Musings Of An Indie WriterSaturday, February 4, 2012
Brainy 44
We've heard quite a great deal from the Sycophant Media about how smart Barack Hussein Obama is. I recall a couple of statements to the effect that he's "the most intelligent man ever to become president." The effusion of praise for our 44th president's intellect has slowed down a bit in recent months, but one still hears the occasional exclamation about it from a columnist desperate for access to Obama or one of his inner circle.
Well, let's have a look at a trifle of relevant evidence:
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama connected his faith with his policies toward the poor at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, a subtle but sharp contrast to remarks made by presidential hopeful Mitt Romney the day before."Living by the principle that we are our brother's keeper. Caring for the poor and those in need," Obama said before an audience of about 3,000 at the Washington Hilton. These values, he said, "They're the ones that have defined my own faith journey."
Oh, my. "We are our brother's keeper." A principle? A Christian principle? Is any Gentle Reader awake enough to cite where the phrase "my brother's keeper" actually occurs in the Bible?
That's right: Genesis:
In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.The Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."
Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were out in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?" [Genesis 4:3-9]
So our brainy president has transmuted an evasion by Mankind's first murderer into Christian doctrine. Brilliant! Innovative! Thomas Jefferson would be awed. But surely we could expect nothing less from "the most intelligent man ever to become president."
Gentle Reader, as they say on C.S.I., people lie; evidence doesn't. The evidence is that Barack Hussein Obama isn't just a step or two short of the genius plateau; he's functionally a moron, and apparently has morons for speechwriters, at that. But let the killing stroke go to the great Mark Steyn:
But according to National Review columnist Mark Steyn, author of "After America: Get Ready for Armageddon," Obama's comments leave much to be desired, particularly when it comes to the president's own brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama who lives on $12 a year in Kenya."Oh give me a break," Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show on Thursday night. "For a start, when he says, 'I am my brother's keeper,' his brother is back in Kenya living on $12 a year. That's what he was living on at the time of the 2008 election. So all the president has to do in terms of shared responsibility is put a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it to Nairobi or Mombasa or wherever and he will double his brother's salary."
Perhaps the ultimate refutation of Obama's moronic statement lies in this: By implying that the government, acting through its taxing power, must assume responsibility for the less well off in America, Obama has expressed longstanding left-liberal doctrine -- which absolves individuals acting as individuals of any responsibility at all. That is a direct, undisguised contradiction of Christian doctrine, as expressed by Christ Himself:
"When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' And the king will answer them, 'I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.'"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels! For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not receive me as a guest, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they too will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?' Then he will answer them, 'I tell you the truth, just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.' And these will depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." [The Gospel According To Matthew, 25:31-46]
Barack Hussein Obama isn't merely unintelligent; he's also the exact opposite of Christian. Let anyone who disputes this argue with Jesus Himself; I'll sit on the sidelines and watch.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Columnist As Machiavellian Kingmaker?
As a long-time admirer of columnist Ann Coulter, whose importance to articulating and marshaling conservative sentiment has seldom been properly appreciated, I was utterly appalled to read her column of yesterday, in which she mounted a thoroughly unprincipled defense of "RomneyCare," the Massachusetts state-level health-care seizure that became the mold from which ObamaCare was cast.
To be fair, Coulter marshals the best imaginable defense of RomneyCare...but it's still light-years away from sufficient. To be even fairer, she cites a couple of solid libertarian-conservatives who've also endorsed RomneyCare, so she's not alone...but having company in your error, even prestigious, well-respected company, doesn't make you any less wrong.
I was ready to write her off as having ascended into the GOP Establishment and detached from her previous conservative allegiances. Indeed, I might do so yet. But in today's Daily Caller, there just might be a hint of something better peeking through the distasteful surface of Coulter's unprincipled stance:
Later in her appearance [on Sean Hannity's radio show], Hannity asked Coulter who she thought Romney should surround himself with as president. She said that she “better have his ear” and recalled an encounter with Romney."Did I tell you I met him at a fundraiser?" Coulter said. “I went up to him. I was about to leave. But I said -- I just wanted to go up to him and tell him, 'You owe me and you better be as right-wing a president as I’m telling everybody you’re going to be.'"
Coulter said she also plugged Christie to be his running mate, but said the former Massachusetts governor said "oh don't worry" or something to that effect.
I won't mince words: This is an ugly move. It's a power play by a columnist, admittedly a columnist with a large and energetic following, by which she hopes to gain influence over a candidate whom she thinks has the best shot at unseating Barack Hussein Obama. By choosing this course, Coulter has left off being an opinion-monger and is bidding for a "seat at the table" of practical Republican politics. She might think it's the best shot available, given current circumstances and the dispiriting crop of Republican candidates.
But it's a long shot...indeed, it's a very long shot in high winds and poor visibility. Mitt Romney's history of persistently seeking ever-higher office, plus his record as Governor of Massachusetts, speaks quite clearly to his priorities: first, last, and always, greater power and prestige for Mitt Romney. If my assessment of him is accurate, he'll use any endorsement, any advantage, and any tactic to get where he wants to go -- the Oval Office -- and once there, will conduct himself as if it was his sole achievement. He won't feel indebted to Ann Coulter or anyone else. He certainly won't feel obligated to alter his policy preferences.
There is precedent:
On receiving the Democratic nomination for President at Baltimore in 1912, [Woodrow Wilson] declared, "I am a Presbyterian and believe in predestination and election. It was Providence that did the work at Baltimore." After the election, he told William F. McCombs, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, "Before we proceed I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing." Surprised, McCombs reminded him of his services during the campaign, but Wilson exclaimed, God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that." [William F. McCombs, Making Woodrow Wilson President, cited in Paul Boller's Presidential Anecdotes.]
If Romney, a Mormon, doesn't share Wilson's Presbyterian conviction that the presidency is his by predestination, nevertheless he appears to think it's his by right, and that any means that will get him there, no matter how foul, is therefore justifiable.
Miss Coulter has probably committed a grave error: a profound misestimation of her ability to sway the course of electoral and post-electoral events. If matters eventuate any other way than she hopes, she'll either have helped Obama to a second term, or she'll have collaborated in fixing yet another liberal Republican president on us, while sacrificing her credibility in the bargain. It's the sort of mistake persons who think themselves far smarter than the rest of us are prone to making -- most particularly those who think their end justifies their choice of means. But we shall see.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Freedom Of Religion
Barack Hussein Obama's betrayal of his promises to Catholics in America has been much in the news:
Catholics are fired up over new rules implementing Obama's health care reform law forcing Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities to provide insurance for their employees covering contraception -- even though that violates church teachings."When you push people of faith and you tell them the government is going to knock down the wall of separation of church and state and overreach like the Obama administration, you've got a war on your hands," Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, told Fox News.
In an extraordinary move this past weekend, New York Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan and other archbishops throughout the nation had their priests read letters denouncing the Obama administration policy from the pulpit at Sunday Mass.
"Never before has the government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience," Dolan said in a web video that takes the battle online. "This shouldn't happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights. How about letting our elected leaders know that we want religious liberty and rights of consciences restored and the administration's mandate rescinded? We can't afford to strike out on this one."
In one sense at least, this is outrage that ought to have erupted long ago. Catholics, like all other Americans, are taxed to fund whatever Washington chooses to spend our money on -- and that includes subsidies to Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States. So we've been compelled to support a moral horror for some years already.
Nice Deb has expressed herself memorably on this topic:
The Catholic church may not have liked the Iraq war, but American Catholics were allowed to follow their own consciences on whether or not it was a "just war."When they force Catholic employers to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception, and force almost all individuals to buy that coverage as a part of their policies, it is seen as a direct attack on our faith. Those life issues are considered "non negotiable" meaning that for Catholics, they are always morally wrong and must never be promoted by the law.
Indeed. I share Deb's outrage, and I have for a long time. But the larger subject -- what this means for freedom of religion -- was decided long ago.
To qualify as a religion as the great majority of us understand such, a creed must possess the following characteristics:
- Its claims must be unfalsifiable, such that the acceptance thereof involves an act of faith;
- It must offer a mythos, which sets forth a supernatural backstory for existence, particularly Mankind's place in it;
- It must proclaim an ethos, which decrees some aspects of personal conduct to be mandatory or forbidden, on moral grounds.
There are obviously religions that should be unacceptable in a peaceful society. Islam, which prescribes war against all non-Islamic societies, condones deceit, subterfuge, and conversion by the sword for its advancement, and awards Muslims a civil status superior to that of non-Muslims, is one such. Indeed, any creed, religious or otherwise, that condones aggressive violence or fraud by its adherents would be unacceptable; a society that tolerates such a creed cannot have peace and order.
However, a religion which condemns aggressive violence and fraud, which acquires its adherents by persuasion rather than compulsion, and which leaves matters of ultimate judgment and retribution for sins that are not crimes to divine authority is perfectly tolerable. There are several such faiths, and during the decades when the federal government remained within the constraints of its Constitution, they shared this nation in peace.
The expansion of federal power past the explicit bonds of the Constitution was the cleavage point. A federal court case of great importance for this proposition was U.S. v. Valentine Y. Byler.
Valentine Y. Byler was an Old Order Amishman, whose religion prescribes communitarian assistance to one's neighbors in unearned difficulty. They disdain insurance, including the "social insurance" nominally offered by the welfare state. Therefore, when the IRS attempted to collect Social Security payroll taxes from them, they resolved to resist. Byler was their test case. The court decreed it proper for the IRS to seize some of Byler's horses in "payment" for uncollected Social Security taxes. After that, the Old Order Amish, religiously enjoined from violence even in defense of life and property, were helpless, despite American "freedom of religion."
The overarching principle expressed by that case is plain: When government dictates clash with religious conscience, government wins and conscience must give way. In a few very obvious cases -- murder; kidnapping; rape; theft; fraud; the sexual abuse of children -- this rule is unexceptionable. Beyond those subjects, what bright line could possibly be drawn to protect freedom of religion?
Though the evidence is less than conclusive, it's my surmise that the Founding Fathers' awareness of how destructive to religious freedom unlimited government can be was instrumental to their design of the powers of Congress and the limitations they laid upon the states. After all, the desire for religious freedom was one of the drivers that propelled European emigres across the Atlantic. Several of the Founders were "freethinkers," who would have been discriminated against at best, persecuted at worst in the cuius regio, eius religio states of Europe. Whatever the case, the strict observance of the limits on government power written into the Constitution are what makes it possible for men's consciences to be free in all tolerable ways.
Now that those limits are no longer respected -- has anyone forgotten Nancy Pelosi's "Are you serious? Are you serious?" outburst? -- the notion of religious freedom is laughable. Any pattern of conduct, whether prescribed or proscribed, is now subject to federal interference, including what clergymen say from their pulpits. The most we can say is that the major religions in the United States are mostly "getting away with it" -- with being what they are and practicing as they do -- so far. Washington's incursion upon Catholicism via ObamaCare may be a harbinger of worse to come.
This is really a special case of a far larger tragedy. As Eric L. Harry's fictional anarchist theorist Valentin Kartsev said in Harry's blockbuster Protect and Defend:
"Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all its wants. Your country's Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them."
Now that a "compelling government interest" can be asserted to override any claim of rights, it becomes quite clear that freedom -- of any variety, not just religious freedom -- no longer exists in these United States. We have no rights as such are properly understood; we only have permissions, or perhaps the temporary forbearance of a Leviathan that hasn't gotten around to shackling us yet.
What, then, must we do?
Monday, January 30, 2012
The milquetoast party?
If, as all signs are currently pointing, Mitt Romney wins the Florida primary tomorrow, it will mark an important milestone in the primary. Florida is the first winner-take-all state on the calendar, and a win there would cement Romney victories in 3 out of the first 4 contests (I give Romney credit for Iowa despite the results of the recount, as the recount came long after Romney had won the “free media” sweepstakes). That would confirm the “prohibitive frontrunner” status that I believe he won by winning Iowa.
Though it perhaps remains slightly premature to start meditating on the meaning of a Romney nomination, the hour is growing late for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Presuming that the nomination shakes out as is increasingly apparent, what does it say about the GOP?
Both parties are imperfect vessels for the wishes of their supporters. In today’s primary system, “divide and conquer” has become the norm. This was no more apparent than in 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama split the Democratic Party along class and ethnic lines. For the GOP of 2012, Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum are similarly splitting the party along class and religious boundaries. While this divide likely will not play much a role in the general election - Republicans are more united in their opposition to Obama than they are divided over their own candidates - it also provides the key to understanding the near-term direction of the Republican Party.
In fact, if we exclude race from the equation, the main fault lines in the Republican coalition are not so dissimilar from those in the Democratic one. Both parties must increasingly mollify the competing interests of voters that broadly fall into “elite” and “mainstream” categories. In the Democratic Party, this translates to the mainly white, educated elite against the mainly minority, poorer mainstream. For the Republican Party, we are again speaking of a mostly white, educated upper crust, whose interests compete against the working class voters brought into the party’s coalition by Ronald Reagan.
This sort of “elite” versus “mainstream” conflict is not unheard of in American history - the phrase immediately calls to mind the competition between the Republican and Progressive Parties during the Gilded Age. What is different this time is that the competition among these two groups is not happening across the two parties, but within both. Indeed, the elite groups within each party sometimes have more in common with each other than they do with the voters in their own coalitions. This mirrors the sociological phenomenon so ably documented by Charles Murray in Coming Apart. We have not seen in our history a situation where the elite truly separated themselves from the broader society in both material wealth and mores.
Romney is seemingly an avatar of the elite, or “party establishment” as it has come to be known in conservative circles. That being the case, analyzing the consequences of his nomination for the GOP could easily devolve into a pale shadow of Angelo Codevilla’s excellent article on this topic, a fate that I want to avoid at all costs. Instead, I’ll make the initially counter-intuitive point that Romney’s nomination is strong evidence the elites are losing.
First, I do not want to overstate my case. A good deal of the explanation for Romney’s victory lies in the weakness of his opponents. He is the only candidate currently standing whose credentials at least have the whiff of “president material” about them. The other candidate who might have able to say the same thing, Rick Perry, was doomed by his poor campaign skills. Any consideration of the ramifications of Romney’s nomination must begin with the knowledge that he is more or less winning by default.
That being said, it is interesting to watch the contrast between Romney’s positions and George W. Bush’s in 2000. On nearly every campaign plank, Romney is more conservative than Bush was. He may not convey the same ardor that Bush could, but there is hardly an iota of “compassionate conservatism” about Romney. Even on the social issues that have come to most define the divide between the elite and the mainstream, Romney ticks all the boxes in the conservative column. This is clear evidence that the mainstream of the Republican party, defined by its Tea Party and Evangelical movements, has drug the Republican establishment in its direction. Romney may not be a native son of those movements, but he is doing all he can to appeal to them.
It may therefore seem strange that the mainstream party cannot assert enough influence to get one of its own elected, but it must be remembered most of the resources needed to compete in the current primary system (money and organization) are locked up within the party elite. Most of the eligible candidates are going to be drawn from its ranks. The party mainstream must therefore influence the selection through ideas, at which it is succeeding. Most conventional political and sociological theory says this should not be the case - opinion typically flows from the elite “opinion makers” down. However, one unexpected consequence of the divergence between the elites and the mainstream is the blackballing of the elite media, the typical transmitter of opinion, among mainstream circles, who have instead turned to alternative sources on the radio and the internet.
Additionally, the mainstream movements in the Republican Party have left an increasing mark on lower races for the House, Senate, and governorships. Should Romney win the presidency, these groups would most affect the direction of his policies.
The elite of both parties is a creature of the state, kept isolated by the institutions that the state has increasingly subsidized for them. Undo the state, and they will likewise be undone. Romney, though a member of that elite, is evidence that the mainstream of the GOP is becoming more influential, not less. What remains to be seen is whether the energy of the mainstream party will be enough to start the process of dismantling the leviathan once they have a pliable candidate in office.
100 Years Ago Today Part 3
Hilaire Belloc was a thoroughly principled and upright man. He strove always to know what was true, and to relate it to others with exactitude. This characteristic often caused him to engage historical fallacies that one might think were in no way his responsibility to correct:
[O]ur European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted that it was normal to all human society....An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission (and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which barbarism and civilization flourished side by side in Europe, had there not been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood.
There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that is the guesswork of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it, rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic slave. The theory that "superior races" invading a land either drove out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that servile basis upon which paganism reposed was the human equality recognized between master and slave. The master might kill the slave, but both were of one race and each was human to the other. [From The Servile State.]
Contrast this with the prevalent fiction that the foundation of slavery and of all justifications for it is and has always been racism.
Dinesh D'Souza's fine book The End Of Racism delineates the emergence of conceptions of racial superiority and inferiority -- which only occurred after legally sanctioned slavery had disappeared from the Western World. It's a bit of history our modern left-liberals, racial flacksters, and professional grievance-mongers would prefer that you not know.
The insistence that slavery was a consequence of racism is supremely valuable to modern left-liberal polemicists. A single historical fact -- that Negro slaves were sold to Caucasian slave-traders by Negro tribal kings and potentates -- would put paid to that notion for all time. It's information that deserves to be spread more widely, regardless of any and all resistance.
Cleaning the Desk One Day…
YOU COME ACROSS A bolt of uncertain origin, a quarter-inch, hex-headed machine screw. There is no doubt that it is of some importance, or it would have been tossed in the trash, rather than kept in clutter. There’s no matching nut or washer(s), and you really have no clue what it’s for. If you leave it lying around forever, you may never find out, but it will contribute to clutter, confusion, dirt, and disorganizement from now ‘til Kingdom Come. If you put it away someplace where you’ll Know Where It Is, you’ll forget the location within a month easy, and possibly as soon as a week. If you find the place or thing where it actually belongs, and for the eventual repair of which you’re saving it, you’ll have no idea whether you have the part, let alone where it is.
Q: What do you do with the bolt?
- A: Mount an all-hands evolution to locate its true and proper location and purpose and effect repairs.
- B: Find an appropriate nut from your collection, thread it on, and put the two of them back where you found the bolt.
- C: Find an appropriate nut—and washer(s)—from your collection, slip the washer(s) on, thread the nut on, and put the assembly on your desk to admire from time-to-time.
- D: Put the bolt back where you found it to marinate longer.
- E: Put the bolt in a drawer Where You’ll Be Sure to Remember Where It Is.
- F: Pitch the damned thing in the trash and be done with it.
For extra credit, calculate the length of time (T) it will take for you to find the bolt’s proper situation after you’ve done (F).
Full Disclosure Update: I did (E).
The Embryo Of The Leviathan State, Kinda-Sorta
By way of Isaac Schrodinger's blog comes this bit of disturbing news from our neighbors to the north:
The Toronto Star reports that Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad have been friends since middle school. A couple of summers ago, Ho saw a video online that showed some Massachusetts Institute of Technology students sending a balloon into space. The two teenaged boys began working on their project in September, and four months of Saturdays later, they were able to launch their balloon, with Lego man astronaut, into the skies.The balloon traveled to heights roughly 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft, before bursting. An attached parachute ensured a safe landing, and a GPS helped the boys find it once it did bump back down to earth. It was 122 kilometres from its launch point.
So America's dominance of space is being challenged at last, eh, hoser?
But Canada might not have a full grasp of the political peril that comes with a successful space program. Pretty soon now, Canadian left-liberals will be poncing about, arguing for their favored Big Government programs with the classic line: "Well, if we can put a LEGO astronaut into the stratosphere, then surely we can..."
Be afraid, Canadians. Be very afraid.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Assorted
1. Worst...Cars?
Last Sunday, Doug Ross @ Journal presented a list of the "Ten Cars with the Most Obnoxious Drivers." This is a refreshing departure from the usual "worst cars ever" roundup, in that it takes note that the critical component in any automobile one might duel with on the freeway is, in the classic phrase, "the nut that holds the wheel."
An evaluation of Worst Car(s) Ever of the commonplace sort omits a critical consideration: the car doesn't drive itself. Only by assessing car+plus+driver as a system can we reach a truly useful conclusion, to wit:
- That Suburban being driven by a 4'9" woman paying more attention to her cell phone and the sales advertised by the stores along the road than to the traffic;
- That Prius doing 50 mph in the leftmost lane of I-95 (hey, just savin' the planet, dude), while its driver searches the passenger-side floor for exactly the right Kanye West CD;
- That Buick being piloted by an octogenarian in a hat, stuffed animals piled against the back windscreen, that accelerates and decelerates according to some incomprehensible formula (probably astrological) and cha-chas from side to side to a Lawrence Welk tempo;
- That anything whatsoever with all the windows rolled down and "rap music" pouring out of it at 200 dB...at 2:00 AM;
...in recognition of which, I have finally commissioned the construction of a RevengeMobile:
- Reinforced, ultra-rigid chassis;
- Polycarbonate triple-layer window panes all around;
- Cylindrical bumpers made of armor-grade steel and filled with concrete (extrudable steel spikes are on order);
- Twin M2's mounted under the front bumper;
- M-203 grenade launcher mounted on a swivel turret on the roof.
I can't wait. Neither can Mercy, my beloved and trusty 2006 Mercedes ML-500, which has had quite enough of being rammed in the rear in stop-and-go traffic, and sideswiped as I attempt to change lines on the Long Island Expressway.
2. The Campaigner-In-Chief.
Victor Davis Hanson has produced his usual eloquent criticism of the latest Barack Hussein Obama campaign speech:
The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.
Oh, wait, that was the annual State of the Union address, wasn't it?
For my part, I don't want to hear any more campaigning. Obama has now been campaigning for the presidency for more than four years. At some point he should have realized that he won it, no?
Oh, wait, he did realize it: "I won, so I think I trump you on that." Snarled to Eric Cantor during supposedly bipartisan meetings on the "stimulus," wasn't it? So he knew. Even so, he continues to campaign.
Our 44th president is a bad man pursuing an evil agenda. His most important backers are even worse than he is. Given the Republican candidates' ongoing circular fusillades, all that might save us from another four years of campaigning from Barack Hussein Obama is popular weariness with his speechifying, in combination with disgust at his arrogance and inability to endure criticism or dissent...but I haven't yet detected significant weariness or disgust in those around me who voted for him in November 2008.
3. At The Movies.
I suffer from defective color vision; most reds and greens appear gray or black to me. Thus, it was a delight to lay eyes, some months ago, on the promotional trailer for Green Lantern, as the greens featured in that trailer were so saturated that I could actually see them. I resolved to see the movie as soon as it appeared on DVD, regardless of what reviews it might garner.
The reviews, to say the least, were not complimentary. They treated this comic-book movie as if it should be judged alongside Citizen Kane. Needless to say, the standards appropriate to a movie about a fictional superhero ought to be a bit more lenient than that. All the same, it was a bit daunting to read so many opinions to the effect that Green Lantern was unworthy of anyone's time.
We saw it yesterday and enjoyed it greatly. Yes, it has some flaws. Among other things, the emotional thread concerning Hal's father was never really resolved. (Also, it wasn't nearly as green as I'd come to believe.) But as with all good superhero fiction, it spoke of maturation, courage, and moral vision. Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively were good fits to their parts, and clearly had some fun with them. I'd put it alongside Captain America as good clean fun that expresses essentially sound values.
Perhaps people who go to the movies solely to make sophisticated comments about them to their academic or media colleagues should reserve their column-inches for other sorts of movies. Leave the pure-entertainment fare to those of us principally interested in adventure and moral drama. We'll enjoy it for what it is, and ask nothing more.
Friday, January 27, 2012
(Un)intellectual Property
Yet another assault on the free-market has been averted, this time, against the internet by a motley collection of entrenched business interests that have failed to adjust their business models to the realities of the modern age. Or is that a general description of the usual perpetrators of these kinds of things? In any case, one would think with a good decade or so of fair warning, they would have made the transition by now. But no, they’d much rather ask Congress to pass an abominable package of laws that would have stripped users of the information highway of many of their freedoms with an appalling lack of due process, erecting barriers which these businesses can milk for easy revenues. In the business, we call that rent-seeking. So much for the dynamism and competitive spirit of entrepreneurship. Well, at least of these particular entrepreneurs.
As is typical, their arguments were couched in terms which attempt to appeal to free-market sentiments. Intellectual property, they claim, must be protected from acts of ‘theft’ and ‘piracy,’ else the whole edifice of of modern civilization will collapse. Or something like that, as if it hadn’t already, and mostly through the efforts of these very kinds of chumps to confuse the situation and confound our traditions so that they might be taken advantage of. A violation of property? What man of any decency could tolerate such a horror? As it turns out, quite a few. Over seven million people have petitioned Congress to tell these businesses to stuff it. Apparently, there was a difference of opinion as to what constitutes decency in this particular situation.
And as is also typical, I would like to use this happening to ask the reader to consider a few rather radical propositions. Namely, I’d like to take a look at what is meant by intellectual property—and maybe even property in general.
There have been very many good essays on this site and others like it concerning the ‘properties of property.’ Basically, most people instinctively know what these are as a matter of habit, but they haven’t always thought about them deeply. One of the more important of these ‘properties of property’ is that the holder of property has the right to exclude others from using it. If he can’t exclude them, it is taken that he has limited sovereignty over it, and the ‘propertiness’ of the purported property is thereby diminished.
But consider for a moment how this applies to something like a copyright or a patent. Both of these ‘properties,’ come with a built in expiration date, which to most people I would think would be a very strange feature if they really thought about it. Imagine if it applied to, say, one’s car. Imagine waiting outside a man’s house for the strike of midnight on the day of that expiry, and when the moment had arrived, hopping in and drive off. There would be nothing the purported ‘owner’ could say or do against you. He had lost his right to exclude you from it. But if patentable and copyrightable ideas really are property, that is basically how it works.
It seems to me that this is rather incoherent. Either your property is yours until you choose to dispose of it, or it is not. So, if an idea is property, it really ought to be property forever and ever into perpetuity, to be bought and sold and passed on to one’s heirs. Alternatively, it ought not to be property at all and freely used by anyone who likes. But this in-between world makes little sense, and smacks of a contrived legal pretense. The ‘expiration date’ is obviously a recognition that actually treating ideas as property in the normal sense would be impractical. So, allowing patents and copyrights to expire accomplishes a legal jamming of a round peg through a square hole.
It is quite clear what the interest is—the restriction of markets, using the language of property to justify what would otherwise be immediately recognized as an attempt to assert a right to monopoly by legal force. And, typically, that is exactly how intellectual property is used. Worse, once a particular monopoly is established, it becomes a launching point for installing further market chokepoints. The best example of this strategy which I can think of is the way Microsoft attempted to use its overwhelming marketshare in operating systems to attempt to shoulder out competition in web navigators and other software by making them incompatible with its OS. This attempt eventually failed, but it provides a good example of the types of maneuvers that can be piggy-backed onto IP law to restrict markets for the purpose of rent-seeking.
As for the argument that the end of IP law would bring the free-market down around our ears, it is easy to see that this is not the case simply by looking at the digital media industry, where digital technologies have effectively blunted enforcement mechanisms. Yes, major record labels, Hollywood studios, publishers and the like are seeing their profits eroded, and rather heavily at that. But on the other hand, there is certainly no less media available for consumption as a result. Far from it—there appears to be far more of it than ever, and of greater variety than before. Creativity and innovation have not been squashed, they appear to have been multiplied.
What has been squashed are the gatekeepers—the media cartel which before had dominated and effectively homogenized media offerings in an attempt to maximize profits by limiting choice. Among other agendas. Up until recently, they also had the help of a large technological barrier. But with effectively self-produced media approaching the quality of the professional stuff, it becomes difficult for the ‘take it or leave it’ model to work any longer. The erosion of IP is only one aspect of an avalanche of economic effects which have been triggered by the digital age; others are at work as well. But even so, it is still possible, certainly, for the big performers to make the big bucks through concerts, live appearances and such, but in order to do so, they will actually have to work for a living, as the strategy of rent-seeking through legal monopoly and technological barrier is slowly being taken off the table.
It might be argued that the scrapping of IP wouldn’t just hurt the big publishing houses and the like, it’s going to hurt the writers and other creative artists as well, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to protect their ideas. But in reality, very few of these people benefit from the restriction anyway. Typically, for example, it is the publishing house which sees most of the benefit. It uses the copyright to prevent other publishing houses from distributing its titles, of course, but unless you are a Stephen King, a publishing house is not likely to pass on the spoils to you because you have no negotiating power. It is going to go looking for authors who are more desperate to have their works published—of whom there are plenty.
But to take the argument to the next level—let’s forget about all this practical stuff and rhetoric, and get philosophical. What if the ‘in-betweeners’ are just flat right? What if all this market-restriction nonsense is exactly the kind of thing I’m accusing the IPers of doing—attempting to couch an anti-IP argument in the language of the free market? What if, in reality, there are some legitimate differences between types of property which necessitate a slightly different treatment, but on the whole, it really is right and proper to protect the property rights of creative sorts to their ideas? What if not to do so is a very basic and fundamental abridgment of their rights and, as such, certain to be followed by serious, negative repercussions?
I think that what has happened is that this argument —like most political arguments—has been trapped in a sort of ideological vortex. I think that, like it or not, there is no straightforward answer that takes a form that most people would like, if this ‘logical rhetorical answer’ is the form that most people prefer, which it probably is. Life, after all, is not a logic problem, and as the notion of what property is must depend strongly on the answer to the question as to what constitutes human nature, it should be plain that there isn’t going to be a clear-cut answer given one has accepted the notion that human nature can be a variable as opposed to a constant.
As I wander down this path, questioning axioms as I go, I’m reminded of a certain thesis I once heard which I find to be quite brilliant—that there are certain institutions which are given purely by human convention. Sorry, I’ve lost the link, but it was by that Fran Porretto guy. Three were named—money, language, and marriage. And I begin to wonder if perhaps property should not be added to this list.
I say this in the main because it is difficult for me to accept that the notion of property as articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers is the end of the argument when I see the medieval notion of property placed alongside it. Clearly, if the one is valid, and we live in a world where such things are defined purely ‘logically’, then the other must be invalid. Invalid, as in, not even close. I find this very difficult to accept, and further, I find it difficult to accept that I can be thrown into such a logical conundrum over something as simple as a patent. If property is as simple as that, this should be a piece of cake.
But if I take the view that property, like money, marriage, and language, is defined by the norms, traditions, habits of thought, and conventions of the society which institutes it, it provides me with a way to reconcile all of these notions. In fact, it does so in a way that is rather useful. Neither the philosophers of the Enlightenment nor the medieval traditions were wrong—or, at least, not utterly wrong—and I am free to see what good I can in any particular convention, to begin deriving ideas concerning the behaviors of property and people under different sets of norms, and understand the notion of property as something that changes with people and situations.
None of this is to say that property may be defined arbitrarily, or that any which way is perfectly valid. Nothing could be further from the truth. I perfectly accept, for example, that money is similarly defined, yet I will criticize our own norms and conventions about it until I am blue in the face. I recognize what money was ‘meant for,’ how it ‘works,’ and how choosing silly and nonsensical ways to deal with it produces spectacularly reprehensible results. Nevertheless, I fully acknowledge that no matter what I may say, or how ‘illegitimate’ I can argue our money system to be, at the end of the day, it is what it is. If people accept bank deposits as money, then bank deposits are money and there is nothing I can do about it. Except to repeat over and over that it is really, really stupid. But people will just keep doing it. Including myself.
Likewise with language and marriage. There are good, sensible ways of doing things, and really, really retarded ways. Evil, even. I expect that property is the same way, and that it is perfectly valid to have very strong opinions on the subject, and that these opinions may be said to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect,’ if you see what I mean. I just suspect that they do not take the form which I used earlier in the essay, and which most people tend to employ. And now that I’ve completely philosophized myself out of my original argument and thoroughly confused myself about what I mean, I think I’ll leave the reader to make up his own mind…
Minorities
An aside before we begin: As regular readers of Eternity Road probably all know by now, I rise very early in the morning, typically about 4:00 AM, for reasons beyond the scope of this tirade. The early morning hours have become precious to me for an unusual reason: the way I think when I've only just departed from sleep differs substantially from the way I think when I've been awake for an hour or more. My earliest-morning cogitations are less linear, more amenable to breadth and the cross-connection of nominally unrelated ideas and motifs. As the morning ages and my pattern-recognition ability kicks in, I find patterns and parallels that might not have been visible to me in other conditions.
And I resolve to write about them.
It's well established that a coherent, highly motivated minority with a short, coherent agenda will usually out-maneuver and out-politick a much larger group with a broad, diffuse set of concerns. The power of such a minority waxes as the majority fragments. For example, in cases with political relevance, it acquires the appearance of the "swing vote," capable of deciding a closely contested election. Thus, it is to the advantage of such a minority that the larger society be multiply divided according to as many "issues" as possible.
Though it isn't always possible for a minority to encourage such fragmentation, some minorities have made a specialty of it, and have deployed the capacity with abandon. Much depends on the existence of political fault lines: special interests, actual or potential, by which the greater number of persons can be corralled into contending groups.
Consider the environmentalist movement as a case for study. Nomenclature notwithstanding, environmentalist activists generally don't think much about "the environment," whatever that means; their concentration is on preventing others from doing anything. (If you haven't yet heard them called "BANANAs" -- "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything" -- it strikes me as the perfect label for their real agenda.) Ironically, it's because consideration of objectively measurable things such as air and water pollution, or the well-being of specific creatures, seldom enters into their thoughts that they've become so effective in thwarting human development. It allows them:
- To lobby for the preservation of old things -- forests, buildings, neighborhoods -- simply because they're old;
- To agitate against various projects on bases other than pollutive or habitat concerns (e.g., aesthetic values);
- To invoke "issues" that are objectively nonsensical as arguments (e.g. "We can't allow off-roading in the desert. When you scar the desert, it doesn't heal!");
- To substitute anecdotes, isolated incidents, and scare talk for verifiable data.
Is it not perfectly clear that, were "environmentalists" truly concerned with continental biomass, they would encourage the destruction of climax ecologies such as "old-growth forests" to make room for younger, faster-growing, more vigorous vegetation? Is it not perfectly clear that, were the "environmentalists" of the Massachusetts coast as favorable toward renewable energy as they claim, they would not have agitated to block the seaborne wind farm, proposed to stand thirty miles from their coast? Is it not perfectly clear that, were environmentalists really concerned about the caribou and the polar bears, they would be applauding the developments of recent years -- in particular, the Alaskan oil pipeline -- that have correlated with a substantial increase in those populations? Is it not perfectly clear that, were "the ecology" a real priority to them, they would favor the displacement of activities such as "off-roading" into the deserts, where disturbances to "the ecology" are closely confined by the lack of water?
Don't all rush at once, now.
I selected environmental activists as my test case mainly because "the environment" has been so much in the news in recent years, owing to the Gulf oil spill, the Keystone XL pipeline project, the harnessing of oil shale and tar sands, the development of hydrofracking, and similar developments. When the verifiable facts are presented to a fair-minded man, he invariably sides with development and against environmentalist crisis-mongering. Thus, it's critical to environmental activists that they either prevent the facts from being disseminated, or overbear them with political action to fragment the opposition.
Pick a prominent activist minority. It hardly matters which one. You'll find that the pattern applies. Its activities, if successful, will be guided by a "by any means necessary" credo. Its members will argue whatever will prejudice the "issue" in their favor, whether the argument connects with their overt agenda or not. Its victories, however, will be trumpeted as victories for "the cause," even if "the cause" has taken an objective setback from their machinations.
If you're already aware of this pattern -- and the Gentle Readers of Eternity Road are bright enough that I'd expect you to be -- you're probably asking yourself, "What's his point?"
The point, as it is so often, is the underlying dynamic.
A group intent on achieving a specific aim will always be organized into circles:
- Outer: Persons who favor the overt agenda with votes and / or donations.
- Middle: Persons willing to labor in the group's interests.
- Inner: Top operators, strategists, and keepers of the covert agenda.
Those in the inner circle are the "voice of the organization." They determine what appearance the group will present to public. Often, they direct the specific activities of the middle-circle activists, always with an eye on the covert agenda. That agenda will invariably include increasing the power, perquisites, and prestige of the members of the inner circle. Indeed, self-serving action of that sort will often trump all other kinds.
Those in the middle circle are the organization's foot soldiers. They go and do as the inner circle has directed them. The more naive among them are convinced that the inner circle's choices of strategy and tactics really are in the best interests of the overt agenda. Others aware of the covert agenda, or less starry-eyed about group activism, mainly hope to rise among their fellows, perhaps into the inner circle, by conspicuous service. The distribution will vary according to many factors, prominent among them the ages of the middle-circle activists -- and of the group itself.
Those in the outer circle are seldom even aware of the activities of the others. Their allegiance, such as it is, is to the overt agenda. Were that agenda proved to be a deceit perpetrated to conceal other motives, their allegiance would lapse. Thus, it is critical to the longevity and potency of the group that the deceit not be revealed.
The overarching political dynamic of our time, in which activist special-interest groups are so many and so prominent, is the one inside each of those groups. Their agendas -- both overt and covert -- differ widely; their internal structure and dynamics are uniform.
The constitutionalist appalled by the degeneracy of American government and politics will naturally be massively outraged by the success of special-interest activists at subverting the limitations placed on Washington. The idea that such groups could lure Congress into setting aside the explicit limits on its powers is an offense against the Supreme Law of the Land -- indeed, against the idea of law as such. Yet we have found ourselves to be powerless against those groups; they are far too numerous, and maneuver far too adroitly, for the believer in freedom and Constitutionally limited government to counter.
So far.
Yet the objective facts are plainly in our favor. We can't shake the sense that victory is achievable; we just don't know how. We keep recurring to our fundamental principles -- the value of freedom; the importance of objective law; the dangers from unlimited government; the specific nature of the Constitutional compact and its underlying concepts -- and finding them insufficient to carry the day.
Which brings us to the key insight, which might just turn the tides for us:
If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten....If what you're doing doesn't work, do something else! -- Michael Emerling
In part, this will require an alteration in our mindsets. Most of us think of ourselves as champions of freedom and allegiants of the Constitution. That we are, and have been, and there's no denying it. But that should not determine our tactics.
The great military breakthrough of World War I, which I studied intensely for twenty years, was a simple innovation by the German General Staff in the use of its forces. Prior to that contest, the usual course of a war involved hurling one's main force at the main force of the enemy, and hoping to prevail by superior strength. The underlying assumption was that one cannot win without breaking the enemy's main force, and that the only way to do that is to meet it head-on. The Germans very nearly won the war by rejecting that assumption; they pioneered infiltration tactics that emphasized the search for vulnerabilities, and the use of small, highly mobile strike forces to exploit them.
A successful assault on a vulnerability brings several consequences:
- Disruption of the enemy's near-term plans;
- A "hole in the line" through which a larger force can penetrate;
- An artificial "flank" -- a border to the enemy's holdings toward which his defenses and operations are not oriented -- that can far more easily be assaulted than his defensive front.
This is a considerable improvement on a frontal assault. Yet it took six millennia of human warfare to reach that conclusion. But more important for today's topic, the insight applies to political combat as well.
I wrote some time ago about the nature of American "quilted fascism." That essay remains accurate, in both its observations and its strategic and tactical implications. Please reread it and reflect on it for a few moments.
If, as I have argued, the problem is that the numerous, mobile, coherent special-interest groups have been outmaneuvering us for decades -- with the able assistance of a completely amoral political class, of course -- then the core of our problem is that the interest groups have been using the Germans' infiltration tactic against us while we've sat still.
The solution to the problem follows logically:
- Rather than merely argue for Constitutional principles and governance, we must form small battle units;
- Each such unit must select one and only one special-interest group as its target;
- The unit must study its target's vulnerabilities, and concentrate its firepower on them.
If my earlier assessment of the internal dynamics of special-interest groups is accurate, the major vulnerability of any such group is the divergence between its overt and covert agendas. By attacking that gap, we can divide the Outer Circle allegiants, whose money and votes are critical to the group, and some of the more idealistic Middle Circle activists, from the clutches of the Inner Circle power-mongers. Whenever the facts are on our side -- and they always are -- the group will lose cohesion and fade away.
I call this the Freedom Commando strategy.
The essay linked immediately above is more than seven years old. It didn't get much attention or commentary at that time. But the time has arrived when it must be taken seriously. The nation is on the brink of disaster. We might not have more than a single year left to us to pull it back.
Think about that. Slightly less than a year remains before the investiture of a new Congress and the inauguration of a new president. I can guarantee you that the majority of those men, no matter to which party they belong, will not be where they are out of a sincere desire to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the freedom it was written to guard. They will be persons who think themselves brighter and more cunning than you and I. They will be there, with few exceptions, to advance their own interests.
In other words, they will be "the wrong people," having risen to their stations through the operation of the mechanisms Friedrich Hayek described in The Road To Serfdom, specifically the chapter titled "Why The Worst Get On Top." It's our task to actuate Milton Friedman's insight: to make it politically profitable for "the wrong people" to do "the right thing."
And with that, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.
