So Bush Created a Catastrophe

We are at an inflection point in the War on Terror. Three years of effort to produce democracy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion has demonstrated that the forces of chaos in Iraq are stronger than the move to democracy. “Bush Has Created a Catastrophe,” complains Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian.

Yes, of course. The Middle East is a catastrophe, and Bush created it. That was always understood as a possibility from the beginning.

Back in 2003, some unnamed Bushie said that the administration was throwing all the balls up in the air in the Middle East. He was right, and they have come down in a right mess.

So what? Suppose that Iraq is a catastrophe? What does that mean for us?

The answer is: Not much.

The first best outcome in the Middle East is for democracy to flourish. The next best outcome is for the Middle East to be divided between Sunni and Shia, and for the Sunnis under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the expansionist Shia of Iran.

The one thing we do not want is for the Middle East, its oil, and its oil money to be united under the control of a single murderous dictator.

The reason that progressives like Timothy Garton Ash are upset is that the War on Terror upsets the business-as-usual of the worldwide bureaucratic welfare state.

In the minds of progressives the story, er, the narrative, is supposed to go like this. Progressives discover a festing sore of inequality and oppression and write brilliant manifestos demanding its immediate remediation through the means of a bureaucratic government program funded by tax monies. Then everyone goes back to a life of writing works of creative intellectual brilliance punctuated by the occasional sexual adventure.

But this fantasy becomes impossible when there are young Muslim men running around the world blowing themselves up and beheading people. When that is happening, you must call up young western men of a martial disposition, furnish them with abundant materiel and leadership, and tell them to go at it.

And the progressives of the world hate that more than death itself.

Because they thought that, after a century of work, they had completely extinguished the martial instinct in the young men of North America and Europe.

Yes. They were wrong about that, too.

The Lessons of Pinochet

Former President Auguste Pinochet of Chile, who died last week, was a dictator who toppled a would-be Marxist dictator. With all this dictator-ology going on, his life offers many lessons to us, writes Peruvian Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

• “The first lesson is that social utopias always end in tears.”
  
• “The second lesson is that there is no such thing as an ‘emergency’ dictatorship.”
  
• “The third lesson is that free markets and dictatorial governments are ultimately incompatible.” Dictatorship is about power, and the free market is about the regulation of power.
  
• “The fourth lesson is that human rights are not an invention of human rights groups[.]” The rule of law was developed for a good reason, that all power corrupts and usually results in a reduction of the welfare of the people.
  

The story of Chile and General Pinochet had a happy ending. Pinochet gave up power and returned democracy to Chile.

But as we tut-tut about the abuses of Pinochet let us not forget the unhappy people of Cuba, still under the rule of the ruthless dictator Fidel Castro and still getting poorer by the day.

The Great Sexual Taboo

It’s the great taboo of our time. It’s eating away at half the population. It’s a political issue waiting for some brave political entrepreneur to grasp. You know what it is.

"I want to spend more time with him, and do stuff like go shopping or see a movie. That would make it a friendship for me. But he says no, because if we do those things, then in his opinion we'd have a relationship--and that's more than he wants. And I'm confused, because it seems like I don't get the 'friend' part, but he still gets the 'benefits.'" It finally dawns on her: "I'm really unhappy about that. It's hard to be with him and then go home and be alone."

Those are the words of “Heather” in Unprotected by Anonymous, MD reviewed by Danielle Crittenden.

The patients of Anomymous, MD, are hurting, but what can she do? She can advise them on eating disorders and substance abuse. She can opine about the evils of tanning beds. But there is one subject that she cannot be judgmental about.

You see, young college women all over the nation are hurting themselves because of their “sexual choices.” Unfortunately, when it comes to sexual choices, “few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.” Boys, of course, are instinctively avoiding the modern university, as the male/female ratio keep dipping towards 40/60. In the rebellious way of the male, they naturally rebel against the advice of their betters. But girls are different.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong.

The fact is that, whatever they may think they want, most girls do not do well with sexual freedom, sexual experimentation, sexual self-discovery. That is because the sexual life of a woman is not a journey of practice and creative experimentation. The sexual life of a woman is for real.

This is the great question of our age. We have decided that we need to transcend the simple world of rules and traditional roles. People cannot attain their full potential as human beings unless they transcend the rules in original, creative work. In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asserted that the same applies to women. But what about sex in the life of this “independent woman?”

A woman.. needs... not only to satisfy her sexual desires, but also to enjoy the relaxation and diversion provided by agreeable sexual adventures.

That’s easy to write, but the Beaver understands that this is more easily said than done. She writes for pages about the difficulties of the sexual life of the independent woman.

But we have proceeded in the past half-century on the assumption that there is no problem here, that women can indulge in “agreeable sexual adventures” like any man. And more than that, we have erected a taboo around the question. You are not allowed to discuss it.

This question of women’s sexuality and the agony of the young woman trying to experiment just like she is supposed to is, I suspect, the key political question of the age. If conservatives can understand the question and speak to women about it so that we show that we understand and they feel that we understand, then it’s Katy bar the door.

Oh House! Not Another Anti-hero

Oh no! Last night on Fox Dr. Gregory House just decided to cop a plea on his forging of prescriptions for the prescription painkiller Vikodin, but when he turned up at the detective’s office, it was no deal.

Why? Because the acerbic House had signed for a dead patient’s prescription for painkiller, and the DA was going to hang him on that instead of the testimony of colleague Dr. James Wilson.

But the next exciting episode of Fox’s hit series House M.D. won’t be aired until January! How are House fans supposed to wait until then?

OK, so this was my first experience of House, on account of visiting my sister in Colorado to celebrate the 90th birthday of our mother. I had no idea, no idea about House at all, until she introduced me to her addiction. Of course, I never watch network TV. Never.

House M.D. is certainly a fully modern TV experience. It has an anti-hero in the title role, a crew of main characters right out of diversity camp, and the eternal chick draw of loved ones with their lives at stake.

Gregory House is said to be modeled on Sherlock Holmes (Holmes, House, get it?) and that raises the interesting idea that Arthur Conan Doyle was a writer before his time. Who thought about anti-heroes in Britland back at the turn of the twentieth century? Well, Conan Doyle did.

But I am underwhelmed by yet another anti-hero. I mean, haven’t we done that already?

Instead I am waiting with baited breath for the end of the anti-hero era. What is it that makes the anti-hero such a necessity in our era? Is it the pervasive power of government, the endless rules, that Gregory House must overturn if he is to get anything done?

And we will leave aside the utterly unbelievable careerist female physicians in the series. Sorry, pal. Women just aren’t like that. Never were, never will be.

Here is the nagging question for me. Why are we lying to ourselves so compulsively, lying about the provenance of anti-heroes in an age of stifling conformism, and lying about women who act and talk just like men—except when the plot requires a dose of tear-jerking emotion?

What is it? And what will it take to break out of the Age of Lies into a new age?

I know. Every age is an age of lies, because life is a lie: the eternal hope that rises irrepressibly every morning against the inescapable fact of death.

But I’m ready for the dawning of the age of the New Hero, whatever that may be, and whoever he may be.

God Bless the Secular Fundamentalists

Did you know that we live in an age when the achievements of science and technology are under attack from religious extremism as never before? Then the Center for Enquiry (CFI) is for you. As CFI’s home page puts it:

Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science.

Oh dear, writes Father Thomas Berg on NRO. Where do we start? The fact is that religion is not necessarily opposed to science and reason. Catholicism, for instance, is a 2000-year-old effort to develop a reasoned religion. And anyway, Berg writes,

it may come as a surprise to many secularists that their unquestioned faith in the possibility of an objective, “scientific” approach to life, cleansed of “religious ideology”, is itself an ideological hangover from the Enlightenment, one that has been long since de-legitimized by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty.

Secularists miss the big point, and make the fundamental category error of conflating the “Is” and the “Ought.” Science can do wonders illuminating the “Is,” but it has little to tell us about the “Ought.” RMC Chappie F.S.C. Northrop has a whole book devoted to this problem. It is called The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience. He was a professor of law and philosophy at Yale who flourished in the mid-twentieth century.

We know, as well as we can know, that we live in an amazing universe, and we know how it works, especially in the realm close to our everyday lives. But the big question is: What does it all mean? And closely allied to that question is: How should we live?

The basic problem is that science cannot provide answers to these questions. To know the answers would be to know the destiny of the human race, to have reduced the universe to a deterministic problem. Hence religion; hence “belief systems.” Berg again:

If secularists want to have a meaningful voice in the public square — and not a preposterous one — then we invite them to be attentive students of history, and with intellectual honesty to recognize that Christianity in particular has a lengthy track record of contributing to the very goals that secularists profess to be seeking: beliefs grounded in reason, an ethics sustained by reasonable moral discourse, advances in human knowledge, and the general betterment of human life.

Of course, monstrous things have been done in the name of religion. But then monstrous things have been done in the name of science and reason.

The basic problem with the secularists is that they are utterly unreflective on the basic articles of their faith. (And yes, they do have a faith.) Their faith is so immediate and obvious to them that they aren’t even aware of their assumptions. They bandy about terms like “medical ethics” and “ethical foreign policy” as if these concepts were fully decided and that all reasonable people agreed upon them.

What do you call a faith like that? How about “secular fundamentalism?”

The Hydra-headed Diversity Monster

Maybe it would help if the United States Supreme Court would make up its mind one way or another. And maybe it will in the next few years.
Unfortunately, right now, diversity is metastasizing like cancer, as articles in NRO by Frederick M. Hess make only too clear.

It’s an irony, if you like, that back in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that it was unjust for a little black girl to be bussed across town instead of attending the school near her home. Now the highly advanced educationists of the twenty-first century are doing the same as the segregationists of the Old South. They are bussing little kids around in accordance with their race theories. Writes Thomas Sowell:

The racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas.

In the Solid South, the dogma was that little white children shouldn’t be soiled with black children in their class. Now the dogma is racial “diversity,” that children benefit from a critical mass of racial diversity in their class.

What are those “compelling” benefits of “diversity”? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor’s wardrobe.

The trouble is that diversity is digging deep roots in the educational bureaucracy. In Washington State, where voters passed a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, diversity is big business.

In 2004, Washington State University created an office of the “vice president for equity and diversity” that has an annual budget of $3 million and a full-time staff of 55.

...

Washington State’s equal-employment office (called the Center for Human Rights) coordinates with faculty committees to encourage minority hiring.

To show how big all this is, there is now a National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

Well, call it what you will, diversity or a racial spoils system, it isn’t going to improve relations between the races. What encourages amity between the races is the knowledge that race will not be a factor in hiring and promotion, that people will be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

The only good thing is that the people of the United States of America hate racial preferences, even if their lords and master love them.

And why wouldn’t they? When you run a government bureaucracy it is too much like hard work to be held accountable for the quality of your hires. Much better to be required to hire women and minorities according to quotas or diversity criteria. Then, so long as you keep your quotas up, nobody can blame you if your little fiefdom doesn’t actually do anything useful.

Home Mortgage Market: Crash or Bounce?

Perhaps the most radical change in the financial markets in the last generation has been the securitizing of home mortgages, the bundling of home mortgage obligations into mortgage bonds which are then sold to investors.

But Lewis Ranieri, the Wall Street guy who is credited with creating the market is worried that risky mortgages are creating a problem, according to Patrice Hill.

Banks and mortgage brokers have been passing along to unwary investors as much as $600 billion a year in risky mortgages they made through untested channels in the junk-bond market. That raises the threat of a financial crisis beyond the ability of the Federal Reserve to remedy.

Now the point here is that this is not the same as banks holding risky mortgages. Banks are uniquely vulnerable financial institutions because they inherently make promises they cannot keep. They promise to pay to their lenders (depositors) on demand monies that they have lent out long term. They cannot pay back all their creditors at once. If mortgages held by a bank go bad then there is a risk of systemic financial failure, like in the Great Depression.

But mortgage bonds are different. If the mortgages behind an issue of mortgage bonds go bad then only the bondholders suffer the losses. There just isn’t the same level of systemic risk.

Obviously, there is still risk.

Bank regulators told the National Housing Forum here yesterday that they have found major banks punting to investors questionable mortgages they could not legally keep in their own loan portfolios. Mr. Ranieri said brokers on Wall Street have raised the risks by repackaging the mortgages in deceptive and opaque ways so that the small investors and foreigners who buy them are unable to understand the risks.



"No securities market can stand if we do not have true disclosure, and we do not have true disclosure" of the growing risks of exotic mortgages whose payments can double overnight and force buyers into default, said Mr. Ranieri.

The financial markets are in the business of selling paper. And they do what it takes to get the paper out there. No doubt, stuff “gets sold to the public and to foreign investors who don't have a clue what to look for.” Happens all the time. And willy-nilly, the fact that a mortgage bond has junk-bond status should be telling the investor something.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, seems unconcerns about the risks. “If a few speculators get burned, that's just icing on the cake.”

Probably the big take-away is that

Some banks are selling the questionable loans to investors to avoid keeping them in their portfolios, where they would be unacceptable to regulators.

That is exactly what bank regulation is supposed to do. The systemic risk of bank default is due to the concentration of risk in a few financial insstitutions. But when the risky mortgages are sold to investors then the systemic risk is removed. The concentrated risk proposition is diluted as the risk is allocated to thousands of bond holders.

Of course, the question: is how many public employee pension funds have picked up the risky mortgage bonds? And then there are Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage-bond issuers, who are already in trouble with their financial shenanigans. But then in the worst case taxpayers would have to pick up the shortfall. And who cares about them?

The real risk is that if the sub-prime mortage market contracts sharply then the reduced supply of mortages will be reflected in further house price declines. That would turn off the home equity ATMS. And that could spread to the whole economy.