The Razor

Unlike many on the right I don’t instinctively fear Russia or the former Soviet Union. Having studied Russian history and culture over the years I appreciate the suffering its citizens have gone through – usually at the hands of their own government. But understanding Russia one appreciates that at heart it views itself as in competition with the West – a zero sum game whereby any perceived weakness of the Western powers is perceived as making Russia that much stronger.

Eastern European countries also understand this, which is why they are pissed at being stabbed in the back by the Obama administration (who can’t even seem to get the protocol right when wielding the knife). Having been occupied by the Soviet Union for most of the last century, they aren’t very keen on being threatened with another occupation, especially when they see themselves as a pawn by an American administration keen to “reset” relations with their former occupier.

So being an ex-diplomat-wannabe myself, I propose that we offer Russia a grand bargain: They can occupy France, Germany, the Benelux countries, the Nordic states (except Denmark because the Danes understand America better than most of the Euroweenies), Portugal and Spain in exchange for leaving alone the Eastern European countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine. We can even throw in my ancestral Ireland to sweeten the deal. Moscow wants a warm-weather port? How about Lisbon? Is that warm enough for you?

That way most of the Europeans who hate America will get their wish, and those who want to be our allies, get theirs. Russia gets some new friends – and everybody wins.

UPDATE: Since I got someone’s Irish up in the comments I reconsidered and decided to swap out Ireland for New Zealand in the Grand Bargain. Ireland may have its doubts about the USA, but aside from throwing Mary Robinson at us and being neutral during WW2 it has generally been a good ally. So sorry Liamascorcaigh.

As I’ve documented here, here and here, New Zealanders hate America with a passion that scares their sheep. So that they can sleep soundly, I would offer this fly on the windscreen of American foreign policy to the Russians gratis.

Guess it’s obvious why I washed out of the Foreign Service interview process.

Iranian protester begs for American intervention.

U2’s the Edge owns 156 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains and plans to build five 10,000 sq ft mansions on his property. “These homes will be some of the most environmentally sensitive ever designed in Malibu — or anywhere in the world,” the guitarist, whose real name is David Evans, said in a prepared statement released to the press. This being America even if it is a post-Kelo America, property rights should trump p***ing off the locals which The Edge’s plan seems to be doing.

“It is going to look nice to the human eye but at what cost?” said surf shop owner and City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. “When is enough enough?”

Surf-dude, enough is enough when you own the property you are whining about – unless you want someone like me to violate your property rights by convincing the council to turn your shop into something truly useful, like a Wawa.

As a property owner myself I support the Edge’s right to do whatever the heck he wants to with that 156 acres. If he wants to clear-cut it and turn it into a parking lot, that it is his right. Ditto with the Surf-dude councilman. If he wants to sell wannabees boards that they aren’t qualified to ride, then that’s his business – not mine.

But one difference between the Edge and me is that I don’t claim to be green. He’s considered by the MSM to be an environmentalist yet I’m considered to belong to a group that would drop-kick the Lorax into a chipper-shredder.

Funny thing is that I’m currently looking at properties with acreage in rural North Carolina with the intent on protecting it from development. In fact the Wife just checked out 75 acres along a river with old growth timber on it. Unfortunately it was also infested with hippies and Rainbow People-types. The owner was charging top dollar for the property but insisted that in any contract he was going to write a clause that allowed him access to a cave on the property anytime he wanted, and that the hippies would be allowed to continue to “gather” on the property.

The Wife laughed heartily at that and then mentioned that the Kid and I planned to set up a shooting range. The owner smiled a bit wanly, evidently imagining me running my very own hippy hunting reserve.

I don’t care about my carbon footprint and evidently The Edge doesn’t care about his either. Supporting each of five 10,000 square foot mansions takes a lot of carbon to build and maintain. I do care about wilderness, preserving what remains and returning land that has fallen out of use by Man to the wild. I look at the blocks of empty lots and vacant buildings that blight the urban landscape, and imagine fencing the area off with razor wire, removing the concrete and asphalt, planting trees and adding a pack of wolves and a herd of deer. But I don’t have the money for my crazy “green” ideas like the Edge does.

Meanwhile I live in a 1,200 square foot home. My Wife and I are adherents of the Not So Big House philosophy which is the anti-thesis of current American housing culture. In place of a large McMansions on postage stamp piece of land our ideal is a small cozy cottage on a large tract of land. We have considered how much house we really needed and decided that the answer was under 2,000 sq. ft.

Does the Edge need 10,000 square feet? That is just under a quarter of an acre, and over 4x the average home size in the USA. According to Wikipedia, Edge has a wife and two children. Does each need the equivalent square footage of the average American house? More importantly does he need to offer such mansions to 4 other families?

The price of the lots alone are $7.5 million, and selling all four would net him $30 million – 3 1/2 times the original cost of the entire 156 acre parcel. The project would require the removal of 70,000 cubic yards of earth and the grading of a road up the steep hillsides.

Edge claims that the properties will be “environmentally sensitive” in terms of blending into the landscape and using state of the art power and water conservation technologies. But reducing the environmental damage caused by building a single 10,000 sq. ft. house doesn’t eliminate the damage such construction causes in the first place, not to mention the ongoing damage caused by the maintenance of such a behemoth.

So what ego requires 10,000 square foot? The Edge’s ego and no doubt his pocket book; it has nothing to do with being green – and that’s hypocrisy in my book.

In the 1950’s William F. Buckley lifted conservativism out of the muck by driving out the John Birchers and racists, forming a modern political movement that changed America a generation later. Today liberalism continues its swift descent into the same sewer conservativism left, supporting religious extremism and spouting neo-nazi rubbish. There is no better example of this than the following cartoon.

This cartoon did not appear in a Middle Eastern paper, one that regularly demonizes the Jews for all the world’s problems. No it appeared in an American paper that refused to display the Mohammed cartoons for fear of getting a suicide bomber in the editorial office: the Washington Post.

As Roger Simon notes, “Oliphant – whose work I usually find humdrum in the extreme – has done us a favor. Deliberately or not, he has dropped the oldest of phony Leftist pretenses – that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.” That’s something I’ve noticed recently; increasingly the Left is dropping the pretence no doubt due to the fact that the pretence is a sham. Hating Israel is simply the politically correct and modern way to hate Jews. After all anti-semitism is probably the oldest existing prejudice and hatred, and being called an anti-semite just makes one seem old-fashioned.

It fascinates me how the Left, which claims to champion feminism, supports a doctrine where women are second class citizens. The Left claims to uphold gay rights, but supports regimes and groups in the Middle East where homosexuals are stoned to death. Yet I – who support these very rights – am dismissed as a “conservative” and called thug.

The Left is sliding into irrelevance the same way conservativism did in the 1930’s. Until it’s own version of Buckley comes along and cleans it up, the Left is looking mighty pathetic.

In the meantime liberal outlets like the Washington Post will slowly resemble the Arab media. How far is the cartoon below from the one above?

UPDATE: Does anyone else find it odd that the Arab media enjoys showing Jews as modern day Nazis considering that the Arabs were Nazi allies during World War 2? This group appreciates the irony.

UPDATE: Barry Rubin weighs in.

No surprise considering it’s the Land of the BBC:

A poll of nearly 2,000 Britons by YouGov/PHI found that 70 per cent of respondents incorrectly said it was true that the US had done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000. More than 50 per cent presumed that polygamy was legal in the US, when it is illegal in all 50 states.

...

The survey showed that a majority agreed with the false statement that since the Second World War the US had more often sided with non-Muslims when they had come into conflict with Muslims. In fact in 11 out of 12 major conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the US has sided with the former group. Those conflicts included Turkey and Greece, Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and and Kosovo and Yugoslavia.

Asked if it was true that “from 1973 to 1990 the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons,” 80 per cent of British respondents said yes. However the US sold just 0.46 per cent of Saddam’s arsenal to him, compared to Russia’s 57 per cent, France’s 13 per cent and China’s 12 per cent.

Nothing like taking the “special relationship” for granted. Hope they can develop a similar “special relationship” with Russia to prevent them from freezing to death should Russia decide to cut off natural gas exports.

I almost missed this story. Dutch Cartoonist Arrested on Suspicion of Violating Hate Speech Laws

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — A Dutch political cartoonist was arrested this week on suspicion of insulting people because of their race or religion through his work, authorities said Friday.

The cartoonist, who works under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of violating hate speech laws and held overnight before being released, said a spokeswoman for his publisher, Uitgeverij Xtra.

“He was arrested with a great show of force, by around 10 policemen,” the spokeswoman said.

She asked that her name not be used and declined to give Nekschot’s real name because the cartoonist and publisher have received death threats.

Example of Nekschot’s Work

Nekschot as you might surmise means “shot in the neck” – “the preferred method of execution by fascist and communist forces to get rid of their opponents” according to the artist. Gregorius refers to Pope Gregory IX who started the Inquisition. Nekschot’s work is extreme from what I’ve seen on his site, but it doesn’t just pillory one group. He’s insulted nearly all major religions and upset Dutch religious leaders of all sects.

Seeing the Netherlands, a country where drugs and the sex trade are all but formally legalized, arresting an artist in the 21st Century only proves that liberals are a greater threat to classical Liberal values like the freedoms of speech and expression than conservatives. It also proves that those who claim to value tolerance are in fact unable tolerate opinions that differ more than slightly from their own.

One solution to fight these draconian PC laws is for conservatives and “true liberals” to use them against the Left. I’m sure you wouldn’t have to look through too many Dutch periodicals to find cartoons and artwork that “incites hatred” of Americans, the Bush administration, or Christians. This is a type of jujitsu employed by terrorists, who receive training to claim torture and being subjected to anti-Muslim comments after being detained. True liberals on both sides of the conservative/liberal divide should use these stupid but dangerous PC laws to undermine them.

Link

Best of all London mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone received a sound thrashing, losing to conservative candidate Boris Johnson.

Labour officials were amazingly clueless about the burden these green taxes placed on ordinary Britons and merrily proposed more.

“If someone drops litter, they should be arrested,” Livingstone threatened during his campaign, thinking his resolve would impress rather than infuriate voters with its ecologically correct pettiness in a city otherwise awash in real crime.

Every tax and intrusion imposed by Labour in recent years was justified as being for voters’ “own good.” Ending global warming, reducing carbon footprints, lowering carbon emissions and raising public funding of renewable energy — all were excuses used to hit the voters’ pocketbook with more taxes.

Yet none of these taxes improved the quality of life. Instead, just a few of them — the same ones the green lobby wants here — showed British voters this was a puritanical scheme to reduce the quality of life and substitute a Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward.

“In other words, don’t even think about enjoying yourself,” wrote Malcolm Davis on Reuters’ site.

But in the meantime, crime rose, state services declined, the bureaucrats proliferated, the National Health Service deteriorated and British purchasing power evaporated. “Many feel the government is creating a green fear for monetary gain,” Mark Hodson of Opinium Research told the Independent newspaper.

Worse yet, government’s only strength seemed to be in harassing its own citizens. Britain, for instance, had been covered with security cameras — which no doubt would be used by Livingstone to nab litterbugs — but have done little to prevent terrorism. It’s telling that last year a car full of bombs was detected not by anti-terror cameras, but by over-active tow trucks looking for illegally parked cars.

I’m just waiting for pundits to blame the loss on conservative US president George Bush.

If you have to go through all that to “provoke a discussion about the link between art and the body” then you really must suck at communication.

(March 23, 2008) – Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-France, won’t endorse Sen John McCain, R-Ariz., for president. In an interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulis, Hagel cited his differences on Iraq with the presumptive Republican nominee for president as the reason. “I’ve obviously got some differences with John on the Iraq war. That’s no secret,” Hagel said.

Later that day during a campaign stop in Irvine, California McCain expressed his relief over Hagel’s decision. “If Chuck had endorsed me, I would have had to pay him back by making him French Ambassador, and honestly I prefer to appoint someone who won’t suck up to the cheese eating surrender monkeys the way Chuck does.”

Whose idea was it to recognize Kosovo’s independence?

By doing this we have…
1. Undermined the legitimacy of multi-ethnic states. What happens if/when the Serbian-dominated bits of Kosova decide to breakaway to join Serbia? Or when the Albanian bits of those bits decide to break away from the breakaway regions and join Kosovo? Or when the Serbian neighborhoods present there decide to go their own way – except for the small cluster of Albanian houses that is stuck in the neighborhood?
2. Pushed Serbia further into Russian orbit. Consider that Serbia has been shedding its past and westernizing. However by this simple action we have emboldened hard-core nationalists, and undercut the westernizers who must now play the nationalism card in order to survive.
3. Gained nothing from the Islamic world. Even Islamic nations haven’t recognized Kosova for fear of stoking their own separatist movements.
4. Strengthened Russia’s hand in Europe. Putin now has an opening through Serbia to exercise his Soviet-era policies vis-a-vis the West.
5. Gained us nothing – anywhere. By recognizing Kosovo we don’t get squat.

This stinks of the Euroweenie-run State Department following the lead of the EU. In the end I don’t see any good and a whole heap of trouble coming out of this. This has to be one of the biggest bonehead moves of State since Madeline Albright tied one in Pyongyang with Kim Jong-il.

According to Bruce Bawer:

Never mind that Europe, far from oppressing Muslims, offers personal freedoms and welfare-state benefits far beyond those available in any Muslim country. Never mind that few if any Europeans – certainly not gay people – are doing any Muslim-bashing. Never mind that Hindu and Buddhist immigrants, or immigrants from South America or China, feel no compulsion to react violently against their “oppression.” No, assaults by Muslims always have to be construed as defensive – as expressions not of power but of weakness, not of aggression but of helplessness. To suggest that the culprits, far from being fragile, sensitive flowers who’ve been pushed over the line by something we did, are in fact bullies driven by an overweening sense of superiority and a deep-seated malice – both of which they’ve been carefully taught at home, at school, and, yes, in the mosque – is verboten.

Being gay – and European – himself, Bawer should know.

I’m not sure if the cultural elites of Europe have always been naive or it’s a recent development. However given that Pym Fortuyn’s murderer only got 18 years it’s only a matter of time before Europe, like Iran, has no homosexuals.

From a DailyTech thread on Voyager’s pending crossing of the termination shock.

So brightly did shine American genius and the desire to build the best. Today, we are left with only the pursuit of profit; there is no quest for greatness, no heart that guides the craftsmanship.

To paraphrase Sir Edward Grey:

“The lamps are going out all over America. We shall not see them lit again in our time.”

If you are an American, savor this moment. With today’s America nothing more than a nation of illiterate, immoral and obese idiots, it is folly to think we will reach again as far.

Nice Romantic comment. Too bad it’s wrong.

First a little context. Grey was speaking about Europe before WWI - a war he was trying to stop. After the war was over in 1918, the “lights” came back on in most of Europe for two decades before going back out again between 1939-1945. Although I am a Eurosceptic, I can’t argue that the lights have been burning since the mid 1940’s (although the rioters in France are doing their best to put them out again by burning libraries and books.)

So Grey’s comment is dripping with romance – but it was wrong. No Dark Age (beyond a 10 year period of total warfare) descended on Europe, and all things considered Europe remains a dynamic center of progress and intellectual achievement.

What’s wrong with the pursuit of profit – if that’s what you’re into? Profits lead to higher taxes which can then be used for the greater good. If you don’t want to pursue profit… I just spoke to my son’s grade school teacher this morning. I don’t think she’s in it for the money.

Not everyone in the US pursues MBAs and yearns to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company – but they have the tools – and the freedom – to do so if that’s what they want. Pursuit of happiness and all that.

But that also means that some would rather sit on their butts and do just enough to get by. Do you or I have the right to force them to do otherwise? As long as my taxes aren’t supporting them, then I have no problem with it. If you don’t like it, what gives you the right to tell them what to do with their lives?

Predicting America’s decline is big business and has roots in the 19th century when America was threatened by my Irish ancestors. We were supposed to outbreed the protestants and wreck America – which we did as the laws banning abortion, all non-Catholic religions, and the constitutional amendment mandating free whiskey attest to. Almost since its inception people have predicted America’s decline, and it’s usually coincides when another ethnic group arrives. Coincidence?

Meanwhile American universities have to reject qualified foreign students who want to come here. Most foreign graduates of US universities stay – leading to brain drains in countries throughout the Middle East and Africa. The American economy continues generating wealth, jobs and raised living standards not just for Americans but for Indians, Chinese and yes, even Grey’s Europeans.

Romantic sentiment is much more alluring than cold-hard facts. But reality abhors romance almost as much as nature does a vacuum.

This isn’t the first time this has happened:

Rampaging youths rioted overnight in Paris’ suburbs, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting fire to dozens of cars. At least 77 officers were injured and officers were fired at, a senior police union official said Tuesday…

This isn’t Paris 1848. The Parisian rebels of the time didn’t do this:

Among the buildings targeted by the youths was a library, which was set afire.

This isn’t the first time libraries have been targeted either. Note these burning ancient books from the Sorbonne (via GatewayPundit)

French rioters burning books stolen from the Sorbonne, Spring 2006.

These people aren’t the noble oppressed rising up against their bourgeois masters: they’re doing it for no other purpose than it’s fun. No doubt some self-styled “leaders” of the rioters will emerge to press a list of grievances against the French government, which in true Gaullic fashion the government will capitulate to. Then these “leaders” who have absolutely no control of the rioters will make some sort of gain before the rioters tire of destroying their own neighborhoods.

And burning libraries. This is barbarism.

French Mime Rioters, Spring 2006

I am an intellectual, although I was raised by a pragmatic mother and an emotional father who never finished the 10th grade. I became an intellectual in my teens when I avoided academic or athletic success for bad poetry, clove cigarettes and other accouterments of the Bohemian lifestyle. Much of this has to do with the Jesuits who taught me how to think, but some of it was there from the start. How many 5th graders do you know who read encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun?

But I never forgot my working class roots – which is why I was always the one in my group that held a job, saved money and never chased rainbows.
The result? A middle class suburbanite with house, a fixed 30 year mortgage at a low interest rate, two sensible Japanese cars, a Wife and Kid – but one who can quote romantic and beat poetry, is comfortable in distant, exotic locales, and can sing Clash tunes to embarrass his kid in front of his friends.

In my time I was exposed to all sorts of ideologies. One of my friends left high school and supposedly ran off to join the IRA. A girl I knew in college donned peasant skirts and set off to live with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Others took drugs searching for artistic creativity, resulting in scribbles that looked like epileptic crickets had been dipped in paint and left to seize on canvas, or poetry that was impossible to read by anyone who wasn’t tripping on several hits of acid. I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital until it put me to sleep. I’ve read de Sade until I had to puke. I’ve read Plato’s Republic, and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. I’ve read anarchists, existentialists, Randists, modernists, post-modernists, and post-post-modernists.

But I still watch football on Sundays.

I suppose my intellectual fore bearers are the Beats because they too had hard scrabble and working class backgrounds (except Ginsburg, who was bourgeoisie – and the lamest of them all.) Though most intellectuals claim to speak for the common man, they believe they know more than he does. The Beats knew different. The Beats felt that the common man had much to teach them, rather than the other way around.

Which brings me to the story of Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dane who ran off to join Columbia’s FARC guerrillas. The Columbian government has gotten hold of her diary and released it to the media.

“I’m tired, tired of the FARC, tired of the people, tired of communal living. Tired of never having anything for myself,” wrote the author, a 29-year-old Dutch woman.

In the diary, Nijmeijer abhors the strict discipline imposed by FARC’s male commanders — no smoking, no phone calls, no romantic relationships without their consent. She says the rank and file are hungry and bored, and describes FARC leaders as both materialistic and corrupt.

“How will it be when we take power? The wives of the commanders in Ferrari Testa Rossas with breast implants eating caviar?” she writes.

Intellectuals have always been attracted to idealist causes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Crusades weren’t filled with the ranks of Europe’s intellectuals in the Middle Ages – at least, the few that existed and weren’t banned from attending by their abbots. What better for the practical-minded to have at your disposal intelligent men and women who were open to manipulation: Lenin’s “useful idiots.”

So I’m not surprised to read that Toni Vernelli, an Englishwoman, has an abortion to reduce her carbon footprint. I only wish her mother shared her fanaticism 36 years ago. At least Sara Irving had her tubes tied because she felt “a baby would pollute the planet.” No word as of yet on her suicide date, since by her logic her existence continues to spoil the Earth – and bringing to mind a bumper sticker that I recently saw that said: Save the Planet. Kill yourself.

And did I mention that I’ve also read Sun Tzu, Musashi Miyamoto, von Clausewitz and Niccolo Machiavelli? All these men were intellectuals, but they were also practical men interested in results more than theory, and the real rather than the ideal. Of these, Machiavelli has shown himself to be the most useful in day-to-day life. His advice to the Medici princes can be just as easily applied to bosses and office coworkers, and on a grander level his view of international politics of the 15th century can be just as easily applied to those of the 21st century.

Are these men no less intellectuals than Plato, Sartre of Marx? Absolutely not. But they were not only intellectual, they were practical. In essence they blended together intelligence and creativity with the practical – sort of like scientists or engineers. While the idealist knight went off to fight the Crusade, they were his trusted adviser who stayed behind to impregnate his wife. When the Paris intelligentsia rioted – and died – in the streets, they negotiated compromise with the regime that strengthened their own power.

They are the Dick Cheneys in a world of Barack Obamas.

What would Machiavelli make of Nijmeijer, Vernelli and Irving? It’s hard to imagine him doing anything but smiling.

The fact that 1/2 of the country is overweight hasn’t stopped New Zealand from barring overweight immigrants.

British citizens Rowan Trezise, 33, and Richie Trezise, 35, are living apart as she tries desperately to shed the pounds needed to comply with New Zealand guidelines that immigrants maintain a healthy BMI, or body mass index.

BMI is a weight-height ratio that estimates percentage of body fat. The New Zealand Immigration Service requires all applicants to undergo a complete medical examination, which includes body size measures like “waist circumference.”

The regulations were supposedly put into place for budget reasons. The country’s health care system cannot afford to open its doors to overweight immigrants, a spokesman for New Zealand’s Fight the Obesity Epidemic explained to the Daily Mail.

A BMI requirement for immigrants? I could possibly understand it if we were talking an island nation filled with 4 million Kate Mosses, but for a nation of 2 million porkies?

I’ve written about New Zealand here and here. Apparently I’m one of the few people who actually pay attention to what those bigots are up to in their tiny corner of the planet.