Jimmy Kimmel at the White House correspondents’ dinner:
Best line: “Remember when the country rallied around you in hope for a better tomorrow? That was a good one.”
The joke we should pray comes true: “There’s a term for President Obama. Not two terms.” Ouch. And this is from Hollywood.
Brussels has decreed (“decree” being is favored mode of governing) that, beginning on May 9, “Europe Day,” Whitehall must fly the European flag (azure field, yellow circle of stars) or be fined daily.
As drafted, the legislation, which mandates that any organization that manages development funding for the EU, would require not just one building in London but more than 1000 institutions in what used to be denominated Great Britain continuously to fly the blue menace.
For the moment, the EU is temporizing about the extension of its requirement that its flag fly over headquarters of national managing authorities. But it is clearly testing the waters. How much can it get away with?
And that question leads to two others: Will this be the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or will it be Britain’s Stamp Act: an incident that, though trivial in itself, rouses the people from their dogmatic slumbers and incites them to rise up and throw off the chains of tyranny?
Does “chains of tyranny” sound a bit melodramatic, a bit extreme or exaggerated, for the reign of Brussels? Think again. “Tyranny” can be mild as well as harsh. It need not feature jackboots and Gestapo cellars (though there is always police power hovering in the background).
A tyrannical rule is an arbitrary rule. And what could be more arbitrary than the rule-by-elites that is the dispensation known as the European Union? Quoth Edmund Burke in Thoughts of the Cause of Our Present Discontents, a classic in the library of anti-totalitarian reflection: “It is the nature of despotism to abhor power held by any means but its own momentary pleasure; and to annihilate all intermediate situations between boundless strength on its own part, and total debility on the part of the people.”
Would you like to grow a certain type of potato on your farm? Import a certain kind of banana? Criticize an EU minister? Drive a certain sort of car? Fly, or not fly, a certain flag? That decision is not yours, Comrade, it is the decision of a bureaucrat who lives tax free in a country that is not your country and whose actions and decrees are as immune to your wishes as are those of Santa Claus. A few months ago, I wrote about the worrisome tendency of contemporary American society to bifurcate into wards and warders: dependents and those who manage them. The phenomenon is much further advanced in Europe, where an unelected, unaccountable elite rules by fiat and is almost totally insulated from popular dissent.
It is all part of what I have described elsewhere as “the new Gleischaltung,” the effort to “harmonize” or bring into conformity laws, customs, and behavior all over Europe. “Of course,” I noted, “this is not the first time that Europe has attempted to “harmonize” its laws. Beginning in 1933, there was a concerted effort to ‘harmonize’ not only the laws but also all of social life. The German word for the process was Gleichschaltung. That time the effort came out of Berlin. It almost worked. It took the combined military might of England, the United States, and the Soviet Union to stop that earlier push for ‘harmony.’ It is anyone’s guess what it will take to stop this new, Brussels-based effort.”
“No, no, no, no!” Thus quoth Lear to Cordelia near the end of the grimmest play Shakespeare wrote.
As my friend John Allison observes, Europe is acting a lot like Lear on his way to prison:
“No” said the Irish on February 25, 2011. They ejected Fianna Fail, the largest party in Ireland since 1927 and replaced it with Finn Gael.
“No” said the Italians on November 12, 2011. They sent away Silvio Berlusconi who served on and off for a cumulative 10 years from 1994 through 2011 and was Italy’s longest-serving Prime Minister ever.
“No” said the Spanish on November 20, 2011 to the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, two-term Prime Minister from 2004-2011, replacing him with the conservative People’s Party led by Mariano Rajoy.
“No” said Geert Wilders, Party for Freedom leader on April 21, 2012 to his coalition partner, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Liberal Party, sending Holland to a likely caretaker government and election on September 12.
Ditto the French and the Greeks. And this procession of negatives means —what?
One thing it means is that the gulf between the European people and the elites who presume to govern them is growing wider by the month. On the one side you have the Italians, Greeks, French, Germans, Dutch, Spanish, Irish, etc., etc. — particular peoples living in particular places with individual identities. On the other side you have Europe. Or rather, “Europe.” That airy abstraction, a brainchild of elites who think the term “country” is an atavistic abomination and that the facts of history, tradition, custom, and national identity are disposable holdovers from a discredited and discreditable past.
Fiduciary responsibility: remember that? I didn’t think so. Nobody around here does either. But Iceland does, and it has just provided the rest of us with a brisk reminder that the people we entrust to be public stewards have a responsibility to be, you know, public stewards.
The Financial Times (registration req’d) reports today that Geir Haarde, former prime minster of Iceland, has been found guilty of negligence in his handling of the economic crisis that engulfed the U.S. and most of Europe late in 2008. (Perhaps I should say, “began to engulf”: we aren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.)
Mr. Haarde was cleared of other charges — eating dogs was not, apparently among them — and he faces no jail time or other punishment. Still, it is good to know that the habit of holding public servants (how quaint that phrase sounds in the age of the Imperial Motorcade) responsible for their actions has not, not quite, passed out of existence.
Barack Obama has added more than $7 trillion to the federal deficit since he took office. That’s 7,000,000,000,000. How’s that for negligence — or maybe something far worse? Is it time to think about the Icelandic Option?
My new book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, will be out in early June. The good news is that it is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Velocity is king! Order one (or two) now and make an author happy. No dogs are eaten in this book.
Here’s the first in a series of previews I’ll share with PJM readers on the run-up to publication:
All of Marx’s major predictions have turned out to be wrong. He said that societies based on a market economy would suffer spiraling class polarization and the disappearance of the middle class. Every society lucky enough to enjoy the fruits of a market economy shows that Marx was wrong about that. He predicted the growing immiseration and impoverishment of the working class in capitalist societies. (Actually, he didn’t merely predict that it would happen, he predicted that it would happen necessarily and inevitably—thanks, Hegel.) The opposite has happened. Indeed, as Kolakowski notes, “in the second edition of Capital Marx updated various statistics and figures, but not those relating to workers’ wages; those figures, if updated, would have contradicted his theory.” Contradicted, Comrade. Dialecticians like Hegel and Marx pretend that a contradiction is as much an intellectual commendation as a refutation. It’s merely pretense, though. A simpler, but more profound philosopher, David Hume, had the right attitude when he complained of “the custom of calling a difficulty what pretends to be a demonstration, and endeavoring by that means to elude its force and evidence.”
Marx further predicted the inevitable revolution of the proletariat. Mark that, inevitable. This is the very motor of Marxism. Take away the proletarian revolution and you neuter the theory. But there have been no proletarian revolutions. The Bolshevik revolution, as Kolakowski points out, “had nothing to do with Marxian prophesies. Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and Land for Peasants.” Marx said that in a capitalist economy, untrammeled competition would inevitably squeeze profit margins: eventually—and soon!—the economy would grind to a halt and capitalism would collapse. Take a look at capitalist economies in the hundred and fifty years since Marx wrote: have profit margins evaporated? Marx thought that, when they matured, capitalist economies would hamper technical progress and Communist societies would support it: the opposite is true.
No, Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong. Addicted to “the self-deification of mankind,” it continually bears witness to what Kolakowski calls “the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Why then was Marxism like moral catnip—not so much among its proposed beneficiaries, the working classes who bore the brunt of its immiserating effects, but among the educated elite? Why?
—From “Leszek Kolakowski & the Anatomy of Totalitarianism,” in The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.
I have long recognized and admired the philosophical acuity of W. S. Gilbert. His insight from The Gondoliers that “if everybody’s somebody, no-one’s anybody,” for example, is a crisp logical insight that many famous metaphysicians would have done well to take on board.
I had never seen a production of Utopia, Limited, Or the Flowers of Progress, Gilbert’s late contribution to political philosophy and economics, until yesterday afternoon, when I caught the storied Blue Hill Troupe’s staging at the Museo del Barrio in New York. Utopia is the second to last collaboration between Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan for Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre. Written in 1893, it is by far the longest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. Partly because of its length, and partly because the original contains several unresolved subplots and story lines on which the sign “Dead End” might have been posted, the piece is seldom performed. (I’d never even heard of its being performed.) But part of the mission of the Blue Hill Troupe, a high-octane, mostly amateur company whose delightful semi-annual productions benefit charity, is to perform all of the G&S operettas. Last year, they produced a splendid HMS Pinafore for their Spring performance. This year they tackled Utopia, Limited, and the result was thoroughly riveting. The editorial geniuses at the Troupe, Cornelia Iredell and Joanne Lessner, transformed a three-plus-hour behemoth into a svelte beauty that clocked in at just over two hours, with intermission.
Utopia, Limited tells the story of Utopia, a tiny South Seas island, whose dizzy King Paramount (played with signal ebullience by Alan Abrams) has a protracted fit of Anglophilia when his daughter, the luscious Princess Zara (Sheena Ramirez), returns fresh from a stint at Girton College, Cambridge, bringing the gospel of English mores and manners — along with a clutch of English bureaucrats and a knock-out red dress — to transform their quiet island life into a commercial powerhouse.
I won’t detain you with more particulars of the story, except to note that the performances were universally captivating. Captain Fitzbattleaxe (Richard Miller) was dashing as the male love interest and aced what must be one of the most difficult parts in all Gilbert & Sullivandom: deliberately, comically singing off key because he is agitato with passion for Princess Zara. I’d say that David Pasteelnick and William Remmers stole the show as the king’s scheming “wise men,” except that other performers, including the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus, regularly stole it back.
It is often, and correctly, observed that Utopia, Limited, is a satire. But those who see Gilbert’s barbs aimed chiefly at the British Empire and its pretensions of bringing advanced culture to primitive peoples miss what I think is his main target. Gilbert was happy to guy anything he thought ridiculous, and no doubt there were aspects of the Empire that called out for ridicule. But his chief target in Utopia, Limited, was more commercial or economic than imperial. Gilbert took particular aim at the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1862, which provided that a shareholder’s liability was limited to his investment. Invest 18 pence, lose 18 million pounds, and you’re only out the 18 pence.
SONG.
Some seven men form an Association,
(If possible, all Peers and Baronets)
They start off with a public declaration
To what extent they mean to pay their debts.
That’s called their Capital: if they are wary
They will not quote it at a sum immense.The figure’s immaterial it may vary
From eighteen million down to eighteen pence.
I should put it rather low;
The good sense of doing so
Will be evident at once to any debtor.
When it’s left to you to say
What amount you mean to pay,
Why, the lower you can put it at, the better.They then proceed to trade with all who’ll trust ‘em,
Quite irrespective of their capital
(It’s shady, but it’s sanctified by custom);
Bank, Railway, Loan, or Panama Canal.
You can’t embark on trading too tremendous
It’s strictly fair, and based on common sense
If you succeed, your profits are stupendous
And if you fail, pop goes your eighteen pence.Make the money-spinner spin !
For you only stand to win,
And you’ll never with dishonesty be twitted.
For nobody can know,
To a million or so,
To what extent your capital’s committed.If you come to grief, and creditors are craving,
(For nothing that is planned by mortal head
Is certain in this Vale of Sorrow saving
That one’s Liability is Limited),
Do you suppose that signifies perdition?
If so you’re but a monetary dunce
You merely file a Winding-Up Petition,
And start another Company at once !Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
As a Company you’ve come to utter sorrow
But the Liquidators say,
“Never mind you needn’t pay,”
So you start another company to-morrow!
So, having “lost” more than a billion of his clients’ money at MF Global, Jon Corzine is still “bundling” money to support muppet master, President Goldman Sachs, aka Barack (do not say “Hussein”) Obama. Is there anything these clowns cannot do with impunity? I ask again, why is Jon Corzine still at liberty? I’ve been wondering this for a while. Here’s what I wrote early in March—seems like ages ago:
Jon Corzine, epitome of the .01%, former head of Goldman Sachs, former U.S. senator and governor of New Jersey: why is he still at liberty? Why is he padding about dispensing ridiculous economic advice to terminally credulous politicians like Joe Biden (“The first thing we did was call Jon Corzine,” said our vice president within weeks of taking office). Have an air sickness bag handy? When you’ve attended to that, take a look at this YouTube video.
Who is more repulsive, Senator Corzine or Vice President Biden? I’m not sure we have instruments accurate enough to measure that. But at least the vice president has not, as far as I know, presided over an entity that lost $1.6 billion of its clients’ money, as Jon Corzine did as head of MF Global, another item on his resume. (I know, I know, Biden is helping to run an administration that loses $1.6 trillion annually, but let’s leave that to one side.) The Corzine story is old news, sort of. It’s been reported, but not quite savored; there hasn’t been the gleeful handwringing on the part of the legacy media. The New York Times, for example, has not gone into hysterical overdrive, running front-page stories and blistering editorials every day as it would had Jon Corzine been a Republican malefactor.
Still, the outline is clear. Here’s a tidbit from a February 28 story in the Huffington Post, bold face courtesy your humble reporter:
The $1.6 billion belonged to MF Global’s clients. Officials say it apparently went to cover MF Global’s short-term financial needs as investors and trading partners lost confidence in the firm, punishing its stock price and causing a severe cash shortage.
Client money is supposed to be held separately from corporate cash to protect investors in case a firm fails. MF Global’s misuse of client money would violate a fundamental investor-protection for people who trade options and futures.
Corzine, who hired a criminal lawyer last fall, told Congress he did not know what happened to the money.
Gosh, where did that money go? It must be around somewhere. It was here just a minute ago!
It’s appropriate that Jon Corzine has hired a criminal lawyer. I wonder whether the government will freeze his assets, as it froze Conrad Black’s in an ex parte proceeding, making it impossible for him to pay the multi-million-dollar retainer that top lawyers demand. Probably not. Jon Corzine, after all, is one of them. He’s the sort of chap Joe Biden turns to for advice about fixing the U.S. economy. That’s worked well, as anyone who has looked at the unemployment figures can see.
But I digress. $1.6 billion. For us little, tax-paying folks (I’m not talking about people like Timothy “What are taxes?” Geithner), that’s a right-large sum. And when it goes missing, people get hurt. “Who Has Jon Corzine Hurt?” An article in Forbes by that title details some of the carnage:
MF Global shareholders have been basically wiped out — the stock trades on the Pink sheets at $0.12. The bondholders are going to get stung as well, and while many of these investors are large institutions, certainly some small investors have been hit hard. MF Global employees are also being forced to swallow a bitter pill. On Friday, 1,066 employees were laid off from MF’s brokerage unit. The terminations were effective immediately, and employees will be paid through November 15. Their health coverage will lapse at the end of the month.
Not so nice, is it? “Corzine’s reckless decisions,” as the article put it, “have real consequences.”
The next group that has been substantially hurt in the wake of the firm’s bankruptcy is their clients, many of whom have also been put out of work. The bankruptcy trustee said on Friday that out of an estimated 50,000 commodity accounts at MF, 17,000 have been successfully transferred back to customers — although cash and some collateral in these accounts still remains frozen. Quite a few of these accounts belong to individual futures traders. The money in those accounts, and the ability to trade daily, is how they derive their income.
Forbes was not the only news source to notice what’s happening. In December, NPR ran a story about how ranchers and farmers were hurt by Corzine’s lack of oversight — if “lack of oversight” covers the enormity he presided over. “They just stole my money,” said Tim Rietzke, a cattle rancher from Kansas. “And now, I have to figure out how to get it back.”
Good luck with that, Tim! I do have one suggestion: try MF Global again. You lost $30,000. But according to The Wall Street Journal, although MF Global has “collapsed,” it may still pay top executives bonuses of “several hundred thousand dollars each.”
“The bonus plan,” quoth the Journal, “could face fierce resistance.” You don’t say? Where, as Bob Dole once put it, is the outrage? And why is Jon Corzine still at liberty?
Who would have thought that the venerable New England Journal of Medicne, once a respected scientific journal, would succumb so thoroughly to the virus of political correctness? A friend regularly sends me anguished hand-wringing bulletins from the NEJM. Increasingly, they have nothing to do with medicine and everything do to with emitting little left-wing progressive bleats about social policy. The latest emission concerns the fate of ObamaCare before the Supreme Court. “Is Medicaid Constitutional” is a sad piece, really, for it betrays evidence of serious cognitive deterioration. Here’s the argument:
If the Supreme Court declares ObamaCare un-Constitutional, a kindred argument could be used to question the Constitutionality of Medicaid, the federally funded program that pays for medical services for the poor. If the plaintiff’s argument against ObamaCare is accepted, reasoned Justice Breyer, then “Medicaid has been unconstitutional since 1964,” when it was signed into law.
Ergo — what? Ergo, according to the microbrains at the NEJM, it is imperative to defeat this challenge to ObamaCare.
How’s that for a leap? Why not challenge Medicaid, the unsustainable, spendthrift invention of 1960s Utopianism? Why not think about caring for the poor in a way that gets the federal government, the world’s most inefficient bureaucracy, out of the picture? Why not let local organizations deal with their local problems without getting the vast, impersonal state apparatus of Washington involved? Why not a little fresh thought about this problem? Sure, Samuel Johnson was right when he observed that “a decent provision for the poor is the true test of a civilization.” But foisting an inefficient, unsustainable social program of the less-well-off is an indecent provision. Basing social policy on fantasy is an immoral, not a moral, action, no matter emollient rhetoric accompanies it. The NEJM should get back in the business of collecting and disseminating medical knowledge and leave the left-wing politics to folks like Jesse Jackson.
This is a sad day in the Kimball household. A British-based Islamophilic organization called Hope Not Hate (h/t Mark Steyn) has published a “Counter-Jihad Report” that lists various “Islamophobic” (i.e., freedom-loving) individuals and organizations. There are some impressive names there. The Center for Security Policy, for example, which is run by my friend Frank Gaffney. And there’s the David Horowitz Freedom Center—great organization run by a great man. I’m proud to say that PJMedia made the list. And I see many other friends: Andrew McCarthy, Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Diana West made the list. But my name’s not there! Lord knows (even if Allah doesn’t) I’ve done my best to be Islamophobic — though, as I am fond of pointing out, I do not like the word “Islamophobia.” A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear of something. What could be more rational than to fear a freedom-blighting, homicidal, misogynist mass movement bent on world domination and the subjugation of all nations to the insanity of Sharia law? At least I’ve published many people who made the list. It does sadden me, though, to see that I have made insufficient efforts to publicize the enormity that is Islamism. I must redouble my efforts.
As regular readers of Roger’s Rules know, I do not often read our former paper of record. The only time I tend to encounter the New York Times in propria persona is when I visit friends in Northwest Connecticut. Being an early riser, I motor down to a local emporium to collar the papers and the needful for breakfast. Since this happens only every few months, my view of the paper’s devolution is dramatized by a sort of time-lapse effect. If you were subjected to the paper day in and day out, I reckon you wouldn’t notice the degradation quite so vividly.
Consider “Young, Black, Male, and Stalked by Bias,” an op-ed by Brent Staples. Here’s how the piece opens:
The door to the subway train slides open, revealing three tall, young black men, crowding the entrance, with hooded sweatshirts pulled up over downward-turned faces; boxer shorts billowing out of over-large, low-slung jeans; and sneakers with the laces untied.
Your response to the look — and to this trio on the subway — depends in part on the context, like the time of day, but especially on how you feel about young, male blackness.
If it unsettles you — as it does many people — you never get beyond the first impression. But those of us who are not reflexively uncomfortable with blackness . . .
Got that? If you are unsettled by thuggish looking teenagers who happen to be black, you are racist. “Young black men,” says Staples, “know that in far too many settings they will be seen not as individuals, but as the ‘other,’ . . .” Here’s a piece of advice for Brent Staples: if you want to be treated with respect, dress and act in a way that invites it. It doesn’t matter if you are black, white, yellow, or polka-dotted: if you dress in a minatory way, people—if they are sane—will regard you with suspicion.
“Society’s message to black boys,” continues Staples, is “ ‘we fear you and view you as dangerous.’ ” No: society’s message to black, white, and yellow boys is “if you act in a way that seems threatening, we will view you as threatening.”
Quoth Staples: “the toxic connotations that the culture has associated with blackness have been embedded in thought, language and social convention for hundreds of years.” Wrong again, Brent. The “toxic connotations” have to do with the toxic behavior of certain segments of the population. When Jesse Jackson hears footsteps behind him, looks around, and feels relieved when he sees the person behind him is white, it is not because he is racist but because the instinct for self-preservation has not been entirely bred out of him.
