Why The West Was Won, Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Victor-Davis-Hanson/dp/0571216404

A worthy final book review for the end of Moose Tracks. I regularly have blogged on articles by Dr Hanson who writes regularly for National Review, where I find his thinking always of merit and with whom I am typically in agreement with. The depth and scholarship of this work of 455 pages is amazing, even more so when I look at the giant list of books by Dr Hanson -- although an avid reader, I could spend years just catching up with Hanson's writings, let alone a sampling of the classic writers that he often references.

My lack of any training in Greek or Latin makes many of the historical names difficult for me -- Dr Hanson is one more reminder of my lack of historical and classical education.

The book can be summarized fairly simply -- it is a series of battles that bring to light the way of Western warfare. Hanson argues that because of the relative democracy, freedom and private property rights of Western peoples from Greece onward, the west developed the unique character of attacking in mass with a disciplined and cohesive force, and then pressing the attack until the opposition was no longer able to make war. A world of private property and advancement of personal and family fortunes was the way of the West ... and that made WINNING and STOPPING war a priority!

In a recent case that we are familiar with, Japan never imagined that by attacking Pearl Harbor, the US would declare total war on them with no thought of any "negotiations" to come before unconditional surrender. For the Japanese, and other imperial, "god as emperor/king" cultures, wars had elements of symbolism, martial artistry, "honor", and ritual -- they were not simply about getting the bloody task over with as quickly and efficiently as possible. War was an important part of their very culture.

For the West, no matter how great the slaughter on the battlefield, it was seen as "moral" compared with the mutilation of prisoners, women and children. The culture of the west up to recently was in line with the character in this clip from the unforgiven -- if you want to take the west on in battle, you better arm yourself.

In a slight measure, the book is a response to "Guns, Germs and Steel" which Davis finds to not make it's case -- western armies, even with superior weaponry were defeated by native forces on a number of occasions. Cortez was defeated and barely escaped with his life from Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1520, only to amazingly return and win in the summer of 1521! "Germs" affected both sides. What the non-Western adversaries lacked was the ability to form proper formations and successfully fight using them with discipline and resolve, even when leadership was killed.

The story of Western military dominance according to Hanson is one of strong independent individuals at all levels of the force who are drilled and BELIEVE that staying in rank, maintaining the line, and no running are the ultimate best way to stay alive and WIN. Without democracy and private property, it is not possible for a nation to hold this advantage, even if they purchase Western armaments. Western culture could not be bought ... but unfortunately, as with Rome and Britain before it, it has certainly been squandered.

The section on Midway makes that case exceptionally strong. Yorktown returns from the battle of the coral sea to Honolulu heavily damaged with repair estimates of 3-6 months. Admiral Nimitz says he MUST have Yorktown at Midway, and he himself is in hip boots under the hull assessing damage before the dry dock is even drained. Because of the ability of the American workers to operate  without close supervision and know exactly what needed to be done, they worked around the clock and she steamed out of the harbor with the last of the workers still finishing up as she headed into battle 68 hours after she came into port!

The Japanese carriers damaged or losing many planes at Coral Sea -- Shokaku and Zuikaku with FAR less severe damage, sat in their repair port of Kure during Midway battle. Reverse this picture, and the US goes up against SIX Japanese carriers with TWO, rather than the 3 on 4 which resulted in the Japanese losing all 4 carriers and thus the initiative in the war only 6 months after their victory at Pearl.

The tales of the battles are detailed and BLOODY -- on all sides. The book gives some real insight into what battle and life was like for soldiers of Greek and Persian empires, the Romans, the Spanish Conquistadors, the British Empire, etc.

While Vietnam and subsequent anti-war protests have possibly weakened the Western resolve to win, and most of all to do it quickly and efficiently, Hanson maintains that as long as democracy, personal freedom and basic private property continue to exist, so will the Western way of war.

Interestingly, the orginianl Star Trek, right during the Vietnam war had an episode called "A Taste of Armageddon" about two civilizations that had been "at war" for a very long time where "attacks" were carried out by computer simulation, casualty figures totalled up, and people filed into "disintegrators" as war casualities -- very tidy, no loss of costly infrastrucure. When the Enterprise is computer "collateral damage", Kirk decides to give them the option to negotiate or engage in real actual very messy war.

A worthy read if you want to know about western military tradition and some of the key battles of history.

Borking, The History Of Ending America

The Wages of Borking | Power Line:

An excellent column that helps us remember that killing America had a history -- Bork was 30 years ago this fall, in 2019 it will be 50 years since Chappaquiddick, which should have ended Teddy Kennedy and prevented the "Borking" wound to America from ever happening. React to Chappaquiddick as a nation with any morals, and Borking never happens -- perhaps the horror of Roe is even overturned 30 years ago, millions of unborn survive, law, decency and life are honored, Slick and BO never happen, and America lives. My thesis is that America didn't HAVE to die, it died by CHOICE ... a number of them, with Roe being a gigantic one.

America was a great nation, so it didn't die suddenly. The following paragraph shows the lie that Bork was "out of the mainstream", no matter what Teddy Kennedy thought -- Teddy was wrong on a lot of things beyond where he last left his car parked upside down under water with his young secretary in it.

During his tenure on the DC Circuit Bork had written or joined 416 opinions, many of them on the same side as fellow DC Circuit Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bork’s three-judge panels were unanimous 90 percent of the time, and Bork was in the majority 95 percent of the time. The Supreme Court had reversed not a single majority opinion Bork wrote or joined, while in six cases the Supreme Court had adopted a dissenting opinion of Bork’s. Bork’s critics said he was hostile to minorities and civil rights, yet he sided with minority plaintiffs in seven out of eight cases that came before him as a judge. As political scientist Aaron Wildavsky noted, “How could a superb legal craftsman be outside the mainstream when he was one of the leaders in determining what constituted excellence in legal reasoning [as a professor at Yale Law School and Solicitor General of the United States]? How could a judge who had written some 150 opinions, and had never been reversed by a higher court, be outside the mainstream?”

The whole concise column is well worth the read -- "Borking" was a point at which "The Party" (TP-D) flexed it's connection with the corrupt groups whose thirst for sexual gratification was partially slaked by the sacrifice of millions of unborn on the altar of "choice". The Constitution said that the president was allowed to appoint qualified men to the court, but Teddy and the TP cabal said otherwise, and they won!

The application of TP power to trump law, decency, comity, tradition, etc was a giant step toward BOistan. Evil won the day, and the soul of America turned blacker.

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Chappaquiddick Kopechne Kennedy BOistan

A Chappaquiddick Reckoning At Last? [With Comment by John] | Power Line:

There are lots of points that could be argued as the true point at which the decline of America into BOistan was sealed, but Chappaquiddick is certainly an obvious one. As Buckley foreshadowed with  "God and Man At Yale", the seeds were carefully sown -- it was just a matter of time before they bore their noxious fruit. The fact that the Moon Landing was happening as the essence of the corruption of the American system was playing out lends a Biblical cast to the events of that day. We reached our peak ... but we were falling as we reached it.

Forty-eight years later, let’s be clear on what the meaning of Chappaquiddick is. Ted Kennedy should, by all rights, have stood trial for involuntary manslaughter, which would likely have ended his political career. The fact that the Kennedy family — the original postwar dynasty of the one percent — possessed, and exerted, the influence to squash the case is the essence of what Chappaquiddick means. The Kennedy's lived outside the law; the one documented instance in American history of an illegally stolen presidential election was the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. He lost the race to Richard Nixon, but his father sealed the presidency for him by manipulating the vote tallies in Illinois. That’s the meaning of Chappaquiddick. too.

The Kennedy Crime Family was a family founded on bootlegging. It gained power through stealing the presidency in the 1960 election, and it bore poisonous fruit on July 18th 1969.

The fact that the dominant political party in the old "United States", THE PARTY (TP-D) was able to allow a sitting US Senator to effectively murder a young woman in his employ and yet continue on as a Senator showed that morality was a dead issue for TP. POWER was the only coin that mattered, and it would be 30 years later before the Clinton Crime Family would make it clear that TP POWER was able to hold even the White House in the face of any breech of law, standards, or morality as Slick Wille stained the blue dress and the oval office with it.

TP established the death of morality, law, and even decency in the old "America", and the culmination of that "victory" was the ascension of BO to power. BO established the end of the Constitution and the Separation of Powers, ushering in BOistan and the age of Trump.

A good video explaining what may have happened :

https://youtu.be/mtP389IZ3TM

We still have no clue as to the direction which Trump may move this failed tribal state, however we ought to all understand how we got to this point.

I don’t say any of this as a right-wing troll. But those are the facts, and they are facts that liberals, too often, have been willing to shove under the carpet. And they have paid the price. Ted Kennedy became known as “the Lion of the Senate,” and did a lot of good, but when you try to build a governing philosophy on top of lies, one way or another those lies will come back to haunt you. (Hello, Donald Trump! He’s an incompetent bully, but his middle name might be “Liberal Karma.”) As a movie, “Chappaquiddick” doesn’t embellish the incidents it shows us, because it doesn’t have to. It simply delivers the truth of what happened: the logistical truth of the accident, and also the squirmy truth of what went on in Ted Kennedy’s soul. The result may play like avid prose rather than investigative cinema poetry, but it still adds up to a movie that achieves what too few American political dramas do: a reckoning.

I still hope that Trump may want to bring us back to "America" ... "greatness" is a long way off. That is very likely wishful thinking, but it was TP that took us down the path of lawlessness and amorality. That much is very clear to anyone that pays attention.

As a parent, and now a grandparent of the most beautiful granddaughter in the history of the universe, I can't imagine my anguish if she had died in the back of Teddy's car at Chappaquiddick. I strongly suspect my Christianity would not have been enough to have prevented my taking Teddy's life in as horrible a fashion as possible, but I am not proud of that sentiment ... it is just true.

We need to remember the name of Mary Jo Kopechne with honor and reverence. Her death was a greater loss to America than all the wars fought with honor. This was the moral 911 of America ... look, think, and imagine your daughter, wife, or granddaughter as Mary Jo. You know the truth, ACT! It is NEVER too late if you can swallow your pride and see the evil for what it is!

How can you run when you see her dead ....?

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First Cultural Wartime President

He Fights - Evan Sayet:

This is one that is worth just going out and reading top to bottom. If you need background, I cover that here. Just go and read it -- a teaser.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

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Gettysburg, Brandenburg, Warsaw -- Historic Speeches

Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland | July 6, 2017 | whitehouse.gov:

When we live through history, we tend to not notice the major mileposts until they are well in the rear view mirror. I'm not going back to Gettysburg today, although I have been there both physically and intellectually. I will return to Brandenburg for a bit, because I think it is the most recent model that helps us understand the potential parallels to Trumps speech in Warsaw.

Reagan and his battle against the forces of socialism and communism had a very happy ending for those of us who believe in God, Family and limited government. I covered a good book on the subject here, a key quote from that book is a message between an East German leader and the leader of the USSR, Khruschev:

"The experience of the last years have proven that it is not possible for a socialist country, such as the GDR to cary out peaceful competition with an imperialist country such as West Germany with open borders".

My contentiion is that the forces of "progressiveism" are generally intelligent, (or at least their leadership is). There have been WAY too many historic (USSR, East Germany) and current (Venezuela,  North Korea) examples of the failure of Godless Socialism to provide anything but both physical and spirital poverty to the bulk of the people under its control, but they feel their superior intellects are just too great a blessing to deny the masses their" benevolent" authoritarian rule. They know what the common man needs, FAR more thant he common man.

Trump calls out these adversaries here:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies. 

Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. (Applause.) If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.

Trump is making Trumpism, which is essentially a return to Western civilization, very clear in the above -- and here as well:

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?   

 Our elite generally hates Western civilization, covered well here. Their attacks on this speech are largely along the lines of "Western civilization is Christian and white, and therefore exclusionary and racist, and it, along with Trump, must be repudiated".

The whole speech is WELL worth taking the (fairly short) time needed to read it. It also covers the little reported fact that we are now deploying Patriot missles in Poland.

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The Arab Descent Into Darkness

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/05/the-arab-world-has-never-recovered-from-the-loss-of-1967/

I suspect that the intellectual author finds Christianity and Judaism to be just as "atavistic" (ancient / backward) as Islam. When there are three great monothistic religions, two of which DO worship the same God (the Father), and one who does not, intellectuals see the failure of the imposter as reason to indict the other two as well. It was what they see as "equality" -- we know religion is bad, if one out of three monotheistic religions is a disaster and the other two are huge successes, it "proves" that religion is bad! Simple.

It's a good visitation of Arab history post '67 anyway ... an excerpt.

Fifty years after Azm and other Arab intellectuals started to mercilessly deconstruct their ossified political orders, reactionary and primitive religious structures, and stagnant societies, the Arab world has descended further into darkness. Physical, intellectual, and political desolation has claimed many of the once lively metropolises of the Arab region — Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul, Cairo, and Alexandria — with only Beirut still resisting, albeit teetering on the edge. For centuries, these cities constituted a rich human and linguistic mosaic of ancient communities including Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, and Circassians. In modern times, they were joined by Greek, Armenian, and Italian communities. A vibrant cosmopolitanism found home in the port cities of Alexandria and Beirut and the cities of the hinterland, such as Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad.

TP Religious Hatred

Blog: Why the left hates Trump so intensely:

We've been over this more than a few times. The assertion is that "Secular Humanism", "The Party" (TP-D), "Blue America", "progressivism", etc, have become very much a religion, and not a particularly tolerant one. TPism is pretty much like Islam -- It demands that the State and the religion be one in the same -- in Islam, that is called "Sharia Law", in the TP Religion it is called "Secular Humanistic Administrative Law" with Political Correctness enforcement as one of it's branches.

Cults get very unhappy with members that leave, especially if they publicly say bad things about the cult -- and Trump was a definite member in good standing of the TP elite until he "went rogue'.

The whole linked article is not all that long, but still not very worthy, but I found the following to be the highlight:

Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it's got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism. 

Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right. 

The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don't go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you're on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform. 

Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel's voice whispering, "You're right, you're better, you're winning." 

Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows - the skits and jokes aren't really funny, but it's fun to look at the pretty girls, and you're all on the same team.

When you have been ensconced in a blue bubble through all your educational years (and for many, in your comminity and job as well), fully assured that you were on the "right" (meaning correct) "side" of history and heading inevitably to nirvanah, an event like Trump can be REALLY disconcerting!

The "Blue Church" has it's own escatology (description of the "end times") that is rooted in concepts like the old Hegelian / Marxist Dialectic of "Thesis->Antithesis->Sythesis" or "Problem->Reaction->Solution". Since most of the post-moderns are not aware of much of history, theology or philosophy, many of them think this is also "new".

This all assumes that "history" somehow has some sort of "direction" apart for the one in Christianity. Historicism asserts that somehow, not just plants, animals, etc are "evolving" to a "better" state. How did it get this "direction"? ... big mystery. It "just is", or "somehow" in 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES, this one with all these cool Goldilocks characteristics also has some mysterious built in "random teleology" that pushes it toward "better", and "better" just happens to always align perfectly with whatever "progressives" are thinking as being "better"! A very very happy accident indeed!

The bottom line here is that as finite and very limited beings, ANY explanation of our existence is at some level "fantastic, improbable, paradoxical, etc" ... which is why when I went through my greatest faith chllenges, I eventually settled on belief in things that have a history (meaning 100's or thousands of years) of WORKING!
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Trump vs Fidel, False Left and Right Personified

https://spectator.org/frightened-by-trump-inspired-by-fidel/

I find that contrast is a great way to understand the vast differences in world view -- Trump vs Fidel is a great opportunity. The top linked article is an  example of those contrasts.

Here, Roger Cohen, a NY Times columnist who has savaged Trump sings the praises of Fidel.

Fidel. A single word suffices to evoke the man who descended from the Sierra Maestra with his ragtag army to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, purge Cuba of American domination, proclaim the empowerment of the poor, and embody Latin America’s thirst for an end to government by the pampered coteries of imperialism.

Here Cohen talks of the joys of "the left".

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen describes how, as Communist forces loyal to Ho Chi Minh advanced towards victory in Vietnam in 1975, his protagonist “longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for.”

One of Castro's many "achievements" accorting to the US press was lowering heart disease through famine and fuel shortages, causing his island prisoners to eat less and excercise more!

The food shortage was severe enough that per-person calorie consumption dropped to about 2,400 calories a day in the 1990s, and typical adults lost about 10 pounds. At the same time, they had to exercise more by walking or riding bikes instead of taking buses. The number of Cubans meeting exercise guidelines climbed to an impressive 80 percent.

Even a famine is cause for admiration when the dictator is Fidel!

Fidel was responsible for at least 10's of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees -- some of the people that fled Cuba no doubt helped Trump take Florida.

The key differences between "left and right" jump out here, and (as always) the confusion created by the wartime propaganda making Hitler and Nazi Germany "right", when in fact they were LEFT as all dictatorial and totalitarian regimes are -- the spectrum would better be called "Control vs Chaos" vs "Left and Right" (covered in detail here).

While the MSM in the US has been unremittingly disparaging of Trump, they at best can mount tepid criticism of Fidel. The closing paragraph of the Cohen article is an example.

Fidel was a flawed giant. By the end the only idea of his still standing was the anti-American nationalism taken on by the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. However, this is certainly not the moment to say his stand for the disinherited of the earth was unimportant. Nor, at a time when the United States has elected a charlatan as president, is it the moment to overlook the fact that Fidel was a serious and uncorrupt politician. Nor to leave unsaid the suffering he inflicted.

 For contrast, here is his article claiming Trump a sociopath. No explanation required on why Fido was a "serious and uncorrupt politician". From the left, mass murder does not corrupt you ... but surprisingly, living a hidden luxury lifestyle and being worth $900 million doesn't either! As we have discovered many times, being left means being incorruptible!

The themes that come out through a lot of the writing are:

1. The evil of historical America. Fidel thumbed his nose at America the capitalist/imperialist unjust nation. Putting America in "it's place" made Castro a hero to the left -- no matter the cost to his people. BO established relations between BOistan and Cuba at the end -- a victory for Fido.
   
2. The vision of the masses as "children" -- unable to care for themselves, they need a "strong man" to guide them -- "properly". But if that strong man is not a doctrinaire leftist, he becomes "dangerous", like Trump.
   
   It is here where the left/right dichotomy has some complexity. The ORIGINAL left / right of the French Revolution had "Church / monarchy" on the RIGHT, with "revolution" on the left. As I make clear in the "Left/Right" blog post linked above, my choice of the terms "Control vs Chaos" is obviously imperfect -- as any selection of a single axis to describe the complexities of ideology is bound to be.
   
   Religion is part of "natural" (in my world view). We are created with a spiritual hole to be properly filled by God -- on the left, that hole is filled by the state and leftist ideology. At the time of the French Revolution, the understanding of the "Natural Order" included God, The Church, and The Crown, "natural" was equal to "right" and thus included the church and state.
   
   Our founders separated church and state and allowed freedom of religion in what they saw as a "center-right" nation ... enough control to prevent chaos, but with the "divine right of kings" severed. The people gained power in the form of a democratic Constitutional Republic with a strict Constitution, separation of powers, and a number of anti-democratic measures to prevent shifting to toward democracy and the tyranny of the masses.
   

The MSM sees no danger in moving left continuously, and ideally by force -- you WILL bake a cake, you WILL let this man in the woman's locker room!, you WILL only contribute politically as we decree!.  Even slowing the slide to totalitarianism is seen as "fascist", thus the hatred of Trump. It is an article of faith for the left that "the masses" lack the intelligence and maturity to "make correct choices" without largely state controlled media, massive educational indoctrination, and  demagogic leaders like BO or Fidel -- thus, Trump must be destroyed at all costs. 

God Speed, John Glenn

John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95 - The New York Times:

February 20th, 1962 -- America took a major step to try to catch the USSR, "Russia" if you will. Today, we no longer even imagine competing with them -- both Russia and China have active space programs and BOistan has no ability to even  put a man in orbit. "Progressives" (regressives) have regressed our space capability back to prior May 5th 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first of American in space. We can no longer put a man in space,  John Glenn was the last of the Mercury 7 Astronauts, men who exemplified "The Right Stuff".

Scott Carpenter famously uttered "God Speed John Glenn" and it was not a controversial statement. America was unabashedly a Christian Nation then -- there was no need to even discuss it.

Glenn himself, a Democrat, still believed in God's Creation in at the age of 77 in 1998 when he rode the shuttle and said

“To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible

Even Democrats believed in God and America back then. There is a link to some of the TV coverage of the launch embedded in that previous link.


During the time of BO, the biggest "milestones" reached were in the area of our sexual organs -- as in gay "marriage" and doubting the validity of gender. Climate change is "settled science", but the fact that every cell in our bodies save our blood cells has gender --  two X chromosomes for women and an XY for men, is no longer understood.

Man has free will. He can ponder infinite and the divine, or he can contemplate his navel and his sex organs. When John Glen launched, we reached for the stars -- going where "no man has gone before". Today, the frontier for mankind, at least in regressing BOistan,  is men in women's bathrooms.

We have regressed a long way from February of '62. Can Trump at least change the shape of the decline a little?

It remains to be seen, but John Glenn has now "slipped the surly bonds and touched the face of God".

If you stayed up WAY too late in even the '70s, they shut down the TV stations, and at least here in the midwest,  this is what they played.

Governor Goofy Has A History Fit

Dayton’s stormy Tuesday | Power Line:

Looking at Dayton's eyes makes one glad that a governor has very little authority to do violence to others. Storming out of a meeting over Civil War paintings is indicative of the kind of "leadership" that at least managed to put both the MN House and Senate in Republican hands.  We can thank him for that.

He doesn't like Civil War paintings in "his" ceremonial governors office at the capital because they don't represent "all Minnesotans",  and when his hand picked "commission" voted against him, he stormed out to make his level of maturing clear.

The left generally hates history. It shows "heritage", it gives a sense that everything might not be about today, and the promised future "progressive" utopia. Civil War history is even worse -- it seems to document hundreds of thousands of white people giving their lives to abolish slavery while preserving a nation that was the precursor to BOistan. Best to forget both the war and that old flawed nation.

I covered Gettysburg by Sears here, and by Coddington here. I also read Pale Horse at Plum Run but failed to blog on it -- the story of the 1st MN at Gettysburg. Without the 1st MN, it is very likely the South would have won -- it could be the reason Dayton is pissed, the South was Democrat after all!

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Hidebeast's Watergate Irony

Clinton’s FBI Interview What Was Cheryl Mills Doing There? | National Review:

The irony that Hillary Rodham was involved with the Watergate Committee that brought down Richard Nixon on charges of Obstruction of Justice over a botched burglary of the DNC is so incredible as to make one believe that God himself is giving us a "clear text message".

Nobody died in Watergate and it had nothing at all to do with National Security. The burglary didn't change anything -- it was stupid, but McGovern wasn't going to win anyway. As anyone who has even looked at the debacle knows, "it was the cover-up" that took down Nixon.

I’d add that this was five months before she feigned ignorance when Fox News’s Ed Henry pressed her on whether she’d “tried to wipe the entire server … so there could be no email – no personal, no official.” Henry finally asked, “Did you wipe the server?” Famously, Clinton scoffed, “Like with a cloth or something?” But we now know, as the FBI notes recount, she had the server purged with a sophisticated software program, BleachBit, which eventually made it extraordinarily difficult for the FBI to recover her emails, several thousand of which were successfully destroyed.

We absolutely know that Hildebeast explicitly ordered evidence destroyed which DID have a direct bearing on National Security, and that the evidence was related to the Benghazi attacks where people, including a US Ambassador, DID DIE!

We've sunk a LONG way baby!

What really took down Nixon is that there were Republicans that still thought that there were things that were "above politics". What paved the way for Slick Willie, BO, Hildebeast,  and Trump is that by the time we went through Iran-Contra, plus the Bork and Clarence Thomas confirmations, it was totally clear that in fact NOTHING was above politics for "The Party" (TP-D), so all Tribes followed suit and the way was paved for BOistan.

NO RULES means NO RULES! So the Tribes fight over the declining scraps of the once great nation now a tribal backwater known as BOistan.

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God And Man At Yale, WF Buckley

The version of this book I re-read was the 2001, golden anniversary edition of this 1951 book written at the same time as Lionel Trilling uttered this: 

In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

While "liberals" certainly thought that way, there were a lot of folks that took huge exception to WFB's (SUPER Initials!) assertion that Yale had become essentially atheist and collectivist, rather than Christian and Capitalist, which are the ideals it was founded on.

As WFB put it:

"The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level".  

He did not write the following himself, but quoted it in his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition and said it would have saved him the trouble of writing the book:

"Unless the great concepts that have been traditional to the western world are rooted in a reasoned view of the universe and man's place in it, and unless this reasoned view contains in it's orbit a place for the spirit, man is left in our day with archaic weapons unsuited for the problems of the present" 

In the chapter on "Individualism at Yale", after pointing out how Yale in 1950 believes in socialism, high taxes on business and individuals, 100% inheritance taxes and a host of well known leftist nostrums, he arrives at the following as to the effect that this will likely have on future Yale graduates after they decide it is useless to try to make it in small business:

So he finally decides to go down to Washington and get a job with some government bureau. Or maybe AT&T (his first question to the pension officer at both will be about pension provisions).  

And Dean DeVane was astounded, puzzled, and shocked in 1949 when he read that the graduating class seemed more interested in security than in enterprise. 

The word "enterprise" was once so revered that US ships and even imaginary starships were christened with the name. Today, maybe "fortress",  "lock box",  or possibly just "security".

"God And Man At Yale" (Gamay) was the book that launched the modern conservative movement that reached its pinnacle in Reagan and it's 2nd act in Newt Gingrich and the Republican House of '95-2000.

WFB was able to hold the darkness at bay with the power of his ideas and communication skills. Yale and the entire educational system was lost along with law and media, and the federal and state bureaucracies exploded in size and power, but as long as the Constitution and Separation of Powers held, it was still possible to keep the great nation from being completely being destroyed.

"Enterprise" -- "the AMERICAN Enterprise", to honestly believe in the future, in building something to PASS ON to one's own children as an inheritance in a nation assumed to get BETTER from generation to generation. Those dreams were in danger in the '50s, they are dead today.

Today we suffer the sadness of the predictions of Gamay come true and with the evil kicker of BO taking out the Constitution and Separation of Powers.

If the warning of the book had been heeded, it might be similar to the result if Admiral De Robeck had decided to continue the attack at Gallipoli on March 19th, 1915, rather than withdrawing, WWI would have been over shortly, Eastern Europe would have been stabilized under British power, and Churchill would have continued on to likely become Prime Minister and have thus been in a position of power to stop Hitler before Hitler became anything but a local madman in Germany.

America did not fall because we lacked the information on the danger. No, we fell because we willfully chose the path of sin and "security" over the path of God and enterprise!

Believing Hillary, Trump Treason

Bill Comes Due - WSJ:

Near the end of the linked article, we find this from the WaPo :

• “And [Romney’s] unscripted moments have not inspired confidence: calling Russia America’s greatest foe, for example.”—editorial,Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2012
• “This pro-Kremlin tilt is unprecedented in the Republican Party and would represent a radical and dangerous shift in U.S. policy.”—editorial,Washington Post, July 26, 2016

WaPo reporting is pretty easy -- first you identify the party of the candidate. If D, then what they are saying is brilliant, credible, important, etc. If R, then  what they are saying is ridiculous, false, or maybe even treasonous. Well, at least they are consistent if you look at it that way! They are ALWAYS pro-D and anti-R -- it's just that the facts change to fit their bias.

Let's forget for a moment that pretty much since the Pentagon Papers, "leaks", "hacks", "whistleblowers" that uncover the "nefarious deeds of the right" have been left wing heroes, no matter where they come from. In fact, back when we cared about fighting ISIS and such, leaks of "secret Bush stuff" was patriotic beyond belief.

When the old leftist ally the USSR folded in the early '90s and their archives were opened, we found that Teddy Kennedy lobbied them to try to directly influence the '84 election  ... needless to say, the left could care less. For them, beating Reagan was of such importance it justified any actions, so certain are they that their positions at any given moment are the highest potential expression of human morals. (up to that moment .... they will be better yet in the next moment!)

But what does THAT have to do with Hildebeast's emails? Has she not already assured us MULTIPLE times that there is NOTHING even remotely secret in any of those? "Yoga schedule and wedding plans".  Clearly there is nothing to be found!

She told us that she has NEVER lied and NEVER will! Certainly the Democrats believe her -- don't they?


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$12 trillion of QE, Lowest Interest In 5,000 Years

$12 trillion of QE and the lowest rates in 5,000 years ... for this?:

It's not a very long article. I've written on the subject before -- these times are historically NUTS! Massive inflationary monetary policy, but other than the stock market, where is the BOOM!?  There ought to be a boom!

 I really don't think anyone has a clue as to WHEN the "crash" is going to happen. Everyone that pays minimal attention realizes that these sorts of financial unnatural acts are not "sustainable". "The event" might be deflation, who knows? To some degree, we have had more inflation than we realized, and growth is probably WORSE than even the numbers we see.

Most likely we would have been far better off had we allowed a lot of the speculative and uninsured financial system to fail in early 2009. We find ourselves somehow staggering on when we ought have allowed the "creative destruction" of the market do some destruction so we would be CREATING something other than tepid 2%ish growth.

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Degree, Ideas, Shakespeare

The included quotation is from one of my most favorite books -- reviewed multiple times in the Blog, "Ideas Have Consequences",  it is an quotation from Shakespeare as you can see. I've gotten back into trying to understand the bard, with the help of Issac Asimov's Guide To Shakespeare. The reason I'm using that book is because it is very clear to me (and Asimov) that the only people in the modern world that can understand Shakespeare are those that study him AND have a reasonable understanding the historical, legendary, and mythological underpinnings of the works.

Other than the Bible, Shakespeare is one of the biggest creators / interpreters of the meaning that made Western civilization work. His work was intended to appeal to both the common man of his day ("1600 England"),  AND to the aristocracy that funded him. Our problem is that even our (largely technically) "educated" have LESS understanding of Classical Greek and Roman literature than his lower class audience in 1600.

The following quote is included as an "artful means" to make the argument that the chapter it is in opens with ...

"... those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something that can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth, the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain". 

(The Jacobins are the radical reformers of the French Revolution -- the folks with the guillotines) 

Troilus and Cressida, Act I Scene II
O! when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself. 

The play Troilus and Cressida was written about 1600 but set against the Trojan war (1200 BC) with all the heroes of Homer (850 BC oral, 500 BC written) -- Ulysses, Achilles, Helen of Troy, Agamemnon and sundry references to gods and goddesses and historical references both real and legendary.  Prior to the late 1800's when a German named Heinrich Schliemann went a digging, Troy and the whole story was assumed to be a myth -- but he found it, so historians are sure it is based on history rather than pure mythology.

As you read the Shakespeare and the Greek and Roman mythology for that matter, you see timeless human questions played out -- "the Gods", fate, chance,  betrayal, friendship, love, honor and hatred of parents, children, peoples, order, disorder, etc.

In 1600, they considered the BASICS of a "Classical Education" to know the time of Troy -- 2500 years removed from their time, to be REQUIRED if one was to consider themselves "educated". Even the "peasants" knew more of ancient history than the typical college educated science, humanities, etc "educated person" today.

From the Shakespeare:

"Degree' -- Difference, distinction. Fair lady vs worthless harlot. Immortals vs mortals, etc. Today much of our society screams that "there are no degrees or distinctions" -- all supposed "merit" is "privilege". All outcomes are to be made the same ... "inequality" is the 2nd biggest issue of our time (Climate Change the first).  The Golden State Warriors may as well replace Stephan Curry with any old college player -- there is no such thing as "degree" -- your "betters" have told you so! Fortunately, they have told you there is no such thing as TRUTH either.

"Force should be right, or rather right and wrong" ... might is right. TP has the votes to repeal gender, marriage even life itself for the 60 million unborn dead so far. The gods have spoken!

"Power into will" -- or in Nietzsche, "Will to Power".  All of life CAN be reduced to abolition of degree between "mortals" through will and power. See North Korea today. Remember the USSR or National Socialist Germany. Shakespeare knew all about POWER. Shakespeare had been sponsored by and was friends with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southhampton, who was aligned with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex who ended up being executed by Elizabeth I -- in fact, Cressida going bad may have been an allusion to Elizabeth I.

As I now try to parse through Shakespeare I realize yet again the inadequacy of my own knowledge and the height I need to climb to recover even tiny pieces of the wisdom of the ancients. We once KNEW THIS! It was "so simple a child could do it". We had a much greater grasp on what it meant to create and operate a working personal character, family, church, community, culture and nation, but we lost it ... here is a little metaphor from one of the cheesier original Star Treks -- at about 2:30 McCoy has encountered "the teacher" and returning Spock's brain is suddenly doable.

  I covered a bit about our shared plight of having lost the owners manual to the starship of western civilization, grabbed a bottle of pure grain alcohol (we didn't want to try to identify "degree" between beverages), and turned the controls of the starship over to natives from the jungles of the Amazon -- why not? Everyone is equal!

What could go wrong? ... hey, I just met this girl named Pandora. She has a box that seems interesting, so we are going to crack it open tonight and see what is in it. I hope it is "new stuff", new stuff is ALWAYS better -- "progress" you know.

Eugenics: “The Thick-fingered Clowns We Call The People”

The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement - The New Yorker:

I'm starting to think that the New Yorker might be the victims of a "terrorist attack" if they keep this kind of reporting up. The quote in the title is from Oliver Wendell Holmes -- that paragon of American "progressivism". However, as one reads to the end, we discover that this fine column is yet another cautionary tale on "Trumpism" rather that the wonderful "progressivism" of our day.

Cohen writes that there was widespread skepticism about eugenics among those whom Oliver Wendell Holmes once referred to as “the thick-fingered clowns we call the people,” but the opposition wasn’t large or organized enough to effectively counter the influential network behind the movement.

Naturally, the New Yorker sees no similarity between BO's calling out "the bitter clingers" nor their own allusions to Trump supporters later in the article:

The 2016 Presidential campaign has reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere. The response in some quarters has been bafflement, as though this way of speaking had materialized out of nowhere.

Perhaps some "imbeciles" have been breeding in the Red States after all?

What is hardest to forget about “Imbeciles” is the stream of grandiose invective against the supposedly unfit—the diatribes concerning “germs of dependency and delinquency” and the “world peopled by a race of degenerates and defectives.” It’s a language that combines the detachment of scientific terminology with the heat of bigoted slurs.

Yes, apparently the "bitter clingers" in fly-over America are not yet fully "imbeciles", but one doesn't need to listen to very much NPR or read much NY Times to realize that those Trump supporters are certainly not much above genetic flotsam and jetsam.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, about his pleasure in writing the Buck decision, “Sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.”

I've read enough of the left to know that they have done plenty of "studies" about how "conservative brains" are more gullible, less prone to believe in "facts", etc -- they know they are superior and their big issue is how long they have to put up with the inferior conservatives!

I'm definitely "thick fingered", and no doubt Oliver Wendell Holmes would find me to be an "imbecile". That's OK. When I was young I spent some time with young adults that worked at a nursing home who were certainly "low IQ" which was referred to at that time as "retarded".

Personally, I prefer to be identified with them than with Oliver Wendell Holmes! I like to think that Oliver or even most of the New Yorker staff would treat me rather well 1 on 1 -- let's face it, intelligence isn't everything!

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Saudi Arabia

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433990/release-truth-release-redacted-28-pages-about-saudi-arabia-and-911

The last paragraph of this article is well worth reflecting on:

My general philosophy of the Middle East is simple — however bad you think the place is, in reality it’s far worse. Even our “allies” will constantly surprise even the most hardened cynic with their mendacity and double-dealing. We’ve long known that our so-called alliance with Saudi Arabia has put us in bed with the devil. It’s time the American people learned how evil that devil truly is.

It is pretty much the same as Washington DC -- no matter which party you tend to support, this election year makes it completely obvious that the corruption in DC is **FAR** worse than you can imagine! The reaction of BOTH parties to Cruz and Trump ought to be proof enough. BOTH parties would actually rather have Trump than Cruz, because he is more likely to carry on the corruption!

This past week I was at a discussion where an immigrant from Egypt and a refugee from Syria were present. They were both convinced that the Saudi corruption was the true core of the unrest in the Arab world.

• Saudi Arabia contains Mecca -- the site you must visit to attain paradise if you are not willing to be a martyr
• The House of Saud is a fabulously wealthy tribe that maintains total control and likes to dabble in as much western decadence as it can get away with.  
• "It's price" is support for the Wahhabi Sect of Sunni Islam which has been funded lavishly and world wide since especially the 1970's. 
• A look at the Grand Mosque Seizure in 1979 gives some idea of the dangerous tightrope the Saudi's walk, and how many of the responses they make increase the danger / tensions for not just them, but the rest of the world. 

The "big problem" as the west finally woke up to in 1100AD and formed the First Crusade is that Islam is at war with any who are not Muslims! Islam means SUBMISSION, after which comes "peace". So if you are not a Muslim, Islam is at war with YOU -- ultimately you can either defeat them or die. A little more detail on this here.

As I travel through the Old Testament in my Bible reading, I am consistently reminded that Christ is THE WORD ... ALL the Word, Old and New Testaments. Somehow the Son of Man that rebuked the wind, drove the money changers from the temple with a whip and simply walked back through a crowd intent on pushing him from a cliff in NEW Testament, as well as being the Word of Creation, death to Sodom and Gomorrah, the Red Sea washing over the Egyptian Army and so much more in the old Testament is somehow made to be a "pacifist". It's a TRINITY -- Christ is FULLY Yahweh, the OT God is not some "first draft", he IS Christ as well.

When Christ heals the Centurion's servant, he responds to him with " When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith"" ... not a word about "leaving the military". Likewise, when John the Baptist was approached by some soldiers; "What should we do?" asked some soldiers. John replied, "Don't extort money or make false accusations. And be content with your pay.""

If the west had not finally rose up and defended itself in 1100, Islam would most likely have destroyed Christianity in Europe -- or God would have intervened there or some other way. I'm often reminded of the old Jewish Lottery joke:

“There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he’d go to synagogue and pray: “God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?”
But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win.
Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: “God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?”
“And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: “Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!”

I don't believe that God ONLY helps those that help themselves -- but I believe that if we listen well and by TAKE ACTION, we provide a much better chance for his blessing!

Values, Corvettes, Todays Dollars, How It's Going

In 1978 I started at IBM and $15,500 a year salary. I could have purchased a new Corvette for a little less than $10K. So I went to work for "1.5 Corvettes". It looks like a 2016 that anyone would want to have is $60K, the top of the line pushes at least $90K.

I was dating someone whose dad worked at GM in Janesville and made close to $50K, REALLY good cash in those days, her brother started on the line at $20K with a full month and 1/2 of vacation about the same time I did. I got two weeks -- the benefits were better at GM than at IBM in those days.

A teacher at Barron made about $12K in the early '70s when I was considering teaching as one of the options for a career. A number of them were married to other teachers and had a small home in Barron and a small lake place on Silver Lake about 40 min north. Times were pretty decent, and with the election of Regan in '80, they got a lot better.

Things were just starting to really go berserk in '78 -- prices would shoot up and taxes would shoot up even worse. I remember one great raise I got of something like $50 a week that moved me a bracket or so and I got all of $5 in actual take home pay. Inflation would push 20% and eventually, interest would exceed 20%.

Today a programmer starts at IBM around $60K, so barely one Corvette. According to this, a new GM hire (of which I'm sure there are not very many) hires on at a bit less than $16 per hr, or $33,280 annually. Experienced old hands push $60 an hour for $124K ... hey, so two Corvettes for the old guys (but 5 in '78)! A median teacher salary in Eau Claire is $45K, so less than a Corvette.

According to this calculator, $1 in 1978  worth $3.81 today, so I REALLY started at $15,500 x 3.81, or $59,036 in todays dollars. Todays programmers are basically identical given inflation. The GM worker starting at $20K was making the equivalent of $76K today, so starting manufacturing workers are doing WAY WORSE. The $12K teacher would be doing $46K in todays dollars -- so teachers are doing about the same as well as programmers.

If the $10K corvette had just inflated, it would cost $38K today rather than $60K. The starting auto worker gets less than 1/2, and even the experienced worker would be getting $190K today if they had kept pace with inflation! Yet, the price of the car -- with materials costs down, automation supposedly saving money and WAY less labor input in both cost and actual hours has risen in relative value far beyond inflation!

But let's face it, none of the above really feel that they are doing better today than we did in 1978!!

We sure as hell felt we were doing better in 1988, and even 1998 in many cases, but certainly not today!

So what happened? I'm really not all that sure, but I'll throw out some thinking:

1. The inflation calculations are lying -- for many things it is much worse than the calculator indicates. The vettte shows us one example.  Sadly, they are lying WORSE than that because taxes are much higher (income, property, state, sales, etc) plus medical is MUCH higher. (think for a second, is government more or less involved in medical aspects today than it was in '78? Which way do YOU think government causes costs to go?) 
2. The media and "The Party" (D) likes to focus on "inequality", but unless you foolishly believe that the economic pie is a fixed size (which means you don't know enough to even think of economics at all and need to study), what matters is "what you can do with what you make". What someone else makes is meaningless. Teachers kept pace, programmers kept pace, auto workers did terrible -- but EVERYONE in that comparison got screwed in the last 40 years to some extent relative to the vette. 
3. The chart doesn't show DEBT and UNFUNDED liabilities (FICA, Medicare, BOcare, etc ...  now $19T and $125T respectively. The costs of these problems are starting to siphon off any government funding going into "productive investment" -- roads, research, education, space programs, etc, and requiring ever more pure transfer payments. Primarily from old to young, but also from productive to unproductive as more and more votes are purchased to keep the rising percentage of government ever growing even as GDP is stagnant or shrinking. We started "eating our seed corn" with the stench of BO arriving in earnest. 
4. I suspect if we looked at medical or government jobs we would see some people who have improved their relative position a bunch since '78 -- "administration" is the REAL "growth area" almost everywhere. More government = more bureaucracy = more administration and less productivity. Even worse, government tends to keep the numbers -- "the house wins"! I've covered the GDP and Inflation shenanigans.  We are being lied to -- A LOT, which is why EVERYONE inside the beltway is DESPERATE that neither Cruz or Trump get elected!

A lot of government taxation and spending has been increasingly hidden at the state and local levels due to "Federal Grant In Aid". 

Add this together with increased Federal spending and you get the following.

Remember, this chart is RELATIVE TO GDP ... so when we are doing well economically, our spending can be high without increasing the % of GDP much if at all. WWII and BO are the big events. From the '90s to BO we can see the relative prosperity, and then the disaster of BO struck!

Certainly, for manufacturing things went bad starting in the '80s, but neither teachers or programmers as examples are ACTUALLY keeping pace with inflation because the numbers are cooked. We can see it is bad, yet it is WORSE than that and all we are being told is "the rich make too much".

BULLSHIT! The government TAKES TOO MUCH!!! Sure, some of that sticks to some palms more than others (try Hillary going from "penniless" in 2000 to worth $100M in 2016! You can still buy A LOT of vettes with $100 Mil!)

This is not one of those blogs that I feel satisfied with -- "work in progress". I feel like there is a lot more truth hiding in plain sight here, but I'm not seeing it yet. Later.

Foreign Affairs, Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations? | Foreign Affairs:

A little historical context, like a Montgomery martini, VERY dry -- and in this case old. The article I pulled this from in '93. Some of the points that I'm interested in:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

Remember, this is '93 -- the USSR is just gone, the first Gulf War was 1991, and appeared very economic / Arab on Arab (Iraq invaded Kuwait). The next paragraph covers the

In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "the wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy.

Everyone thought that the world was going to go into a "golden age" as science replaced religion, but as the 20th century wore on with it's two world wars, Korea, Mao killing millions in China, Vietnam, Pol Pot killing millions in Cambodia,  and scores of regional bloodbaths, religion started to look better than it once id.

The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.

I'd argue that in the West -- Europe and the US, religion has NOT recovered and along with it's continued decline, any sense of culture or "civilization" has declined with it. The cultures are less damaged in Europe, but in the US, the culture is on life support at best.

Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.

So the US is essentially unarmed in this conflict, because there is no longer any answer to "What are you". ... "black", "Christian", "progressive", etc, but NOT "American". Other than at Trump rallies, there really aren't any people very excited about "America" -- let alone rallying around it. No, it is all about "special interests" and "voting blocks" ... women, minorities, elderly, gays, the unemployed, single mothers, etc, etc ... "Americans"? You mean the "Trumpkins"???

Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

So as early as '93, there wasn't enough "American civilization" to recognize -- and there is a LOT less now! I'd argue that we are already not "playing" in this clash, but rather just LOSING.

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100 Million Deaths, DDT, Malaria, Value of Life

Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies - Forbes:

Readers of this blog know that I believe ALL lives matter, and that I am intrigued, dismayed, perplexed and frustrated by the WIDE variation in how much given lives in fact do matter! To that end, I've come back to the issue of DDT and Malaria.

To make the longer story REALLY short, DDT came online at just the right point in history -- right as WWII was getting underway, and from 1943 - 1960, it saved on the order of HALF A BILLION ... yes, you heard that right, 500,000,000 lives!!!  If you have time to read just the very early part of this article, it is WELL worth your time!

Then, along came "Silent Spring" -- a FICTIONAL work, that was supposedly based on science, but was not, that is credited with founding the environmental movement. The results of the world wide emotional backlash against DDT were immediately catastrophic, and if you must see the "punchline", at least 100 MILLION dead, making Carlson in the ranks of the greatest mass murderers in history:

In Ceylon, for example, where, as noted, DDT use had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the 1940s down to just 17 by 1963, its banning in 1964 led to a resurgence of half a million victims per year by 1969.[18] In many other countries, the effects were even worse.

By 1970, the National Academy of Sciences was worried, they tried to head off the rush to disaster with this:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the consequent losses. At this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive per crop-year and decidedly more hazardous.[19]

But it was banned in the US anyway, and many other places to follow.

And even for those that did not, the halting of American DDT exports (since U.S. producers slowed and then stopped manufacturing it) made DDT much more expensive, and thus effectively unavailable for poor countries in desperate need of the substance.[25] As a result, insect-borne diseases returned to the tropics with a vengeance. By some estimates, the death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded 100 million people.[26]

I did more reading this PM on DDT than I really wanted to ... the guy that wrote this article used to eat a teaspoon of it before his speeches! He died of a heart attack at age 84.

I could ramble on -- in general, danger to humans, very close to nil. Danger to birds, nothing if used in ANY sort of sensible way -- the issue of eggshells / eagles is from having it virtually POURED on fields for no good reason other than it was "cheap and effective so more must be better".

Back to the important point, LIFE!

No images of lilu in her outfit today guys! ;-(

So a woman writes a fictional story about birds being killed at just the right time so a bunch of lefties go off the deep end about a pesticide that has saved HALF A BILLION lives, and it is banned!  We finally start getting back to use it FIFTY YEARS  after it's banning has killed well over 100 MILLION !!!

I understand that most of the lives saved and lost were black, and I certainly understand that from the point of view of the left-liberal-progressives in this country, black lives are "pawns". They are CRITICAL as a voting block today, but as 6K young black men die in the streets here by shooting each year, those lives matter as much as the lives of babes in their mothers wombs. Abortion falls especially hard on the black, which was the intention of Margret Sanger and the eugenicists.

The gay guys that died from AIDs mattered HUGELY, although far, FAR less than a common street thug that attacked a police officer in Ferguson. His life approached the worth of an assassinated US president if one considers the amount of media time spent on it.

OTOH, many many thousands of deaths of poorly educated white people in an epidemic of suicide and substance abuse are worth even less than those of the young urban black men shooting each other!

My answer is that we have abandoned any sense of proportion, reason and morality and are being completely driven by a politically controlled media, government and educational monolith under single party (D) control that is 100% directed to gaining and locking in POWER.

I'd like to hear alternative answers.


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