Author: VD

Michael Ledeen unexpectedly takes time off from advocating useless wars that are used to justify continued encroachments on American liberties to cite a wise old warning about soft totalitarianism in America:

These extreme cases help us understand Tocqueville’s brilliant warning that equality is not a defense against tyranny, but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom. He summarizes it in two sentences that should be memorized by every American who cherishes freedom:

“The…sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.”

Equality is not only an immaterial fabrication and an abstract concept, it is a monstrous and unnatural ideal primarily of use to those who are attempting to establish themselves at the top of a very unequal pyramid.

If you are a Christian, you cannot rationally believe in equality, except in the belief that all are fallen short of the glory of God. If you are a rational materialist, you cannot believe in equality except for that of the grave. If you are, on the other hand, an irrational materialist like most self-proclaimed rational materialists are, you probably believe very firmly in equality despite the fact that there is almost infinitely more evidence for God and the immaterial than for the idea that two human beings are, or could ever be, equal in any way.

The practice spreads from China and India to Vietnam:

Birth history statistics indicate that the SRB in Viet Nam has recorded a steady growth since 2001. Starting from a level probably close to the biological standard of 105, the SRB reached 108 in 2005 and 112 in 2006, a value significantly above the normal level…. These results suggest that prenatal sex determination followed by selective abortion has recently become more common in Viet Nam.

How fortunate that Oppressive Patriarchy is no longer an issue. I’m sure that the brave new age of Secular Science will be much better for women… assuming, of course, that they’re permitted to live in the first place.

Meredith Levinson writes what is quite possibly the most ridiculous column I have read in the last year, which in this age of Monetarists and Keynesians attempting to get their heads around the ongoing financial crisis, is really rather remarkable:

I’m tired of career experts advising job seekers to “play it safe” online by not posting any photos, opinions or information on blogs and social networking websites that a potential employer might find remotely off-putting. I understand where these career counselors are coming from: They’re in the business of dispensing advice that will help people land jobs. Recommending that people “play it safe” is as anodyne as it gets.

But instead of cautioning job seekers to censor their behavior and the information and pictures they post online, we job seekers and defenders of civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and stop judging our behavior outside of work. What we do, say and believe in our personal lives in most cases has no bearing on our ability to do a job, barring criminal behavior, of course.

This is utterly stupid, and I say that as someone who has been repeatedly warned by other authors that I will never be published by publishers such as Tor due to my personal opinions published on the Internet. But why shouldn’t Tor publish whoever they want? If they want to publish only fiction written by fat feminists and the aging drones that cater to them, that’s their call. It was interesting when, within minutes of my starting a high-profile consulting project last year, a few employees at the company began emailing the management to complain about my political views. That backfired a bit, ironically, because it turns out that in difficult times, amazingly few executives are interested in continuing to pay employees who are more concerned about trying to enforce their personal ideological prejudices than they are about the survival of the company.

It is not only an employer’s right to search online for information about their prospective employees, it is their duty! The fact that Ms Levinson doesn’t like the idea that any pictures she might post of herself exposing her breasts at Mardi Gras or taking part in an interspecies erotica festival in Tijuana could inhibit her future employment possibilities is totally irrelevant. The employee has the right to choose for whom he wishes to work, and the employer has the right to choose whomever he wishes to employ, selected by whatever metric he elects to choose.

But give the woman some credit. At least she had just enough sense to avoid calling for Congress to pass a law prohibiting employers from accessing Google.

The collapse of the Eurofascist dream would be a very good thing indeed:

Economic crisis threatens the idea of one Europe
The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels for an emergency summit meeting designed to tamp down the centrifugal forces unleashed by the global economic crisis that threaten to spin the bloc – and its single currency – apart.

Score one for the socionomists, who have been saying for years that globalization and European unification are merely artifacts of the economic boom. No wonder the globalists are so desperate to revive the corpse of their debt-inflation boom. There may be opportunities for the ongoing economic crises to further their campaign of One Bureaucracy to rule them all, but the crises have also quite clearly upset the notion of an easy, gentle decline into global fascism.

Simon Heffer of the Telegraph is of like mind:

The truth is that Europe has never had so dire a crisis since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Sauve qui peut is the watchword. President Sarkozy has entered a familiarly Gaullist phase, ignoring EU competition policy and pushing through a €6 billion support for the French car industry; other manufacturers, notably in eastern Europe, have protested to no avail. Mr Sarkozy’s assertion that he is not a protectionist is purely rhetorical. When a German minister says that “now is not the time” to let workers from the EU’s former eastern bloc countries have full immigration rights in Germany, he is saying the same thing. Gordon Brown may not be able to ensure British jobs for British workers, but the Germans are determined to keep their jobs for German ones.

This bending of the rules – or rather this wholesale disregard of them – is the surest sign of a currency, and quite possibly an empire, in terminal decline.

I find it very difficult to imagine that the Eurofascists are going to find any utility in forcing a second Irish vote on the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty. In the current environment, one would expect the Irish to vote even more vociferously against surrendering to the bureaucrats in Brussels. And I, for one, would be delighted to see a return to the lira, as the Euro has made la dolce vita significantly more expensive. 80 percent of Greeks want to return to the drachma, and I don’t think that Italian sentiment is far south of that.

UPDATE – It’s increasingly clear that the financial crises are unlikely to improve the European public’s opinion of the European Union: “My friend Hjörtur in Reykjavík sends me a couple of opinion polls, suggesting that there is now a majority against even applying for EU membership. Four months ago, at the height of the financial crisis, 80 per cent of Icelanders were for joining the EU and the euro. Now, that number has halved.”

“These aren’t the advanced skills they’re going to need. They’re going to need the more practical skills, like how to build a shelter from abandoned cars, or learn how to find drinking water by collecting the morning dew in human skulls…. A kid is not going to be able to kill a six-long irradiated beetle by pressing a few buttons. He’s going to have to go in there with an axe and hack, and hack, and hack!”

Fortunately, all the time I’ve been spending on the Wii of late means that I feel quite confident that if the global depression does turn the world into a post-apocalyptic environment, I will be able to drive circles around any mutated lizards, oversized apes, or children in turbo-charged baby strollers.

This is just the beginning. STRATFOR is the first to pick up on what will soon become a continent-wide theme, and no multiculti mantras or bureaucratic Eurobabble are going to dispel it.

STRATFOR can forecast with some certainty that as the economic recession worsens, tensions between native populations and immigrants in Europe will come to the forefront of what is likely to be a restive summer. This is by no means a novel or modern phenomenon. Europe’s geography and the concept of the modern nation-state both lead to a certain logic of violence against minorities that may have been tempered by the taboo of the Holocaust immediately after World War II but is now coming out in the open. Anti-immigrant sentiment is no longer just for fringe right-wing youth groups; it forms the ideological underpinning and electoral platform of some of the most successful parties in some of Europe’s most advanced economies (Switzerland and Austria being cases in point).

Xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment is obviously not exclusive to Europe. The United States, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Kuwait and others all deal with social unrest caused by immigration and manifestations of xenophobia. Europe, though, does have a particularly long and storied tradition of anti-immigrant social unrest, and unlike the East Asian countries, for example, already has immigrants in large numbers within its territories….

Because European ethnic and cultural identities are so entrenched by geography, however, these migrants who are at some point necessary for economic development eventually come up against established identities that at best tolerate them during times of plenty, but turn on them as soon as resources become scarce. For example, neither migrant community just mentioned above exists in any significant numbers now. The bottom line is that foreigners — and often their descendants — are not trusted because they do not belong to one’s own group, the idea being that they cannot be relied upon to place the interests of the host society and culture before their own self-interests or that of their own homeland, culture or religion. Unlike states built through immigration, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, European ethnic identities are today firmly established in the minds of the population.

As I have repeatedly written, I expect forced expulsions of social undesirables to take place in a number of European countries, probably beginning with the Scandinavian nations. The prospect for the worst violence is France, followed closely by the UK, although the Italians have already begun resorting to it. Regarding Italy, if the Mafia and the Camorra are clever enough to align themselves with this popular sentiment, it could easily become another Sicilian Vespers, with the EU, the Romanians, and the Africans representing the French.

The Irish Times has a tongue-in-cheek parody that is based on a false premise, but isn’t actually unsound from a macroeconomic perspective:

Does the woman in your life really need a job? Admittedly, this is not a fashionable question. From Iceland to Australia, men are blamed for causing the credit crunch, while a more feminine approach to finance is proposed as the solution.

Of course there will always be a place in the world of business for exceptional women. Women also have an important role to play in jobs that are too demeaning for men, like teaching. But the general employment of women is another matter. Indeed, working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch by bringing a second income into the average household, pushing property prices up to unsustainable levels. Whether working women actually caused the credit crunch is now a moot point. The point is that removing women from the workforce would mitigate its effects….

It would be ludicrous to suggest that women should be sacked purely to give men their jobs. In many cases, their jobs should be abolished as well. Women are twice as likely as men to work in the public sector. They account for two-thirds of the Civil Service and three- quarters of all public employees.

It’s simply not true that women caused or even exacerbated the credit crunch, (except, of course, for Blythe Masters, the woman who invented the credit default swap), but it’s true that getting rid of three-quarters of the jobs in the public sector would be economically desirable. But the only direct effects from that the entry of middle-class women into the workforce, (lower class women representing about a third of the female population always worked), are lower average wages and reduced productivity. While there were certainly a wide variety of social effects that have had an impact on the economy, such as an increase in the divorce rate leading to an increased demand for housing, they are derivative effects that usually involve one or more additional factors.

Our favorite Nobel Prize-winning neokeyn avoids looking in the mirror:

The sickening feeling of drift — the sense that policymakers are refusing to face hard facts, and are dithering while the world economy burns — just keeps getting stronger.

The amusing thing is that by Krugman’s latest reckoning – it’s the dirty little yellow people’s fault – there’s nothing that the US authorities can really do anyhow, except convince Asian governments to spend money on… something besides the US Treasuries that the US authorities are currently begging them to buy. This makes absolutely no sense, of course, nor does it have much, if anything, to do with Krugman’s previous theories of the crisis, but then, what can an economist do when his economic model is broken. Again.

It’s worth noting in passing that the Age of Irrational Exuberance is officially over. The S&P 500 closed at 700.82 yesterday, well below the 744.38 that inspired Alan Greenspan’s famously feeble admonition of December 5, 1996.

It’s not prophecy when the outcome is completely obvious:

The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy is a big mistake; it is not a panacea. Artificially low interest rates are achieved by inflating the money supply. Low interest rates penalize the thrifty and those who save are cheated. It promotes consumption and borrowing over savings and investing. Manipulating interest rates is an immoral act. It’s economically destructive.

The policy of artificially low interest rates caused our problems and therefore cannot be the solution. The market rate of interest is crucial information for the smooth operation of the economy. A central bank setting interest rates is price fixing and is a form of central economic planning. Price fixing is a tool of socialists and destroys production. Central bankers, politicians, and bureaucrats can’t know what the proper rate should be. They lack the knowledge and are deceived by their own aggrandizement.

This isn’t ideology, Ron Paul is merely telling his fellow congressmen what the facts of life are. The stimulus packagerecovery plan won’t work. It can’t work. It’s dependent upon a deeply flawed economic model.

As long as my masculinity is again being called into question, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to answer a few of the regulars who emailed to ask about what’s been going on in the workout front, particularly about an injury I’d mentioned a while ago. I don’t know if it was age getting the better of me or if it was just my propensity to overtrain, but something deep inside my shoulder had been bothering me for a long time, so I finally listened to Spacebunny and kept my bench under 165 for about a year.

The rest seems to have helped quite a bit; today was my second heavy lift in over a year and the shoulder held up fine without even a twinge of discomfort. It felt great and everything except the very last rep at 270 went up easily. I suspect it will take a while for me to get back where I was, but I seem to have retained a bit more strength than I’d dared to hope. I also have a workout partner 3x per week who is one of those fill-out-the-card types and his mania for always going to the gym at the same time has probably been a good thing too. Partly due to the shoulder injury, which ironically only affected my chest workouts, I’ve been on a shoulder kick for a while now. Here’s what we did today:

Bench
135 12x (warmup)
225 10x
240 8x
255 6x
270 4x (Only got 3. Still too nervous to force any reps)
215 12x

Shoulder press – seated dumbell
50-55-60-65 for 10x-8x-6x-4x

Shoulder press – standing military
45-65-75-85 for 10x-8x-6x-4x

Dips
10-12-12

Shoulder flies
30-25-20 for 10x-10x-10x

Seated curls
Cappucino for 1x