The Elusive Wapiti

Book Review: An Austrian Perspective on The History of Economic Thought, Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:09:00 +0000

Note: this is Part III of a four-part book review

Karl Marx and Marxism

Rothbard's work ends with a very large and detailed and frankly disconcerting discussion of Marx, his life as a young man, his militant atheism and mysticism, and his dyspeptic theorizing. Here, the heritage that Marx owes to Smithian and Ricardian thought are laid bare for the reader, as he drives home his earlier claim that Smithian thought is responsible for much modern economic mischief. To this end, Rothbard presents evidence that Marx adopts many Smithian-Ricardian-Millian tenets wholesale, for instance, the class-warfare model, the labor theory of value, the equalitarian notion that all laborers are indistinguishable from one another, the claim that capital will accumulate and strangle profits, and the theory of underconsumption/overproduction (i.e., production increases until the point it outstrips the ability of the people to consume) and its putative tie to the business cycle. But Marx also struck out on his own while building on his ideological forebears, particularly with this "law of centralization of capital", in which Marx introduces his own theory as to why profits narrow over time (Smith and Ricardo had their own farcical theories), only in this case, Marx links these narrowing profits with the need for capitalists to squeeze the proletariat harder and harder until production outstrips the proletariat's ability to consume. These unconsumed inventories, according to Marx, then spark the business cycle, as companies must somehow clear this excess inventory low prices. Economic dislocation results, which swells the ranks of the proletariat, which is inflated further by capitalists going abroad for laborers to pull into the capitalistic exploitative economic system. In keeping with the post-Enlightenment economic tradition of scientism, Marx's theorizing aspired to be "scientific" and leveraged mechanized models to explain economic behavior. As Rothbard put it, Marx's theories were in

desperate service to the fanatical and crazed messianic goal of destruction of the division of labor and indeed of man's very individuality, and to the apocalyptic creation of an allegedly inevitable collectivist world order, an atheized variant of a venerable Christian heresy....A convincing case can be made, indeed, that the well-known horrors of twentieth century communism: of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, can be considered the logical unfolding, the embodiment, of the nineteenth century vision of their master, Karl Marx

This chapter on Marx is one of the most aggressive take-downs of the Marxist economics I have ever read, and occupies roughly 1/5 of the book. I cannot hope to do Rothbard's exposition justice...I can only suggest that you read it in toto yourself.

It is with Marx that Rothbard's book ends, which is too bad, because I would have like to have seen Rothbard tie Keynes into the flow of economic historical thought and connect the historical dots between Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx and Keynes.

Next: Analysis and Random Thoughts

Book Review: An Austrian Perspective on The History of Economic Thought, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Note: This is Part II of a four-part book review.

Mercantilism

Mercantilism enabled the ruling castes (the king and nobility) of nation-states to build up individual power and wealth with high government expenditures, military conquest, the granting of monopoly guilds and cartels, the establishment of export subsidies and tariffs on imports, and high taxes. Mercantilism concentrated on proto-Keynesian full-employment, and often did so by forced labor, which also (and conveniently) happened to lower wage rates. It was during this time that the world's first central bank was thought up, the Bank of England.

The BoE is an interesting case study in how hostile central banking is to private banking and a stable currency, and how central banks enable runaway inflation, precipitate boom-bust cycles, spur the unchecked growth of government, and swell the public debt. As to the latter, when it came time to "pay the piper" as it were, the BoE, armed with the power of government, can and frequently did suspend specie payment and, armed with legal tender laws, prevented the populace from shifting away from depreciating government paper to sound competing currencies. The ill effects of central banking were easily observable, as various pamphleteers and government officials argued strenuously for sound money, attacked currency debasement, and central banking in general, culminating win an 1854 survey of banks throughout the world by Otto Huebner, where he stated that "banks were soundest and least in danger where they were freest and least controlled. Privileged central banks tend to be wildly run and are in danger of insolvency". Piling on, Rothbard writes:

From then on, Great Britain, and eventually the rest of the world, was stuck with a fractional reserve banking system issuing demand deposits, pyramidizing on top of a central bank monopolizing the issue of notes and centralizing the nation's gold, and generating an endless round of boom-bust cycles of inflation and recession

Also during the mercantilist period, we see the rise of empiricism--political arithmetic--or the Enlightenment-inspired theory that human behavior can be quantitatively measured, studied, and predicted (as opposed to received wisdom, natural law, or inductive reasoning). What Rothbard calls "quantophrenia" entered the field of economic study during the mercantilist period; indeed, we see in empiricism the contrast with the Austrian perspective that economic theories and models can never be proven by experimentation, because true experiments are not possible. In the field of economic study, as opposed to the physical sciences, it is not feasible to hold all variables constant and move just one. Moreover, all quantophrenic attempts to prove mathematical models fall victim to the "n-body" problem (rapidly increasing computational complexity as n increases), making solving economic problems short of "assuming away" variables practically impossible:

Economic theory, in short, must choose between formally elegant but false and distorting mathematical models, and the 'literary' analysis of real human life itself

Thus we have the modern economists' persistent habit of simplifying economic models to make their models "work"...as well as a term for such simplification so as to make economic computations tractable...the "Ricardian Vice". Who knew that we moderns would be such slaves to an Enlightenment-inspired fad from 500 years ago?

Some noteworthy economic theorists during this period were John Locke, the esteemed Classical Liberal champion of property rights and later, religious liberty, the latter in response to a Continental scene where governments, particularly Catholic ones, ran roughshod over property rights. Locke, a Protestant, resurrected Scholastic natural law theory and transformed vague "notions of natural law into the clear-cut, firmly individualistic concepts of natural rights for every individual human being". Locke also attacked currency debasement and price controls, which he observed led to shortages. Unfortunately, he also promulgated the quantity theory of money, a false doctrine in which a change in the total supply of money causes a uniform, proportional, and simultaneous change in prices at all locations throughout an economy. John Law later picked up on this theory and advocated for blatant inflation, claiming that an increase in the money supply "vivif[ies] trade, increase[s] employment and production"...a proto-Keynesian theory.

On the Continent, the French were busy thinking up laissez-faire, leveraging Locke's work. Most notable of these Frenchmen was Turgot, who fully implemented Lockean natural law theory and applied it to the state. Turgot set aside mercantilist baggage and argued for complete (i.e., internal and external) free enterprise and free trade, and trade without subsidies, monopolies, or restrictions. Turgot also attacked the self-contradictory mercantilist focus on trade imbalances and massing unused hoards of specie ("losing rather than gaining wealth in real terms"). Moreover, in Turgot, Rothbard located the formal application of self-interest for the benefit of all [3] in contrast to the pursuit of virtue for virtue's sake, while also arguing that one man can never amass sufficient knowledge to make decisions in the interests of every, or even most, men. Today, Turgot is best known for his "law of diminishing returns", while the bulk of laissez-faire theory is comparatively out of style.

[3] The French physiocrats, typified by Turgot, emphasized self-interested behavior harnessed for the good of all. Some, particularly the atheist Italian Renaissance thinker Machiavelli, defined virtuous behavior as self-interested behavior as that which increases or cements an individual's power...and in Machiavelli's The Prince, whatever a prince must do to maintain and/or increase his power is therefore virtuous. A far cry from the Scholastic's take on virtue and the virtuous life, for sure.

A contemporary of Turgot, Cantillon, was an Irishman living in France who extended and elaborated upon Turgot's work. Cantillon was among the first to split economic study from ethical and political concerns, as contrast to medieval and Renaissance thought which embedded economic thought in a moral and theological framework. Cantillon introduced the first sophisticated analysis of the demand versus price mechanism, and continued the Continental theme of value as a function of the consumer's valuation. Prices, to Cantillon, determined what production costs could be incurred, as opposed to the Smithian "costs = price" concept. Cantillon was the first thinker to stress and analyze the individual entrepreneur in the market: the bearer of risk, the person who forecasted, and invested, adjusted and balanced supply and demand in the market at the point of exchange. The entrepreneur, Cantillon wrote, absent government intervention, is what makes the market naturally self-regulating.

English Classical Economics

[H]istorians of economic thought...have habitually treated the development of science as a linear and upward march into the truth. Each scientist patiently formulates, tests, and discards hypotheses, and thereby each succeeding one stands on the shoulders of the one who came before. [However,] the Kuhn theory [of paradigms] is that a very few people patiently test anything, particularly the fundamental assumptions or basic paradigm of their theory: and shifts in paradigms can take place even when the new theory is worse than the old. In short, knowledge can be and is lost as well as gained, and science often proceeds in a zig-zag rather than linear manner. As a result, paradigms and basic truths get lost

Thus does Rothbard introduce Adam Smith, not as the Father of Economics but as a blatant plagiarist who corrupted the thought of his immediate forebears and contemporaries, from Cantillon to Turgot to (his own teacher) Hutcheson, to the Spanish Scholastics, and even his own earlier political and economic work. His turgid, vague, and self-contradictory Wealth of Nations, perhaps because it was so turgid, vague, and studded with inconsistencies, overshadowed out the writings of other more technically correct economists, and according to Rothbard, quoting Schumpeter, "shunted economics off on a wrong road, a road unfortunately different from that of his Continental forebears". So, while Smith did cement limited laissez-faire in popular governance, at least for a while, and helped propagate the notion that men, acting in their own self-interest, serve the best interests of society (i.e., the "Invisible Hand"), and while he did promote savings and investment to the exclusion of proto-Keynesian "hoarding" or underconsumption, overall, Rothbard assesses Smith's impact on economics as a net negative. For instance, Smith re-invigorated the by-then discredited institution of fractional reserve banking (a "highway in the air" of putatively free money), obscured the role of the entrepreneur as a price-setting mechanism and a bearer of risk (leading to spasms of class warfare between capitalists and 'exploited' labor for generations), and was "almost solely responsible" for injecting the disastrous labor theory of value into classical economic thought, thus providing the beachhead by which socialists and Marxists would launch their class-warfare attacks a century later. Indeed, from the Austrian perspective

The most unfortunate aspect of the total Smithian takeover in economics was...the blotting out of knowledge of the rich tradition of economic thought that had developed before Adam Smith. As a result, the Austrians and their nineteenth century predecessors, largely deprived of knowledge of the pre-Smith tradition, were in many ways forced to re-invent the wheel, to painfully claw their way back to the knowledge that many pre-Smithians had enjoyed long before.

Due to his popularity, Smith had a number of followers in the Anglophone world, including such well-known men like David Ricardo, John Mill, and Mill's son, J.S. Mill. Each extended and propagated Smithian economic thought...Ricardo took Smith's "law of absolute advantage" and generalized it to become his famous "law of comparative advantage".[4] He continued Smith's focus on long-run equilibrium (the better to simplify his economic model), a disregarding of the entrepreneur, and a focus on constructing mathematical, predictive aggregative models built on flawed assumptions (such as perfect economic knowledge and static environments). This focus would lead Schumpeter to coin the phrase "Ricardian Vice", to describe the act of building elegant abstract economic models built on shaky assumptions and often gross oversimplifications. One way Ricardo kept his models neat and elegant (and also incorrect) was by designating labor as homogeneous...there was no variation in talent or productivity from worker to worker in Ricardo's world, an assumption that Marx would adopt later. Similar to Smith, who crafted a generalized cost-of-production theory, Ricardo promulgated a labor theory of cost and therefore value, by assuming land would gain zero rent and profits would be uniform across the economy...ergo the price of a good is driven by the labor hours (plus a small profit) used to produce it. As a result, Ricardo's economic theory has class warfare built into it, by postulating that the real wage rates would always be at subsistence level, the laborer would never get ahead, while the capitalist reaps his small profit with no effort (remember, Ricardo assumes away entrepreneurial risk) on his own, based on nothing but his ownership of land.[5] Ricardo errs further in his focus on the macro; Rothbard counters that there are no such things as macroeconomic laws, only the consequences of micro economic laws linking together economic agents on a market scale.

Others in the Smithian vein include James and J.S. Mill, father and son, the former adding the "law of comparative advantage" to the body of economic thought (and mentor of Ricardo) while the latter seizing upon the Smithian conceptualization of the inevitable friction between capitalists and labor and amplifying it to Marx's great class-warfare glee. It was also the younger Mill who rehabilitated Ricardo, after Ricardo's theories had been thoroughly trounced in the early nineteenth century by various thinkers and pamphleteers. J.S. Mill would re-install Ricardian economic theory in the place of primacy in British economic thought.

[4] Rothbard claims that Ricardo did not postulate the law of comparative advantage and claims that an English physiocrat named William Spencer first articulated it in 1807.

[5] Ricardo glosses over the Austrian claim that landlords to perform an economically useful function: they allocate land to its best and productive use.

Regarding the J.S. Mill-led resurgence of Ricardianism, Rothbard wrote: "for not the first or the last time in the history of economic or social thought, error displaced truth from the post of dominance in the intellectual world". Indeed, J.S. Mill was a towering figure in the British intellectual scene in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and he did much to scrub proto-Austrian thought from the British consciousness. Not only did he single-handedly re-institute elite support for labor theory of value, Ricardian rent theory, and Malthusian wage and population theory, but he administered the coup de grace to flagging British enthusiasm for laissez faire. From J.S. Mill forward, with his penchance for moderate versus full-fledged democracy, moderate statism, mild support for socialism, advocacy for positivism, inductivism, and organicism (as contrasted to Austrian praxeological techniques), and generalized laissez-faire apostasy, the British intelligentsia adopted a materialist view of wealth and came to view man as "Economic Man" (i.e., man's only interest is in acquiring wealth, that is, when he's not shirking). Mill also promulgated the notions that economic distribution could be split from production, and that the State could and should shape distribution through taxation, subsidies, manipulation of the money supply, or other State intervention. Mill was among the first to articulate the recurring nature of business cycles, celebrating the inflationary boom as the cure for Ricardian-style economic stagnation. A Malthusian, Mill also supported first-wave feminism and advocated birth control as a means to control population growth, as well as led the gradual British rejection of classical liberalism in favor of a more aggressive "white man's burden"-style messianic imperialism that encouraged the installation of benevolent despotisms over barbarous peoples. Quoth Rothbard, citing Mill: "I have always been for a good stout despotism, for governing Ireland alike India". A curious statement indeed for a fellow that wrote a landmark essay entitled "On Liberty" that so resolutely defends the individual rights of man (and women... JS Mill was a through-and-through feminist).

Standing in sharp relief to the English classical economists was a Continental French contemporary of Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say. In Austrian thought, Say is a towering figure of the French laissez-faire tradition. With his focus on real-world interactions instead of long-run equilibrium, Say redeemed the entrepreneur from Smithian purgatory. He added the concept of (entrepreneurial) risk premium to the concept of interest, posited that it is related to the supply (inverse) and demand (proportional) of capital, and made the case that interest--usury--is morally indistinguishable from rent or wages. He was virulently laissez-faire, opining thusly about government intervention in the market, compared to entrepreneurs

The producers themselves are the only competent judges of the transformation, export, and import of these various matters and commodities; and every government which interferes, every system calculated to influence production, can only do mischief

Say was a minarchist of the first order, being possessed of a cynical attitude toward government in general (the "services government provides are to itself and to its favorites"), of the opinion that government spending was pure consumption, that government was a "grievous public nuisance" and "an aggressor upon the peace and happiness of domestic life", and stating (paraphrasing) "that government is best (least bad) when it spends and taxes the least". Accordingly, and in anticipation of Keynes, Say was critical of government measures to 'stimulate' consumption without attendant production, for it is of

no benefit to commerce; for the difficulty lays in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire for consumption; and we have seen that production alone furnishes the means...the only real consumers are those who produce on their part, because they alone can buy the produce of others, [while]...barren consumers can buy nothing except by the means of value created by producers

Moreover, also seemingly anticipating Keynes, Say argued that savings do not leak out of an economy, and that cash hoarding in a free market will eventually clear itself out--prices will fall, and when they do, hoarded cash will re-enter the market. Say is also generally credited with popularizing what is commonly referred to as "Say's Law", which, loosely speaking, postulates that production of a product will 'stimulate' demand for other products, as individuals engage in production of their products so as to enable their consumption of others' production. What Say called "barren consumers" do not produce, and therefore do not stimulate others' production in and of themselves. Unfortunately, in keeping with the principle that rectitude does not necessarily have bearing on the dominance of a particular economic theory, Say's work is largely unknown except to economists of the Austrian school, eclipsed as it was by the blazing hot sun of the Millian resurrection of Ricardianism.

Next: Marxism

Book Review: An Austrian Perspective on The History of Economic Thought, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:33:00 +0000

A book review in four parts.

The Book: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 1241 pages, by Murray Rothbard

The Gist: This well-crafted, lucidly written, exhaustively detailed, and frankly brutally large tome traces the thread of economic thought and theoretical development forward from the first recorded economic thinkers in the world...the Greeks...forward through time to the present day. [1] Right away, Rothbard poses a fundamental argument about the human condition that frames his History: that history is not a progressive improvement upon the values and thought systems of our forebears but is instead a "zig-zag" back and forth, with technologies and "correct" theories discovered only to be forgotten and "rediscovered" later on, oftimes after an "incorrect" theory has been followed to its fully fallacious and often calamitous conclusion. Furthermore, throughout his History, Rothbard is careful to holistically integrate the influence of the zeitgeist with a historical figure's own life experience and religion on his economic contribution:

Leaving out religious outlook, as well as social and political philosophy, would disastrously skew any picture of the history of economic thought

The result is a painfully long yet informative manuscript leveraging autobiographies and Church history, weaved together in such a manner as to tell the history of economic thought from the Ancients forward to Marx. This review will, in four parts, attempt to summarize Rothbard's history and capture his key points.

Ancient Economic Thought
The Greeks, most notably Aristotle, but also Plato, articulated for the first time ever, notions of private property, scarcity, subjective value and utility, the influence of supply and demand on value, time-preference, division of labor, the functions of money, and the imputation of value from ends to means. In short, the bulk of the body of economic thought had already been thunk by Western Civilization's progenitors. Indeed, as Rothbard puts it, these men

were focusing on the logical implications of a few broadly empirical axioms of human life: the existence of human action, the eternal pursuit of goals by employing scarce means, the diversity and inequality among men. These axioms are certainly empirical, but they are so broad and pervasive that they apply to all of human life

The Greeks, in addition to practically founding modern economic thought and doing the bulk of the yeoman's work in fleshing out the theoretical framework, also gifted the human race with a theory of natural law, the "just and proper moral law discovered by man's right reason, can and should be should be used to engage in a moral critique of the positive man-made laws of any state or polis". Natural law, thence, attempts to capture the universal and eternal nature of man, and Rothbard will circle back to natural law repeatedly in his Austrian perspective of economic history.

[1] Rothbard claimed to have searched for economic thought outside of Western Civilization and, with the notable exception of ancient China (which had no impact outside of China), failed to find any whatsoever, an interesting finding in and of itself. What was/is it about Western Civilization that made it the unique locus of economic thought on the planet for 3,000 years?

Scoping forward through time, the Romans, having absorbed the Greek city-states, carried the seed of Greek economic thought, via the traditions of the Stoics and the most famous Roman Stoic, Marcus Tullius Cicero, forward through history. Interestingly, according to the author, the Romans contributed little to nothing to the extant body of economic thought, but did function as an efficient and extremely effective conduit of economic and jurisprudent tradition, as Roman law greatly influenced subsequent Western legal and social theory (which in turn, influenced thought about "political economy"). As an example, Roman laws ensconced, for the first time in the West, the notion of absolute property rights and attendant contract theory, which in turn shaped Anglophone concepts of English Common Law and the civil codes of non-Anglophone Continental Europe. Private property rights are the bedrock rights in natural law theory, as well as the foundational assumption of Austrian economic theory.

Scholasticism and the other "Great Schism"
For a period of time after the Roman Empire collapsed, the history of economic thought was the history of the Scholastics of the Roman Catholic Church, at least for a few hundred years. The Scholastic schools, by integrating economic analysis with the study of ethics, natural law, jurisprudence, ontology and theology, methodically refined and propagated Western economic and political thought, including theories that were pagan (i.e., natural law theory) as well as Christian in origin, forward through the Middle Ages. The Scholastics emphasized private property and freedom to contract, as well as a "just price" (defined as the prevailing market prices, plus or minus some arbitrary "reasonable" sum), and the (often hedged) right to violently resist tyrants. Merchants, money-changers, and money-lenders were viewed as profiteers in the Ancient and Scholastic traditions, their gains "turpe lurcum", or ill-gotten. Accordingly, the Scholastics also maintained a prohibition on usury, the ultimate in turpe lurcum, which in the old days was the charging of any interest at all, although this prohibition waned over the ages under pressure from various quarters, to the point to where the proscription was in name only. They were also some of the first recorded hard-money advocates, and, notably, the "Salamancan School" postulated a subjective theory of value based upon consumer utility, in contrast to the prevailing cost-of-production theories of value or the labor theory of value, of which Smith would be a notable exponent and Ricardo, and later Marx, would propagate to much distractive and destructive effect. However, the Salamancan School was before its time, and its discoveries were lost when the Scholastic tradition was cast aside in the aftermath of the Reformation. The advent of Protestant anti-Scholasticism, Rothbard claimed, split European economic thought into two camps: one from the portion of Europe that was Calvinist or Lutheran (i.e, northern Germany, England, and Scandinavia), the other from the remainder of the Continent that remained Catholic.

This split is crucial to Rothbard's history. The advent of Calvinism ushered in the first wide-spread acceptance of interest (still proscribed during this time in Catholic lands), the concept that labor as a good in and of itself (the so-called Protestant work ethic) and, according to Rothbard, the first historical introduction of the labor theory of value, which would derail economic thought for 500 years and still holds influence today. In contrast, Scholastics focused on consumption, where the consumer strikes the Thomist Aristotelian balance between the "good life" of labor, consumption, and leisure. In this Scholastic framework, the consumer makes a subjective valuation about the price of goods and selects accordingly. Being an Austrian economist, Rothbard clearly sides with this Continental subjective theory of value and a near anarcho-capitalism rooted in natural law.

The factor with arguably the largest effect on the trajectory of post-Reformation economic thought and theories of governance was the Protestant rejection of para-Christian natural rights and natural law theory embedded in Canon law.[2] This rejection, according to Rothbard, opened the proverbial Pandora's Box for absolutist "sovereigns", the "divine rights of kings", and set the stage for the absolutist rulers that followed. In their zeal to return to the essentials of Christian faith, which Protestants allegedly saw as corrupted by centuries of popery-cum-paganism, Rothbard argued that Protestant Reformers also set aside two thousand years of received Western natural-law thought. Rothbard argues that this removed the philosophic check on state power and led, progressively over the centuries, to absolutism, mercantilism, and communism.

A second, less influential factor was where this thought was occurring: before and for a short while after the Reformation, economic thought was transmitted from professor to pupil in the universities. Soon, however, economic thought would migrate away from academia and Latin and, via the Protestant emphasis on literacy, "democratize" economic theorizing to lay citizens, clergy, merchants, and pamphleteers, each in their native languages. This "distributed" system of economic theoretical development accelerated Western economic theoretical development, but also made it far more chaotic and incoherent (lending support to Rothbard's "zig-zag" theory proposed earlier).

[2] Under lethal pressure from authoritarian and absolutist Catholic regimes, Protestants would later return to the natural law and natural rights framework they had earlier rejected, but this was after some thoroughly shocking examples of mystic-inspired, Book of Acts-style proto-communism were attempted in central Germany, Holland, and in Bohemia by the Anabaptists and the Taborites, who attempted totalitarian
communism five centuries before Marx popularized it. What was noteworthy about the Anabaptist example was how quickly utopian communism devolved into forced labor, forced polygyny, forced expropriation of goods...and death to those who resisted. The Secularists, for their part, never did return to any conception of natural law and natural rights, and recognized no limit on State power whatsoever.

Next: Mercantilist Economic Thought

False Flags From Our Supposed Ally

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:59:00 +0000

All of the major presidential candidates, from Messrs Gingrich, Romney, Paul, Santorum, and Obama have publicly declared that they support Israel. Somehow, we are to believe that Israel is the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Middle East and that she is our greatest ally in the region. Curiously, Evangelicals are quite often more Zionist than Jews themselves, particularly American Jews.

I am not a Zionist, despite the fact that a great many, possibly even a majority, of my Christian Evangelical peers are.* But I am also not an anti-Zionist. I simply don't care whether the country of Israel exists at all, except maybe to lend moral support to Israelis in their competing claim to ancient Judea against that of Moslem Arabs. After all, Hebrews predated Arabs in the Holy Lands by at least 1,000 years, so on the basis of "git thar fustest with the mostest" alone they win the coin toss. That said, I honestly don't get the intensity of American support, measured in decades of American presidents attempting to act the zebra between Israel and her Arab neighbors, but also in $3B in annual foreign aid, especially after she pulls stunts like this:

Agents with Israel's Mossad agency posed as American CIA agents in operations to recruit members of the Pakistani militant group Jundallah, a report in Foreign Policy magazine said Friday. Using American dollars and US passports, the agents passed themselves off as members of the Central Intelligence Agency in the operations, notably in London, according to memos from 2007 and 2008, said the report. Jundallah (Soldiers of God) says it is fighting for the interests of the southeastern province's large ethnic Baluch community, whose members, unlike most Iranians, mainly follow the Sunni branch of Islam. The Baluch straddle the border with neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan and Jundallah militants have taken advantage of the unrest in the region to find safe haven in the border region. In July it claimed responsibility for attacking the Grand Mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan, reportedly targeting members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards Corps, killing 28 people. "It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," a US intelligence officer told Foreign Policy. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought"

Okay, so we (USA) have busted Mossad in the past for posing as American CIA agents, besmirching whatever good name we have in anti-American Pakistan, in order to do their dirty deeds in the interests of their home country. Is it then so far-fetched to wonder that the recent assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran, which Iran blames on the USA, possibly thinking it was in retaliation for a foiled Iranian assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC, may have actually been executed by famed the Israeli intelligence agency, again in the interests of their own home country? Seems to me that, once again, our one-way friendship with the beleaguered Jewish state is more trouble than it is worth. I daresay that if the political state of Israel were wiped off the map tomorrow, and replaced by an openly Christian one or simply subsumed by the Moslem states surrounding it, our nation's strategic situation would be greatly simplified in that corner of the world.

* I don't get Evangelical enthusiasm for Zionism. Seems to me that Evangelical Christians, in their attempts to either (a) hasten Armageddon or (b) curry favor with God by supporting the political state of Israel, is making a similar mistake as that made by first-century Jews: They assume they are aiding in the formation of a temporal kingdom, not a spiritual Kingdom. One would think that Christians of all people would know that the country known today as Israel <> the spiritual nation of Israel. One would think they wouldn't repeat the mistakes of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries.

Exit question: What should we call a country that pursues its own self interest, without aiding us in ours (how many conflicts since 1948 have Israelis openly fought alongside US forces, again?), takes our foreign aid, openly lobbies our congress for the same, gives little to nothing in return, and poses as Americans while conducting dry/wet ops in Islamic countries? An ally? Or a troublesome freeloader?

Bankrupt

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Behold the New Year's Eve fleshcapade in London and other cities across England, as laddettes stumble their way through the evening in a half (or quarter)-dressed stupor.

(Note: pictures lifted from here, in the Daily Mail).

Used to be, only hookers gussied themselves up in whore's uniforms. For these sexual capitalist exploiters of lonely or bored men, dressing like this made sense: it (a) readily identified a woman as a purveyor of sex for money, and (b) coaxed a fellow's mind into thinking about having a romp in the hay by bombarding it with sexual signals so clear and so loud only the blind and stone deaf couldn't see or hear them.

Used to be, other women, "good" girls, who realized that a portion of their value pivoted around virtue, didn't want to be mistaken for a slut, whose value as a wife was steeply diminished. Yes, they wanted to signal their beauty, but they didn't want their comeliness to overshadow the other qualities that made her attractive to a potential husband. Not today. "Pretty", as this author calls it, is dead. Enter hotness":

Young women today do not seem to aspire to pretty, they prefer to be regarded as hot. Hotness is something altogether different. When women want to be hot instead of pretty, they must view themselves in a certain way and consequently men view them differently as well. Pretty is cherished. Hotness, on the other hand, is a commodity. Its value is temporary and must be used. It is a consumable.

The merits of hotness over pretty is easy enough to understand, they made an entire musical about it. Who can forget how pretty Olivia Newton John was at the beginning of Grease. Beautiful and innocent. But her desire to be desired leads her to throw away all that is valuable in herself in the vain hopes of getting the attention of a boy. In the process, she destroys her innocence and thus destroys the pretty. What we are left with is hotness.

Hotness is a consumable. A consumable that consumes as it is consumed but brings no warmth.

Most girls don't want to be pretty anymore even if they understand what it is. It is ironic that 40 years of women's liberation has succeeded only in turning women into a commodity. Something to be used up and thrown out.

What happened in Manchester over New Year's Eve, and repeated in several other cities across England and doubtless here in the States, is what you get when an entire generation of young women, when asked "what else you got?", look at the empty cupboard of their life, only to realize they had little else to offer. So they double and triple-down on the only attribute of value they have left, cheapening all in a sexual signalling arms race to the bottom.

I find it ironic that the greatest SMP advantage to be had is accrued by women who don't offer themselves up for sale in the sexual meat market, but instead cultivate those eternal qualities of faith, virtue, chastity, fidelity, thrift, industry, integrity, a nurturing nature, and contentment. Sexuality is merely part of the package, not the whole thing, and it is certainly not packaged and traded upon in hopes of attracting the attention of that hot guy who yourself find hot.

I found humorous truthiness in this comment over at Hot Air:

For me, hot is what happens after pretty strips off.

martin.hale on January 1, 2012 at 10:31 AM

Yup. Note the order here: Pretty first, then removal of modesty-enhancing clothing, then comes hot. Something else, too. Hotness is more than signalling. It's a state of mind. It's
an environment, it's surroundings, it is a climate of trust and safety and intimacy. It's not simply just dressing like a streetwalker. For the latter is rude, off-putting, disrespectful, and transparent in its naked attempt to manipulate.

In the end, if your response to "what else you got?" is to strip off most of your clothes and parade around in a bid for male and female attention, you're in the sort of predicament that no amount of flesh-baring will help.

So Close, Yet So Far

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:13:00 +0000

Ross Douthat accurately characterizes the connection between the decline of marriage and the increasingly threadbare American social fabric, then badly lapses into utter statist banality on what should be done about it:

At Christmastime, we like to tell stories about resilient families. The Cratchits of "A Christmas Carol," for instance, who subsist on love, hope and 15 shillings a week. The Baileys of Bedford Falls, who survive wars, bank runs and bankruptcies because they have friends, one another, and a guardian angel watching out for them. The first couple of the New Testament, who manage to cope with a supernatural pregnancy, a murderous king and the necessity of delivering a child in the bleak midwinter, half-out-of-doors and far from home.

In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families - the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class - are less and less likely to have them. This domestic dissolution plays a role in a host of socioeconomic ills: stagnating blue-collar wages, weakening upward mobility, stalling high school graduation rates, even the increase in juvenile obesity and diabetes. But it isn't an issue that politicians of either party are particularly comfortable addressing. Liberals worry about seeming paternalistic and judgmental; conservatives recoil from the idea of increasing the government's role in the most intimate of spheres. Thus America has a crisis of family life, but no family policy to speak of.

[T]here are costs to the European approach. Government-guaranteed leave often gives less financial relief to a mother or father who is already at home full time. And Europe's overall web of regulations and job protections makes the labor market more rigid and less accommodating to part-time work - which is the kind of work that mothers, especially, tend to want. (A recent survey of American parents found that 58 percent of married women with children preferred part-time to full-time work, compared with 20 percent of husbands.)

A more flexible alternative, championed by the conservative writers Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein, would change the way we tax families, dramatically expanding the child tax credit in order to ease the burden on parents with young children. Their proposal would leave contemporary Baileys and Cratchits with more disposable income and more options without favoring one approach to parenting over another.

Yes, quite unimaginative. A more penetrating analysis would have discovered that government policies themselves dis-incentivize marriage and subsidize divorce, producing the sort of domestic destabilization that Mr. Douthat describes. Yet, after cataloging the downside of a divorce culture, the best Mr. Douthat could come up with is to double-down on government intervention.

Since an operative definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results, a much more sane alternative would be to do the opposite of what's been tried so far...instead of more government, let's try less of it, to include removing Federally financed enticements that encourage single parenthood and closing down the government funding sluices that shunt taxpayer monies in the direction of marital dissolution. I know it will be counter-intuitive for most of us who have grown up in the age of government-as-universal-problem-solver, but in public policy matters, often the best thing government can do is...nothing.

Imagine for a moment what would happen were a marriage to dissolve, threatening poverty for the mother and two children, and the State did nothing except to let the estranged couple, their families, and para-governmental civic institutions sort things out on their own. What would that look like? Who would look after the children? Dad? Mom? Grandparents? The Church? Orphanages? Faced with such daunting and thorny and distasteful questions, would such a marriage dissolve in the first place, or would the estranged partners stick out their rough patch and arrive in a happier future? Would the divorce rate drop if husbands and wives, and their relatives and neighbors, directly felt the sting of marital implosions, rather than sticking some unknown, faraway taxpayer with the bill?

What sort of public policy, then, reinforces marriage? A policy that intervenes to facilitate parendectomies, and then intervenes again to recapture otherwise lost household income by selling the divorce-suit respondent into state of semi-slavery? Or a policy that, by virtue of a policy of non-intervention, refuses to get sucked into quarrels between husbands and wives, thus ensuring that divorcing spouses bear the full brunt of their decisions?

Of course such out-of-the-box thinking would be anethema to people like this commentator:

Carolyn Egeli, Valley Lee, Md.
Children that are well cared for are society's best investment in the future. Children need their parents, but mostly they need their mothers. European governments seem much better at recognizing this simple truth. Fathers are needed too of course, but in nature's scheme of things, the father plays a secondary role in the early years. He doesn't have breasts. And there is not much evidence to support that substitutes for women's breasts are as beneficial to very young children. And ditto for the pure attachment that children and mothers feel for one another. Most mammals replicate this phenomena. Our economic system strains gnats and swallows camels to justify the destruction of the most fundamental human relationship of mother and child. Mothers escaping in no fault divorces, are forced into shared custody of their abusers and a deeply divisive and unfair division of property, ultimately skewed in favor of the fathers. The men have off of the top, in 90% of the cases, a much higher income, on average 25% higher, yet the women must share equally in the burden of child care. Most children don't want to live 50% one place and 50% another, but again, the property rights of fathers are more important to the legal system. Cut the child in half seems to be the solution. Making it possible for the mother to continue to spend her time mostly on the care of her children is not even possible, most of the time, even with a very well off and often revengeful former spouse.
Dec. 26, 2011 at 1:54 a.m.

Whew, where to start with this one? First, the data is overwhelming: children do best with both parents, not just the one with the breasts. A policy that emphasizes mothers over fathers, while feeding Ms. Egeli's inflated sense of maternal superiority, flies in the face of this simple fact. Furthermore, men also attach to their children, via vasopressin rather than oxytocin, and it would be a mistake to sideline this bonding process early on, not because breast-challenged men can do the kind of feeding breast-blessed women can, but because bonding between father and child takes time, and this bond will progressively become more and more important, even overtaking the bond between mother and child in some cases, as infants wean into toddlers and children.

Second, while it is true that most of the animal kingdom's families feature mothers and their brood in isolation, with dad nowhere to be found, is it not also true that in such a "state of nature", life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short? Does not such a "natural" family configuration in the animal world feature males who pump-and-dump, who practice polygyny, who are "rewarded" with sex, status, and offspring for anti-social behavior (fighting, killing other males, who kill the offspring of other males, who copulate with estrous females, whether she desires the coupling or not, etc), and who generally can't be counted on to stick around, leaving the mother to carry all the burden? Why then does Ms. Egeli think such an "natural" family model is to be preferred over one where children enjoy the full, active, present contribution of both biological parents, parents that contribute to the household in their own distinct and complementary ways?

Third, when one examines the divorce statistics, as I have, it is clear that DV accounts for a very small fraction of divorce suits. So the canard of "mothers escaping in no-fault divorces" is just that--a canard, used to justify the far more prevalent reason for divorce: simple unhappiness. As for the evil of shared parenting, if she'd like, we can simply award full custody of children to fathers, the way it used to be done until fairly recently in our culture, and the sex more likely to be able to support their children financially. In this way, the children aren't bounced back and forth between houses. Moreover, awarding children to fathers has the happy side effect of heavily suppressing the divorce rate, which would do much to mend the social fabric that Mr. Douthat frets about in his article. Furthermore, father custody would better protect the interests of children and women than the sole mother custody model. Somehow, however, I don't think that Ms. Egeli would cotton well to this alternative.

Fourth:

The men have off of the top, in 90% of the cases, a much higher income, on average 25% higher, yet the women must share equally in the burden of child care. Most children don't want to live 50% one place and 50% another

Well duh. As the more productive sex, the sex that works longer hours, labors harder, does more dangerous jobs and who commutes further to get to them, and the sex less likely to choose or be afforded the choice to be a haus-herr, no kidding that husbands are the partner more likely to have a higher income in a divorce suit. And her objections to shared parenting can be solved pretty simply: don't divorce, or award primary custody to fathers and be done with it. Again, somehow I don't think she'll cotton well to this idea either.

So we see that Mr. Douthat's unfortunate failure to dig deeper into the root causes of marital instability only results in more calls for government intervention, intervention that will further sideline marriage, promotes marital dissolution, and appears to feed the solipsistic egos of women like Ms. Egeli who think that mothers alone are the relationship that matters most, and fathers are an accessory, value-added, fashionable, helpful (at times) but not critical. I suppose I can't fault her, though. Our social policy for the last 100 years has taught her that she's right.

Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:43:00 +0000

"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power"

-Thomas Jefferson

Dems Flipping the Script

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:27:00 +0000

Once again, Republicans find themselves on the wrong side of freedom, and Democrats, who largely kicked the neocons out of their party for their imperialist and bellicose nature before they were known as "neocons", find themselves in the unusual position of being liberty's advocate:

Mr. Obama, his aides said, is adamant that the United States will not send troops back to Iraq. At Fort Bragg, N.C., on Dec. 14, he told returning troops that he had left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people, and in private conversations at the White House, he has told aides that the United States gave Iraqis an opportunity; what they do with that opportunity is up to them.

Already, Mr. Obama is coming under political fire. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that Mr. Obama's decision to pull American troops out had "unraveled." Appearing on CBS News on Thursday, Mr. McCain said that "we are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there," adding that while he was disturbed by what had happened in the past week, he was not surprised.

I am also dismayed by the fact that only one candidate among all the Republican contenders for president doesn't want to get us into another fight, just to prove we still can. And that candidate isn't really a Republican but a libertarian. Memo to Republicans: being strong on national defense doesn't mean that one need be aggressive and warlike...in fact, being strong on national defense probably means much more focus on "defense" rather than how we presently implement it.

A Compendium of Paulisms In Context

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:58:00 +0000

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of scanned pages of Rep Paul's many publications over the years. With one exception, they are all stored at The New Republic's website, so considering the source, I have no doubt that, in these pages, lay the most damaging and controversial things Rep Paul has written in his 35+ years in the public eye. That said, even given the cherry-picked nature of the selection, there is some stuff in there that gives some support to critics on the left and the right who accuse Rep Paul of crypto-racism, of being a black-helicopter NWO crank, conspiracy theorist, &c. I'll let you read and click and decide for yourself.

April 1978 "Freedom Report", pp 1-3. A very young Rep Paul, judging by the photograph, decries international blackmail in connection with the Panama Canal treaty, claims Panama Canal Treaty "undoubtedly written by the banking and big business interests of Wall Street"; decries former president Jimmy Carter's membership in the now-not-so-secret Trilateral Commission

May 1979 "Freedom Report". Paul's take on nuclear power. Not much to this single-page letter fragment.

August 1983 "Freedom Report". Exposition on big government; "IRS tactics become more gestapo-like every year", IRS attacked a 'tax rebel' with a US Army tank and burned him to death.

January 1988. Reprinted claim from anti-government medical doctor, William C. Douglass, that AIDS was produced in a government lab at Ft Detrick.

April 1988 "Investment Letter". IRS considers the "value gained" by debtors who no longer have to pay on a foreclosed mortgage as income; solicitation for a Ludwig von Mises institute conference.

May 1988 "Investment Letter. Promotion of a book by Mr. Gary Allen "Say No To the New World Order".

Sep 1988 "Ron Paul Political Report. Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission, in Rep Paul's view and extra-Constitutional international coordinating body. Critique of the draft as involuntary servitude.

Apr 1989 "Ron Paul Political Report. Salman Rushdie affair may be a product of those who want Moslems to look bad. Criticized treatment of Canadian Ernst Zundel "who questioned the historical reality of the Holocaust" under Canada's "anti-hate" law. Contrasted left-liberal positive treatment of Rushdie and negative treatment of Zundel; both committed "hate crimes" under the Canadian law. Also critiques former USMC Lt Col Oliver North.

November 1989 "Ron Paul Political Report". Description of a secretive Bohemian-style gathering of (mostly US-based) world leaders in California, "the West's hidden summit", replete with prostitutes and a homoerotic atmosphere.

December 1989 "Ron Paul Political Report", pp 1-7. Newsletter describes gangs of black females "needlin'" white women with used hypodermic needles and suggests pervasive racial double-standards in the news media; claims legalization of drugs will dramatically cut crime; Lew Rockwell says then-Senator John Glenn (D-OH) got what he deserved when a citizen punched him in the mouth; quotes Rep Bill Dannemeyer (R-CA) "The average homosexual has 1,000 or more partners in a lifetime...only one sexual encounter per partner and never sees the partner again"; "Washington DC: a black thing?...to be white in Washington, however, is to experience a culture that is anti-white and proud of it...[w]hat a relief it is to walk, shop, or eat in the small Ethiopian community in Washington: successful, confident black people whose self-image is not defined in anti-whiteness, and who are therefore invisible in the liberal media...of course, there are racist whites. But outside of a miniscule band of KKK members, there are few whose racism is the defining fact of their lives. Too many DC blacks, on the other hand..."; racial double-standards in DC and in Congress; the socialist inclinations of Surgeon General Koop. This Report also predicted the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailouts some twenty years before it happened.

Jan 1990 untitled letter fragment, pg 4. Newsletter quotes "well-known libertarian editor" as stating: "The ACT-UP slogon on stickers plastered all over Manhattan is 'Silence = Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?"

Jul 1990 untitled letter fragment, pg 6. Speaks out about national ID card, about a no-knock police raid that hits the wrong home, and quotes author Tom Clancy, regarding homosexual behavior: "I live in a free country, and if people want to have their anuses used in that way, while I find it unsavory, I do not arrogate to myself the right to prevent them from doing so".

Jan 1992 "Ron Paul Political Report. Describes his decision to step aside in favor of Pat Buchanan's presidential candidacy.

Feb 1992 "Investment Letter". Secret regulations to suspend the Bill of Rights; decries Executive Order 11921 "Emergency Preparedness Functions", alleges gateway to censorship, regulation of communications devices, confiscation of the personal property of 'hoarders'; steps citizens can take to prepare for emergency (store up food, water, fuel, gold and silver).

Jul 1992 "Ron Paul Political Report". Ross Perot candidacy; racially tinged description of Jun 14th 1992 post-Bulls game violence by Chicago-area blacks in which 1,000 blacks were arrested, 95 LEOs injured, 61 police cars destroyed, and 100 other citizens injured. Quotes Mayor Daley: "When people have an excuse to loot, the loot. And when they have an excuse to shoot, they shoot." Quotes Sister Souljah, regarding the LA riots, "have a week and kill white people". Critiques Clinton's invocation of David Duke in support of Souljah:

At the conference, Clinton mildly criticized those comments [by Souljah] as sounding like David Duke turned around. (In fact, Duke never said anything of the kind. He was called Hitler for opposing black privileges)...what does it say about a party when it's candidate can't criticize those who advocate killing white people without upsetting its core voters? What does it say about blacks [Jesse Jackson] that they would find it upsetting to hear this criticized?

Also in this issue, the rich Kuwaitis who we liberated from Saddam Hussein allegedly held slaves. Relates a story about his youngest son and medical school:

My youngest son is starting medical school. He tells me there would be no way to persuade his fellow students of the case for economic liberty. His colleagues have all borrowed tens of
thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, from a government loan program. They can't possibly resist government intrusion in medicine once they become so dependent.

Prefiguring the real estate bubble and the sub-prime real estate crisis by 25 years, Page 7 of the newsletter contains a racially charged description of "the racial racket" wrt lending to urban homeowners, ACORN's race-based blackmail of major mortgage-lending banks, bullying them into making loans that have a low likelihood of being repaid, yet the loans are extended by banks at the behest of the government and "never mind that white taxpayers are the ones insuring the bank system"..."just another form of welfare". From the news letter, sarcastically: "Real racial discrimination" is a homebuilder in Arlington Virginia who used only white models in his ads for five years...and was sued for it.

Oct 1992 "Political Report". Asserts whites a common target of car-jacking among urban youth. Contains the quote:

In the old days, average people could avoid such youth [sic] by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth [sic] now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob. What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.

Nov 1992 "Ron Paul Political Report". A discussion of abortion and on the legal standing of fetuses; euthanasia; decline in a "culture of life"; condom distribution at a Galveston, Texas, high school; the left-wing domination of the Smithsonian; criticism of asset-forfeiture laws. Discussion of the Spassky v Fischer chess match, in which Fischer fell off the radar for alleged anti-semitism, despite the fact that Fischer himself is a Jew:

When the champion chess match between Bobby Fischer and Spaasky got underway, it was called the game of the century. Major newspapers had hotlines for updates. Daily 1,000-word essays chronicled every more. Then something happened. Fischer began to lay waste to Spassky, and the press attention disappeared. What happened? It turns out that the brilliant Fischer, who has all the makings of an American hero, is very politically incorrect on Jewish questions, for which he will never be forgiven, even though he is a Jew. Thus we are not supposed to herald him as the world's greatest chess player.

Jan 1993 "Survival Report", page 7. The disappearing white majority. Quote:

I know it is considered impolite to worry about this trend. We are all under the same skin, the argument goes. Whatever the truth of that assertion, it is an empirical fact that in a mixed-economy democracy, nearly every racial and ethnic group votes its group interest except the white population. Whites don't vote for candidates that promise to promote white interests, whereas blacks and Hispanics do. Groups other than whites have strong ethnic and racial identities. They are devoted to using the State to advance their cause. That, inevitably, means more welfare, more affirmative action, more grants of privilege, etc. That demographic shifts have profound political implications should go without saying. What is often forgotten is how such changes affect our culture. Nearly every other group but whites are allowed a certain degree of cultural autonomy. Blacks have black high schools, clubs, and neighborhoods. The same is true of Hispanics. It is human nature that like attracts likes. But white are not allowed to express this same human impulse. Except in a de facto sense, there can be no white schools, white clubs, or white neighborhoods. The political system demands white integration, while allowing black segregation.

April 1993 "Survival Report", page 3. Promotion of gold, US government is expanding the definition of income so as to capture more taxes; speculation that the 1993 WTC bombing could have been a Mossad false-flag op; a call for citizens to arm themselves.

Undated 1993 Ron Paul political solicitation. Also available in html here. Long letter consisting of scare-language about the "new money", in support of his "Surviving the New Money" publication.

Sep 1994 "Survival Report".

Avoiding AIDS.

Those who don't commit sodomy, who don't get a blood transfusion, and who don't swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay, as was Kimberly Bergalis...In the news recently was the tragic case of an infant getting AIDS from another infant in a hospital. In addition to being further proof that AIDS carriers should not be mixed with regular patients, let alone healthy babies, the disease was apparently transmitted by infected blood. Despite all the government propaganda about hugging and dissing AIDS patients, the virus can enter through a mere break in the skin

Sep 1995 "Survival Report". Alarm about foreign troops training on US soil; former President HW Bush "defending his authority to send 500,000 US troops to the Persian Gulf as coming from the UN and not Congress". Specialist New. Highlighted case of an Idaho citizen who questioned the authority of BLM officers to act as peace officers in the State of Idaho--allegedly an illegal act on the part of the federal government

May 1996 "Surivial Report, page 5. Questions former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's use of military aircraft to transport businessmen to foreign countries to drum up business. "...spending in the defense budget only enhances the Military Industrial Complex and encourages activity such as the involvement in Bosnia. Tax dollars are the foundation of the New World Order, the international equivalent of the domestic welfare state".

Speeding with the Queen's English

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:32:00 +0000

It used to be that only left-lib-progs threw around words like "racist" and "anti-Semite" with reckless abandon. I wonder what then should I make of Mr. Gingrich's attempt to smear a fellow contender for the Republican presidential nomination with those very same epithets, first here:

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says he couldn't vote for rival Ron Paul if he were to become the GOP's presidential nominee. Gingrich sharply criticized Paul in an interview with CNN for what he said were "racist, anti-Semitic" comments in newsletters that carried Paul's name in the 1990s. Paul says he didn't write the newsletters or even read them.

And then here:

Gingrich's fencing with Mitt Romney seems like an afternoon at a gentleman's club compared with his slams on Paul. "As people get to know more about Ron Paul, who disowns 10 years of his own newsletter, says he didn't really realize what was in it, had no idea what he was making money off of, had no idea that it was racist, anti-Semitic, called for the destruction of Israel, talked about a race war - all of this is a sudden shock to Ron Paul?" he asked. "There will come a morning people won't take him as a serious person."

While Mr. Gingrich has a point in mockingly rejecting claims that Mr. Paul didn't read or otherwise approve of the content of the newsletters that bore his (Mr. Paul's) name, he is truly abusing the English language with his claims that the newsletters were "racist" and "anti-Semitic". Yes, he is merely repeating the left-lib-prog (and in some cases, "conservative") media's narrative regarding Mr. Paul, but their ignorance doesn't give him license to speed either.

For all those public school graduates out there, of which I myself am one, having overcome that disability, here is the definition of racism, of which anti-Semitism is a related, albeit ethnically based, subset:

rac*ism:

1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2: racial prejudice or discrimination

Based on this definition, I call shenanigans on the media's repeated parroting of this Big Lie, and on Mr. Gingrich too, who, as a student of history, is one undoubtedly familiar with what constitutes real racism and real anti-Semitism, and is also likely familiar with Goebbelsian Big Lie theory. Moreover, while it is a common mistake to conflate criticism of the political state of Israel and Israeli politicians with attacks on Jewry as a whole, it is not anti-Jew to criticize, say, AIPAC's perceived oversized influence on United States foreign policy. Put differently, Mr. Paul in his letters criticized the activities of a political action committee that represents the interests of a foreign government inside our own legislature, and Mr. Gingrich is complaining about it...as if the overt influence peddling of a foreign government in the halls of the US Congress--a body that awards the nation and state of Israel nearly $3B in US taxpayer-funded foreign aid annually--should not be viewed with skepticism. Furthermore, since when did Mr. Paul call for the destruction of Israel? I've read quite a few of Mr. Paul's newsletters, and nowhere did I read anything like that, unless Mr. Gingrich is somehow confusing Mr. Paul with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad who has threatened both Israel and the United States (and has done so repeatedly). And if Mr. Gingrich really is comparing Mr. Paul to the Iranian president, perhaps it is he--Mr. Gingrich--whom we shouldn't take seriously. Ditto with "race war"...while hyperbolic with his rhetoric, Mr. Paul wasn't calling for a race war, he was (in 1992 and 1993, in the aftermath of nationwide race riots after the Rodney King verdict) warning of one. Obviously in retrospect Mr. Paul's warnings were overwrought, but given the context of the time, and the past- and present-day interracial crime statistics, I do not think Mr. Paul's concerns were completely without warrant. As for me, I would be curious to know if Mr. Gingrich denies the lopsided interracial nature of violent crime in this country, and if he would recommend we all adopt the three-monkey approach to addressing the issue. Would he deny in emperor-has-no-clothes fashion what is plain to see?

I opened this post by rhetorically asking "what should I make" of Mr. Gingrich's adoption of the left-lib-progressive vocabulary. But it is not me who should wonder, but conservatives and Republicans, for those two overlapping populations may take keen interest in what sort of candidate for president wears Republican clothing but speaks using the diction and semantics of the proverbial Progressive wolf.

Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:41:00 +0000

"It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power"

- John Adams

Counterargument: Paul May Not Compete Well Against 44

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:33:00 +0000

In a previous installment, I argued that Rep. Paul espouses an old-school version of conservatism, focused on freedom and liberty and Constitutionally proscribed government. I also argued this vision (a) resonates with voters and (b) is unique among the extant field of Republican contenders for the party's presidential nomination. Furthermore, I argued that, were it for his principles alone, he would be a good candidate to go up against Mr. Obama in the 2012 election. Now that he is no longer a fringe candidate but a serious contendah, as it were, operatives on both the left and the right have been training their guns on him, attacking him for his comparative lack of polish, shrill anti-militarism, harsh and sometimes hyperbolic and bombastic rhetoric, and unorthodox politics. He was also a prolific writer, particularly in his younger years, and therein lays the problem...he has a written record to attack and dissect ad nauseum.*

* The lesson here is, of course, if you aspire to public office, do not produce any written works or advance any ideas in the public square. If a college grad, you must extirpate any papers you wrote, and work to have your graduate thesis made a secret. You must be a tabula rasa, a "Rorschach blot" politician where your public image comes from the mind of the polis, not from yourself. A legislator and political activist with 35-odd years of public statements and a Congressional record is most certainly not this kind of candidate.

Anyways, as hinted in this article, there are quotes from his past that I think don't lend to good optics for a presidential candidate in the current political climate. Subjects such as opposition to homosexuality, opposition to a one-world government, supra-national government (New World Order) alarmism, and a penchance for survivalism tend not to play well in mainstream discourse. Moreover, discussing racial matters as a white (as opposed to the perfectly ordinary and politically correct black and "Hispanic" and "Asian" license to speak at will on racial matters) person does not play well in a mainstream climate that comes down hard on whites expressing opinions for which blacks and other non-whites get a pass. Especially not when coupled with some sloppy hyperbole, in which Rep Paul appears to have occasionally employed when fund-raising or hawking his newsletters.

Below is a sampling of Ron Paul quotes that I've found, mostly coming from here, but other places across the interwebs as well:

(1) "[O]ur country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists-and they can be identified by the color of their skin."

(2) "If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be"

(3) "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal...Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began."

(4) "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began."

(5) "We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."

(6) "What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn't that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?"

(7) "Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action"

(8) "We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers"

(9) "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government"

(10) "...the coming race war in big cities...The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS...the Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica."

Hmmm. A lot in here, and it certainly doesn't look good at first glance. More quotes can be found at the left-liberal anti-Paul website The New Republic, which has two pages dedicated to context-free Paulisms, including some fairly bombastic quotes, and guilt-by-association links to other figures outside of the contemporary political mainstream, such as David Duke and Jared Taylor. But let's unpack the ten listed above, shall we?

Quote #1. Source here. When one looks at the full context of the quote, written in the ugly racially tinged aftermath of the nationwide Rodney King riots in which inner-city blacks rampaged through their neighborhoods, targeting innocent whites and Asians along the way, all of the sudden the remark is a lot less sinister:

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists -- and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Quote #2. I was unable to find the context for this quote, but I agree with Justin Raimondo: it is both a compliment and insult rolled into one.

Quotes #3, #6, #7. Source here. Full quote, in context of the Rodney King riots, again:

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action. I know many who fall into this group personally and they deserve credit--not as representatives of a racial group, but as decent people. They are, however, outnumbered. Of black males in Washington, D.C, between the ages of 18 and 35, 42% are charged with a crime or are serving a sentence, reports the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives. The Center also reports that 70% of all black men in Washington are arrested before they reach the age of 35, and 85% are arrested at some point in their lives. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the "criminal justice system," I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

Without looking up all of Rep Paul's cited figures, I see little here that is controversial, except for the fact that such invconvenient truths are being mentioned at all. Facts are facts. And facts are all that are here, with the exception of the "95%" quote at the end of the paragraph which appears to a judgement-based extrapolation on Rep Paul's part. And the context to this quote is important, for it indicates that, rather than a "racism" against a group of amorphous Others with black skin, Rep Paul acknowledges individual diversity of opinion in the black community, small as it is.

Quote #4. Same source as 1, 3, 6, 7, and 8. Full quote, for context:

The violence wasn't limited to the L.A. area. It extended to Long Beach, Cal. (where more than 500 Cambodian-owned businesses were torched); Seattle, Wash.; Eugene, Ore.; San Francisco, Cal.; San Jose, Cal.; Las Vegas, Nev. (where it still lingers); Madison, Wis.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Atlanta, Ga. Terrorism swept America. In Las Vegas, for example, a white man was pulled out of his car and severely beaten by blacks breaking up from an anti-white rally at l0:30 pm. The blacks shouted racial insults as the police carted him away to the hospital. The crowd then pelted SWAT teams in armored vehicles with rocks and bottles. Someone in the crowd of blacks shot a gun and the police responded with tear gas. I'm sure that there were many more incidents of looting, fires, and violence that we haven't heard about for the simple fact that the media doesn't want us to know about them. Newsmen and editors are protecting us from the truth [emphasis mine].

Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. The "poor" lined up at the post office to get their handouts (since there were no deliveries)--and then complained about slow service. What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided

In the quote, Rep Paul does not cite or source his claim that order was only restored after rioters queued to receive their taxpayer-funded payoff (in the form of welfare checks). Thus I have little to judge the veracity of this statement. Objections to the words in this quote tend to pivot around the "order restored after welfare checks" claim. If true, there can be no controversy here, other than a lack of conformance to politically correct speech codes, that is...for libel isn't libel if it is true. Additionally, in the text that I bolded, Rep Paul makes an observation that I have seen as well...that media editors tend to suppress the race of offenders in news reports, that is, unless the offender is white, in which case, race is happily and merrily acknowledged as a man-bites-dog novelty item. Leftist mainsteam media working an agenda? You be the judge.

Quote #5. Can't find the original source, although Ed Morrissey at Hot Air covers the topic here. If one takes mention of race out of the quote, it is entirely sensible to treat ultra-violent repeat juvenile offenders as adults. Paul's mistake was to run afoul of political correctness by adding "black" into his quote, when referencing the behavior of yoofs in Washington DC, which is interestingly called the "Chocolate City" by blacks whom the same political correctness that censures Rep Paul permits them to trumpet their preferences for racial homogeneity in the City.

Quote #8. Source here. Context of the quote:

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Well one can debate about whether it is prejudice or not to be afraid of black men based on the data--no less a person than the black economist Walter Williams calls this sort of rational prejudice "cheap information"**--what is irrefutable is that black men are disproportionately represented as perpetrators of violent crime, usually against other blacks but also against whites. What the data also shows is that blacks predate upon whites far more than the reverse, making accusations that Rep Paul is promoting a "race war" (see Quote #10) particularly humorous, for one may interpret the wildly lopsided interracial crime rates as a form of de facto race war in and of itself, albeit a war in which one side is committing the vast majority of the aggression.

** More "expensive" information comes at a price...for the price exacted for finding out whether or not the group of young black men in saggy pants, wife beaters, and gang colors malingering on a street corner represents a threat to your safety or not, may be quite steep indeed. Is discovering this information worth your or your family's safety?

Quote #9. Can't find the original source for this quote, but this quote appears to be an opinion of Rep Paul's that the "Israel lobby" has an oversized influence on US policy compared to the size the American Jewish population. Claims such as these are usually met with charges of anti-Semitism, as if the interests of the political state of Israel (or criticism thereof) are in anyway analogous to the interests of individual Jews across the diaspora. As for the judgement that the "Israel Lobby" exists, and that it is extremely influential, well no less luminaries than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made this exact same claim...and Rep Paul, a long-time member of Congress, may have had frequent occasion to watch this lobby in action. Rep Paul would be the person here with the expert knowledge, and the professionally offended hollering "nuh uh" and "jew hater!"doesn't necessarily invalidate his observations or his opinion, nor are their protestations bona facie evidence of evidence of anti-Semitism.

Quote #10. The source of this quote [html] [pdf] appears to be a letter from Rep Paul to potential clients hawking of a trio of newsletters ("Surviving The New Money", "The Ron Paul Investment Letter", and the "Ron Paul Political Report"). This particular letter, though itself undated, is thought to be from 1993. Keep this year in mind as you read the context of quote #10:

...these stooges don’t scare me. Threats or no threats, I’ve laid bare the coming race war in big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.) The Bohemian Grove — perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress’s Mr. New Honey. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica. And the Soviet-style “smartcard” the Justice Department has in mind for you.

Regarding the "race war" quote, as with quotes 1,3,4,6, and 7, this newsletter was published in the few months after the Rodney King riots and in the racial climate of the time, in which the news of the day was filled with more than just your garden-variety racially imbalanced black-on white crime rates (which continue to this day, in media-imposed relative obscurity) but nationwide instances of race-based depredations upon innocent bystanders for no reason other than the color of their skin. Furthermore, warning of a "race war", while possibly over the top, is not the same thing as wishing for one, and claiming that such a warning is "racist"--i.e., making claims that one race is intrinsically better than the other--is itself hyperbolic while simultaneously abusive of the Queen's English.

Re: the "federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS": whether or not this constitutes hatred of homosexuals I leave this up to the reader to decide. From my perspective, I definitely recall a concerted effort on the part of the bien pensants to squelch speech linking AIDS and certain behaviors, behaviors largely confined to certain politically connected niche populations in America. This effort continues to this day to make opposition to homosexuality, even if it is Biblically based, akin to rank bigotry. But if Rep Paul can lay out evidence of a nexus between homosexual advocacy groups and various policy making figures in the government, then this statement, however offensive to homosexual activists, is not false.

So, what do we have when we look at the context of the quotes from Rep Paul's past writings? By and large, when read in context, there is much to excuse what he has said and written. That doesn't mean that Rep Paul will get a pass though, for very few consumers of the mass media will take the time to research whether or not these quotes, as framed by the media, are truly representative of Mr. Paul's opinions. Instead, I suspect that most voters will internalize the repeated accusations of "racism", "homophobia", and "anti-Semitism" made by those opposed to a Paul candidacy. Worse, Rep Paul's actions in this regard haven't helped either, what with his mutating story featuring claims that a ghostwriter wrote these articles and/or he didn't read the material that went out under his name. Even if this explication were true, such evasion looks dodgy, untrustworthy, and suggests Rep Paul has something to hide...and further feeds the media firestorm, keeping the issue alive. Overall, such denials do more harm to him in the long run than the letters themselves...and his efforts at damage control would be more successful if he were to face down these accusations with either repudiation of his past words or a "put up or shut up" challenge on the facts.

In the final analysis, I believe that Rep Paul gives voters the only real, clear choice for the direction of the country. Whether or not he is a good candidate to go up against Mr. Obama next year is dubious...for these letters are dynamite for reasons already mentioned, especially against a mercurial candidate such as Mr. Obama who has the loyalty and ideological sympathy of the mainstream left-wing media.

Update: Mr. Paul had a pretty good interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz yesterday. While reading the interview, it occurred to me that maybe Paul's problem isn't that he's easily accused of being anti-Semitic, but that he's philosophically at odds with Reformed Judaism...and that camp accuses Gentiles who disagree with their policy platform as being anti-Semitic. If true, that's quite breathtaking arrogance, similar in scope and nature to feminists presuming to speak for all women.

Why Paul May Compete Well Against 44

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:52:00 +0000

Now that Rep. Paul is threatening to win in Iowa, the establishment conservative commentariat has been going out of their minds. They appear to not consider him electable, think he's too old, too eccentric looking, a tinfoil hat crank, an isolationist, a barely-concealed racist, among other things. Perhaps it is because Rep Paul actively dislikes Republicans...and they don't like him either, because, well, he's not one of them. He's a paleocon in the style of Taft, Howard Buffett (Warren Buffet's father), or "Pitchfork Pat" Buchanan, and most certainly not cut from the same cloth as those who call themselves conservatives today. And this distinction isn't some inside-baseball trivia...members of the right and even left-liberals have noticed that Rep Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate that doesn't "want to start another war". And we thought Sen McCain's "bomb bomb bomb Iran" riff four years ago was just a one-off. Silly us.

There are a ton of articles making the case, from left [1] [2] and right [1],[2] just to cite a few, that Rep Paul is unfit for the presidency.

One of the articles I read, making the case that Rep Paul can never be president, in many ways does the opposite. This is especially so when one considers Kimberly Strassel's recent warning that Republicans had better field a candidate substantively different from Mr. Obama if they hope to win in 2012...for Rep Paul is nothing if not the antithesis of Mr. Obama, far more so than either Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Romney.

The subject article cites quotes from his past in an attempt to show that he's too fringe or too extreme, but what it really does is promote a Paul candidacy as a candidate of freedom and liberty and against big government. The article implies that views described below are too extreme for a president; this is particularly dismaying is when one considers that his views at one time were mainstream in American politics, going back as far as the founders:

On Leaving the Republican Party in Reagan's Last Year of Office, 1988: "The Republican Party has not reduced the size of government. It has become government's best friend...[t]here is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government"

On Abe Lincoln: "I don't think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided...the Civil War was to prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government and that's what it did. It rejected the notion that states were a sovereign nation."

On the Civil Rights Act of 1964: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota"

On the CIA/FBI: "Interviewer:...[i]n the last interview we did with a Libertarian candidate for President, he said you that would abolish the CIA, the FBI, and the IRS. Do you hold those same positions? Ron Paul: Yes, I do -- because you know, most of our history, we didn't have those institutions"

On Social Security and Medicare: "There's no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn't say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from?"

On Legalizing Heroin and Cocaine: "It's an issue of protecting liberty across the board. If you have the inconsistency, then you're really not defending liberty. We want freedom [including] when it comes to our personal habits...[f]or over 100 years, they WERE legal. You're implying if we legalize heroin tomorrow, everyone's gonna use heroin. How many people here are going to use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody! "Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don't want to use heroin, so I need these laws!"

If these quotes in support of limited government, of the individual's right to free association, in support of property rights--the bedrock natural right of Western Civilization, of not trading one set of state-sponsored race-based discrimination for another, of disposing of government bureaus whose jobs can be accomplished by other means or done away with entirely, of abolishing unconstitutional government redistribution programs, and ending the drug war, are today prima facie evidence of disqualification for the presidency, are "outside the mainstream", and aren't even topics of legitimate debate, then I think we're pretty much finished as a free republic. May as well sit back, nuke some popcorn, and enjoy the decline into mediocrity and tyranny. Freedom, we barely knew ye.

But then there were some quotes that need some extra explaining, for while factually accurate, can be interpreted to make Rep Paul look like he's doing the national security equivalent of "blaming the victim":

On Who's at Fault for 9/11: "They (Al-Qaeda) attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years"

On the Taliban, Who Were in Control of Afghanistan and Allied with Al-Qaeda on 9/11: Taliban doesn't mean they want to come here and kill us. The Taliban means they want to kill us over there because all they want to do is get people who occupy their country out of their country just like we would if anybody tried to Occupy us.

Both these quotes open up Rep Paul for attacks from hawks who want to bluff-charge the American people into reflexive support for a bellicose foreign policy and overseas adventurism. Yes, al Qaeda's stated reason for coming after us was for our support for Israel and for our presence in Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Taliban really didn't care about us and had no desire to come over here and kill us prior to our invasion in 2001. But while both statements are technically accurate, both make Rep Paul vulnerable to the victim-blaming charge, for I think most Americans, myself included, sense that even if were weren't in Saudi Arabia and didn't support Israel, that we'd still be a target of Islamist aggression on some other occasion and some other location. For that is the nature of militant Islam, and has been so since its inception over 13 centuries ago. Commentator Dorothy Rabinowitz made this exact point in the WSJ on Dec 23d (while criticizing Paul for being, in not so many words, an America-hater who sides with America's Islamist enemies), and illustrated her point by quoting the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad: "the US a Satanic power that will, with God's will, be annihilated". Thus those who say that Islamists hate us "for our freedoms" are wrong in my book...Islamists hate us because we are kafirs, infidels, and they are on a mission from god to put us all under submission. They need no other reasons to come after us, our support for Israel and presence in Saudi Arabia are convenient pretexts for their fevered calls to jihad, and this is a fact I think the American people instinctively understand. Which then becomes a potential issue for Rep Paul, for his rhetoric on this issue goes against the grain of the American peoples' common sense.

Furthermore, Rep Paul regularly, and unjustly so in my opinion, takes spears for being a so-called "isolationist". This gross distortion of his position would be laughable were it not so widely repeated. Rep Paul is non-interventionist, not isolationist, the latter being the standard ad hominem employed against those who dare to speak out in opposition to America's aggressive and interventionist foreign policy over the last three generations. I am convinced that Rep Paul would steadfastly defend the homeland if attacked...he just isn't keen on going abroad looking for monsters to slay, or democracies to install by force.

Based on these positions alone, I argue that Rep Paul could compete favorably against Mr. Obama in next years' presidential election. For he has a three-part winning message here: one, Rep Paul is consistently about freedom and liberty and of keeping government within Constitutionally prescribed boundaries. Properly articulated, is quite well positioned to capture the "Not Mitt" Republican vote, particularly those of a Tea Party bent.

Two, I sense that a large portion of the population is quite tired of ten going on eleven years of warfare, the tossing around of "Afghanistan Cost Metrics" ($10B/mo) as if it were mere chump change, and in this instance, Mr. Paul would probably siphon off some of Mr. Obama's white working-class and youth support, leaving Mr. Obama with his (powerful) core Democrat constituencies of well-off white liberals, single women, and racial/ethnic minorities.

Third, for all those Republicans fighting so hard against him now, were Mr. Paul to be the nominee, they would have little choice but to support him or stay home and pout. Given how distasteful another term of 44 would be for most of them, they would be well counseled to throw their support behind a Paul candidacy and work to moderate his less mainstream views from the inside.* Paul energizes a portion of the base that neither Gingrich nor Romney electrifies--how many conservatives will stay home next year if presented with the Hobson's Choice of Mitt v Obama? Which has the déjà vu feel of McCain v Obama, ca 2008, two candidates so close together in basic governing philosophy that one can barely discern any light between them?

* Much in the same way that former President George W. "I-don't-do-nation-building" Bush and President Barack H. "I'll-close-Gitmo" Obama had body-snatching episodes the moment they took office, I strongly suspect a President Paul would be more moderate and circumspect than Candidate Paul or Congressman Paul or Private Citizen Paul.

One serious aspect of the article I cite highlights some newsletters and other publications, if not written by Rep Paul himself, bore his name, and therefore he is ultimately responsible for their content. The content of these newsletters and publications will be quite troubling for a Paul candidacy, and I will delve into that situation in Part 2 of this post. For it is in this area where Mr. Paul will experience some serious difficulty from here forward through the primary and (if nominated), the general election against Mr. Obama.

Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:09:00 +0000

Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.

Howard Buffett

The Christ is Born, Hallelujah!

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:05:00 +0000

1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

21 On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived.

Wealth Gap Tracks the Marriage Gap?

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:22:00 +0000

In a season where pols constantly highlight the growing gap between the rich and poor--leftists propose redistribution to "fix" it, while rightists point out that income distribution is highly skewed and this distortion is throwing off the "average income" numbers--perhaps the problem has less to do with economics or governance or statistical artifacts and more to do with reproductive behavior:

"Family structure is a new dividing line in American society," Isabel Sawhill of the [left wing] Brookings Institution told me. "These two-earner couples at the top are just making out like bandits and these single parents at the bottom have miserable lives. If the single parents were married, their life wouldn't be so miserable. And at the top, if these high-earning professionals weren't getting together and forming little collaboratives, they'd be worse off. Pew found that 27 percent of those with college degrees say they consider marriage "obsolete." But 45 percent of those with a high school diploma or less took that view. A different arm of Pew, its Economic Mobility Project, found that among children who started in the bottom third of income, only one-fourth of those with divorced parents moved up to the middle or top third as adults. By comparison, half of children with continuously married parents - and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 percent of those born to unmarried mothers - moved up the income ladder as adults. Of even more concern is the generational impact of this increased inequality. Being raised in a stable, two-parent household is a strong determinant of educational achievement. In turn, educational achievement is a strong - and growing stronger - determinant of lifetime income. Asa result, the marriage gap becomes a grimly self-perpetuating process.

Getting married and staying married is a key predictor for success in life. It is also a good predictor of the success of one's children, particularly for the upward economic mobility of male children (as I point out here). Accentuating the problem further, post-fem-rev mating behaviors are becoming more and more assortative. In the past, men used to marry their secretaries, whereas nowadays they marry the woman they met in college or a colleague at work. Reinforcing this phenomenon is female hypergamy, which narrows the pool of eligible men for college-educated women. Women tend to not date down, and were a man a secretary, there's little chance a female boss would find him a suitable mate. Thus, successful men and women marry each other, and beget children statistically more likely to be successful themselves.Guess who those children will marry? Children of successful, educated,married moms and dads. Little wonder then that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer...their behavior, and their parents' behavior, tends to assure it.

Before I close this post, a bit of analysis is in order about the"somewhat surprising" factoid that 42% of children born to unmarried mothers moved up the income ladder as adults. Some possible reasons:

1) Less interpersonal conflict in the home, as would probably be the case before, during, and after a divorce. A choice mother was captain of her ship from day one

2) Unmarried mothers tend to be quite poor, and the bar is lower

3) Girls born into the bottom quintile enjoy far more relative mobility than boys, whereas the mobility of both sexes in the upper quintiles is similar

4) Public subsidy of choice mother families cushions the financial impact that would otherwise befall this type of family organization

Commodified Female Sexuality and the Entertainment Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:56:00 +0000

Janice Shaw Crouse over at American Thinker expresses surprise that, in this post fem-rev world, that women would be still "marginalize[d] and sexualize[d]":

...Hollywood movies "marginalize and sexualize" women as much as ever. One of the study's authors said, "There are about 4,300 characters across 100 films per year, and under a third are female. The marginalizing is very surprising when women have made such strides in educational attainment, in sports, in medical and legal careers, and in breaking the glass ceiling in terms of salaries and opportunities across the board. Yet, the Annenberg study reveals that in movies, men have over twice as many speaking roles as women (32.8 percent of speaking characters are women and 67.2 percent are men). These movie trends perpetuate the attitude that women are nothing more than "eye candy." Television, too, perpetuates that attitude when male news anchors are in their 40s, 50s and sometimes 60s, while the female anchors are still in their 20s and early 30s.

The sexualizing is not surprising; it is very disturbing, because of the influence of movies on the culture and on the behavior of teens, as well as even younger children. The study showed that women were clothed in sexy attire more than six times as often as men (33.8 percent of the teen movie actresses wore sexy clothing as compared with 5.3 percent of the teen male characters). Even more troubling is the fact that the female teens -- even those barely in their teens -- were as likely to be sexually provocative as the women in their 20s. Such film trends encourage young men to treat girls as sex objects -- even in some instances condoning and normalizing the sexual exploitation of young girls and women.

Many girls perceive their worth solely in terms of their sexuality.

As long as our children live in a culture saturated with images of women as sex objects, they are going to be exploited by that culture.

While I am just as disturbed as Ms. Crouse about the gross sexualization of females in general in our culture, especially girls below the age of legal consent, and in the media in particular, I'm not surprised one bit, for many reasons. First, the fem-rev was very successful at knocking down all the old roles and taboos for women. These roles and taboos tended to keep feminine sexuality out of the public square. In contrast, the fem-rev introduced new cultural norms that encouraged women and girls to express their sexuality publicly, while simultaneously and zealously attacking anyone, particularly men, who objected to this public expression of what was traditionally a private matter kept more or less behind closed doors. Second, from a somewhat cynical viewpoint, women as a sex have always traded upon their sexuality, to one degree or another, throughout human history. In the past, it was more subdued, in modern times, it is very crass and overt. And third, the fem-rev has largely succeeded in creating a world in which women are equal* in the eyes of the law. They compete as equals in the business world and, thanks to so-called "women's lib", they find the old sex roles largely gone. So they search for ways in which they can gain advantage over their competitors, be they male or female. In comes Ricardo and his law of comparative advantage to the rescue...women have something they can "produce" that gives them advantage over their competitors, and it's permissible now for women to "express their sexuality" publicly, so why not trade on it equally as publicly? Ms. Crouse cries "exploitation!" and "eye candy!" when she spies female news anchors on television who, in the 20s and early 30s, are at the peak of their SMV. Yet she doesn't stop to consider the comparative advantage, that the marketplace rewards handsomely, that such women have over men in their 20s and 30s.**

* Actually, it's "equal +", but I won't get into that right now.

** Rhetorical question: what is the comparative advantage of male news anchors in their 40s and 50s? What unique "product" or trait do they bring to the table that females in their age cohort do not possess?

As for marginalization in media, I can't say much about that except to say that, in the SMP, a woman's educational attainment or careers in sports, medicine, or the law aren't counted as much of an asset, and in some cases is a liability. Furthermore, to those who do cry "exploitation" or "marginalization" upon encountering the types of scripts where women are pigeonholed in the manner that Ms. Crouse describes, I ask: "who writes the scripts for Hollywood shows, anyway"? I very strongly suspect it isn't trad-con men.

Last, as to Ms. Crouse's point about exploitation, is it really exploitation when the girls themselves are "sexually provocative"? Who's exploiting who here, anyway? The female who trades on her SMV for money or fame or access or to "get her start" in Hollywood or Nashville or New York, or the man or woman who is hooked into buying a certain product based on the image used to sell it? Which one is more the chump? Moreover, aren't those girls/young women just getting what they quite literally ask for--the attention they themselves solicited for? Why should we then be surprised that they do?

In the final analysis, I agree with Ms. Crouse that parents can do much to change the culture and halt what she calls "exploitation" (and what I call self-commodification) of girls and young women, namely to teach daughters that they are more than "hot bodies" and that, to be treated as more than a piece of meat, they should start by not establishing the precedent themselves by virtue of their actions. This message needs to come from mothers of course, but the one parent that teaches young girls sexual self-worth and self-restraint is the one that is too often missing in the American household.

An Argument for State-Sponsored Heterogamy

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:29:00 +0000

While I don't agree with the underlying assumption of this scholarly paper...that the State's involvement in marriage is a net positive, ceteris paribus...I do think that the article presents a pretty powerful case for heterogamy and against homogamy (and the inevitable variants of whatever-ogamy that will assuredly follow legally enshrined homogamy).

A brief summary of the paper is as follows: the authors define, compare, and contrast heterogamy and homogamy, then challenge the revisionists' case for homogamy (i.e., civil unions don't hurt anyone, that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, that homogamy doesn't threaten anyone's civil liberties, religious freedom, or freedom of speech), while disputing the assertions of homogamy activists that there is effectively no difference between homogamous couples and infertile heterogamous couples. The article finishes by deflating some conservative arguments for homogamy (as odd as that sounds, apparently there are some, namely, homosexuals getting married will strengthen marriage and encourage more moral behavior from homosexual couples).

A key point in the article is the distinction it makes between what they content are "real" marriages, i.e., conjugal ones and counterfeit marriages, i.e., revisionist. Briefly, the article defines "conjugal marriage" in such a way as to reinforce the sexual and generative aspect of the bond, while contrasting that definition against what they call "revisionist marriage", a concept which pivots around the emotional and financial aspects of the marriage relationship to the exclusion of the bodily union or procreative aspects.

Paraphrasing the authors, conjugal marriage is an organic joining of bodies and minds, a comprehensive union such that the male and the female components join to form a composite reproductive unit. Homosexuals may pair bond, but they can never reproduce without outside assistance. In addition, the conjugal marriage union has a natural, structural link to children that the revisionist marriage does not. It is oriented in such a way as to produce children, even if no children are conceived, and by its very nature fosters and environment that yields superior outcomes over and above other family configurations. The authors contrast the qualities of the conjugal union with that of the revisionist one, an propositional institution centered around emotional fulfillment and not structured toward procreation. Furthermore, the homogamous-revisionist marriage model, based on emotional fulfillment, results in empirically inferior social and individual outcomes. Indeed, the authors specifically highlight the fact that homogamous unions are biologically and socially incomplete, they systematically lack the sexual complementarity that conjugal unions have; the authors imply that it is this complementarity that results in superior outcomes for children. The authors further contend that conjugal marriages also differ from revisionist ones in that they provide "stable and harmonious conditions [for children] that sociology and common sense agree are undermined by divorce...and by infidelity". Therefore, according to the authors, the State has a compelling interest in enshrining traditional male-female marriage in law...for it yields the best outcomes for society, objectively.

One aspect of the authors' argument for traditional heterogamous marriage that I found interesting was their exposition of emotional fulfillment as a key component of revisionist marriage. For it is in this recent, "romantic" ideal of emotional fulfillment that I think much heterogamous marital discontent is located. For certain, the ideal of emotional fulfillment isn't limited in modern times to revisionist marriages, no, quite a few heterogamous marriages also start here (and, unfortunately, end here too). The authors, in pivoting their distinction between traditional man-woman marriage and homogamy around emotional fulfillment, therefore missed this key point--that the Romantic ideal of marriage as first and foremost about emotional fulfillment has fully penetrated modern American society. Indeed, this appears to me to be a symptom of the complete and full and extreme victory of individualist equalitarian secular humanism...that the fundamental building block of society is no longer husband-wife complementarity but the all-men-are-equal individual. Now of course I am not claiming that happiness in a marriage isn't important or even desirable. My issue is with making emotional happiness the litmus test for getting and staying married...and my point is that the modern fixation on happiness to the exclusion of other values has had terrible consequences for our children, our culture, and our freedoms.

I also thought this quote of the authors was interesting:

...the more effectively the law teaches the truth about marriage, the more likely people are to enter into marriage and abide by its norms. And the more people form marriages and respect marital norms, the more likely it is that children will be reared by their wedded biological parents. Death and tragedy make the gap impossible to close completely, but a healthier marriage culture would make it shrink. Thus, enshrining the moral truth of marriage in law is crucial for securing the great social benefits served by real marriage.

Unfortunately, the law today often acts to undermine the moral truth about enduring heterogamous marriage and teaches several falsehoods about marriage and optimal family outcomes for children, for example, that marriage starts and ends with the State (marriage licenses, divorce lawsuits, clergy signing the State's marriage documents after marrying a couple in a religious ceremony, Justice-of-the-Piece marriages), that marriage is disposable (no-fault divorce), that inconvenience of any kind is grounds for divorce (no-fault again, also loosely defined "emotional abuse" as a valid pretext for divorce), that fathers are disposable and replaceable by government (welfare, chalimony), that single parenthood is a valid family configuration on equal or even higher footing as the two-parent heterogamous family and deserving of State support and subsidy (welfare, EITC, WIC), and that there are no effective differences between heterogamous and homogamous parents, at least as far as foster parents and the adopting of children is concerned. The law also, technically, teaches that mothers and fathers are equivalent and interchangeable (another fib), however, the law as implemented by agents of the State and Officers of the Court definitively declares that mothers are far superior to fathers as parents (near universal mother custody, adoption laws which routinely disregard the rights of fathers).

But back to the quote "...the more likely people are to enter into marriage and abide by its norms". This quote sums up for me the issue with the decline of marriage in our society...that a goodly portion of the whole edifice of law has been set against the marriage institution, to the point that a good many women and men don't see the point in monogamous, heterogamous, permanent marriage or fear its reputation as a gateway to servitude.

And another way the law perverts the truth about marriage is through how the State leverages marriage as a trigger for the delivery of public and private goods. Marriage makes a couple or individuals eligible for a whole host of goods, such as survivorship benefits, taxation, and housing (for military members), to name a few. It was the State, in attempting to cement marriage as the institution around which society would be legally organized, just as these authors propose, that opened the door for its perversion. I'd wager that a lot of wind in the sails of the homogamy lobby would be taken away, were marriage no longer used in this manner. Because marriage law, if used as proposed by the authors of this article, through the act of preferring one sort of coupling over another, will most certainly be used to discriminate between certain family configurations, and because the law would consequently always be used to confer some benefit upon heterogamous married couples over and above that of singletons or homogamous pairings, is why I'm on record as desiring that the State get out of the marriage business entirely. No more licenses, no more using marriage as the criteria that decides if John Doe's partner gets survivor benefits when he dies. Marriage becomes the province of the Church, synagogue, or mosque.

This opinion appears to put me at odds with the article's authors:

Although some libertarians propose to “privatize” marriage, treating marriages the way we treat baptisms and bar mitzvahs, supporters of limited government should recognize that marriage privatization would be a catastrophe for limited government. In the absence of a flourishing marriage culture, families often fail to form, or to achieve and maintain stability. As absentee fathers and out‐of‐wedlock births become common, a train of social pathologies follows. Naturally, the demand for governmental policing and social services grows.

Contrary to the article's authors, I think it is because of government intrusion into marriage and family policy that we have these things. Perhaps it is a chicken-and-egg thing, but I think it is because the State has intruded into marriage, and that the State, through government social policy, effectively obscures the truth about marriage, that we have so many excuses for more big government. The State, through its interventions, creates the conditions that justify more intervention.

Thus I find the authors' argument in favor of State-enforced heterogamous marriage to be persuasive in the respect that traditional conjugal marriage model is superior to so-called revisionist marriage. The contention that State sponsorship is healthy in the long run, less so.

The Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:27:00 +0000

At long last, I have concluded that I need to lay down some rules. Apparently it is a mistake to simply assume that guests here will always comport themselves with decency and honor in the spirit of genunine academic debate. Don't laugh...it worked pretty well for four years, and I only have had to ask one person to leave and not come back.

First rule: this is a dictatorship. Sorry, it's true. My place, my rules.

Second, as a right-illiberal, I fancy myself fairly tolerant and permissive with what I let stand in the comments section. But even I have my limits. These include: swearing, cursing, sock-puppeting, flaming, taking the Lord's name in vain, and blaspheming. If you have a burning desire to do any of this, take it elsewhere.

Third, I reserve the right to delete any comment that offends me or my sense of justice or fair play. See #1. Particularly if a comment ad hominems a long-time reader or someone I know IRL.

Fourth, I turned off anonymous commenting. Sorry for those regulars to don't have a google profile...but I was tiring of all the drive-by gutter-sniping.

Thanks in advance for everyone's compliance with "the rules". It will make for a better reading experience for everyone.

BOGO on Abortion

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:15:00 +0000

Okay, not quite. But a Florida clinic does offer a $50 discount to abortionettes who stop by for a little bit o slice and dice on Sundays. Why Sunday? Who knows. Perhaps it's because business is otherwise slow on that day, seeing how it's the Sabbath and all. Call it "deadly stimulus" I guess, gotta keep business flowing:

Right now, for instance, those who fight for life recoil at the fact that the Orlando Women's Center (OWC) is currently offering a special $50 discount for abortions performed on Sundays. (It's not quite "buy one, get one free," but it's a quite a deal on death.) And for those who are almost drawn in by the discount but still need a bit more motivation, the OWC also offers free Wi-Fi for mothers who want to surf the Web either just before or just after their preborn child is killed

But that's not all. For those too far along to legally commit fetuscide in Florida, help is here!

At the top of the OWC home page, a link reads: "Greater than 24 weeks Pregnant? Please click here." Upon clicking, [a website] opens to inform women they can fly to an undisclosed clinic in Washington, D.C., and have their baby's heart stopped. Afterward, they can then fly back to their home state and have the murdered child aborted. [Website's URL redacted, I don't want to drive any traffic their way. If you're interested, one may find the link to the site from the linked article near the top of this post - EW]

I guess this goes to show the general futility of supply-side pro-life legislation...if someone wants a pre-born baby dead, that fetus is going to die, and will eventually find a butcher to do the deed. More effective methinks are demand-side measures that make such craven acts of murder distasteful and gauche. On that front, the anti fetuscide crowd is having a bit of success, as fetuscide, particularly the late-term variety, is gradually becoming both less popular and more difficult to
obtain.

Rape Culture Backfires

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:14:00 +0000

In this even-handed and balanced news article, we can see that rape culture does indeed generate sufficient political pressue to do something, anything, about rape. But what price appearances for politics sake? For in the end, rape culture of this sort harms the real, genuine victims and manufactures more victims by obscuring the relationship between risky behaviors and sexual assault, all while wasting scarce resources and unjustifiably branding men with the scarlet "R":

McClatchy's review of nearly 4,000 sexual assault allegations demonstrates that the military has taken a more aggressive stance. Last year, military commanders sent about 70 percent more cases to courts-martial that started as rape or aggravated sexual-assault allegations than they did in 2009. However, only 27 percent of the defendants were convicted of those offenses or other serious crimes in 2009 and 2010, McClatchy found after reviewing the cases detailed in the Defense Department's annual sexual assault reports. When factoring in convictions for lesser offenses - such as adultery, which is illegal in the military, or perjury - about half the cases ended in convictions.

The military's conviction rate for all crimes is more than 90 percent, according to a 2010 report to Congress by the Pentagon.

Making acquittals even more likely, the military is prosecuting more contested cases under a controversial law that broadens the definition of sexual assault. Under the 2006 law, the military can argue that a victim was sexually assaulted because she was "substantially incapacitated" from excessive drinking and couldn't have consented.

"There is a pressure to prosecute, prosecute, prosecute. When you get one that's actually real, there's a lot of skepticism. You hear it routinely: 'Is this a rape case or is this a Navy rape case?' "

Analyzing the numbers in the graphic at the top of the linked article suggests that the tens of millions spent on forcibly implanting a rape culture in the Defense Department hasn't appreciably changed the data much, at least when compared with the civilian sector. According to the data presented, an individual rape and/or sexual assault accusation will result in a courtroom conviction 7% of the time. Including those who resign or accept discharges in lieu of a trial boosts "attrition rates" to almost 10%. Which, incidentally, is the going attrition rate for an individual rape/sexual assault allegation in the UK (could not find reliable figures for the US). Now it is true that those accused can accept non-judicial punishment in lieu of a court-martial, and that option does muddy the analysis a bit, for we do not know if those fellows were punished non-judicially for rape/sexual assault or some other infraction surrounding the accusation. It would also seem to me that if the government had any kind of a case, in the face of all that rape culture pressure to prosecute, that the government would not offer or accept offers of non-judicial punishment in lieu of court-martial.

So I wonder: is inculcating a rape culture in DoD worth all that extra money, unneeded aggravation and decreased morale, additional broken women, more unfairly tarred men, and no appreciable change in the conviction rates? If not, then why bother?

Quote o' the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:54:00 +0000

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

- Milton friedman

Boomers: Don't Count on That Fat Retirement

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:18:00 +0000

Like anyone else, Millennials vote their pocketbook too. And a sizable minority of them, even more than my fellow Xers (who famously concluded they'd sooner see aliens than Social Security in the form their parents enjoyed) wonder why they should financially support a generation that enjoyed more wealth and opportunity than they will:

Earlier this month, a McClatchy-Marist Institute for Public Opinion poll showed that young people are more likely to support major cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the deficit. The poll showed that 30 percent of adults younger than 30 favor such funding cuts, versus 20 percent of 30- to 59-year-olds and 10 percent of adults 60 or older.

Honestly, I'm surprised it's only 30%. I figured it would be much higher, since it is their (and their children's and children's children's) bankbooks that are squarely in the crosshairs of pols who have no truck with stripping away their hard earned money to buy the votes of their parents and grandparents.

But I suppose I am being unfair somewhat in singling out Boomers, for if we want to zero in on those who really profitted from the system, in the sense that they paid into it far less than they took out, it was the Silents and particularly the parents of Silents. These folks made out like bandits relative to those that came after them.

Anyways, I think we're in for an interesting ride from an entitlements perspective, as the young, slightly more male and significantly more non-white are (for now) being commanded to fatten the wallets of their aged, disproportionately white female elders. I suspect that the former population, as time goes on and the demographic gaps widen, will be progressively less sanguine about surrendering larger and larger
fractions of their paychecks to the latter.

Kings and Queens

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:42:00 +0000

In chess, the queen is the most versatile and mobile piece, while the king is comparatively quite restricted. Similarly, Army infantry is known as the "Queen of Battle" due to its mobility and versatility, while artillery is the "King of Battle" due to its decisive yet slow-moving nature. Who would have thought that life would begin to imitate (martial) art, particularly as the destinies and condition of the sexes are considered:

"Picking the right parents," as Winship puts it, has an enormous impact. A child born to parents in the bottom fifth has about a 17 percent chance of making it to the top two fifths, while a child born to parents already in the top two fifths has a 60 percent chance of staying there.

It is humbling that we seem - although comparisons get very complicated - to lag other advanced countries in mobility. "Research shows," Winship writes, "that most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility than does the United States. [W]e are definitely worse off than Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries, and probably worse off than Italy, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom." We are particularly bad at getting people, especially males, out of the bottom. One study Winship cites showed that 23 percent to 30 percent of sons and daughters of fathers in the bottom fifth of Nordic countries and the United Kingdom remained there as adults; in the United States, 42 percent of sons stayed there.

This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America's economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the [sec-humanist, left-liberal] Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for National Affairs, "economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors." He argues that society's leaders "should herald the 'success sequence': finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies." If Americans finished high school, worked full-time at a job that matched their skills, and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent.

These old-fashioned bourgeois virtues, and particularly marriage, rarely figure in the public debate.

Looking at this snippet of data, it appears that males in the US have a 50% higher risk of being stuck in the bottom socio-economic quintile relative to foreign men and women. The data point that is conspicuously absent in the NRO article is the proportion of US women what manage to climb out of the socio-economic basement. Do similarly situated US women have more or less mobility than men? A quick bout of googling yields the answer: less mobility for low-class women and greater mobility for the upper four quintiles. For the low-class women, this lower probability is attributed to their opting for choice mommyhood...in other words, women electing to bear and/or attempt to raise children out of wedlock. For upper (that is, the highest four quintiles) class women, their greater income mobility is a function of who they wed, and therefore is more a function of assortative mating instead of the family income of their birth.

Taken together, it appears that Mr. Lowry is correct: we have yet to figure out, reliably, how to extricate bottom-quintile men from the cellar...their fates being tied to their father's income (or whether they grew up with their father in the home at all). They are kings alright...decisive in their own way, but less mobile on the chessboard of life. Women on the other hand, queens as they are, display much more mobility, and their mobility is a function of whom they marry, particularly if they originated from the lower classes. Moreover, given the confluence of several factors, to include increasing levels of assortative mating and a persistent innate tendency toward hypergamy, this feminine advantage in social mobility is not likely to abate. Thus, the 'success sequence' Mr. Lowry discusses above is a clear path to economic success for women. It is less so for males, for whom the benefits from marriage are indirect: "did your parents marry and stay married?" seems to be the salient question for males, since the presence of father appears to be a significant, if not dominating, factor that bequeaths economic and social success to sons.

Book Review: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:48:00 +0000

The Book: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

The Gist: This was a massive, and I mean massive, set of books that chronicled several centuries of the Roman Empire from immediately before its apogee to the breakup into the short-lived Western empire and comparably longer-lived Eastern Empire. While Gibbon's eighteenth-century prose was somewhat archaic, it was still quite readable as it drew an outstanding and detailed picture of life within the Roman Empire at the time, as well as cataloging the political and cultural forces that contributed to its rise and drove its fall from power. Rather than attempt to poorly encapsulate what Gibbon wrote, I will instead discuss some of the key take-aways I had from the book--takeaways that may speak more to my own preferences and prejudices than to the book itself, but no matter--and some of the other topics that I found interesting.

My first takeaway from Fall was the role that (im)migration and multiculturalism played in the demise of the Roman Empire. Whereas the Romans used their techniques of cultural and ethnic cleansing to great effect during the expansion of the empire, namely insisting that conquered peoples speak Latin (much culture is embedded in a language), utilize a Roman-style civil and military government, and no longer practice their religions, my sense was that Rome grew too large to effectively implement this course of action.* Indeed, if there was anything to conclude from Gibbon's history, it was that, in the end, the far-flung roman empire collapsed under the weight of attempting to implement an e pluribus unum. The Greeks proved too proud to give up their language and culture, the Celts kept theirs due to the difficulty of the terrain they inhabited, the Egyptians too truculent, and the tribes of the Eastern Steppes were too different in skin tone and morphology to assimilate into a Southern European culture. It was diversity, it was multiculturalism that did them in:

multitudes of secret enemies, insolent from favor, or desperate from oppression, were introduced into the heart of the empire

and the sort of chauvinistic tribalism of the sort that we in the West are experiencing today precluded the cultural consensus that sustains a large empire, and ate out the substance of the Roman Empire from within.

* One advantage of Roman-style polytheism was that the Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian all alike were easily convinced that they worshipped the same deities, just under a different name. This eased integration of conquered tribes and nations into the Roman fold and reduced the need for the sort of forcible conversions so common in Egypt, Celtic Gaul, and in Scythia.

The second take-away from Gibbon's tome was the corrosive effect that "arriving", of achieving what it sought to achieve, has on a culture. At the apogee of their culture, their hunger sated by luxury, Roman citizens had settled back into a comfortable and languid existence, much to their detriment:

Long peace and uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the Empire. The minds of men were gradually extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. Their personal valor remained but they no longer possessed the public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of anger, and the habit of command

This "slow and secret poison" combined with the blessings of luxury, the hardships associated with the colonization of foreign lands, an aversion to marriage, increased acceptance of homosexuality, and what Gibbons called a "depravity of manners that interfered with procreation, birth, and the rearing of children", served to depress birth rates and turn the minds of Romans away from the harder business of patriotism and toward voluptuous dissipation. In a similar manner the inclinations of the populace shifted too, away from the honor of public service to the State and toward more personal and commercial ends. Nowhere was this more obviously felt than in the military, a province which was once dominated by citizens who "had a country to love, property to defend, and some share in enacting the laws" and which it was the interest and duty of the citizen to maintain. Instead, just like today in the West, the upper classes came to shun military service, and as a result the military became more 'democratized', more plebian, and more foreign, and thus the former strength of the empire became one of its greatest vulnerabilities:

The more polished citizens of the internal provinces were alone qualified to act as lawyers and magistrates. The rougher trade of arms was abandoned to the peasants and barbarians of the frontiers, who knew no country but their camp, no science but that of war, no civil laws, and scarcely those of military discipline. With bloody hands, savage manners, and desperate resolutions, they sometimes guarded, but much often subverted the throne of the emperors

Thinking it beneath them or not worth their time, the citizens gradually delegated their collective defense to the mercenary servants of despotic princes. They would come to regret having done so, once their liberties had long departed the land.

Speaking of the collective defense, the relationship of the military to the State and the form of State government is another take-away from Gibbon's work. For it was Gibbon's considered opinion that the lack of an orderly mechanism for the transfer of power, coupled with a mercenary army staffed by the ruder classes and by foreigners, opened the door to repeated military coups and the wars of succession that roiled the empire after the golden age of the Antoines. Gibbon again:

...the temperance of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, renders them very unfit guardians of a legal, or even a civil constitution. Justice, humanity, or political wisdom are qualities they are too little acquainted with in themselves to appreciate them in others

It is against this backdrop that the elite Praetorian Guard, an elite cadre of military men who fancied themselves as guardians of the realm, caused much mischief during the Fall. For instance, because they rose through the ranks by merit, they thought themselves--nay, they deserved--to be the "true" representatives of the common people. For certain they were more representative of the Mob than the stuffy and privileged nobility, and this "popular mandate" of sorts led them to adopt the conceit that they alone were the entity best positioned to elect the chief of the Empire

[T]he meanest of mankind might, without folly, entertain a hope of being raised by valor and fortune to a rank in the army, in which a single crime would enable him to wrest the sceptre of the world from his feeble and unpopular master

Thus, for a people with no tradition of civil control of the military, a weak mechanism for the transfer of State authority from one ruler to the next, and whose upper classes had abandoned the military to proles and to barbaricum, the loss of the Republic quickly resulted in martial despotism.

The fourth take-away is that Roman society succumbed to pressure by more dynamic and vigorous cultures. Rome had the misfortune to peak just before the Volkerwanderung, or the "Great Migration". Weak, tired, effete, and decadent, Rome was unable to defend her frontier provinces from the virile and martial Nordic and Eurasian hordes that pushed their way into the vacuum created by Rome's decaying and retrenching political and economic power. That a once powerful and mighty culture would yield to a more masculine, a more martial, and more aggressive culture is a lesson repeated throughout history and we Westerners would do well to consider the application of such a take-away to our present lot.

I now adjust course slightly, and discuss not "take-aways" but rather subjects that I found merely interesting. For instance, many other authors interpret Gibbon's barely concealed hostility toward Christianity--typical of Enlightenment-era thinkers--as an indicator that he attributes the rise of Christianity as a contributing factor to the Fall. I am not so sure that Gibbon did so. Sure Gibbon extolled the virtues of so-called pagan tolerance of Christianity, a claim easily refuted by considering the cruelties of pagan rulers toward their Christian subjects. But I think that Gibbon located the enfeebling of Roman virtues and corroding of Roman civic institutions prior to the arrival of Christianity; indeed, Rome was already on the downward slide when Christianity began to metastasize through the provinces. For sure, in some ways Christianity gave a teetering pagan Roman society a shove. It degraded the legitimacy of polytheism (Gibbon relays the dilemma of Christian legionnaires prohibited by their faith from participating in pagan prayers and practices prior to battle...doesn't take too much of that to erode unit cohesion), while the ranks of Christians swelled through the generosity of Christian alms "which paid less regard to the merit than to the distress of the object" and through the rescue and adoption of infants abandoned to the elements in the Bronze Age version abortion. Another factor Gibbon cited as contributing to the rapid spread of Christianity was its relatively favorable reputation when compared to another monotheistic religion originating from Palestine...Judaism. In contrast to Jews, Christians were possessed of fewer onerous and strange habits, lacked the Jew's conspicuous ethnic tribalism, and were other-oriented, whereas Judeans were famous for their inwardly focused insularity. In short, I think Gibbon saw the rapid spread of Christianity as a secondary symptom of a spiritually bereft people responding to the evangelistic zeal of the early Christians, rather than a primary cause of the sort of unmanly softness that make Rome so vulnerable to invasion.

I also found Gibbon's description of the Germanic tribes to the north of the Alps to be quite interesting, if nothing for the study in contrasts that such a description provides. The Romans were a complex, hierarchical, agricultural society, and as such were technologically, socially, and culturally advanced. This level of civilizational advance stood in stark relief with the egalitarian primitiveness and rude condition of the barbaric cultures that Rome encountered to the West (Gaul), North (Germans, Danes, and Britons), and East (Scythians and Dacians). Gibbon:

If we contemplate a savage nation in any part of the globe, supine indolence and a carelessness of futurity will be found to constitute their general character. In a civilized state, every faculty of man is expanded and exercised; and the great chain of mutual dependence connects and embraces the several members of society. The most numerous portion of it is employed in constant and useful labor. The select few, placed by fortune above that necessity, can, however, fill up their time by the pursuits of interest or glory, by the improvement of their estate or of their understanding, but the duties, the pleasures, or even the follies of social life

Indeed, Gibbon characterized the character of Rome's barbaric neighbors, especially that of their Germanic neighbors to the north, thusly:

The languid soul, oppressed with its own weight, anxiously required some new and powerful sensation; war and danger were the only amusements adequate to its fierce temper

The Germanic tribes to the north were particularly warlike in Gibbons' account. Their system of governance was a sort of tribal democracy, where war chiefs were chosen from the ranks of warriors by popular election. The way to gain influence and power was to fight, and fight well, and the way that the German war chiefs garnered wealth was through the booty captured by raiding and/or subduing neighboring peoples. According to Gibbon, this social inclination, combined with a harsh climate, want of learning, arts, and laws, the Germanic notions of honor, gallantry, religion, fierce independence and sense of freedom, contributed to form a people to whom military heroism was a way of life.

Furthermore, I found the role of women in German society, as described by Gibbon, to be interesting, if not instructive, study in the effects that sex roles have on the prosperity and living standards of the society (or lack thereof). Consistent with the role of women in hunter-gatherer civilizations, Germanic society at the time of the Roman Empire was quite egalitarian and featured a variant of fertility worship that ensured women were held in high esteem by the violent and hard warrior

The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance and fondly believed that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human

Like the German warrior male, the German woman was deeply concerned with honor, such that while male honor came from success on the battlefield, honor for the German woman was tied to her virginity upon marriage and fidelity thereafter. Moreover, prefiguring my contention that women are a civilization's center of gravity, that the state of women in a society determines the direction of the society, Gibbon wrote similarly of German women in the Tribes some 2,000 years ago that

the sentiments and conduct of these high-spirited matrons may at once be considered as a cause, as an effect, and as a proof of the general character of the nation

Thus, similar in effect to the Spartan woman's famous exhortation "return with your shield or on it", did the German woman's own example of honorable conduct, high social stature, and insistence that her man behave similarly, reinforce and sustain the warlike character of the aggressive German tribes. It also stalled civilizational advancement: In societies where women are egalitarian, are equal partners on par with men, and where their sexuality and fertility is an object of worship, persistent material poverty follows. In contrast, when inegalitarian sex role specialization characteristic of agrarian (or more advanced) societies takes root, the sort of wealth and high standard of living that comes with civilization accompanies.

Last, the below quote of Gibbon's was attention-getting for me, as a fellow interested in the power dynamics between clergy, the State, and the people and the interaction of these three with freedom and liberty:

...so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince

While this viewpoint probably well reflects the post-Enlightenment, deist-bordering-on-atheist zeitgeist of the time in Britain (Gibbon's work was published in 1776), I highlight it here as a civics lesson, passed down to us moderns from our forefathers. Of course a mere cursory examination of history reveals evidence that Gibbon was correct on the tendency of the church/temple/synagogue/mosque to ally itself with the state in opposition to the people or liberty, rather than protect the people from state abuse. Examples abound, and three that immediately come to mind are (a) the modern church of sec-humanism, where, riffing on Louis XIV, l'etat, c'est Dieu, (b) the nexus of mainline "right hand of God" Protestantism and Progressive statism in late 19th / early 20th century America, and (c) the entangling of the Roman Catholic Church with various princes throughout history, both pre- and post-Reformation, more recently in the Church's comfortability with state force to accomplish "churchy" ends, such as un-Biblical welfare, or most recently in calls for a global, one-world government just last month. Moreover, Gibbon's mention of the natural rights of self-defense ("possessed of arms") and property rights ("tenacious of property") were fundamental, foundational rights upon which American-style Republicanism was founded. Both are under progressively more intense Progressive attack, and both are in decline. In a similar manner, Gibbon would be hard pressed to locate his martial nobility in modern-day America, the elite having long since abandoned military service, and his stubborn commons has mostly melted away into a more pliant mob.

In summary, Gibbon's long tome was a worthwhile read, and my few excerpts here do not do his work justice. Gibbon seemed to attribute the Fall to multiculralism, luxos, to upper class abandonment of service to the State (in favor of presumably commercial ends), and to the feminization of the culture. In addition, I found Gibbon's characterization of the role that Christianity played in the Fall to be interesting, as well as the implications that the organization of barbarian Germanic tribal society have for us moderns, especially as it pertains to religion, to family structure, and to sexual role specialization in a culture. Finally, Gibbon's observations regarding the interaction of the church, the state, the elite, the commons, and natural rights such as the right to self-defense and the right to property remind us all of the fundamental tenets upon which Western civilzation in general, and American society in particular, were founded.