Bush Farewell Address

Last night President Bush, with one weekend left of his term as President of the United States, addressed the nation in a final speech.

It was, as you would expect, almost all about the war on terror. As the president said:

As the years passed [since 9/11], most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

We all tussle and argue about how to direct the firehose of government programs in our direction. But for the president, the reality of his job is omnipresent: to protect the nation from enemies, foreign and domestic.

And so the president laid down a marker, a marker that will be sitting on the desk of the new president.

There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.

Democrats were insistent that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and therefore Bush was to blame. Well, on January 20th, the watch changes, and the new officer of the watch knows that anything that happens after that date happened on his watch.

Conservatives can be glad that President Bush also laid down the gauntlet on good and evil.

America must maintain our moral clarity. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.

Some things are wrong, like “murdering the innocent.” Some things are right, like “freeing people from oppression and despair.” It is intriguing that the president uses left-of-center language to speak to his critics on the left.

President Bush, the fair-minded can agree, came to the presidency at a tough time. He served at the end of a time of conservative resurgence, and inherited a bunch of foolishness, from the “wall of separation” between foreign and domestic intelligence that the Clinton adminstration erected in the interests of civil liberties to the follies of Fannie and Freddie that Congress refused to see until the mortgage giants collapsed into a smoking ruin.

President Bush lacked the ability and the desire to dominate the national conversation from the president’s bully pulpit. Some have complained of this almost as a betrayal.

But the truth is that the national conversation is our job, the job of conservative thinkers and commenters. It is up to us to plant and water the seeds that someday a conservative president will display as dazzling blooms in the White House. President Bush served in a time when the old Reagan blooms were fading, with no new ones ready for display.

But we must not despair. We can see, even as we celebrate and honor the historic accession of President-elect Obama, that our Democratic friends have nothing to offer the American people except same-old-same-old.

Our Democratic friends will find out soon enough that the American people demand more than happy talk about Hope and Change. The American people know that something is wrong, and that reform is needed to sweep away the encrusted corruptions and decay of the past. It is a fact that most of those accretions are Democratic and liberal.

We conservatives know that the answer to the concerns of dispirited Americans does not lie in another expansion of government power but in a reduction in the power and the span of the political sector.

A great nation like the United States of America needs a careful balance between the three sectors of society. It needs a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

Our liberal friends have built up, over the last century, a society in which everything issues out of the hegemony of the political sector, the sector of force and compulsion. They do not see, and cannot understand, that you cannot have a society of freedom, trust, care, and compassion if everything is decided in the cockpit of political power.

But we conservatives do understand this. It is our duty, and our destiny, as President Bush leaves office, to once more raise high the banner of freedom—political, economic, and moral/cultural—against the tired culture of compulsion that that our liberal friends continue to offer the American people.

China's Cultural Wrench

If you are willing to read just one thing on China, try China’s Massive Wrench by Francesco Sisci over at Asia Times. It is the best thing I have seen that tells just how massive the change is, day to day, in China.

First of all there is the simple notion that China is changing in 30 years, from rural agricultural to urban industrial, what took 200 years in Europe and the US. But China has been undergoing a parallel cultural change.

But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China’s complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision.

Take the Chinese family.

The change started with the family, the cell and basis for society and the state. The ideal family in the 19th century was unchanged from the times of Confucius, some 2,000 years before: three generations under one roof. The older man had many wives and even more children. Each male heir also had many wives and children, all living together in a large courtyard, resembling a small village of dozens of people.

Now, with the single child policy, Chinese society has been turned upside down. Now there are four grandparents and one grandchild.

In the old system, you could hope for one of the many children to distinguish themselves and enter the mandarinate by passing the state examinations. Today, that hope is focused impossibly into a single child.

Then there’s the end of the emperor system. For over 2,000 years the emperor has embodied the state and its people, down even to Mao, the Communist emperor. Even today parents bring their children to Tienanmen Square for a photo dressed as an emperor. But now the state is run by small men who do not embody the state.

For 2,000 years China had, as a religion, a combination of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist notions. That was overthrown during the Communist era, to the extent that, in 1979 when Deng took over, China had no religion. Now the Communist Party is discussing the importance of returning China to religion. The Falungong demonstrations taught the party that if religions with sensible ideas were banned then religions with crazy ideas would fill the gap.

Yet, it also revealed that Chinese people wanted religious values, and the government had to be open to them. Buddhism was favored: it was a religion that had been in China for hundreds of years, Chinese people were very familiar with it, and Buddhist monks had been among the first to denounce the dangers of the Falungong in 1998.



Furthermore, the Chinese leaders realized that the much-feared Christian faiths were not so dangerous after all. In 50 years of communist rule, despite ruthless oppression, Christian Protestants and Catholics had never staged demonstrations in Tiananmen, as Falungong followers had...



Religion is no longer an issue of public security that can be handed over to the police - it is a top social and political issue involving all aspects of society, and therefore all politburo members must be aware of it.

China is changing, more rapidly, perhaps, than any great people has changed in history. Right now, about 15 million people are moving to the city every year. The outcome of the wrenching change in China, economic, political, and cultural, will affect the whole world.

Muslims Return to Sacrifice

What is the meaning of sacrifice? Frederick Turner defines it this way.

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor.

But sacrifice, like anything else, can be abused. In particular, rulers have a way of making their people sacrifice for their own acts of impurity. In the story of Iphigenia in Tauris the king of Tauris (in the Crimea), agonized by his crimes, decides to sacrifice to the gods the next stranger that arrives in Tauris.

In its extreme abuse, sacrifice becomes a blood frenzy. You can see this in the Ghost Shirt movement in the US among the young warriors of the Native American tribes on the western plains, and you can see it in the young men of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century in China.

So when Ralph Peters talks about the orgy of self-sacrifice among Muslim terrorists, you can get some perspective on what he is talking about.

The big thing about the three Abrahamic religions is that they stopped the blood sacrifice. It starts with Abraham, about to sacrifice his son Isaac when God tells him to sacrifice a ram instead. Then in Christianity, God sacrifices his Son so human fathers don’t have to sacrifice their sons. The same thing happened in Islam, according to Peters.

The Prophet sought to purify the idolatrous devotions of his people, to do away with heartless desert cults...

But now the young men of the Muslim faith are returning to the barbarities of the days before the Prophet.

What’s the meaning of those beheading videos and suicide bombings, the slaughter of fellow Muslims and the exploitation by pagan cults, such as Hamas, of masses of the faithful as human shields? Why stone 13-year-old girls to death? What’s this celebration of blood lust all about?



It’s about the threatened collapse of the Middle East back into an age of human sacrifice - the precise sort of gruesome travesty the Prophet inveighed against.

The thing is: this is not unexpected. When a culture is failing, when everything is going wrong, that is when a society reaches back into the past for the old ways.

After the defeat of World War I, the people of Germany, “the most advanced country in the world,” felt utterly humiliated. It seemed that the new ways that had been developed in the 19th century had failed them. So they found it easy to return to the old ways of Blood and Soil offered to them by Hitler. They were willing to sacrifice in order to find the right way forward.

One of the old ways is human sacrifice. And the greatest sacrifice of all is for a young man to sacrifice his own life. So it’s not surprising in the tumultuous Middle East, reeling from centuries-long humiliations, should turn to the ancient way of human sacrifice.

WattsUp, Pharyngula and Robbers Cave

It’s a nip and tuck battle today between Watts Up With That, run by independent businessman Anthony Watts and Pharyngula, run by P.Z. Myers. They are finalists in the 2008 Weblogs Awards for Best Science Blog that ends today. But it looks as though WUWT will win.

There’s a big difference between the two blogs. Let Pharyngula proprietor P.Z. Myers tell why:

"I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion.”

Myers, by the way, advertises himself as “a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.”

One commenter on WUWT had this to say about Pharyngula:

I used to subscribe to Pharyngula, but unsubscribed from it due to the excessive frequency of posts and excessive percentage of political and anti-religious posts.

There’s a reason why WUWT is the “nice” site and Pharyngula is the “naughty” site. You can read all about the phenomenon at The Robber’s Cave Experiment performed on a group of boys back in 1954. The concept is simple. When you have two groups of guys in proximity they immediately form into warring gangs, and they immediately differentiate themselves to sharpen their differences. If one group likes to swear, the other group will decide not to swear.

If you want them to stop warring you have to get them to cooperate on a common project. That’s what they did with the two warring tribes at Robber’s Cave, and it worked.

Joe the Plumber Asks a Question

Joe the Plumber goes to Israel and insists to a flock of media that he is not the story.

Ask this chap (pointing to his handler), if you want a story, says he, as the Pajamas Media camera rolls.

Then Joe the Plumber asks a Reuters guy whether he thinks that Israel has a right to defend itself. The reporter responds, yes.

“Have you said it on air,” asks Joe the Plumber?

I’m just a reporter, is the reply.

It’s the liberal way. Don’t look at me, I’m just a reporter. Nothing I can do about it, old chum.

Yeah, you won’t want to do anything to risk your career in media would you?

It’s easy to be a liberal media guy and file sob stories about the latest fashionable victim. It’s easy to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted when you are runninga story using the standard liberal template on a certified liberal protected class.

But when the subject is the hypocrisy of liberalim, then our brave liberal media guy runs for the exit.

That means that our liberal media friends, day by day, miss the great story of our time: the cruelty, the corruption, and the injustice of our liberal political power.

Pelosi's Politics

I often like to say that the Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years of Reagan/Bush economic policies. But I have to admit that, privately, I don’t believe it. Surely they must have learned a thing or two about the economy, and twigged onto the 140 year old notion of marginal value that was invented in the single year of 1870 by about three different economists in three different countries.

But when you read Nancy Pelosi in the Washington Post saying, according to Paul Kane:

"Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed[.]"

Well you have to wonder. Doesn’t she get that income tax collections on the wealthy have soared over the Reagan Bush years as marginal tax rates were decreased? Doesn’t she get that when the government increases marginal tax rates as she wants to do then economic growth will be reduced and less jobs will be created?

I know why she doesn’t get it. It’s the politician’s version of reality. Nothing really exists except reelection. That means that nothing exists except having more money with which to buy votes. So why would anyone give up revenue with tax cuts?

Well, the absolutist monarchs of the Enlightenment loved revenue as much as anyone, but they came to realize that you got more revenue with a healthy economy. In their day, they wanted the lovely lolly for their armies. Today, of course, politicians want the money to pay their armies of entitlement beneficiaries. But the principle is the same. Bigger economy equals more revenue equals more money to slosh around among your supporters.

According to Larry Kudlow the Obama people seem to get this. Sort of. His “stimulus” package is still full of pork, of course.

However, it’s interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed since the election. The size has been roughly constant. But the mix of tax cuts and spending increases is now totally different.



Instead of $100 billion worth of tax credits, there are now $300 billion worth of tax cuts. This includes a big new piece for business, more cash-expensing for small-business investment, and a restoration of the five-year tax-loss carry-back, which will especially help banks and homebuilders. It might even result in tax refunds for businesses, and might also allow banks to rid themselves of toxic assets, since the losses will now be spread over many years.

And the Obama people are talking about keeping the Bush tax rate cuts until 2011. Unfortunately the Obama guys are still living in the pre-1870 world. “The problem is that they’re not reducing marginal tax rates on large and small businesses or individuals.”

I say, chaps. How about getting with the consensus on marginal tax rates? The science is in on this, you know. And anyone who is holding out on Marxian labor theories of value, or the prior notions of “exchange” value and “intrinsic” value is really dealing in superstition.

You might even call them “deniers.”

RU Sophisticated?

Time was, Paul Johnson writes, when “sophisticated” was a pejorative—as in “sophist” and “sophistry.” But now it means that you are the cat’s pajamas.

Given that we all now want to be “sophisticated” how do we know if we are?

Not to worry. Doctor Johnson is in, and he will advise you. Here is his ten-point test. Passing grade is 7 out of 10.

1. “Can you remain truly indifferent to what people say or think about you?” If you can (be honest now) you are sophisticated.
   
2. “A sophisticated person knows all, or a very great deal, but rarely chooses to display knowledge.” This is too hard. Who amongst us can resist the temptation to display knowledge and scatter pearls before swine?
   
3. “[I]t is vital to be able to command behind-the-scenes knowledge.” Johnson uses an example: “Did Benjamin Britten first lose interest in choirboys when their voice broke or when pubic hair sprouted?” Hmmm. Maybe I don’t want to be sophisticated after all.
   
4. Then there’s the amusing anecdote. “A sophisticated person ought to be able to make you laugh.” But they would never go on and on and make you bored. Oh no! That would be the worst!
   
5. Then there is behavior. “[A] sophisticated man never inflicts pain except in an attempt to extract information in a good social cause.” The sophisticate is, of course, a gentleman, but more.
   
6. You must never ask to go to the bathroom. Particularly important for women. That means, of course, that you must limit your input of adult beverages.
   
7. “Granted only one moderate-sized suitcase, what do you pack for a weekend at Highgrove or Sandringham?” Oh dear. Don’t have a clue.
   
8. “After such an event, which servants do you tip, and what, and how exactly do you do it?” Worse and worse.
   
9. Finally, if you call on the President, how do you avoid politics? “And how do you decide when it is time to leave?” OK, I know the answer to that one. Keep an eye on the president’s aide.
   

When you think about it, who needs to be sophisticated? It sounds like too much work.