Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Greek crisis; Obamacare

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

Mark Steyn - 2-27-10

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

After you’ve turned citizens into junkies, with government as the pusher, it’s very hard to turn them back again, and even harder to get them to quit (if you’ll forgive the expression) cold turkey. It’s all but impossible in the present Continental political culture. Europe has a psychological investment in longer holidays: the fact that they spell national suicide is less important than that they distinguish Europe from the less enlightened Americans.

Mark Steyn - 12-27-04

Woodstock 40th anniversary; New York Times coverage; Ayn Rand; Nightmare in the Catskills

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of "Woodstock." We are supposed to celebrate "peace," "love" and other stuff in honor of this anniversary. Debbie Schlussel has the real story:

I really don’t care that the “greatest names in rock of the day” performed there. So what? And who cares if Jimi Hendrix played there? Look what happened to him just over a year later. Dead of a drug overdose and too much alcohol. Typical of the Woodstock idiots. They, the rockers, and the hippies, yippies, and other numbskulls making up the boomer generation at this infest-o-fest brought us free love . . . and STDs and AIDs, single mothers and baby mamas, and a whole new hipness to out-of-wedlock births that has brought us crime waves, sensitive men a/k/a wimps, and a whole lot of other problems. Their sexual mores brought us sky-high divorce rates and a rate of out of wedlock mothers–40%–that rivals many Western democracies.

They are the liberals who voted for Barack Obama and not too long before him, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. They are the ones who made today’s consideration of socialized medicine possible.

Apparently Debbie didn't get the MSM/DNC memo (or she got it but was able to ignore it like the rest of us should).

In 2007 [in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting], I wrote in detail about the changing way we view news stories after the initial event. I chronicled how the MSM/DNC line develops, after which all of the MSM/DNC outlets learn to stick to their story:

Years from now, we will forget that we were in the dark for so many days or hours in the immediate aftermath of the killings at Virginia Tech. MSM/DNC becomes more polished the more time passes in the wake of any news item. As various parts of the MSM/DNC "get their story straight," the MSM/DNC line becomes standard and can be reduced to a few soundbites. That is why immediate coverage of any major story is interesting. We have the chance the catch the MSM/DNC off guard.

The same is true of Woodstock. On August 18, 1969, the New York Times published an editorial highly critical of the gathering entitled "Nightmare in the Catskills." By the next day, the Times had apparently received the MSM/DNC memo and changed their position. Today, the Times' original editorial has disappeared down the memory hole. Other MSM/DNC outlets fell into line quickly also.

The definitive piece on Woodstock was written by Ayn Rand four months later. She not only summarized the social implications of the gathering but she chronicled facts that have been lost to history. Debbie Schlussel has summarized the negative consequences created by the participants, consequences from which we suffer today. Those consequences were easily predictable for anyone who had read Rand's piece - "Apollo and Dionysus."

In particular, Rand chronicled the hardships created for neighboring farmers and small businessmen by the Woodstock event:

Richard C. Joyner, the operator of the local post office and general store on Route 17B "said that the youngsters at the festival had virtually taken over his property - camping on his lawn, making fires on his patio and using the backyard as a latrine

.

Clarence W. Townsend, who runs a 150-acre dairy farm . . . was shaken by the ordeal. "We had thousands of cars all over our fields," he said. "There were kids all over the place. They made a human cesspool of our property and drove through the cornfields. There's not a fence left on the place. They just tore them up and used them for firewood" . . .

"My pond is a swamp [said Royden Gabriele, another farmer]. I've got no fences and they used my field as a latrine. They picked corn and camped all over the place. They just landed wherever they could . . . We pulled 30 of them out of the hay mow smoking pot . . . If they come back next year I don't know what I'll do," Mr. Gabriele said. "If I can't sell, I'll just burn the place down."

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p. 71 [Signet edition] (quoting New York Times, August 20, 1969)

As Rand wrote, "No love - or thought - was given to these victims by the unsanitary apostles of love." Ibid.

The apostles of love have been enabled for decades since that event (much in the way summarized by Eugene Lyons in the Red Decade (referring to the 1930's)). The enabling and coddling has led that generation to give us the unsustainable welfare state of today with no thought of the consequences. As revealed by a New York Times interview with participants the following week, the participants had no thought of consequences for their own basic needs at the festival:

Q: What about food?
A: We brought a bag of carrots. And some soda.
Q: Did you expect to be able to buy more there?
A: We never really thought about it.

[As quoted by Rand, p. 73.]

In the same way, these same people are now supporting Obamacare without thinking about what will happen when they are denied medical treatment under the system of rationing that may soon be enacted.

No living, eating or sanitary facilities were provided; . . . "Festival food supplies were almost immediately exhausted . . . and water coming from wells dug into the area stopped flowing or came up impure. A heavy rain Friday night turned the amphitheater into a quagmire and the concession area into a mudhole. . . Throngs of wet, sick and wounded hippies trekked to impromptu hospital tents suffering from colds, sore throats, broken bones, barbed-wire cuts and nail puncture wounds. Festival doctors called it a 'health emergency,' and 50 additional doctors were flown in from New York City to meet the crisis." [There will be no "50 additional doctors" flying to our rescue under Obamacare - Salt.]
According to the New York Times (August 18), when the rainstorm came "at least 80,000 young people sat or stood in front of the stage and shouted obscenities at the darkened skies [a precursor to the anti-Christianity that pervades today's culture? - Salt] as trash rolled down the muddy hillside with the runoff of the rain. Others took shelter in dripping tents, lean-tos, cars and trucks . . . Many boys and girls wandered through the storm nude, red mud clinging to their bodies."

Rand, pp. 69-70

Has it ever occurred to you that it is not an accident, but the psychological mechanism of projection that has made people of this kind choose to call their opponents "pigs?"

Rand, p. 75

Who will the leftists shout obscenities at when they cannot receive medical treatment under Obamacare? The thought of such a scene makes it tempting to support Obamacare - except for the fact that I will suffer also.

Drugs were used, sold, shared or given away during the entire festival. Eyewitnesses claim that 99 percent of the crowd smoked marijuana; but heroin, hashish, LSD and other stronger drugs were peddled openly. The nightmare convulsions of so-called "bad trips" were a common occurrence. One young man died, apparently from an overdose of heroin.

Rand, p. 70

There is much more to Rand's article, especially the discussion of the attitudes of the participants, and their expectations of happiness without work and life without thought.



These details (especially the destruction of neighboring property) have largely been ignored in today's MSM/DNC memorials to the event. So have the subsequent disputes among the organizers of the event (over money). That the event was organized by wealthy heirs who spent the next few years fighting over money does not fit the MSM/DNC theme of peace, love and utopia that we are all expected passively to accept. Woodstock has become another object of worship among the MSM/DNC. Leftists expect their history books to treat Woodstock much the same way that Christianity treats the "Sermon on the Mount." They fail to realize that as more of the leftist agenda becomes law, civilization will continue to collapse. With the end of civilization comes the end of higher learning, including the faithful recording of history (even propaganda). Propaganda itself depends on the existence of the civilization that the left seeks to destroy.

As the left becomes more politically successful, the gods of leftism will fade into the memory hole along with the rest of our knowledge. By passing Obamacare, cap-and-trade, the stimulus bill, etc., the left relegates itself (and the rest of us) to oblivion. Future generations will know little or nothing of Woodstock, the first African-American President, the first hispanic Supreme Court justice, the Vietnam protests and other landmarks of leftism. They will know only that the greatest civilization ever to exist somehow collapsed, leaving them to struggle on a daily basis for their very survival.
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Visit counter added August 16, 2009

Mark Steyn on the decline of Western and Japanese populations

Mark Steyn's post in The Corner on Saturday paints a grim picture of the future of Western Civilization:

The transformation of developed societies — either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) — will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America — but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

For much of the developed world, the "credit crunch," the debt burden, and the rest are not part of a cyclical economic downturn but the first manifestations of an existential crisis.

What is most tragic is that we now have the opportunity to receive the best and the brightest from the declining countries in Europe and Asia. But the present administration (with a little help from FDR, LBJ and 75 years of the welfare state) is ruining this opportunity by plunging us toward bankruptcy as fast as the other developed nations.

In this case, the "existential crisis" of which Steyn speaks does not refer to some subtle interpretation of Sartre or Nietzsche, but the very existence of our nation.

The end of Pontiac - Pontiacs on film; GTO; Bonneville; Firebird; Grand Prix; Sid Davis

Click here for a photo tribute to Pontiac on the occasion of GM's impending cancellation of the Pontiac line. I wrote yesterday that a long line of automobile history is meeting its official end. But we are seeing the end of more than simply a line of automobiles.

Here are some examples of Pontiac on film through the years. The first four films are Pontiac commercials from the 1960's. The commercials are as different from each other as the classic styles were from those of modern cars:



1964 Grand Prix





1966 GTO




1967 GTO




1968 GTO


The next one is a brief promo for one of the earliest Firebirds:



The 1980 Bonneville commercial shows obvious influence from the economics of that age, as the commercial focuses on gas mileage instead of image and styling. Prices in general and the price of gasoline in particular skyrocketed that year (and the year before). The same conditions that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 were reflected in the Pontiac ads.




Here is a two-part 1960 educational documentary that features the 1959 Pontiac as the main star. The film was meant to deter young men from juvenile delinquency. The car was the focal point of the story - "Temptation is waiting in the form of a sleek bronze convertible. . . . "




The 1959 Pontiac saw tailfins reach their height, much like the other American car lines.

These videos barely scratch the surface of the films in which Pontiacs have played an important role. The point is that our civilization and our culture are composed of many interwoven elements. Even something as seemingly mundane as a line of cars can have an impact on our education and our entertainment. As our civilization is destroyed by the barbarians from within and without - as each strand that comprises our culture disappears, the impact will be felt far beyond the loss of any one particular item. Only when we see how far something like Pontiac had become ingrained in our society can we truly appreciate what we are now losing.

Bread and Circuses; Pittsburgh Steelers; Super Bowl 43; Dan Rooney

The Pittsburgh Steelers' participation in this weekend's Super Bowl 43 gives me an opportunity to post an item I started to write four years ago. Just before the Steelers faced the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game in January 2005, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story in which it repeated worn out cliches about the Steelers' success helping to compensate for the city's problems. The point was that the Steelers need to win in order to help the city residents forget the problems resulting from the loss of the steel industry.

Steelers owner Dan Rooney was quoted on the effect the game would have on the City's "psyche":

There was a piece in the paper ... about what the Steelers and this game mean to the economy, which I guess was in the high 20 millions or something," he said. "But what it didn't say and what I think is more important is what the Steelers' success really means to the city's psyche.

The newspaper summed up the City's problems and why the win would be a needed distraction:

In an era when the city's only real growth industries seem to be strip clubs, towing, and Steelers analysis, Pittsburgh's overall mood is not terribly hopeful. Since the last time the Steelers won a Super Bowl [1979], the city has gone from America's most liveable city to one of its most leaveable. Manufacturing and industrial jobs have all but dried up. US Airways, one of the region's biggest employers, is in its second bankruptcy. The Steelers' aging, blue-collar fan base today worries as much about prescription drug prices as about New England's pass defense.

If there's a place that could use the two-weeks-long jolt of adrenalin that a win today would trigger, maybe this is that place.

January 23, 2005

The newspaper and Dan Rooney missed the point. Pittsburgh's problems are far deeper than those listed above. Since the 1970's Pittsburgh has seen its steel manufacturing base mostly disappear. This disappearance has had far reaching consequences for Pittsburgh and the nation. The loss of any nation's industrial base is a grave matter. Most articles and films about the Steelers of the 1970's make a point of stating that the Steelers' success at that time was necessary to restore civic pride, unify the city, compensate for the loss of steel jobs, boost local morale and many other meaningless cliches.

But these cliches and stories have gotten the story backward. In fact, the success of sports teams in our culture has distracted us from the loss of our civilization. Industry, including steel, was a cornerstone of the United States. The loss of such a vital part of our nation should have been greeted with long lasting alarm and resolve to address and reverse the problem. Instead, those most immediately affected were given "bread and circuses" at which to celebrate, while their livelihoods disappeared before their eyes. In any decaying society, bread and circuses serve the purpose of distracting the public while economic and other conditions deteriorate. Our leaders cannot handle the crises that destroy our civilization, but they can pacify the great mass of people with games.

In ancient Rome, gladitorial and other games continued up to the very end of the empire, even as the barbarians conquered Rome's provinces one-by-one:

In fourth-century Rome there were 175 holidays in the year; ten with gladitorial contests; sixy-four with circus performances; the rest with shows in the theaters. The barbarians took advantage of this passion for vicarious battle by attacking Carthage, Antioch, and Trier [provinces of Rome] while the people were absorbed at the amphitheater or the circus.

Will Durant, Age of Faith, p. 31

In our own age, we "tailgate" and play fantasy football while we bask in second hand glory everytime our NFL team wins. Meanwhile, a 900 billion dollar "stimulus" package is passed by Congress, thus eroding our credit and guaranteeing the permanent insolvency of our nation and the inevitable crash of what is left of our economy. Boomsday approaches, while our factories remain idle. The nails are being hammered into the coffin of our civilization while we celebrate another Super Bowl. The games serve the same purpose they served in the 4th and 5th century A.D. They pacify us into accepting the policies that destroy the real source of power, glory and prosperity in any civilization. Never forget that Super Bowl trophies and end zone celebrations are no substitute for factories in this regard.

The Steelers entered the decade of the 1970's never having enjoyed success in their entire 40 year history. At the same time, Pittsburgh was the steel capital of the world. By the end of the 1970's, the roles had been reversed. The Pittsburgh Steelers enjoyed a sports dynasty - having won four super bowls - while the steel industry lay in ruins. The success of the Steelers helped us accept the simultaneous loss of our nation's backbone industry. That emblem on the Steeler helmets [once the symbol of the company that Andrew Carnegie built] is now nothing but a grim reminder of a dead past. The symbol mocks us while we fool ourselves with the fantasy that we root for a "blue collar team from a blue collar town."

Baby Boomer comeuppance; Richard Berry; American Thinker; Crash of 2008

American Thinker has posted an essay detailing how the baby boomer values led to the crash we have experienced over the past few years (most sharply in the past few weeks):

We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. Storied investment banks were being run on 40 to 1 leverage. Fancy new securities were designed and widely disseminated whose terms are opaque even to highly knowledgeable and experienced hands. Mortgage securitization techniques were developed which, our bettors assured us, would magically spread risk and thus stabilize the financial system. However, simultaneously with these brilliant innovations, lenders were being forced -- by Boomer Elite congressmen with an aching love of the poor and oppressed unique to themselves -- to loan to uncreditworthy borrowers at subprime rates and without adequate documentation. These loans, packaged into securities together with standard, performing loans, rendered unknowable the value of the securities, leading to mandatory write downs and drastic capital impairment or outright insolvency for many very large firms. Given the high degree of integration of the international financial system, critical destabilization was the real result of this confluence of Master of the Universe genius and Boomer Elite turpitude.

The next time you hear or see:

• a TV program extol the virtues of the 60's generation and how they stopped the war in Vietnam;
• a speaker refer to Vietnam as the "crucible of a generation";
• 60's music referred to as idealistic and the catalyst for peace and love, etc.;
• John Lennon referred to as the voice (or the conscience or whatever) of a generation;
• commercials or news accounts celebrating the empowerment of the baby boomers as they grow older;
• any other whitewash of the generation that has done so much damage;

click on this American Thinker article and remember the price we pay for our indulgence in this 40 year fantasy.

Athens (4th Century); Will Durant; Plato; Aristotle; Dionysus; Philip of Macedon; parallels to 21st Century U.S.

I have recently read portions of Will Durant's Life of Greece, written in 1939. I was struck by common themes appearing in the book and our own era. These excerpts contain dire warnings for our own time. Remember two things as you read these passages:


(1) Will Durant wrote these words before our current political, economic and moral problems had fully taken shape. He was not taking sides in our current battles. He had never heard of George W. Bush. He might have anticipated, but had not experienced, the modern state of the 21st Century Democrat party. He had no axe to grind in our modern day political wars. If anything, Durant was a liberal, having left the Catholic Church due to his atheism and having adopted socialism in his youth (he had also affiliated with many of the leftist icons of the early 20th Century such as Margaret Sanger and John Dewey). Durant described the decline of ancient Athens from a purely historical perspective without anticipating how this description could be used in our century.

(2) This story ends badly.

In the 4th Century B.C., the Golden Age of Athens had recently ended. Athens had entered into a period of decline. Athens was beset by many problems that will sound familiar to those of us that must endure the 21st Century A.D.

First of all, decades of class warfare incited by demagogues finally took their effect on government policy [including tax policy]:

In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor. They disdained the merchants and the bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas...finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes...they resorted
every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth...the result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and inprison tax invaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away...the middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes staultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip [Macedonian King] pounced down upon it...

[pp. 465-466]

The class warfare, resulting welfare state, inevitable confiscatory taxation and widespread tax evasion amounted to only one aspect of Athenian decline.

Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state. Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitiute for divine commandments and surveillant deity;...as the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints-the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility...[S]exual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage...the voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide...the old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs;...

[pp. 467-468]

As religion and demographics declined, other aspects of Athenian life changed also:

Atheletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions.

[p. 468]

Athenian ruins


In 4th Century B.C. Athens, there was little distinction between lawyers and politicians - and little apparent distinction from our own modern politicians:

...the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle's word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills. Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to "reimburse themselves doubly." (Citation omitted.) As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city.

[p. 469]

1939












Durant had a way of summing up diverse elements into a powerful conclusion:

As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtly, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primative man passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the williness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistable temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

[p. 470]

And around the United States hover Islam, Mexico, etc.

The conditions about which Durant wrote ended when Athens was conquered by the Macedons later in that century. Athens could no longer resist foreign enemies. Its economy was weakened by taxation, its population depleted and demoralized by Athens' own sexual revolution and its civic life destroyed by political activity in which Athenians regarded each other with more hostility than any foreign enemy. Athens would disappear (and with it its contributions to art, science, literature, etc.) as it was absorbed into the Macedonian empire of Philip and Alexander. While the Macedonian empire would briefly rule the known world, it, too, ultimately ended as Greece, itself, would disappear from the world map for 2000 years.

Moral decay, high taxes, redistribution of wealth, government programs, class warfare, etc. have consequences. Those consequences last far beyond the temporary political advantage that one faction may gain in the present. Future archeologists may find names like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons or John Edwards in the ruins of our civilization. But those names and their "achievements" will pale in comparison to the story of our own decline and its consequences.

Spengler; Asia Times; Kung Fu Panda; the end of slacker culture

"Spengler's" column in Asia Times should be regular required reading for all of you. This week, Spengler writes of the slacker culture in America end predicts said culture's demise. He ties in everything from the Kung Fu Panda movie to current trends in unemployment and the banking collapse:

Two events on June 6 might denote the death of the "slacker" as an American cultural archetype. . . .

-----------------

America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American.

Kung Fu Panda - symbol of a dying culture?



----------------

It is hard to think of a comparable case in social history: a country borrows from foreigners to lend money to its young people to spend four years binge-drinking at a university that pretends to prepare them for the world.

------------------

So-called home equity loans, or second mortgages on homes, are the cause of the crash of US bank stock prices during the past few weeks. The well is dry. That leaves the youngsters in the lurch, which is precisely where most of them deserve to be.

A profound sense of panic appears to have gripped American youth, which might explain why so many of them are seeking a messiah in Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama. But there isn't much that Obama or anyone else, for that matter, can do to help the slackers.

-----------------------
While Spengler's outlook is grim, I would be relieved if the only consequences for the western world are those outlined in Spengler's article. Read it all.

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’s “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery.

Mark Steyn May 31, 2008

Quote of the day - Peg Noonan

So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

Peg Noonan 2-22-08

We are so screwed.

Mitt Romney, as flawed a candidate as he has been, was the last best hope for the survival of the Republic. With his departure from the race, I am not quite ready to give up on the Republic. The final nail is not quite all of the way into the coffin.

Three things need to happen in order to save us from the destruction that a Presidential victory for the Clinton/Obama/McCain ticket would bring, all of which are unlikely:

(1) Mike Huckabee, as the last remaining viable alternative to McCain, will have to win the nomination, which is unlikely given the delegate count.

(2) Huckabee will then have to beat Hillary or Obama or both, which is unlikely given Huckabee's status as a weasel flip-flopper.

(3) Huckabee will then have to govern properly, also unlikely (see #2).

If any of these three things do not happen, get used to waiting in long lines to see government doctors. And get used to giving up all of the other luxuries and amenities that living in a free, prosperous nation has afforded us.

Because the stakes are so high, I am not yet ready to declare the Republic dead yet. Most of us are suffocating inside that coffin that is now being nailed shut. Once the Republic is dead, it is not coming back. More than 1800 years elapsed between the death of Rome's republic (@ 48 B.C.) and the birth of the American Republic (1776). I can not wait that long for the rebirth of freedom somewhere in the world.

So I am officially supporting Huckabee until such time as he either drops out or sells out to McCain. Like I said, we are sooooo screwed.

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn [creeping dhimmitude]

So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated "anti-Islamic activity." Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. . . . . . Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" – in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity."

Mark Steyn January 26, 2008

Quote of the day - Pat Buchanan

This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.

Pat Buchanon - January 14, 2008

Boomsday approaches; U.S. credit rating in jeopardy; Federal health care spending; Social Security;

The United States runs the risk of losing its AAA credit rating within a decade [for the first time since the rating was created almost a century ago]. Moody's warned that this scenario could occur "unless it [the U.S.] takes radical action to curb soaring healthcare and social security spending."

If the U.S. loses its credit rating, it will be harder for the federal government to borrow money. The federal government's borrowing costs will soar. Interest payments on the national debt will soar. Budget deficits and the federal debt will continue to grow.

Just as importantly, "safe" investments such as bonds, T-bills and money market mutual funds will be jeopardized, as the stability of such investments has always been predicated on the credit rating of the U.S. government and its ability to repay its debt. [The previous sentence is a gross understatement.]

With these previously "safe" investments now at risk, the devastating consequences will spill into other markets, such as insurance and banking (including mortgage lending). The consequences for mortgage lending have been forecast in such books as Empire of Debt (specifically the final chapters). The coming credit crunch is related to and will compound the bursting of the existing real estate bubble.



Since the Moody's warning focused on healthcare and SS spending as the principal culprits of the coming credit rating downgrade, I wonder how the candidates will react to this news.

In the pre- new media days, this story would have been buried, lest it prevent the candidates' attempts to bribe the voters with their own money. If this story sees the light of day now, most candidates will simply spin it into their own pre-existing demagoguery. They will say that the coming crisis shows the need to enact their own programs to greatly expand federal health care spending, even though such spending is the cause of the coming crisis.

Most presidential candidates have vowed to reform the healthcare system but many of them, especially on the Democratic side, have focused on extending coverage to the 40m-plus uninsured Americans rather than on cutting costs.

H/T Financial Times

For any problem, politicians confuse the cause with the solution.

Some day, when you are forced to accept pennies on the dollar for your money markets and other "cash" savings, remember to blame every politician that pushed for more government health care and refused to face facts on Social Security.

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct." As does Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.

Mark Steyn - 12-14-07

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

Mark Steyn - November 2007

Quote of the day - Thomas Sowell

Wise people created civilization over the centuries and clever people are dismantling it today. You can see it happening just by channel surfing on TV or hear it in rap music or read it in the pompous nonsense of academics and judges.

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell - circa 1980 h/t crainium . net

Quote of the day - Ann Coulter

At the precise moment in history when the U.S. has abandoned any attempt to transmit Anglo-Saxon virtues to its own citizens, much less to immigrants, George Bush wants to grant citizenship to hordes of immigrants who are here precisely because they are fleeing cultures that are utterly dysfunctional and ruinous for the humans who live in them.

Ann Coulter - 5-30-07