Steyn: RU1-2? John Bolton Isn't, and That's His Problem

Remember the tsunami relief effort? You do? Then you’ll probably be shocked
to learn that containers full of aid are sitting on the dock in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, while
customs inspectors riffle through the paperwork. Canada pledged $425 million
in aid, and so far has dispatched $0.05 million. Yes, that’s forty thousand out
of four hundred million.

It all makes sense, writes
Mark Steyn.
As long as you fill out your form RU1-2 to show
you are part of the international floating crap game of the “global community,”
you’ll get the kid glove treatment. But if you are John Bolton, who scorns
the polite fictions, you could be in real trouble.

European Death Spiral

Here in the US the mainstream media is tut-tutting about an economic pause as
growth declines to 3.1 percent on an annual rate. But in their favorite global
region, Europe, growth is really pausing, down at 0.4 percent, and in Italy, they are
having a real recession.

So what could be the problem in good old Europe? Could it be taxes? Could
it be government spending? Could it be restrictive labor markets? Or could
it be all three? In fact, to stretch a point, could the problem
be that the Europeans have exactly the economic policy that Democrats
want to create in the United States?
Brian Carney
has the details.

Snapshot of the American People

Here’s a look at the American people in 2005, courtesy of
The Pew Research Center.
Dividing us up into three blocs, Left, Right, and Center, we look
like this:

Registered Voters CENTER   Upbeats 13%   Disaffecteds 10% Total:   23% RIGHT   Enterprisers 11%   Social Conservatives 13%   Pro-Government Conservatives 10% Total:   34% LEFT   Liberals 19%   Disadvantaged Democrats 10%   Conservative Democrats 15% Total:   44%

So there we all are. The question is: what do we do about it?

Get a Hip Replacement in India, and Take in the Taj

The latest thing is health tourism. Go to India to get your procedure done
at 25 percent, 50 percent, maybe 75 percent off prices in the US. And maybe you will recover from
your hip replacement
enough to take in the sights before you come home. An elephant ride in Jaipur,
perhaps.
Val McQueen
has your tickets ready. Maybe the night sky will soon be rumbling with squadrons
of gigantic Airbus A380s flying wingtip-to-wingtip from Europe to Delhi, full of
geezers like you and I.

The Real History of the Filibuster

So you thought that the filibuster was a 214-year tradition of the good old Senate now being threatened by evil theocratic Republicans? Not exactly.

Lee Harris traces its actual history, through the pre-civil war rantings of John Randolph, the pre-World War I anti-war speeches of Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and “the willful 11,” onto the segregationist filibusters of the 1940s and 1950s. In each case, the Senate rules were changed to de-fang the filibusters.

Still, the judicious Harris opines, one should be very reluctant to stiff-arm a vociferous minority. It leads to bad blood. The history of the filibuster shows that each talkathon crisis led from
confrontation to compromise. But what would be an acceptable compromise this time?

See No Evil, Hear No Evil...

Remember the good old days when liberals thundered their moral outrage to
the reverberate hills? (A little bit of Shakespeare for you DWM aficionados.)
When they were unafraid and bellowed truth to power?
Well things are different now, at least in the modern, tenured, $40,000-per-year-tuition university.
Confronted with the outrageous grading
practices of a departmental college, here’s how a modern, scholarly academic responded,
according to provocateur
David Horowitz:
“`I don’t want to hear it,’ he said, and walked away.”

Once you have surrendered the moral high ground, liberals, you will find
that you will be surrendering other things too, sooner than you think.

And here is something to ponder. What happens when the young generation
raised on X-Box’s “Halo” starts flexing its muscles in natural,
testosterone-fueled rebellion against a flaccid, enervated academy?

When Hayek's Extended Order Goes Virtual

What will the media world be like in 2014? A couple of journalists,
Matt Thompson of the Fresno Bee and Robin Sloan of Current, a new cable news channel in San Francisco, have
produced a “mockumentary” called “EPIC 2014,” that prophesies the dominance of
Googlezon, a merger of Google and Amazon. There won’t be any media as
we know it. Googlezon will customize news and features for each customer in
its new feature EPIC, the “Evolving Personalized Information Construct,” gathering news
and video from millions of, well, “us,” and then distributing it back to—us.

Here is a transcript
of the video and here is a url to the video itself.

There is one thing missing, of course, and it is what you would expect journalists to miss.
It’s the trust factor. No doubt that “At its best, edited for the savviest readers,
EPIC is a summary of the world — deeper, broader
and more nuanced than anything ever available before,” and at its worst, they say,
is will be trivial, shallow, and untrue. (You mean just like media today?) But the amazing success of eBay, which
runs on trust, shows how the future media world will operate. It will operate on trust,
just like eBay.
Googlezon’s EPIC will
allow its customers to build ratings on its content providers and its editors, just like
eBay does today. That will build trust into the Googlezon media empire. The whole
issue of trust, and how the Hayekian “extended order” is built on
trust, is something that our modern media chappies just do not understand.

And that’s ok, isn’t it? Because it means that they just don’t get it. Heh.