Category: Uncategorized

Flat myopic

Thomas Friedman unwisely gushes over rebellion in the Middle East:

With Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria now all embroiled in rebellions, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the authoritarian lid that has smothered freedom in the Arab world for centuries may be coming off all 350 million Arab peoples at once. Personally, I think that is exactly what is going to happen over time. Warm up the bus for all the Arab autocrats — and for you, too, Ahmadinejad. As one who has long believed in the democracy potential for this part of the world, color me both really hopeful and really worried about the prospects.

If this was the 1930s, Friedman would no doubt be gushing about how optimistic he is about the new German Reichschancellor, and how remarkably popular Mr. Hitler is with the German people. And we can expect that he’ll soon lose his optimism and start shrieking bloody murder about how the US should invade whichever new Arab democracy first begins rattling its sabres in Israel’s direction.

Like most secular liberals, Friedman wildly overestimates the popular appeal of secular liberalism… when he’s not daydreaming about how useful it would be to be an authoritarian dictator-for-a-day.

Yearning for freedom

Clearly the Egyptian anti-Mubarak movement almost exactly reflects the left-liberal secularism of their most enthusiastic supporters in the USA:

Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahrir Square earlier this month.

After army officers violently cleared the square of protesters on 9 March, at least 18 women were held in military detention. Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges.

It is obviously complete madness to conclude that the Ikhwan has any connection to the mass uprising of democratic people power in Egypt.

GDP growth!

Revised Q4 2010 GDP is reported at 3.1 percent. Which sounds pretty good, until you take a look at the fine print. Imports were actually negative, which is not a sign of consumer strength, but that wasn’t the real indicator of the problem being hidden by the government statistics:

Real gross domestic purchases — purchases by U.S. residents of goods and services wherever produced — decreased 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter, in contrast to an increase of 4.2 percent in the third…. domestic profits of financial corporations increased and profits of nonfinancial corporations decreased. The decrease in nonfinancial corporations reflected decreases in all industries shown, except for small increases in some detailed manufacturing industries. The largest decrease was in wholesale trade.

In other words, the financial parasites are continuing their vampiric depredations on a weakening host. The productive companies are making less money, and the financials that supposedly make things more efficient – and therefore profitable – for them are profiting at their expense. In other words, the banks have learned nothing post-2008, except that they can expect to be permitted to break the law and fail with impunity. So, they are continuing to strangle the capitalist goose that lays the golden egg, with the express written consent of the U.S. government.

The gateway to apostasy

Roissy provides a reason why men should never date vegetarian women… as if it wasn’t already a priori apparent:

I have a theory that the reason grazers react so violently to bacon aroma is because it smells SO GOOD it might tempt them to betray the Gaianist religion for which they have sacrificed so many years in penitential devotion. Bacon is the gateway meat to apostasy.

I don’t have a problem with most freak dieters, having been one myself in the past. But I absolutely loathe vegetarians. As Roissy observes, it’s not a diet, it’s a religion. And a particularly stupid religion at that. Vegetarians are among the only people on the planet who make Scientologists look rational and reasonable.

I think he’s onto something with regards to the bacon thing, however. I was seated next to a vegetarian who hadn’t eaten any meat for five years, but the excellent jambon negra on the start plate provided too much of a temptation for her and after “just trying a bite”, she ended up helping polish the whole thing off.

Don’t marry this woman

Women like this are really out there.

“I’ll come right out and say it: Children repulse me. They frighten me. They make me anxious. Babies all look the same, and they are all ugly. Toddlers are praised for doing ordinary things like speaking and waving. Children have a comment and a question about everything…Each stage of development brings with it new things to annoy me.

Don’t marry this one either.

Fed to hold quarterly press conferences

Apparently they can’t trust the financial media to lie adequately for them anymore. Of course, given the near-complete economic ignorance on the part of the media, it’s not as if Bernanke is going to be facing any difficult, or even pertinent, questions.

Paglia on Taylor

I could not care less about Elizabeth Taylor’s life, loves, or death, but I knew Paglia would have something interesting to say about the death of one of her favored icons:

To me, Elizabeth Taylor’s importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right” is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening — who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman — were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars — a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There’s something almost android about the depictions of women currently being projected by Hollywood.

Now, I happen to prefer very slender women, but I am the only one out of all of my friends who do. They used to mock me for it, so I can’t imagine that they feel significantly different than Paglia does on the subject. But the Hollywood push for what she terms android women is little different than its push for multi-racial couples or multi-ethnic parties. And I have never seen a single black man or woman walking around in the real world with the hipster semi-fro that every token black individual appears to be sporting in television advertisements.

However, Paglia’s tribute to Taylor is also demonstrative of the way in which the first great wave of immigration helped wash away the moral norms of the nation. Taylor’s appeal to an adolescent Paglia shows the direct line from Taylor to Girls Gone Wild and the multimedia prostitutes of Vivid.

It would appear I was wrong

Back in November 2008, just before Obama was elected, I declared: “you know that between Zimbabwe, Kenya, and the Congo, a President Obama is going to invade Africa one way or another.”

But he’s running out of time and obviously Obama is not invading Libya, he is merely engaging in kinetic action there. I’m not sure which is more amusing, all of the usual doubletalk meant to indicate that engaging in acts of war is not warfare or the contortions with which Obama’s most liberal supporters are attempting to excuse their erstwhile peace candidate as he not only continues Bush’s two wars, but launches a third one.

But I know what is more amusing still… the neocons’ new fears that their World Democratic Revolution blueprint, which involves making use of the UN to sideline the U.S. Congress and justify attacking anyone the neocons want to attack, could lead to a US attack on Israel if utilized by the new Arab democrats in the Middle East.

All of which goes to underline the inherent wisdom in pre-WWI American isolationism. Wars may be wildly profitable to some, but they reliably lead to circumstances that are unforeseen by even the most perspicacious profiteers.

Bitch, meet slap

Le Cygne Gris demonstrates that John Case doesn’t know the first thing about Austrian economics, which somehow didn’t prevent him from attempting to critique the theoretical school:

The role of the state in Austrian and now Libertarian theory is more confused than its transparently false propositions on the business cycle. The first Austrian, von Hayek, was actually a social democrat and strongly supported standard social democratic policy on the key role of the state in providing services that were market failures. He differed only on whether the post office should be public or private.

Actually, the Austrian school was founded by Menger, Bahm-Bawerk, and Wieser, so 0 for 1 there.

I am not sure what is more remarkable. The fact that more people are attempting to critique Austrian economics than ever before, or the fact that they think they can do so without so much as cracking open a single work of Austrian economic theory. Of course, based on how little they know about the Neo-Keynesian theories to which they nominally subscribe, I suppose they are accustomed to opining in near-complete ignorance.

The sure tell is a critic mentioning Hayek or Schumpeter. If he doesn’t even mention Mises or Menger, there is virtually no chance he knows any more about Austrian theory than Paul Krugman does.

Mexamerica

It still amazes me that people believe an America that doesn’t look like historical America is going to think or act like historical America, especially in light of all the evidence of past large-scale migrations.

Hispanic students for the first time make up the majority of students enrolled in Texas public schools. The Texas Education Agency reports Hispanic students this school year account for 50.2 percent of the state’s 4.9 million children enrolled in public schools, including pre-kindergarten and early childhood education. Currently, there are an estimated 2.48 million Hispanics students in Texas public schools.

The fact is that 21st century Hispanic Catholics are simply not going to harbor the same allegiance to the concepts of 18th century English Protestants that 21st century English Protestants do… the latter aren’t exactly hard core on the U.S. Constitution, after all. But considering how the Mongol immigrants significantly modified the Russian and Indian societies to which they added their inimitable vibrancy, I fail to grasp why so many people, white and Hispanic alike, believe that an even larger scale Mexican migration won’t have similar effects on what was once historical America.

The world is not small, flat, or digital. Above all, it is dynamic. But change is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad… although if the initial state is far better than virtually any society has enjoyed for most of recorded human history, you are pretty much guaranteed that any change will be for the worse.