Tom’s Big Picture

Steve Sailer compares the benign Cuban ethnic lobby to the totalitarian Israel Lobby.

England declares toddlers racist who dislike nasty foreign food.

I remember I had a friend in college for a while who was an Indian Muslim (as an aside, I remember the Muslim international students pharisaically getting their Aggie rings cast in some kind of freak aluminum alloy that looked like silver, because they can’t wear gold or silver; by this late hour the saying “Highway 6 runs both ways” was considered insensitive to those who bucked Aggie tradition).

He kept trying to tell me how great Indian food was.  Now, I have roots in Louisiana, so I have a pretty high standard for food.  So we go to this buffet place near campus at A&M that reeked of curry and other things hinting at their lack of proportion in seasoning their food.

And then I figured out why this particular Indian food was so bad.  Apparently, since India is such a messed up amalgam of various cults and sects, any restaurant serving a limited clientele (like international students at Texas A&M) must cater to every cult’s preferences.  Of course, the cult following Mohammed can’t eat pork or shellfish.

But the cult that really ruins the party are the Jainists, who believe that onion, garlic and salt are all foods that lead to sexual desire, which they find morally unacceptable.  Really, they believe that junk.  Last time I checked, you didn’t get onions or garlic on your food if you were potentially looking to indulge sexual desire, but no self-respecting Oriental cult is going to let logic get in the way.

So the food was basically really hot and over-seasoned, but with no salt, onion or garlic.  And way too much dang curry.  What’s up with the curry?  It’s like cinnamon but stomach-turning in large doses.  It’s like some cultures get stuck in these monotonic cul-de-sacs with their cuisine- way too much of one type of flavor.  Ever smelled soy sauce from outside someone’s house?

So to avoid hurting my friend’s feelings, I took to an old trick I discovered when I was seven.  If I cut my food into small enough pieces, I can swallow it like a pill without tasting it much.  Works like a charm on Brussel sprouts AND Indian “cuisine”.

Since their defeat in the late 1970’s in the SBC, socialists and theological liberals (often one and the same) have been clawing their way back into positions of influence in the evangelical world.  Taking advantage of the soft analytical focus of the postmodern era, they have been careful to avoid outright attacks on the Bible, but carefully twist its message for their political agenda.

Groups like Sojourners and other quasi-evangelical left-wing groups often are able to influence young evangelicals, their church experience usually leaving their heads full of feel-good mush more than doctrine, by taking advantage of young peoples’ idealism and foolish assumptions about their ability to change the world. The liberals promote some “new, vain thing”, stirring up the young with cynicism against tradition and their elders, that inevitably leads to greater power for liberals and the government orifices they control.

The Marxists keep marching, and it is this persistence more than anything that we in the opposition must take to heart.  Only when we are willing to fight as hard and as long and against great odds, in other words when our faith exceeds theirs, will we win the battle.

Of particular concern is the tendency of the “Christian pop culture” towards this kind of thing.  When our youth look to shiftless musicians (Christian ones, but still still shiftless artsy muddle-headed types) as theological guides, problems are bound to arise.  Witness the CCM world’s fawning over the socialist manifesto parading as Christian parable called “The Shack” (for a review click here).

It all goes back to the Social Gospel, a movement that must be terminated by the orthodox Christian mainstream.

Gary North’s latest essay on this subject is a gem.  Choice quotes:

If voters can be made to feel guilty about their economic success, they can be manipulated. This is why the politics of guilt manipulation is at the heart of the welfare state.

In a systematic political program to make people feel guilty, the Social Gospel movement within Protestantism has played an important role for over a century.

The Social Gospel movement, which began in the United States in the 1880’s, shared an ethical principle with the Progressive movement, which began at the same time and in the same social circles. This ethical principle can be summarized as follows: Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.

Defenders of the welfare state may wax eloquent about justice and fairness and the moral high ground. But no matter how lofty the rhetoric may be, as you are listening, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Where is the gun?
2. Who is holding the gun?
3. At whom is the gun pointing?

Today, there is a small, dedicated movement within the evangelical Protestant camp that regards Federal tax increases and Federal welfare increases as crucial to extend the kingdom of God in history. This is a recent development.

This latest post by Chris Ortiz is very brave. Click here to read his post about Anti-Southern Bigotry.

I’m not exactly a theonomist, but I do keep up with their work and am working my way through Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (it’s a great study of the Law, even if one doesn’t always agree with the degree of strictness Rushdoony wishes us to observe). The heart of Rushdoony’s work IMO is his concept of Dominion, of limiting the scope of both church and state and expanding the realm of the multigenerational extended family according to Biblical principles.

“[the so-called sentiment of equality] is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive ‘intellectuals’ still believe; but it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, this latter being their chief concern.”

-Vilfredo Pareto, Italian economist

Conflict over scarce resources among groups of people is the reality for fallen man, and all talk of equality, of somehow avoiding God’s judgment by creating the Tower of Babel here on Earth, are nothing more than shams designed to separate our children from their inheritance.

A great analysis of the decline of paleolibertarianism at LewRockwell dot com:

vdare.com/misc/080514_pendleton.htm

I can sometimes barely stand to read their reactionary blog anymore.

My take: Lew Rockwell, like Paul, is at heart an autistic libertarian with no loyalty to flesh-and-blood people, just his pet abstractions of liberty and limited government. Problem is that those abstractions, while worthy, can only be sustained by certain flesh-and-blood people. A foundation of European stock seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for liberty-respecting government.

After the 1994 Republican revolution, Rockwell thought that right-wing populism might provide a vehicle for his abstractions. But when the Heartland united behind Bush after 9/11, and Bush subsequently abused that trust to advance the Likud Party’s foreign policy agenda, Rockwell was horrified at the consequences. And on that I partially agree, though I am not as morally outraged. Whether it’s Saddam or U.S. troops, the people of Iraq are probably predestined to live under some sort of occupation since they are incapable of functional self-government and enjoy too many natural resources to be left alone in their squalor. If we’d just take their oil and stop building bridges and schools that they will blow up when we leave, the whole enterprise might at least break even and not ruin us.

So Rockwell writes an essay after the 2004 election titled “Red State Fascism” where he abandons the right wing and seeks an alliance with the anti-globalist Left. As a pragmatic ideologue, he’s simply trying another strategy. Since Ron Paul never even came close to the electoral success of Buchanan, it looks like a failed one.

Steve Sailer continues to bring us the most interesting stories.  For over a year, he has been telling us about the fascinating Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor.  I must say I find him a most interesting person, highly intelligent, and if I didn’t know he was black, I don’t know that I’d recognize him as such.  How is it that someone who is clearly 3/4 white identify so strongly as an African-American?

The irony is that the liberal press is racist in seeing Wright as just another black pastor saying crazy stuff, but in reality he’s quite the intellectual.  He’s a Marxist liberation Afrocentric intellectual, but nevertheless he’s a complex and interesting person.

This press conference is pure gold.  Sailer comments that he bets Obama is wishing he had tithed the full $700,000 on his $7 million income instead of $53,000.

Sailer’s articles on Wright here.

These teapot tyrants need to be shut down:

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.

I had an engineering professor at A&M who shared this tip, and so I will share it with you.

This professor was a conservative Christian and an elder at a large church in town, and taught me Engineering Economics.  It’s the class where I figured out I was a lot better at economics than engineering.  Whereas I was an average chemical engineer (i.e. about average among the 14% who start and finish a chemical engineering degree without washing out), in this class I did really well.

I found it amusing that people smarter than me in something like, oh say Mass Transfer Operations (distillation towers made my brain hurt), totally shut down when it came to financial calculations.  Garden-variety amortization was too much for some of them.

Anyway, this professor shared a particularly interesting tax strategy I’ve never heard anyone else talk about.  The key to his strategy is the fact that the state of Texas allows you to pay your property tax for a certain year in either December of the same year or January of the following year.  There’s no penalty, and when you pay is up to you.

He would pay last year’s property tax in January and this year’s property tax in December.  In that year, he would also double-tithe (or alternatively, save up last year’s tithe in an interest bearing account and give it in January of the “on” year).  Then, in the “off” year, he would take the standard deduction instead of itemizing, which is $10,700 this year.  If you’re in the 25% marginal bracket (typical middle class situation), then this is a savings of over $1000 per year in taxes!

One key part is that you might have to own your house to do this, as the mortgage company usually escrows and pays your property taxes on the same date every year.  And your charitable giving has to be such that you would exceed the standard deduction, otherwise it’s pointless.  So it’s really a strategy tailor-made for financially secure Christians whose incomes are not too high (as the gummint starts taking away deductions and such when you make too much money- if there’s anything that’ll make you want to start the revolution now, it’s when you meet fedgov’s little friend named AMT).

I shared this with a conservative Christian friend (who has since reformed his view to align with mine) after I heard it.  He thought it was neat, but was concerned that such maneuvering, while legal, might be sinful.

What’s sinful IMO is sending one more penny to the federal fetus butchers than the minimum absolutely required to keep them from unconstitutionally seizing your person and property.

But that’s just me.  I’m a moderate on the issue.

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.