Savages of Socialism

In Venezuela, savvy shoppers are hunting down scarce supplies of toilet paper with a smartphone app. The smartphones, compact packages of electronics, are several generations more advanced than the white square, but they are available when the toilet paper isn't, because unlike the toilet paper they aren't subsidized and price controlled.

While Hugo Chavez did at one point unveil a Chavezphone for the poor, he succumbed to the wonders of Cuba's Socialist medicine before they could become as big as Obamaphones. But if Venezuela ever falls to the dumbphone, then there won't be a smartphone app to find a smartphone with.

The sight of modern men and women hunting down toilet paper with smartphones seems like the Soviet Union as reimagined by William Gibson, but it's a common enough outcome in an economy that is really a patchwork of uneven subsidies.

The Arab Spring was fueled by the social media apps of smartphones and anger over insufficient subsidies for staples such as bread and fuel. The smartphones may bring you the revolution, but it's the toilet paper and bread shortages that set them off.

The problem is a commonplace one that Americans will shortly begin experiencing with the subsidized medicine of Obamacare.

Most governments subsidize or price control some necessities to win over the underclass... or at least keep them from burning down everything in sight.

The Arab Spring took place in countries where government subsidized food and fuel existed side by side with monopolies over nearly everything held by cronies if the ruling class. Bread was temporarily cheap, but nearly everything else was either substandard or nonexistent... except for the American-designed and Chinese-built smartphones being used to document the food and fuel revolution.

A society stuck somewhere along the way in the transition between Socialism and a free economy finds itself in these savage intersections in which high technology is available, but the basic needs which the underclass is bought off with aren't.

Manhattan, that glittering island of towers rising between the waters of two rivers that are one, values real estate above gold. A square foot of dirt in Manhattan might as well be marble for what it fetches.

Finding an apartment in Manhattan is a challenge worthy of a treasure hunter and Bloomberg recently unveiled a plan for micro apartments that would be little more than closets with kitchen sinks.

Manhattan is a small and narrow strip of land which accounts for some of the high prices, but its real estate is also a crazy quilt of wildly overpriced market housing and subsidized housing projects. In some tenements rent-controlled apartments that cost less than anywhere else in the city coexist with 5,000 dollar a month pads and the only difference between them is regulation.

Downtown grim blocs of housing project towers crowd out riverfront views that would be worth hundreds of millions while the bankrupt city Housing Authority fights pitched battles with residents to sell a few scraps of empty land to developers to finance the welfare castles.

Uptown, large lots sit empty and bound to a covenant of affordable housing signed during the city's lean years that now make the land worthless for anything except growing weeds.

A booming housing market in the city is built on runaway prices caused by artificial shortages. Manhattan is really two islands, one is being built up and torn down again every few years, while the other is stuck in a state of permanent slumhood since the seventies. One pays for its organic grapes with smartphone apps and the other buys everything with food stamp cards.

The gap between these extremes is where the shortages form and the Middle Class eventually falls into that hole between the extremes of the liberal poor who want to be subsidized and the liberal rich who want someone to do something about the poor. The welfare class is relieved not to be burdened with slog to the Middle Class and the crony capitalists are not interested in more completion. Both agree on a static society managed with subsidies and monopolies. This system had more than a passing resemblance to the dysfunctional countries of the Middle East. The only difference is that America still has a Middle Class for the system to drink dry.

Over in Pennsylvania, the union for liquor store workers in the state-controlled liquor monopoly is running alarmist ads insisting that privatizing the liquor industry will cause mass death.

If you can't trust ordinary mortals with the difficult and dangerous task of selling bottles of liquor, what can you trust them with? Nothing.

There is no reason why liquor has to be a state monopoly except that it pays better for liquor store workers. It also pays better in every other industry.

Nationalizing industries is a bad deal for consumers and taxpayers, but a great deal for workers. And all it takes is declaring the industry a vital one that can't be entrusted to the same boobs who run nuclear power plants, design artificial limbs and build dams, but must be put in the care of the great minds responsible for forcing banks to loan money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back, an economic catastrophe that we are still recovering from.

Like government toilet paper, subsidizing jobs makes jobs harder to find, but that is only of concern to the people who don't have them. Every economic system creates those who have and those who don't. Socialism creates have nots with the same system that it creates haves, manufacturing scarcity for social justice.

Socialism is an economy in which the haves have jobs giving out welfare and the have nots have jobs receiving it. The one truly scarce commodity under Socialism is employment because there is only so much welfare to be given out.

Consolidating an industry improves the bargaining power of its employees while diminishing the quality of service. And then there are no longer two tiers, only the tier of the monopoly.

Nationalize industries in parts or all the way and you end up with taxpayer funded and worker run industries that are run for the benefit of the workers. It's a Socialism of the civil service, a bureaucratic collectivism that plays at public service.

The return of the guild system walls off more of those rivers that the Middle Class once depended on to reach the shore. Services become sinecures. Jobs are allocated based on racial representation. The number of employees is inflated while the results vanish. The system exists for the sake of the system.

In Mexico, teachers from its powerful union pass on their jobs to their children and sell them. Soon enough it will be that way in Los Angeles too.

When jobs are subsidized then jobs are scarce and it only stands to reason that those who are lucky

Yes, that's a teachers' strike

enough to get their hands on government jobs will want to pass them on to their children. In America the rallying cry if teachers' unions is that they are doing it for the children. That is also the rallying cry in Mexico, except that they mean their own children. Naturally. Why should they care about anyone else's children? They're public servants, not humanitarians.

There is something medieval about public service being transformed into a family business but this sort of "privatization" is a commonplace consequence of a system in which government jobs are the ultimate commodity.

The idealism of Socialism turns savage as the Middle Class finds it harder than ever to go up but easier than ever to go down. All you have to do is give up and a life of hopelessness is waiting for you. There will even be cheap government toilet paper... though it may take a non-government smartphone to find it and a mob to keep it.

The Urban Tyranny

Every city is by necessity a tyranny. Density determines how people live and how they do not. Freedom is in part inefficiency and city living is fed by the need to achieve social efficiency. Bloomberg's much denounced nanny state tactics are only an extension of the same drive to maximize social efficiency.

Bloomberg may have become the poster billionaire for such behavior, but the majority of cities have their own solutions to the problems of people that come at the expense of individual freedom. The same efficiency that compresses the maximum number of people into an existing space is also applied to every other area of their lives. In cities of strangers, there is no area of life too intimate to be examined and made more efficient.

Unlike the country, the city is its own frontier. Its great adventure is not exploration, but existence. The city is always changing, mutating, falling apart and coming together under assault from waves of new immigrants and social challenges. Its spaces are inner spaces; whether those of the mind of the individual on a crowded bus, the meaning of the squiggles in a piece of abstract art or that club hidden at the end of an old alley.

Cities are never stable. That is what makes them exciting. Truly old cities become fossilized, but they still always seem on the verge of being tipped over. The city is a social breakdown in motion and the authorities are always scrambling to apply emergency measures to salvage it. There are always poor people somewhere and other people on the verge of rioting. A criminal underclass haunts its towers and slums. And most of all there are too many people.

Freedom is measured in terms of space, both physical and conceptual, but in the city freedom is largely conceptual, rather than physical. The city man and woman are less likely to go camping than to explore their inner psyches. With little physical space available that is unoccupied, the urbanite retreats to the one sanctuary where no one can trouble him. His own mind. Despairing of physical space in his cramped conditions, he takes refuge in the space of his own psychic attic.

Culture flourishes in the city, but it is a culture that is a signpost of status. Urban culture has to work harder to be noticed among jaded appetites in cities where the noise and bustle make attentions harder to seize and where sensibilities are harder to shock. Status symbols in culture take that one step further by disrupting communications, producing art that is illegible and requires inside knowledge to interpretation. The escape into deeper levels of metaphor continues the urbanite exploration of the psyche while closing the door to the underclass to preserve the status of the artistic cultural space.

The city is seen as the pinnacle of culture and therefore there is nowhere else to go but deeper inside. If the city is the endpoint of human civilization, then its refining becomes the prime task of that civilization.

The modern liberal would hardly exist but for the various social improvement schemes of the city from the early muckraking photographers taking photos of dirty slum children playing in alleys to the massive implementation of the modern welfare state. The agrarian and industrial obsessions of the left have collapsed. Only the urban obsession with the eternal slums, now likely to be the product of government intervention, rather than slum overcrowding, continues.

It is no coincidence that Obama's big victories came in the city. And it is even quite probable that population density might be a predictor of big government and small government voters. It isn't that urbanites especially love government, but they have come to accept it as a necessary evil and to look longingly for the vaunted reformers to come and save them from the political machines.

The lack of space, physical, economic and structural, in a city makes the lack of freedom into a part of the design. It is second nature to assume that someone must administer those friction zones because there is no alternative.

The social codes that might resolve such conflicts elsewhere are difficult to sustain in an environment that is always changing. Anonymity brings with it a freedom from peer pressure and community mores, but also eliminates the power of those things to maintain social norms.

Urban social norms are evolved to avoid conflict. Urbanites studiously ignore each other or maintain a distant politeness in their interactions. Not noticing other people is the height of good manners. The truly civilized man is expected not to notice uncivilized behavior. Relativism is the expected response to any violation of human norms, but not to violations of any element of the petty codes of urbania. It is very well for a man to strip naked on a train and run from car to car shouting that the aliens are coming, but not to throw his recycling into the trash.

The only free people in cities are eccentrics and criminals. Eccentricity is a necessary performance art in the face of anonymity. And criminality is often the only way to get things done. Everyone breaks some laws because there are too many laws and many of them are unreasonable or unlivable. In their own way, every urbanite is an eccentric and a criminal. It is only a matter of scale. The best eccentrics have features written about them in newspapers. Less successful eccentrics occasion only shrugs. The best criminals become legends. The rest just spend their senior years bemoaning the new thugs who don't seem to care about honor and are only out for themselves.

Information is the great obsession of the city. The urbanization of America has kept up with an information management revolution. Telecommuting did not touch off a second wave of suburban escapes. Instead cities became bigger than ever.

The new mobile technologies can be used for telecommuting, but what they do best is overcome the sense of confining space. Compacting social interactions into a 4 inch device has transformed the city into a landscape of invisible connections. Social media has achieved another descent for the city into inner space, maintaining imaginary broad social spaces amid the density of urban life.

The internet has become the ultimate city, a virtual urban environment flooded with content, shocks, amazes and confuses, while destroying sensibilities and boundaries. It is a multicultural city encompassing the world. And the individual cities are also coming to seem like the internet, networks and hubs, short-lived and purposeless, but somehow hanging on long enough to grab some attention.

Information is the city's only reason for existence. The industries have fled to dirtier cities in the far east. Detroit still grinds on as carmakers subsidized by the government subsidize a city abandoned by its people. On the verge of bankruptcy, Detroit looms large in the imagination as a failure, a relic of industry whose great failure was the inability to attract enough bright young people with money to subsidize its army of government employees.

New York City on the other hand is a success story. The city makes very little of any use, but it does cater to tourists and acts as a hub of the financial industry. It offers impressions and information as its currency. And supplements that with culture and education. It is no different in this than many other cities, including London.

The new city is park brokerage and part hipster hangout, with the two often overlapping. Outside this charmed circle of hedge funders attending art exhibitions is a growing permanent underclass flowing through the gates of the city. The relationship of that underclass to the two charmed circles of finance and culture is that of the barbarians at the gates of a decadent empire. 

Cities are arguably ghettos. The old mechanisms for moving workers up the ladder collapsed when industries did. The workers who moved to the north from the south to take advantage of those industries became dwellers in the ghettos and they were joined by armies of immigrants looking for opportunities, but finding few of those outside the civil service.

The city exists to administer the city, to cater to it and to serve it. Cities are getting bigger, but it's not a natural increase. The very efficiency of the city has made it a convenient place to gather large numbers of people who need caring for. That is explicitly the case in Detroit where plans include making the city far smaller by demolishing parts of it in order to be better able to care for the people.

The modern city is a failure, but it is also the space out of which conceptions of the ideal state come from. Urbanites are still suckers for the progressive dream of a global state that packs everyone into a city as big as the world. No one asks to what purpose. To an urbanite, the purpose of the city is self-apparent. It is home.

Coming to America

How does one define a nation? That is truly the fundamental question of amnesty.

The libertarian argument in favor of amnesty comes down to the question of whether nations even necessary at all. If the only characteristic that matters is freedom then borders and the other vestiges of nationhood only interfere with the flow of the free market.

America then becomes a set of ideas and its only usefulness is as a space for harboring those ideas. This ideological definition of a nation demands that it sacrifice its survival to its ideas.

This notion is found most strongly among liberals for whom the actual physical survival of the country ranks a distant second to its duty to live up to its ideals. That is why liberals can argue that torture is wrong even in a ticking nuclear bomb scenario.

In the real world countries don't do well as vehicles for ideology. A country is a practical entity that encompasses the real life needs and challenges of people, while an ideology tends toward rigid self-righteous fantasies. Countries need ideologies to define them, but becoming prisoners to rigid ideological ideals can destroy them.

Any ideology whose logic is followed to its final conclusion leads to a horrifying and unlivable society.

The logic of libertarian amnesty would fill the voting rolls full of supporters of big government and the welfare state in the name of economic freedom. It's not the worst illustration of how ideologies commit suicide through following the siren song of their logic to the farthest north. It's not even the worst such example involving immigration. That honor belongs to the European left whose immigration policies have doomed the survival of every value it claims to care for. But it is typical of the destruction wrought by dismissing people and their nations as interchangeable cogs in a machine of ideas.

The multicultural left is not entirely wrong about cultural relativism; it is only wrong in assuming that its existence demonstrates the lack of any absolute values or truths.

To a tribal society, America is a land forever in contention and American leaders are mere tyrants who represent no one. In a tribal society where legitimacy stems from family, the President of the United States is no more than a bandit with a large army and a heap of weapons. Not only does he have no tribe, but he boasts of his confusing tribelessness in his books, at times pretending to be a member of different tribes.

America is a power to tribals, not a tribe. An empire that fills its land with tribes and imagines that it can rule over them. A land in which their tribe may rise supreme.

What happens when an identity based on economic regulation or deregulation meets one based on family? The expansion of the welfare state is only one of the minor consequences of this collision. Democrats and Republicans have come to think of themselves as regulators and deregulators, but for all the flowery prose that gets trotted out at conventions, this is less an identity than an engineering philosophy of government that has little meaning to tribals who view government as either "mine" or "yours", as a source of patronage, money and power to their tribe or to their rivals.

Family is largely immune to the clash of ideas. Ideas are for introverted societies exploring their own depths while families are for extroverted societies bound on missions of conquest. While the introverted society explores inner space, the extroverted society explores the outer space at its borders. 

While the ideologues study to see how the tribals will fit into their plans, the tribals are checking out the real estate. That is how it happened in the Roman Empire. That is how it happening in the clumsy new Rome of the EU.

The End of Control

We utilize systems to achieve goals whether it's defending the country or fighting poverty or making the trains run in time or achieving political change.

Modem systems are systematic creatures that aim to achieve goals by maximizing control over all the subsidiary elements of the problem.

So if you set out to solve poverty, you need control over all the social and economic elements that either cause poverty or could be used to ameliorate poverty. Those elements include the sum amount of national wealth for the purposes of wealth redistribution, the rate of  unwed teen pregnancies and any forms of racial discrimination... and that's just for starters. Even poverty, which would seem like a rather simple phenomenon becomes a system which takes into account tools like abortion, progressive taxation and discrimination laws.

The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every string touched spreads vibrations everywhere. Solving even the most minor problem requires solving all the problems and the only solution is the absolute power of the system.

Socialism relies on systems as means to achieve social ends. The systems develop policies that control as a means to achieve those ends. 

When the ends are not achieved then the system responds by intensifying the depth and scope of the control. Increasing control is the only solution of the system to failure. 

And so the system changes from pursuing control as a means to pursuing control as an end.

Socialism, like most systems of government derived from it, has enshrined control as an end in and of itself. 

As O'Brien said in 1984, the purpose of power is power. And control is just another word for power. 

Systems may be formed to achieve moral ends but they are no more moral in and of themselves than a hammer. The longer a system exists, the more it comes to exist for itself and its power becomes its own end. 

A hammer exists to hammer. A hammer in the hands of a man is a tool, but a hammer that exists for its own sake is a destructive force. A bureaucracy exists to regulate to achieve a specific end, but a bureaucracy that exists for its own sake is tyranny. It seeks to control for the sake of control. It wields power for the sake of power. 

It insists that its ends are moral, but as they are not achieved, the true end of control is revealed. 

Socialism begins with control to achieve social ends only for control to become the end. And that leads to the end of freedom.

An institution vested with power becomes an institution of power.  The response of the left to this inevitable fact of human history is to insist that granting unlimited power to their institutions will have different results because their purposes are moral. But moral purposes can only be vested in people, not institutions. Ideology can take control of institutions but once control is achieved then the ideology comes to exist for the sake of the institution. That is how the grand ambitions of the left died in China and Russia. That is how it may die in Europe and America.

As a system becomes its own purpose, it uses the purposes of others as camouflage. It promises to solve problems that it has no intention of solving as means of extracting resources from those who want the problem solved. 

Initially the system may be run by those who do want to solve the problem and see the system as the only way to do so but as the system grows and spreads their motives become mixed. 

Bureaucracy is the essence of the system and exists to keep track of and implement its many rules. The rules are the tools of control and their purpose is to make the unpredictable into the predictable. 

The rules start life as the means but as with all means of tyranny they become the ends by which the bureaucracy exercises its power. 

Rules in a bureaucracy operate on different levels. On one level they are meant to achieve a socially responsible end, but on another they benefit the allies of the bureaucracy. On a third level they exist to justify the expansion of the bureaucracy and to allow it to wield its power. On a fourth level they define status within the bureaucracy. 

So for example an environmental initiative may be intended to lessen pollution levels on the surface but also rewards environmental groups and consultancies whose lobbying enhances the power and funding of the EPA. On a third level, the EPA now uses the initiative to expand the scope of its authority and request more funding to hire more people in the D.C. pecking order between government agencies. On a fourth level, this influences the pecking order within the organization.

The EPA is an environmental organization but it's an organization and in the long run when the institutional long marches have been completed, it is the organizational part that will matter more,

The left provides tyranny with the social motive to come into being, but in the long run the left Is only the midwife of tyranny. Its ideology and activists dismantle democracies and burgeoning democracies and replace them with tyrannies. 

Whether it's Islam or a conventional oligarchy or a cult of personality tyrant, the left's role is to act as the virus that kills the host and then allows it to be fed on by predators in the hopes of infecting them in turn. 

The left injects bureaucratic collectivism into a healthy state to control it, but in the long run the bureaucratic collectivism will outlive it as it becomes the end for which the left was only the means.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Brief Roundup

This has been a very long week and while there has been Thank G-D some important progress, there is still a road ahead. That means more reruns and shorter less edited new articles.

Thank you for your understanding and patience. 

THE DISPENSABLE OBAMA

The Dispensable Nation is the story of a struggle between two Democratic administrations; the one that exists and the shadow administration that Hillary Clinton attempted to create as Secretary of State. Like any fawning propaganda text, The Dispensable Nation has to be read on two levels. On one level, it’s a critique of Obama’s foreign policy. On another level, it exists to make the case for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In 2008, Obama campaigned against Hillary Clinton as the peacenik versus the warmonger who voted to invade Iraq. Now Hillary’s people are preparing to run her as the peacenik alternative to the warmonger of the previous administration who was too hard on Iran and the Taliban.

To understand how terrible the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton would be, it’s enough to know that here she is depicted as the negotiator to Obama’s militarist. If you thought that Obama spent too much time apologizing and negotiating, then just wait till Hillary arrives. And indeed, one of the few foreign policy “triumphs”  of the Secretary of State that Nasr cites involved an apology to Pakistan.

Clinton Insider Reveals Obama’s Foreign Policy Blunders



SELECTIVELY STUPID

Investigative work is built on selective mistrust. The difference between a state in which there are police and a police state is the scope of that mistrust. A state in which there are police will pursue criminals by using investigative techniques to profile suspects while a police state criminalizes everyone by treating the entire population of the country like suspects.

Pandering to Islam is just the latest phase in the dumbing down of law enforcement that began when civil liberties activists made it nearly impossible for police to do their jobs. After decades of lawsuits and judicial activism, law enforcement and a new generation of urban mayors reclaimed troubled areas with ruthless policing that terrorized people across the board.

This strange compromise between liberals and law enforcement led to a perverse police state in which any form of discrimination based on likelihood of criminality was worse than the actual crime or than treating everyone like a criminal.

The Dumb Police State




WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

And now there is the closest thing we’ll get to an admission from the halls of Obama Inc.

The decision was ultimately driven by the discovery Assad used [chemical weapons] but there were a number of other factors in place that were also important,” conceded an administration official with direct knowledge of the deliberations. “Would we have made [the determination Assad had breached the red line] even if we didn’t have the evidence? Probably.”

Par for the course. The arrogance of the admission is a statement of confidence in the media. If a Bush official had said in 2002 that we’re going in and saying there are WMDs even if there aren’t any, it would have been on every front page of every paper for a week. There would have been calls for impeachment.

But Obama’s people can openly admit that they were planning to lie the country into a war and it’s buried.

Obama Official Admits They Would Have Lied About “Red Line” Breach




THE ROAD TO HAMA

Back during the Iran-Iraq War we viewed Saddam Hussein as the lesser evil. This time around our Saddam is still a Sunni pitted against a Shiite in a new version of the conflict taking place in Syria.

The Syrian Civil War is likely to end more like Hama than Stalingrad. The Assad clan has survived challenges before and the Sunni rebels are losing. And unlike Russians, Muslims don’t tend to fight to the bitter end nearly as much. Instead they run away to fight another day.

The Iran-Iraq War was unique in some ways but it had two dominant tyrants on both sides pushing men into the meat grinder. This time around there are only clumsy coalitions dominated by politicians who want someone else to do the fighting and dying.

That’s why the Turks, Qataris and Saudis have dragged in the United States.

The Return of the Iran-Iraq War in Syria




IMMEMORIAL

An unspecified time ago a bunch of Founding Founders of unknown sexual orientations and sexual identities founded a country on a non-exclusive basis in order to promote free birth control, open borders and cowboy poetry.

We are engaged now in a great civil war for transgender bathrooms, gay marines and abortions for all to test whether a nation so conceived can endure all its abortions.

Obama Inc Renames “Founding Fathers” to “Founding Founders”




WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE II?

“You just think how lame you’d be … suppose I had let a million people, two million people be refugees out of Kosovo, a couple hundred thousand people die, and they say, ‘You could have stopped this by dropping a few bombs. Why didn’t you do it?’ And I say, ‘because the House of Representatives voted 75 percent against it?’” Clinton said. “You look like a total wuss, and you would be.”

Digging deeper, Clinton is patting himself on the back for invading Yugoslavia, a country where genocide was not taking place, while ignoring Rwanda where genocide was taking place.

Here’s Clinton saying it himself…

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton admitted that if the U.S. had gone into Rwanda sooner following the start of the 1994 genocide, at least a third or roughly 300,000 lives could have been saved.

Bill Clinton Taunts Obama as a “Wuss” If He Doesn’t Ignore Congress, Go to War in Syria

Little Brother in the Big City

When the big things start getting out of control, we start focusing on the little ones instead. Tackling small problems we can't solve is a good way to feel good about the big ones that we can't.

Can't do anything about the nice young men from Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh who occasionally stop maxing out social welfare and working odd jobs to set off bombs in the London Underground or butcher a soldier within sight of his base?

Just arrest an 85-year-old woman who shouts at Muslims that they should go back to their own country. At 85, she probably won't put up much of a fight. Then send out 1,200 police officers to protect Muslims from the wrath of a few dozen angry Brits who might conceivably hurt their feelings. And follow that up with some interfaith sessions with community leaders and you're all set.

Can't do anything about Muslims rioting and burning cars in Stockholm? Just send them out to leave parking tickets on the charred wrecks afterward. The owners probably won't do more than mutter a few obscenities and then recollect that they are lucky to be living in such a progressive country that stays out of both foreign and domestic conflicts while providing the best in social welfare.

Most multicultural urban utopias are sliding downhill under a new generation of technocrats who can juggle the numbers and focus on what really matters. Salt in food. Bike shares. Toy gun buybacks. Plastic bag bans. Composting. Obesity programs. Diversity programs. Bullying programs. And forty other mostly irrelevant things.

The city is being segmented into unlivable welfare ghettos where there is no law and gentrified areas inhabited by hipster technocrats who want a thousand regulations that will make everything come out exactly their way. Both the ghetto and the gentro are expanding and squeezing out a working middle class baffled to wake up one morning and find out that they are the enemy of the new state.

In the modern city, you can walk two blocks or drive two miles and cross from a graffiti streaked strip of subsidized housing where the only law is don't talk to the police to an oasis of renovated homes where there are roughly four million regulations covering every little thing.

On one side, the police are out in force responding to shootings, stabbings and domestic violence complaints. On the other, the community board or local council is constantly under pressure from "community activists" to pass new Green regulations on energy efficiency or a ban on displaying toy guns in store windows.

The big effort to salvage the cities lay with courting a new elite of top grads by catering to their proclivities for bike zones, artisanal fusion cupcakes and just enough multiculturalism to make them feel good about sending Sierra or Madrigal to a private school that reserves 10 spots for diversity. That made trendy companies more comfortable about setting up shop in the city and the new burst of gentrification ticked out numbers that made it seem like the city was on the way up. Growing populations of hipster yuppies were displacing the ghettos to the suburbs, helped along by diversity lending mandates from banks, and ushering in a new clueless incarnation of the nanny state.

The old city was liberal. The new one is retarded. It's chock full of all the insane regulatory treehouse agendas of the college campus and just as tightly controlled. Its livable areas are hideously expensive post-college hangouts for grads with big money and big debts looking for hip places to live and its unlivable places are kept to a dull roar with lots of freebies. That worked in the 90s when cities were full of tech and finance sector money and were happy enough to pass it down to the ghettos or to even export the ghettos to the suburbs. But now the money is tight and the violence is up.

Progressive technocracy failed at all the big stuff, but it's focusing on all the small stuff. Set foot in a modern college campus and you'll be leafletted by a dozen activists pushing their petty agendas. That is now the state of the city where no one talks about mass riots and unsustainable pensions, instead the agenda is dominated by the petty fascism of environmental activists and diversity activists. The areas of every city not inhabited by the hipster yuppies and their dog parks could burn to the ground and the very next day the big agenda would still be LGBT school bullying or plastic bag bans. 

Bloomberg isn't some kind of outlier. He just happens to be more obnoxious than the rest. The truth is that in policy, he is no worse than dozens of other mayors, who eagerly sign on to all his initiatives. And the other truth is that this petty control freakery is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the big issues. The worse the big problems get, the more focused the entire policy apparatus becomes on the minutia of liberalism. It's not big brother anymore. It's his obnoxious little brat of a sibling.

Forget burning cars. If anyone can smell a waft of cigarette smoke, Little Brother will be on you. Bombings and beheadings are taken in stride. But sensitivity violations bring out the cops, who always know whom they can take a club to and whom they can't. Fighting Morlocks is dangerous, but abusing an Eloi who didn't use the proper verbal form for a protected group or didn't put something recyclable in the right trash bin is fun for the whole government family.

What we have is not quite fascism. It's a selective fascism. It's stuff white people like fascism. It's fascism for enclaves of hipster yuppies who still believe in initiatives advocating perfecting the community through petty tyranny while around them the world burns. It's not Reichstag fascism, it's a compartmentalized fascism in which the sheep prey on the sheepish while pretending that the wolves don't exist. It's the fascism of the Eloi who don't just sit around helplessly, but oppress other Eloi.

Little Brother and Little Sister never grew up, and instead of a family album, they have photos of their favorite meals in their social media. They would only wear jackboots ironically, but they have painstakingly exact tastes in everything from food to fonts to politics and they want everything to be exactly the way that they think it should. They believe in freedom and in reporting their neighbors to the authorities. They believe in personal choice for everyone who thinks the way that they do. They are, it goes without saying, Obama voters.

In Little Brother's state, the police don't enforce the law. They enforce the whims of Little Brother and Little Sister. They are there to see that all the children play with Little Brother and Little Sister the way that they want them to. They don't believe in fighting crime or terrorism, except briefly when it happens to them, and they let go of it once their Facebook friends tell them to check their privilege, but they do believe in enforcing the million petty regulations of utopia.

Little Brother doesn't want anything done about crime. He wants something done about the rude people who drive cars to work or carry food home in plastic bags without caring about the impact on the environment. Little Sister doesn't care about Islamic terrorism. Islam is like spiritual and part of the great fabric of diversity. She wants something done about the unenlightened people who just don't get that.

Little Brother and Little Sister are the new elite. They are the unthinkingly glib products of an educational system that teaches little, but indoctrinates a lot. Their knowledge comes from Wikipedia. Their actual education taught them little except about how many people the United States managed to oppress in such a short time and how we need to feel connected to the environment to truly be alive.

Every age has its elites. Our age is burdened with idiot elites dedicated to destroying the "elites". We have a 1 percent that inveighs against the power of the 1 percent and then throws around its weight to get its way. We have people who work for corporations denouncing corporate power only to make use of it anyway. Our elites offer a torrent of contradictory pieties that are undone by their actions.

And the people who actually run all this, negotiating between the idiot elites and the violent classes, are only too happy to focus on the small stuff because the big stuff is officially hopeless. The real problems are a tangled Gordian knot that can be cut through, but not unwound individually the way the technocrats would like to do. And the little problems devolve into petty fascism that makes everyone but the people being stepped on feel better.

The angry mobs get to torch, behead and bomb. And the remnants of the middle class get a boot in the teeth. And Little Brother and Little Sister get to turn another street into a bike path or to insert calorie counts or environmental warnings or some other treehousery into daily life so that they can pretend that they have power, when the territory that they have power over is actually shrinking.

The center of power is always the last to feel the sensation of deadening chaos outside. It takes tyrants, even petty ones, a while to figure out that the system is over. The power that insulates them from that knowledge becomes petty. Instead of controlling nations, they control capital cities and eventually only their own courts. That micromanagement gives them the illusion of being in charge.

The Little Brothers have pushed the West to the edge, but they laugh at the very idea of danger. By all their metrics, everything is better than it was before. There are more jobs developing apps and more bikes being ridden and fewer people saying insensitive things and more little boys being taught not to play with guns and more diversity everywhere. It's progress. It's the future. It's forward and onward.

They're winning all the arguments and controlling the debate, but yet somehow everything is slipping through their fingers. Every initiative of their agenda passes, but it never works out the way that they think it should.

Little Brother, that poor sad imitation of Uncle Joe or Fidel, is a child playing with toys. All his experiences have taught him that he can control whatever he wants to, from his parents to his electronics to other children, but his societies, cities and countries are slipping out of his grasp and into a dark territory of anarchy.

The new power isn't an entitled brat with a government, but a gang leader with a hundred men or a kid who figures out how to bypass some onerous aspect of the system and tells other about it. Civilization is coming apart at the seams and it is the destroyers who have the power, not the petty liberal fascists who can dictate the ingredients of every meal, but not whether they will be beaten to death while biking home.

Liberals have wrecked cities and nations. And what rises out of the wreckage is not some progressive utopia, but oases of petty progressive fascism surrounded by a growing darkness of unmanageable and ungovernable territories and people. The dark age isn't coming. It's already here.

You Can't Outleft the Left

The dominant struggle of the 20th Century was the attempt to reconcile the growth of industrial economies with the social welfare demands of the left. The various attempts to "Steal the Thunder" of the left by adopting its social programs led to horrors such as Nazism on the one hand and the growth of the welfare state on the other.

Communism was finally defeated by adopting its program. The national battle against a Russian
Communist empire was won while the domestic struggle against the left was lost.

The welfare state created a fifth column of bureaucrats and recipients to act as the left's electorate. Instead of stealing the left's thunder, they subsidized the triumphant long march of the left.

The liberal Republican prescription is still to Outleft the left, adopting some of its more popular ideas and social policies in a more sensible fashion. And they have never understood that the strategy, even when it succeeds in the short term, is doomed. You don't win by making your enemy stronger. The left understands that. That is why it's strategies once in power involve deepening and expanding its institutional power while destroying those of the right.

The temptation to Outleft the left is always there and always doomed because adopting the ideas and positions of the left means that you have already lost.

Mastering the craft of political expediency only gets you through an election. But if you adopt enough expediencies, moving left to win battles, the day will come when there are no more elections because the war has been lost.

Allying with the far left against the left on national security can be as tempting for some libertarians as bending on social welfare and amnesty is for some liberal Republicans. But it's equally a dead end.

The media has begun conniving in the downfall of Obama because the election is over and the next election will require a Democrat who will run against Obama in the same way that Gore ran against Clinton and McCain ran against Bush.

In 2008, Obama ran to the left of Clinton on national security. There are signs that this time around Hillary Clinton will try to run to the left of Obama on national security taking advantage of the national dissatisfaction with multiple wars to push a return to a 9/10 Clinton Administration era of ignorance and inaction.

The ultimate beneficiary of the NSA outrage will be Hillary Clinton. And even if that we're not the case, trying to Outleft the left still fails even when it appears to work. Mainstreaming the ideas of a Glenn Greenwald because at a given time he makes a useful club to beat Obama with will only ensure a future version of Obama who is even further to the left.

Outlefting the left only radicalizes it and then the left radicalizes the country. Defeating Obama by empowering the left would be as pyrrhic a victory as winning the Cold War while empowering the welfare state.

What distinguishes conservatives within a party whose political operatives all too often sacrifice principles to political expediency are those principles. It is often said that those who hold to their principles lose sight of the bigger picture. But principles are the bigger picture.

Either we fight for principles or for power and it's easy to tell the difference. Principles are consistent regardless of who is in power. Everything else is political expediency.

There can be a conservative case made against NSA data mining, but the case had to be consistent. Treating drones as an ingenious weapon under Bush but an evil death machine under Obama is not a principled position. If the NSA is bad, it was bad under Bush. If drones are bad, they were bad under Bush.

There is a fundamental difference between opposing a political targeting program in the IRS under Obama and jumping on the left's side of any national security issue because it allows us to hit Obama even when the issue did not originate under Obama.

Not all scandals are created equal. Some scandals are an outrage because they violate our principles and because they are a declaration of war against us. Others are a scandal because a bunch of international left wing activists who oppose every conceivable American military action say that they are.

A conservative case on any issue does not rely on the likes of Glenn Greenwald for support. If what we truly fear is the tyranny of the left, then what possible good can come from empowering the far left?

That's not allying with Stalin against Hitler, it's allying with Stalin against Socialists.

If you go into a struggle of ideas, you should know what your principles are and derive solutions from them. Greenwald and the rest of the far left does. Their principles lead them to reject terrorism as anything other than a response to American foreign policy. Their solution would be total surrender and appeasement. Imagine a policy that makes Obama look like a militarist and exceptionalist and you're there.

Many believe that there can be nothing worse than Obama. History suggests otherwise. There can always be worse and the seeds of that are here today.

The Democrats embraced the anti-war movement to bring down Bush and the end result of that alliance was Barack Obama. If Republicans embrace the anti-war movement to bring down Obama, forcing the Democrats to go even further to the left, what political monsters will be spawned from that mating?

In a long struggle it is easy to lose sight of your principles. The question is have we lost sight of our principles in fighting terrorists, as the left insists, or after fighting a long bitter war against Obama for so long are we losing sight of the fact that our larger struggle is not against Obama, but the ideas and institutions of the left that he is a part of?

The enemy isn't just Obama or his flunkies. It's also Glenn Greenwald and Michael Moore. It's the entire transnational idea that denies the right of nations to defend themselves and indicts them endlessly for imaginary crimes against the Third World.

The only way to make a conservative case against tactics like the NSA wiretapping is to reject that premise and the likes of Greenwald. Unless that is done, the case belongs to the far left and adopting it is not an act of principle but expediency. Trying to beat Obama with the ideas of the left by undermining America will only give the left an even bigger victory.

The Art of Building Things

Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams.

American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work.

Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets.

The Soviet Union fell because its Communist collectives were not able to equal the West in the military or the economic arena. The only technique that Communist states ever had was to create a heavily regulated top-down infrastructure and when a crisis occurred, a mass of people would be thrown at the problem.

The collective approach allowed the Soviet Union to construct massive infrastructure projects; building roads, power stations and housing. But these were flawed imitations of Western projects and were poorly designed and implemented. The same pattern repeated itself across the Communist sphere. The collective could inefficiently mobilize armies of workers to carry out a project, but the planning and design of the project was grandiose, derivative and poorly adapted to the task at hand. Communist projects were mechanically conceived, mechanically implemented and unfit in the way that any project purely designed by machines would be for human use.

The Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Vietnam all won their engagements with enemies in the same way; by throwing so many men at the problem that the enemy would become bogged down and eventually forced to retreat. Their military victories did not emerge from strategy or heroism, but the mechanical willingness to sacrifice numberless individuals for the goals of the collective.

The few bits of genuine scientific progress came from scientists like Pavlov and Sakharov who were open critics of Communism and the Soviet Union. They did not come out of the collective that collectively crippled Russian science and ensured the collapse of its efforts at military parity with the United States. Ultimately the collective destroyed its own rule.

The seduction of the collective as builder however is not limited to countries that flew the red flag.  When Obama and Warren proclaimed that there were no monads, that no man was an island, but that we were all part of one great economic collective to which we owed an eternal debt, they were following up on some very old ideas.

Obama's interpretation of individual creativity occurring only within the context of state institutions is a natural outgrowth of a political philosophy that views those institutions as the essence of the country and the true foundation of its national greatness. This "Institutionalism" is the dominant liberal mindset which sees individualism as a chaos that must be ordered by the state.

Institutionalism says that individuals are not creative, only institutions are creative. Individuals who create are harnessing the creative energy of institutions. In the liberal institutionalist view, the state must create the conditions that make creative acts possible and those who fail to acknowledge their debt to the state are "free riders" who exploit the system without paying back to it.

21st century America is institutionalist, though it derives the greater part of its economic energy from individual creativity. The official philosophy emphasizes the virtues of committeedom; of agencies, corporations, governments and mass determinants which slowly move forward, consuming any form of progress and transforming it into mulch. The official debate is not over the virtues of this rank institutionalism, but over which forms of institutions are best and who should be running them.

To the east and the south, the core of the Muslim world has finally gotten around to adopting the democracy that their Western friends had insisted would be their salvation. And the essence of their experiment with democracy was to reaffirm a collective identity based on Islam. What the masses of individuals in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Iraq, not to mention the Palestinian Authority, wanted was an Islamic state that would eliminate any individuality.

In the face of chaos, Muslims chose not liberal institutionalism but Islamic institutionalism.  What this means in practice, beyond women with covered faces and more bombs going off on buses, is that the state and its economic monopolies will be in the hands of the devout who will nobly take care of the needs of the people. The practical difference between Islamism and Socialism is that the former is more backward, more tyrannical and more violently disposed toward us. But these are distinctions in degree, not in essence. Both Islamists and Socialists institute tyrannies based on theorists from the last few centuries that recreate a more ancient feudalism in the name of an absolute call for justice.

Americans with Obama, like the Egyptians with Morsi, chose a collective leader who would inspire and take care of them. A leader who would make them feel united into one single group. The promise of transcendence lingered over Tahrir Square and the United States Capitol, a promise that individual differences and divisions would melt away leaving only a perfect collective that would be capable of doing anything it set its mind to.

Even if Obama had been genuinely well-intentioned, the project of collective creativity was doomed from the start. Institutions excel most at their own construction. In their early stages they can fund creative works, but with the passage of time they become incapable of meaningfully interacting with the outside world.

The longer an institution exists the more likely it is to develop its own groupthink, its collective mentality and culture that allows for internal consistency, but makes creative work impossible. Like the Soviet Union, these collectives can draw up grandiose plans that are inefficient, have no purpose and are implemented without regard to actual conditions on the ground.

These collectives can envision masses of wind farms, without taking into account what will happen when winter comes or whether there is enough wind to make the project worthwhile. They can pay foreign architects and foreign workers to create symbols of Islamic grandiosity, such as the Dubai Burj and Saudi Arabia's Royal Mecca Clock Tower, and symbols of Socialist grandiosity such as North Korea's Ryugyong Hotel or the USSR's Palace of the Soviets; but these are not signs of creativity, only pyramids representing the entombing of creativity within a display of mindless power.

Creativity brings new things into the world, but new things are the bane of institutions which already have too many things to deal with and see such creativity as elementally disruptive. Institutionalism strives to repress creativity by forcing everyone into a collective plan, a mandate to follow the central program of the collective. And the only thing that the institutions of the collective are interested in creating are monuments to themselves.

An individual building things according to his own plan is disruptive. Even when following tested techniques and using standard tools to complete the same task that he has already done ten thousand times before, the individual can still find easier and better ways to do something. The individual can also find that a thing might be better done in an entirely different way or that there is no reason to do it at all.

This expression of creative energy is what tyrants like Obama or Morsi fear because it upsets their goal of using institutional power to maintain a completely ordered society. Institutionalist societies believe that bigger is better, that the individual is wrong and the rule book is right, and that a difference is a danger. They may talk up their commitment to progress, but what they truly do is accept a lack of progress in exchange for order and control. They would rather own everyone and everything than have a society that actually moves forward and creates things worth owning.

It is not the state that builds things, it is individuals who build the state. Once the state is built it begins by protecting individual creativity and ends by consuming it. Institutionalism does not unleash creativity, it suppresses it in the name of its own consensus.

Institutionalists like Obama do not believe in the individual, they believe that the individual is the root of all evil. They see him as an exploiter, a free rider, a breaker of commitments, a smasher of idols and a disruptor of their plans. They wrongly believe that the individual owes them something for the privilege of living under their rule and they are wrong in this. It is they who are indebted for their parasitism, for their free ride on his back, for the muzzle they have put in his mouth and the spurs they have planted in his side.

The art of building things is a simple art. It is the art of learning about the world as it is, of learning what one's own hands and mind are capable of. And above all else it is the art of being free.

We'll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here

Ever since FDR made it his campaign song in 1932 while running for office during the Great Depression, the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party has been that Tin Pan Alley classic, "Happy Days are Here Again." But no matter how often the old Victor spun, it would not be until well after Roosevelt's death that happy days would be here again.

Like Hope and Change, Happy Days are Here Again was a blandly optimistic and non-specific promise that good times were coming. Someday the happy days would arrive, an appropriate enough sentiment for a song whose pivotal moment came in the movie "Chasing Rainbows" where it was sung to reassure a cuckolded husband who is threatening to kill himself. And in an even more appropriate bit of symbolism, the actual movie footage of that moment is as lost as the happy times.

No matter how often the Democratic Party cheats on the American people, it can always break out a new rendition of "Happy Days are Here Again" to win them back. And even if the happy days never seem to actually arrive, the promise of "So long sad times" and "Howdy gay times" where "your troubles and cares are gone" is always a winner.

While the American Democratic Party may not have an official anthem, the British Labour Party does and its anthem, "The Red Flag" would be entirely appropriate for the new Democratic Party that no longer has anything in common with Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.

It might be awkward to imagine Harry Reid or Joe Manchin trying to make it through verses like, "The people's flag is deepest red" and the sonorous chorus, "Then raise the scarlet standard high /Within its shade we live and die/Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/We'll keep the red flag flying here."

They would probably look almost as awkward singing it as Labour Party leader Ed Milliband does, but you could easily imagine Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett belting it out. And that would be only right because while The Red Flag never gets around to mentioning Manchester, despite its popularity there, it does namecheck two cities. "In Moscow's vaults its hymns were sung/Chicago swells the surging throng."

These days red flag songs, once mandatory, are confined to all sorts of vaults in Moscow. The new Russian anthem is Putin's redress of the old Soviet one, with lyrics by the same composer. And the Soviet National Anthem, that secular hymn, has a familiar pedigree going back to the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party in 1938, which took its melody from "Life is better, Life is fun."

You might be forgiven for thinking that the Bolshevik Party had borrowed its melody from some Moscow musical, but that wasn't the case. "Life is better, Life is fun" was based on a statement by Stalin: "Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more fun." The year was 1935 and while it is impossible to know whether Comrade Stalin had decided to crib from the Democratic campaign of 1932, the theme was the same. So long sad times. Happy days were here again.

And just to remind everyone that happy days really were here again, Stalin began another round of brutal purges. A year earlier, Uncle Joe, as the Fireside Chatter liked to refer to one of the world's bloodiest mass murderers, had arranged for the murder of Sergei Kirov, who was everything that Stalin wasn't, and used the murder to begin a purge of anyone more popular than him, with the support of red flag wavers in Chicago, New York, London and Los Angeles.

Unlike Franklin, Stalin's idea of a campaign involved a lot of firing squads to properly soak the red flag in the deepest red, while the band played, "Life is better, Life is fun." After the purges were wrapped up, Stalin signed a pact with another red flag waver from Berlin. The Nazis and Communists might have disagreed on any number of things, but both of them had inherited the Jacobin fetish for painting a flag red with blood and then waving it while calling for more death.

While Moscow might have turned in its red card, Chicago's "surging throng" is still swelling the polls, and even though their shirts are purple, their fingers are red from the strain of repeat voting. If there is anywhere in the United States that the red flag has gone on flying, outside of Marin County, it's Chicago. In its shade, generations have lived and died, and now generations have begun living and dying in its shade across the country as the red flag keeps flying for another four years over D.C.

The red flags of the post-modern, post-American, post-British, post-everything revolutionaries aren't usually as obvious as a gang of wealthy politicians staggering to a microphone once a year and belting out, "We'll keep the red flag flying here". It usually sounds more like the parody of that anthem, known somewhat sarcastically as  the "Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party,"

"White collar workers stand and cheer/The Labour government is here/We’ll change the country bit by bit/So nobody will notice it." A policy of changing the country bit by bit so none of the workers who want their benefits notices that everything else they value is being dragged away to the rubbish heap while they sleep may be sneered at by the real reds, but it's worked quite effectively.

Tony Blair did a masterful job of changing Britain, leaving behind Neil Kinnock's threats to take the workers into the streets if the election did not go his way. (It did not. He did not.) Kinnock proved good enough for Joe Biden to plagiarize his biography from, but the future rested with a sensible left. A New Labour that would talk like technocrats while importing unprecedented number of immigrants to change the electoral balance of the country, so that the red flag would go on flying here, even if it was green and had a crescent and a pair of crossed swords in the middle.

Instead of the flying red flag, Tony Blair's New Labour used D:ream's "Things can only get better" as its election anthem, which despite a title that made it sound like another, "Happy Days are Here" or "Life is better, Life is fun" was more of a love song to a Labour messiah promising to cure "prejudice and greed".

"Walk my path/Wear my shoes/Talk like me/I'll be an angel," New Labour voters were promised and they fell for it. The age of the Me Generation PM was here and the new egotism resounded in lyrics like "Things can only get better/Can only get better/Now I've found you/(That means me)" that took both self-help and self-involvement to a whole new level. But British voters probably should have paid more attention to warning lyrics like, "I sometimes lose myself in me".

Bill Clinton was America's Tony Blair, but with enough Good Old Boy charm to leaven the false earnestness that led so many to hate Blair. If Blair was a liar pretending to be an honest man, Clinton was a liar pretending to be an honest man pretending to be a liar, a rotten sandwich of a paradox that you have to be a politician or an observer of them to properly appreciate. Like Blair, Clinton worked to change the country bit by bit, appealing to white collar workers and leaving the red flag in the trunk next to the road flares and the dynamite.

It's Chicago time now and the red flag is back. Talk of changing the country bit by bit is done. Now the country is being changed aggressively, every change a finger poke in the eye of the people who don't notice right what is in front of their faces. The cuckolding is no longer subtle. It's more out in the open than ever and the country is being bankrupted and the middle class is being wiped out to a rousing chorus of "Happy Days are Here Again", when an entire generation has come of age never knowing a time when happy days prevailed.

Whatever faults Kinnock and old Labour had, losing himself in himself wasn't one of them. But the Baby Boomer and Generation X leaders had the narcissistic habit of doing just that. Clinton and Blair both lost themselves in themselves and since then never appear to have found themselves again. And Barack Obama never lost himself in himself because he never stepped out of himself to begin with.

Obama marries the red flag radicalism of the old left with generational egotism to show us the spoiled brat as leader, the tyke born with a set of silver spoons in his mouth who not only waves the red flag, but who mistakes his shamelessness for political genius. Where Clinton limited his shamelessness to his personal life, for his Democratic successor, in the tradition of both the hard left and the fellowship of mirror gazers, the personal has always been political. To the Hope and Changer, the man is the office, the state is the man, and the whim is the national agenda.

Stalin famously told his mother that he was the new Czar, transmuting collectivist revolution into the egotistical authoritarianism of one man. Obama has managed the same trick, merging revolutionary politics with his own brand until there is no longer a difference between the man and his revolution. FDR only promised happy days, but Obama has become the actual incarnation of hope, which may explain why there is no longer any hope to go around.

There is a flag flying over Washington and it's no longer the stars and stripes, but the same red flag that flies over Chicago. It's the red flag under whose shade misery and tyranny spreads while the band strikes up the same anthem over and over again. "Happy days are here again." Life is better, life is fun." "Things can only get better" and of course Obama's victory speech promise; "The best is yet to come."

It might have been more honest if he had instead admitted, "We'll keep the red flag flying here."

Saturday Night Notes

Note 1. Regular readers may have noticed that there was no roundup on Friday. I am dealing with the illness of a close family member and posting will be spotty right now. Some older articles will likely show up on the site. 

Hopefully that will change soon, but for the moment I am making multiple trips to the hospital a day and balancing everything isn't easy.


Note 2. The site is under sustained spam attack. Today I came on to find over 700 comments in moderation, 99 percent of them spam. The volume has gotten so bad that I'm losing legitimate comments in it.

I would like to ask readers to use a name when commenting. You don't have to make an account. Just choose Name/URL in the dropdown menu, where it says Anonymous now. It makes it a lot easier for me and I would appreciate it. And it makes it a lot less likely that your comment will be lost.


Note 3.  A very belated roundup


 Looking for a Few Good Men in Syria

McCain is warning of a regional conflict, but it’s already a regional conflict. Helping the Sunni militias beat the Shiites won’t change that. It will just advance the conflict to the next stage in Iraq and Lebanon. Overthrowing Gaddafi did not stabilize Libya, it destabilized Mali and Algeria, and overthrowing Assad will not stabilize Syria. There are no “right people” to arm because there are no good guys in an inter-religious holy war. And there is certainly no one we can trust.

There is as little sense in choosing Sunni Islamists over Shiite Islamists as the other way around. The only reason we have taken the Sunni side is because so many of our allies are Sunni. And yet the term “ally” is a misnomer.

Are the Saudis really our allies? Can the Islamist governments in Turkey or Egypt be trusted despite their ideological hostility to the United States?

Al Qaeda in Iraq Still Threatens America

Washington, D.C. often lives in its own bubble. Having forgotten about Iraq once it stopped being a political football, Democratic politicians imagine that Iraq and its Al Qaeda legions have forgotten about them. The Sarin raids in Iraq, Turkey and Syria are a reminder that Al Qaeda in Iraq may now be a bigger threat than it ever was before.

The Clinton Administration chose not to take down Bin Laden when it had the chance, instead taking refuge in outreach and “smart” targeted strikes that were the predecessors of today’s drone warfare. It believed that showing Muslims that we would engage in humanitarian intervention to empower their national aims in Yugoslavia would count for more than hunting down Osama bin Laden. It was wrong.

September 11 was the outcome of its neglect. Now the Obama Administration is allowing history to repeat itself with more humanitarian interventions and smart strikes that overlook the real threat growing on the horizon.




Zimbabwe Achieves Economic Growth by Destroying Ability of Government to Print Money

So the good news is that once the economic collapse kicks in and the dollar becomes worthless preventing Hillary Chelsea Clinton Obama III, our 79th President from just printing more money, we too can have an actual economic recovery. Just like Zimbabwe.



“It Is Only When People Tire of Slaughtering their Neighbors and Eating Them…”

As in Israel, the state sponsors of terror are insulated from the terror they spread. The cannibalism is not likely to come to Doha or Istanbul. If it did, perhaps Erdogan might turn into a genuine moderate, instead of a firebreathing radical whom everyone in the diplomatic class has agreed to pretend is a moderate.

Syria is getting the same treatment that Israel has gotten over the years. The irony is that Syria used to dole out the treatment to Israel and to the United States in Iraq. Now it’s on the receiving end.

The question then is when will Islam get tired of its worshipers killing each other? Historically the answer may be never.