Scary Halloween Reading

From David Horowitz, “Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me”. No wonder he needs bodyguards on university campuses. He is writing in an "in your face" style here - denouncing more and explaining less than I would like. I've heard him speak more persuasively and less angrily on the radio than in his opening salvo against Alinsky here. He's a fascinating guy - the son of communists and former champion of the Black Panthers who became disillusioned in part because they murdered each other and their supporters.

You might want to read Alinsky's book before Horowitz' series. Or Sanford Horwitt’s book about Alinsky. Or Gramsci. Why didn't I learn about any of these people in college? I knew something about the radical movements they, and their more violent ideological brethren, spawned. And I had never heard of Lakoff until this year, either. Even though I have been aware for some time of the deceptive misuse and selective application of words which are favorite tactics, or "crucial intellectual moves" within the "progressive" movement.

Alinsky's model worked great for President Obama during his rise to power, but doesn't seem to be working out so well right now. In fact, some of Alinsky's methods are being used against the Head Community Organizer now. From Instapundit:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

Note also the history of the phrase, "Speaking Truth to Power".

Of course, Obama did not accept all of Alinski's advice. He didn't think community organizing worked without a strong leader. And Alinski also warned that when the "have-nots" gained power, they would behave as badly as those whom they had overthrown.

The Alinsky model (and its Gramscian predecessor) is far better at telling people how to overthrow an existing power structure or cultural system than at explaining how to establish and maintain a new structure or system. Something to keep in mind as liberal Democrats steeped (or at least dipped) in the Gramscian tradition make big plans to destroy, rather than reform the insurance industry as we know it and micro-manage your health care. What are the chances now that they will read the final bill before voting on it?

Scary Halloween links from Maggie's Farm.

Oh, and here's a book for kids, too.

Explaining David Letterman

Well, after this summer's scandal, now we have found out that Letterman was involved the the classic abuse of power reviled by feminists, with regard to his female office staff. He was successful for many years at keeping his private life private - protecting himself from mockery by people like himself. And others.

An analysis of why Letterman thought he could laugh it off once his office sexual exploits were exposed: His edginess would protect him. He's stuck in the past. Plus: the changing nature of the worlds of television and of celebrities, and the changing relationship of celebrities and politics. By old time Hollywood insiders. The video is very interesting, but kind of long. Keep in on the the background while you work on something else.

Prescient post, June 12:

Letterman's congenital problem manifested itself in spades. He is a Beta male in an industry filled with Beta males. Even the industry's a Beta. He's not even an entertainer -- his job is to talk to and about entertainers. They say politics is show-business for ugly people, and the similarities are manifest. Politics is often home to Beta males that try to cut in front of the big men on life's campus by the side door. Same deal. That's why they get along famously.

That's why men like Letterman always end up groping the help. . . .

How did he know in advance that Letterman had groped the help? Continuing concerning Letterman's war on Sarah Palin:

It was almost touching to hear of Letterman's non-apology for suggesting the statutory rape of Palin's child would be a hoot. He invited Palin to come on his show.

Dear lord, it's the class reunion, and she's still pretty, her husband could kick your ass if he had swine flu and you had a club, and she's showing pictures of a bunch of her children she manifestly loves. You? You married your second wife as an afterthought, after your kids just sort of showed up and got old enough to ask. You left your wife home, too, because she's gone a bit thick in the middle and never was very pretty.

So you're drunk and bitter, and you totter over and tell her how much you've always hated her; tell her she's not all that; tell her you've got a Camaro now. Then you ask her back to dance as she walks away. You'd probably murmur "You're not so tough" after her husband was out of earshot if he beat your beta ass as you so richly deserve, but neither of them could be bothered really, because a loser is a loser.

The Enigma of Jimmy Carter

After going over some of the links in this post, I got to thinking about the enigma of Jimmy Carter. He stays in the spotlight long after his presidency. Some people think this is diastrous, and some think it is a good thing. I think there are three points of view which, together, come close to explaining my current understanding of the effect of Jimmy Carter's policies on the world.

Oprah Winfrey's buddy, affectionately known as Rabbi Shmuley, comes close to explaining why Carter so often choses the side of tyrannical dictators.

Carter wants to do what's just. His heart's in the right place. He just can't figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.

CARTER SUBSCRIBES to what I call the Always Root for the Underdog school of morality. Rather than develop any real understanding of a conflict, immediately he sides with the weaker party, however wicked or immoral.

Early on, Carter seemed to have a fairly healthy understanding of the nature of oppression. He deserves some credit for his early emphasis on human rights. President Obama could learn something from Carter's early positions. Since the end of his presidency, Carter has done good work with Habitats for Humanity. He has also helped resolve a few disputes between countries which were relatively evenly matched in power.

But moralistic purist that he was even during his presidency, Carter soon started choosing to support on the International Stage the weaker of two political entities in any contest, rather than choosing between weak populations and their tyrannical governments.

When Carter helped depose the Shah of Iran and put into power the Ayatollahs, there were some legitimate concerns about the Shah's human rights record. Carter decided that America could no longer support the Shah because the Shah engaged in some oppression of his opposition. But Carter failed to foresee the exponentially harsher human rights violations by the Ayatollahs whom he helped install, and who later turned on him. And he had NO influence with the Ayatollahs once they were in power. Carter's actions helped set in motion today's militant Islamist campaigns.

Carter really went off the rails in support of tyrants vs. their people in later years, perhaps because he thought more and more of power imbalances in terms of contests between the governments of countries rather than in terms of struggles between governments and their populations.

See what you think of James Taranto's take in February of 2008:

. . . The idea is that America (or another Western country, usually Israel) is not perfect, and therefore has no business passing judgment on the affairs of its adversaries. All nations, like all men, are predisposed to sin, and the greatest national sin of all is for a dominant power to exhibit pride. By this reasoning, it is morally worse for an American leader to call (say) the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq "evil" than it is for those regimes to undertake actions that deliberately hurt or endanger innocent people.

When applied to public as opposed to private morality, this kind of above-it-all attitude, this self-regard masquerading as humility, provides an excuse for inaction in the face of evil. To be sure, sometimes inaction is a wise course, because available actions would only make matters worse. But this is a practical question--one of consequences, not intention.

To make the perfect the enemy of the good, to make a principle of responding to evil with inaction, is a dangerous way to approach the world. That should have been the lesson of the Carter presidency. . . .

It may not be too late for President Obama to learn this lesson. But it would be a hard lesson for him to absorb, because of his education.

Even though Carter frames his positions in terms of Christian doctrine, his tendency to conflate power (leading to pride) and evil is similar to the intellectual approach taken by many who were influenced by the Academic Left. Including President Obama.

Worrisome Echoes of Ancient Greece and Jimmy Carter

Victor Davis Hanson is worried.

About Money:

. . . as a veteran of the near usury of the 1970s and early 1980s, I see no reason why interest rates won’t shoot up to 10% once the economy recovers and the U.S. has to convince lenders to buy our paper in an inflationary spiral. In other words, we could fork out each year about $150-200 billion in interest costs on our annual red ink, in addition to paying annually another trillion dollars to service the existing debt. (We forget that many of us young people in the 1970s and 1980s simply never bought anything new due to high interest: my first new car was not purchased until 1989 when interest was only 7.2% on it; my parents bought a small condo in 1980 for the unbelievably low rate of 8.8%, due only to redevelopment incentives in a bad neighborhood of Fresno. Inflation will be back, even in this quite different age of globalized competition and low wages.)

When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect. Does he include the cost of interest? Where will the money came from? Who will pay the interest? Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life? Did he cut back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs? Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day’s end?

What destroys individuals, ruins families, and fells nations is debt—or rather the inability to service debt, and the cultural ramifications that follow. When farming, I used to see the futility in haggling over diesel prices, trying to buy fertilizer in bulk, or using used vineyard wire—when each day we were paying hundreds in dollars in interest on a “cut-rate” 14% crop loan.

The difference between the 5th century BC and late 4th century BC at Athens is debt– . . .

Once the conservative Bush people started talking about trillions in debt in terms of percentages of GDP rather than of real money, I feared we were done for: if a so-called conservative is doing this, I thought, what will the liberal Congress do when it gets back in power?

(One more historical truth: the melodramatic language of people dying, starving, being ignored, etc. increases as the level of government services expands as the fears of public insolvency spread: in the late 1930s our grandparents thought tiny sums from social security were lavish godsends, now we assume a temporary suspension in cost-of-living increases on top of generous pay-outs is nothing short of a national disaster and proof of our collective selfishness.)

About Foreign Affairs:

One can get away with Carterism for a year or two. Remember, Jimmy Carter was loved up until about 1978, as he bragged of human rights, slashed defense to use the money for more entitlements, promised to get troops out of Korea, sold out the Shah, intrigued with the exiled Khomeini, pooh-poohed communists in Central America, sold warplanes without bomb racks to our allies, lectured on the inordinate fear of communism and sermonized how no one would die on his watch.

We were his Plains Sunday school class, he the sanctimonious prayer leader. The lions abroad would lie down with us, the new lambs, at home. I will never lie to you” Carter repeated ad nauseum. I used to listen to his call-in empathy radio shows while driving to work as a grad student, and at 24 thought “Does this adult really believe all this?”

And then somewhere around 1979 the world finally sized him up—and the result was a bleeding American goat crossing the Amazon as the piranha swarmed. Radical Islam was on the rise. The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. Nicaragua blew up. Iran took hostages. And in reaction Carter devised brilliant strategies like boycotting the Olympics and arming jihadists in Pakistan—and more lecturing us from the rose garden. He wanted a flashy hostage rescue mission—after slashing defense in 1977-8: but the two don’t mix, as he learned.

Obama likewise is outside the mainstream of bipartisan Democratic foreign policy as practiced by Truman, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton. He’s to the left of Carter, and indeed, on both Afghanistan and Iran, to the left of France and Germany. Readers, none of you thought you would ever see Europeans wanting us to buck up in Afghanistan and get tougher against Ahmadinejad. . . .

Our administration officials praise the mass-murdering Mao, or talk up the UN “human rights” commission. We reach out to Ahmadinejad, Assad, Chavez, Putin, and others. We snub the Brits, the Europeans, the Japanese, Colombians, Israelis and eastern Europeans. Russia tries a simple gambit—a) lie about helping on Iran, b) in exchange get the US out of the anti-missile business in eastern Europe—it works so well that Putin brags that he expects more of this, as if he is sitting at a rigged roulette wheel in Vegas.

Like our spiraling debt, there will be a reckoning soon, maybe in a year or two—and it will cost more than boycotting the next Olympics.

About fuel and resurgent terrorism, too:

Why the pessimism? I think there are a few truths that transcend politics and remain eternal. In life as a general rule, debt has to be paid back, and with greater pain and anger than it was to borrow it. Bullies do not respect magnanimity, but tragically interpret it as weakness to be exploited rather than to be admired.

Hoping that something good comes true —like being self-reliant through solar and wind—does not make it true; neglecting the riches at hand to dream about greater riches that do not exist is adolescent. Radical Islam hates the West, not because of what we do or say, but because of who we are: a dynamic, mercurial culture that challenges all the protocols of a traditional, tribal and religiously fundamentalist society.

Diplomacy is a tool to lessen, but not eliminate, tensions—a way to conduct foreign policy, not a foreign policy in and of itself.

I hope I am wrong about all of the above, and that human nature really has magically changed in the era of Obama. So close your eyes, listen to the the Messiah’s* voice and repeat: “Debts will be forgiven by creditors; inflation will not follow from massive borrowing; breakthroughs in solar and wind will power our cars and heat our homes; enemies will admire our compassion and join us to achieve world peace; and terrorists are either misunderstood or provoked needlessly by our bellicosity that alone stands in the way of peace.”

Believe all that and you can lie back and enjoy the age of Obama.

Read the whole thing. Can you think of reasons to be more optimistic? Examples of significant progress (other than in speeches) since Obama became president?

JFK and Clinton both changed course after some serious policy missteps at the beginning of their presidencies. Maybe President Obama can, too. Hope and change, after all. There are some areas where I would not want him to OVER-correct.

I'm not so confident about Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and friends.

* Interesting view from abroad: Obama is the best leader to navigate the world's problems because he is "very genuine, very present" and "super-smart". And because of "his background, his education, particularly in regard to Islam"(?) Interesting set of qualifications. Not much about accomplishments.

Also astonishing: Sting's singling out of Obama's domestic opposition as "aggressive and violent and full of fear". Most of the violence associated with this year's Tea Party demonstrations and Town Hall meetings has been on the part of supporters of President Obama and the Democratic Congress. Particularly on the part of union thugs brought in for these occasions. And even with the violence from Obama supporters, there was far less violence associated with the massive Tea Party and Townhall protests than with the much smaller recent anti-globalist demonstrations. And none of the aggression and violence on any side of America's domestic conflicts this year hold a candle to the aggression and violence of the tyrants with whom President Obama thinks he can negotiate in good faith.

It is typical of today's predominant strain of liberals to target and demonize an "enemy" who will, in all likelihood, not do violence against them, and who try to avoid doing violence against all innocent parties.

The best thing about the Obama presidency

Image here.

San Francisco - a fascinating place to visit

San Francisco has one of the most breath-taking settings of any city in the world. It is blessed with a natural port, a benign climate, rich inhabitants and all kinds of businesses. I remember my first visit, walking the city streets. I got a fallen metatarsal arch walking those hilly sidewalks. Every corner brought something new and interesting into view. I was warned by a passerby not to enter the Tenderloin district. Chinatown was fascinating. My Aunt Jean commuted over the bay to teach English to immigrants, most of them Chinese. Some of the upscale business districts had far fewer people on the sidewalks. There were panhandlers, though. Sometimes quite aggressive panhandlers.

Housing costs in San Francisco are among the highest in the nation. Service workers typically live far from the city and commute in. Lots of fairly well-off business people commute in, too. There are street people who sleep in doorways at night. But per capita, people who live in San Francisco can afford to have among the the most progressive, compassionate city governments in the nation. Especially since that government is also supported by businesses whose labor largely comes from outside the city.

We can learn from the rich city government in San Francisco a few things about how far government compassion should be taken. We can also learn from the story linked how government compassion toward a certain group of people predictably leads to a lack of compassion toward other people. Those who decide to dispense compassion through government need to weigh whether the predictable resulting lack of compassion toward others will be justified.

Dennis Prager's dream for an ideal society comes to mind: A just government and a compassionate population. As opposed to a compassionate government and a self-congratulating population.

It's a good thing that San Francisco is a rich city. The city can probably re-adjust and recover from its government's decision to become a sanctuary city, a shining example for all those morally inferior cities across America. Some nearby cities may find the quest for a civil society a little more challenging.

Thrifty, effective ways the unemployed can utilize the Web

Wretchard provides simple, low-cost ideas to help the unemployed (and other people) stay connected (including low-cost phone service) and increase their prospects for a new job, utilizing online resources.

The on-line simplified Word and Excel-compatible programs available through Gmail are also a good backup for people who work mostly in Mac-based systems. Or anybody whose computer has crashed and who needs to create a document on a computer at the library, etc.

More tips and ideas in the comment thread.

Democrats Repeat Mistakes with ACORN and public/private entanglements

Captain Ed on the decision to AGAIN make community organizations like ACORN part of the decision-making process on banking rules:

Congress has a duty to pass rational regulation that can be precisely and consistently enforced without “strategies” and agendas, or better yet, just provide resources to enforce the regulation we already have.

Business has a hard time recovering from a recession when there is no confidence that regulations on those businesses will be stable and predictable.

The second comment here puts this decision in slightly blunter terms:

So the new agency will be created in order to put administrative-law muscle behind a line-extension of the Democratic Party protection racket industry?

Why am I not even in the least bit surprised?

One of the flaws in FDR's governing strategy, which led him to unintentionally prolong the Great Depression, was his habit of changing the rules for running business. This practice was applied frequently to the financial industry which funded other businesses in a somewhat fickle and unpredictable way. Sometimes in a strikingly arbitrary way. Until the war concentrated everybody's minds.

Turning government rule-making for running businesses over to "community organizations" is another really effective way to increase the hesitancy of businesses to start new projects.

RELATED: Government has the right to cut the pay of executives of companies which receive government money. But cutting the pay of the best and brightest has unintended consequences.

UPDATE: financial institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, whose financial disasters were more easily traced to government involvement, are different from those nasty capitalist banks. Bailouts of banks? Morally repugnant, even if necessary. Bailouts of Fannie and Freddie? Compassionate. Their head honchos don't need to become independent of the government or financially solvent before they can rake in the really big bucks, apparently. Then again, Fannie Mae didn't suffer much government criticism when the head honchos were caught doing Enron-style accounting to pad their bonuses a few years ago, either.

General Principle: Coercive government meddling in private business can lead to unintended concequences. Cutting the reimbursement of health care professionals to control costs is one key to the Democratic plans for health care reform. Wonder how many ex-physician lawyers and ex-nurse union bosses the country needs? Or ex-hospital worker stage hands? Or ex-physician stage hands? OR, maybe physicians can reverse lowered compensation after Obamacare by forming a union themselves so they can make as much as stage hands. Democrats love unions, especially in public/private entities.

BACKGROUND: A little more history on ACORN and the Government here. The latest on the "helping child sex-slavers" sting here. ACORN lied when they said that Hannah and James had been kicked out of ACORN's Philadelphia office. The gradual release of these videos has caught ACORN in several lies now. As James says in the post linked just above,

Alinsky Rule #1: “Power isn’t only what you have, it’s what the enemy thinks you have.”

Do you think it's fair for the Right to use the Community Organizing principles of the Left against them? On the flip side, progressive think tanks are becoming more powerful as a way to circumvent rules against lobbying. Not long ago, it was the conservative think tanks which were thought of as more intellectually influential in Washington - a major counterbalance to the liberals who predominated in Washington bureaucracy. Conservative think tanks had been largely staffed by people who were squeezed out of government and academia by liberal dominance.

The tactics in the struggle for power and influence in Washington do not remain static.

Iran double-crosses Obama, Russia likewise

The Iranian government has rejected a deal with the Obama administration, but used the negotiations in a devious manner. We Lie! What did Obama expect from this regime? And our country may have helped send many protesters in Iran who wanted free and fair elections to unspeakably horrible prisons or to horrible deaths. The first person I ever followed on Twitter went silent on June 29. It's hard to think about what might have happened to him.

Now we know why Obama turned his back on Iranian protesters. Note that the secret negotiations began in June. What else went on in June in Iran? Oh yeah… those pesky election results protests.

Basically, he turned his back on the Iranian people because that whole free election fight of theirs wasn’t nearly as important as the nuclear deal he was working out with Iran’s regime. Too bad the regime couldn’t be trusted to actually live up to its end of the bargain. Big surprise there, that you can’t trust political leaders who believe in silencing their own people…

Maybe that should serve as an object lesson to us about Obama. . . Heh. at least Leno is motivated by the President.

Bill Whittle talks about the Russian angle to negotiations with Iran, and prospects for a lasting peace now that President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Whittle's video skips over a few details in history, but reminds us of some basic principles in a memorable way. Charles Krauthammer fills in a few details about the latest foreign relations negotiations by Team Obama.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

More history about WWII here. More on the advantages to Russia in being soft on Tehran.

America is Addicted to Fantasy

A politician works for the next election, a statesman works for the next generation.

I commented earlier on a post in which Wretchard wrote about several manifestations of irrationally optimistic expectations. Just before he wrote that piece, Wretchard wrote about a speech by Robert Reich, a former official in the Clinton Administration, given before a liberal student audience at Berkeley in 2007.

Wretchard goes beyond the segment of the speech which concerns healthcare reform. This segment (and the troubling audience response to it) is being widely reported in the blogosphere and in conservative commentary. At first, the student audience applauded his statements, but after the segment in the video which is making the rounds, they apparently stopped applauding. Concerning the segment on healthcare reform, Wretchard says:

That is largely going to be interpreted as the “hidden truth” that the MSM doesn’t want you to know and to a certain extent it is, but not in the way the casual reader may understand it. Robert Reich was once my teacher and I knew there had to be more to it than that, and so I went to the source: UC Berkeley maintains an archive of webcasts and Reich’s speech is available there verbatim. . . . Indeed, upon listening to the speech there was more to it than that. Although Reich is liberal he is also incorrigibly intelligent and his remarks were framed as a speech by a hypothetical candidate, who for perverse reasons, could only tell the truth. His main point was that the truth was untellable. And although his politics are left of center, his hypothetical unspeakable speech slaughtered every sacred cow the Berkeley audience held dear.

You can also listen to Reich's speech (linked) if you're really serious about hearing honest words from a liberal.

Wretchard throws in a little defiance against liberal pessimism at the end of his piece. Worth your time and thought.

Possible Trends in US Politics, a Recent Shopping Incident and the Mindset of British Academia

Harper's publisher runs a critical piece about President Obama from somewhere in the principled left of center in American politics. It features his Chicago patrons, the Daleys:

Take, for example, Obama’s intervention in Chicago’s failed bid for the Olympic Games in 2016. . . .

It didn’t matter to City Hall that there wasn’t enough money in the public coffers to pay for staging the games. What mattered was all that boodle for friends and political allies who could have been cut in on the action. As far as I know, the Daleys aren’t personally corrupt about money. But they love power and they deeply value the currency of political leverage. The Olympics would have meant enormous amounts of leverage. (emphasis mine).

This statement reminds me of an interview with Nancy Pelosi when she became the Speaker of the House. She described the warm, compassionate feeling it gave her as the young daughter of a politician when people would come to their house, hat in hand, and her father was able to give them patronage jobs (with other people's money). The statement above concerning the Daleys emphasizes the practical advantage to politicians of having control over other people's money. Though many convince themselves of their own altruism in selectively dispensing other people's money.

There's a reason that liberals are criticizing Obama now. Here's Krauthammer's take on why Obama's liberal base is frustrated with him at this time. He compares Obama's recent actions to the way Bush, in his words, "spent political capital" in order to achieve his primary goals.

In counterpoint, Wretchard describes some developments in Britain as well as a riot at a Burlington Coat Factory to remind us what is likely to happen when a population starts to look to government for basic needs. It is important to take a long view of the changes now proposed by the Administration and Congress.

Maybe the problem is exactly as Sir Howard Davies described it: the culture of dependency which in some circles is confused with the phrase “scientific socialism”. When even people who should know better believe they can get something for nothing — striking academics in the UK, shoppers in a store, people with health care insurance, people with mortgages — the problem comes to resemble not ordinary debt but participation in a scam. It’s almost as if a hoaxer had appear on the national scene and grandly offered to pick up the tab for a dazzling future without a real dime to his name — and people believed him. How could it happen? And what happens when the joker is unmasked?

Elsewhere, more than once, Mark Steyn has described the extraordinary selfishness of ordinary people who have lived in the social democracies of Europe for a while, especially when the money starts to run out.

Back to the current American political situation: Americans are not immune from selfish dependency on government. Can enough senior votes be bought to pass Obamacare? Will we all become little piggies fighting for the best government handouts in the near future?

President Obama's poll numbers are not so good at the moment. Will Obamacare turn Democrats into supply-siders?

Or is President Obama allowing a very liberal Congress to drive the agenda and absorb the anger of disaffected voters (note, for example, that there is no actual "Obamacare" plan under the administration's name) in order to strengthen and save his presidency by sacrificing many liberal members of Congress in the next election? The liberal base feels downcast and disappointed, while much of the rest of the country is upset about government over-reach. Perhap's Obama's presidency would be more successful if he had a more evenly-matched domestic opponent than Rush Limbaugh, who has no power in Congress, just like the current Republicans in Congress.

We're at an interesting, important crossroads. You may wish to decide on an issue which is important to you and communicate your ideas with an elected representative.

From Wretchard's comment thread:

Isn’t it strange that people can insist that drastic action be taken to respond to a theoretical construct based on questionable data and models that can hardly be trusted – like Global Warming – and ignore real, hard facts, such as the growing national debt, the impact of litigation run amok, the outright insanity that accompanies the modern concept of Civil Rights, the drugging of many of our children, nuclear weapons in the hands of lunatics, and so forth?

We laugh at people of times past who argued over the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. But at least those people were not focusing the energies of whole nations on that topic, while ignoring the real issues – if they had, we would not be here.

Concern over global warming is not exactly like worrying about the number of angels which can dance on the head of a pin. But it is surreal that politicians are in such a hurry to exert control over the world's economy in the name of catastrophic global warming, during a worldwide financial crisis, after 11 years of global cooling (since the hottest year in recent decades). In spite of the truly pressing concerns facing us at this time. It is even more surreal that scientists are willing to fake some data and suppress other data in order to support the politicians in their quest for cotrol.

As Dennis Prager reminds us, people like to focus on a problem they think they have some control over, while pushing out of their minds problems which make them feel helpless. People can recycle. Recycling (particularly of metals) is a good thing. But to recycle with the thought that they are "fighting global warming" makes people feel like they have some control over their environment and that they are doing something good. And they may be willing to cede more control over their lives to the political class (even when it will mean a significant lowering of their standard of living) in order to continue to feel that they are making a difference. But they may not consider the unintended consequences of their good intentions. Damaging the world's economy at this time, for example, could have grave consequences for the truly poor.

Working on the things which you think you can change is healthy, as long as you don't become convinced that the problem you have chosen to address thereby becomes the most important problem.

The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I would add, concerning problems beyond the personal, something about the wisdom to look ahead in humility to try to foresee how the change I seek will affect other important problems in the world. This is where a set of timeless principles and some lessons from the past can come in handy.

Ordinary people tend to think they can't do much about the more concrete, threatening problems facing us today. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they think that to do something would require too much effort or danger. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they choose to believe the unbelievable promises and assurances of politicians. Sometimes they just ignore real problems and expect that the good times will continue to roll even when politicians warn of the development of real problems, like British academics who think they can agitate for raises when their country's economy is in dire straits. These types of self-delusion set people up for big disappointments, like the shoppers who found out that they would not be getting free stuff from a mysterious benefactor at the Burlington Coat Factory.

Interesting viewpoints on Columbus Day

Whether or not you think Columbus discovered America, he certainly changed the world. Instapundit had a couple of posts linking other writers concerning Columbus and Columbus Day. He quotes first a selection from a book concerning the effect of the discovery of the Americas on Europe. Then:

Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:

"This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.:

"Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit."

A few years ago I chanced to be in Buenos Aires on Columbus Day. It is a major holiday there, during which no business is transacted. I spent the day wandering about town enjoying the celebrations. One plaza held a Columbus Day festival in which passersby could enjoy demonstrations and samples of music, dance, crafts and foods of all the various Latin American nations, and of many of the source-nations of Argentina's immigration.

The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.

Traditionally, the role played by the United States in this narrative is not one of a joint participant, but rather an antagonist. In the narrative of Hispanosphere nationalists, Latin America is Shakespeare's Ariel, the graceful and sensitive artistic spirit. The United States, or "Gringolandia" as it is sometimes called, is Caliban, the powerful but ugly monster that dominates tragic Ariel. . . .

From the History News Network, Columbus and the Jews who were being expelled from Spain at around the time of his voyages. Fascinating.

Decline is a Choice - Charles Krauthammer

A lot of people are recommending this piece by Charles Krauthammer as one of the most important recent commentaries on our current political situation. We have the choice at this time whether or not to plan for America's decline.

Here's a video of his speech to the Manhattan Institute from which the piece above was adapted. The introduction gives some remarkable biographical information about him. Charles Krauthammer started his professional career as a medical doctor, specializing in psychiatry. He had an accident which paralyzed him, but still became a leader in his field. He then began a second career, working for the Carter Administration, which led to his becoming a speechwriter for the Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale. He is described as a "Scoop jackson Liberal" whose party left him. He is now considered one of the very top conservative political analysts in the United States. In The Corner blog at National Review, "Krauthammer's Take" is a regular feature.

Krauthammer is always worth your attention, whether or not you agree with him.

From Ancient Greece to the U.S. Constitution

A very short course in the philosophies concerning political power which underly the Constitution of the United States of America. Also includes a few comments on the practical application of those philosophies and other philosophies regarding power, relevant to our current political situation.

This little piece gets down to basics about the choices facing us at this time.

Unexpected Endings - Battles for Berlin, Constantinople, etc.

History has two categories of Last Stands. First kind are represented by Thermopylae and the Alamo. The second is exemplified by the Battle for Berlin and the Fall of Constantinople. What chiefly distinguishes the former is that they pre-figure eventual victory. They are the night before the dawn; and so are glorious. . . . . But in the second category of last acts, the sun never rises. The loss of Nazi Germany and Constantinople are final. That doesn’t mean they are uninteresting.

Wretchard writes about the shock in Berlin when the city fell in WWII, and the shock among the population of Constantinople during its fall. Well worth your time and contemplation. The comment thread is fascinating. Only a couple of conspiracy theorists, many remarkable insights. Of course, there's always the possibility that a couple of nuts got on a roll in the comment thread after I read through it. Skip those.

Wretchard describes scenes from the movie Downfall, concerning people in and around Hitler's bunker as the Russians invaded the city. Then he comments,

The characters in Hitler’s bunker are the archeypes; and every tale of downfall has their kind again and again. , , ,

But the true fascination of stories of the End is the realization that great empires — and great ships — are mortal; that and the realization that its most privileged members are often the last to see it. They remain blind to the end, toasting each other, offering one another meaningless Golden Party Badges. Madmen in a madhouse. Those who trusted in the walls of Constantinople, the professionalism of the German Army; or the subdivision of the unsinkable RMS Titanic were according to their own lights the best informed, the most knowledgeable and the most worthy of their societies. Indeed, that is what trapped them. Their lives were so bound up in the paradigms of their system that they could not see it as failing.

Samples of the conversation in the comments:

1. Bob Murphy:
It gives me great pleasure to imagine the end scenes of the presidency of Barry Obama at the close of his first and only term with the tragic death-of-empire mindset of his far left minions as power slips from their grasp and their mental projections collapse.
Clinton’s people stole the cutlery. I wonder what Barry’s people will do, given their intense hatred of the real America.

2. Wretchard:
I wouldn’t wish too hard for any kind of real demise. That has a way of being tough on everyone, but especially on the most helpless. But I think it’s important to remember that defeat, like bankruptcy, exists. It isn’t something that “can’t happen here”. Those who spend out a legacy with the same profligacy with which wastrel runs through a family fortune have to remember they are the custodians, not the beneficiaries of the past.

Of course a real wastrel never sees it until the last coin goes down the slot. But the power of democratic politics lies precisely in the existence of mechanisms which enable realizations, then warnings and finally changes to take place. What democracy is supposed to innoculate against is fantasy, through the franchise of the common man. Charles Krauthammer wrote that “decline is a choice”. . . . .

3. Salt Lick:
But the true fascination of stories of the End is the realization that great empires — and great ships — are mortal; that and the realization that its most privileged members are often the last to see it.

In a different kind of movie, the privileged don’t see it because it never affects them.

Everyday, in this small university town I live in, I run into retired and current faculty who will never experience the creeping economic and social disintegration enabled by their anti-American, Leftist politics. Their pensions and university privileges continue until they die. Those still working will never be laid off. Yet despite their working-class rhetoric, I know from experience that they won’t raise a finger to save a staff job.

Some days I feel like I live among the Nazis who escaped to South America. They’ll die happy in big houses on the nearby mountainside whether America declines or recovers. Grants and taxes collected from the rest of the state will safeguard the idyllic quality of the surrounding community. Life’s not fair.

Read the whole thing.

NASA flies to the Moon, Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

It was an unusual day today. A lunar probe crashed into the moon, and President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This surprised just about everybody. He had to have been nominated when he had only been in office for 11 days. The Prize Committee:

"Only very rarely has a person, to the same extent as Obama, captured the world's attention and given his people hope for a better future," the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, said in a statement.

"His diplomacy is founded in the concept of those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitude that are shared by the majority of the world's population. For 108 years the Nobel Committee has sought precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The committee endorses Obama's appeal that now is the time for all of us to take a share of responsibility for a global response for global challenges," the statement said.

There was a wide variety of reactions, but most people, even liberals, seemed skeptical about the choice. Immediate reaction from Dennis Prager's team was sympathy for the President, who had just had a weight placed upon him which would increase scrutiny of his performance and increase partisan divisiveness, as well as fuel jokes about narcissism and symbolism over substance. Even some Europeans expected that the President would be embarrassed. And even most Norwegians don't agree with the decision of their own Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

The Anchoress suggested that Michelle Obama should have shared in the prize (seriously) to make it more meaningful. "Giving the prize to The Obama Family is something that actually could instruct the world and give it genuine “hope,” and something that everyone can strive for – commitment and depth of feeling!" Mickey Kaus and others suggested that it would have greatly enhanced Obama's reputation if he had turned down (or postponed his acceptance of) the prize until he had had a chance to accomplish more.

It wasn't the President's fault. The unexpected prize made it harder for the mainstream media to control the narrative. Maybe there's "no such thing as bad publicity". But maybe not. The Nobel Prize Committee unwittingly validated the goofy satirical proposal which turned into a running theme on Frank J's IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion) website.

The world's established institutions seem to be more than a little bit out of kilter. We're now living in The Society of the Spectacle. It's not the first time the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has chosen aspiration over accomplishment. though.

Such a flurry of excitement. For now, guess I'll just have to hope the President's actions (more than his words) will lead to more peace without increasing the amount of cruelty or oppression in the world as the price of peace (as in, "They made a desert, and called it peace"). I think the Nobel Prize Committee just made that heavy responsibility more difficult for him. Before he was elected, I often imagined that Obama must be secretly thinking, as one or another supporter spoke out about the unusual reasons they wanted him to be President, "Save me from my friends". I would not hold it against him if he pleaded, "Save me from my friends" with increased intensity from time to time.

Not much I can do about these developments at present. Think I'll take a little time for some Nat King Cole. First time I've heard the whole song. A lovely confection.

The difference between self-confidence and self-esteem

I think most people would consider Jay Leno to have lots of self confidence. Here's what he said about what he had learned during his years on the Tonight Show:

The biggest stars and supermodels arent' always interesting. What do I have to say to Paris Hilton? I've learned that there's no such thing as a bad English guest, because they know how to play to an audience. Here's the key though: Put yourself below everyone else. I'm a huge believer in low self-esteem. The only two groups with high self-esteem are actors and criminals. If there's a key to my success, it's that I honestly don't believe I'm better than anyone. I was dyslexic as a kid. I wasn't particularly good in school. I wasn't the best-looking guy. So I never got caught up in myself. Reader's Digest, May 2009 (emphasis mine)

Self-esteem gets certain people a lot of attention, though. Have you ever wondered why? Barely related: Watching and listening to some real stars.

What Super Achievers Know about Time Management

So THAT's why I'm not a super achiever. I'm such a good putterer.

Not that there are any revelations in the article linked above that weren't covered here. Successful people do the things that are important. Even if those things are not entirely pleasant. They don't get sidetracked by less important things. And they take time to "sharpen the saw".

"Super Achievement" may not be everyone's idea of success. So not every successful person will follow the "super achiever" model. But successful people share with "super achievers" the ability to set aside unimportant things. I need to remember this.

The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in the YouTube Era

Here's a story about how one woman became a major part of the "vast Right-Wing Conspiracy".

On August 4 of this year, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House, released a video where she instructed the public, "My job is to keep track of all the disinformation that's out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this," she reads the Drudge Report from her computer screen, "'Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate PRIVATE Insurance.'"

What most don't know is that Douglass was targeting a video unearthed by Key, first released on her video news website, Naked Emperor News, and then picked up by the Drudge Report. The video, which pieces together various Obama statements, damningly quotes the president at an SEIU forum in 2007 saying, "I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out."

The same day the White House posted Douglass' video on its blog, it also released this message: "If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

A self-described Reagan-conservative, Pamela Key laughs the whole thing off, noting that the White House's overreaction "hilariously made it a bigger story. Really bizarre." And bizarre is the word she comes back to, time and again, when she describes her informal foray into investigative journalism. Though her website, Naked Emperor News, debuted in 2008, she was first inspired to dig into Obama's past after reading his memoir Dreams From My Father at the end of 2007. It was then that she "realized what a total radical this guy was."

Originally intended to be a site about children's books, Naked Emperor News was coming together right as the Jeremiah Wright controversy exploded across the media. With a title appropriately suited to its content, Key decided to devote the website to exposing candidate Obama and his pals as mainline members of the political fringe. Obama, Key was certain, was not the centrist fellow the mainstream media was painting him to be in 2008.

Her gaudy website, Naked Emperor News, is not my style. It's past "tabloid" in its style, and consistent with "tabloid" in its headlines. Originally, her intention may have been partly to embarrass the mainstream media into doing their job. When I see one of her videos, my usual reaction is to want to get a balanced, complete picture of the stories behind the video. But these days, lots of people think that they are getting the news through TV and videos. Since liberal thought dominates the mainstream media (including TV), these videos provide some counter-balance. I do wish more people would go beyond the videos, however.

Key remarks sardonically that in 2008, when she started her site, she assumed it would be a temporary endeavor, that the mainstream media would begin holding Obama accountable. What amazes Key is that the media are becoming all the more subservient. Speaking about Obama's recent media circuit, Key says, "he did all those interviews and no one asked him about ACORN and Van Jones." Since the mainstream media is not doing its job, Key is still fishing through Internet archives to uncover information about her next target, ACORN.

Streaming across the head of her website is a quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran minister-turned Nazi resister, which summarizes the raison-d'etre behind Naked Emperor News. "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

There's more to her story at the first link. Example of her videos - What President Obama said about transparency BEFORE he tried to pressure Congress in August to pass a bill no one had read.

The Timeless Magna Carta

At First Principles, James R. Stoner talks about how to understand the Magna Carta in our increasingly "post-literate" age. As an aside, I am a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of a "post-literate" age. But most people do little serious reading anymore outside of school or business. Ironically, the most rapid decline in independent serious reading seemed to coincide with the increase in the percentage of people with college degrees in the latter half of the last century. But I believe that most of the people whom we consider to be "leaders" still read books and do other serious reading on their own.

Everyone knows that Magna Carta stands among the headwaters of the great stream of American constitutionalism. Taken out of context, however, it is hard to imagine a political document more incongruent with our world today. Ours is an age of science and technology, eager for fresh discoveries and new gadgets; but Magna Carta invokes established customs and traditions and looks for wisdom in a distant past. Our time is democratic and secular; but Magna Carta was granted by a king at the urging and with the witness of archbishops and bishops, barons and knights. Increasingly our society is “post-literate,” obsessed with song and image and chronicled by video recording; but Magna Carta is a document, repeatedly copied and reissued, whose power was always understood to lie in the written word.

Even in comparison with our own Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta appears out of step. . . .

But it is precisely because Magna Carta has grown strange to us that we have much to learn by becoming reacquainted with it. Its central concern—how to counter the abuse of governmental power with the rule of law—remains a matter of interest to citizens of all political stripes today. Why would we want to ignore a successful response to a problem with which we still must grapple? The character it supposed in the human beings who made it and lived under it can also be inferred from its terms, and there is nothing about human nature that makes such character obsolete. Seeking to learn from Magna Carta teaches us doubly about the value of tradition, for the document itself looks to tradition, and we learn about our own tradition by looking to it.

At Maggie's Farm, The Barrister chooses a quote from the piece above highlighting differences between the American and British with regard to the Magna Carta.

If you are starting to think that there might be some holes in your education, like I did when I read this piece, First Principles offers short courses in Western Civilization.

Hollywood's Superior Moral Compass and its Future

Wretchard writes about the support for Roman Polanski among the intellectual elite as it relates to traditions of inequality before the law. Very interesting.

The arrest has outraged the Poles and the French and many public intellectuals, not because Polanski didn’t commit the crime: he pleaded guilty to it; not because there’s any doubt that he’s a fugitive: he was. The outrage really stems from the idea that Roman Polanski, a man of genius and a tormented background, should be treated like a common criminal. And when you think about it, the only population that can naturally be treated as common criminals are common criminals. Uncommon criminals ill-suit the case. For much of human history, inequality before the law was the norm, and it was regarded as perfectly natural that different rules should apply to different classes of people. . . .

On a more practical note, Glenn Reynolds (a libertarian who is tolerant of many kinds of behavior outside the "mainstream") finds support for Roman Polanski to be a big potential problem for Hollywood's image.

Roman Polanski anally raped a 13-year old girl. After plying her with Quaaludes and champagne wasn't enough to make her succumb to his charms, he ignored her protests and did what he wanted. . . .

Yet Polanski had -- and still has -- important defenders. . . .

. . film mogul Harvey Weinstein chimed in to argue that -- by going after a multidecade fugitive -- the government was the one "acting irresponsibly and criminally." Weinstein went on to opine that "Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion."

Compassion for rich and powerful auteurs, anyway. . .

Yet Hollywood's compassion is peculiarly narrow. They're still trying to decide whether to forgive Elia Kazan for naming communists in Hollywood more than a half-century ago. Anal rape of a 13-year-old girl merits compassion, but there are limits.

My daughter -- just past 13 herself -- comments that until pretty recently, actors and theater people were just a rung, or maybe a half-rung, above common criminals in the public estimation, and suggests that the Polanski scandal, and Hollywood's tone-deaf reaction to it, may go some distance toward returning things to the status quo ante. She may be right.

Though self-righteous moralism has been Hollywood bigwigs' stock-in-trade for decades, the evidence suggests that, overall, their moral position is nothing to brag about, and the Polanski affair may bring this home in a way that earlier scandals have not. . .

Why hand your money to a bunch of obvious moral cretins, when there are so many better things to do with it? Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it's ever been, and yet it is also more arrogant than it was in its Golden Age.

Such circumstances seldom end well.

As Glenn often says, read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn has another interesting thought:

Earlier bad boys – Lord Byron, say – were obliged to operate as "transgressive" artists within a broader moral order. Now we are told that a man such as Polanski cannot be subject to anything so footling as morality: He cannot "transgress" it because, by definition, he transcends it. Yet all truly great art is made in the tension between freedom and constraint. In demanding that an artist be placed above the laws of man, Harvey Weinstein & Co. are also putting him beyond the possibility of art. Which may explain the present state of the movie industry.

Update: If Hollywood has lost ABC's Green Room, some soul-searching is in order.

UPDATE: The French Culture Minister who defended Polanski earlier wrote about having sex with young boys in Southeast Asia. Plus, the Polanksi Culture in Hollywood: normalizing sex with children.

A View from Canada - Is Obama America's Gorbachev?

An unusual piece from Canada.

Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev's temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.

Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern "liberal" mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

Read the whole thing. How close does the author come to your own thinking?

Note: VDH is worried about Obama becoming too weak in international relations to be effective. It may be more important now than it was before to support the President when he takes actions with which we can agree. And to kind of nudge him toward actions which we think will be in the country's (and the world's) best interests. Where is Obama's Dick Morris to help him modify the influence of the radicals around him and increase his bipartisan appeal?

UPDATE: Gorbachev won a Nobel Peace Prize, just like President Obama. Instapundit has a worrisome question.

The observations above are consistent with Richard Epstein's observation about Obama when they worked together at the University of Chicago:

. . . he assumes that redistribution can take place without any negative impact upon production. And if you live in that kind of fairyland, which I think he does, every one of your major social and economic initiatives is going to (A) misfire and if they succeed, God forbid, in getting through, they're going to lead to an intensification of the downturn that we've already experienced.

Perhaps President Obama optimistically assumes that the transformative changes he envisions for our government can take place without too much suffering and destruction domestically and without placing too great a burden on future generations. Maybe he really believes that he can insult the leaders of allied nations, one after the other, abrogate agreements for mutual defense, appease dictators, etc. without destabilizing and imperiling world governments which are currently free and democratic. At least, I hope that's what he believes. Otherwise, he is far more radical than most people would want to think.

President Obama on the UN Stage

Victor Davis Hanson, in considering the events of last week, wrote of President Obama's visit to the UN. His impression was that President Obama was presenting himself as if he were The World's President. The lofty, idealistic, self-referential rhetoric preferred by the President for occasions like this is starting to wear on VDH.

If Obama is right, and American exceptionalism is over, and we are just one of many, why, then, does he expect to garner the world’s attention and to seek the world’s limelight? What is it about America that gives him, the two-year Senate veteran, such prominence?

In fact, it is America’s 20th-century achievements, its wealth, its singular morality, its competence — all the things that Obama either takes for granted or snarls about — that alone explains everything from his enormous Air Force One to the influence he enjoys. Put mellifluous Obama as President of Sweden or Slovakia and the world, rightly or wrongly, snores. Obama tragically does not understand that America made him — he does not make America.

VDH also presented the interesting idea that at home, President Obama is governing a lot like one might expect the president of an Ivy League University to govern. Michael Barone thinks that maybe President Obama's foreign policy is a little too influenced by his formative years in the university. This is one logical way to explain why he seems to offend our allies so often, (repeatedly and apparently deliberately insulting British dignitaries, especially) while trying to make friends with dictatorial leaders like Hugo Chavez.

Can President Obama learn to think strategically from the point of view of someone like Putin? This ability may be important to the future of the world. Right now, it seems like he thinks most of his potential enemies are domestic. Much of what is going on in the world right now reminds VDH, a war historian, of World War II. It's worthwhile thinking about what he has to say in forming your own opinions about current world events. For example, he thinks that, from a Russian point of view, trouble between the West and Iran provides a number of opportunities and advantages.

Trouble means showing the world’s onlookers that the Obama hope-and-change rhetoric is a good way to get yourself in a lot of trouble, and reminds others that Russia is a dependable if not thuggish regime to have on your side. (When the Wehrmacht approached Moscow in late 1941, “civilized” European neutrals like Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Portugal all started to horse-trade with the sure winner Hitler, angling for trade, cash, borderland, the clearing of old grudges, etc — without a whit of care that he was killing millions of Russian civilians and murdering on sight the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine.[By late 1944 these same “civilized” states were damning Hitler and now angling with the allies.]). So yes, the past is helpful.

Charles Krauthammer is not impressed by the President's involvement in a UN Security Council nuclear non-proliferation resolution. Krauthammer said on TV:

Look, my model U.N. in high school was more realistic than this Security Council. The resolution, as you pointed out, isn't even binding.

And the problem is that the assumption of Obama is that the reason that these rogue states are pursuing nukes is because we have not led by example — rather than the obvious, that they want the prestige and the power of having a nuke.

In fact, the '80's and the '90's, when we radically reduced our arsenals, is precisely when Iran and [North] Korea launched their ambitions and nuclear programs.

Claudia Rosett is not impressed, either.

The Obama administration keeps looking for ways to pretend that Iran’s nuclear bomb program is no immediate crisis.

Interesting times ahead, I'm afraid.

60 Years of Communism in China

Interesting angle on the 60th anniversary of communism in China by Tim Blair. Follow the last link. Why does China now have so much money?

Remember, the parades and most of the other official celebrations were apparently "out of bounds" for the people, and the government brought in female models for the parades. There's some real image-consciousness in China these days. Diverts some of the attention from The Revolution's murderous past and not-entirely-glorious present. They're still pretty much in denial about Mao.

Update: Another group of marching military women here. Follow the link to photos of the big spectacle.

How did ACORN get such a deal?

ACORN has received a lot of money from big banks for enforcing policies which harmed the interests of those banks, and which contributed a lot to our current financial crisis.

ACORN perfected this “pay for protection” business model in the 1990s. And it is a business. While some of the ACORN organizations are non-profit, others are not, which means that by working together they can get the best of all worlds: political actions, union-style organization, tax-exempt status, privacy, and profit.

And concerning union connections . . .

High Art

Maybe Hollywood needs to learn not to take itself so seriously.

UPDATE: By Hollywood "taking itself seriously", I mean things like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein saying,

Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.

before getting all emotional about Roman Polanski winning the Legion of Honour in France, where the people have "incredible love and affection" for him. (Though current polls in France run about 70% in favor of Polanski's return to face the justice system. Maybe Weinstein is thinking instead of the love for Polanski among all the more "grown-up" and sophisticated intellectuals in France).

Allahpundit responds concerning the type of compassion shown in Weinstein's world. Actually, his crack is a bit harsh, I think. But Weinstein's high regard for the importance of "art" clearly figures into his support for Polanski.

Like many liberals, Weinstein's compassion likely flows toward the face he sees in his mind, Polanski's. His concern is for the immediate suffering of his friend rather than the non-immediate, though highly predictable, suffering of future child victims of "artists" if the rule of law regarding sexual abuse of minors is not respected. He probably really believes that he is being more compassionate than people who want to uphold the rule of law.

And Remember: Art belongs to the world. Polanski belongs to the world.

Weinstein also cited Hollywood fundraisers for disater victims as evidence of Hollywood's superior compassion. These are a good thing, but glitzy fundraisers are not more "compassionate" than the actions of those who donate money to the fundraisers with no recognition, or those who provide hands-on help.

Of course, it's often not possible for the denizens of Hollywood to be compassionate toward strangers in the way other people are compassionate toward strangers. It's too dangerous for them to leave a highly controlled environment - fans, paparazzi, etc. often interfere with normal compassionate actions of the famous.

Mark Steyn, naturally, puts it more pithily:

Let us agree that Hollywood bigshots have "compassion" for people in general, for people far away in a big crowd scene on the distant horizon, for people in a we-are-the-world-we-are-the-children sense. But Hollywood bigshots treat people in particular, little people, individuals, like garbage. To Polanski, he was the world, you are the children; now take your kit off and let's have a "photo shoot."

A parallel concern for Hollywood's image is the pictore of the "stage mother from hell" who signed permission for her 13-year-old daughter to participate in the "photo shoots".

Roger L. Simon reports his personal discomfort concerning other supporters of Polanski in Hollywood, where he works. Intellectuals in Europe have joined in, too. Steyn again:

France's Society of Film Directors warned that the arrest of such an important artist "could have disastrous consequences for freedom of expression across the world".

Really? For the past two years, I've been in a long and weary battle up north to restore "freedom of expression" to Canada. On Monday afternoon, in fact, I'll be testifying on this very subject at the House of Commons in Ottawa, if France's Society of Film Directors or Debra Winger would like to swing by. Please, don't all stampede at once. Ottawa Airport can only handle so many Gulfstreams. If only I'd known how vital child rape was to "freedom of expression," my campaign could have taken off a lot earlier. (emphasis mine)

Steyn also summarized the famous tragedies faced by Polanski during his life, and puts them in perspective.

Simon laments that the police did not act decades ago, so this sordid subject could have been dealt with when it was more appropriate. I wonder if the police were concerned about backlash from the liberal elite even back then? I'm not really certain of the timeline, but I believe that it was at about this time that a prominent leftist on the East Coast fled to France after having been charged with killing his girlfriend and stuffing her body in a trunk. He also had a lot of support on the Left. He lived a quiet life in a small town in France for many years before the law started to catch up with him. Funny how people like this can get other people to support them financially, too. One of the perplexities of life.

In the case of Polanski, it appears that pressure from both the Left and the Right may have affected how prosecutors and the judge acted. Prosecutors were rather lenient toward him at first, allowing him to plea to reduced charges with an agreement to submit to therapy. But then they seem to have decided they had to "do something" (due to public outcry) to make it look like they were not giving him special treatment. Polanski thought that he would be in for something more than 90 days in therapy. When he recently tried to get the charges dismissed, lawyers cited the laxity of prosecutors in trying to bring him to justice as a reason for dropping the charges altogether. Thereby almost forcing them to defend their reputations. Politics makes all sorts of situations more complicated.