Tom’s Big Picture

Sometimes the public school system can be quite the source of comic relief, as evidenced by this recent historically-challenged protester of China’s hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics:

On a related note, here’s the Chinese Olympic Stadium now under construction:

Did they really mean to make their stadium look like the ejected remains of some bad Lo Mein takeout? And here is the 1936 Berlin stadium:

Of course, the Chinese might have preferred a more monumental stadium, but the fundamental reactionary nature of political correctness forbids it. The Nazis had good taste in music, art and architecture, largely because it was a malignant hypernationalism that celebrated the natural German talents in those areas. So in reaction we must all suffer through ugly architecture, dissonant “modern” music and degenerate art. Thank goodness the Germans aren’t renown for their cuisine, else our senses be deprived of at least one remaining pleasure.

I once heard a conservative describe liberalism as a religion like Christianity, except that instead of Jesus they substitute Hitler, or rather what they view as anything that is anti-Hitler.

Even the immigration issue can be seen in this light. So while Germany went down in flames, Hitler has his revenge at last. The following is from the introduction to Peter Brimelow’s excellent book Alien Nation:

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965.

And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.

Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one. You can be for this or you can be against it. But the fact is undeniable.

There are so many double standards in this story it boggles the mind. Apparently Hasidic Jews, among America’s most wealthy ethnic groups, were able to get “minority” status for themselves for purposes of federal contracting. Sailer breaks an important story that sweeps from a roid-raged punk in Miami Beach to an Israeli-owned gun shop in LA to Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson):

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazing-adventures-of-men-with-gold.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/hey-feds-theres-this-thing-called.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-did-diveroli-family-qualify-for.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/general-theory-of-afghan-ammo-swindle.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-aey-hasidic-enough-to-be-eligible.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/alleged-transcript-of-diveroli.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/packouz-were-not-hasidic.html

These are the same people who run the rip-off lowball “camera shops” you see in magazines that operate out of Brooklyn.  Unfortunately, I’ve had this experience personally!  Sailer’s working theory is, oddly enough, loosely based on the 2nd amendment:

Why the Hasidim?

First, there is the “in-group morality.” Some Muslim in Afghanistan loses an eye because his bullet explodes in his gun? Eh … The taxpayers of America have to shell out more to make up the loss? Eh …

Second, there is the simple psychological ability to not be distressed about other people’s anger, whether justifiable or not. Most people become uncomfortable when people around them become angry and they try to mollify the angry person. (The Japanese are among the world leaders at feeling psychic pain when people around them aren’t content.) In contrast, the kind of people who flourish in these kind of bait and switch businesses don’t mind other people getting angry at them. They just get angry right back, angrier even. It’s fun.

My cocktail party theory of the origins of this stems from Robert Heinlein’s famous phrase, “An armed society is a polite society.” In most of medieval Europe, you didn’t want to get into screaming arguments with acquaintances because they might pull out a sword and run you through. Well, medieval ghettos were largely disarmed, so the verbally hostile weren’t excused from the culture and gene pool.

So, the bottom line is that anybody sensible would be cautious before buying from Hasidic-owned businesses that don’t specifically have a good reputation, like B&H. Take that super-duper quoted price and add a percentage to account for all the hassles you are letting yourself in for.

But, of course, nobody is supposed to think like that. The media won’t print that kind of advice. And the poor federal government isn’t supposed to treat Hasidim skeptically, they’re officially supposed to bend over backwards for them and treat them like a legally privileged minority!

Update: Of course, in neither of Efraim’s two mugshots is he wearing a beard or a hat, so I guess he’s Hasidic for federal contracting purposes, but a wild and crazy guy for the ladies.

Not many people know this, but 90% of the costs of affirmative action are hidden from sight. One engineer getting a promotion over another because he’s black causes a bit of economic damage, and certainly a lot of personal damage to the victim. But where the bills really get paid for the Racial Extortion Coalition is in government contracting.

You see, the leaders of minority groups aren’t usually so interested in the welfare of their group as they are in their own personal wealth and power. The elites of any group, your Barack Obamas and Jesse Jacksons, are the most important to placate and preferences in contracting allow minority elites to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of taxpayers. As Tom Wolfe’s Reverend Bacon put it, it’s a highly leveraged investment in “steam control”.

This system of preferences milks taxpayers for shoddy goods and/or exorbitant prices based on quotas that various governments have to meet when contracting with suppliers. It’s the soft, fat underbelly that no one talks about, as the taxpayers get quietly fleeced.

Even Texas does it!

www.window.state.tx.us/procurement/prog/hub/hub-certification/

Hint: make your wife the owner of your business if you want to do business with the state.

The real conservative movement has always been a coalition between libertarians and social conservatives.  Both groups have been sold out and used at times by Republican Party elites.  Many leaders of the grassroots have themselves been grafted into the Washington establishment.

The mainstream libertarians castigate Paul for daring to declare that Caesar has no clothes: every tax cut achieved by the libertarian wing of the party has been neutralized by the hidden tax of inflation, as the government simply prints the money they need instead of taxing it.

The evangelical social conservatives delude themselves of their influence.  About the only measurable difference they’ve made is starting a war with Iraq, half-convinced Saddam was the anti-Christ, even dusting off the Nostradamus to justify their pre-ordained conclusion.  Devoid of hope and alienated from the culture of their country, much of Christian activism has become a rapture cult about as practically relevant as the Heaven’s Gate people out in California.  For if all hope is pinned in the rapture, then if they are wrong about the rapture, the strategy is suicide.  We have the Iraq War because the power elite (or rather the Likud wing of the power elite) wanted it for Israel, and American evangelicals served as the useful idiots to move it along.  Witness Pat Robertson’s early endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, cross-dresser and supporter of gay rights and abortion, as an example of evangelicals’ decadence in their Israel Uber Alles delusions.

And now it is 2008.  Libertarians and social conservatives, having abandoned principle long ago, get bland liberal John McCain as the nominee, a recycled rerun of Bob Dole (the scary thing is that unlike Dole, McCain is crazy, and will probably win against the Democratic nominee, as the idiot white liberals indulge their multi-culti fantasies by nominating Barack Hussein Obama; they had their shot at a southern white boy, John Edwards or even good-old-boyish Bill Richardson, who would have fooled enough of our people to have defeated McCain, but their fantasies got the better of them).

The continued enthusiasm for Paul and Huckabee, however, represents a remnant among Republican primary voters.  This remnant has denied McCain majorities in many states and is a thorn in his side as he tries to convince us that this year’s choice between two evils is not a toss-up.

The enthusiasm for Huckabee, as I’ve documented, is unwarranted, but represents a healthy form of identity politics among evangelicals.  He’s our ess-oh-bee, dang it, and we want to be represented by him rather than a Yankee from Massachusetts.

Paul, on the other hand, has very much to admire.  Problem is, he advocates an early Virginian and Jacksonian libertarianism with the language of a third-generation German Pennsylvanian.  Germans are a great people, arguably among the greatest, but theirs is a culture with low emotional content, an objective voice so-to-speak and this comes across with Paul.  Everything is abstract, to the point that he would not attack his opponents.  To backcountry Celts, this smacks of weakness.  To my Celtic brain, if they’re so wrong, why the heck are you so nice to them?   We’ve got Martin Luther passive-aggressively nailing theses to churches (a very German thing to do) when we really need William Wallace to work up the Celts for war and unite the clans.

Paul is a great man, the greatest in our government, but I don’t think he is the man.  He’s too great, really, to ever lead a mass democratic movement.  Doesn’t he know you can’t just go around telling the truth anymore?  I mean, he just came out and said that we were to blame for putting ourselves into a ant’s nest in Iraq.  We started a land war in Asia and we’re bleeding to death financially from the occupation.  But, Mr. Paul, don’t you know you can’t go around saying that?  Blame it on the neocons or another scapegoat, but never tell the voter he is responsible for self-inflicting his problems.  That’s not a winner politically.

Divided into libertarian and evangelical camps, this remnant will continue to suffer defeat.  As a member of both groups, I think we need each other.  It’s clear at this point that the libertarians have the money; Paul gets about 10% of the vote but has more money than anyone.  The evangelicals have the votes, but Huckabee can barely keep his campaign afloat.

But what we really need is a leader who understands both groups and the two most powerful themes in politics: us versus them and something for nothing.  This person will have to be astute enough to sell something to the American people that they don’t really want to buy, yet be pure enough to deliver on it once in office.

Rather like someone innocent as a dove and wise as a serpent.  The odds are against it, but to paraphrase Huckabee, we’re long past the point where the odds were for us.  We need a miracle.

How can we have hope for a civilization that tolerates this? Our boys fight and die overseas to counter the “Islamo-fascists”, but our own governments refuse to delouse the home front. The threat of terrorism is overplayed to support the expansion of government, as the most obvious solution is to ask our Muslim guests to leave our countries.

There is no historical precedent for any Muslim to live in the US or Britain.  If it’s worth fighting a war over, then why not kick them out and send them home?

Why are American and British boys dying in Iraq while our governments allow mosques to be built in our major cities? It’s a scam and a farce using the good-natured nationalism of our people (and their blood and treasure) to accomplish neoconservative foreign policy objectives while doing nothing to solve the rot at home.

Meanwhile, old ladies and blonde girls are getting frisked at the airport by the lowest denominator GED-qualified affirmative action beneficiaries, all because we can’t admit that the 300-year Enlightenment experiment called “the brotherhood of man” is an obvious failure.

New Orleans mayor Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin and crony checking out and enjoying their new arms shipment, like Third World dictators:

Paul disappointed but is still in the game. Iowa has a poor track record of predicting the nominee.

That said, Huckabee does look unstoppable from a neutral point of view. The “flyover” part of this country is so tired of being marginalized that they’ll nominate a bad conservative from Arkansas (who at least seems to be mostly decent in his personal life and shares their Christian faith) over bad conservatives from Massachusetts. And it is with a bit of sporting regional pride that I say this, as nobody makes better politicians than the South. When the fake conservatives fight, ain’t nobody gonna out-fake a southern-fried good-old-boy like Huckabee. He was born in that there briar patch!

And I can’t help but smile at Rudy Giuliani’s butt-whooping in the Heartland. Paul has saved us from the cross-dressing criminal at a minimum.

My gut in the first debate told me Huckabee was the best political tactician: I actually cringed a few times when watching Paul in the first debate. Unfortunately for Paul, most of the populace votes with their gut, not based on researching the policy positions of the candidates. If Paul does not succeed, the most interesting question is this analogy- Goldwater:Reagan::Paul: [?] . The Paul Revolution is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon already.

I think Peggy Noonan does a good job at explaining Huckabee, similar to my analysis of his Christmas ad. Mix equal parts cultural alienation from the elites, social gospel-lite and millions of Christians with their heads full of doctrinal mush and Huckabee is what comes out:

Something new begins on the Republican side, too.

Everyone said Mike Huckabee was a big dope to leave Iowa Wednesday to fly to L.A. to be on Jay Leno, but did you see him on that thing? He got off a perfect line on why he’s doing well against Romney: “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.” The studio audience loved him. And you know, in Iowa they watch “The Tonight Show” too.

Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he’s Gomer Pyle, but he’s more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He’s more James Carville than Jim Nabors.

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he’s an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools’ squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don’t admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don’t need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues–taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia–and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.

But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know. Second, I’m sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

Of course, I think the cultural alienation and populism are valid concerns of an increasingly marginalized majority in the country. And Huck’s social-gospel-lite does appeal to the little old ladies who vote in Republican primaries, soft-hearted folks who can’t comprehend the harmful consequences of unregulated state-funded charity. As a Baptist preacher, he’s got more experience than anybody with that demographic.

On Meet the Press this weekend, despite Tim Russert’s hostility, Ron Paul hit a home run when questioned about his views on property rights, the right of free association and Lincoln’s War of Aggression:

About 4:50 into the broadcast, Paul defends his views on the Civil Rights Acts AND his opposition to the necessity of Lincoln’s invasion of the South.  My wife and I watched this and our mouths dropped open.  Did he really say that?  Is a man that principled really the best-funded Republican candidate for President?

I mean, I thought Tancredo was the best we could do, and a little stomach-turning Lincoln-worship might be part of the deal if we wanted to save that which was left of our nation.  But Paul shows what’s possible when people stand consistently on principle.

I am reminded of Robert E. Lee’s quote regarding the outcome of the war:

“In spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair the future? The truth is this: the march of Providence is so slow, our desires so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

Does Ron Paul mark the end of the Lee’s “ebb”?

A post on Lew Rockwell’s blog sums it up beautifully:

George W. Bush and the Republican establishment are, if nothing else, Lincolnian, regardless of what anyone might say. The party of corporatism, imperialism, centralism, economic fascism, dictatorship, aggressive war, militaristic duplicity, conscription, direct taxation, cronyism and police statism has never strayed much from its 1860s roots. And it has always advanced despotism in the name of liberty and national honor, from Lincoln to Teddy, from Nixon to Reagan, from the Bushes to Benito.

Ron Paul is indeed an exception within the GOP. And he has stood up, heroically, to the Lincoln myth. This will get people thinking — perhaps there is something similarly wrong with aggressive war on the Iraqis and on the Southerners, a continuity between the rape of Atlanta and the rape of Fallujah, between Lincoln’s internal improvements and Bush’s Haliburtonization of Middle East policy. Maybe Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War Between the States were both murderous and deceitful. Maybe the two Republican administrations to suspend habeas corpus unilaterally, only to have their kept Congresses rubberstamp the tyranny, have a lot in common, after all.

No one serious who really thinks about it for more than 45 seconds can conclude there would still be slave plantations in America if not for Lincoln, so that smear just won’t work. Black Americans won’t fall for it either, despite the PC establishment that has taken for granted this demographic for so long. Americans of color can tell which Republicans are a genuine and grave threat to their liberty, and it’s not the one who challenges the corporatist warfare state that has always depended upon blacks as cannon fodder.

But Ron Paul has done something that no presidential candidate of any prominence has done in many, many years — he has challenged the cult of Lincoln, the ideological godhead of the modern American regime. The Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, the Wilsonian empire and now the Lincolnian central state have all become national issues of discourse again. Thanks, Ron Paul. Once again, you have told the American people what they need to hear. If we want America to become a free country, we must go further than overturning the legacy of George W. Bush. We must overturn much more, and replace it with liberty itself. We are closer to that goal than ever, as the ideological basis for the modern American system is crumbling at every moment of exposure to Dr. Paul’s truth serum.

No, I’m not talking about the cheesy Civil War miniseries with Patrick Swayze. This is a recent miniseries put out by the BBC based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

A conservative friend of mine recommended it and said: “Don’t rent it, you’re wasting your money. Buy it because your wife is going to love it.” I rented it. We watched it. And I should have bought it since I will be buying it soon.

The movie concerns a minister’s family from South England moving to North England sometime in the mid-1800’s. The minister, a dissenting non-conformist (presumably a closet Presbyterian), refuses to sign a statement swearing ideological allegiance to the Church of England, and thus sacrifices a comfortable living as a parson out of principle. He moves his entire family north to Milton, an industrial mill town full of lowlanders genetically identical to and not unlike America’s own Scots-Irish.

There, his family and his daughter Margaret, the protagonist, must adjust to the very serious and business-like atmosphere of the North, quite unlike the gaiety and frivolity of the South. Romance and drama of course ensue, and I will say no more since the plot is quite intricate. (As an aside, it’s amazing to me how easily my wife keeps up with the twenty-odd characters in the series, their relationships, etc. It’s more than the male mind can handle, so I’m always asking her who this person is again, etc…)

There are so many nice touches in the movie, such as how it deals thoughtfully with the conflicts between the mill-owners and the workers (coming to the realistic conclusion that there is good, evil and plain incompetence among both groups). Or the moment when the main character revisits her old hometown, discussing theology with the new minister who took her father’s place, and finds herself disgusted with the anti-intellectual attitude (in terms of a disdain of serious Bible study) of the then-embryonic liberalism within the Anglican Church.

And apparently many women in Britain went crazy over the male lead character, Thornton, many thinking him superior to even Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. It is very similar in plot to Pride and Prejudice, and healthy for it. Both plots are realist romantic, almost anti-romantic in their centering around the serious-minded conservative people who are always cleaning up the messes of the ne’er-do-well “free spirits” around them, always denying themselves for someone else’s sake. The real romance of these plots is their forcing these personalities out of their self-denial for others for a moment and causing them to fall in love despite themselves with someone just like them.

Buy this for your wife for Christmas. It’ll be a hit:

www.amazon.com/North-South-Daniela-Denby-Ashe/dp/B000AYEL6U

The most powerful expression of our heritage is the Christmas season, and it is for this reason it is continually attacked and undermined by our society’s elites, who desire a homogenous generic multi-culti “holiday” soup that profanes Christ’s name while securing additional rents for themselves by stimulating retail avarice.

To counter this, I believe it is of utmost importance to transmit the real heritage of Christmas, the most powerful cultural meme of our Christian and European heritage. I’ve always found it interesting that Christmas carols are all, almost to the song, written in minor keys. There’s a bleak beauty in the music, transporting one instantly to cold winter nights circa 1600 somewhere in Scotland.

Anyway, I found the two following resources to be very helpful. The first is a pdf of many Christmas carol lyrics, which can be easily printed at home for singing with the family:

images.meredith.com/bhg/pdf/ChristmasCarols.pdf

The second is a site with a cornucopia of Christmas carol-related information, including pdf’s of sheet music now in the public domain:

www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/table_of_contents.htm

Am I alone in starting to listen to Christmas music on November 1, and continuing all the way to Epiphany on January 6th?

The second greatest commandment meets Castle Doctrine in Houston:

In a case legal experts say may “stretch the limits” of the state’s self-defense laws, a Pasadena man shot and killed two suspected burglars during a confrontation as they attempted to flee his neighbor’s property Wednesday afternoon.

In the minutes before the fatal shootings, Pasadena police said the man called 911 and reported that he had heard glass breaking next door and saw two men entering the home through a window. Still on the phone with police, the man, believed to be in his 70s, saw the suspects leaving from the back of the home.

“I’m getting my gun and going to stop them,” the neighbor told the dispatcher during the 2 p.m. call, according to Vance Mitchell, a spokesman for Pasadena police. “The dispatcher said, ‘No, stay inside the house; officers are on the way.’

“Then you hear him rack the shotgun. The next sound the dispatcher heard was a boom. Then there was silence for a couple of seconds and then another boom.”

After the shotgun blasts, the telephone line went dead. But the neighbor called police again and told a dispatcher what he had done.

My favorite part: the 911 dispatcher tells the man that “property isn’t worth killing anybody over” and “if you go out there, you’re gonna get shot”. To which the man says “the hell I will.”

These were the wrong things to say to a Texan with a gun. The Scots-Irish moved to the state to get rich, even though doing so put their lives at risk with some of the nastiest most aggressive Indian tribes of the frontier. And to tell a Texan that if he engages in a gunfight, he’s going to get shot…well, even if he were inclined to not fight, by saying that you force him to prove you wrong.

What’s the old saying? You can tell a Texan, but you can’t tell him much?

This brave man loved his neighbor as he loves himself. Go and do likewise.