CIRCUSMAXIMO

May 19, 2012

We await your brainstorms, kind sirs

So I say another world war is inevitable. If it happens, I’m a prophet. If it doesn’t, I’m a crank. In no other instance do I so hope I’m a crank.

I don’t take myself seriously. I try not to.

But some people are Very Serious. We know that because they never tire of telling us how serious they are.

These are the people who imagine they are trendsetters. They are vanguards of change. They are revolutionary thinkers here on earth to pull us out of the box we’re thinking inside, out of our intellectual ghettos where we metaphorically spit on the sidewalk, jack up old people and devolve to gutter rats of our nature.

They’re here to save us from ourselves, since we don’t have brains, are incapable of original thought, and barely can wipe ourselves after crapping in the weeds.

Take the now-withered “controversy” over the “attachment baby” story with the not-so-baby attached to mommy’s mammary on the cover of Time last week. Remember? Everybody went ape-shit because a little boy old enough to milk a cow if he’d been around a century ago is hanging onto his mother’s nipple like it was the last tit he’d ever suck. For 15 minutes, the shit hit the fan, or so the media told us.

Here’s how Time editor Richard Stengel defends the deliberately provocative (in 1962) photo:

“My response,” Stengel said, “is thousands and thousands – if not millions – of people will pay attention to a story when they wouldn’t have even known about it (otherwise)… Stengel, who says his wife breast-fed their children well after they turned 1, said the cover of a natural parenting act is far less worrisome to him than the images of violence Americans ignore every day on television and in video games. “It’s really comical,” he said, “that some think this stretches the boundaries of taste.”

While avoiding the phrase “milking the publicity for all it’s worth”, we surmise what Stengel means isn’t really that the reaction is comical. Certainly the tit isn’t comical. It’s well-shaped and perky; I envy the kid, a little. What Stengel is really saying is that we’re comical. This was a set-up to get us all confabulated, we fell for it, and we’re hilarious doing so.

We’re comical. We Americans.

And why the hell wouldn’t junior-league thunderbolts like Stengel believe that? Look at what Americans believe… and don’t:

18 percent of Americans believe the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo was Inquisited for nothing. And still they breathe!
Only 39 percent believe in evolution. Adam, meet your rib. You may kiss the bride.
Goodbye, Columbus: Almost 10 percent believe… yes… the earth is flat.
21 percent believe in witches. In a serial fantasy of mine, my favorite girlfriend at any given time is abducted by a coven of voracious lesbian witches, stripped naked, and tormented wetly by lips and tongues on a hideous red altar until she CUMS for SATAN! Whew! I could use a sugar-tit, myself, right now.
Even though we’ve been occupying the country for almost a decade (and will go on doing so forever, despite the “drawdown”), 63 percent of young Americans can’t find Iraq on a map.

C’mon. Anyone capable themselves of grasping the inhale-exhale-inhale formula can form broadly generalized conception of a big-sky, purple plain Bonehead America.

Trouble is, a lot of what our betters believe also turns out to be vast, heaping tubs of shit. When I was young, brilliant professors writing brilliant books for brilliant readers throught Marxism was “inevitable”. It was scientific – ultimate evolution of social dynamic.

And less than 15 years later, Marxism crapped out.

There was a time when our best educational geniuses decided children could be taught to read more quickly if they were taught the way deaf kids learned to read. Phonetics was thrown out the window and several generations of all-but illiterate Americans emerged from our public schools before these visionaries finally fuckin’ died out or retired. We still believe any problem can be solved with enough expenditure of public funds or efforts of a body-painted, passionate counterculture, even though it’s now decades after failure of the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and even the hippie War on War.

Good ideas tend to flow bottom to top, not the other way around. A guy on a jerkwater farm, sitting on a toilet, realized if he sliced the side of a washer and bent the two ends slightly, the pressure would hold bolt to nut much tighter. The lock-washer was born. Really. The guy was on the pottie. Think of how many lock washers are in an airplane next time you’re in flight; think of that inventor ruminating and laying cable.

Bad ideas run out of gas regardless who thinks them up, but when they flow downward, from our detached elites, they tend to overstay their shelf-life because they’re enforced by new, secular morality. Religion is slowly eroding as social enforcer; we just can’t buy the big, careless Creator making it all happen, anymore. However, at least His commandments made sense, especially the one about treating others as we want to be treated. There’s no better way to make civic interactions tolerable.

That’s just one good idea superceded by this new ass-backwards book of common law and rules of order. Politeness is disposable. Today, the most important rules downplay those that used to hold us together. Or, rather, not downplay them as much as slit their throats and fling them down dry wells. For instance: Politeness is merely a facade to mask racist exploitation and oppression. Funny it never seemed that way before.

Even funnier: It doesn’t really seem that way now.

What’s important today, to live a righteous if not logical life, is to eschew racism. Nevertheless, we’re doomed to be forever mired in the sticky stuff if we’re white, regardless what we do. We must believe there is no difference between sexes – women can do everything men can do, only better. All humans are equal – and any differences or advantages in intellect or ability are because racist institutions and rigged social mechanics favor white people with unfair privilege. There’s other stuff – like animal life being no less valuable than human and that Christians suck – but that’s really the foundation. Honkies, women, privilege. There’s your wrap.

We know all of this is bullshit, but the greatest law, the very cornerstone of our new faith is never to mention that in public. No greater sin can be committed than doubting our contemporary hogwash.

I’ve noted this before, this amazing procession of our new vigilant clergy. Some social flaw is discerned – or, more likely, fabricated – and trumpets blare. The lord’s host sallies forth to slay dragons – and mostly to burn heretics in fires of unemployment.

Every time government and media start talking about the same thing, some creepy agenda is bucketing along with the bandwagon. A moral panic is created by cultural discovery – in astounding ‘eureka’ moment - of a component of human life since we sat in trees and chewed nits off our ass-hairs.

Our causes and infamies pop out in spectral horror. Profiling. Bullying. Discrimination. Child abuse periodically is rediscovered by media seers. Each time, it’s brand-new phenomenon, or one growing statistically as scourge unnoticed beforehand. Here we stupid peasants thought schoolchildren capered in pastel paradise, feeding Disney animals from their palms and playing placid co-ed softball. Something must be done!

Take bullying, for instance. We have stories about poor souls driven to suicide by pint-sized Mr. Sluggos who made their lives living hell. We have “Dr. Phil” confessions from former bullies who were re-educated out of their waywardness by cozy psychologists and, for the recidivists, chemical emasculation. Government local and national pass volumes of laws as impossible to enforce as they are badly thought-out. The issue is co-opted as gay crisis. Four-eyed, picked-on – and straight? Tough breeder luck, punching bag.

Then, the worst nightmare imaginable occurs: The ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center get involved. Bullying? You mean, ‘hate crime’, don’t you, fucker? They’ll travel the country, talking to local police about this. By the time they’re through, this emerging outrage will be added to lists of Terrible Goy Dangers.

This process is designed to allow the government more and more control over our lives. It becomes arbiter of “do-bee/don’t-bee” on grand scale. It doesn’t matter if its bullying, or terrorism, or hate. …Seatbelts or smoking. Someday, the government will regulate our erections, bowel movements and use or overuse of air, as well. And there will be punishments. There always are punishments.

We’re told this will help. And we not only believe what we’re told. We DO it

Paying the tab for Israeli arms

Before today, I confess blinkered ignorance of H.R. 4133, a House of Representatives bill aka “the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012.”

There’s little evident cooperation in the this bountiful money bomb for our brave li’l ally, though. What’s going on seems more co-option – of Capitol Hill. According to a column today by ex-CIA officer Philip Giraldi, the outlay couldn’t be more beneficent if it came from the North Pole via eight tiny, Composhield-girded reindeer.

It obligates the United States to veto resolutions critical of Israel, to provide such military support “as is necessary,” to pay for the building of an anti-missile system, to provide advanced “defense” equipment (including refueling tankers, which are offensive), to give Israel special munitions (i.e., bunker-busters, which are also offensive), to forward deploy more U.S. military equipment to Israel, to offer the Israeli air force more training and facilities in the U.S., to increase security- and advanced-technology-program cooperation, and to extend loan guarantees and expand intelligence-sharing (including highly sensitive satellite imagery). Actually, there’s even more included, and I may have missed the kitchen sink. But the objective is to provide Israel with the resources to attack Iran, if it chooses to do so, while tying the U.S. and Israel so closely together that whatever Benjamin Netanyahu does, the U.S. “will always be there,” as our president has so aptly put it.

Kitchen sink? There are also a couple of tiled baths, chrome toilets and one or two terraced pools for the backyard in this dementedly generous package. And here’s another little point Giraldi makes: The reason I and almost everyone else never heard of the bill or its astounding content is because the mainstream media ignored it as vigorously as Jamie Dimon does calls for his dismissal as Chase CEO.

Giraldi points out a Google search of ‘H.R. 4133′ turns up sparse coverage outside of a few lines in the Washington Post (and a mention in The Hill). Actually, House approval of the bill May 9 was quite muted, itself, after the vote went 411–2 on a “suspension of the rules” proviso fastracked it to the floor; that procedural hocus-pocus is intended for non-controversial legislation allowing little debate and speedy vote. It’s tough to believe, even in 2012 America, such windfall giveaway would be lauded universally. The nation isn’t Capitol Hill, by a long shot; in a downturn year, that kind of spending would attract some gimlet stares from lowly denizens of Main Street, regardless all fulminations and “Nazi” accusations hurled their way.

Why all the muffle? What is it about this bill that’s so unreportable? You can bet if we handed a bundle like that to France or Togoland, there’d be eyebrows raised in the national press.

Could it be that old anti-Semetic canard has popped up anew about heavy Jewish influence in major media? Really? OK. Here’s what I’ve got: If it’s anti-Semitic, so be it. Israel gets a pass in our information industry. Everything is good press – or nothing. Name another country so indulged.

It’s not a matter of holdings in this or that company, or whether TV sitcom characters are circumsized. It’s a matter of powerful lobbies twisting arms, doing favors, networking in Congress – of the Federal Communications Commission, for that matter.

In short, yes, doing its job. That’s how things get done in Washington, and if you happen to be deployed to press the cause of the Jewish state, that’s what you do. The Israel Lobby certainly is one of the most successful and most competent at the business of getting what its client wants, bar none. And both our major political parties are populated with flush Jewish donors, who also see to it Israel is treated with kid gloves.

Is that anti-Semitic? OK. The truth is anti-Semitic. It is quite frequently in this country. As I noted: So be it.

For the rest of us, we get to see our foreign policy hijacked to lopsided alliance with one nation, at active disadvantage to its neighbors. Frequently that “active” part is in form of bombs and bullets. This pattycake routine in the Mideast has earned us nothing but enemies throughout Islam. They don’t hate us for our freedoms; they hate us for our policies.

Strapping up Israel for a war with Iran does us no benefit. All the fallout from such an attack would be catastrophic for our own position in the Mideast, and here at home. One thing 9/11 proved, yet again: Terrorists love to travel, and our security lasts as long as a stride through an airport terminal, it’s as durable as forged papers, and as vigilant as bored TSA timeclockers yawning at the gates.

It’s not anti-Semitic to point out we shouldn’t be in such emulsive partnership with any other country.

Who decided nationalism is bad?

…And why do we go on believing them?

Only a deluded leftist ideologue or a media-brainwashed useful idiot would keep scratching their head at the persistently stubborn resurgence of nationalism without pausing to ponder that perhaps tribalism is an ineradicable human instinct rather than a sinister psychological aberration. - Jim Goad, Takimag

Much of the drive to get rid of traditional restrictions against interstate banking was that obsessive American conviction that bigger is better. The thinking gained traction with proposal that capital was the sole, proper engine of economic expansion. Oddly this formula ran parallel with growing popularity of crap-shoot gambling on markets – not to create and build through investments – but to make money out of thin air in process fast, clean and as fragile as a skyscraper made of dry leaves.

The issue is whether we prefer a situation with a large number of little, local monopolies, unaffected by competitive pressure, or a smaller number of larger, branched banks constantly under the competitive gun and better at meeting the needs and demands of consumers. As John McGee has said, “Competition between the old and new ways of doing things proved to be more important, and more valuable, than was ‘competition’ among large numbers of the old style firms. That the new style firm may make large profits under these circumstances surely does not justify either dissolving it or preventing its emergence by prohibiting the new techniques. For consumers (and the surviving producer) benefit greatly in the process.” [Cato Institute, 1987]

Until the 1980s, commercial, depositor banks were limited by state line. It kept them from becoming too big to fail. When they became national in scope, they became integrated into the very DNA of the country, because they handle, buy and sell its lifeblood: money. So, banks got to operate nationwide by the late 1980s. The Reagan years simplified acquisitions and mergers between banks – so these banks became big banks. …And then bigger banks. Once the Glass-Steagall Act’s firewall was removed between commerical and investment banks, 2008 was certainty.

BAM! …The bill for Too Big to Fail banking came due September that year.

It’s not like we weren’t warned.

“Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes ‑‑ excusable or not ‑‑ can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic ‑‑ this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. . .To paraphrase Clemenceau: money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.” [Milton Friedman]

But coaxing us along with that bigger/better delusion was our faith that new ideas overpower old ideas, wrestle them to the ground, and turn them into cellblock bitches. We like new as much as we like big. We constantly revolutionize, we forever teach ourselves what we already know and call it novel. We’ve spent the last half century embracing the new, rejecting the old – and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

…And the bill is coming due for all that bullshit, too.

Those two useful but easily fucked-up propellants – big and new – really power arguments for a one-world, borderless mush of global unity, as well. Surely such a United States of Earth would be new – it’s never been achieved before, although its would-be contractors generally have been tyrants like Genghis Khan and Hitler.

But is bigger really better in this context, either?

Look at it this way? How much a fair shake could you expect if you were held for trial by the salon Jacobins turning wheels of justice at the International Court of Justice at “Peace Palace” in The Hague? (What a pretentious fucking name for a town.) Right now, tinpot tyrants like Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic are collared and hauled before those self-important barristers. But, say, you defend yourself in a home invasion and smoke one of our protected ethnic species? You defend your castle, honkie, and you’re a war criminal. Certainly in any place as archly PC as Europe.

In such arrangement, the ruling elite would see their power boost to superpower. I can imagine the kind of all-but-divine direction bestowed – or subjected – to an enormous pool of stateless, and so rootless, fauna down below. That’s the real push behind all this one-world bullshit: concentration of supreme power within a decisive, and perforce detached, administrative bloc. Wonder who that would be – other than wealthy folk always at or near the seat of command?

Bureaucrats in Brussels scurry though a rat-maze of opaque procedural gobbledygook to govern the European Union, a brainstorm that’s been nothing but trouble since in was installed in the ’90s. It was supposed to combine traditionally antagonistic European states under a single administration umbrella, supposedly applying rubric of “unity is strength”. But it’s never worked. Britain has resisted full membership. Other nations have harpooned proposals for a single, binding Constitution, so the one in force is largely ceremonial. Comparing its legitimacy to America’s charter is like comparing a military medal to an infantry division.

Now Greece and other Mediterranean states are verging on collapse and treatening to take the whole EU down with it. The very idea of a “united Europe” never has seemed more idiotic and unworkable. Nevertheless, fans of “unification” in all its forms persist, if only centralize power, and so enhance it, with themselves at the helm, they hope.

If the nations of Europe do not reclaim their past and safeguard their future—which is what the Hungarian Constitution and the views of likeminded Europeans around the continent is about—then only two futures remain. Either—as Pat Buchanan and sundry others have predicted—our nations of origin will be under sharia law in a century or less, or else their desperate denizens will turn for protection to new leadership with the will to resist creeping Islamization. Such leadership will inevitably be what our pundits are pleased to call neofascists. Neither Islam nor neofascism would bode well for the USA. [Charles Coulombe]

Nations are necessary because they localize power and so its relatinoship to governed. The bigger, the more remote, the more bureaucratic. One size does not fit all. EuroUnion’s aims are to gradually morph all different ethnicities and nationalities that pepper the Mighty Continent into one uniform, hopefully pacified EuroMan. Europese? Europican?

There are some powerful interests in this hemisphere pushing for a union of North American states. A 2005 convention by the very specious Council on Foreign Relations proposes a union of Mexico, Canada and the U.S. would bring us into viable competitiveness with “united” Europe and, of course, provide all-important security against apparently eternal travails of terrorism. Ostensibly, it would be a boon to our neighbor just to the south – probably more than anyone else. As part of a scheme to “spread benefits more evenly”, the move would, among many other things,

Establish a North American Investment Fund to build infrastructure to connect Mexico’s poorer regions in the south to the market to the north.

Restructure and reform Mexico’s public finances.

Fully develop Mexican energy resources to make greater use of international technology and capital.

It would pretty much do away with our troublesome borders, and “develop and implement a North American regulatory plan that would include ‘open skies and open roads’ and a unified approach for protecting consumers on food, health, and the environment.”

“We are asking the leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada to be bold and adopt a vision of the future that is bigger than, and beyond, the immediate problems of the present,” said co-chair John P. Manley, Former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. “They could be the architects of a new community of North America, not mere custodians of the status quo.”

That bigger and beyond future for the “North American community” is what worries me. And the broad language to protect AmeriCanadExicans’ health and environment, together with some orbital “security sphere”, sure is worrisome. How much of blend are we talking about here? Mexico has a Constitiutional approach to judiciary still based on that old-time, Napoleonic “guilty until proven innocent”. Canada is problematic, as well: Our maple-leaf neighbors have drunk the Kool-Aid and have on the books the same kind of “hate speech” bans that so choke free debate in much of the “free world”. Before you argue I’m conflating economic with social unification, remember that in halls of power there always is mission creep. Consider how war is now exclusive purview of the executive branch; since the Korean War, Congressional approval is unnecessary to send in the Marines.

There’s even a proposed North American dollar – the “Amero”. In a Canadian economists argument for such unification of pecuniation, he notes that although monetary sovereignty is seen by many of his countrymen as “very essence of being an indenpendent nation, the land of a thousand lakes already has given up much of its sovereignty by signing on to the World Trade Organization, the IMF, the World Bank and even treaties banning landmines.

Gives me pause about what we’ve signed away in an avalanche of concordats since WWII. (In Herbert Grubel’s Amero pdf, note THE COSTS portion and tell me such a move wouldn’t cost us our individual political and cultural sovreignty, as well.)

Who came up with anti-nationalism idea? The same sector that came up with the “hate speech” con game, of course. Leftists, for all their blather about freedom and civil rights, actually favor oppressive regime design and vast concentration of power in hands of a few. It is an arrangement best suited to that of a Dark Age warlord and tiny court. Fitting that this would emerge from Europe’s ghettos, with street cultures so fatuous of confidence and limited of foresight. The rest of us are ants, after all, and we’re here to take orders from our socially and intellectually superior leadership class.

We are moving, in the West, back into format of hereditary wealth, of economic class determined by bloodline and genetics. Like all aristocracies, it cynically adopts whatever high-minded religion happens to be trending. Right now, it’s cult of the Left, with all its visionary sanctity and determined exclusivity.

The children of the new upper class hardly ever get real jobs during summer vacation. Instead, they get internships at places like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (where I work) or a senator’s office.

It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children. Those from the middle and working class, struggling to pay for college, can’t afford to work for free. Internships pave the way for children to move seamlessly from their privileged upbringings to privileged careers without ever holding a job that is boring or physically demanding. [Charles Murray]

This is a system that’s hardening around its edges, becoming frozen in mechanics and function. It cannot change, it resists alteration. It rejects new blood. Every hereditary class burns itself out. You want a big reason why the U.S. is beginning to be less a commercial turbine for the world, no longer hotbed of development and idea? There you have it.

A single, universal regime of Terra Firma is stuff of nightmare. But even setting aside any neo-monarchies, we need separation, if only because there are some humans we simply don’t want to live around. I don’t sexually mutilate women and disfavor stoning them. I don’t believe in big hairy hobgoblins in the sky, and don’t wish to be forced to do so.

I need a nation of my own kind, to firewall me from those more stupid and dirty than I am or can stand to be.

The elementary drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership easily translates at a higher level into tribalism. People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often than not as marriage partners. They are quicker to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out-group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group.

- BIOLOGIST EO WILSON ON WHY HUMANS NEED TRIBE

Bigger, better, global government would operate no better than Marxism did. People aren’t uniform. They are distinct, and the West is right about a key aspect of humanity: Countries should be contained. Borders should be patrolled. Citizenship isn’t for everyone.

We are first individuals. Company comes in a distant second.