothes washed, homework done, supper cooked, and the dishes washed, will be able to do it?  Daunting, I think was the word Jeeves told me it was.

And then along comes PBS and serves up a meatball like this idiot quiz.  Seven of the twelve questions relate to what are economic matters.  One is asked to agree or disagree, or somewhere in between, with statements like, “Business corporations make too much profit.”  Other than the drunk-on-a-barstool nature of the statement itself (one is involuntarily reminded of Grandpa Simpson’s complaint that, “There are too many states these days!”), can anyone spot the fallacy in weighting the answer?

Right:  It’s the assumption that completely disagreeing with the statement is a “conservative” position.

Disappointingly predictable is the PBS Marxist assumption that free markets are somehow “conservative.”   Nothing could be farther from the truth.  You cannot “conserve” anything, anything at all, once you concede freedom to people to house, clothe, and feed themselves by their own efforts, talents, and luck. Freedom has never produced an hereditary nobility, or an NKVD, or party-machine politics, or crony capitalism, or tariff walls, or Berlin Walls, or cartels, or any of the other structures, systems, and habits the effect (and it’s the effect that matters, dear children, not the intent) of which is stasis of human achievement, growth, fulfillment, or prosperity. 

The supposition that free markets are inherently monopolistic, inherently retrogressive, inherently oppressive is an idea that traces straight back to Karl Marx, one of the most economically illiterate writers who ever should have had his thumbs lopped before he found his way to the ink well.  Marx’s ideas stood in diametric opposition to, and were contemporaneous with, the movements which repealed the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts in Britain.  Both of those latter movements were hailed, and rightly so, by the great masses of Britons as being enormously liberating, enormously empowering, and greatly to their own advantage.

Every socio-politico-economic arrangement in history you can name which has had the effect of entrenching some to the detriment of others has come into existence and endured solely because it enlisted the coercive power of government to maintain itself.  Chattel slavery could never have existed without government’s enforcement of it, both by way of things like the fugitive slave laws and by dragooning the locals, slave-owning or not, into slave patrols.  For years the ICC permitted railroads to charge higher freight rates out of the South than into it, with the result that products of the South operated at an additional disadvantage relative to their northern competitors.  Sugar is as expensive as it is here not because it’s unavoidably expensive to produce, but because the government forbids us to buy foreign-produced sugar, which is much cheaper than what can be grown this far north, as cheaply as it can be produced and got here (in fact, it was the Big Boss of the largest U.S. sugar company who was on the telephone with Bill Clinton while Monica Lewinsky was fellating Clinton in the Oval Office).  Railroad cartels arose not because there was something inherently monopolistic about them, but because you can’t build a railroad without the power of eminent domain.  If the cartel owns the legislature what do you think the odds of securing that power to a railroad that doesn’t agree to become part of the cartel?  The Schechter Poultry case arose because a couple of kosher butchers (hence their name) violated the National Recovery Act’s prohibition that customers . . . wait for it:  be allowed to choose their own chicken to be slaughtered for their own damned dinner table.  There were also then pending prosecutions for failing to charge the minimum price for a pair of trousers.  Wickard v. Filburn affirmed the proposition that government can forbid you to feed your own family from the produce of your own land, if doing so will enable you not to buy from the industries who dominate the legislature.  And so forth.  The Consumer Financial Protection Board, acting under Dodd-Frank, is set fair to annihilate your community bank’s ability to continue offering home mortgages.  The compliance costs will crush them, the liability for non-compliance will destroy them.  So if you want to concentrate the home lending market into even fewer hands, too-big-to-fail hands, just wait it bit.  And if your community bank can’t make home loans, in 20 years there will be scarcely any left.  The Local Banker, who has been a not-always-loved fixture of the American scene for 200-plus years, will go the way of the dinosaurs, and for the same reason.  The planet that both inhabited will have been hit by some external disruption that wipes out the environment they live in, at a stroke.  The only difference is that no one chose to aim an asteroid at the earth 65 million years ago.

It was the genius of the constitutional framers in 1787 that the document they wrote denied the ability to federal government to shackle the people to entrenched powers. To the extent we have forgot that and permitted the federal government to impinge on our freedoms — whether the ICC in the 1800s, or Roosevelt’s NRA in the 1930s, or today’s CFPB and its 60,000-odd regulations — we have done nothing more than cement in power the haves, and assured the have-nots that they have naught better to hope for than crumbs from the table.

What we have-nots will be left with is the pork barrel.  And here is appropriate a bit of history.  The expression “pork barrel” to refer to the scramble for bits of money, power, and perks from the government first arose back in the 1800s.  Back during the days of gang labor.  Back during the days of slave labor.  It referred to the actual, physical barrels of salt pork which were typically the slave’s only or at least primary source of animal protein (except for chickens they might have been permitted to keep, or what they could steal from Massa’s smokehouse).  It was miserable stuff, mostly fat anyway, and of course eaten with maggots.  The meat of it was hard as a rock (it was, in short, the same stuff we fed sailors in the navy).  The expression “pork barrel” came into use to describe the scramble for money because approximately the same scene unfolded when a new pork barrel was opened in the slaves’ presence.  If you wanted a halfway decent piece to take back to your cabin so that maybe tonight your children would not go to sleep quite as hungry, then by God you saw to it that your hand got in that barrel first.

The pork barrel, in sum, was what you offered your slaves periodically.

PBS and its masters have once again betrayed just how deeply they have drunk from an essentially Marxist well of thought.  For them freedom is threatening.  For them freedom is oppressive.  For them freedom is an active impediment to the achievement of the workers’ and peasants’ paradise on earth. 

In fact freedom is corrosive. You cannot be either “conservative” or leftist and permit freedom, because (with apologies to Winston Groom) freedom is in fact like a box of chocolates. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.

Ambivalence

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Work out the Latin roots, but this interview with retiring Sen. Lieberman awakens a good deal of it in me.

I am profoundly, eternally grateful that the pious fraud at the head of the ticket he ran on never was more than a guest in the Oval Office.  Of all the fundamentally dishonest people who’ve risen to prominence in national politics in recent memory, Algore has a decent claim to be the top bottom of that heap.  Clinton was very up front about what he wanted:  He wanted to be elected and he wasn’t very shy about doing what he had to in order to get there.  He was dishonest, but in a fairly shallow, do-one-thing-say-another sort of way.  Mostly he just wanted to get laid.  Dear Leader is actually fairly up-front about what he’s about: he’s a Chicago thug politician who has spared no effort to drag this country sufficiently far down the road towards socialism that it can’t be reversed. 

But Algore, he was something special.  He was more than just blather-about-the-trees-while-annihilating-the-hydrocarbons.  He was pious, sanctimonious.  And a fraud to the very soles of his feet.  It’s not by coincidence that he started out to be a jack-leg preacher, going to divinity school for a while.

And he picked Lieberman as his running mate.  Most of the policy positions of Lieberman’s that have ever swum into my ken I’ve disagreed with, for one reason or another.  But I’m not aware that anyone has ever had the slightest reason to impugn his character or the sincerity with which he holds those positions.  If there could be some way that we could keep him around to read us a sermon every now and then, just because we need reminding, I’d like to see it done.  In the balance, I think American political life will be measurably the lesser endowed when he retires.

Fair winds and following seas, Joe.

In Case You Can’t Recognize It, He’s Talking About Us

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Here’s a snapshot about what the rest of the world — or at least that portion that isn’t living under the guns, missiles, armored divisions, and fifth columnists sponsored by goons like Putin, the Muslim Brotherhood, and/or Chavez — thinks about the U.S. presidential race.  It’s the sort of thinking that folks who have the luxury of not having to defend themselves either at home or abroad can indulge.

When writing about a foreign place, it’s generally a good idea to have, you know, some actual knowledge about the joint before hunker down at the keyboard.

Just by way of fish-in-a-barrel:  No president can “sign a law” making illegal what the Supreme Court has decided (whether or not incorrectly) is a constitutional right.

Secondly, he seems to think that the separation of powers designed into the constitution means that the same party isn’t supposed to dominate all three branches of government.  This would be, um, you know, news for any American who lived from 1933 through 1953, or from 1865 through the 1890s.  In fact, the very notion of “parties” would have struck the framers as something repellent; they’d have excoriated any “party” dominating any branch of government.

And of course it’s just horrid, unthinkable that Congress should be primus inter pares, and have the stones to act like it.  Tell that to the first half-century worth of Congress-critters, who were outraged when Jackson began to veto legislation not because he thought it beyond the scope of powers granted by the constitution or otherwise prohibited by it but simply because he didn’t agree with it.  The modern imperial presidency, where the Congress, toad-like, meekly does whatever the president of the moment decides he wishes, is decidedly a modern invention.  This feller seems much, much more comfortable with the system practiced by Stalin:  He humbly proposed to the Plenum and if they didn’t approve it unamimously right off, he just had them all shot and started over with a more cooperative bunch.

State education is in line for a “haircut,” ignoring that comparatively little of education is federally-funded in the first place.  This goober of an author doesn’t quite seem to understand that neither a president nor the president and Congress together can decide that state-level education funding is going to take a haircut.  The fiscal literacy of this clown is demonstrated by his profound insights on what the “sudden removal of trillions of federal dollars from US GDP” will do to the world’s economy.  I have news, Ranger Bob:  Those dollars don’t really exist.  They’re fiat money that’s being, metaphorically speaking, printed by the trainload by the Federal Reserve, and “loaned” to the U.S. government, which is already borrowing . . . I can’t recall the exact percentage, but it’s ominously close to 50% . . . of every “dollar” it spends, and now that the Fed’s the one buying over 90% of all long-term Treasury debt, we’re just making it up (as ol’ Mittens quite correctly pointed out).  So pulling value-less paper money out of the economy is going to do, what, again?

Listen up, ol’ sport:  The political structure of the U.S. was intentionally set up to be slow and obstructionist.  That’s what “checks-and-balances” means; that’s what “separation of powers” is all about.  They weren’t devices to implement a playground teeter-totter system of “you’ve had your turn; now I’ll have mine.”  All three branches of government were set up to answer to different interests, at different intervals, and to be selected by different methods.  It’s only by doing so that you ensure that (i) decisions are limited to Very Important Things, and (ii) the scope of the decision is limited to those areas in which genuinely broad consensus actually exists (see Hayek).  In other words, it’s Not A Bad Thing that Mittens, if he’s elected president, may find himself dealing with a Congress that’s dominated by people who don’t see eye to eye with him.

If this boy can get an appointment within the next eight months from his “free” NHS provider (and hoping his doctor doesn’t just decide he really needs to be on the Liverpool Path or whatever their slow-motion “assisted” death glide path is called), he needs to get him a prescription for a chill pill and then take them, all at once.

Wonder Where This Glide Path Ends?

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I can’t recall who it was who first observed that fascism is always descending on America, but always landing on Europe.  Certainly that’s been the case up until now.  Our most recent assurances that fascism was on its way was during the Bush administration, when the hand-wringers at the NYT and those like them were just convinced that the administration’s monitoring international cross-border communications among known terrorist affiliates was somehow the foundation stone of a new chain of concentration camps — one coming soon to a neighborhood near you — and bearing the smiling face of Bushitler over the gates.  These hand-wringers would be the same crew who haven’t weighed in much about Dear Leader’s assertion that he has the right — unilaterally and secretly — to promulgate a kill list disposition matrix under which anyone in the world outside the U.S., including U.S. citizens, may be blasted to shreds of meat by a missile fired from a lazily-circling drone.

But what do I know?

The ominous quotation from this article about Golden Dawn, Greece’s nascent and increasingly fashionable fascist party, comes from the fellow — an MP for Golden Dawn — who allows, “Most nations, well, not the US or Australia, have a single nationality that defines its culture and Greece must return to this ideal.  The Golden Dawn is a very well organised party that is intervening to support and help people. Without us in a country where two million of ten million people are illegal, there would be chaos.” 

Some years ago I read a book by Ludwig von Mises (can’t recall the title any more, alas) in which he identifies as the point where Europe began the course change which pointed it towards the rocks of the 20th Century that point at which became common currency the idea that each linguistic group needed to be gathered into one polity purged of other linguistic groups.  At that time, of course, we had two — actually, three — enormous polyglot empires in Europe, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian.  Each of their dozens of native languages, in many cases fragmented across the map, had sullenly chafed under distant monarchs for centuries.  But then pretty much everyone chafed under monarchies for centuries, when you get right down to it.  The German-speaking serf in 18th Century Austria was neither in better nor worse shape than his Polish- or Hungarian-speaking counterpart in the 19th Century . . . or the 14th.  The wheels began to loosen on their hubs when someone whispered in his great-grandchild’s ear that it was an outrage not so much that he was a peasant but that he had all these Czechs cluttering up the place.  To say nothing of all those filthy Joooooosssss.  And so forth.

How deeply that idea took root we got to see when the restraining forces of the monarchies crumbled with the end of the Great War.  The fistful of nation-states that sprang into existence in Central Europe were not creations of the peace-making process; they were called into being by whichever dominant ethnic group happened to live there and by the time of the Paris Conference in 1919 they were facts on the ground that could not be ignored.  What didn’t change, however, was the geographic distribution of the groups within those new states.  Every single successor state had within its borders large numbers of language groups which had — from their perspective, at least — only traded dominance by some lantern-jawed Habsburg or nitwit Romanov or strutting and puffing Hohenzollern for dominance by the People’s Party of Whatever-the-Hell majority ethnic group happened to have seized the levers of power in the neighborhood.

In short, they all had the Minorities Problem, only this time the groups’ jealousies and resentments had the blessing of America’s first quasi-fascist national politician, Woodrow Wilson, and his pernicious doctrine of “self-determination.”  For all his posturing as a Deep Thinker and Mr. Cosmos himself in the flesh, Wilson like any other human could not see the world from any frame of reference other than his own.  Of course everyone ought to have the right of “self-determination,” because it had worked so well in the U.S.  Everyone pretty much rubbed along (well, except for that lynching thing across the South and up into Indiana, which Wilson really doesn’t seem to have had much problem accepting) and whether it was the Tammany Democrats or the Boston Brahmins in charge at any particular moment, we all more or less agreed on the rules of the game and we’d self-determined to throw in together.  Hell’s bells; we’d even fought a civil war that decided once and for all that we really had thrown in together and for keeps.

So what could go wrong with transplanting that notion of “self-determination” onto an ethnic mosaic the forms of which had begun to coalesce with the latter days of the Western Roman Empire (there’s a reason “Romania” is nowhere near Italy, guys) and the massive migrations of the next few hundred years?  The Sudeten Germans who had migrated to Bohemia beginning in the 1300s and by the 1900s comprised around a quarter of the total population of ancient Bohemia were simply among the more prominent groups — and more pregnant with mischief.  The Sorbians, a Germanic people who spoke a Slavic language, and who gave names to such places as Drežhdany — “forest swamp dwellers” — which we now know as Dresden, were among the lesser.  Toss in several million Roma and Sinti, Ruthenians, Slovenians, Rumelians, Bulgars, Croats, Ukrainians, and millions upon millions of Jews (Wilson’s high-falutin’ principles don’t seem to have applied to them), mix them in with several centuries’ worth of genuine grievance and several generations of demagoguery, and you’d think anyone with more than just walking-around sense would expect something along the lines of what actually happened.

But not Wilson.  To understand how disastrous Wilson’s influence on history was, you have to understand how nearly universally admired the United States was back then, even among people who couldn’t stand Americans because we were . . . well, we acted like Americans.  [One of my favorite Twain passages is from The Innocents Abroad, in which he describes some American in a Paris restaurant loudly proclaiming himself a “free-born sovereign, sir,” an American, who never dined without wine, sir, and so forth; Twain observed that he failed to mention that he was also a “lineal descendant of Balaam’s ass, but we all knew that without his saying so.”]  When Wilson spoke he did so not as some momentarily-successful politician.  When Wilson spoke he gave words, specific words, to an abstract and idealized Promised Land, a secular Zion for the Gentiles, which millions of people all over Europe looked up to.  Many of them had family members, fellow villagers, friends, or fellow parishioners who had crossed the oceans and sung the praises of the Land of Unlimited Opportunity in writing.  When Wilson began to bloviate it was the same as if in ancient Rome the massive statue of Capitoline Jove had in fact opened its mouth and said, “So let it be done.”

Had Lloyd George or Clemençeau blathered about a bunch of “self-determination,” it would have swirled about the floor a few times then gone right down the drain.  Wilson gave the idea the sanction of Idealized America.

After World War II, that is, after the next round in the fight which Versailles made if not inevitable then something which only phenomenal luck could have avoided, Central Europe solved a large measure of its Minorities Problem.  The minorities got their country asses kicked out, is what happened, frequently on twelve hours’ or less notice.  Ox carts full of possessions (and frequently pulled by their owners, the animals in the span long since having dropped dead or vanished into a cooking pot somewhere along the line), parents slogging along loaded down with pathetic bundles, filthy, emaciated children in tow, their faces bearing the pole-axed look that only violated innocence can show, the corpses of those who could no longer keep up lining the road sides: all those were part of the landscape in 1945-46.  Who has counted the loss?  Who has measured the suffering?  Who today traces the psychic scars of those savage adjustments on the survivors and their descendants?

The EU is no more exempt from the Law of Unintended Consequences than is any other human undertaking.  Its intentional obliteration of barriers to human movement has encouraged exactly that.  And with it is returning the Minorities Problem.  Whether it’s “illegals” in Greece or cheap Polish labor flooding Germany (won’t someone please explain to Germany that fixing their demographic issues is fun?  I mean, guys, c’mon, you’ve got a statistically irrefutable mandate to hop in the sack as frequently as you can and with as little precaution as possible; so shuck them clothes and Get it On), or the Islamization of wide areas of ancient European cities, the tide is setting towards the rocks, once again.

Pray God we may not see Europe visited with Wilson’s legacy once more.

At Least Journalism Isn’t Completely Dead . . . Yet

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Prostitution may be the world’s oldest profession, but its practitioners can certainly no longer claim to be the most supine when at work.  That title has to go to the U.S media, from roughly late 2007 until . . . well, until right about now.

They resolutely buried any and all information that came their way which might have reflected poorly on their Golden Boy, their Great One, the vessel of all their dreams.  And so we bought a pig in a poke.

But a few journalists are finally, less than one week from an election, at the point where they’re willing to look things straight on and call them by their correct names.  The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s headline sums it up:  Benghazi blunder: Obama unworthy commander-in-chief.  As the Blogfather a.k.a. Instapundit, would say, read the whole thing.

The Proof of the Pudding

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. . . being in the tasting, in evaluating the relative merits of the two visions of the citizen-state relationship on offer this coming Tuesday, might we not with profit ask ourselves:  From which of the two systems are people most intimate with it willing to endure the greatest hazards to escape it?

Exhibit A:  China is having a hard time holding on to precisely those people which it must, absolutely must, keep as willing participants in the great adventure that is China if it is to continue to flourish.

Exhibit B:  The Antifaschistische Schutzmauer, better known over here as the Berlin Wall, which up to 200 people died trying to cross between its 1961 construction and its 1989 breach (this ignores those shot elsewhere along the border between the two Germanies).

Exhibit C:  The periodic waves of people fleeing Castro’s Cuba.

You know, I’m not a Deep Thinker, and certainly not one of them Sophisticated Northeasterners, and so I tend to ask real damned simple questions, and to weigh the answers accordingly.  But I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that if large numbers of people are willing to throw everything they’ve ever worked for overboard, if they’re willing to risk being shot, if they’re willing to consign their nearest loved ones staying behind to prison (if they’re lucky), just in order to escape your system . . . then you might ought to think real hard about whether you need to change how you do things.

It Takes a Village

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. . . to sell its daughters into marriage when they’re anywhere from 11 to 15 years old.  One of the girls in this picture series was married off to a man in his mid-20s.  She was eleven at the time of marriage and was delivered to her husband shortly after her 12th birthday, when she still had not had her first period.  She attempted not to consummate the marriage . . . until the village women (way to stick together, sisters!) got after her, whereupon she gave in.  I can understand, just barely, selling a daughter into marriage when the choice is she gets married off to someone who may be able to feed her or she starves at home with you.  Just barely. 

But according to this report “even in good times” a full third of all girls in Niger are married off by the time they’re 15.  According to the lead-in, world-wide among women now between 20 and 24 years old, a full one-third were married off while still children.

The next time one is tempted to condemn the patriarchal, phallo-centric power structure of entrenched dominance &c. &c. &c. &c., in the fashion of those tiresome all-sex-is-rape gas-bags, remind them that pretty much not any of that one-third of the forced marriages of children occurred in a Western country.  And the next time one hears someone gush about “it takes a village,” remember the child in this picture series (she’s no. 5), whose daddy back in the ol’ village has three wives and 23 children, which, you know, just may have something to do with his difficulties feeding them all.  Just sayin’.

But most of all, remember, ladies:  It’s Mitt Romney and all them awful Rethuglicans who are after your lady parts.

The Next Time Talk Turns to Open Borders

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. . . and immigration policy, please do keep in mind that people like Alla Axelrod are also among the people in whose face you spit when you argue that any attempt to keep out swarms of illegals is somehow deeply unfair, nay, racist.

This is the view from someone who lived and grew up in the socialist, re-distributionist utopia that Dear Leader really thinks the U.S. ought to be more like.  These are vignettes from the “single-payer” healthcare system that he and his allies tout.  This is what the ways of the U.S. looked like to someone so fresh off the boat that she spoke almost no English (and having tried to function — even a little — in a society of whose language I spoke almost zero, her coming here, to live and work in NYC, fills me with immeasurable awe).

And these are the thoughts and discussions that are current among those who played the game, honestly, correctly.  Who paid their dues, digging fans for an un-airconditioned NYC apartment from the garbage, digging up a mattress from the same source.  Who walked 16 blocks to the subway through early 1980s NYC dirt and crime.

To pretend that there can be no two good-faith sides to the discussion about immigration policy, about government hand-out policy, about tax policy, about socialized medicine, is neither more nor less than dishonest.  This woman’s intellectual legacy isn’t of patriarchal, dominant-culture, slave-holding exploitation over sundry oppressed minorities on whose necks she and her ancestors stood to enjoy the Good Life.  Her legacy is just about the diametric opposite of that.  Her resentment of shucking out her taxes to fund drug habits and sturdy beggars is not that of someone who’s finally being asked to “pay her fair share” to those whose misery is the foundation of her prosperity.

Disagree with her if you want.  But you cannot dismiss her out of hand.