After the Foreign Policy Catastrophe, What Then?

Our problem, writes the Zman, is that the politicians have handed over foreign policy to a permanent cabal.

The political class in the West has handed foreign policy and war making over to a professional class that operates independently from the political class.

And so, no matter who is president or controls Congress, the professional foreign policy elite keeps on keeping on.

It is this narrow group that has been running Ukraine policy since the Obama administration, and they are the people responsible for the current war.

OK, fellahs, so what is the point? What is the grand plan behind your two-decade Ukraine policy? What is the point of being anti-Russia? What is the point of all the little wars all over the place?

Zman doesn't say, but I have an idea. The foreign policy elite really doesn't know. It's just that they all sign on to the agenda, whatever it is, in order to join the club and get ahead.

Maybe we could use the Nazi Carl Schmitt notion that in any politics there must be an enemy.

So, for any foreign policy elite, there must be an enemy. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a foreign policy elite.

We could say that back in 1948 and the Berlin Airlift there was a real enemy, the state of Stalin's Soviet Union. And so we had 40 years of Cold War. Jolly good fun, and all, for the foreign policy elite. Sorry about the kids killed in Vietnam and in Iraq, and all.

But after the end of the Cold War, what are we trying to do? Well, we are fighting extremist nationalism, or an expansionist China, or a revanchist Russia, or mad mullahs, or Islamic terrorists. 

In other words, we are making it up. Oh, sorry, not we. I mean the international foreign policy elite.

But really, they don't have a clue.

Don't be discouraged. The Zman sees a silver lining to the black cloud. He thinks that the Ukraine thing will end in a bloody catastrophe. And for what?

This may be what saves the West from another catastrophe. The looming disaster in Ukraine cannot be covered up with clever messaging or media censorship.

And the disaster will delegitimize the foreign policy elite,and the global elite, and the Democratic party elite. And then we can sit down and do a reset and decide just what the heck we are trying to achieve with our politics. Other than give jobs to foreign policy experts that have got everything wrong for the last 30 years.

So What if College Women are D+38

I expect you've seen the poll that shows College+ women as D+38. They are the most Democratic among men and women, educated and uneducated. Scott McKay has a long article about it at The American Spectator. He goes into the travails of the educated woman, particularly the single educated woman.

Why are educated women so strongly Democrat? It seems weird. But not if you believe my maxim that "women expect to be protected."

If a woman is protected, she is happy. If she is not protected then she's going to find a new protector today.

The reason that educated women -- and especially single educated women -- working on their careers and living in urban condos are all Democrat is that women expect to be protected. If there isn't a husband to protect her then she expects the state to protect her.

Only, of course, the state doesn't protect you. The state will shovel loot at you, in return for your vote, but it won't protect you. The subhead for the American Spectator piece is:

Why are they surprised that they’re living alone with no prospects when they still think it was a good idea to vote for Biden?

Well, because women do what they are told, and expect to be protected in return. For getting on for a century, the feminist movement has taught women not to rely on men for protection but to get an education and a career. When they find they are not protected, and find they are not happy, they get angry, and they start to complain. Did I mention my idea that women have a Culture of Complaint?

It slots in with my maxim that "women expect to be protected." What does a woman do when she finds she is not protected? She complains to her friend. She votes Democrat. Eventually, she finds a new protector.

And that is what is going to happen in the next year or two as women are terrorized by the Biden inflation. They will find themselves utterly unprotected. They will complain to each other. They will complain to their Democratic politicians. Then they will abandon the Democratic Party and go find a new protector.

As the sainted Rush Limbaugh used to say: "Don't doubt me on this." 

Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

I think that there are three basic issues on which the ruling class of our time has utterly failed.

The first is the welfare state that supports the working class. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for the working class. I believe that what we should have done was encourage the mutual-aid aspect of labor unions, set up a legal framework to encourage workers to save for retirement and against sickness and unemployment, and keep government and its heavy hand out of the market economy.

The second is the promotion of feminism and the sexual revolution and abortion. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for women. I believe that the idea that the highest and best thing for women is to have careers is an utter misunderstanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for humans in general and women in particular. We humans are social animals, not economic animals. We only work in the market economy to bring home the bacon. Men have careers so they can acquire high-status women for marriage. The sexual revolution goes against the instinct in almost all women, that sex is something you gladly and freely give to the man you love -- forever. And, of course, sex means children. A society needs abortion only when its women are expected to give themselves to men who can summarily dismiss them after they have won their love, or when women are expected to schedule children to suit the demands of their careers.

The third is the utter injustice of the post civil rights era. I believe that the resort to quotas and affirmative action and diversity and "underrepresentation" and equity in race relations is more than a strategic mistake, it is a vile injustice that has divided society and Made Things Worse for blacks and whites, but great for the administrative class. The point about law is that it is a replacement for the culture of revenge. You gotta problem, you appeal to the legal system for redress, not to your kindred or your race or your class. The whole point of law is that unless you treat everyone as an individual you enter an impossible thicket of special pleading  that will fail to resolve anything. That is the point of saying, in law, that government and businesses may not discriminate on the basis of race. It means that institutional decision makers are expected to treat people as humans, not as members of a particular group. That approach is not perfect, because humans are not just human individuals but people with individual characteristics and history and ability and weaknesses. But any other approach in a large society is doomed to failure and conflict.

Because our ruling class has imposed these three great errors on us and Made Things Worse, and doubled down on its mistakes, it must be removed as a ruling class and replaced with another. I suggest that the new ruling class should be drawn from the ordinary middle class, because the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power, and I believe that human society in the future is a society that needs a lot less political power. That's because, I believe, the last two hundred years of the Great Enrichment has demonstrated that the market economy is a much better way to resolve human differences than the old way of defending food-growing land from the Other.

The only question remaining is whether our present ruling class releases its grip on political power voluntarily or not. The only question, therefore, is the size of the mountain of skulls. It could be zero. Or not.

Tulip Mania in Washington State

Did you know that Washington State is a major tulip-growing region? Yes, in the Skagit River estuary there are tons of tulip farms. And we went to Roozengarde Farms where you can bury yourself in tulips for a mere $15 per person. You can enjoy an ornamental tulip garden, filled with all kinds of exotic tulip variants. And you can stop by the side of the road and enjoy acres of tulips in full bloom. And, even midweek, there are tons of people enjoying the tulip fields.

Crowds and crowds of people, all enjoying the remarkable diversity of the tulip plant. What a glorious thing it is to see people enjoying the magic of Spring. The camera is looking eastward across the Skagit estuary towards the foothills of the Cascade mountains.

Then we went to the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum in La Conner, Washington. We saw "The Quilt Road: Contemporary Korean Quilts." These quilts are mainly quilts-as-paintings-on-the-wall. If you, like me, think that most contemporary art is Sick and Wrong, it is a beautiful and liberating thing to experience these artworks that seem to know nothing of the nihilism of modern art. They communicate a joy in life that you won't find in your average rooty-snooty art museum.

And why not? Why is there no joy in your average rooty-snooty big-city art museum?

Could it be that when you mix art and politics you get politics? You may well think so: I could not possibly comment.

Here's something to ponder. For weeks, as I take a Wednesday walk around Green Lake here in North Seattle, I have been worrying about the clash between flocks of our good old American Widgeon, and marauding flocks of bad-tempered Canada Geese. You see, both widgeon and geese like to graze on the grass at Green Lake. But today the American Widgeon had disappeared, leaving only the suspicious-looking Canada Geese, almost certainly foreign agents of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Mounties. But maybe those American Widgeon have flown north, over the border into British Columbia, there to bring forth a new generation of good old American Widgeon to gladden our all-American hearts. But I fear that up in Canada they will be singing:

American Widgeon, stay away from me
American Widgeon, mama let me be

I just hope that Our Justin doesn't freeze their bank accounts. And the Mounties don't trample them, like they trampled the old woman in a mobility scooter in Ottawa the other day.

Elon Musk is My Man

In the last week Elon Musk announced that he had bought about 10 percent of Twitter. And it looked like he was going to join the board of directors. Until he wasn't. Says CNBC:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s reversal of his decision to join Twitter’s board opens the door to a hostile takeover and could lead to additional volatility in the stock, according to analysts.

God, I love that guy. And all the Twitter employees report being "super stressed" about the prospect of Elon Musk owning a good chunk of Twitter. But why should this be? Surely, the Twitterati are providing us the best in social media "healthy conversations" that educated lefty twerps can deliver. 

By the way, I just added the following maxim to my catalog of Maxims. 

Women: "Shelter in place." Men: "March toward the sound of the guns."

I wonder what that means, cupcake.

Did you see Elon Musk introducing his Starship launch facility "Starbase" in Boca Chica, Texas back in February? The show begins at about 35:00. He begins with the question "why are we doing this... why build this giant reusable rocket?"

His answer is basically, well, you can't be too careful. So it's best to become interplanetary. And really, there comes a point where Jackie Gleason's command "to the Moon, Alice" becomes insufficient. Let's "go to Mars," just to be safe.

Sorry, Elon, we know the real reason. It's the same reason that Edmund Hillary gave for climbing Mt. Everest: "because it's there."

But I had two big takeaways from Musk's show. 

First, that he has made a remarkable improvement in the basic Raptor rocket engine from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2. Raptor 2 is smaller but more powerful, with an improvement from 185 to 230 tons thrust. 

Second, that he figures that he can make reusable rocket travel cheaper than ordinary long-distance jet travel. Hey, If you can travel from the US to Hong Kong by Starship in one hour, you can have a lot more use of your spacecraft than your average long-distance jet plane. And Musk plans a one hour turnaround for booster and Starship between flights. Musk makes the point that reusability is basic. Hey, he comments: Imagine if your average long-distance $230 million jet plane was not reusable.

Yep. Imagine if Musk could bring off the two-fer of reusable space hardware and an end to censorship on Twitter. Talk about Hope and Change!

A History of Lefty Grooming

Our lefty friends seem to be mad as hell about being called "groomers" for grooming our kids in the glories of the LGBT life.

This is something of a breakthrough on the pejorative front. Ever since the end of the worst thing ever, McCarthyism -- imagine, the very idea of Communists in the State Department! -- our lefty friends have been doing the pejorative thing on us. Racist, sexist, homophobe, and all the rest of the -phobes.

Now, all of a sudden, our lefty friends are outraged, outraged, that we evil far-right violent extremists dare to say that schools with "transition closets" are grooming our kids for the LGBT life.

As Cpl. Jones would say in the Brit WWII series, Dad's Army, "they don't like it up them." I have no idea what he meant by that.

But really, isn't it the truth that leftism is groomism, and lefties are groomers. On everything.

Religious Grooming

The whole point of Horace Mann and the "common school" movement was first of all, to groom the children of the more severe Puritan sects away from their enthusiastic Christianity. Because the Boston Transcendentalists knew better. Later on, of course, the idea was to groom Irish kids away from their Catholicism, but the Irish weren't having it and built their own Catholic schools instead.

In my view not only is this vile and monstrous, but it also grooms the children of the lower classes away from the best road to the middle class, that encourages subordinate people to become responsible.

Anti-Capitalist Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids to love socialism or the welfare state is to make them into obedient subordinates. There was an excuse for Marx & Co. back in the day. The dark satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution really did look pretty forbidding. Except, of course, that the workers were getting to live instead of dying out on the land, as they had in England since, say, 1500.

And the market economy encourages people to get out of subordinate peasantry and become an actor in the life not of making just for you and yours, but making stuff for the whole world and accepting its verdict in the wage you get for your labor, or the price you get for your product.

No doubt the market economy has its rough spots, particularly after wars when it is difficult for idiot governments to figure out how to return life -- and particularly the financial system -- to normalcy. But don't ever forget that in the last 200 years the average real per-capita income has gone up by 3,000 percent -- or 30 times. And nobody saw it coming. Oh, there was one guy, Carter Reynell in 1685:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

But really! What did he know? Especially since it was three years before the Dutch invaded Britland in 1688 and installed the Dutch Finance that would lead to Britannia ruling the waves and Britons never, never, never being slaves.

Career Grooming

The whole point of feminism is that upper-class women don't really like to be domestic. So the schools groom girls to want to have careers.

I tend to find this amusing, for it assumes that men pursue careers because careers are rewarding and satisfying. Not exactly. Speaking as a man, a young man understands that he needs to have "prospects" if he expects to attract an attractive woman to his bed. Thus it is that in the lower classes, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And the problem with grooming women for careers is that it tends to take them out of the baby business in their peak fertile years. You tell me that this is a good thing.

Sex Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids for the sexual revolution is what, exactly? My judgement is that free sex is not good for women at any number of levels. First of all, women are much more at risk from STDs, because of the enclosed nature of their sexual equipment. Secondly, women really do not like serial sexual affairs. It affects their, er, mental health. Or, if you prefer a more universal understanding of women and sex, women really want to cleave to one man and love him forever. Oh, of course, all the men in the world are cads and layabouts and heartless. But a girl can dream, right?

Anti-Family Grooming

The whole point of leftism is to marginalize the family, so it grooms young people away from the mainstream life of marriage and children. No doubt there are people in the world that are marked out to be creative artists, and burying them for thirty years in the work of marriage and children is a waste of their transcendental talent. No doubt there are masculine women that are just the wrong fit for mothering. But for 97.2 percent of people they need to get married and have a family because if they don't they will miss out on the whole point of life. And that is grandchildren.

LGBT Grooming

If you really can't stand a sexual relationship with the opposite sex, well good luck to you, for it's hard to miss out on the mainstream of life. But grooming kids to believe that LGBT is creative, or cool, or deliciously rebellious, or that LGBTs are innocent oppressed people since the dawn of time, is sick and wrong. And to facilitate and groom kids for "transitioning" is not just stupid -- as in good little liberal teachers toeing the party line -- but cruel. Society's message to LGBT should be: do it if you must, but don't frighten the horses in the street. Because the bottom line for human life is babies on the ground, and every child needs a mother and a father: their mother and their father.

I think we need something that rhymes with Groomer. Groomer Doomer? Groomer Broomer? Groomer Fumer? Groomer Puma? Groomer Vroomer?

I will put my unconscious mind to work on it.

A Window into Activist World

There's a poster in the window of the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, just up the street from the ferry dock. This poster says:

#TAKE CARE OF

MUSLIM
BLACK
WOMEN
QUEER
LATINX
NATIVE
IMMIGRANT
P.O.C.
TRANS
DISABLED
L.G.B.T.Q.+
LOW INCOME
ACTIVIST
REFUGEE
UNDOCUMENTED
INCARCERATED

FRIENDS, FAMILY & COMMUNITY

Now, let's unpack this, because there seems to be a victim hierarchy here.

Sex/Gender: 5
Immigrants: 3
Race: 3
Religion: 1
Upper-class: 1

Well, you can see who is really important in Activist America: the various flavors of upper-class sex and gender creativity.

And think about the travails and the discrimination suffered by the humble upper-class activist working away for nothing at some Soros-funded NGO!

Let's see who is missing from this list. First of all, The Jews! Then, of course, the Homeless. You know what: I'm a bit surprised about that. Then, naturally there is no mention of bitter clingers, presently dying of despair from various opioid addictions, armed insurrectionists, and all the rest of the unmentionables.

You know, I'm afraid that I find this amusing, for it confirms what I believe, that our friends in the Activist Community have no room for any reality other than their activism.

I suppose that, for every victim on the list, there is a vitally important "intransigent minority" activist group that lives for its saving truth and spends every hour of every day fighting for justice.

Yes. I imagine that there must even be an NGO out there fighting fearlessly for the rights of Activists!

But really, what happened to good old religion?