Worse Before It Gets Better

Today conservatives are angry about the New York Times, angry about the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, and angry about the limp wrist resolutions in the House and the Senate to deplore the Times’ declassification of the terrorist financial tracking program.

So let us step back and think a little.

This war, the War on Terror, World War IV, the war between the West and Islamism, or whatever we want to call it, is not going to be easy. President Bush never said it would. In fact, from the beginning, he said it was going to be a long war.

Obviously our trans-national secular elite does not think that the war is really a war. Perhaps that is because, as of right now, they do not feel threatened. And if they do not feel threatened then there is no threat, because they know best.

Of course, at this stage of the conflict we do not yet know how serious it is. Just as in 1938 it was possible to do some wishful non-thinking and persuade yourself that Herr Hitler had a point. The Germans had been badly treated, etc. We now know that nothing short of all-out conflict could have stopped Hitler. But in 1938, people did not know that.

Is this really a world conflict, or just a bunch of rich Muslim kids with guns and bombs who are really not worth getting into a sweat over? We don’t know.

Why wait until the threat has fully matured, you might ask? Why not finish it off with a neat 0.25 GDP war and a few thousand deaths rather than wait until it takes a WWII type effort of full national mobilization and hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No doubt that is what serious people used to worry about in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Yet maybe that is what it is going to take. After all, if the New York Times really believed that the terror threat was real then they wouldn’t have recklessly compromised national security. They would have gone to the White House for guidance, rather than to straight-arm it.

Yet think how hard it would be for them to admit that Bush is right about the War on Terror. For one thing that would mean admitting that Bush and the Republicans are right. And one thing they know in Manhattan is that they are right and fundamentalist Religious Right conservatives are wrong. So they go back to their old familiar template, reenacting their glory days. As Peggy Noonan writes:

[T]he people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power.

And why not reenact? It’s a vicarious excitement, a reminder of the good old days. But of course it is also putting the nation at risk. Because if you started to do some real thinking then you might have to deal with the fact of the underclass poor. How come that the underclass seemed to come after the War on Poverty? Or you might start to wonder about the vast and underperforming schools. Or you might ponder how the ranks of people on disability doubles every ten years. Best not to think about all that.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the nature of things, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before the liberals and Democrats are going to see what is right in front of their eyes and get with the program on the war on terror.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. You’d think that after 9/11, after 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, that people would be getting the idea. What will it take, do you think, for them to get serious?

Maybe it is better not to think about that. But here’s a prediction. The New York Times will never admit that Bush was right on the war on terror.

Getting Snobbish in Tuscany

Suppose you bought a house in Tuscany. Then what? Then the problem would be to move heaven and earth to avoid being taken for an American or a Brit.

Your whole life would revolve around getting people to say “Buongiorno” in the street instead of “Hello.” It’s not easy, as Anna Blundy explains. For instance how do you get people to stop addressing you in English? For a start, you have to dress like an Italian. Guess what that means.

Though it was almost 100 degrees in the shade and all the Italians had taken refuge in Sardinia, I drove to Lucca wearing stilettos and a tight skirt. I curled my hair and retouched my lipstick all day. ‘Buongiorno, Signora’ all round and immediately on to the next rung.

Are you sure you have the backbone for that kind of punishment, girls?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking out there. How to differentiate yourself from the other ex-pats that are crowding in, looking for their own Tuscan villa just a little down the hill from Tony Blair? The technique is to sound as if you have lived in Tuscany forever.

[O]ne must adopt a tone of utter despair when speaking of the continuing invasion (in which we ourselves, naturally, have played no part). ‘Do you think there are more than there were when we came?’ I ask Jenny, bowing to her impressive decade of prosecco-swilling.



‘Oh God, yes,’

And the awful thing is that, the way the Italians aren’t having children, there ought to be bargains in the Tuscan villa market for years to come. It’s too awful, darling.

Rep. King Wants to Shine Light on College Admissions

If you search for: Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act on the New York Times website you won’t get any hits.

That is odd, because the New York Times has made a point of publicizing the secret anti-terror programs of the United States government on the argument that the release of such information is in the public interest.

But the New York Times doesn’t seem to have much interest in shining the light of knowledge into another notoriously secretive area of American life: the policies of university admissions officers.

Rep. Steven King (R-IA) wants to change all that. As reported by Peter Kirsanow he is introducing a bill into Congress,

“Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act.” The bill would require institutions of higher learning that receive federal dollars to disclose to the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice various items of information related to the use of race, color and national origin in the admissions process.

Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it? I mean, people need to know things about a college’s admissions process before they start shelling out admissions fees. They need to know things like:

(1) how much weight its admissions process gives to an applicant’s race, ethnicity, etc; (2) the probability that a student given preferred consideration on account of race or ethnicity will have to enroll in a remediation program; (3) graduation rates for preferred students vs. that of non-preferred students; and (4) the probability that preferred students will default on student loans.

Wouldn’t you want to know stuff like that before you applied to a university?

But the question is, why has the New York Times, which believes in the public’s right to know the methods and tactics of the national intelligence agencies, not weighed in to support this modest proposal of Rep. King?

Brit Chicks Want More Time With Children

In the US there is a swelling movement of women who are wondering if career and children are a sensible combination, indeed whether, as Carolyn Graglia puts it, “market production” has any moral or economic advantage over “domestic production.”

Now British working mothers are beginning to wonder too. Writes Camilla Cavendish: “For me, the desire to be with my children is physical, like an elastic band stretching. I can’t be away for too long.”

And now there’s a poll to back her up.

This week, a YouGov poll of 1,736 mothers in First magazine demonstrates how profoundly unhappy many mothers are with living this way. More than half feel guilty about time spent away from their children. Two thirds think that mothers should stay at home with their babies and toddlers during the first few years — though nationally, less than half do. A third would like to reduce their working hours, and more than a third say they would give up work altogether if they could.

How did we get to this point, where mothers have been tossed into the workplace and told that it is good to leave their children to a childminder? And where they are exhausting themselves—for what?

Here we have the most prosperous society the world has ever seen, and mothers are running themselves ragged?

There seem to be two trends on a collision course. The National Center for Health Statistics says that in 1995 6.6 percent of couples were “childfree,” up from 2.4 percent in the 1980s But wealthy hedge fund managers are going for four and five children, and many people are saying that “three is the new two.”

Writes Cavendish:

We live at a time of greater opportunities for women, of greater job flexibility, of higher average incomes, than at any period in history. Yet we increasingly talk as though we have no control over our lives. We are the first generation to feel that we cannot afford to bring up our own children.

Yes, what is that all about? In the richest society we say we cannot afford to bring up our own children? Who are we kidding?

There is this to think about. When women are at work, governments get revenue from their market production. And they get more control over the nation’s children. It’s all about power, as the postmodernists say.

Nicholas Wade's Updated Genesis

This week I am reading Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn. It’s a review of recent developments in archeology, particularly the important contribution that biogenetics is making to our knowledge of our ancient ancestors.

For instance, tracking of the Y chromosome in men indicates that we are all descended from one man. And tracking of mitochondria in women indicates that women are all descended from the same woman. And it seems likely that all people except those in Africa are descended from a band of hunter-gatherers that crossed the southern end of the Red Sea from Africa to Arabia about 50,000 years ago.

It is intriguing that the Biblical speculation of Adam and Eve, and even the Mosaic Red Sea crossing receive echoes in the latest science.

Nicholas Wade is a science correspondent for The New York Times and so it is significant that he tells his readers that, like it or not, ancient man engaged in constant warfare. That behavior, of course, is shared by our great ape cousins. Male chimpanzees frequently engage in border raids on the territory of neighboring troops. They do it for a practical reason. A bigger territory means more food, and more food means more baby chimps making it to adulthood.

But over the years, humans have become more “gracile,” meaning that our skulls and skeletons have become less robust. In other words, we have become more oriented towards cooperation and less to competition and conflict.

But here’s an interesting speculation. The big problem for humans is to develop the trust circle for cooperation, and particularly cooperation outside kinship. How do you control and sanction the freeloader? The human solution, he suggests, is religion.

Maybe that explains why the rising European bourgeoisie of the last millennium developed their own religion, Protestant Christianity, to define their trust network. And maybe that explains the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in the emerging economies of the world. The big problem for the people in the huge new cities is to establish trust networks to replace the old kin-based trust in the village.

If AMLO Wins in Mexico

The reason that the US has an immigration problem is that Mexico’s economy stinks. One critic wrote years ago that the problem with Mexico is that it has tried everything, everything fashionable to come out of Europe. Everything, that is, except democratic capitalism. That has never been in fashion.

At least since the Mexican wipeout of 1994 (remember that?) Mexico has begun to fix its economy. But the trouble is, according to Robert Samuelson, that as much as two-thirds of Mexico’s workers are employed in the “informal” sector, i.e., the sector that doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t have access to regular finance, and cannot grow without attracting the attention of predatory government officials. And the formal sector isn’t much better. Take
Pemex, the state-owned monopoly oil company. Without competitors or complaining shareholders, its operations are lax. In 2004, Pemex had $69 billion in sales and 137,722 employees, according to its Web site; in the same year, Exxon Mobil had $291 billion in sales and 85,900 employees.

Do that math on that. Exxon Mobil gets $3.4 million in revenue per employee. Pemex gets $0.5 million per employee. In other words, Exxon Mobil gets about 7 times as much in revenue out of each employee as Pemex.

And now it looks as though lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is likely to win the Mexican presidential election on July 2.

According to Enrique Krause he is proposing to slash salaries at the top of government.

Mr. López Obrador has also talked of revising Nafta's agricultural provisions and subsidizing exporters with cheap fuel (a practice prohibited by Nafta). He has declared that he will "allow" private investment, but not national or foreign interest in strategic areas that urgently require it, like oil and gas.

He also proposes a mammoth microcredit program (run by the government perhaps?) and bullet trains to the northern border.

But he is also proposing a presidency founded on his personal charisma, with referendums and plebiscites. We have a word for that. It is called fascism.

The problem for Americans is that when the lefty economics of AMLO fails, then we will see even more Mexicans crossing the border to find economic sanity. And who will be asked to pick up the mess south of the border?

Blair's Swansong: Third Way Just Hype

Clintonian Third Way politics came to an end in 2000. Now the Third Way politics of Tony Blair is coming to an end. It is time to come to judgment about Third Way politics. Was it really a Third Way between capitalism and socialism? Did it succeed in charting a new way? Or was it all just hype? The answer is pretty clear. It was mostly hype.

For years you couldn’t say that. Blair promised so much, and you wanted to believe him. But now the sands are running out for him. And the Third Way achievement has been to increase government employment by 800,000 workers. These workers have been absorbed into the government health system and the government education system. But the health system and the education system are still centrally run and directed, so the vast additional resoures—that have increased the British public sector to the level of Germany—have had little effect on the delivery of services.

And now the scandal of crime and illegal immigration has made a mockery of Blair’s promise to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,” a powerful sound bite that ended up meaning nothing.

Writes Simon Jenkins in The Times:

The two communities I know best, one in London and the other rural, are no longer policed in any recognisable sense, certainly not as they were in Blair’s golden 1950s. Police are never seen and phones are never answered. For Blair to put this down to terrorism and globalisation is ludicrous. Since the 1990s progressive centralisation has ended beat patrolling, disbanded the police solicitor network and bureaucratised the overnight magistrates’ courts.

Blair blames the “establishment” for all this, writes Daniel Finkelstein.

Last Friday Mr Blair attacked “the political and legal establishment”. He said that it “didn’t understand”, that it was “in denial”, that it was “out of touch”. And he argued the Establishment was letting down everyone else, “ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk”, and failing to get the balance right between victims and offenders.

Well, of course. But isn’t Blair part of the political and legal establishment? If reform is needed, isn’t it natural that the reform would be a reform of the establishment? It’s a little late in the Blair administration to be suddenly waking up and realizing that the problem all along was in themselves.

We can see in the death throes of Tony Blair our own struggles in the United States. The great conservative reforms of the last generation were all enacted in the teeth of opposition and scorn from the bien pensant elite. The supply-side economics: it was voodoo economics. The “broken-window” policing: it was racial profiling. The welfare reform: it would mean children starving in the streets. And the campaign to value once again the nuclear bourgeois family: why that is just bigoted.

But we know now that the Third Way was just hot air. It was the bien pensant elite complimenting itself on its enlightened world-view. Both President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were excellent in their heyday in winning the hearts and minds of the media. But when it came to the boring stuff of boots on the ground, actually formulating policy and seeing it through to completion, they were nowhere to be found.

And that means that ordinary people suffer, with bad schools and lousy health care while the Third Way suits settle into a well-deserved retirement.