Dean Barnett's 9/11 Generation

We know all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish Dean Barnett.  Forty years ago, they (that is, we, since I’m a boomer) checked out of their generational challenge. 

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.

But now we have the 9/11 generation.  And it is starting to look as if it is very different.  Barnett has been taking a look at the young people signing up for the armed forces and he likes what he sees.

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who... could have chosen to do anything with their lives.

Something about the culture has changed.  Barnett speaks about a young man who graduated recently from Harvard and obtained a commission in the United States Marine Corps.

After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

So what is it about these young men? LTC Kurt Schlichter of the California National Guard has an answer:

"The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

Here’s another idea.  After the cultural revolution of the last half century young men have discovered that they have a real problem in choosing and living a life that has meaning.  Men have been marginalized and scapegoated out of their respected roles and fathers and providers and they have been forbidden to complain.

But what young men can do is what they have always been able to do.  They can offer themselves and their lives in the defense of the nation’s women and children.

Things haven’t changed that much after all.

What Do Women Want?

The feminists don’t want to hear it, according to Megan Basham, but married women are trickling out of the workforce.  And it’s because they don’t want to work full-time. 

Only 21 percent of working mothers report a preference for a 40+-hour work week, while only 16 percent of at-home moms say the same.

What could be driving this?  Feminists say it’s the post 9/11 economy.

Rather than admit the obvious, that women increasingly favor cutting back their careers when their children are young, some feminists are employing their own brand of voodoo economics. Women aren’t opting out, they’re being pushed out, they say.

There is this idea out there that working for a living, having a brilliant career, is the reason for living. Sorry to rain on the parade but it ain’t so.

Men work mainly so that they can get access to women.  Down the ages, women have preferred monogamy, and they have preferred men that didn’t look like losers—in short, men with jobs.  So men figure that they’d better get a job.

High status women, the ones that men fight over, are a different proposition.  Men with a taste for them need more than a job; they need a fortune, or a fortunate political career.

Women work because... Yes why do women go out to work?  Many women work because they have to.  Always have, always will.  But we are talking about the upper-class feminist ladies, women like the First Feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Second Feminist Betty Friedan.  What they wanted was liberation, liberation from the fundamental work of women, which is, of course the only really important work in the world, the work of generation. 

But a generation after the intoxication of the Second Wave of feminism many women are finding that the most important thing in their lives is children—their children.  So they are asking themselves why they are out in the world working themselves to exhaustion when all they can think about is their children.

It’s a good point.

When the US Leaves Iraq

Call me a conspiracist, but I believe that US political class has already decided to leave Iraq.

I base this on the behavior of presidential candidate John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign.  Time and time again he would rail at the Bush administration for not doing something—like ramping up training of Iraqi security forces—and then it would turn out six months later that the Bush administration was doing it, but just hadn’t splashed it all over the media.

It was as though Kerry knew what the Bush administration was going to do next week, and used the knowledge to accuse the Bushies of not doing it this week.

All this year the Democrats are pushing troop withdrawal resolutions in Congress.  Why would they bother except to whip up their netroot base?  In September, after Gen. Petraeus reports, the Bush administration will either announce that the surge has been a success, in which case it will start to draw down troops, or it will admit it not quite a success—and start to draw down troops.

Democrats are doing what Kerry did in 2004, demanding that Bush do what he is going to do anyway.

But we center-right people are better than that.  We are people with serious responsibilities and a serious strategic outlook. We should start thinking about what comes next.  To help us Austin Bay has set forth the seven likely scenarios in Iraq after the US leaves.  As he points out, he’s not the only one thinking about contingencies.

Business and government make plans. Every plan anticipates a future outcome. Since the future can’t be predicted, the best plans acknowledge uncertainty. Acknowledging uncertainty means accepting risk -- the risk of being wrong.

So here are the seven scenarios for Iraq post withdrawal.  Go read the whole thing if you want the details.

1. Three new countries
2. Regional Shia-Sunni war
3. Turkey expands
4. Shia dictatorship
5. “Gang-up” of Shia and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs
6. Chaos
7. The Iraqi center holds

Doesn’t look too promising, does it?

My own feeling echoes that of the Asia TImes’ Spengler.  He points out that  proper nations “have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists.”  They need people who show up on time and get along with the neighbors.

Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

Sounds pretty shocking, doesn’t it?  But we had two civil wars here in the US.  And between them they pretty well took care of the rejectionists, first of all the Brit loyalists and secondly the Southern slaveholders.  Since then, we have gone without civil war, which is nice.  Everyone gets along with the neighbors except when liberals come along and heighten peoples’ group identity instead of their American identity.

But there are always some troublemakers.

In the Middle East the west has been keeping the safety valve screwed down for decades because we want access to the oil with no interruptions and no shenanigans while the natives fight it out to decide who gets the revenue from the oil.

But what about the people of the Middle East?  What do they want?

Eating beef 'is less green than driving'

They’re coming to take you away, those lefty global warming types, those watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag.

Now some Japanese scientists have computed that, according to the Daily Telegraph, eating meat contributes to global warming. 

Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday.

The reason, of course, is that a lot of methane gets released into the atmosphere during the life of  a humble cow, on account of the anaerobic digestion going on in the multi-chambered bovine GI tract.

Well?  Is that too much?  Shall we give up our meat to save the planet?

Or should we emulate Charlton Heston? You’ll only take my meat out of my cold, dead hands.

And here’s another fact.  A lot of methane gets discharged into the atmosphere as a result of wet rice cultivation.

Should we stop eating rice?

Dem House Solves College Costs With Subsidies and Regulation

With college costs soaring way above the rate of inflation and many graduates finding that they can’t find jobs to pay off their loans, what would you do if you were Congress?

Naturally, you would increase the already vast subsidies for higher education and you would get tough on price gougers with new regulations, as reported by Ruth Mantell of Marketwatch.

The House passed a student-loan bill Wednesday that would boost college financial aid by about $18 billion over the next five years and cut federal subsidies to lenders.

If you are willowy blonde Anya Kamenetz, writing a youth-oriented financial advice column on Yahoo called “Generation Debt,” this all seems right and proper.  She quotes Democrat George Miller.

"This bill is a remarkable step forward in our efforts to help every qualified student go to college," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the legislation. "With this bill, we are saying that no one should be denied the opportunity to go to college simply because of the price."

 And the delicious thing for Kamenetz is that if you can’t afford to pay back your student loan, you don’t have to.

[G]raduates whose earnings don’t exceed 150 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for a single person) would be exempt from repaying student loans.

Isn’t that nice?  Another subsidy program which will sluice more money into the bottomless pit of government education.  But there will be strong controls to penalize colleges that increase their tuition too much!

Starting in 2011, any college with high, outlying tuition increases would have to submit a report to the education secretary explaining why. After two consecutive years, the college would be placed on "affordability alert status."

That will set them quaking in their shoes.

Twentysomething Kamenetz has perfect MSM credentials: an Ivy League education and a stint with the Village Voice.  But the commenters on Yahoo weren’t too impressed.

They could see what was going down.  They knew that more subsidies means more subsidies.  They were contemptuous of the idea that you should only repay your student loan if you could afford it.  Why that would mean that kids would sign up for basket-weaving and never try to earn a thing after they graduate!

It’s the great challenge for conservatives in the next generation.  To educate Americans to the idea that more subsidies equals bigger government and less room to breathe, that the more the government helps us the more we have to turn to the government for help.

It seems too complex an idea to communicate, and yet the Yahoo readers seem to get it.

Who Is Norman Borlaug?

Everybody knows Paris Hilton.  But who the heck is Dr. Norman Borlaug?  Like, whatever?

Step away from that remote!  And listen.

Norman Borlaug is the guy behind the green revolution, the advances in grain breeding that has produced staggeringly large increases in crop yield in the third world.

It started in Mexico, as Elizabeth M. Whelan reports.

Over the course of 20 years, he developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat. The results were spectacular: Mexico evolved from a wheat importer to a net exporter by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, Dr. Borlaug’s work nearly doubled wheat production in Pakistan and India, saving millions from starvation.

You’d expect the media and the liberals to be all over this guy like a cheap suit, but somehow it never took. 

Perhaps it’s because he helped people help themselves.  Our MSM buddies much prefer people who help people by handing out other peoples’ money.  You can’t do much media without emotionally compelling victim situations that can only be solved by handing out other peoples’ money.

Perhaps it’s because a lot of the funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation.  You know, evil oil money.  Remember how the evil John D. Rockefeller put the father of magazine feature writer Ida M. Tarbell out of business more than a century ago?  Who can forget?  

And then there’s the GM connection.  Who knows how much of that high-yield grain is Frankenfood! 

This week, Dr. Norman Borlaug was awarded in the Capitol Rotunda the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian award.

I’d say he deserved it.

The Not-so All-Night Debate on Iraq

The United States Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body, and last night they debated a motion to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq.

But it turned out not to be quite the extravaganza we were promised, according to Shailagh Murray, Paul Kane and Debbi Wilgoren in the Washington Post. 

Reid, the majority leader, initially had threatened to schedule votes throughout the predawn hours. But he agreed shortly after midnight to delay even procedural votes until 5 a.m. That meant most senators could grab a few hours of shut-eye, so long as a few remained in the chamber[.]

Sen. Reid went to bed and a handful of senators kept the debate going, alternating Republican and Democratic throughout the night. 

That’s the way the WaPo reported it.  At The Captain’s Quarters, Ed Morrissey wrote about calling Majority Leader Reid’s bluff.  According to Morrissey Reid figured that Republicans would call for a quorum and when it failed would go home for the night and allow Reid to accuse Republicans of “dodging the debate.”  Instead, Republicans showed up for debate and Reid went home.

The overnight session has done nothing except to annoy Republicans into a more unified caucus, and to make Harry Reid look like a fool. One might have expected a Senator from Nevada to recognize a busted flush when he saw it.

At least the MoveOn.org folks got their media event.