It’s not that hidden.
Ed Lazear explains it:
The U.S. is not getting back many of the jobs that were lost during the recession. At the present slow pace of job growth, it will require more than a decade to get back to full employment defined by prerecession standards.
Clearly it is Bush’s fault, though all of the slightest and even cosmetic improvements belong to Barack. (That’s America’s “Soviet” joke now.)
That’s the news this morning. Tom Donilon, the current National Security Adviser, is resigning and Susan Rice is going to be named to replace him.
It has never been clear to me that Susan Rice knows anything about national security.
“THE GREATEST myth in American politics today is the view, perpetrated by the Democratic Left and elements of the news media, that Barack Obama is a political moderate. In truth he represents an ideology that is barely within the American mainstream as understood over two and a quarter centuries of political experience.”
Robert Merry slides this under the door, I assume for the benefit of those who actually believe that Obama is some sort of moderate. Merry doesn’t go nearly far enough, but he gets close to my formulation that Obama cannot be grasped within the normative terms of American politics, and that to make the attempt is to cede him ground he does not hold.
This is otherwise a very conventional analysis of Obama’s place in American political history, but at least it sees him on the periphery (though he’s way beyond that) rather than hovering near the center.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, compared DNA to fingerprints and mug shots. That is not a serious comparison. DNA is everything that you are genetically. It reveals diseases your are predisposed to. It tells people things you may not want to know yourself. And there are new developments coming along all the time that will tell an even fuller story about you. I haven’t checked to see whether a person can be tissue-typed for organ donation via DNA, but if that becomes available, anyone looking for an organ, with sufficient money, will be able to find one by either having the DNA database hacked or by bribing his way into it. And then he gets to come get the kidney or liver or heart. That’s not sci-fi anymore folks.
Scalia doesn’t go that far in his vigorous dissent, but the implications of this category error by Kennedy et al., about DNA as simply another means of identification, will now require either a future USSC decision overturning it or a Constitutional amendment. It’s bad enough to merit either or both.
A few years ago the recurring idea of getting rid of the Village of New Palltz as a municipal government resulted in a $50,000 grant to study the issue. Fairweather Consulting, a local firm, was hired to conduct the study and after much inquiry that outfit could only say that “consolidating” the (two local, village and town) governments would have marginal benefit, if any.
When you get that sort of report, you shrug your shoulders and say, “O.K., let’s move on.”
But when the handful of people in New Paltz who circulate in and out of government and general civic busybodyism get the wind of the latest civic fad in their sails, it is never over when it’s over. Ego commitments get made. A belief system arises. Evidence has no place. It’s just “let’s keep going until we make complete assholes of ourselves.”
It gets very detailed, this story, but underlying it all is an already falsified a priori assumption, an axiomatic premise, that the current arrangement of a village government and a town government is bad. There can be no looking back to that arrangement, as if it was already gone, and no right-thinking person would conceivably say, “wait, no, it’s fine, it works, and there’s nothing to be gained from changing it.”
Here’s a distinction that I often make: When the issue of getting rid of the village government came up around 2006, it was a response by more established busybodies to the Green Party annoyances who had taken charge of the village board (via the election of Jason West as mayor along with a couple of trustees, Rotzler and Walsh). No one, and I mean no one, had a greater distaste for West than I had, but my argument for keeping the village government (the “inner municipality”) rested not on the personalities but on the origin and purpose of the village government, which to me were clear, sound, and justified. The village has exclusively village work that needs to be done, and whoever sits on the village board must see that it gets done. This village work was not a good job for the town government, which would have to juggle divided interests. In other words, the village made sense when it was formed back in the 19th Century and made roughly the same kind of sense today.
Now is the time to drop this effort. Let it go. It has devolved into personal feuds veering toward local spectacle. Here’s a bottom line to consider: Does it make sense to consolidate local political power into one set of administrative hands? Or is the subsidiarity of the village government the way to keep some of that power directly accountable within the distinct concerns of the village? Conversely, why would someone in the area of the town outside the village, getting water from a well and using a septic system, want to be involved with the water mains and sewers of the village?
Once you drop the a priori assumption that the current village-town arrangement is somehow no good and view it with fresh eyes, and then consider two old maxims: “First, do no harm,” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” you can indeed move on.
Now, let’s do something about recruiting volunteer firemen, who are the pride of New Paltz. How about getting high school students interested in volunteering, and also those at the college? That’s an important issue that we are failing at.
Minor edits on 6/3/13 at 1:34 pm.
One does not follow Obama foreign policy. Its purpose is incoherent other than as a means to “increase the contradictions.” So Putin is helping out by making it obvious that the supposed cure in Syria is worse than the disease. He’s backing Assad, probably because he knows Islamic radicalism first hand in Russia and doesn’t want the same kind of mess so close by in Syria that the “liberation” of Libya brought on. He’s probably concerned that what Syria does to Israel via Hezbollah, an anti-Assad regime in Syria might do to Russia through a re-invigorated jihad of Chechen radicals.
The young man would return to Germany after the war, in 1945, and after visiting Hitler’s famous “Eagle’s Nest” mountain-top retreat, would write that, “Anyone who has visited these places can imagine how in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures that ever lived. There is something mysterious about the way he lived and died and which will outlive him and continue to flourish. He was made of the stuff of legends.”
Hit the link to find out who wrote that.
It’s Rupert Sheldrake, raising hard questions about the dogma of science.
The Daily Freeman (Kingston, N.Y.) reports that the consolidation confusion is coming to a boil:
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — Consolidation supporters will need to wait until the new Village Board is in place on Saturday before a request is submitted to the state Legislature asking to allow both town and village boards to vote on consolidation.
Town Supervisor Susan Zimet said during a Town Board meeting last week that state Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, D-Kingston, has decided to wait before endorsing the request.
“Assemblyman Cahill refused to carry it and said he wants the new sitting … Village Board to vote,” she said.
Zimet said state Sen. John Bonacic, R-Mount Hope, was prepared to seek state Senate approval until Cahill decided to wait.
The right thing for Cahill and Bonacic to do is to say “Oops” and walk away from this monstrosity, ASAP. Zimet has no idea what she is doing, nor does Sally Rhoads of the village board. This entire project ran away with itself well over a year ago and is now just caught up in loops of process and the attending intellectual paralysis.
The best solution is to leave the current village-town arrangement alone. It works. The village is 1/17th the size of the town as a whole, yet it has half the population of the entire town. The village has a distinct infrastructure (sewers and water mains) that it manages through its Dept. of Public Works (which is a good and reliable outfit) and is the core settlement with different matters that it must attend to, largely unlike those matters that the town outside the village attends to.
On matters of common interest, the village and town are already consolidated, and have never been un-consolidated. The village is simply an inner municipality that sees to distinct interests.
The Daily Freeman, out of Kingston, New York, reported several days back that Village of New Paltz mayor Jason West has been caught red-handed by Vici Danskin, doyenne of all that is decent in New Paltz:
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — A village resident has asked the Village Board to remove Mayor Jason West from office, saying he’s moved outside the village boundary and violated state laws in a recent election.
Victoria Danskin, in a letter to the board, contended West listed a former address when he signed candidates’ nominating petitions this year and a polling place sign-in book when he voted in the May 7 election.
“Jason West’s actions display disregard for correct process for public business and the critical importance of valid local elections,” Danskin wrote. “… He openly shows total contempt for the very basis of representative democracy.”
I have to be impressed by the forensic detail of Vici Danskin’s sleuthing, though I am reminded of Det. Mick Belker’s immortal line while working undercover in a poultry shop in an episode of Hill Street Blues: “Lady, could you pass a test like that?”
The backstory on this, holding to the side for a moment the general animus that Danskin may or may not have for West, is that Danskin is an adherent of New Paltz’s current civic fad (there’s always at least one going), which is the absolute belief that the village and town governments must be consolidated, and West, much unlike himself, resists the contagion and so casts himself as the scapegoat who must be purged.
Other than the fact that there would be no clear benefit from consolidating the two governments, and that there is good reason for the village to continue to exist as it is, the belief that they must be consolidated is a perfectly good fad to keep the usual busybodies, well, busy. Danskin’s commitment to it goes above and beyond the call of duty.
West, of course, merely had to be careful about how he handled his stay across the village line, but instead misplayed it, hence this latest tempest in his fair trade coffee mug. Not that he doesn’t deserve it.
Thomas Sowell on “Undoing the Brainwashing“:
“This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo some of the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning.
“The strategy used by General Douglas MacArthur so successfully in the Pacific during World War II can be useful in this very different kind of battle. General MacArthur won his victories while minimizing his casualties — something that is also desirable in clashes of ideas within the family.”
To say that Mark Steyn is brilliant is to state the obvious, but this column was extraordinary even by the standards that apply to him. He is, I think, one of our greatest writers, easily in the top five.
Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club quotes C.S. Lewis on men without chests:
“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
“Mr. Yang’s father would die within three days. Yet it would take years before Mr. Yang learned that what happened to his father was not an isolated incident. He was one of the 36 million Chinese who succumbed to famine between 1958 and 1962.”
It’s about six weeks past the Boston Marathon bombings, right? O.K., then, I give up, who ordered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name be taken off a terrorist watch list? Not only has that question not been answered, there’s no one in the big ass mass media even asking it. So, that’s the next question: Why isn’t anyone, from Charles Krauthammer to Jonah Goldberg to Ron Fournier to Paul Krugman to Tom Brokaw to James Rosen *asking* who took Tsarnaev’s name off the bloody watch list? Seems to me that there had to be a real, live, breathing person who ordered that his name be removed. Who was it? And why? And why can’t the question be asked and answered? Is this what’s called an “oversight?”
America has a show culture, and in America, politics is the show of shows. But shows are always a virtual reality, a simulation of real things, that reduced to their essence are shadows of what is real. They are two dimensional. So, despite the real living and dying that Americans do, the representations, the feedback they get on American life from the vastness of American media, is two dimensional.
That is not to say that there is little feeling or emotional content aboard those two dimensions. In fact, feeling and emotion are the principal material of these othewise often flat narratives, supplying the one element that keeps them afloat.
So Americans are plugged in, listening, watching, experiencing every human emotion that can be put into a live wire, and they often buy and sell along those pathways, as well as buying others and selling themselves in those two dimensions, with great feeling.
A problem arises, among many problems, when the political realm is sold in the same way a song, a car, or a soft drink is sold. Images of granny and baby, sorrow and happiness, success and failure, are attached to politics, but when we buy any political product the price is now more often the last of our own freedom, and that freedom is converted by the political class into power. The joke is on us because the power is over us. What was two-dimensional in its offering, like everything else that settles into reality, becomes three dimensions, and the third dimension of politics is power.
This is where conservatives and libertarians, who do not agree that often or on that much , operate: In a third dimension in opposition to the further accumulation of power by the state. Neither conservatives nor libertarians are very proficient in the two dimensional realm. They can occasionally sell themselves and their ideas that way, but the product is freedom and self-reliance, and that’s not really a product at all. That’s a “take back the real world from the illusion of free stuff, because the ultimate price on free stuff is slavery” principle, and principles are three dimensional, at least when they are acted on.
“But we like our free stuff!” is the bottom line in much of America. “Take somebody else’s free stuff, we like ours.” It’s not uniquely American, but in America it’s done in a unique way, and our foolishness in the matter is something we easily deny. The two-dimensional world is very easy to produce: images, themes, music, words, feelings, emotions. Not much reality.
But conservatives and libertarians work the third dimension where they are trying to sell you on yourself and all that messy freedom stuff, where you choose the things you want and your way of life. It’s an uphill battle, and the other side always has a new fear to exploit along with a new product to take care of it (and there’s always granny and baby), and they have long had enough media power accumulated to dominate the discussion. How they have so much control of the media might be explained in terms of simple compatibility: they are specialists in the two dimensional and the media is their natural realm. It’s a ready made and nearly perfect combo.
It is only when reality comes a calling that conservatives and libertarians have a small advantage. They know, for instance, that the business and commerce of entrepreneurial capitalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs in America and that the other side thinks the goose is to be plundered “for the people” and of course and especially “for the children.” When reality comes a calling, however, enough people usually wake up to pry the fingers of plunder from the goose’s neck long enough to let her produce more golden eggs so that the real world can move forward and prosper.
That’s what should be happening now in America, where the goose is hanging by the neck from a tree, and the two dimensional plane of feeling and emotion are as exhausted as the employees of a brothel are on a Sunday morning.
Enter Obama, one of the great operators in the two dimensional realm. He entered the power picture as hope and change, but wore it out in six months. He hid, for awhile, in plain sight, but has now repainted himself as “vitally serious statesman and leader.” He does this in the middle of an act that has been catastrophic for America. The media enables him. Nothing in the third dimension, in reality, supports him in this refurbished act. How does he manage it?
He manages it by not taking either the two or three dimensions seriously, meaning that he believes in neither the shadow nor the reality. He attends to both via the two dimensional route, but he has another realm that he works from, a fourth dimension, and the perspective from there allows him to treat the values and principles of reality with contempt. He is not just working the two dimensional track with the usual images, feelings, and emotions. He has activated the fourth dimension, and that fourth dimension is an idea and the idea is class struggle.
Obama is an orthodox Marxist who has vicious contempt for the values and principles of the bourgeois world, and he embraces revolutionary Marxism, seeking to lift the veil of bourgeois ideology and to allow the “scientific” struggle to emerge. So he has the people who vote for a living on his side and aligned against the people who work for a living. He has a special government class of public employees aligned, much like an army, against the taxpayers who pay them. He has the public sector aligned against the private sector (the goose). And internationally he has reinvigorated radicals in and from the Middle East as scavengers of the bourgeois carcass in Europe.
As the best trained and most committed Marxist since Lenin, living behind a veil of deceit and political correctness, and with violent malice toward bourgeois society, particularly American society, Obama is determined to ruin America and the West. Not only does he have no interest in their success; he has no interest in their survival.
This is the power of his fourth dimension. He is on the other side of the looking glass of history, but he reaches back and manipulates the “false consciousness” of the second and third dimensions, both the illusion and the reality. The illusion is manipulated by the usual methods of image, feeling, and emotion. The reality is manipulated by power. But the drive to do this is concocted in the more or less infantile realm of orthodox Marxism, which is an ideology that teaches that history is an unfolding material process that leads only to the “scientific” finale of socialism. Everything not aligned with this process is either the “false consciousness” of “bourgeois principles,” or a temporary stall along the path.
The collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago was an unbearable catastrophe for orthodox Marxists, and was conceivably the most agonizing moment for Obama, who was thirty when it happened. But to a truly committed Marxist, whose understanding of “scientific socialism” takes the form of an absolute belief that interprets all human society in those “scientific” terms, could only see the end of the Soviet experiment as a temporary setback. Indeed, the Soviets left a legacy throughout Europe and America with a ceaseless “march through the institutions” of those societies by indigenous Leftists who were de facto, and sometimes de jure, Soviet agents. It is Marxism that has prevailed in the politics and culture of universities, for instance.
Obama is the legacy of all that and, the extent to which that shows, it had to be hidden in plain sight. Enter political correctness and the countless declarations that focusing on these elements of Obama’s background amounts to “racism.” At this blog, I have said that the church was the key to this man’s unfitness to be a U.S. senator, let alone president. Anyone who belonged to the white parallel of Obama’s church would have been hooted off the national stage the moment he set foot on it. This, however, is the power of political correctness at the two dimensional level. But it is important to understand that political correctness is a tactic from the fourth dimension: A Marxist manipulation, shaped as social intimidation and threat, of bourgeois “false consciousness.”
