Could Europe's Anti-Semitism Happen Here?

Ever since Jews first started immigrating to the United States from Russia a century ago they have found their home on the Left. Jews experienced the universalism of socialism as a refuge from the ethnic and religious hate they had experienced in European ghettos and beyond the Pale of Settlement in Russia.

But are Jews safe on the Left any more?

Student Teresa Mia Bejan reports on the pervasive anti-Semitism in lefty Europe and in the oh-so-lefty European universities

Anti-Semitism is alive and well and living in Paris. And London, apparently. And Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid — and Oxford, too, to my shock and chagrin.

Yes. In Oxford.

Walking down the famed Cornmarket Street in central Oxford, one routinely sees the telltale combination of Lonsdale-brand jacket with Gap T-shirt — the neo-Nazi's favorite fashion statement for the clever way in which it displays NSDAP, nationalistische sozialistische demokratische Arbeitspartei, proudly across his or her chest.
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But mentions of the Holocaust at the traditional Oxford formal hall are met with derisive coughs and cries of "don't bring that up again!"

Bejan seems to think that European anti-Semitism couldn’t happen here. But of course, it already is, in the university, as colleges encourage Middle-Eastern Studies departments to fill up with Jew-hating academics.

It goes against centuries of bitter experience, but it is looking more and more as if the best friends that Jews have in the world are American Christians—you know, Red State Americans who go to work, follow the rules, go to church, and obey the law.

Fortunately there is already an advanced guard of Jews who have migrated to the conservative movement and the Republican Party. They are the dreaded neoconservatives and religiously observant Jews. There are even Jewish conservative radio talk show hosts! Let us hope that the laggards overcome their natural and well-founded mistrust and come on over soon.

The fact is that the Left is a movable feast and it only dines on the victim du jour. When Jews were dying in their millions, they counted as victims. When Jews are successfully building the State of Israel they don’t count as victims any more, and don’t enjoy the compassion and the caring of the Left any more.

While there is still time, come on in fellahs, the water’s fine!

Imagine If Oppressed Blacks Were in Therapy, Says Instawife

What does a psychologist think when she encounters the thought of Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character, The Dream Deferred, and now White Guilt?

Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith, the Instawife, takes a look at the black power/white guilt dynamic that was the precipitate of the civil rights revolution. The victim politics of race victimhood, if practiced by psychologists on their patients, would be malpractice.

[I]f psychologists spent their time telling their patients they were victims of mental illness (or racism etc.) and that they could only get better by coming to therapy, how could the patient ever develop autonomy, skills, and the ability to solve their own problems? It is the same with the race card on the part of the left -- victimhood will keep blacks maintained in the status quo, always looking to the left for validation and to enforce their "rights."

The politics of race is a destructive game that keeps its victims in permanent victimhood. All parties to this political game have abandoned. their moral authority. The

left has turned against democratic principles and instead engages in a victim mentality for blacks that keeps them on the plantation. The left's deal is that they will keep throwing out a few bones like affirmative action, as long as blacks will allow themselves to be reduced to their race and the left can take moral authority for "helping" them. As Steele points out, this is a deal with the devil.

One fine day, one fine spring day, the ice jam on the river of race, the liberal discourse of oppression and victimhood, will break up. It will be a sight to see.

How Badly in Debt Are We?

The average US household has a credit card balance of $9,000. That’s what we hear. America is drowning in debt.

But Liz Pulliam Weston at MSN says: Wait a minute. First of all, she writes, most Americans owe zero to the credit card companies. Half of those that do owe money have a balance of less than $2,000.

So where does the $9,000 number come from?

Well, it seems to be concentrated up in the high income sector. For instance, Fair Isaac reports that 15 percent of card holders have balances in excess of $10,000. If that is so then it could be that a few rich folks are the ones that are skewing the average.

All in all, Weston reckons, there is

more than enough evidence to suggest that a large number of people are overdosing on debt. The average American, though, seems to be doing just fine.

But if that is true then there’s no need for politicians and moralists rush out and do something before the nation drowns itself in debt. At least not yet.

It's a Good Sign that Manufacturing Jobs are Declining

Economics is as “dry as toast” to use the memorable phrase from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But someone has to explain it because lives depend on governments getting with the economics program. Right now Zimbabwe is suffering from runaway inflation. Why is that not surprising, when the Mugabe government has done everything possible to wreck the economy?

Economics Professor Walter Williams is willing to do the dirty work of explaining economics, even the vexing question of the decline in manufacturing jobs. You know. Outsourcing.

Everyone is worried sick about the decline in manufacturing jobs. Is it a bad thing? Or not?

Williams cites the vexing question of the decline in farm jobs. You are worried about manufacturing jobs going away? Look what happened to farm jobs.

In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Now, only 2 percent of today's labor force works in agricultural jobs.

Well, what do you think, Senator? Good or bad?

Good, right? Because farmers today are much more productive than they were a century ago. We need fewer people on the farm to grow our food. That means that instead of people working on the farm they can work other jobs. That way we get a two-fer. We get the food production from the farms and also the work from people who would have been working on the farm a hundred years ago.

That is what is happening in manufacturing.

Since 2001, with the aid of computers, telecommunications advances, and ever more efficient plant operations, U.S. manufacturing productivity, or the amount of goods or services a worker produces in an hour, has soared a dizzying 24 percent. That's 72 percent faster than the average productivity advance during America's four most recent recession-recovery cycles dating back to the 1970s. In short: We're making more stuff with fewer people.

And guess what. Manufacturing employment is going down all over the world, including the countries

who produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico).

But what will all the manufacturing industry workers do? Well, they will get to do other stuff. Some of them will experience hardship, of course, especially those in unionized industries like airlines, autos, and steel, where wages were artificially high due to union monopoly power.

The bottom line is that the US workforce is at an all time high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 150 million strong, and unemployment is down to 4.7 percent. Wherever it is that those jobs are flying to, they aren’t flying far.

Is The Global Warm Turning?

For years climate scientists have been telling us just what the environmentalists have wanted: Global warming is real and more research is needed.

Actually that last bit about “more research” is my little contribution. That is because it pretends to understand what scientists are thinking. I imagine it is something like this: “My Land! There’s gold in them thar hills. Ahem, yes. GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL! Now, can I have my next climate change grant approved, please.”

But now Kenneth Green in NRO thinks that the worm has turned.

Environmentalists, who have long espoused a version of humankind as an energy-powered cancer on the Earth, see greenhouse-gas controls as a way to starve out the tumor of humanity. Many scientists, unable to look beyond linear thinking, can’t get past the idea that the only answer to change is to impose stability.

Of course, tree researcher Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies deals rather firmly with the stability theory. The climate of the earth fluctuates in all times scales, according to his research.

Up to now scientists have bought into the self-help solution of the environmentalists, to put mankind on a energy diet as repentance for its sins. But now some of them are changing their tune.

On April 18, a group of 90 scientists wrote an open letter to Canada’s prime minister observing that “Advances in climate science . . . have provided more evidence supporting the need for action and development of a strategy for adaptation for projected changes.” The group goes on to emphasize that as “mitigation measures will become effective only after many years . . . adaptive strategies are essential and must begin now.”

Notice the words “action” “development,” and “begin now.”
You can see why the scientists might be changing their tune. They are not fools. They can see that an adaptive strategy on climate change could mean a lot to them. It could mean: Jobs; Research; Startups; Money, power and the love of beautiful women. Yes, scientists can play both sides of the street on this one. And why not? The only thing that matters to a scientist is where the next grant is coming from.

The adaptive strategy, in case you didn’t know, is the policy of President Bush and the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Signatories to the partnership included Australia, India, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea, as well as the United States—in other words, everyone that matters.

Do you think that President Bush might have figured the scientists out?

Billionaire Koch Reads Hayek and Mises

He got a PhD at MIT; he inherited Daddy’s company, and now he’s #33 on Forbes list of billionaires. He’s Charles Koch, worth north of $12 billion.

How did he do it? According to Stephen Moore it’s the “library of liberty” in the bookcase.

Whereas the bookshelves of most of America's leading CEOs are stocked with pop corporate management and "how to succeed" books, Mr. Koch's office is a wall-to-wall shrine to writings in classical economics, or, as he calls it, "the science of liberty." The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.

Well, of course those are the authors on every conservative’s bookshelf. And the cool thing is that most liberals have never heard of them. OK so they have heard of Paul Johnson, they revile Charles Murray; they’ve heard the quote about “creative destruction,” and they have a vague recollection of Hayek and Mises.

Best of all, Koch is putting his money where his mouth is.

Charles Koch--no surprise--disdains government and the political class. He has invested tens of millions of dollars into free-market think-tanks and political activist groups (including several founded by this author). He's disgusted with the runaway federal budget under the Republicans, and he proposes that "every new law should be subject to the question: Will it strengthen the culture of prosperity?"

Sounds like my kind of guy.

Yes, Why Does Freud Matter?

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, the Wall Street Journal hauled out Harold Bloom to explain in “Why Freud Matters” why Freud matters.

As you would expect, Bloom signally failed to do so. He tells us that Freud was not so much a scientist, as he pretended, but a “moral essayist” like Montaigne, a contemporary of Cervantes and Shakespeare. He writes that “Freud maps our minds by mapping his own.”

So what? Does Freud map your mind? Me neither. At a visceral level, Freud doesn’t ring true. Id, Ego, Super-ego? So what?

But a conservative can understand Freud on an intellectual level. And this understanding began for me when I read a playwright declare that the scales fell off his eyes when he read Freud.

What could he mean, I wondered? I certainly didn’t experience a similar epiphany from Freud. All the stuff about repressed memory, infant sexuality, the importance of dreams. What was the point of it?

The Freudian apparatus may not mean much to a conservative, but it does have a point for the creative artist. And that is why Freud has been so praised and so woven into the culture of the twentieth century. Let us try to understand why this is so.

The creative artist lives a daily agony. He may be a fine prose stylist, a craftman of the written word, but that is only the half of it. The other half is talent, the silent, unbidden impulse that makes the difference between a craftsman and a genius. Where does the idea for a novel or a painting come from?

Even more urgent, where does the idea for the next plot twist come from?

This question is the agonizing problem of every creative person. Fortunately, it is also the great subject of German philosophy and psychology beginning with Kant.

First of all, Kant says that we cannot know the thing-in-itself, only appearances. If we cannot know reality directly then we can only know a Weltanshauung, a world view. In Kant’s world I cannot know the ultimate reality; as a conscious ego I can only possess a personal view of the world as it appears to me. Then along comes Fichte’s creative ego and the declaration that “All our thought is founded on our impulses.”

With a dash of Hegel’s developmental psychology and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression everything is in place for Freud, physician and prose stylist, to come along and popularize the ideas that will help the playwright wipe the scales from his eyes. Genius is impulse, Freud teaches him, creative impulse that wells up out of the unconscious. And the worst thing you can do is to repress it.

Maybe creativity is everything for artists and writers, people whose job it is to think previously unthought thoughts. But the rest of us may be excused for pointing out that, creativity or not, we have lives to live: going to work, following the rules, and performing our promises.

There is also the minor question of getting married and raising children. On the whole, the artists inspired by Freud would rather not.

Freud matters because he mapped the artist’s mind. And he explained the agony of the creative artist to any of the rest of us that cared.

But don’t expect a theater of the neglected artist’s child any time soon.