How we got Thanksgiving

"It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom." There are some similarities between the experiences of the Pilgrims and the experiences of some Israelis. But the hard lessons of failed socialism came over a longer time period in Israel.

The Norwegian massacre and the Left's addiction to demonization

After the terrible Norwegian massacre, the Mainstream Media and others on the Left were quick to label the assassin as a "fundamentalist Christian". But this designation was apparently wishful thinking on the part of the Left which hates "fundamentalist Christianity". Timothy Dalrymple:

What exactly, then, is Breivik’s “Christianity”? He cares not for Christ or Christianity, but for Christendom. Rod Dreher gave perhaps the best definition I’ve seen so far. Breivik, he says, “sees the faith much as the Nazi leadership did: as a European tribal religion that can be instrumentalized to provide the basis for an ethno-cultural war against the Other.” The Nazis were not fond of what Breivik calls “religious Christianity.” Hitler, rightly, did not believe that “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” would suit his purposes. Personal devotion, a living and breathing relationship with a God who is Love and a Son of God who teaches the love of enemies, does not “instrumentalize” well into the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners and Christian resisters. Neither does it instrumentalize into the murder of 85 innocent children. . . .

Being a Christian can mean many things, Breivik says. It can mean that “you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage.” . . . .

Indeed, in his account of the secret meeting that reconstituted the Knights Templar, the largest contingent is “Christian atheist.” . . .

Why the self-appointed guardians of nuance want to ignore these facts — that Breivik was no kind of Christian in the ordinary sense, but more like an agnostic committed to Christian symbols for pragmatic reasons — in their rush to portray Breivik as a “Christian fundamentalist” or “Christianist” (which Andrew Sullivan uses to associate Breivik with conservative American Christians), is a question well worth asking.

Cathy Young presents factual information to counteract the "blame the Jews" theme which has also emerged from the terrorist rampage.  

Clifford May points out the inconsistency of the mainstream media with regard to labeling people as terrorists:

Exploiting atrocities to settle political scores through guilt by association is a nasty game, but if we are going to play it, I’d look elsewhere. I’d start with Reuters or, more precisely, what we might call the Reuters Doctrine. After the attacks of 9/11, there were individuals and groups (emphatically including the policy institute I head) making the case that terrorism should be defined as the use of violence against civilians to further a political cause, and that expressing a grievance by intentionally killing other people’s children is never justified.

We argued that civilized people, of whatever religion or nationality, ought to be able to agree on this principle, and, if they did, then those who target innocents would be seen only as terrorists, unequivocally condemned by the “international community.”

Reuters disagreed. The global news agency took the position that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This expression of moral relativism was embraced by many in the media, on the far left and far right, in academia, government, and transnational organizations. And that may indeed have paved the way for Breivik — who unquestionably fancies himself a fighter for European freedom — to believe he could use terrorism to focus attention on his grievances without de-legitimizing those grievances. If it works for militant Islamists, why not for a militant Norwegian?

May also includes in his piece a number of helpful notes to young readers concerning the way the mainstream media has changed over the years, as classical liberalism has largely been replaced by leftism (with regard to open-mindedness, the ability to examine one's own positions objectively, support for freedom of speech, etc.) Read the whole thing.

Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character

Agree with him or not, this piece by Dennis Prager is a good example of writing with clarity (I sometimes think his writing would be better with more examples, but I thought this piece was well-written for a short summary). Read the whole thing. As usual with Prager, I didn't find a single "weasel word" in the piece.  Kicker at the end.

If you'd rather watch a video, he did short one with the same theme earlier. I hope that most people would fall somewhere between the extremes in how much government they think is good:   no government (true anarchy with its risks of destruction) and really big government (national or international egalitarian government with its risks of totalitarianism).  But about the only people agitating for anarchy today are faux anarchists who want to see Western Civilization fall so they can build a new, utopian system.  Progressive policies which lead toward really big government, on the other hand, remain popular.  The ten moral downsides which Prager identifies are:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme.

As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, along with many American states, like California, is going broke.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing.

And the rhetoric of liberalism — labeling each new entitlement a “right” — reinforces this sense of entitlement.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption.

Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And, unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency, and they cannot arrest you.

7. The welfare state corrupts family life.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults.

9. As a result of the Left’s sympathetic views of pacifism, and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world’s evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society’s and the world’s great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil.

This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

Bastille Day and La Marseillaise

I was thinking yesterday that it's a wonder that La Marseillaise is still the French National Anthem: "To Arms, Citizens", etc. Doesn't quite fit with the current culture of Social Democracy and multiculturalism in Europe. Does any Western country have a fiestier National Anthem? Or a more rousing one? The version from Casa Blanca reminds us that tyranny is a recurring danger.  On the other hand, Bastille Day also reminds us that revolutions don't always turn out as hoped.  

Walter Russell Meade is on a roll. He has a wonderful piece about the Fall of the Bastille.  

Anyway, for your holiday reflections, five takes on the French Revolution : Charles Dickens, Maximilien Robespierre, Albert Camus, the Marquis de Lafayette and your Via Meadia host.

I hope that a significant percentage of high school and college students still knows who Dickens, Robespierre, Camus and Lafayette were.

Maximilien Robespierre:
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror.

And of course, terror got a little out of hand during the French Revolution and eventually took even Robespierre's life.* I don't know if Meade intended a connection, but he also put up a short post on the Spirit of Marie Antoinette Alive and Well in the Hamptons. Heh.

* A great deal of the terror came as the result of the attempt to "purify" the country with regard to egalitarianism, (which takes "equality" far beyond the American Founders' emphasis on Equality Before the Law) and other principles which animated the revolutionaries.

It's remarkable to me how many 20th Century tyrants from around the world spent time in Paris before embarking on their careers of tyranny. Many of those tyrants also espoused the idea of "purifying" their own countries. Not something you would expect when visiting modern-day France.

Progressives in American History

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that things could be worse with regard to the political actions of the Commander in Chief.

I'm thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.

Oh, and I'm not thinking of George W. Bush, but another "W" – actually "WW": Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.

President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of "self determination" and the author of the idealistic but doomed "Fourteen Points" – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.

That's a shame, because Wilson's two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson's racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. . .

An extremely interesting piece which briefly outlines the beginnings of the progressive movement in the United States and discusses the changes in progressivism over the years.

Personal note: My grandmother briefly lost her citizenship during Wilson's administration because she was married to a German immigrant.

Ed Driscoll recounts how Progressives decided, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, that they should start from zero in a variety of ways. And later, that they should go forward, into the past. Glenn Reynolds comments: Reminds me of this Neal Stephenson quote: “The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

Michael Knox Beran: When compassion turns to coercion

The past three years have witnessed a renewal of faith in progressive social policy, a faith embodied in President Obama's pledge to lead an administration dedicated to "change we can believe in." It is a faith that, in an earlier incarnation, made one liberal, the Columbia teacher and literary critic Lionel Trilling, uncomfortable.

In his book "The Liberal Imagination," published in 1950, Trilling pointed to the "dangers which lie in our most generous wishes." Progressives, Trilling observed, believe that through the "rational direction of human life" they can alleviate misery. But the reformers, Trilling showed, are too often oblivious of the truth of their own motives.

In his 1947 novel "The Middle of the Journey," Trilling probes this hidden impulse in his portrayal of Gifford Maxim, a character modeled on his Columbia schoolmate and legendary Soviet spy-turned-anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers. "And in the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man," Maxim says. This hope tempts the progressive to embrace coercive policies in the name of social equity. "The more we talk of welfare, the crueler we become," Maxim says. "How can we possibly be guilty when we have in mind the welfare of others, and of so many others?"

The age of white guilt and the disappearance of the black individual

An amazing 1999 essay by Shelby Steele, a man born to a white mother and a black father, like the President. He's older than the President, and his family was on the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. He believes that today's institutionalized white guilt leads to blacks donning a "mask" of group identity rather than adding strength to their group by developing as individuals. Every phrase in this essay seems well-placed, and I believe it is worth careful study. It is quite long for today's short attention spans, and therefore makes a useful subject for study by students wishing to expand their capacities to follow a line of argument.

One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time.

He draws several distinctions between life for blacks before and after 1965, and discusses shifts in "black identity" over time.  He discusses his personal experiences with the "corrupting influences" of institutionalized white guilt.

This essay helps to explain a lot of things, like:

• How "liberalism" abandoned classical liberalism to conservatives and libertarians
• Why black activists beat up conservative blacks and set fire to their vehicles
* Why "black leaders" waged a vicious campaign to get Larry Elder kicked off the air
• Why TODAY'S liberals (actually, leftists) demonize the people who disagree with them
• Why Thomas Sowell so resented Francis Fox Pivens' theories
• Why Francis Fox Pivens fought so hard against Thomas Sowell's concerns for personal freedom
• Why so many former participants in the Civil Rights Movement have turned against the Left

Near the end of the essay, Steele writes about a black author who left America during the Age of Racism, returned to America during the Civil Rights Era then returned to Europe again.  I have emphasized points which seem important to me:

James Baldwin once wrote: "What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself." If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true.

Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens.

This essay also shows a little of how Steele's thinking about the future President Obama developed.  He believed that Candidate Obama would become trapped by the need to present different "masks" to his black and white audiences. He hoped that Obama would eventually be able to rise above the "masks" to express his individuality. The two "masks" could be characterized as the "Jesse Jackson model" - demanding compensation from whites who felt guilty - vs. the "Oprah Winfrey model" - offering redemption to whites who felt guilty.   Steele puts it more elegantly, of course. The President surprised Steele by winning the election. But that was not the last of the President's struggles.

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

The President now often seems more comfortable with the symbolism of being President than with the duties of office. He even suggested recently that it would be easier to be President of China.  People are starting to seem him more as an individual than they did during his campaign, and to treat him like "The President" rather than as a symbol.

Hat tips: I tracked down this article via Mickey Kaus, who was writing about consolidation of affirmative action and civil rights bureaucracies. He linked to John Rosenberg, who also wrote an interesting piece on "Diversity" as Tribalism. His latest post links the remarkable Shelby Steele essay discussed above.

If by now you haven’t thought of Shelby Steele and his soul-searching writing about white guilt, you should have. . .

Today whiteness is stigmatized by liberals like Yglesias in much the same fashion that blackness has been stigmatized by white racists. . .

Update: Ideas like affirmative action, quotas, etc. may not have started as as result of the black civil rights movement in the U.S.: "Former NY mayor Ed Koch reveals new evidence of genuine anti-Semitism on the part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:"

The transcript of those discussions, which Dr. Medoff cites, reveals what FDR said about the status of the 330,000 Jews living in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. . . The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”

Of course, among the Jews of Europe and the Middle East who had traditionally faced limitations on their rights to hold property, etc., education was one way of surviving (and their religion encouraged education, too).

Housing or Homes?

From a man who has lived among the poorest of the poor, my pick for today's Thought Piece.

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project.

Read the whole thing. Watch the video at the end.

Then you might want to scan the comments. Lots of fascinating life experiences are represented in these comments, from several different countries. There are lots of politically incorrect thoughts in there, some better than others. There are several observations about why high-density housing works in places like Singapore, but not in places like Pruitt-Igoe.   Plus some thoughts on the "social-engineering" architects like Le Corbusier, ("Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s. . . in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being." whose goals in designing buildings included weakening bonds between people.   It would all be so efficient and well-planned.   Lots of people in lots of countries thought he was a genius.

Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism. . .  Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. . . 

Below are a few comments I thought were interesting.  But there are others.

#10. Demolition video from YouTube, by an Austrian guy.

#20: - written by a guy who once ran a homeless shelter

Pat Moynihan told LBJ he would destroy Black families with his new welfare program. The old sociologist was right. Most families then – including Black ones – had 2 married parents living at home. Not now, thanks largely to Welfare. Now over 80% of the poor are never-married moms and their children – and very dysfunctional too. These families are the major source of poverty in the U.S. Also the major source of violent young criminals, 70% of whom are fatherless. . .

....the key to slums and dangerous housing is not architecture, nor government programs. It is the 2-parent family. As you noted Blert, boys need a father badly, especially when they get bigger. (Girls do too, although for somewhat different reasons.)

That is where we need to focus. If the stable, 2-parent, enduring family built on marriage can somehow be restored, the slums will lose most of their horror.

Otherwise, each new generation of fatherless kids becomes a civilization-destroying onslaught of new Barbarians.

When the number of fatherless children becomes too large, a family or society cannot provide enough acceptable male role models. During the Great Depression, a period of low crime in spite of widespread poverty, the marriage rate among Blacks was higher than among Whites.

#23: It's not just big projects which have problems

On the connection between Section 8 housing and high crime rates, below is a link to an article titled “American Murder Mystery,” from the July/August 2008 Atlantic. It discusses the findings of a criminologist and housing expert (a married couple) studying changing crime patterns in Memphis. . .

#69. Wretchard pipes in on his own thread:  What all this means for us today:

. . . . Maybe housing isn’t about housing at all. Back in the Tondo Days, we had people negotiating with the Marcos administration who wanted to demolish the Foreshore and relocate everyone to Sapang Palay, Bulacan, where there wasn’t a hope in hell of employment.

The people who lived in Tondo were there because they found a niche in the ecosystem as ragpickers, small tradesmen, day-laborers in nearby factories, or in service industries like home laundry and domestic service. That whole ecosystem would be bulldozed over and its human contents sent off to a rural area.

It was a recipe for disaster, but you couldn’t convince the planners, who had degrees from pretty good universities, to see that. Later, they relented and decided to reclaim some more land from the Bay and turn it into the Dagat-dagatan estate, which at least would be nearby. . .

But if housing is not about homes, then what? PR has already been mentioned. Other objects come to mind. Housing could be about votes. It is almost always about money and the subprime crisis is in some way the perfect confluence of PR, money and votes. It was the perfect vehicle to achieve all these non-homing goals. Here was an “affordable housing” project, which was good PR, for which people were to be eternally grateful through votes. And it made a pile of money too — for a while — and for some.

And then, like some terrible, virtual Pruitt-Igoe the whole subprime thing imploded and its ruin is still upon us. The fragments are still raining down. So maybe Barney Frank is right: housing has lasting value, at least for his own political faction. See he’s still in office. Yet Dionne Warwick may have been right too. “A House is not a Home”. In fact, homes have been broken up to fit people into housing. You have whole communities of single-parent, unemployed, poor people where once you might have had communities of relatively familial, employed poor people. Homes for housing is a poor trade.

But at least the machine has the votes. And of course, for the connected, there is also the money. “The poor we will always have with us.” So the only question is how to make a buck off of them.

#90. Wretchard gets REALLY politically incorrect. Beginning with an Australian example this time.

Update: #105: "Car 54 Where Are You?" Herman Munster before he was Herman Munster.

Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday

Tear Down This Wall.

Background of the speech:

Our friend Peter Robinson was the man who wrote the speech. . . .

Part 2

John Hinderaker: How Ronald Reagan made me a conservative pundit

I grew up in a Republican family, became a left-winger when in college and was a Communist for a while. By 1976 I was a garden-variety liberal Democrat. I voted for Jimmy Carter, enthusiastically, in that year. But then the wheels came off. Gas shortages, inflation, chronic unemployment--"stagflation," previously thought impossible by most economists--and weakness overseas. Liberal pundits scolded young people for expecting more. They said that America's decline was only natural, and we should all get used to it. The best course, according to the liberal consensus, was to move toward a state industry model like Germany's or Japan's. . . .

But shortly after the Reagan administration ended, something strange happened. The Left tried to rewrite history. A veritable cottage industry sprang up, consisting of journalists, politicians and pseudo-economists who tried to convince Americans that what they had lived through in the 1980s never really happened. I would have thought such an effort must be doomed to failure--who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?--and that revisionist history isn't possible until the eyewitnesses have passed from the scene. But no! The idea that the Reagan administration had been a disaster for most Americans was actually taken seriously in many quarters. . . .

I don't know who Rocketman is, but he makes some interesting observations, categorized under "Rants":

Where 2 years ago we saw magazing covers with Obama as FDR, today we see them with the President embracing Reagan. And the MBM (make-believe-media) has been working hard in order to exploit every opportunity to refer to something Obama has done or said as being “Reagan-esque”. . . .

No matter how studiously Obama or the progressive left imitate Reagan, they will never be able to be like him. That’s because to them, Reaganism is a certain pose to be modeled, a scene to be played, “optics” to be achieved, a tone to be struck, another phony affectation that can be mastered.

60 Minutes Retrospecitve:  Reagan in historic video clips defines fascism, criticizes the Republican Party (many of these criticisms are still valid today) and describes the process by which the mainstream media build stories to fit their desired narrative.

The Mainstream Media's Delusional Focus After the Arizona Shootings

I thought it would be a good idea to document some of what happened in our national media following the terrible Arizona shootings, for future reference.

Following the lead of CNN and the New York Times --- Paul Krugman in particular, the Mainstream Media and a few politicians on the Left started immediately to make the connection between the Arizona shootings, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. And they got details about the shooting wrong, too. Local media and alternative media did a better job.  And much commentary in the MSM was more responsible than news reporting. Don't miss Dr. Krauthammer's take.  He is a psychiatrist, after all.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

Or should we call the Mainstream Media the "Make-Believe Media"? Compare the continuing references to "civility" in connection to the Arizona shootings (in order to connect the shooting in people's minds to the early false reports) with the incidents the MSM doesn't report nationally because the victim is conservative and/or there is no possibility to connect the perpetrator with conservative motives.

I think Krakatoa made an interesting point early on in the media frenzy:

Pretending that you can compartmentalize all the woes in the world into one neat box of causation called "Republican/Conservative/Colonialist White Male bigotry" gives you the illusion of the power to easily deal with those problems.

There's another reason that they lie: Misinformation gets results.

Glenn Reynolds wrote a piece in the WSJ about the Politics of Blood Libel on the Left. Sarah Palin later used the term "blood libel" in a statement, leading to a furious reaction from the Left and defenses of the use of the term from the Right - and even from Alan Derschowitz. (scroll through search results) Ann Althouse quickly compiled a little list of violent incidents which the Left tried to pin on conservatives. Jim Treacher on Twitter: "So what term would the left prefer for how they're using lies to try and connect their political opponents to murder?"

Ed Driscoll, February 1: "No Matter How Cynical You Get, it is Impossible to Keep Up"

New York magazine, November 16th, 1992:

I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that’s unhealthy.

Bill Keller, the New York Times executive editor, yesterday.

Keller added: We have had a lot of talk since the Gabby Giffords attempted murder about civility in our national discourse, and I make no connection between the guy who shot those people in Tucson and the national discourse. But it is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch.

From the comments - Shannon Love: 

You’ve got admire the technique the same way you admire any good con.

By simply repeating they don’t believe there is a connection over and over again, they can plant the idea that there is a connection just by shear repetition. Eventually, when people hear about the shooting their minds will instantly associate that with Fox News, Palin and whomever else they wish.

It’s pysch 101, basic formative association.
They revealed their unprincipled and irrational biases in their rush to judgment about the shooting and now they are using their denouncement of their own mistake as a smear.

NoahP:

We live in an era almost without grace. The Missoula Community Theater stages the Mikado with lyrics calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin to applause and laughter. Following national exposure by the indispensable James Taranto in “The Best of the Web Today”, we get nonapology apologies but no apology to Sarah Palin and her family.

And if some deranged Leftist should harm her or her family would the NYT and their ilk take any responsibility? Not a chance.

James Taranto. . . this incident is shocking but not surprising. For all the bogus accusations being thrown at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, genuinely hateful political rhetoric is commonplace in the art world, even in art that is not overtly political. . . .

Californio:
Wait – Didn’t the Times initially report that the Tucson incident should be blamed on Sarah Palin and the Duke Lacrosse team?

“We got the narrative right but the facts wrong…”

Remember how eager the MSM is to place blame on the Right as the 2012 elections approach.

Democratic Pollster Mark Penn: What Obama really needs is an Oklahoma City moment.

Earlier Related Posts:

The Establishment: Observations of Shannon Love on changes in the Left during the last 40 years.

CNN puts itself "in the crosshairs": Examples of irresponsible reporting and deceptive reporting - including sneakily deleting lines from the President's speech.

The Disturbing World of the Arizona Shooter: Legitimate issues which the mainstream media IGNORED while trying to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting.

Perry Mason could teach today's reporters a few things: How to restore some credibility to the media. How readers can spot deceptive news reports. Poll showing distrust of media.

The New Civility in Washington D.C.: Representative Cohen compares Republicans to Nazis. Not the person I would expect to do something like this.  Fascinating.

Libeling the Right: The only way the Left can win in America: Because Leftist policies are failing around the world in front of our eyes.

Newsweek finds a new way to keep the Big Lie alive: Including false suggestion through cover art.  Despicable.  Also, Daniel Henninger explains the origins of the Left's belief that the Right is violent.

Hollywood, Howard Zinn and the Fellowship of the Ring

Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring. "I’m pretty sure this is a parody, but, really, how can you tell the difference?" Heh.

Radical historian Howard Zinn died a year ago today. But his influence is still very strong.  It would be fine to have the viewpoint of a radical historian broadly considered in America if so many people did not consider it to be the ONLY VALID viewpoint.

Recommended as companion reading to Zinn's signature book: Paul Johnson's A History of the American People.

Former radical Ron Radosh wrote a piece in Minding the Campus the day after Zinn died:

Howard Zinn's death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public's understanding of our nation's past. His book A People's History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day some 128,000 new copies are sold each year. That alone made Zinn perhaps the single most influential historian whose works have reached multitudes of Americans. Indeed, Zinn found that his book was regularly adopted as a text in high schools and most surprisingly, in many colleges and universities. . .

Zinn was aided in getting his book attention by two youthful neighbors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. When both became movie stars, they used their celebrity to popularize Zinn's work and to help bring it to a wide audience. As Damon told the press recently, Zinn's message showed that what our ancestors rebelled "against oftentimes are exactly the same things we're up against now." Zinn himself added a few weeks ago that his hope was that his work will spread new rebellion, and "lead into a larger movement for economic justice."

So, Matt Damon ---  from the ultra-rich, insulated, shark-filled artificial world of Hollywood  (a world rife with nepotism,  cronyism and people who believe themselves to be very important)  --- imagines himself to be one of the common folk within   Zinn's "continuous rebellion of the masses against oppression" narrative.  Figures.  Sort of reminds me of the French aristocracy play-acting as shepherds and milkmaids to escape the intrigues of the Court.

From Zinn's perspective, history should not be told from the standpoints of generals or presidents, but through that of people who struggle for their rights, who engage in strikes, boycotts, slave rebellions and the like. Its purpose should be to encourage similar behavior today. Indeed, Zinn candidly said that history was not about "understanding the past," but rather, about "changing the future." That statement alone should have disqualified anyone from referring to him as a historian.

Zinn did not exempt President Barack Obama who he thought was both "a mediocre" and "dangerous president" from his criticism. In the last article he wrote, that appeared in The Nation last week, Zinn argued that Obama's foreign policy was "no different from a Republican," that he was "nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike." As for his proposed domestic programs, he found them "limited" and "cautious." He also did not approve of the apparent decision to try those responsible for 9/11, and referred to them as "suspected terrorists," who "have not been found guilty."

Zinn was certainly entitled to his perspective, widely held by many in the academy, but its danger lies in the favorable reception he often got from those who know little. As one of his proteges, Dave Zirin, writes on The Huffington Post: "With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States." That, precisely, is the problem.

Back in the day when there was still a difference between "liberal" and "leftist", Zinn was investigated by the FBI, like many of the Hollywood Left. They were later successful in demonizing those who questioned their communist affiliations, and the dominant Hollywood culture still endlessly brings up the blacklisting of those years -- while they blacklist others who don't agree with their ideology.

Orson Bean is old enough to have been blacklisted once in Hollywood for being a communist ("kind of cool, except for losing your career") and again for becoming more conservative. He describes the second blacklisting as much more difficult.  Bean's difficult experiences helped lead his son-in-law, Andrew Breitbart, to rebel against the Hollywood Left and become a libertarian/conservative activist.  Funny how these things are connected.

Obscure Kennedy History

The Memorial of the Inauguration of JFK

The 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration seems to have brought out the history buffs. At the 50th anniversary commemoration at the Kennedy Center, they read a poem by Robert Frost, but not the one he recited at the inauguration, nor the one he had intended to read:

Both of these poems are pugnacious, echoing of American exceptionalism, and a bit bloody. The Kennedy's decision to trade them out for "The Road Not Taken," is an interesting one.

Instead, they chose the "The Road Not Taken", which I memorized as a child (got my only standing ovation at school from reciting a Frost poem). The rejection of history at the commemoration is one more indication of how much the dominant culture's values have changed in 50 years. (Though I think "Left on Left violence" actually started out as "Left on Liberal" violence. The political rhetoric of the Democratic Party under Kennedy included many elements of classical liberalism). We need to start using more specific language.

The Prelude to Watergate

Fifty years ago next week, Richard Nixon stood uncomfortably on the Capitol's inaugural platform and watched his rival John F. Kennedy being sworn in as president. "We won" the election, Nixon fumed, "but they stole it from us."

Indeed, the dirty tricks that helped defeat Nixon were more devious than merely the ballot-stuffing of political lore. In one of the least-known chapters of 20th-century political history, Kennedy operatives secretly paid off an informant and set in motion a Watergate-like burglary that sabotaged Nixon's campaign on the eve of the election. . . .

Indeed, the mysterious break-in to recover Nixon's incriminating financial documents convinced him that such burglaries were standard practice in national politics. Nixon vowed that he would never be caught unprepared again, and he ultimately established his own corps of hard-nosed operatives to carry out espionage and sabotage, which culminated in the botched break-in a dozen years later at the Watergate office of the Democratic Party.

A half-century afterward, Washington still lives with the residue of the Kennedys' little-known dirty trick, which helped unleash our modern scandal culture and continues to influence politics and media today.

So, it wasn't just Joe Kennedy paying off the Daley machine in Chicago to stuff ballot boxes? The author of this piece has written a book about the rise of the modern scandal culture during this time period. It's still with us.

Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration

It's a reminder of what our culture has lost to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Which political leaders in our day write in a way which provoke reactions like this so long after the words have been put on paper? And how many of today's college students would be able to appreciate the allusions King made to parts of the then commonly-understood cultural heritage of our country?

UPDATE: William Bennett in 1986 on MLK's change in his field of study from sociology to theology:

Martin Luther King turned to the greatest philosophers because he needed to know the answers to certain questions. What is justice? What should be loved? What deserves to be defended? What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man? These questions are not simply intellectual diversions, but have engaged thoughtful human beings in all places and in all ages. As a result of the ways in which these questions have been answered, civilizations have emerged, nations have developed, wars have been fought, and people have lived contentedly or miserably. And as a result of the way in which Martin Luther King eventually answered these questions, Jim Crow was destroyed and American history was transformed.

Plus, comments on some inherent weaknesses in scientific studies, particularly in the social sciences.

Here's a thought-provoking review of a book about MLK's funeral.

The country itself seemed to quake in the shooting's aftermath. Fear of more assassinations and riots was rampant. The Vietnam War raged. President Lyndon Johnson had just announced that he would not seek reelection. The FBI manhunt for King's killer had gone global.

Yet Atlanta stayed calm. . .

King catalyzed positive changes in our society. New weaknesses seem to pop up as we correct old ones. But it's worth remembering King's dream on this day.

UPDATE: Don't forget Sudan's slaves.

p.s.: Did you know that the pacifist Martin Luther King was an advocate of gun rights? Like many other civil rights leaders. Apparently, Michael Moore thinks King was a racist.

The Hard Left's Latest Ideas for Improving Society

Honored professor of sociology and political science Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, has some timely advice for the unemployed in America. She wants to foster again what they call over at Protein Wisdom the "blind rage of Cloward-Piven":

they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant

You might think of it as encouraging a generalized, emotional sort of covetousness for revolutionary purposes. Ron Radosh:

What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy was one part of American history about which I knew very little until a couple of years ago, when people started pointing out that some of its ideas had contributed to the financial meltdown. ACORN's* agitation for home loans for high-risk borrowers helped to  crash the real estate market in the U.S., and very nearly the financial system of much of the West. Of course, they had big assists from brilliant Ivy League computer modelers on Wall Street and their friends in Government, with their slick computer models for the bundling of bad loans with good loans (and all the reckless behavior which accompanied the acceptance of those models).  Of course, you can't discount  government borrowing and fractional lending by banks. (Too bad American banks were not allowed, or even encouraged, to be as realistic as Canadian banks.) 

But the West's financial system is still limping along.  So far, the hoped-for (by Cloward-Piven types) Rise of the Proletariat Masses to build a glorious new world on the ashes after their planned collapse of the structure of Western civilization has failed to materialize. Even if they did succeed in bankrupting New York City back at the height of their influence. I remember news stories about the bankruptcy of New York City and its relationship to high welfare costs. I DON'T remember hearing that there was a deliberate movement to overload the welfare system. I wonder why the press suppressed this bit of information?

Wall Street and Government financial hotshots (in the recent financial crisis) and the Cloward-Piven bunch (in their dreams to change the world) exhibited a remarkable lack of forecasting abilities. This gives one slight pause about revolutionizing the entire world's economy based on Global Warming computer models and utopian plans for redistributing wealth. Apparently the recent Cancun Climate Conference was more about Climate Justice than about reducing greenhouse gasses.  Even though some UN bureaucrats seem to have some doubts about giving all that money to corrupt, brutal African dictators (or perhaps even to common uneducated Africans). And they may have a point, given the irresponsible reactions of Greeks to the money flowing to their government from other European counties. Although poor, Greece was not exactly a third-world country when the money started flowing in without much effort on the part of the populace.  And when the government ran out of money  --  REALLY ran out of money -- the reaction was rage.  Would not even more irresponsibility be expected if third-worlders were suddenly awash in money they didn't earn?

The trouble is that the Hard Left has always been better at taking over and/or destroying existing institutions than at building new ones.

Frances Fox Piven can look to recent models for her dream of an angry identity-formation from Americans who have been hurt financially by the economic crisis. Richard Fernandez (nom de blog: Wretchard) provides some additional education on the  rise of ANARCHY, once again, in Europe.

In fine anarchists are Red Guards of the European Left, a collection of dupes formed inside the vast and creaky infrastructure of Marxism to advance the interests of one faction against another faction. It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation. The real problem European anarchism solves is how to send bombs without seemingly sending them, or how to trash the Tory party headquarters in London without really doing it.

Just as Mao’s Red Guards were never about themselves, always about Mao, anarchists are about a larger political question: what is the correct political line? Once the Red Guards of China had resolved that in Mao’s favor they were allowed to rampage for a time to bring hatred down upon themselves and subsequently suppressed, hapless tools to the very end.

Read the whole thing. Wretchard was once part of a genuine rebellion himself (in the Philippines)  and he interacted with revolutionaries who had various ideological reasons for participating in the rebellion.  Some of these revolutionaries seemed more threatening to him than the corrupt, autocratic government against which he was rebelling.

Wretchard's commenters often have some interesting ideas, too.  If you make a comment which he thinks brings something important to the conversation, he may comment on it, as well.  Glenn Reynold notes a few clarifying comments from others on various types of anarchists - some more responsible than others.  A "true anarchy" doesn't sound at all appealing.

I wonder how many generations ahead Fox Pivens was thinking when she called for this angry, indignant reaction from the unemployed in America?  Has she ever considered Thomas Sowell's perpetual question to the utopian thinker, "And then what?"

BLAST FROM THE PAST (circa 1980), Thomas Sowell takes on Frances Fox Piven in the last part of this 6-minute video. He was really feisty back then. Sowell and Fox Piven don't seem to have persuaded each other much in the intervening years.

Additional reading: Life and Death in Shanghai is the story of a remarkable woman's experiences with the Red Guard and the Maoist government after being identified as an "enemy of the people".

Wretchard  comments on VDH's latest piece comparing the behavior of the Left in Greece and California. Can the Left be brought to understand to the reality of the dire situation they are in?

So Hanson says, why not let them have it but make it clear that the state will have to pay for it? Let them see for themselves where the path leads if they won’t listen to reason. . . . .

Maybe they won’t listen to experience either, just as certain types of people keep trying the same thing while hoping for different results. They will press on despite failure, despite debacles and just press the keys harder. But under no circumstances will “sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish” get anyone else off the hook. Because other people are permanently on the hook. The whole point of socialism is precisely that it’s built on somebody else’s money. If it were built with their money it would be capitalism.

WH Auden observed that “all sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.” If the Left the world over has reached the point where they have got to have their fix, then neither reason nor experience will be persuasive. . .

The Hard Left aside, even more moderate young Social Democrats of Europe are starting to wake up to the consequences of not asking Sowell's question, "And then what?"   in their social planning. As reported by the NEW YORK TIMES?  Similar education bubble coming to a state near you.  Demographic issues may be a little different.

Video showing the lighter side of Marxism in NYC linked at the bottom of this post.

* Does ACORN really have BILLIONAIRE supporters who need to be informed of their business plans like, maybe, George Soros? Seems odd for a group focused on financial equality.  But then, Soros has justified destroying currencies in his stated quest to create more equitable governments.

UPDATE:  An old Stalinist is also delighted by the world's financial difficulties.   Even Fox-Piven had evolved beyond loving Stalin, I believe.

YouTube University: Milton Friedman Explains Libertarianism

Although currently allied with conservatives, libertarians are not exactly like the typical conservative. The late Milton Friedman explains libertarianism in a 1999 interview with Peter Robinson. You can watch the whole thing a one time, or in shorter segments. You might want to consider where you fall on the continuum between supporting the maximum possible individual liberty on one hand OR mandating equality of outcome as well as providing safety, services, etc. through government action on the other hand.

Peter Robinson looks "inauthentic" on a motorcycle. But in this classic interview he asks Milton Friedman some tough questions about his libertarian positions. A college semester in 25 minutes.

Want shorter classes?

What is a libertarian?

What produced the dark and dirty London of Charles Dickens?

Are regulators like the FDA necessary to safeguard consumers? I could tell some stories to support either a yes or no position.

Should the government mandate that nutritional labels be placed on food packaging?

Of 14 cabinet departments, Milton Friedman says he would only keep a handful.

MORE: The kinds of interviews you don't see on TV anymore (radio interviews sometimes still provide this kind of exchange):

GREED 2 minutes. Kudos to Phil Donahue for asking good questions, then listening.

Federal Reserve and the New Deal, Chrysler bailout in 1979, automobile industry. 10 minutes.

Economics of medical care 9 minutes

Why it isn't necessary to change elected officials in order to change government. One minute.

The four ways to spend money.3 minutes

Local vs. Federal Government Spending, increasing production of goods and services (what the Greens want us to keep to a minimum). 3 minutes

Auld Lang Syne

Elizabeth Scalia on her remembrances of the Kennedy years and Auld Lang Syne.  She also links a piece on food shortages here in the Central Valley, one of the great food-producing regions of the world.  It is relevant to some of our personal challenges, and those of our friends.  Peggy Noonan talked with several people about their impressions of the song we sing every year:

"Auld Lang Syne" — the phrase can be translated as "long, long ago," or "old long since," but I like "old times past"—is a song that asks a question, a tender little question that has to do with the nature of being alive, of being a person on a journey in the world. It not only asks, it gives an answer. . . .

But "the interesting, more serious message in the song is that the past is important, we mustn't forget it, the old has something for us."

So does the present, as the last stanza makes clear. The song is not only about those who were in your life, but those who are in your life. . . .

A lot of food for thought on New Years Eve day. Hope everyone is looking forward to a wonderful New Year.

Michael Crichton, Science and Global Warming

The late Michael Crichton describes the "nasty, unfair, brutal" response of his fellow liberals in the Global Warming camp to his book, State of Fear. He supported a traditional scientific approach over the post-normal approach to science favored by global warming alarmists. Entire interview is here. Critique of An Inconvenient Truth here. Note that Crichton died before Climategate confirmed many of the points he made in these videos.

Michael Crichton talks with high school students:

1. Although he does not name the Sierra Club, he gently explains to students how the lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club helped lead to the deaths of 30 million people - "more people than Hitler and Stalin together killed". People of color.

2. Should environmentalism be a religion?

3. His personal interest in people's attraction to totalitarianism.

4. Second-hand smoke

Richard Fernandez looks back at the alarmism concerning Global Cooling in the 1970s, to which Crichton made reference.  Prominent Global Warming alarmist James Hansen was just a lowly computer model developer back in those days of global cooling alarmism.  I don't think he got nearly as much publicity (or money) then as he does now.

. . . . .   Can a New Ice Age be blamed on America? If it can, then it’s real. Otherwise it is false. Over the coming years and beyond my lifetime, historians may wish to apply this formula: V = American Policy multiplied by the absolute value of any variable. It’s always America’s fault.

And of course, whatever problem with the climate emerges in the future, The Left Must Be Put In Charge.

Because the Liberal Elite is always right.  Somewhat brutal, but hilarious. There are a lot of people just  like this on the Left.  Especially in academia.

Mao's Great Leap to Famine

Just a reminder that, at one time, Chinese peasants were escaping to North Korea to avoid starvation, rather than the other way around. Aside from the deaths during the revolution, the "cultural revolution", etc.,

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

Yet more than a decade later, thousands of students at American universities were still reverently carrying around Mao's Little Red Book. And even today, many intellectuals continue to believe that Marxism could work if only the right people were in charge. The New York Times recently ran a puff piece on Marxists pontificating and playing in New York City.

Glenn Reynolds:

Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.

Dennis Prager: "The bigger the government, the more of its citizens' lives it 'owns'."

A small example of what happens when government officials implement their great ideas about how to achieve "progress":

Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals. As could have been predicted by anyone with any experience of steel production or basic knowledge of metallurgy, the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.

. . . According to his private doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he found out that high quality steel could only be produced in large scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal. However he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later that year.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale but often poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works often built without input from trained engineers. . . . .

Despite these harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labor diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed en masse as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign.

Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the new innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the state to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. During 1958-1960, China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain "face" and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.

Even more democratic nations can face serious unintended problems due to the sincere efforts of government officials and their favored business allies to implement their good intentions. Especially when the government exempts itself from criticism.

Illustrative Video: GREAT MOMENTS IN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Note that the tragic dimension of unintended consequences attaches itself like a lamprey to public-sector derring-do rather than quaint lab accidents and kitchen-based discoveries.

Did Stalin commit genocide, or just mass murder?

Does it really matter?

An interesting book review by Illya Somin:

Absent Stalin’s malign influence, Naimark contends, the regime probably would not have committed mass murder or genocide on such a large scale. There is little doubt that Stalin’s paranoia and sadism influenced Soviet policy. Nonetheless, I think Naimark overstates the importance of Stalin’s personal role. Most of the major repressive policies and institutions — including the secret police and the Gulag slave labor camps — of the Soviet state were begun by Lenin, not Stalin. As historians such as Richard Pipes have shown, even the terror famine was a reprise of the first Soviet effort to collectivize agriculture in 1918–21 (which also led to a famine in which millions died). Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s main rival for power after Lenin’s death, attacked Stalin on the grounds that his policies were too generous to “bourgeois” elements and otherwise not repressive enough. Had Trotsky defeated Stalin, life for most Soviet citizens might have been just as bad or even slightly worse. One of the very few ways in which Stalin was harsher than Trotsky was in his much greater willingness to kill and imprison members of the Communist Party elite. Here, Stalin’s extreme paranoia about possible rivals for power really did make a big difference. Under Trotsky, the party comrades would have suffered a lot less; the rest of the population would not have been so fortunate.

More generally, Stalin’s policies were far from unique in the communist world. Almost every other communist regime engaged in very similar mass murders, including in countries like China and Cuba where the rulers had a high degree of autonomy from Soviet control.

Check out the discussion in the comments.

The New York Times and Stalin

During Stalin's forced starvation of Ukranian peasants, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty  falsely refuted the true stories of starvation by other Western reporters. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his lies.

The New York Times recently ran a puff piece on Marxists pontificating and playing in New York City. It is unthinkable that the New York Times would run a puff piece on "Fascists pontificating and playing" in New York City.  But Mussolini's brand of fascism, for example, was far less destructive and brutal than Marxist communism has been (though the two ideologies held much in common in both theory and practice).

 One begins to get an impression of the hold that Marxism has had on our intellectuals for so many decades.  If only the right people had tried it, utopia would be have been achieved.  But since the West won't accept revolution, it's better to socialize Western countries a little at a time.

UPDATE: Video at the link - Marxist study groups and games in NYC. Yes, there are still REAL Marxists in America. Who read Stalin's works for ideas.

North Korea: Run by and Emperor

Dennis Prager interviewed the author of a new book on the ordinary lives of North Koreans. She noted that North Korea is not a typical communist country, but rather one run by an emperor. Dennis pointed out that most Communist countries are run by emperors, even when the horrors don't get as bad as those in North Korea, China or Cambodia.

She noted that in NK, the people are the possessions of the government. Dennis pointed out that the bigger the government, the more of its citizen's lives it "owns".

Happy Constitution Day

Restoring Madison's Vision

Can the Constitution be sustained in such a large country?

Toqueville and today's America. Did he miss some developments that make "soft despotism" less attractive? Something to think about.