The New Clarion

As a historian, I am all too familiar with the dangers of placing too much stock in contemporaneous sources. Present events and actions attract the most attention, leading to a myopic search for explanation. Causation is best determined from afar since the historian has a diverse group of hypotheses from which to choose and can evaluate subsequent events for corroboration. But one cannot fully discount contemporary analysis; it offers up a rich source for facts and, uncommonly, spot-on assessments. With this trepidation, I cautiously read Thomas Woods Jr.’s 2009 book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Woods, an Austrian economist with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, sought to present an alternative to the previous and current administrations’ indictment of the free market on the charge of causing the present economic predicament.

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Bad news out of Russia for those of us who watch the rise of religion with concern:

Two stunning initiatives from the Russian government over the past few weeks illustrate a disturbing fusion of religion and politics as Vladimir Putin’s regime makes a final effort to consolidate dictatorship.

First, the government announced that it would consult the Russian Orthodox Church before introducing any legislative proposals in parliament, in essence giving the church a veto on legislation and allowing the church to promote an openly religious agenda in parliament.

Then, the regime declared it would begin teaching Orthodox religion in schools, ignoring the constitutional requirement of separation of church and state. Study of other Christian faiths, like Protestantism and Catholicism, has already been ruled out, and it’s clear that the lip-service being paid to Islam is only window dressing.

The move gives Putin and the state a veneer of ideology and morality; and it gives the church power. Atilla, meet your witch doctor.

If I were a Jew, Muslim, non-Orthodox Christian or unbeliever in Russia, I’d be looking for a way out. Things could get ugly — and get so quick.

Mark Steyn identifies as a problem the unmanageable size of proposed bills, such as the current health care reform bill:

Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on.

Then he jumps to the wrong solution to the problem:  

That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

One thousand page bills are certainly a problem.  The answer, however, is not the Balkanization of the US.    Is socialized medicine at the state level any better than socialized medicine at the Federal level?  One is just as wrong as the other, regardless of the relative length of the corresponding bills. It is inherent in any centrally planned economy, wherein the government attempts to plan the details of the lives of hundreds of millions of people, down to the type of food they can eat, that there will be enormous, and enormously detailed, legislation. 

The solution to this problem is individual rights and capitalism.  The sole purpose of a proper government is the protection of individual rights. In such a capitalist society there wouldn’t even be a health care bill.  That’s all one thousand pages of collectivist central planning that would never have been written, let alone read.  Or not read.  If a capitalist society felt the need for a health care bill, it  would consist of one sentence:

“Resolved: there shall be a free market in health care, as in all other fields.”

Then even the likes of John Conyers would have time enough at last to read a bill before he voted on it.

Betsy Speicher’s Facebook page links to a couple of must-read articles. First, Obama is appointing Cass Sunstein to the “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.” The name of that position alone is frightening. But it gets a lot scarier when you learn that his latest book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” argues that the state should take down what it determines to be lies on the internet.

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I was watching CNBC tonight and they were discussing the case of a Citi trader who was due to receive a $100 million bonus.  Then they showed a Wall Street Journal headline that read: “US Pay Czar to Renegotiate Contracts He Deems Too Lucrative.”  This Citi trader’s bonus contract is presumably Exhibit One for the Pay Czar.  So the panelists, moderated by Dennis Kneale, were arguing back and forth about the merits of the case.  Finally one of the panelists asked another panelist if he understood they were speaking about a contract.  Then another panelist, Leslie Marshall, interjected this comment: “A contract is only worth the paper it’s written on.”  Now who does that sound like?  Who else viewed solemn agreements as mere “scraps of paper”?  

Here is a link to the video clip on the CNBC website. The clip is labelled Demystifying Goldman Sachs. The Citi trader discussion begins at about the 5:50 mark , and Leslie Marshall’s infamous comments come at about the 8:00 mark.

Gene Schwimmer, in a blog post about Obama’s latest move of appeasement, this time of Syria, reminds us:

In 2002, George W. Bush went to New Jersey, stood before an audience of his fellow Americans and declared that “we will not allow the world’s worst leaders to threaten us with the world’s worst weapons. 

In 2009, Obama went to Cairo, stood before an audience of foreigners and assured those very same leaders that “[n]o single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.”

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I just finished reading The Blue Wound, a 1921 novel by Garet Garrett and boy what an enjoyable read. I found a 2008 paperback reprint, 109 pages, at Barnes and Noble. Now I want to get copies of his other writings.

The story is about a writer who goes on a journey to find the man who started World War 1. He meets a man named Mered who takes him around the world of the past and present with a glimpse of the future of 1950 showing how civilizations keep destroying themselves and giving his reasons why. It’s scary how many ideas that were popular then are again so now.

I won’t mention any spoilers here and I recommend this site for a good in-depth review of the book.

Mered’s thought processes are sometimes loaded with juicy mental somersaults as in this paragraph where he explains to the writer about a union meeting of miners deciding whether to go on strike for more money and benefits:

“Again,” said Mered, “listen rather to what they mean than what they say. The question here is whether the state has still the strength to say on what terms half a million shall continue to perform the drudgery of digging coal. Their dilemma is that the coal diggers are politically free. Therefore they cannot be chained to their work. But on no account can they be allowed to stop; nor can they be permitted to name their own terms. Thus you approach involuntary servitude under conditions of political freedom.”

Wow! Sounds like political science professors of today instead of 1921.

I recommend this book.

ARCTV has a 2min. video by Yaron Brook on the subject of sacrifice vs trade. While this subject needs a lot more coverage in today’s culture, Mr. Brook as usual, nails the essentials.
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I know this is a few days old but I think it’s noteworthy anyway. The newest burden you will be asked to carry is provided by the Sec. of Commerce Gary Locke who says that Americans must be made to pay for some of the carbon emissions of–the Chinese! Read the WSJ blog article here. You see, the Chinese factories are making lots of inexpensive products that make our lives better, so we are the cause of their CO2 emissions.
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An alert relative sent to me a link to this story. Evidently, Nashville Tenn. is experiencing new record lows for July. They didn’t mention his name but Al Gore lives in the Nashville area. Love it.

How weird is Obama’s view of man?

Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, “You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.”

Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change — maybe they have allergies. Maybe they have something else that would make a difference.

So — so part of what we want do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care. And that’s the whole idea behind Mayo. That’s the whole idea behind the Cleveland Clinic.

He really believes this.

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People are talking about a USA Today report that shows Obama’s poll numbers at this point in his presidency are 10th of the 12 post-WWII presidents.

Peter Wehner presents the case:

When Barack Obama assumed office, his supporters viewed him as a man of preternatural talents: highly intelligent and unusually reasonable, disciplined and competent, open to different points of view, committed to bipartisanship and to achieving common ground, an agent of reform and comity, cool and graceful, trans-ideological and groundbreaking. Governing is never easy, especially when facing an economic crisis — but Obama was extraordinary, we were told, a once-in-a-lifetime figure, wise beyond his years, compared to Lincoln and to God, destined for greatness, The One. Or so the story went.

Suddenly, six months into his presidency, Obama is beginning to look overmatched by events, on almost every front. More than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since Obama took office. Unemployment is significantly worse than Obama told us it would be, and it’s going to get worse still. The deficit and debt are bursting like exploding stars, with no end in sight. The stimulus package was a three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar bust. The cap-and-trade legislation, ill-conceived and unpopular, will probably never become law — though House Democrats who voted for it may well pay a high political price for having done so. And Obama’s bailout and management of the auto industry looks increasingly unwise.

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In an earlier post, I characterized pragmatists as “epistemological primitives”. Today I have two groups of examples to demonstrate this kind of primitivism in action.

Some time ago, Arnold Kling did so when he proposed that individual states should perhaps “experiment” with government health care — as if  the experiment has never been tried before, all over the world and here in the United States at least twice (Tennesse and Massachusetts), with ample results.

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In Podcast 71 Leonard Peikoff briefly discusses his upcoming book on the DIM Hypothesis. From the explanation of his lecture series on DIM:

Dr. Peikoff’s forthcoming book, The DIM Hypothesis, identifies three different modes of integration, i.e., of interrelating concretes, such as individual percepts, facts, choices, etc. As Dr. Peikoff explains: “My thesis is that the dominant trends in every key area can be defined by their leaders’ policy toward integration. They are against it (Disintegration, D); they are for it, if it conforms to reality (Integration, I); they are for it, if it conforms to a superior reality (Misintegration, M).” The book demonstrates the power of these three modes in shaping Western culture and history.

The book looks to be a bombshell. In his podcast Dr. Peikoff says it explains how religion is “the root of all evil from the beginning.”

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Well, they’ve done it. According to this Washington Times report, the US Senate passed the hate crime legislation that was attached to the DOD appropriations bill. The Senate is supposed to be the more deliberative, more cerebral, more intellectual of the two congressional bodies. HAH! What a joke! As I wrote in a letter to Senator Carl Levin; “Hate is an emotion, it is insane to try and outlaw emotions. To do so is to open wider the door to censorship.”

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I missed the US Postal Service when they knocked on my door yesterday with an important package I’ve been waiting for impatiently. The postman left a note on my door that I could pick up the package at the post office on Saturday between 9-11am.

So today I went to the post office at 9am today to pick up the package before going to rehearsal at 10am. I waited until 9:30am, but the window that is supposed to be open from 9-11am never opened. I’ll have to wait until Monday to get my package.

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It’s remarkable to hear Sonia Sotomayor walk away from every postmodern/multiculturalist statement she has made. As many have noted, she sounds like Justice Roberts all of the sudden. Now she has no place for empathy and believes the law is to be judged the same by all men regardless of race or sex.

It’s pretty obvious to critics from across the spectrum that she is lying. Like the President who nominated her, she will tell any lie in the quest for power. This seems to be SOP for the New Left, and is most troubling. Those capable of destroying the truth are capable of any enormity.

It’s fascinating to me how little integrity radical subjectivists have. If I were sitting before a hearing and I firmly believed a legal philosophy, there is no way I could disavow what I believe to win a nomination. No, it’s inconceivable. I would argue for my beliefs. I could not with a straight face sit before the world and lie.

But my beliefs are grounded in reality. I hold that there are absolutes, that A is A, and that reason can identify reality. Sotomayor, as a postmodern subjectivist, believes none of this. To her, each ethnic group and sex constructs its own “narrative.” How easy it is then for her to state the opposite of what she believes to gain power. Power is the only absolute the New Left really believes in.

It’s even more astonishing when you consider that, with 60 Democrat Senators and plenty of pragmatist Republicans, Sotomayor is a lock to be voted to the Supreme Court. She does not need to lie, and yet the quest for power is so much more important than the truth that she’s not taking any idiotic chances by telling the truth.

This is the nature of the leftist enemy: it’s a black hole, a nothing. We should be able to defeat these nothings as easily as we wipe dandruff off our shoulders. Now, the religionists are a different matter…

Ryan Mauro has a stunning story about what looks to be an attempted terrorist attack that failed last month. This one would have involved commercial jets heading to Phoenix, Arizona.

The enemy is still at war with us. Why is something like the Islamic Saudi Academy, which teaches militant Islamism and plays a part in Mauro’s story, still in existence?

Our failure to destroy the enemy, including states that sponsor terrorism — our failure to wage an all-out, serious war — will come back to bite us someday. It’s just a matter of time.

Until then, the mainstream media can blather on in false security about Michael Jackson and Jon and Kate. A story such as Mauro’s gets a mention in the back pages, if even that.

Michael Barone writes about the disarray on Capitol Hill. I was surprised to read that as of June 19, only $29 billion of the massive stimulus bill had been spent. You remember how it was so urgent that the bill was passed quickly that Congressmen didn’t have time to read the thing? It turns out they could have waited until now to pass the bill and they would have “stimulated” the economy about as much as they have. (Actually the economy would be in better shape if they had not passed that bill.)

And where did that $29 billion go?

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In an opinion piece called “Obama curiously rigid at all the wrong times,” E. Thomas McClanahan is puzzled by Obama’s “inflexible streak.”

He showed it last year during the campaign. Even as the success of the troop surge in Iraq became undeniable, Obama remained rooted to his position that the policy was futile and bound to fail.

And last week he doggedly held to his dream of “engagement” with Iran’s mullahs, even as the struggle over the disputed June 12 election widened to encompass a pivotal body of clerics based in the city of Qom. This important group, the Association of Religious Scholars, essentially pronounced the election results invalid.

But the outstanding example of his inflexibility is his continued refusal to adjust his domestic agenda.

Last fall, the economy dropped into a void. The tectonic plates of the financial world shifted. Financial institutions with storied histories and generations of stability vanished. Jobs disappeared by the hundreds of thousands.

But Obama held fast to his “transformative” agenda. In the changed circumstances, the obvious imperative was to stabilize the economy first and worry about the particulars of his program later.

But no. He marched before Congress and called for action on a long list of items that had nothing to do with economic recovery, including a system of carbon limits and health-care reform.

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For much of the Bush presidency the left made much of Bush’s “domestic spying” as they called it. We still don’t know how much politicizing intelligence has weakened American security.

A document dumped on Friday reveals that many Democrats were less than honest in their outrage.

Between the time the time the collection intelligence activities that came to be known as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was first authorized after the 9/11 attacks until the warrantless surveillance aspect of the program was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, the Bush administration briefed the bipartisan leadership of the congressional intelligence committees 17 times about the activities involved in the program.

In sum, congressional Democrats knew about the program and knew that the dissent of the Justice Department’s senior leadership in 2004 was not about warrantless surveillance. They knew that if they postured that the dissent was about warrantless surveillance, Gonzales — not an adept communicator — would not be able to rebut them in a public hearing because the details of the dispute were classified.  Congressional Democrats also knew that President Bush agreed to make changes in the program in March 2004 to assuage DOJ’s concerns, and they knew that the program activities continued thereafter for a year-and-a-half (i.e., until the Times blew part of the program) without incident and with bipartisan congressional leadership continuing to be briefed.

The politicizing of the nation’s security that went on here was shameful.

But don’t question their patriotism.

I get daily email updates from Townhall.com. Often I delete them unread. I’m busy, and conservatives are predictable in their opinions. Today I opened the email and looked around to find a lot of devastating criticism of the Democrats’ statist policies.

In our two-party system, when one party is in power, the other party’s job is to keep the party in power honest. I guess you could say the liberals did that during the George W. Bush presidency. Well, they called him “chimpy” a lot. Name calling passes for criticism on the left these days.

Today the right is shouting the truth about the Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime. Opinion pieces like this are the reason dictatorships always crack down on free speech. The Democrats have to suffer when the truth gets out like this.

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