And to think he'll probably still squeak through

Hagel did himself no favors today in his SecDef confirmation hearings.  The man clearly has no core principles, no fealty to any idea of Western civilization.

The guy pretty much did nothing but step on his you-know-what all day.

But he will soon be the go-to guy for seeing to the ongoing viability of all that freedom-cherishers hold dear.

Once again catching hell for merely trying to ensure its survival

Iran and Syria are threatening retaliation for Israel's zapping of the military research facility that was a known nest of mischief.


Russia says it was unacceptable and Hezbollah weighs in as well.


The Arab press is full of outrage as well.

And that cesspool of evil known as the UN Human Rights Commission deems this an appropriate time to demand that Israel withdraw from Judea and Samaria.

Tyranny doesn't come cheap

Dare to compare.  The MEC regime's regulatory assault is costing post-America a bundle:

. . . the costs of “major” regulations — those estimated to cost at least $100 million in any one year (in 2001 dollars) — issued by the Obama administration in its first three years nearly tripled the cost of those issued by the Clinton administration in its first three years, nearly quintupled the cost of those issued by the George W. Bush administration in its first three years, and nearly doubled the cost of those issued by Bush and Clinton combined.  Again, that’s according to the Obama White House’s own tallies.

Schechter Brothers redux

A Missouri dairy operation that makes cheese from raw milk and has been in a yearlong tussle with the state's milk board was raided by gummint agents who shut it down and seized assets.

Leviathan is making an example of Morningland, much as it did in the 1930s, in the case of the Schechter brothers, kosher poultry producers in Brooklyn.  They eventually won the suit they filed, but not before burning through lots of money and time.

When I was a kid, we had a Latvian neighbor who had escaped with his wife when the Communists took over.  Many is the time that he regaled his sons and their friends including me with accounts of the singularly chilling experience of getting "that knock on the door."

In post-America, people are getting that experience now.

In post-America, the real reasons for problems can't be pointed out

Tom Blumer at PJ Media says that the AP's contortions in the attempt to avoid blaming the MEC regime's policies for the continuing economic malaise have led it to that old canard, technology rendering human labor obsolete.  He then lists - the temerity of it! - the real top ten reasons the economy is still in the toilet.

And Michael Tanner at NRO says that the world's Krugman's disingenuously talk about the portion of our debt held by the public and studiously leave intragovernmental debt out of their discussions.

No wonder consumer confidence has been plunging

The economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Consumer confidence has experienced three sharp monthly drops in a row.  It was at 73.1 in October.  Today it's at 58.6.

The Freedom-Hater regime wants us demoralized and desperate.  The next stage - in which we all become cattle, staring blankly as we're corralled into the pen - is not far off.

Big thumbs down

Roundup of views on the Gang of Eight bipartisan (read: rotten with the stench of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome) immigration-reform proposal unveiled yesterday:

Daniel Horowitz at Red State

Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller

Heather MacDonald at NRO

The recommendations of that commission of southwestern law-enforcement, political and civic leaders would have a non-binding status.  More to the point, the deal still puts amnesty before a secure border.

More to the point, it's another case of a conservative being dragged into an anti-American move by Freedom-Haters and Reasonable Gentlemen.

I really think there's a conversion experience in her future - today's edition

Kirsten Powers represents a breed that is just about extinct - the common-sense Democrat.  She says that the MEC - H-Word Creature sit-down with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes came across like "state-run media."

Sheriff David Clarke gets it

Releases a public service announcement for Milwaukee radio urging citizens to take firearms safety training so that they can be proactive agents in their own defense if their homes are ever violated. Says not to depend solely on 911.

This is rich indeed; excuse the pun

But don't excuse the hypocrisy.  Can you believe this?  FHer Senators moaning about how a "No budget no pay" arrangement would affect their own household . . . budgets.

Oh, sheesh . . .

Now the Most Equal Comrade gives an interview to The New Republic in which he says that he has mixed feelings about watching football, and that the NCAA will probably eventually have to take steps to "reduce the violence."

This is just a suggestion, of course, like the reminder to doctors that there is nothing in Freedom-Hater-care that prohibits them from discussing gun storage with patients.

To revisit the subject of my Gender Post below, men are aggressive creatures.  Without ritualized yet compelling situations in which to channel it, they will terrorize the world with their brutishness.  As George Gilder asserted in the seminal classic Men and Marriage, the most dangerous type of human being on Earth is the unmarried young adult male.

Men are also more analytical and quantitative by nature than women.  Men like to measure things, inquire into what they're made of, see if they can fit the raw materials of this world together so as to build things with ever-greater utility.  So it is that the diamonds, tracks, courts and fields of the world's most popular athletic games came into being.  In each case, a man considered how to ritualize the competitive - dare I say warring? - instinct in his gender, and considered a given chunk of space and how to section it off in various zones that would be defended by one team or the other in a contest of strength, focus, hierarchically based teamwork and - this is the most germane point - establish rules to ensure fairness and determine how to proceed when there is a disputed occurrence.

In football, there is an entire infrastructure of team doctors, physical therapists, fitness trainers, nutritionists and sports-science experts at the ready for every play.  Nothing in this world is more scrutinized in real time than the action on a football field.

Lately I've been on something of a "consider-the-sum-total-of-various-events-of-the-last-few-days" kick, and that's because the thread of continuity connecting them becomes ever more obvious and ominous.

Think again about the transgendered 11-year-old, the edict opening combat positions to women soldiers, the push to get rid of guns, and . . . the decision of the MEC to weigh in on the sport of football.  In a passive-agressive way, the FHers are acting the alpha male, attempting to eradicate any kind of resolute masculine energy that could pose a threat to their great leveling project.

When big becomes all-encompassing

Conn Carroll has a great piece at the Washington Examiner this morning on the entirely different relationship that America's small businesses have with government from that of large corporations.

We all know the prominent examples of the coziness of the government - megacorporation axis: Jeffrey Immelt of GE and his role on the MEC's "jobs council."  (By the way, is that body ever going to meet again?  It's been over a year.)  Google's long-acknowledged bias in the way it sets up its search mechanisms.  The obsequiousness with which engine and vehicle makers respond to ever-more stringent environmental edicts.

By their very natures, small businesses and large corporations are going to have different organizational cultures.  The sprawling leviathans see themselves as being in the business of "making this a better world."  Again, I refer you to the world's premier diesel engine maker that has its headquarters in the city where I live.  It has a policy of expecting employees to "give back to their communities," and even devotes a page on its website to examples of how its staffpersons in such far-flung places as Brazil and India are helping villages with clean water and schools and such.  The big companies are the ones pushing "green" initiatives and "diversity."  If their small suppliers seem to be getting on board, it's because such activities are now as much a requirement of doing business as having satisfactory prices, or assuring that their processes are stable within the six-sigma parameters.  Left to their own devices, small businesses are much more concerned with matters such as getting the raw material in on time, and the finished parts out on time, and making sure the finished work measures out like the blueprint calls for.

Another interesting factor in all of this is the role of trade associations.  Small businesses band together in order to ry to counteract the regulatory onslaught from Washington and state capitals.  Such associations for the large corporations are more inclined to see things in terms of "partnership," to the point of taking a cue from the Beltway as to what's of societal high priority and where it ought to next direct its marketing energies.

At some point - and we're now there - the goose-and-golden-egg phenomenon becomes a factor.  Small businesses, where everybody shows up at a certain hour, and job titles are not much of a big deal, given that everybody pitches in where needed, where birthday celebrations have the personal touch because people actually know each other, do most of the hiring in this country.  Or did.

That Chicago way

The Godfather leans on banks to quit loaning money to gun manufacturers unless they get behind his specific idea for gun "control."

These Freedom-Haters, they play hardball.

The gender post

At the conclusion of a week that marked Leon Panetta's announcement about military women in combat roles, the essay by the 11-year-old "transgendered" girl in response to the MEC's inaugural address (see my "Hey, did any of you other frogs . . . " post below for links re: these developments), and the  40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, my thoughts turn to the matter of what, if anything, is intrinsically masculine of feminine.

As regular readers know, I'm adjunct faculty at one of our state universities.  On my way to the mailroom, I pass by a bulletin board devoted to new course offerings.  Recently, the big excitement there was the fact that one can now get a minor in women's studies at our campus.  The flyer announcing this flatly stated as a given that gender is merely a social construct, that expectations based on biological distinctions are arbitrary, with no roots in how males' and females' respective hormonal ratios drive perception or behavior.

It's nothing that hasn't been commonplace for some time.  I recently posted about a situation at the school from which I got my master's degree in history, Butler University in Indianapolis, in which a young man drew the ire of his political science professor for daring to question her instruction at the beginning of the semester to approach assignments in her class without regard to one's gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation or American citizenship.  Look for this deconstructionist presupposition to become ever more codified as the new "Common Core" curriculum comes to prevail.

Feminism expects today's university students to be big boys and girls about coed dorms with unrestricted visitation, to keep arousal under wraps no matter how close the quarters.  Not that there isn't frolicking going on.  Actually, "frolicking" may be an inaccurate term.  According to Helen Rittelmeyer's article "Sex in the Meritocracy" in the February issue of First Things, the point nowadays is not to congratulate oneself on his or her degree of liberation, but to, as with everything else about the highly focused modern student, to bring one's A game to the table:

every admitted student believes he must be excellent at anything he tries. In the old Yale, campus culture developed from the upper-class traits that most students shared and the rest hoped to adopt. In the new, more diverse Yale, the only thing students share is ambition, and it determines attitudes toward grades (anything below an A-minus can be disputed with the professor), extracurriculars (hardly anyone spends four years in a club without achieving a leadership position), and even drugs. Instead of marijuana or cocaine, Yale’s pharmaceutical network now traffics mostly in Adderall, the wonder drug that, as one girl told me, “makes you want to work.” Surely this is the first generation of college students in which even the drug users are more interested in working hard than getting high.

This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism. 

It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.

I've also, in previous posts, mentioned that a Fortune 500 company has its world headquarters in the city where I live.  It runs a day care center / preschool that does a booming business.  Certainly it facilitates its employees' ability to check in with the offspring, but the point is to make it convenient for mom or dad to put in the long hours with a bit less parental anxiety than would be the case with some other child-care arrangement.  This corporation also has, as I've found out in the course of working on articles with a diversity angle for local magazines, a system of "affinity groups," which address not just nationality or gender, but "orientation" or whatever it's called these days.  The point here is that this company is, in its own estimation, a world-class, ISO-certified, seriously excellent organization that brings on board the best and brightest human beings regardless of demographic identity.  Just in case someone within its ranks gets to feeling the need to have that identity affirmed, however, he or she can seek out the appropriate affinity group.  And the company offers a convenient way to address those mommy feelings that can arise in the course of meeting benchmarks and continuously improving.

Which, of course, brings us to the most highly-focused, excellence-driven realm of all, the military.  We are assured that our nation's defense apparatus can surmount such already-established glitches in warrior equality as the effect of eros on matters ranging from unit cohesion to pregnancy rates, to the impact of the menstrual cycle, to the role of dignity in the circumstances under which one relieves oneself.

The usefulness of gender-blurring is not a new tactic for the Left.  In his memoir Radical Son, red-diaper baby David Horowitz recounts a night at a Communist Party summer camp when he was a kid, when the bunk-bed chatter turned to a comely female counselor.  A make counselor came to the cabin door and admonished the lads to watch the "male chauvinism."

This can't be had both ways, though.  There is a group of women in Congress that includes RINOs such as Collins and Snowe but some FHers as well, and it is on record as wishing it had more influence, since women legislators are more inclined to be collaborative than confrontational.  In other words, they like the way it feels to reach compromise, even if their supposedly immutable principles get the short shrift.

So women, in college, in the industrial world, and in the military, are supposed to  focus with ruthless objectivity, or fight with a fierceness that leaves no room for this collaborative inclination, and men are supposed to subdue, to the point of rendering it as good as nonexistent, their instinct for protection and chivalry.

It's just not going to work for the reason that men and women, the assertions of the world's gender-studies professors notwithstanding, are different.  They exhibit two different ways of being human.  Eventually, this manifests itself anywhere and everywhere, as has been noted by even some of the proponents of women in combat who acknowledge that not a whole heck of a lot of women are going to sign up for that duty.

It should also be noted that those in the leadership positions among our enemies are, to a person, men.  Ultimately any conflict has to be concluded, and that means strategically addressing its instigation at its root.  That, in turn, means thoroughly understanding the degree and kind of ugliness that only a male human being is capable of.

We can increase the ratio of technocrats, bureaucrats and focused soldiers to other kinds of human beings, but there will always be some feral creatures among us, and they do not respond to re-education, indoctrination or sensitivity training.  The civilized portion of our species has to take them out, and that requires resolute manliness on somebody's part.

Fleeting glimmers of hope - today's edition

The D.C. appeals court determines that the MEC's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional, because Congress was indeed not in recess.