Vulgar and wily

From his "nation of cowards" remark to the preacher's quatation he carried around for years about the sense of race-based kinship he feels with other Americans who are black, to overseeing the hands-off approach to voter intimidation, to the deliberate hiring of radical lawyers for the DOJ, to his refusal to use the term "radical Islam" when asked about it by Rep. Lamar Smith during his House judiciary committee testimony on the Times Square bomber to his feigned ignorance of Fast and Furious, we've long held that Eric Holder is arguably the most horrid member of the MEC's cabinet.

Latest substantiation for this: his war on voter ID laws.

It's been rough in the most literal sense of the word, let alone in more figurative ways

I guess you wouldn't come to a blog called Late in the Day looking for hefty doses of sunshine. Frankly, besides hardcore statists, who have the momentum of the tide of events on their side, do you know anyone who is, here in late December 2011, sashaying through his daily life on a gust of everything-is-going-to-be-dandy-ism? If so, do him or her the kindness of passing along the phone number of a competent therapist.

There are several levels on which we can mark the steady, continued deterioration of Western civilization throughout 2011, and most of them are regularly monitored by specialists in those areas. For the cultural rot that continues unabated, there is Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center. For the hair-raising level of indebtedness and profligate government spending which assures a future worse than that of Greece, there is Mark Steyn and Mike Shedlock. For the advanced stage of the encroachment of sharia and jihad, there's Andrew McCarthy and Pam Geller. For the continued astronomically costly obsession among far too many in our society with the non-existent trouble that "the planet" is in, there is Climate Depot.

What is left that LITD might focus on and in the course of so doing offer some kind of fresh insight?

For all the above aspects of our current juncture, I'd say that a clear sociocultural theme that emerges when one surveys 2011 is a plain breakdown in basic public order.

There was the rash of fast-food-restaurant beat-downs early in the year. There was the near-riot at an Alabama amusement park in June over a reduced-admission promotion. There were the flash-mob robberies of convenience stores. There was the Independence Day riot at a Peoria housing project when some residents decided to put on a large-scale fireworks display and when police moved in to to tell them to knock it off, got the fireworks turned on them. There was the clearly-racially-motivated riot at the Wisconsin State Fair, There was the unrest outside a George Clinton concert in Cleveland. More recently, there was the melee at Minnesota's Mall of America when rumors of Lil Wayne's presence spread throughout a crowd of hooligans.

And that's just the outbreaks of a general kind (although, as I say, some of these situations did indeed have racial overtones).

There were also labor-union conflagrations. The most noteworthy of these was the sit-in at the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison by teacher-union activists that went on for weeks. What a fine example these erudite educators were setting for their young charges by screaming for government largesse that, as Governor Walker tried to explain pretty much every day, simply wasn't there, due to the state's deficit, camping out in the capitol rotunda, and getting forged doctor slips. There was also the shutdown of the Longview, Washington shipping port in September by longshoremen's union thugs.
If one wants to expand the examination of this phenomenon to the West in general, the riots in Athens and London provide ample material.

Then, of course, there is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which brings together a number of elements present in much of the year's mayhem: spoiled white college kids (ironically, there was very little participation by blacks or other ethnic minorities), the dreadlock-tie-dye-bong-and-drum-circle crowd looking for a party, determined socialist operatives who were orchestrating matters behind the scenes, Jew-hating jihadists, and garden-variety drifters who were mainly looking for free meals and girls to molest.

Look back over all the above-enumerated developments (including the ones for which I've included specialists' links) and then ask yourself if the slip in our level of civilization is a mere hiccup - an unfortunate but momentary lowering of our expectations of ourselves as citizens of an advanced society. Is that what it really looks like to you? Or is the re-attainment of the heights we achieved in the middle of the last century less than likely?

I'm not without at least a faint glimmer of optimism. That residual reserve is not based on any evidence that would justify it. It's just that a human being without any hope that some solution to a dilemma he's facing would shut down and collapse in a heap of inertia. Not me. Apparently I'm not there yet, because I can readily say there is a lot of stuff I want to accomplish in 2012.

That said, I'm not operating under any illusions. I - and everyone else with intentions, ambitions, goals and dreams - will be conducting my affairs in an atmosphere best described as accelerated entropy in the year ahead.

The kind of development that sheds light on why the Most Equal Comrade never uses the term "victory" in relation to our struggle against jihad

The MEC has enlisted the Muslim Brotherhood's Qaradawi to mediate secret talks between the US and the Taliban.

That MEC - a real national-security kind of guy.

Elmer Gantry on the deck of the cruise ship

In the course of poking around the Web, I came across a fantastic blog I highly recommend to anyone for whom New Age "spirituality" is a teeth-grinder.

The blogmistress is a delightfully sharp and astringent writer who calls herself - in what should be obvious irony - Cosmic Connie. Her main thrust is exposing the charlatans who take millions of dollars of Americans' money dispensing the most infantile and obvious-to-anyone-who-is-not-desperate-to-find-a-way-out-of-the-consequences-of-their-bad-life-choices hooey and build personality cults on the premise that it is not about them - no, sir, he or she is just the person behind the podium in the hotel ballroom through whom the "entity" comes - but rather about "source energy." Never mind the rock-star adulation pulsating through the room.

Among the other ills that are currently besetting America, perhaps the most alarming is gullability. We are willing to swallow the notion that "channeled entities" - or "received beings," if you'd rather - have some kind of profound gems of insight to hand to us, much like we are willing to believe that Manhattan will be submerged in ten years if we don't switch en masse to electric cars and solar panels, or that food stamps and unemployment benefits stimulate the economy.

As I say, her writing style is funny and provocative, and she does her homework. Check in often, if thsi is an area of interest to you.

Freedom-hatred at the hootenany

Ron Radosh, a former New Left radical who converted to conservatism decades ago, on some aspects of Woody Guthrie's life that are coming to light as we approach the Dust Bowl troubadour's 100th birth anniversary. Specifically, some new substantiation of Guthrie's communist ideology.

Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax - all Communists.

One fact I didn't see in Radosh's piece, but that I knew from my research as a popular music historian, was that Guthrie wrote a column for the Daily Worker in the late 30s called "Woody Sez."

One interesting new bit of information I did get from the piece, though, was that Radosh took banjo lessons from Pete Seeger in the 1950s.

Lurching toward socialism - today's edition

Fred Wszolek at Townhall has a column today on the radicalization of the National Labor Relations Board that puts the lie to any lip service the Most Equal Comrade gives to wanting to see businesses prosper.

It's this kind of thing that has put a damper on any hope I have about Western civilization's prospects

As I've said before, Newt Gingrich is problematic in the extreme. For every time he has given a rousing speech full of all the right cadences and forthright expressions of conservative principle, nailing the urgency of the task at hand, he has made wacko moves of the most unsettling kind.

Such as this. I feel like I know a fair amount about his life, but maybe I need to learn more about how his overall worldview was formed. For a guy who professes to be the embodiment of conservatism, he behaves more like a technocratic pragmatist, pulling "American solutions" from whatever corner if they have some sort of wonky appeal for him. Yet most pragmatists don't swaddle their mishmash of policy recommendations in the kind of grandiosity he imparts to most everything. I mean, to say that Romneycare had "the tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system."?

I realize the Iowa caucus is just days away now, and more primaries come on its heels. One of the second-tier candidates (that would be Bachmann, Santorum or Perry) absolutely must make an irreparable dent in the double-digit lock that the three absolutely horrible candidates (Gingrich, Romney and Paul) have on the first tier.

The United States of America cannot survive another hold-our-noses Republican presidential candidate, even if the election produces solid conservative majorities in the House and Senate. The DNC and the MEC machine are well aware of any fresh signs of vulnerability, such as the above-linked item about Gingrich. The MEC cannot run on his record, but he's not particularly worried about it. If, during campaign stops or particularly during one-on-one debates, he has a dossier on his opponent brimming with examples of inconsistency and Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, he can draw the blood necessary to ensure four more years of "fundamental transformation."

What a nice bunch of folks

25 Nigerian Catholics blasted to bits while celebrating Christmas Eve Mass. Oh, we should probably do what we can to identify the culprits: Muslims.

The LITD Christmas Eve post

This is the first Christmas for this blog. (For any new visitors here, let me quickly brief you: my old blog of five years, Bent Notes, just up and disappeared and no amount of Wordpress support could bring it back.) At Bent Notes, I customarily wrote a Christmas Eve Post.
I don't know that they were anything close to my best stuff as a writer. I generally wound up harping on the remaining doctrinal sticking points in my quest to really understand, and thereby embrace, Christian faith. I do wish I had the entire collection of the BN posts in the "religion and spirituality" category, because there were some nuggets of genuine hard-won insight, and some sincerely grappled-with and precisely articulated points that were still hanging me up.
I think what strikes me most as I compose the first LITD Christmas Eve post is the challenge for someone for whom spiritual inquiry is at the forefront of life's concerns, yet who is untrained in theology, to write credibly about something so big.
I finally get it that Jesus is the only begotten son of the Most High. For years during adolescence and well into adulthood I tidily deemed the Nazarene a "wayshower," in the parlance of the New Thought denominations. Now, after years of approaching the apologetics of C.S. Lewis with the respect and humility that allows for the possibility that he is exactly right, I see that we are talking about a miraculous birth here, not only because of the mother's virginity, but because of who the father was.
It widens one's perspective on the gospels to remember that Jesus, as dvinity incrnate, knew everything. Even when he was kind of playing games with people such as the woman at the well, or various disciples, or even Pharisees, he asked question of others not because he lacked any information, but because he wanted them to see something they hadn't previously seen.
No one else knows everything about you, not your spouse, closest work associate, oldest childhood friend, or dearest sibling. Some of those people do indeed know you very well, and look compassionately on your shortcomings to the degree that they have cultivated a sublime and mature love.
Still, there are recesses of your mind and heart - places where traces of foul, unsavory indulgences of greed, lust, envy and resentment thrive with little or no sunlight - that these people will never know. You know them; you visit them in those stark middle-of-the-night moments after you've run through the next day's to-do list and the week's bills. You and God.
How are you supposed to react in the presence of someone who knows you completely? Before long, you have to ask that someone, out loud or at least mentally, how could you love someone like me?
The only way that someone could indeed love you is to create a way for you in your totality, dark recesses and all, to be okay.
That's what's really going on in the conception, birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's another thing I find myself doing when discussing Christmas the older I get. The whole thing is of a piece. Implicit in the birth are all the other significant aspects of His earthly existence. The cross and the empty tomb can be seen from the manger.
After all, he was God. Right there in three dimensions, tender and mild.

Could this be timed so as to send infidels a message about what they think of cutting and running? Ya think?

At least 57 dead and scores wounded in a wave of attacks across Bagdhad days after the last US troops leave.

An avoidable hose-up that now must be remedied with as little lasting damage as possible

Erik Erikson at Red State on how Capitol Hill Pubs got themselves into the payroll-tax-cut-extension mess and how they must now proceed.

While they do come off as inept, let us remember that principle really is on their side. A two-month extension does nothing to help the economy and causes huge administrative hassles for employers.

Another one of those scenarios that encapsulates the whole MEC regime's blight on America

Michelle Malkin beckons us to take a look at the federally subsidized switch to trendy health foods in the cafeterias of the Los Angeles school district. Upshot: 21,000 uneaten meals are getting tossed each day. The kids want their corn dogs back; they're just not into lentil-and-brown-rice patties and quinoa salad. This story has all the elements we've seen over and over again since this regime gripped America's throat three years ago: fluffy notions of what people would really want to consume if they were exposed to an alternative to the bitter-clinger fare they've always consumed, nanny-state intrusion into American's lives, rampant waste, and sops to organized labor.

This may be madness, but it's where we are.

Regardless of whether the North Korean missile test had anything to do with Kim Jong-il's death . . .

. . . it was pretty clearly a signal to the U.S envoys who attended the China-brokered bilateral talks with NK last week that that business about a moratorium on missile tests was not to be taken literally.

What really happened to the music

I have signed on to a management role at a music website for which I've been a contributing writer since 1999. Its founding was actually an act of prescience; the editors / owners foresaw the tipping of the music industry's balance away from the record label / radio / fan infrastructure including a press establishment / all-purpose management agency model to that of the DIY approach, in which a musical act must be a business organization and a publicity agency as well.

As a writer during this whole period (dating as it does back to the Clinton era), I've seen predictions and forecasts come true and fall flat. I've seen sub-sub-genres come and go. I've seen new models for all the components of the biz - radio, labels, touring, recording, distribution - prove their efficacy and / or fizzle.

Fifteen years ago, such modern-day music-biz conventions as street teams and album release parties were in their infancy. Musical acts still regarded signing with a major label as the pinnacle of their careers. Radio, increasingly in the hands of big congomerates that kept excruciatingly precise data on the consuming behavior of every imaginable demographic comrpising the American - indeed, world - public, was still the arbiter of which music was going to herald current paradigms and stake a rightful claim in the pantheon of timeless classics.

Much literature about the industry's convulsions has been published over that time. While it would be too broad of a brush stroke to declare mass consensus among these numerous books, a theme does emerge to some extent. Authors inquiring into all this generally believe that it is somehow the greed, and resultant short-sightedness of those at the top of these huge recording / concert-promotion / radio organizations that did the old model in, and that the indie model is democratizing everything for both music-maker and listener, and that much exciting artistic activity is taking place even as uncertainty reigns over the whole field.

While the shift from old-line ways to DIY is undeniably dramatic and full of exciting stories such as rock groups suing websites such as Napster, and interim models such as My Space rising and falling in the space of, really, mere months, there is much that hasn't changed at all.

Think about what a beginning musical act needs to consider. It needs to play some shows in the biggest venues possible, give those who become acquainted with it some reason to become familiar with it, and even become fans, and it needs to get some professional recordings made and get those played on appropriate radio stations. Twenty, fifty, seventy years ago, acts delegated much of this to others who specialized in these areas, but the checklist of what needs to be accomplished remains the same.

A lot of how-to articles on sites catering to the indie / DIY sector exhort musical acts to build a fan base with street teams and social-network contact lists and the like. Much of that kind of activity passes on the exhortation in the form of slogans like "Support local music."

Well, just what kind of person in our modern society is really that interested in going out and consuming live music on a regular basis? Who are the die-hard fans of the handful of acts that comprise the music scene in any given city? For that matter, who goes to all these festivals and showcase conferences one sees advertised on indie sites? Is the mortgage-apying parent of three with a demanding career more or less likely to seek out live music on a frequent, regular basis than, say, a single person in his or her early 20s living alone or with friends in an apartment?


I'm aware, given that in my role as an adjunct university instructor in popular-music history I research this stuff, that some of the richest treasures in American music came out of the clubs and ballrooms of Harlem, Beale Street and Watts, the honky-tonks of Texas, the auditoriums and tent shows of the gospel circuit, and the festivals at Newport, Montreux and Monterrey. Furthermore, I'm aware that the venue owners, booking agents and even musicians themselves that made for that era's greatness were often as driven by greed and hedonistic impulses as their modern counterparts.

What was different about that earlier time is really pretty simple: the music was better. Even the most raucous of the R&B or the most rural of the honky-tonk music expressed an implicit awareness that a listener expected basic human dignity to be conveyed in the art being made.

I'm not saying the greed of those clawing their way to the tops of big corporations wasn't a factor. It most certainly was. What happened was that that greed reached a critical mass at exactly the same time that the boomer generation, which made the consumption of music into some kind of statement of self-importance, basically overdosed on the sheer amount of product that was out there. this would have been about the mid-70s, when the market for contemporary musc fragmented and each demographic wore "its" music like a badge. If you were into, say, southern rock, or disco, or heavy metal, or straight-ahead jazz, or fusion jazz, or introspective singer-songwriter music, the industry's infrastructure was there to affirm your keen aesthetic discernment and bolster your sense of self-worth.

Maybe it goes back a little farther. I think of how EMI producer George Martin sweat bullets in the winter of 1966-67 as he acted as the go-between for the record company and The Beatles as that group ran up huge budget overruns and insisted that the Abbey Road studio be available to them at all hours of the day and night. They had arrived, you see. They sat atop the worldwide entertainment field and could basically snap their fingers and get whatever they wanted. At the same time, they were following a pseudo-spiritual charlatan (the Maharishi) and indulging any whim they harbored so much as momentarily.

That's really the story of the whole music business from about then to about 2000 in microcosm. The industry was awash in gravy, and everybody was mainly concerned with self-gratification.

It made for a jaded bunch of people. How were the heads of Warner Music or EMI or Sony in any position to hear - and recognize - something that was of true musica value, that is to say, ennobling, deeply, sonically rich, expressive of recognizable human passions? They weren't. They were too loaded.

So I don't put much stock in those studies of the whole thing that go back, say, thirty years and, because that allows for a discussion of big hits and phenomena such as MTV, Madonna, Prince or Michael Jackson, assert that that was such a different era as to really characterize a different music industry. The fact is, that by that time, the music was nearly all awful. Michael Jackson was awful. Madonna was (and is) awful. Ditto Prince, Metallica, Garth Brooks, whoever. These people rpovided the soundtrack to the arrested development of every living generation of Western civilization.

It's important to mention the confluence of the extolling of informality as a virtue with the collectivist ideological impulse, and to trace the development of that, we may have to go back farther still. The folk boom of the 50s and 60s really just brought what Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax and their associates had been doing for a while to mainstream America's attention. Rock and roll came along at this time as well, and the notion that music need only be a matter of a small vocabulary of chords and melodies played on highly portable instruments such as guitars, took hold on a mass scale. The notion that one ought to be at least rudimentarily familiar with the way musical principles had been codified into notation and theory was going by the wayside. I remember a few years ago doing a phone interview with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls - for the very site I'm now getting more involved with. I asked her about what, during a given day, motivates her to pick up her guitar. "Do you run through some scales to warm up?" I asked. She said she didn't and muttered something about not really beeing a great guitar player. That exchange spoke, and speaks, volumes about the place aesthetic standards has, or doesn't have, in our culture now.

Couple that with the notion that the "folk" ethos, broadly understood, contributed a sense that it was appropriate for popular music to be "topical," to address societal ills. Again, we are back to the late 30s, when the Communist party members and fellow travelers congregating in the Greenwich Village hub of that world were playing labor rallies, and when Communist high-school teacher Abe Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit" for Billie Holiday. Cut to the present, when politics seems to permeate every note of what musicians - both indie and big-shot - play.

So it doesn't matter that now we have Spotify instead of Columbia Records. When you hear the term "music" or see the little icon for it on the toolbar of your web browser, it has the same dreary set of connotations it has had for decades now.

Shifting business models and changing technology are not the core issue. What we should look at squarely, since it's facing us squarely, is a culture in which even something that had, until about forty years ago, been one of the most sublime realms of the human experience, has become a mere orgy of infantile self-congratulation.

Now, I have to scour the music sites for some hot news and trends.

Kim Jong Il, dead tyrant

When an evil person dies of basically natural causes and has been living a life of unimaginable splendor and luxury right up to his passing, it forces us to revisit age-old spiritual questions about a moral balance to the universe and cosmic come-uppance. Does faith, as it's understood by the conventional Judeo-Christian worldview, include as one of its aspects a certainty that eternity is having its justice on such a figure? And is such certainty categorically different from a revenge wish, a fervent desire that that be so?

Of course, there is also the plethora of earthly questions that this event puts before us: smooth succession to Kim's youngest son, or factions within the military having other ideas? Less or greater regional stability? Continuity of North Korea's membership in the worldwide axis of terror and chaos-foment?

And, are the news reports about the entire citizenry of NK being in tears today accurate, or does the regime have a handy bunch of cryers it can trot out for international consumption?

Vaclav Havel, RIP

One of the towering figures in the ongoing stuggle to establish freedom as the default condition of humankind.

Sweet indeed

Senate FHers cave and allow an insistence on the Keystone XL pipeline to be included in the payroll tax cut extension bill.

Now, sign it, Most Equal Comrade.

The normal-people light bulb gets a nine-month extension of its legality

Gotta hand it to those congressional Pubs. They're finding some clever ways lately to legislatively strike blows for freedom.

Let's hope there's still room for a non-problematic rightie

I didn't get to watch last night's Pub prez candidate debate in Iowa (out having 21st anniversary dinner with the Lovely and Talented Mrs. LITD), but I'm glad to hear that Bachmann and Perry turned in good performances. I can't stand the thought that in mid-December 2011 the race has winnowed down to you-know-who and you-know-who.

Balancing the perfect with the doable

A most thoughtful NRO The Corner piece by Jonah Goldberg on National Review's editorial taking the unequivocal position that Newt is not the one. He delves into the matter of individual members of an opinion magazine's editorila staff taking positions that may differ from those collectively expressed under the publication's banner. He has some interesting examples from NR's history that show that this is not a new phenomenon.

Christoper Hitchens, R.I.P.

At age 62, from esophageal cancer.

He was one of those prickly public intellectuals whose love of drink and sensual living matched his passion for words and an insistence on squarely looking at history's lessons for our species. He was more often than not caustic in his writing, but personal friends recount ample evidence of his graciousness and loyalty. As he grew older, he became increasingly difficult to categorize. He remained steadfastly atheist, but was staunchly pro-life. His writings were less likely to appear in The Nation and moreso in publications like the Weekly Standard. He supported the invasion of Iraq.

A force to be contended with by thinkers of all stripes, and one whose contributions will be the subject of debate for years to come.

How pointy-headed, ideologically poisoned Freedom-Haters can construct a dense blanket of layers of cutlural interpretation to justify evil

Consider this feminist college professor who fiercely defends a Muslim woman's right to wear her jihab when she's applying for Canadian citizenship.

There needs to be real change, brought about with requisite urgency

I was pleased to see that Paul Ryan is taking Newt Gingrich to task for Newt's remarks that massive changes to the big three entitlements would be the "imposition" of something the American public would find way too abrupt. Ryan says that such a viewpoint amounts to treating American voters like children.

About last week's much-vaunted EU summit . . .

It didn't solve the continent's crisis and may have made things worse. World markets certainly haven't reacted well.

LITD likes this - today's edition

Elections do indeed have consequences. I'm not sure that, prior to the 2010 shellacking of the Freedom-Haters, one would have seen the likes of this: the Congressional Pubs saying, by way of their vote on a piece of legislation, "Your payroll taxs holiday is actually a decent idea. Tell you what; we'll go for it as long as you sign onto the Keysone XL pipeline and thereby bust loose 20,000 jobs and bring us closer to energy self-sufficiency. Whaddya say, Chief?"

To the MEC and his remaining handful of true believers, this sort of thing makes him look like an enlightened being

. . . but to normal people, "asking for [the drone spy plane that Iran shot down] back" looks like weakness and incompetence that is guaranteed to elcit the mullahs' contempt in response.

The distinctly modern keenness to try to "fix" suffering

Worldviews from Christianity to Buddhism assert the inevitability of suffering. Why does the modern human being search for the elixir that will supposedly eradicate it forever? Michael Knox Beran at NRO looks at what happened to our species's perspective once it had begun to make some material progress, and its suffering was of a different order from what it had been when squalor was a given.

It's not the private sector that has the American public spooked

Per Gallup, the sense that big government is the greatest threat to the nation's well-being is one percentage point shy of the record - and almost half of Democrats feel that way.

How blatant do they have to get?

In case any of you are still being told that it's over the top to call the Most Equal Comrade a revolutionary socialist, the latest bit of evidence you can include in your arsenal of substantiation is his announcement of the formation of an Office of Manufacturing Policy.

Sounds like something wonky technocrats who don't think much about freedom would come up with

The American Society of Civil engineers has issued a report on the nation's infrastructure, and it's full of central-planning advocacy and not much consideration of the cost-benefit ratio.

College students with a clue

John Mearsheimer's own University of Chicago students call, in an editorial in the campus newpaper, for the anti-Israel Jew-hater to resign from the school's faculty.

The EPA has an objection to hydraulic fracking

So much so, in fact, that it is willing to release a draft of a paper that hasn't even been peer-reviewed and is full of "mays" and "probablys."

If your nose detects the odor of an agenda, you have a fine nose.

The high cost of propping up bad ideas

The latest deal to try to save the Eurozone is a classic example of the futility of laws, rules and policies that merely reiterate already-existing laws, rules and policies. ("Hate crimes" legislation here in America is another example of this.) A policy of "All you debt-ridden countries get your budgets balanced or else!" isn't going to do a stinkin' thing to turn Greece or Portugal into viable economies.

The Eurozone was a bad idea from the get-go.

HT: Sense of Events

The thunderous truth, plainly spoken

Representative Allen West R-FL on the MEC's obsesssion with "fairness."

An encouraging development

Bachmann and Perry are the latest Pub prez contenders to take a pass on the December 27 debate to be moderated by The Donald.

Here's the LITD take on the whole matter: Donald Trump is a vulgar, solipcistic huckster utterly lacking in a core set of principles beyond what he sees as the value of going through life in as hard-nosed a way as possible. He can't utter five sentences without promoting himself and talking about how fantastic and successful his empire is. He has no understanding of what really makes America great. He is the exception to the rule that allows leftists to trot out an Exhibit A example of a "greedy businessman." And the Republican party should avoid him like e boli.

Nihilism dolled up as unicorns and rainbows

Matthew Hennessey at First Things has penned a marvelously written and spot-on insightful essay on the darkness at the core of John Lennon's spirituality.

Here's how you deal with FHers

Darrell Issa puts Eric Holder on the hot seat and sears his tail end good and proper.

It's the whole way the Consumer Protection Financial Agency was fashioned that is the problem

And that's why Pubs gave a thumbs-down to Richard Cordray today.

The thunderous truth, plainly spoken

Representative Allen West R-FL on the MEC's obsesssion with "fairness."

How's this for chilling? - today's edition

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, ostensibly an impartial enforcement agency within the Department of Justice, ostensibly an impartial cabinet-level arm of the executive branch of the federal government, was, according to documents obtained by CBS (that Sheryl Atkisson is doing a heroic job of bringing all this to light), using Fast and Furious as a tool to sway Congressional and public opinion to favor a new gun regulation called Demand Letter 3.

The excitement level for this seems to be pretty much at the bottom of the graph

Tomorrow's EU summit to try to save Europe from economic collapse, that is. Merkel is dampening expectations, and Cameron is saying, "If you people want us to sign on to big changes, we will insist on a quid pro quo that will be outside your comfort zone." (My paraphrasing.)

The more the MEC doubles down on the freedom-hatred . . .

. . . the more America resists it.

It's not an "extraneous measure"; it's very much of a piece with the payroll tax cut extension

That extension, and inking the deal on the Keystone XL pipeline are both economy-boosting moves, and it makes perfect sense to have them in the same bill.

Now, Congressional Pubs, stick to that position. Do not waver. This is the perfect fight to pick with the MEC and the Freedom-Haters.

The MEC has no serious interest in preserving Western civilization

When the Senate was ready to go with some sanctions against Iran that actually had some teeth, he backed away.

Worth pondering - except that, if you basically come from a LITD-type point of view, it will depress you

Yuval Levin, at NRO's Corner, says that the choice between Newt and Romney is not an ideological one, that they are both moderates - in LITD lingo, Reasonable Gentlemen - and that the way for Pub voters to decide between them is on the basis of temprament.

Yuk. I want a principled rightie. Western civilization is done for with anything less.

How's this for chilling?

This whole nation - left, right and center - was so alarmed by 9/11/01 that it went along with the creation of a new cabinet-level department to address homeland security, in spite of the largely-borne-out misgivings about ponderous bureaucracy, silly procedural doo-dah, outright invasion of privacy of citizens who come nowhere near meeting the profile of a radical Muslim terrorist, and, of course, cost. We wanted to be safe against this new breed of fiercely determined, wily, ever-flexible, hate-filled Muslim terrorist plotting against us.

Well, check this out: under the MEC regime, it is reviewing procedures to see how they fare when measured against "environmental justice" criteria.

These people have dog vomit where their hearts and brains should be.

For that last remaining few of you who think it's over the top to say we have a revolutionary socialist for our current president

Exhibit A: The Most Equal Comrade's speech today in Kansas.

Because the MEC regime wants to be sure of the support of this particular voting bloc . . .

. . . it will grandstand on the world stage, via the State Department's singling out of gay, lesbian, bisexual (I've always wondered how a person could determine he or she was in this category without having multiple intimate relationships, either simultaneously or serially, to see if her or she liked them equally) or "transgendered" (Notice how rapidly this awkward, recently-fabricated term has made it into the mainstream of our lexicon, and created a whole demographic out of people who "just feel like they are the other gender") as a beleagured minority whose treatment it will police the world wide. As the linked article points out, shall we anticipate that it will be so vigorous in pursuing respectful treatment of Coptic Christians and Jews?

This oughta be good

Occupy San Francisco is starting its own financial institution: The People's Reserve Credit Union. Plans to hire and makes loans to homeless people.

Oooookay.

Cooking the books on sea level trends

Dr. Nils Axel Morner of the International Union for Quaternary Research gives the IPCC a sound smackdown for falsifying satellite altimetry in order to try to show a rise in sea levels in the past few decades.

Yet more evidence that climate science is a hopelessly corrupted field.

As if SecDef Panetta's bash-one-of-our-best-allies diatribe wasn't enough . . .

. . . along comes the MEC regime's ambassador to Belgium, saying that modern antiSemitism results from supposed Israeli intransigence in its dealings with the Palestinians.

These people clearly harbor a basic antipathy toward Western civilization.

"Back to the damned table" to discuss what and with whom?

Leon Panetta has picked a strange juncture in the unfolding of events in the Middle east to demand that Israel exhibit an even more appeasing attitude toward those bent on its destruction.

One less contender

So the Hermanator makes it official.

As I said in my most recent post about him, he is at least guilty of really poor judgement. Several people who know him well still refuse to believe he has ever engaged in sexual shenanigans, and I'd still like to believe that that's the case. His story is that of someone who knows how to summon the highest levels of character, and has done so on a regualr basis. It's also obvious that he really embraces, and has a zeal for defending, the principles of conservatism. Of course, as we've seen more than once, a person's - particularly a man's - libido can operate concurrently to a fealty to principles and win out in a contest for the person's willpower.

He's not done as a public figure. I'm sure he has books, columns, and probably a resumed radio-host gig in his future.

What's going to be sad and disgusting in the extreme is the sewage flood of vitriolic gloating that will inevitably stink up Facebook and the comment threads at just about any column, article or blog post about the man. That's just where we are as a society.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent . . .

. . . but the labor force participation rate also fell, from 64.2% to 64%.

In other words, 315,000 more people gave up looking for work.

When you hear someone singing the praises of a planned economy, check your ammo supply

I gave some thought to taking on Andy Stern's WSJ column on the Chinese economic model, but Bookworm Room has administered a smackdown at least as effective as any I could have come up with.

Staying one step ahead of the Freedom-Haters

McDonald's came up with an impressive end-run around the Happy Meal ban in San Francisco: tack an extra dime on the price, so that the toy is a purchased item, not a gift.

Of course, the food totalitarians are outraged, saying that "the point was not for corporations to find more clever ways to circumvent the law."

These people never stop until they are defeated.

It doesn't increase the sum total of productivity anywhere in the world by one tiny bit

Kevin Williamson at NRO says that the Fed's move yesterday - lowering the dollar-financing costs to European banks - still does not satisfy the first law of economics: the money has to come from somewhere.

Sounds about right to LITD

The UK orders Iran to close its embassy and all Iranian diplomatic personnel to get the hell out of the country within 48 hours.

A great refutation of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

I was greatly heartened to see Thomas Sowell's resolute smackdown of Michael Medved's recent Townhall column in which Medved said that that Pubs must nominate a centrist candidate to defeat the Most Equal Comrade next year. Sowell looks at a number of past races in which principle clearly trumped mushy stand-for-not-much-of-anything-ness.
Medved is irritating at least as often as he is insightful, and it's gratifying when he's called on it. Especially by a towering intellect like Dr. Sowell.

"Whole lotta not perfect here"

Ladd Ehelinger, blogger, filmmaker, and talk show host, who is a principled conservative, has had substantial fact time with Herman Cain and believed in him long after many another rightie pundit had soured on the Hermanator phenomenon, is now officially through with him. The lawyer's statement on the latest claim (the 13-year affair) seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

How about me? As painful as it is to admit it, I think it looks like a case of a guy's libido being far stronger than his principles. Might be able to keep a radio-host career from sinking under such weight, but a presidential run at a time when uncompromised seriousness is a requisite? Uh-uh.

At war with the West since 1979

Iranian "students" storm the British embassy in Tehran.

"The worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history"

The MEC finally sinks lower than Jimmuh.

The political twilight of Mr. Pay-for-Play

The editors at NRO say that Barney Frank will be remembered for three things. Read what they are here.

Green-ism: going the way of all dead religions

Great Bret Stephens piece in the WSJ about how radical environmentalism, like Zoroastrianim and Greek Zeus-worship before it, is croaking from its own implausibility.

Oh, sheesh - today's edition

Now the IMF is looking at bailing out Spain and Italy with loans at well below their actual cost of borrowing.

Keep in the forefront of your mind the fact that the US contributes 45 percent of the IMF's money. Also the US government's 15 trillion dollar debt.

The money has to come from somewhere.

No doubt about it; the guy has perfected the art of chillin'

No state of the world too crisis-intensive to keep the MEC from taking in games, playing games, and pounding the hot dogs.

Euro deathwatch - today's edition

British Foreign Office drawing up plans to come to the aid of expats when the euro collapses, which it pretty much now sees as inevitable.

I can tell you what it is

What's behind the Black Friday mayhem this year? The same breakdown in public order we've seen in the flash mob robberies, Occupy Wall Street occurences, state-capital stormings by public-sector union thugs, and the general filth that passes for entertainment these days. We're clearly a less civilized society than we were 50 years ago.

What it would really take

A new Mark Steyn column that really only covers new territory in the sense that it's written at the end of a week in which the West's economic prospects grew palpably dimmer.

I haven't seen any comments on comment threads - or columns by lefty or just plain jaded pundits - saying "Isn't Steyn aware that his doom schtick is wearing a bit thin?", but I'll bet they're out there. I have seen some - both comments on threads and reason-to-be-optimistic pieces by well-credentialed rightie pundits - countering his outlook with one that focuses on celebrating that time-tested can-do American spirit. Victor Davis Hanson and John Podhoretz come to mind in this regard.

The glaringly undeniable truth, however, is that Steyn has the numbers on his side. The US government is spending at twice the rate it's taking in money, and even the best proposals put forth so far are, as he says in a sinking-ship metaphor, arguments about whether to use a thimble or an egg cup to address the situation.

If there is anything truly fresh in his latest column, it's this uncomfortable truth: that even if we elect the coolest, most Reaganesque Republican president this nation could come up with next November, he or she would not be able to enact the kinds of policies necessary to stave off a descent into Somalia-level chaos because the American people no longer have the maturity to say to themselves that such policies are necessary.

And the options only get more stark as we put this off another hour.

Euro death watch - today's edition

Italy's cost of borrowing at a record 6.5 percent.

It's just not so

Great American Thinker piece by Randall Hoven that puts the lie to the notion that our current debt / deficit crisis is due to "Bush's wars" or any kind of Pub spending spree in the last 50 years.

Euro on "death watch"

Weaker than expected - by a whole lot - demand for German debt at Wednesday's bond auction.

It's an ideological cause and not a scientific inquiry to these people - today's edition

Climategate 2.0 - a new flurry of e-mails among Michael Mann, Phil Jones and the other leading climate-change hucksters - is upon us.

It's about time

NBC apologizes to Michelle Bachmann for the Jimmy Fallon fiasco.
The layers of cultural rot in this episode are myriad, going back at least to the fact that some rock band called Bonefish back in 1988 thought it was clever to title a song "Lyin'-ass Bitch," and right up to NBC's delay in apologizing, which indicates to me that there is an element at the network that really didn't want to, because it is so consumed with hate for those who champion freedom and decency.

The harvest of Arab Spring

The Egyptian military cuts a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to speed up the election process.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Freedom-Haters never intended for the supercommittee to achieve anything, grand or modest. The whole point was to stock up on more class-envy ammo for their socialist revolution.

There are still those who get it

. . . such as Lech Walesa.

The MEC's damage to America, by the numbers

Poverty rate, housing prices, unemployment rate both literal and U6, length of unemployment, inflation rate, debt, deficit and more - a comparison of January 2009 and now.

What killed the supercommittee?

The Freedom-Haters' insistence on seizing ever more of productive Americans' assets at gunpoint, of course.

Not a great time for this to happen

Two CIA espionage rings, one in Lebanon and one in Iran, have been busted. I shudder to think of what those guys are being subjected to along about now.

The MEC sees no political value . . .

. . . in actually getting involved in the messy process of trying to resolve the nation's debt / deficit crisis.

He's nowhere to be found when the Simpson-Bowles Commission submits its recommendations or the current "supercommittee" would welcome a little executive-branch input - beyond the class-envy / social-justice bromides he dispenses in his Saturday-morning radio addresses before he heads out to the links or the ice-cream shop.

Even Chris "Thrill-up-the-leg" Matthews has had it with the MEC's inaccessibility to Congress.

Two words: time frame

So the US, Canada and the UK are to unveil a new round of sanctions against Iran, targeting its ability to refine petroleum into gasoline, among other measures.

But then there is the cold hard fact that we have months at best for any such measures to stop Iran from the point of no return, and there is still the matter of Russia's and China's intransigence.

History is beginning to render its verdict

Another entry in the ongoing societal conversation about the erosion of maturity. This Walter Russell Mead essay at The American Interest focuses on the countercultural ethos and how pervasively it infected the boomer generation, which, in comparison to the contributions of generations of the past several centuries to human progress, doesn't add up to much.

Well, then what does hydrate a dehydrated person?

Here's a story that combines all - or at least most - of the elements that point to the demise of Western civilization: bureaucracy that permeates every last aspect of human life, nanny-state-ism, technocratic blindness to common sense and the patently obvious, and preoccupation with the silly while real crises go completely unaddressed.

See eif you're not embarrassed for your species after reading it.

The untethered man-child

There has been an abundance of examination of the erosion of maturity in our society. Joseph Epstein's 2004 essay for Commentary entitled "The Perpetual Adloscent" contributed much to the conversation, as did Diana West's 2007 book Death of the Grown-Up.
Pundit & Pundette weigh in with a link-rich post on the subject. It specifically looks at the modern status of marriage as a superfluous institution as a major factor.

The world's most ubiquitous musical statement

A muscian friend of mine posted this on Facebook. What a hoot.

File this one under "He doesn't really expect you to believe what he's saying"

Harry Reid says that the flurry of regulations that the MEC regime has imposed on the business world don't harm the economy. Did he consult the Small Business Administration or the Heritage Foundation before he opened his pie-hole?

Relax and have some pumpkin pie

This is one of those stories that points up why I am a conservative and not a libertarian. Conservatism has three pillars: free-market economics, a foreign policy based on what history tells us about the behavior of nation-states ("strong defense" for shorthand) and a fealty to the essence of Western civilization ("traditional values" for shorthand).
Conservatives are often taunted by those who aren't with scenarios along the lines of, "Hey, you guys with your purist free-market stance asked for Lady Gaga and cage fighting. If that doesn't fit with your cultural principles, that's up to you to deal with."
Well, along comes a story with similar implications. It seems a young man who works for Target was scheduled to clock in at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is very special to him. He propsed to his fiance on Thanksgiving last year and her family was most excited to have him at the table this year. Alas, he'd have to spend the day sleeping if he adhered to his Target schedule.
Target, like a lot of store chains, is opening earlier for the holiday shopping season earlier than it ever did.
Enough, already.
Yes, I am aware that these companies are excited about the prospect of recouping profits they have not seen much of during a dismal year. But the whole point of human prosperity is to enable us to enjoy life, and the richest sense of the phrase "enjoy life" presupposes time spent with loved ones commemorating special occasions, engaging in rituals that express thanks to the Creator, laughing, eating the bounty of the harvest.
You cannot, in the end, have a truly vibrant economy in a society full of disspirited, empty automatons manically selling and buying an endless stream of gadgets, apparel and vulgar amusements. A free market uncoupled from a moral foundation will not last.
The young man has drafted and sent around a petition imploring Taget to keep Thanksgiving sacred. LITD likes this.
A Target spokesperson said that the young man is not currently scheduled to work on Thanksgovong or Black Friday. That's encouraging, but a bit tepid. It's corporate-public-relations-speak for "We don't want any bad publicity, so we've changed the guy's schedule in hopes that this will all go away quietly."
Here's a novel question: Would we all not perhaps prosper a bit more - in the richest sense of the term - if we as a society slowed down enough to savor the specialness of days like Thanksgiving and the opportunity it offers for us to reflect on what we truly need, and thereby see more clearly what we don't?

Think about it; we have at least one Supreme Court justice who is on record as hating basic human freedom

Kagan gets all wet in the britches over the passage of FHer-care.

Whether this rises to the level of meeting the criteria for recusal, it ought to leave all Americans horrified.

I smell the desperation of good, principled people

Boehner, Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan are speaking favorably about the proposal put forth by the Pub side of the Supercommittee. It includes what cannot be construed as anything but a tax increase, and for that reason, at least Perry and Gingrich among Pub prez candidates oppose it.

Steady nerves and steadfast adherence to your principles, guys. The Freedom-Haters would love nothing more than to make you blink.

I didn't elect this technocratic one-worlder to anything and I'll be damned if he's going to get his hands on my wallet

UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon implores that august body's member nations to set up a world-side fund to address climate change.

Time to keep a watch out for US government officials who speak in favor of indulging him in this.

This is especially galling in light of the fact that more facts refuting the warmist fraud come to light all the time.

Now, this is a lovely development

Hours after cops removed the OWS sub-humans from Zucotti Park, the National Lawyers Guild - a Communist front organization - obtained a court order to let the snot-nosed ingrates return.

Dan Carol is none too keen on Steven Chu

. . . per a February e-mail the former MEC campaign staffer sent to various West Wing offices regarding the deep you-know-what that the Department of Energy was tepping in with its loan guarantee program.

Just when you think the Most Equal Comrade can't sink to any disgustingly lower depths

He tells a group of US corporate executives that they've become "a bit lazy" about aggressively marketing America as a great place to do business.

This, from the socialist thug who has overseen more taxation and regulation of American business than any administration of what was until 2009 the United States of America ever imposed. This, from an utter phony who never had a job with an organization that made anything of any value to anybody.

He must go, the instant it's possible by Constitutional means.

Nigel gives 'em an earful

Nigel Farage, who represents southeast England in the European Parliament, lets that august body know what is at the root of the continent's cornucopia of crises.

Completing the process of our conversion from free human beings into docile cattle

Consider the spirit in which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created - what kind of person champions it and what kind of person has been nominated to run it.

Political calculation beats a desire to free up ready-to-go normal-people energy

It's pretty evident to anyone who cares to see that the MEC's decision not to decide on givign the go-ahead to the Keystone XL pipeline until - oh, maybe sometime around late November 2012 is based on a desire not to ruffle the feathers of his green base. But if developments in the Arab / Muslim world have an upward effect on the price of oil between now and then, it could turn out not to be so advantageous after all.

Layer upon layer of civilizational rot

Which layer represents the rot's most advanced staged? The act(s) that Sandusky performed on the boy(s) he overpowered? The silence of witnesses? The attempts by Paterno and the school administration to make the whole thing go away quietly? The rioting by entitlement-mentality students who felt gypped out of getting to go to a school with a legend for a football coach?

We have descended so far from such now-seemingly-innocuous harbingers as "no shirt no shoes no service." The gossamer-thin partition between human nobility and the chaos of unbridled savagery may have frayed irreparably.

Talk about a fox in the henhouse

Shortly before the Port of Oakland was shut down by OWS radicals, a new port authority commissioner was sworn in. His latest professional position? He had succeeded Van Jones as the head of the revolutionary Marxist Ella Baker Center.

Regardless of how the state-run media organs and the regime's minions try to paint him, he's a principled champion of freedom and prosperity and a success at implementing those principles

They can butcher Rick Perry's recent New Hampshire speech until there's no context left and they can try to make last night's debate gaffe into some kind of fatally pivotal moment, but they can't make him quit his run for the presidency.

A major smackdown for FHer-care

Tom Blumer at PJ Media says that while Ohio's ballot issue number two, which opened public-sector organized labor back up to collective bargaining, got the lion's share of the lamestream media coverage today, issue three, which hardwires the assertion that no one can be made to buy a product as a condition of citizenship in to Ohio's constitution, was at least as noteworthy, probably more so.

LITD likes this

A coalition of small businesses and trucking-related trade associations is challenging the EPA's greenhouse-gas emissions regulations for trucks.

The dubious-credibility spectre is back to being weighted toward the accuser side

Since last we posted about Herman Cain's sexual-allegation firestorm, two new accusers have come forth. The one making the rounds this morning is apparently turning out to be lazy, whiny and opportunistic and not above ruining people's reputations to ensure her own gravy train.

The fifth accuser seems to fall into the category of a political-correctness policewoman, who is trying to make something unsavory out of a dinner invitation at a business convention in Egypt nine years ago.

We haven't heard so much about campus and workplace speech codes lately, and their expansion to include facial expressions and voice inflections, but that kind of tyrannical micromanaging is clearly still prevalent.

What time is Cain's presser today? I have a lot on the plate, but I'd sure like to tune it in.

The difference between a leader trying to preserve Western civilization and decadent caretakers of nations in steep decline

The live microphone gaffe that caught the MEC and Nicholas Sarkozy bad-mouthing Benjamin Netanyahu speaks volumes about our prospects. I used to think that Sarkozy was a man of principle, particularly in comparison with the MEC, but this episode indicates to me that he has no more sense of what we are about to lose than any of the other clowns who preside over failing Western nation-states.

Would he care to explain what he thinks Netanyahu lies about? Would he care to identify this element of the Palestinian political spectrum that is supposedly cool with Israel's survival as a Jewish state?

The hour is fast approaching when the courageous prime minister of Israel is going to be the last person among Western leaders to make any kind of a substantive move to save the bacon of the whole sorry lot of them . . . the whole sorry lot of us.

How's this for a sign of Western civilization's advanced stage of rot?

An Arab news outlet reporting on a Chinese official's dressing down of the European welfare state for promoting indolence.

LITD likes this idea

A group of big rightie bloggers has launched a new site, Not Mitt Romney.com.

The point of no good options

Israel seems to have all but decided to pre-emptively attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Thirty years of looking the other way, various types of sanctions, and diplomatic overtures have not lessened the danger from the most threatening regime in the world, and now it's crunch time.

Forty years of rot

Brian Calle at the Orange County Register looks at the changes in American culture that really insinuated themselves circa 1970 and, over the years since then, have wrought a government behemoth education complex that is eroding the foundations of our society.

Why we call them Western civilization-haters - today's edition

What the hell is up with the MEC regime nixing FDR's D-Day prayer from the World War II memorial?

Inquiring minds want to know

The House of Representatives has subpoenaed the White House to turn over documentation about regime contacts with failed play-like energy "company" Solyndra.

What the hell is up with . . .

. . . the mayor and city council of Oakland expressing support for and solidarity with Burn Down America, aka Occupy Wall Street?

The voters of Colorado decide that "do it for the children" is not a good enough reason to acquiesce to having more of their assets seized at gunpoint

A statewide referendum to increase taxes to increase education funding goes down in flames.

There's not enough money

Cato Institute scholar Gerald O'Driscoll serves up the most understandable explanation of the European fiscal crisis I've seen - as well as its implications for us over here on this side of the Atlantic.

A willingness to forfeit one's very humanity

Great Andrew Klavan piece at PJ Media called "What Leftism Does to People".

Why we call them Freedom-haters - today's edition

San Fran Nan tells CNBC's Maria Bartiromo that the government should have the power to shut down non-union plants.

Not so fast - today's edition

Remember last week when everybody got positively giddy about the latest deal for bailing out Greece?

Well, today, financial markets around the world are tumbling on news that Greece will hold a referendum on whether to go with the deal.

Doesn't pass the smell test

Nearly always, when a politician is accused of sexual misconduct, either it immediately and obviously fits the person's overall character and personality, or does so after a bit more about the person comes to light. In the case of the Hermanator, though, the reason these charges that came to light in a Politico article last night seem unlikely at best and more probably impossible is that they are so utterly at odds with what we know about the man.

Two more green firms run out of your money

Beacon Power and Nevada Geothermal Power, recipients of federal loan guarantees like Solyndra, are not making it financially. Beacon is filing for bankruptcy and Nevada Geothermal is probably close behind.

Not so fast

Richard Muller of UC Berkeley, got FHers of the green variety all - go ahead and wince at the pun - hot and bothered last week with some interviews and a WSJ piece claiming that the team on which he's been co-leader for the last couple of years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team, had determined, using methods such as weighting data more heavily toward dry land temperature fluctuations, that the globe is indeed warming rapidly. Claims the findings had converted him from sceptic to believer.

Now his Best co-leader, Judith Curry, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Insitute of Technology, says that he obscured the data everybody's known for some time, that there's been no warming in the last ten years. She and others are also disparaging his having gone to the mainstream press before publishing his conclusions in a peer-reviewed journal. Also, several people who would chime in with objections are bound by confidentiality agreements.

So up with the floodlights and thermostat.

Let's start the week with a little ray of light

This is an uplifting story in a world that could use some uplift. An Afghan woman has opened a bowling alley in Kabul and in the month it's been in operation, it's a hit.

Our enemies smell weakness - today's edition

Thirteen US troops dead in a Taliban attack on a NATO convoy in Kabul.

Wahhabi Muslim attack on US embassy in Sarajevo.

Iranian Navy commander reiterates his country's intention to deploy ships near the maritime borders of the United States.

Al-Qaeda flags showing up all over Benghazi in Libya, including atop the courthouse.

More outrageous by the hour - today's edition

The MEC regime is pressing ahead with more solar-energy activity, even as the Solyndra scandal widens.

The Department of the Interior has identifed seven sites in Western states - sites no private investors were interested in - for conducting solar-panel research.

there is no money for this. Why is the regime choosing winners and losers in the energy marketplace by doing this while it holds up permits for fossil-fuel exploration?

Hustling offense may be a sleazy way to make a living, but I guess it puts chow on the table

This post covers one of those stories you may well have already seen elsewhere: the D.C. Human Rights office's investigation (which is going to take six months; what's up with that?) into Catholic University not providing a prayer-and-contemplation space for Muslim students that is free of Christian iconography.

Apparently this righteous-indignation-hustling attorney who filed the complaint has an obsession with causing hassles for CU. He has filed previous suits regarding alleged discrimination against women and homosexuals.

The obvious question that arises is "What the hell are Muslims doing at a Catholic school?" If the answer is something like "It has programs and departments that particular Muslim students want to enroll in that aren't available at most places," well, the obvious rejoinder is, "Hey, all life's a trade-off, Mustafa. You want that program? Here are the conditions."

A bracing 7 AM splash of cold water

I had the pleasure of addressing the local Sunrise Rotary Club this morning. Here's a transcript of my remarks:

Thank goodness for my blog. It permits me to address, one by one, specific issues and developments on the national and world stages at leisure. Well, maybe not leisure. After all, I call it Late in the Day in order to convey some sense of the urgency of our juncture as a civilization.

I have to approach my opinion column for The Republic somewhat differently. Since it only appears every six weeks, I feel like each installment should be as comprehensive a snapshot as I can take of the economic, cultural and geostrategic state in which we find ourselves. There is no aspect of that, it seems to me, that can be given short shrift.

History shows us that there is always an ample supply of pressing, and distressing, developments on humanity’s plate. Clearly, though, there are periods in which they are piled particularly high. I am firmly convinced that, in the 56 years I’ve been traipsing this globe, I have never seen such a towering mountain of peril.

I’ve concluded that the terms “grown up” and “civilized” are at least largely synonymous. If you think about the traits one ascribes to someone fitting either description, there is a lot of overlap. “Wisdom,” “initiative,” “dignity,” “self-restraint,” “loyalty,” “logic,” “refinement,” and “ability to see one’s long-term best interest” are common to both characterizations, are they not?

And collectively, we have descended from our peak of each. Indeed, we have fallen far. We have fallen so far that Western civilization probably won’t last much longer.

I wish I could accurately be accused of hyperbolic alarmism in making such an assertion. I’d rather be brought up short for shortcomings as a cultural observer than to experience what I am going to experience as the decline becomes exponential.

Because a twenty-minute talk sports similar constraints to a once-every-six-weeks, 600-word column, I won’t delve into the arcane details of any one front of our current predicament, which might, as the clock ticks, be done at the expense of others that are equally important. You’re all smart people. You’ll get it if I employ some shorthand for each of them.

The economic front: Greek taxi driver riots in the face of austerity measures to get another round of still-inadequate bailout money. 45.75 million Americans on food stamps. US federal debt growth in the last three years that took from 1776 to the mid-1990s to achieve the first time.

The cultural front: Lady Gaga performing for a former president. Jersey Shore. Transgendered bathrooms. Occupy Wall Street. Channeled-entity seminars. Speech codes.

The geostrategic front: Iran’s nuclear program. Continued North Korean extortion tactics in talks about its nuclear program. Pakistan’s ISI’s involvement in attacking the US embassy in Kabul. The Islamist character of the Arab spring. Hezbollah training facilities in Venezuela.

Once one begins unpacking just about any of these phenomena, it becomes plain that there are implications on several fronts.

The Solyndra bankruptcy makes for a fine case in point. I remember helping to install a solar panel on a vegetable-drying shed at a hippie commune in Tennessee in the summer of 1980. By then, there was a confluence of such factors as the whole get-off-the-power-grid / ascribe-cosmic-significance-to-sunlight / Mother Earth News / sustainability impetus, as well as the alarmism spawned by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Erlich’s population predictions, as well as the New Left notion that there was some kind of monolithic power structure behind society’s industrialization. At that point, solar panel-ism, which I’m using as shorthand to also include wind turbines and biofuels, wore the smiley face of the pony-tailed hammer-swinger in the backwoods, whistling his day away providing for his family, which, according to him, consisted not just of spouse and offspring, but all the inhabitants of his collective farm. Then came the fraudulent notion that “the planet” was in some kind of dire trouble, rapidly cooling or warming or flooding or drying up. Big-money investors in enterprises that were going to make this stuff on a mass scale, as well as a United Nations panel and several university research institutes devoted to perpetuating this fraud, pushed the idea on the public that it was urgent to sign on to alternatives to fossil fuel. Now we’re at the point where ridiculously inefficient solar panels, hybrid cars and wind farms get propped up - have to get propped up in order to survive day-to-day - by federal subsidies. And that paves the way for good old-fashioned cronyism on a large scale not only distorting the market value of every kind of energy, but lining the pockets of ambitious politicians with madly utopian aims. In the Solyndra case this was exemplified by investor George Kaiser, who visited the White House numerous times around the time that the Department of Energy cut loose the government guarantees for Solyndra. Then there’s the ever-more-stringent EPA regulations on matters that ought to be between consumer and producer, such as mileage standards for vehicles, not to mention the wince-inducing spectacle of vehicle and engine makers obsequiously acquiescing to the leviathan state’s demands.

It’s all based on a cartoonish notion that actually profitable enterprises that efficiently produce energy at prices consumers find appealing would foul our air and water without hesitation if they weren’t constrained by state edict and state-subsidized “competition.” That notion is a manifestation of an even more basic perversion, namely, that there is something morally flawed with fundamental aspects of the human character such as ambition and progress.

In his new book After America, Mark Steyn makes the point that, since the 1970s, the only area of invention and leaps forward in the way human life is condiucted has been the realm of information. Yes, since then, we have gone from mainframes to smartphones. But it’s been decades since we made anything comparably revolutionary to the automobile or the airplane. We quit going to the moon after three years. We’re not even doing shuttle flights anymore. NASA now exists, in the words of its current administrator, to “make Muslim countries feel better about themselves.”

Speaking of Muslims, let’s look at how this whole business about “diversity” plays itself out in postmodern America. Here’s a really recent example: earlier this month, an organization formed at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s called Students for Justice in Palestine held a three-day training program at Columbia University to prepare students around the country to participate in next year’s annual Israel Apartheid Week. How obscene is that? “Apartheid” was, of course, South Africa’s official policy of strict racial segregation that was ended by referendum in 1992. Israel, the only Western nation in the Middle East, has, while it asserts a Jewish national identity, Muslim Arabs serving in its legislature, teaching in its universities and engaging in the country’s commercial life alongside Jewish citizens. Most Israeli Arabs have no interest in moving to the West Bank and certainly not Gaza. Per the SJP’s website, its endorsers include MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Princeton University professor Cornel West. It receives funding from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In February 2010, at UC Irvine, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech was disrupted by students shouting “Mass murderer!” Granted, eleven of them were arrested and sentenced to community service, but this was no isolated incident.

In March of this year, according to Stella Paul, writing at the American Thinker, “Jessica Felber, a twenty-year-old student at UC Berkeley, filed a federal lawsuit against UC's Regents, accusing them of failing to protect her civil rights as a Jew. Felber was holding a sign saying "Israel Wants Peace," when the head of Students for Justice in Palestine rammed her with a shopping cart, requiring her to get medical care. Her assailant was a known provocateur who'd been implicated in other assaults, without disciplinary repercussions.”

How pervasive is this trend? Well, in 2003, Barack and Michelle Obama attended a dinner in Chicago for Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO advisor who was moving to New York to take a teaching post at Columbia. By the way, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were at that dinner, too. Anyway, Obama gave some warm remarks, saying that his times at the Khalidi home had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”…

Why is any of this central to a discussion about our advanced stage of civilization rot? Because, as I say, Israel is the only Western nation in the Middle East. It occupies one-sixth of one percent of all the land in the Middle East. It is a representative democracy with a vibrant economy. It is home to the roots of our philosophy of law, our notions about how what a family is, and our understanding of the nature of our creator and our relationship to Him.

That must be considered when one contemplates this administration’s attempts to demand that Israel cede sacred land for the creation of a Palestinian state. Simply put, do you want the Garden of Gesthemane under Hamas jurisdiction?

This comes down to the same self-loathing that is at the core of the environmentalist example. It’s been central to the anti-West impulse going back to the days when New Left academic pioneer William Appleman Williams, who taught history at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, introduced the doctrine of moral equivalence. In his time, he was speaking of equivalence between the West and the Soviet bloc. The basic concept survived the Cold War, though. Witness the number of people who have disparaged the measures America took in response to 9/11.


And the foundation of all this is a worldview based on relativism. An absence of absolutes. That leads to a lackadaisical attitude toward completely changing the meaning of terms whose dictionary definitions have been established for centuries, basic terms such as “man,” “woman” “parent” and “family.” We’re at the juncture where any mom or dad watching “Dancing With the Stars” with her or his eight-year-old is faced with the question of how to explain Chaz Bono.

Now that we live in an age in which ephemeral “feelings” are the prime gauge by which we should set a course of action, we can invent ourselves moment by moment, completely on impulse. That’s called narcissism.

Narcissism leads to chaos, because no one can depend on the permanence of any of society’s institutions. I am what I say I am. God is what I say God is.

That leaves a fertile hunting ground indeed for those whose main aim is power over a mass of human beings bumping into each other like corralled cattle. They may exercise that power in the name of social justice, or they may exercise it in the name of sharia law. Whatever they call their ideology, it amounts to convincing us that fairness is the most important condition of human well-being rather than freedom, and that they, in their self-proclaimed wisdom, reserve the right to define “fairness” for the rest of us.

When nothing really means anything to us anymore, well accept state-issued gruel as our lot. In fact, we’ll do so convinced that it’s the noble thing to do.

Is there a way to take a detour before this scenario becomes inevitable? There is. It starts with each of us insisting that what is ours is really ours, and refusing to accept the accusation of selfishness for so insisting. It involves placing the highest priority on common sense, so that we don’t accept intrusions into modern and perfectly harmless ways of conducting our lives. It entails a willingness to look at why the wisdom of the ages, such as sacred Scripture, has been considered as such.

If you want to feel a sense of urgency about something, feel it about the slip that humanity has made from its peak. Think about how dulled so many spirits have become. Insist on your nobility as a member of a species distinguished by having a soul.

Mean what you say and insist that words you hear in conversation have real meaning.

This is how we’ll rescue our civilization.

It’s doable, but it’s very, very late in the day.

In case you'd started thinking that Hillary Clinton looked like some kind of smart elder statesperson by comparison . . .

She tells BBC Persia that her State Department is trying to issue more visas to Iranian students and that it's also still trying to diplomatically engage the mullocracy.

The underlying problem still looms

Mike Shedlock at Townhall says that this latest "deal" for bailing out Greece will fizzle because European banks and the ESFS still aren't facing the first law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

The invevitable implosion of OWS

Volunteer kitchen staff going on strike over having to work 18-hour days feeding ungrateful drifters.

This guy is out to purposely destroy the U.S. economy

The Most Equal Comrade announces a new plan - that he intends to implement without involving Congress - that will use federal funds - which, of course, are really just increasingly worthless IOUs to bondholders of federal debt - to make up the difference in student loan balances for college graduates who voluntarily take "service" jobs that pay pauper-level wages instead of going after the best salary and most promising career track they can.

It's on purpose. The MEC is so dangerous, so disastrous, so radical and so arrogant that we can only pray that he does not complete his evil designs before we can send him packing.

I just can't see this being a winning meme at this late date

The MEC is going to run his re-election campaign on a platform of blatant statism and telling the American people that it's great to be cattle.

And how's this for talking out of both sides of one's mouth? In the very same speech, he says Americans have lost their ambition and imagination.

So much for the prognostications of the pointy-headed, chin-rubbing establishment types and Reasonable Gentlemen who no longer have their finger on the pulse of the nation

Per a CBS poll, the Hermanator now leads Mitt Romney by 25 to 21, which is outside the margin of error.

East-coast media darlings, even - perhaps particularly - those who give lip service to conservative principles, no longer, if they ever did, understand how clearly most Americans - certainly most rank-and-file Republicans - grasp the urgency of our nation's situation. We will not settle for coronating the ovbvious next-in-line candidate. (For one thing, GOP heirs-apparent are always glaringly problematic.)

No one articulates that urgency as forcefully, plainly and naturally as Herman Cain, not even his fellow conservative candidates. People are starved for that kind of clarity.

Everyone needs to understand that we really mean it.

Why I haven't posted much about OWS

Believe me, I'm aware of how misguided the drum-circle element within the movement is. I'm well aware of how destructive it is wherever it has appeared around the world. I'm keenly aware of the Communist and anarchist orchestration of it.

Every time I read about it or even think about it, though, it just makes me wince. It makes me embarrassed for my species. As J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker puts it, "They [the OWS foot soldiers] are the third wave of the transcendental slob movements, behind the hippies and the grunge kids." And it doesn't take particularly keen powers of observation to see that with every wave, there has been a dumbing-down and coarsening that has left little room for anything resembling basic dignity. At least the hippies aspired to somekind of literary and musical sophistication, with their interest in Romantic poetry, Indian music and the like. It took a while for that wave to devolve. The OWS kids came right out of the gate as feral animals.

I cringe because it is the overall culture in which we all maneuver that produced them. Their demands, as incoherent as they are, are rooted in an insistence that the comfort and convenience in which they grew and came of age be guaranteed in perpetuity. They were raised on the television, cinema, fast food, sex education, lame pseudo-spirituality, and rock and roll that we as a society bottle-fed them.

To what extent is OWS a force to contend with? I think we can safely say they aren't interested in forming factions or caucuses within either of our major political parties. They won't be fielding any slates of candidates for anything. They won't be starting any cultural trends. In fact, all they represent on the cultural level is the last tired vestiges of the transcendental-slob-ism to which Dunn refers. They are what's left after every possibility of anything esoteric or subtle has been drained from the basic stringy-haired impulse.

As I have said before when I have written about them, the genuinely disturbing aspect of OWS is its wantonness. In that sense, the OWSers are heirs of something even more universal that has been metastasizing over the last few decades. They are of a piece with those who destroyed Watts and Detroit in the mid-1960s, the Iranian "students" who took over the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, the rioters that set whole Parisian neighborhoods ablaze over the past few years, the Islamists who we can now see were the guiding force behind the Arab spring, the Greek rioters who will not tolerate any lowering of their government-guaranteed retirement age, and the flash mobs that terrorized American cities earlier this year. At the heart of their worldview is an unfocused nastiness and nihilism that confirms that human progress is not a continuous upward trend after all.

Finally debating about the right things

I like Rick Perry's 20 percent flat tax.

I like Herman Cain's 9-9-9- plan.

What I like best of all is that the Pub prez candidates are now vying to see who can come up with the best plan for letting Americans keep most of their money. Their time, too, when one considers the man-hours this country wastes on the doo-dah required to comply with our current tax code.

A continent at a dire juncture

The facial expressions of the European national leaders gathered for a group photo accompanying this article tell the story.

The clock is ticking and none of the fancy new mechanisms and funds being devised or considered is adequate to what Europe is facing.

The money has to come from somewhere.

It's late in the day.

Our main enemy is licking its chops

. . . now that the MEC has announced a total drawdown of troops in Iraq.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The U.S. will likely suffer a second credit-rating downgrade this year.

Arab Spring frost warnings

Libya's interim leader starts implementing specific sharia laws, such as allowing polygamy and banning interest on bank transactions.

This is - excuse the pun - rich

OWS is acquiring all the trappings of square old normal-people capitalist America (in its-late-in-the-day stage of progression) - a bank account, squabbles over who controls it, internal decay of its culture (in the form of vandals destroying drum-circle instruments), declarations of the need for law and order, and formation of splinter groups.

Joe Biden, that exquisite combination of idiot and Freedom-Hater

Mark Steyn unpacks the outrageousness of the veep's remarks about school funding to a fourth-grade class last week.

And let me fend off any charges of over-the-top snarkiness right now. I fully stand by the term "idiot" because Plugs clearly can't graps the most elementary law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

The Most Equal Comrade, losing supporters everywhere

Ata meeting last year, Steve Jobs told him he'd be a one-term president because of his rabidly anti-business stance.

Per an AP-GfK poll, more than half of Americans doubt the MEC's ability to do a stinkin' thing to improve the economy.

A mixed bag

The Senate conducted some late-night business overnight, some of it good, but most of it awful:

Freedom-hating, pretend-energy-loving, pro-subsidy John Bryson was confirmed as Commerce Secretary.

Home loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac can now be increased.

Killed a Pub-led effort to bar civilian trials for foreign terror suspects.

On the plus side:

Put the nix on subsidies for farmers who definitely don't need them.

Killed some key provisions of the MEC's bill to funnel yet more federal largesse to government indoctrinators (also known as public school teachers)

Why the Hermanator, even with his need to brush up on a few things, is still the best Pub prez candidate as of now

He speaks plain truths plainly, such as the need to keep any truly vialble inner-city Opportunity Zones free of unions and free of the minimum wage.

Why we call them Freedom-haters - today's edition

The essence of the OWS movement.

Israel has no partner in any peace process

. . . and the Washington Post willfully obscures that fact. Completely omits any coverage of Abbas's welcome-home to the terrorists exchanged for Gilad Shalit, in which he called them "holy warriors."

Lenin in a designer dress

Mrs. MEC, at a White House lawn pow-wow for a Department of Agriculture program that wastes our tax dollars doing busybody nanny-state food indoctrination in government schools, sang the praises of government's ability to "shape who [children] will be."

These creatures are among the vilest that have ever drawn a breath.

Bet this makes Sarkozy, Merkel et al feel really great about sweating out another bailout agreement for these swine

Greece erupts in violence in protest against the austerity measures the government agreed to in order to get the next tranche of EU bailout money.

There's one aspect of the OWS movement that greatly pleases our worst enemy

Iran applauds the Jew-hatred element of the Poopstock phenomenon.

There won't be a moment of everybody in this particular nation singing the same tune until the real victory has been achieved

Michael Rubin at Commentary says that the release of Gilad Shalit does not bring any kind of unifying closure to the Israeli populace. Only an insistence on the sovereignty of a Jewish state with a capital in Jerusalem can begin to help the families of those slaughtered by Palestinian jihadists see the possibility of a future in which their anguish is not unanswered.

Because spouting hooey about "fairness" is more important than actually ensuring the nation's survival

The Most Equal Comrade is stringing along those who still extol the CLASS provision of FHer-care, even as Comandante Kathleen says it's dead because there is nowhere for the money to come from.