South Carolina’s at it again, this time pushing back against Obamacare. More here.
Be sure to watch the embedded video of Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, testifying before a South Carolina House subcommittee on the history of nullification, and the support it draws from the writings of the Framers.
Writing at PJ Media, clacissist Victor Davis Hanson urges us to read old books. This alone should be enough, I think:
Most classical literature, let us admit it, is anti-democratic, moralistic in a reactionary sense, and deeply pessimistic ”” and therefore if not a corrective, at least a balance to today’s trajectory.
Read the whole thing here.
George Santayana said:
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
We, however, are exempt — and nature reminds us every spring that while she is cyclical, we are linear. For us, spring, and winter, come but once.
Not much time for writing today, so here are some links for you:
By way of Dennis Mangan: Don’t eat tofu if you want a functioning brain.
The Horsehead Nebula, revealed.
Yes, friends, it’s over. We had a good run.
Germans want American beer!
Wait, what?
Near-death experience, frozen in time.
The Overton Window: a look slightly ahead.
My, how beautiful it was in New York today! Not a cloud in the clear blue sky, a cool dry breeze, warm spring sunshine, and the trees and flowers all in bloom. Just absolutely perfect. As good as it ever gets.
I hear that Occupy and sundry political groups clogged up the streets of Manhattan with various marches and demonstrations, but here in Brooklyn there was none of that, as far as I know. It was simply splendid; one of those fine, rare days when even a cranky old sourpuss like me feels spirited and optimistic.
CERN has restored the world’s very first website to its original URL. Here.
On April 16th I wrote:
It seems to me that there is a sort of ideological “singularity’, somewhere not far off in the distance, that we are accelerating toward. That singularity would represent the Omega point of the concurrent, onrushing streams of liberal opinion; it would be characterized by absolute non-discrimination, and rejection or elimination of all human differences, as well as by the abrogation of all traditional values, and of belief in objective human truths, in favor of a radical subjectivity in which everyone creates his own self, and his own model of reality, entirely ex nihilo, with no higher aim than maximizing the enjoyment of this brief flicker of life.
That singularity was a long way off, not so long ago. But as our world now begins to approach it more closely, the tidal pull between the side facing it and the side farthest away is becoming much stronger indeed, and very quickly. Before much longer the very ground we stand on will begin to break apart. You’ll see.
To extend the metaphor just a little further: the closer you get to a gravitational singularity ”” the deeper you go into the gravity well ”” the faster you have to be moving to fly back out. At some fixed distance from the center, this “escape velocity’ exceeds the speed of light. Once you have crossed that point, there’s no turning back. No light escapes. Anything that passes this horizon is lost forever.
I’m never surprised anymore when I find that I’m not the first to have had some thought or other. In this case, I learned today, by way of Dennis Mangan, that blogger Jim Donald beat me to the punch by two years: he first described what he calls a “Left Singularity” in a post from April 2011, and has returned to the metaphor several times since then. (Nothing about tidal forces, though.)
I hadn’t read Jim’s Blog before, but I will be. Onto the sidebar it goes.
The Boston bombings have set off a new round of security-tightening everywhere you look. When I went to the train station in Providence last week, I saw that passengers now have to present ID to well-armed police officers just to get to the platform; some had their bags searched. Sporting arenas are adding item after item to the list of things you can’t take to the game; soon, no doubt, there will be metal detectors and full-body scans. Cameras are everywhere.
In short, the level of public trust has sunk so low that we all feel ourselves to be under the continuous, wary scrutiny not only of those with whom we share the public square (“if you see something, say something!”), but also of of a vast, amorphous security apparatus that wields increasingly arbitrary power. We may grumble at the inconvenience, but that’s about as far as it goes; generally, it seems, we just comply, reminding ourselves that it’s all for our own good.
Less often do we reflect on the many uses to which such pervasive “security” arrangements can be put. In the name of safety and security we have been asked to disarm ourselves, to abandon various presumptions of privacy, and to grant the state worrisome discretionary powers. We yield, in little increments, our dignity and our personal sovereignty, while strengthening at every turn of the wheel the supervisory and coercive power of the State. This can’t end well.
Why is this happening? It is because we know we harbor among us malignant foreign bodies, who would do us harm — but, having crippled our organism’s ability to make vital discriminations, we are unable proactively to categorically identify or reject them. Instead, our only remaining defense is to suppress the free activity of every cell in the body.
We are in the grip of a lethal disease. In 2009 I described it thus:
Of all the maladies that can afflict a living organism, among the direst, for obvious reasons, are disorders of the immune system, and I don’t think it fatigues our metaphor to say that this is exactly what’s happening to us here in the West. There has arisen in our culture a memetic mutation, built upon previous philosophical evolution having to do with admirable principles of liberty and tolerance, that has led us to imagine not only that our culture is entirely invulnerable to pathogenic memetic infection in the form of alien cultural influences, but also that it is actually strengthened and enriched by them in all cases, without any regard to their cultural dissonance, infectious virulence, or even explicit malevolence. What makes this particular auto-immune disorder even more — indeed, far more — dangerous is that our society’s natural immune response has been not weakened, but re-directed: to attack precisely the very influences that might suppress the mutation and restore the health and safety of the organism. Criticism of multiculturalism, then, becomes “xenophobia’, and defensive wariness toward the possibly pernicious influence of excessive diversity, or of alien cultures, upon our own, becomes “racism’.
In other words, we’re dying of AIDS.
How do you die from diseases of the immune system? There are two ways. First, as noted above, a misdirected immune response can attack the body itself. Second, the suppression of the body’s natural defenses makes the organism easy prey for opportunistic invaders.
We are in the late stages of both. We stand in the presence of an organism — Islam — that has for 1,400 years presented a pathogenic threat to the West, and which in recent decades has, for whatever reason, taken on an acutely virulent and infectious form. To make matters much worse, we have at the same time infected ourselves with a very nasty bug indeed, leading to a severe case of acquired immunodeficiency.
Were our culture’s immune system functioning normally, we would consider the following, in the light of rational self-interest:
1) That Islam itself, as understood by hundreds of millions of its adherents, is inherently alien, antagonistic, and anathematic to the ideological foundations of modern Western civilization;
2) That the 1,400-year history of Islam has been a continuous struggle for supremacy over its neighbors, and for expansion of its sphere of control;
3) That the ideological structure of Islam itself is, by virtue of its history, the nature and content of its revelation, and its comparative freedom from internal contradiction, extremely durable and resistant to change, and has always exerted among its faithful a powerful gravitational pull toward its fundamentalist core;
4) That in any large enough population of Muslims, some percentage of them will inevitably gravitate toward that ideological center — which includes not only a detailed guide to nearly all aspects of the believer’s life, but also an urgent call to action regarding the conversion or subjugation of unbelievers;
5) That some percentage of these, in turn, will interpret this merely as a call to subvert and influence from within any non-Muslim nation they happen to be living in, while some smaller percentage will take it as a call to warlike action;
6) That, given 1) – 5) above, mass immigration of Muslims to the West will necessarily result in an expanding subpopulation of Muslims who are our ideological adversaries, and who are prepared to act on that in various ways;
7) That, given 6), and given the difficulty of reversing demographic changes brought about by immigration, we owe it to ourselves — and more importantly, to those future generations for whom we hold our civilization in stewardship — to weigh very carefully any imagined benefits to the West of mass Muslim immigration against the certainty of creating within our own borders a growing population of unassimilable cultural and ideological enemies. (And as for those imagined benefits — can anyone seriously believe that the English, the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch, are happier, or the life of their homelands more harmonious, since they allowed tens of millions of Muslims to settle among them?)
The late Lawrence Auster put this very starkly in a piece he wrote in August of 2006, recently cited at VDare:
This is the unchangeable reality I pointed to in my 2004 article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America.’ We will have terrorist attacks and threats of terrorist attacks and inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities FOREVER, as long as Muslims are in the West in any significant numbers. The Muslim terrorists are part and parcel of the Muslim community. According to a survey reported in the Scotsman, 24 percent of Muslims in Britain (I never describe them as “British Muslims’) believe the July 2005 London bombings were justified. Imagine that. Not only do these Muslims in Britain support terrorism against Britain, they’re not afraid to say so openly to a pollster! The unchangeable fact is that wherever there is a sizable Muslim community there will be a very large number of terror supporters and therefore — inevitably –actual terrorists as well.
This is our future, FOREVER, unless we stop Muslim immigration and initiate a steady out-migration of Muslims from the West until their remaining numbers are a small fraction of what they are now and there are no true believers among the ones that remain. Travelers from Muslim countries must be tightly restricted as well. Muslims must be essentially locked up inside the Muslim lands, with only carefully screened individuals allowed into the non-Muslim world.
The enemy are among us, in America, in Britain, in the West, and will remain so until we remove them from the West and indeed from the entire non-Muslim world. As extreme as this sounds, it is a no-brainer. There is no other solution. All other responses to this problem add up to meaningless hand-wringing. The hand-wringing will go on FOREVER, along with the terrorist attacks and the threat of terrorist attacks, until we take the ONLY STEPS that can actually and permanently end the threat.
Was Auster wrong? Here we are, seven years later: wringing our hands, stubbornly refusing to name the threat, while the “inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities” grow steadily worse and worse.
Fortunately, at long last the ground seems to be shifting; after the latest atrocity it suddenly seems to be possible to express these ideas in the media, and various public figures are gingerly doing so, accompanied by suitable pieties and disclaimers. The idea of such discrimination is still generally regarded as a dangerous, soul-destroying heresy, but that anyone in politics or the media would dare to express such thoughts at all is a promising sign.
John Derbyshire commented on this in his most recent podcast:
The other day — Monday, to be exact — Laura Ingraham, on her radio show, said she has long believed the United States should shut down all immigration from central Asia and any nation with a majority Muslim population. Atta-girl!
Quote from Laura: “I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11. Dagestan, Chechnya, Kyrgystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.'”
This is very heartening. Then, when I had just got over swooning about that, Democrat Bob Beckel — he was the campaign director for Walter Mondale’s presidential bid — told Rush Limbaugh that, quote:
I think we really have to consider, that given the fact that so many people hate us, that we’re gonna have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we’ve got, look at what we’ve got and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison.
So it’s bipartisan! We’ve got one bigfoot conservative commentator and one old Democrat warhorse both saying we should keep Muslims out.
To the lefties, of course, this is “hate.” I must “hate” Muslims, and so must Laura Ingraham and Bob Beckel.
How childish! You don’t have to “hate” people to want them to stay happily in their own countries and out of yours. It’s actually how most of the world feels. Chinese people don’t “hate” Indonesians, but they’re no way going to let ten million of them settle in China.
Western liberalism is strange, sick, abnormal, and anti-human. They are the haters. They hate their own countries, their own ancestors, their own culture, their own race. It’s a sickness, a pathology.
So it is; a pathology of the most dangerous sort. It needs a name; let’s call it Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus, or C.I.V.
Is it fatal? I don’t know, though the signs are grim. People do sometimes recover from autoimmune diseases; perhaps there is still a chance that we as a nation and culture can do so as well.
The blogger ‘Ace of Spades’ has on his banner this quote from H. L. Mencken:
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Ace is whetting his blade today, I think, and not without good reason.
If you’ve ever wondered about just how subjective human notions of beauty really are (or aren’t), here’s an interesting item: Korean beauty-pageant contestants go for plastic surgery, and all end up with the same face.
Attention mass-immigration enthusiasts: this study from the Economic Policy Institute concludes that we already have more home-grown STEM graduates than we need. From the report’s summary:
The immigration debate is complicated and polarizing, but the implications of the data for enacting high-skill guestworker policy are clear: Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.
There should be nothing “complicated” about this: the continued emphasis on providing work visas to foreign STEM workers, who are generally willing to work cheaply, gluts the labor market and depresses wages.
As John Derbyshire remarked recently, regarding the immigration bill now oozing through Congress:
Immigration policy is a massive fraud on the American people. This country doesn’t actually need any immigrants at all, legal or otherwise. We have 300 million people here ”” all the talent we need. In 1960, when we had little more than half that number, we staffed labor-intensive industries, put men on the moon, and created a popular culture that swept the world. In 1974, when I first got a job as a computer programmer in this country, I worked in a large room filled with American-born computer programmers, except for one Filipino and one West Indian. Nowadays you can hardly find a U.S.-born programmer; not because we’ve got worse at it, only because mass immigration via the H-1B program has driven down wages to a point where no American wants to do the work.
The U.S.A. is a country, not a hotel. We are a nation, not a mere pool of labor. If this bill passes Congress, we shall have signed away our nationhood. Fight this disgraceful bill! Call your congresscritter; go to the NumbersUSA website and sign their petition; make yourself heard.
Here’s a link to the latest report from the Congressional inquiry into the Benghazi fiasco and whitewash.
A synopsis:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
An ongoing Congressional investigation across five House Committees concerning the events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya has made several determinations to date, including:
— Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013.
— In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.
— Contrary to Administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information. Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior Administration officials.
These preliminary findings illustrate the need for continued examination and oversight by the five House Committees. The Committees will continue to review who exactly was responsible for the failure to respond to the repeated requests for more security and for the effort to cover up the nature of the attacks, so that appropriate officials will be held accountable.
I have serious doubts that “appropriate officials” will ever be held accountable, but I’m glad to see that this shameful episode hasn’t been swept under the rug just yet.
The psychologist and author Steven Pinker lives in Truro, here on the Outer Cape, and is a talented photographer. Here’s his most recent collection.
Today at about 1:09 PM the stock market, which had been having a bullish, happy day, suddenly fell sharply. Why? Because the Associated Press had issued a Tweet saying that the White House had been bombed and the President injured.
It immediately became obvious that the AP’s Twitter account had been hacked, and so the market rose again, just as sharply. The whole spasm lasted only a few minutes, during which time the Dow dipped and rebounded by about 140 points.
For anyone who knew what was happening, there was serious money to be made in that brief interval. I’m sure an awful lot of other people lost a great deal of money as automatic stop-loss orders kicked in.
I think we’ll be hearing a little more about this.
Another sad loss: Christina Amphlett, the former lead singer and songwriter for the Australian band Divinyls, has died after a long struggle with cancer and MS. She had lived in New York for many years, and will be mourned by many, many of her friends here.
Nina and I first got to know Chrissy way back in 1982, when the Divinyls came to Power Station to record their album Desperate. She was a beautiful, loving, keenly intelligent woman, and an immensely gifted artist.
Our thoughts and sympathies go out to her husband, Charley Drayton. Chrissy may be best remembered for the hit single I Touch Myself, but she touched a great many lives as well. She will be deeply missed.
Here’s a real corker from Walter Russell Mead, on the vanity and foolishness of Maureen Dowd.
I used to enjoy Ms. Dowd’s columns, long ago; she writes well, with tartness and wit. Gradually the appeal faded. Call it an acquired distaste.
“There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.”
– Marcel Proust
One of the stranger loose ends in the Boston bombing story is Abdul Rahman Ali Issa Al-Salimi Al-Harbi — the Saudi national, tackled at the scene, who became a “person of interest”. That “interest” quickly became apparent at the highest levels of government: President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry had hasty closed-door meetings with senior Saudi ministers. (Timeline here.)
Now the Israeli intelligence newsletter DEBKAfile is reporting a tangled web indeed, alleging that the Tsarnaev brothers and al-Harbi were wrapped up in a joint U.S-Saudi effort to infiltrate violent Muslim groups in the northern Caucasus. According to Debka, the bombers acted as double agents, their real sympathies lying with the jihadis they were sent to spy on.
From Debka:
The conclusion reached by DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian. Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.
By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East ”“ the Caucasus. This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of. [Well, most people in the West, at least. -MP]
Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombing attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands. They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.
That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.’
Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.
The Tsarnaevs’ recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:
1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2. When in 2011, a “foreign government’ (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview. He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media. Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect.
3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.
Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America ”“ and most strikingly, Washington – this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents ”“ any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.
I have nothing to corroborate any of this, so caveat lector. Read the rest here.
I will say this — there are two major branches of systematic jihad. Both want the same thing, the global triumph of Islam. One espouses jihad through war and martyrdom; the other considers these tactics to be counterproductive, preferring jihad through quieter channels: immigration, demographic change, legal action, pressure by transnational organizations, etc. This is the source of the rift between groups like al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi royal family, and CAIR (to name a few) on the other. By renouncing violence, the latter groups can position themselves as “moderates”, whom the West has no reason to fear; good-cop/bad-cop. In this light, DEBKA’s account of the Saudis’ concerns makes sense: for groups calling themselves “Wahabbist” to be aligned with terrorist forms of jihad blows the whole game.
Anyway, I just thought I’d pass this report along for you to mull over. Make of it what you will.
Phew! I’ve been working so much the past couple of days that I haven’t had time for anything else. Did I miss anything?
Just ran across some fantastic light-table photos of the jellyfish known as the Portuguese man-of-war. Have a look here.
Yesterday I wrote that gun-control advocates had lost in a “clean sweep” of Senate votes. That’s not quite true. One of the defeated proposals was a requirement that all states reciprocally honor concealed-carry permits.
In a rare moment of agreement with Chuck Schumer, I think it’s good that this idea was voted down. It’s anti-federalist, and is an encroachment of states’ rights.
Well! I’ve been traveling all day, but having arrived in the outer Cape I see we extremists (being one of which, I have it on excellent authority, is under the circumstances no vice) made a clean sweep today in Washington. Most gratifying to win a battle every now and again.
On to immigration “reform”!
Today we have an excellent piece by Charles C.W. Cooke on the abrogation, by gun-control partisans, of rational deliberation in favor of shameless appeals to emotion. (Mind you, the abrogation itself is very much the product of rational calculation; the politicians and pundits doing this are clearly aware that such vile mawkishness can be a very effective way to put the opposition on the defensive. These people will use whatever comes to hand; that they cannily prop up these grieving parents as human shields in the culture war is despicable.)
With bills addressing both issues making their way through Congress, here are two fine articles by Thomas Sowell: one on gun control, and the other on “immigration reform”.
I wish Sowell weren’t quite so old; such clear thinkers are as valuable as they are rare.
Public opinion moves fast these days; stick your head out the Overton Window for a glimpse ahead, and you’re liable to get whacked in the back of the skull. A position that was publicly held by the President less than a year ago — a neutral position at that, namely mixed feelings about gay marriage — is now bigoted extremism. As Mark Steyn points out here:
Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted. The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval.
Mr. Steyn cites the example of Jeremy Irons, who was bastinadoed in the press merely for asking on what limiting principle we would refuse to let a father marry his son so as to avoid estate taxes. (It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but there you are.)
Similarly, when President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage a year ago, I suggested that there was no longer any principle anywhere in view upon which we might coherently object to polygamous marriage (or other polyamorous combinations). A commenter took an unpersuasive shot at finding such a principle, but I came away fully confident that as the Window moved ever leftward, we’d see calls for polygamy soon enough, and soon thereafter official sanction. After all, why not?
Right on cue, then, here we are, in the pages of Slate.
Meanwhile, for the sake of balance, here’s the traditional-conservative take, from Pat Buchanan. His opinion is that as religious sorts and others with deeply held traditional views are kicked more and more roughly to the curb, at some point they will decline to remain civil. He observes that the widening ideological rift between traditionalists and the fast-moving Left is “pulling the nation apart.”
Indeed it is. I’m fond of metaphors, so here’s one:
When a moon orbits a planet, or a planet a star, the pull of gravity is stronger on the near side than the far side, with a stretching effect. If the planet is elastic, it will be deformed into an oval shape. This is what causes our tides: the ocean deforms, and bulges toward the Moon, while the rigid Earth rotates under the bulge.
Gravitational force increases and decreases with the square of the distance between two bodies, so if a planet is far from its star the differential between the pull on the near and far sides is negligible. But when you get too close to a massive, compact object, these tidal forces can be enormous. In the most extreme case, a black hole, tidal forces will rip to pieces anything falling inward, long before it gets to the singularity at the core.
It seems to me that there is a sort of ideological “singularity”, somewhere not far off in the distance, that we are accelerating toward. That singularity would represent the Omega point of the concurrent, onrushing streams of liberal opinion; it would be characterized by absolute non-discrimination, and rejection or elimination of all human differences, as well as by the abrogation of all traditional values, and of belief in objective human truths, in favor of a radical subjectivity in which everyone creates his own self, and his own model of reality, entirely ex nihilo, with no higher aim than maximizing the carnal enjoyment of this brief flicker of life.
That singularity was a long way off, not so long ago. But as our world now begins to approach it more closely, the tidal pull between the side facing it and the side farthest away is becoming much stronger indeed, and very quickly. Before much longer the very ground we stand on will begin to break apart. You’ll see.
To extend the metaphor just a little further: the closer you get to a gravitational singularity — the deeper you go into the gravity well — the faster you have to be moving to fly back out. At some fixed distance from the center, this “escape velocity” exceeds the speed of light. Once you have crossed that point, there’s no turning back. No light escapes. Anything that passes this horizon is lost forever.
Nothing for tonight. I had a couple of things I wanted to post, but in the wake of the news from Boston neither politics nor blithe general-interest material seems appropriate.
I was working today, and watching Twitter out of the corner of my eye; one got the sense that a great many people were just crossing their fingers, hoping that the story would break in the hoped-for ideological direction. Some simply couldn’t contain themselves. That repulsive gundyguts Michael Moore, for example, slavering at the prospect of a conservative perp, tweeted “Tax Day. Patriots’ Day.”
I saw a photograph of a poor young man being rushed away in a wheelchair with his legs blown off. I wish I hadn’t; I’m still trying to get over the horrors I saw in the Gosnell grand-jury report. (I’m not going to link to either of these things; you can go find them yourself if you want.)
Meanwhile, the stock market plummeted, and the world waits for North Korea’s next move.
I believe I’ll fix myself a drink.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Meanwhile, in other news…
Happy birthdays to Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard Keel, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ken Nordine, Don Adams, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Seamus Heaney, Paul Sorvino, Jack Casady, Tony Dow, Lowell George, Al Green, Ron Perlman, Christopher Hitchens, Max Weinberg, and Garry Kasparov.
Can’t help thinking I’ve forgotten someone…
Here’s more on the Gosnell case, if you can bear it, from Conor Friedersdorf.
Here too is Andrew McCarthy on the too-familiar process by which dehumanization precedes atrocity.
And here’s Roger Simon on the mainstream media’s discomfort with this story.
Here’s a photo of the media area at the Philadelphia courthouse where the trial, of a man who may well be the most prolific murderer in United States history, is being held. Draw your own conclusions.
I’m very sad to report the death of comedic genius Jonathan Winters, quite possibly the funniest man who ever lived.
Here he was in 1964, with a stick.
Read John McCreary’s latest assessment of the North Korean adventure, here.
Investor’s Business Daily’s editorial board comments here on the mainstream media’s non-coverage of the trial of the monstrous Kermit Gosnell, who ran an “abortion” abattoir in Philadelphia in which living infants were routinely and gruesomely murdered.
A search just now on the New York Times website turned up exactly one article, from page 17 of the March 19th edition.
Having just got back from our trip, I’m still getting caught up on work, current events, email, and so on. It does seem that rather a lot has happened here in the States and around the world while we were gone, none of it particularly encouraging.
Meanwhile, here are three pictures from China (click on the pictures for the full-sized versions).
First, the view from the rear of a house we visited on the outskirts of Yangshuo:
The next is from the countryside between Moon Hill Village and Liugong, a hamlet on the Li River:
And here’s a shot from the top of Victoria Peak in Hong Kong:
We’ll get back to normal operations shortly.
We’ve made it home to New York, and are recovering. Things will get back to normal here again soon.
Having found a little free time and a stable Internet connection, I thought I’d give a little update:
I’m sitting on the rooftop of an inn at the foot of the famous Moon Hill, a limestone arch just a few kilometers from the town of Yangshuo, in Guangxi province, China. Here’s the view from our balcony, two floors below:
We arrived here last night, after spending three nights in Guangzhou, where our daughter lives and works. Yangshuo is famous for its spectacular ‘karst‘ landscape; you’ve seen it in countless images, and it is also featured on China’s 20-yuan bill.
Sadly, the weather has been awful ever since we arrived in China — it has rained every day, and Guangzhou, and now Yangshuo, have been shrouded in fog and mist. We have yet to see even the tiniest patch of blue sky. That didn’t bother us much in Guangzhou, which is just a vast and unbeautiful metropolis, but it’s a pity not to be able to see a little distance here in one of the world’s most scenic places. It’s supposed to be like this until the day after we leave.
Nevertheless, there is still much to see and do. We’ll be here for a few more days, then back to Guangzhou, off to Hong Kong for the weekend, then back to New York. I’ll have more pictures to post later.
Phil Ramone, arguably the greatest record producer of all time, died on Saturday. He was a towering presence in the recording industry, and his death is an enormous loss to us all. His work, and his influence, touched every aspect of recording. (He’s even the man responsible for putting that long-familiar pair of Shure SM-57s on the Presidential podium.)
I didn’t know Phil well, but I did do a couple of dozen sessions with him over the years. He was a lovable, genial guy, and one heck of a storyteller.
His New York Times obituary is here.
Lawrence Auster has died. There are things I would like to say about him, his influence on my own thinking, and the grace with which he faced his final ordeal, but I must say them later. He was a brilliant and difficult man.
For now, go and read Laura Wood’s entry at VFR. See also Henry McCulloch’s piece at VDare, and Bill Vallicella’s comments at Maverick Philosopher.
March 31st, Guangzhou — Having found a little time to write, I’ll add a few more remarks.
Mr. Auster was, as Bill Vallicella correctly observed, an extremist; his view of conservatism was a very narrow one, and he refused to make common cause with other self-styled conservatives whose opinions were not almost exactly congruent with his own. In this he could be almost pathologically stubborn; he picked a lot of fights with many people who broadly agreed with him, and fought them with a sudden and startling fierceness. Thus he alienated a great many people with whom it would surely have been more productive, in the long run, to have fought alongside. But in his view the great civilization of the Christian West was dying of a withering and degenerative disease, and there was no point in making alliances with those who brought any trace of the infection along with them. Being “the enemy of the enemy” was never sufficient to make anyone his friend.
Such factionalism is the cardinal weakness of the modern Right in its struggle against the comparatively monolithic Left. The branches of American conservatism exist in a multidimensional space defined by several orthogonal axes, such as religion, social tradition, immigration policy, ethnic identity, fiscal policy, Federalism, limited government, and foreign policy. Mr. Auster considered his own small region of this large ideological manifold — at the intersection of religious and social traditionalism, immigration restriction, and European ethnocentrism — to be the only hope of our civilization’s survival, and he defended his patch of ground with drawn sword and a wary eye.
He did so, however, with remarakable intellectual consistency and insight. As Henry McCulloch said, Auster refused to “bend the knee to the world’s fashions”, and he lived independently enough that he continued to write under his own name, even as his views became more and more heretical. (His views didn’t change; orthodoxy did.)
My first encounter with Lawrence Auster was to be on the receiving end of withering criticism for an item I had written about race and immigration. It was not pleasant; although Mr. Auster made several points I have since come to agree with, I thought I had not been understood correctly, and he quite obstinately ignored my subsequent attempts at clarification. (He did this sort of thing often.)
As time went by, though, and my own understanding of the West’s existential crisis deepened, I began to reject the neoconservative ideas that had attracted me in the early years of the last decade in favor of a more traditionalist view. Nobody articulated the traditional-conservative ideology better than Lawrence Auster. I continued to read VFR daily; I suspect that many others who had fallen out with him did so also.
Over time I mended fences with Larry, and in the last couple of years we took up an amiable email correspondence, and met a couple of times for lunch. Among other things, we shared an interest in the esoteric teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Larry’s great gift was analysis and clarification. Every day, he dissected current events to show the consistent progress of the disease affecting the West. Much of what he said was forehead-smackingly obvious once he had said it; I hope, and rather doubt, that we will still see things quite as clearly now that he’s gone.
Larry faced his terminal cancer, and the terrible suffering he bore before he died, with almost saintly grace. Though I am not a believer myself (and so lacked a central qualification for Auster-approved conservatism), I’m glad to know that his deepening faith gave him strength and comfort at the end.
Lawrence Auster should have been with us for many years to come. His death is a very painful loss.
Things will be quiet around here for the next two weeks or so: the lovely Nina and I are off to fabled Cathay, where our brilliant and beautiful daughter is teaching science at an international high school in Guangzhou. We’ll all be spending a few days in scenic Yangshuo, and the memsahib and I will have a weekend in Hong Kong as well.
I’ll post when possible, but I have no idea how often that will be. Meanwhile, I hope things hang together while we’re gone – no nuclear strikes, general disorder, declarations of martial law, or ruptures of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which I still think is ready to rip.
You have the conn.
There’s grist for every ideological mill in this item, which came over the transom from a reader this morning. It lists the admissions this year, by race, to New York’s premier public high school, Stuyvesant.
Admission to Stuy is a pure meritocracy; do well enough on the entrance exam, and you’re in. Here are the numbers:
””Stuyvesant offered admission to 9 black students; 24 Latino students; 177 white students; and 620 students who identify as Asian.
Make of them what you will.
Today was gay-marriage day at the Supreme Court. Read the transcript here.
Key points, I think, were two lines of questioning directed from the bench to Ted Olson, one from Antonin Scalia (“You ”” you’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask…”), and one from Sonia Sotomayor (“Mr. Olson, the bottom line that you’re being asked…”).
I think Mr. Olson’s response to Justice Sotomayor was either an equivocation on the concept of “conduct” (I don’t see why marriage is “conduct” for some and not for others), or question-begging on the definition of marriage (which of course the matter being decided).
The respondents (that is, Mr. Olson and amicus curiae Donald Verrilli, who want to see California’s ban on SSM overturned) also found themselves in the curious position of arguing that a same-sex marriage ban would be unconstitutional in states that have already established civil unions with parallel benefits for gay couples, but would be constitutional in less-progressive states that haven’t! As Justice Breyer points out, this could cause states where there is scant support for gay marriage to be reluctant even to consider recognizing civil unions.
Anyway, go and have a look yourself, and see what you think. It’s important and instructive to read these things — legislation, arguments in the Court, executive orders, etc. This is where the rubber meets the road; this is all there is. This is where abstractions are transduced into realities that affect us all.
One of the intrinsic disadvantages conservatives have in the P.R. war with the Left is that we weren’t brought up to think that victimhood is an appropriate foundation for a well-built life. For traditional, conservative sorts, weaned on solid Christian pessimism, it is simply the plain truth that life will always dish out insults and injuries — and that, for the common good, and as a matter of personal virtue, adults are expected to stand it with dignity, do what they can about it, ask for assistance only when they absolutely must, and repay as promptly as possible the debts they incur as a result.
Others, who clearly were raised very differently, have set themselves up in a highly profitable line of work, jerking the nation’s heartstrings with one Queen for a Day story after another. Every slight, every disparaging remark, every little misfortune, every trifling asymmetry in the allotment of life’s blessings, and every instance of life’s natural vicissitudes, however transient or trivial, becomes a violation of “social justice” — an aggression against the helpless victim, and an occasion for the reorganization of society along more clement lines. (So gossamer-skinned have we become, so sensitive to the slightest abrasion, that we have in recent years trained powerful new instruments on these affronts, zooming in by several orders of magnitude, and are now tallying “microaggressions“.) The sought-after remedy is always some act of government: an entitlement or preference of some sort, or some new constraint upon the liberties of others.
There’s no limiting principle. And if you watch for a while, you begin to realize that “social injustice” is not only infinite, but fractal. It’s a Julia set of grievances. Zoom in all you like; new affronts will appear at every scale, world without end.
Well, two can play at that game. The blogger and Twitterer “Ace of Spades” informs us that Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has proposed a new program, aimed at giving succor to a newly demarcated class of sufferers: victims of government itself.
Learn more here.
Charles Cooke, who is a very sensible fellow for one so young, comments at length on Albany’s stupid, histrionic, opportunistic, and authoritarian reaction to Newtown.
Here’s Alfred Jay Nock, writing in 1936 about a little-sought-after but highly rewarding career path: prophet to the Remnant.
This one’s been making the rounds: the fish with “human teeth”.
The perfect should never be the enemy of the good, but we should always let the good be the enemy of the merely convenient.
This caught my eye:
US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email
Non-electronic communication will soon be a thing of the past. It’s interesting that the simplest of technologies — a packet of paper, a drop of wax — made possible, for thousands of years, something that for most people will soon be a thing of the past as well: to deliver a message with the assurance that it had not been read by others. Yes, it can still be done; you can still send mail in paper envelopes. But when the mail service finally becomes obsolete, and you’ll need to send such things by courier, who will bother?
On the other hand: sometimes such messages were read by people other than the intended recipients. A friend of mine just found in an attic a box of courtship letters sent by her grandparents to one another almost a century ago. That sort of thing won’t happen any more, either.
All of this has always just been information. But information always requires a physical substrate. We’re moving through a kind of phase transition: the world of books and letters, where information had to be carried from place to place on discrete and bulky objects, was, you might say, a cold world. Metaphorically, it was a solid state: things moved slowly, lasted a long time, and distant particles rarely interacted. It was an ice world — and if you can measure distance by the time it takes for two things to come together, it was a much bigger world. Things are now heating up very rapidly indeed.
Physical books will still be around for a while — certainly, those already printed aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — but I wonder how much longer it will be profitable to print new ones.
Keep in mind also that e-books can be silently updated through the reading device. Even history books.
When you abandon reason and due process, and act only upon hysteria, emotion and sensationalism, this is what you get.
That such people are in charge of our public affairs — and have the power to revise and abridge our cherished liberties at their whim — is horrifying.
