How the Lefties Retell "Beauty and the Beast"

Whenever I visit my grandchildren and get to see the latest Dis-e-ney [sic, as children pronounce it] production I am struck by the way that the fairy tales are warped to conform to leftist politically correct stereotypes.

So I expected more of the same from the latest Diseney Beauty and the Beast. I'd heard about the gay theme, so was ready for that.

But let's compare the movie with the official fairy-tale version from La Wik and Infogalactic.

Traditional: Beauty is the only good daughter of a rich merchant that loses all his money. Her brothers and sisters are selfish spoiled brats and gang up on her.

Diseney: Beauty is the only daughter of an artist that leaves Paris to live in a rural village. The village thinks that he and she are odd, and eventually gang up on them as witches.

Traditional: Beauty is a good virtuous daughter that loves her father.

Diseney: Beauty is a liberated daughter that is oppressed by the narrow-minded village and wants to break out of its stuffy traditionalism.

Traditional: The Beast sends the father home, laden with riches for his family, on the condition that he should return. But Beauty insists on returning in his stead.

Diseney: Beauty rides to Beast's castle looking for her father, and manages to substitute herself.

Traditional: Using a magic mirror, Beauty discovers that Beast is dying of despair without her.

Diseney: Using a magic mirror, Beauty discovers that Beast is being besieged in his castle by the villain Gaston and the villagers while she and her father are imprisoned as witches.

Of course there is the problem of race in our multicultural society. It is dealt with by having lots of non-white people in the cast, but keeping Beauty and Beast as white, northwest European. Also, the music and the songs are good old traditional mid-20th-century golden-age-of-musicals genre. None of your Sondheim or rap for the kids.

Imagine the story retold with Beauty and her father as Bible-believing Christians in a secular US university and reviled for their godly virtues by the Resisters and the special snowflakes. Imagine Beast recast as a secular libertine that slowly comes to virtue under the influence of the Christian love of Beauty. Yeah. Imagine.

I understand Beauty and the Beast as an ancient affirmation of the faith that woman's love can transform the world. And that is how the Diseneyfied movie ends. But a modern "woke" movie cannot say that, because we are to be carefully taught that gender is culturally determined and that women can and are just as adventurous and risk-accepting and action-oriented as men.

I don't know how long this leftist fantasy ideology is going to continue. I recall how they used to be upfront about this with cartoon "fractured fairy tales." Now they just warp the fairy tales without telling us.

On the good side, even the current PCed Diseneyfied Beauty and the Beast cannot really escape from the central message of the fairy tale. There really is nothing in this world to compare with the love of a good woman.

Hey, but all in all, a good movie.

The White Working Class Again

The decline of the white working class has shown up again this week. 

Naughty conservative Matt Stoller showcased the commenters to a piece at the Huffington Post on the white working class. He selected the comments that most callously declared that the white working class were a bunch of deplorables that had it coming.

And then Steve Sailer featured the death-by-despair statistics, cohort by cohort, of the white working class since World War II. He features a chart that shows the increasing deaths of each cohort as it ages from causes like suicide and drug and alcohol overdose, and things are getting worse, year by year, cohort by cohort. Much worse.

Reacting to Mark Stoller's piece, I am not that outraged by the hatred and the classism of the young liberals and lefties that read Huffington Post. They have been taught to hate, and contra South Pacific, written in a time when liberals confidently expected to inherit the world and rule it benevolently ever after, you don't "have to be carefully taught / To hate and to fear." It's the easiest thing in the world. Hey, even a government teacher can do that. All those commenters are doing is just repeating the lessons taught them at their government schools and colleges. They were taught, by good teachers and by indifferent teachers, to be the shock troops of the progressive movement and they show that their progressive boot camp was effective.

But on Steve Sailer's piece I was drawn to the units of death-by-despair on the chart. It was in deaths per 100,000, and in recent years, for recent cohorts of white Americans that did not graduate college, it is hitting 100 deaths per 100,000 per year.

What's the big deal? Well, it's because social scientists use the same unit of measure, deaths per 100,000 per year, to report murders and violent death. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker tells the story. Back in the good old days of the hunter-gatherers, violent death was about 500 per 100,000 per year. Back in the high Middle Ages, it was about 50 per 100,000 per year. And now, in the United States, violent death is about 5 per 100,000 per year.

The death-by-despair for the cohort of white working class Americans that were born in 1945, right at the end of World War II, is peaking at about 20 deaths per 100,000 per year. But the folks born since 1960 are all dying at rates over 100 per 100,000 per year. That is five times the rate for the cohort born right after World War II.

What is the lesson here? No really: why stop at one? Let us count the lessons.

First of all the lesson to the white working class, articulated by a black Republican politician from Louisiana. He warns all and sundry that politicians do not care about you; they only care about your vote. For about a hundred years, politicians on the left just loooved the working class, and wrote legislation to shower the white working class with benefits and privileges. Great: who doesn't want to win the lottery? But the downside is that those benefits and privileges slowed down the embourgeoisification of the white working class; it allowed them to maintain the tribal, subordinate culture of the peasant, and to delay putting on the armor of light, the culture of the urban middle class. So when the day came in the 1960s when the left started pitching for the votes of minorities and women the white working class was left by the side of the road like the soldiers of a defeated army. I go into this in detail in my pieces on the "little darlings" of the ruling class.

This is not the first time that people have died of despair. What do you think that cartoonist William Hogarth and his pieces on "Beer Street and Gin Lane" of 1750 were all about? Not to mention Alfred P. Doolittle, father of a poor Covent Garden flower girl, saved in the nick of time from death-by-despair by the horror of "middle-class morality." And, of course, there is the question raised by Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms. His study of parish records in England showed that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, England was a downward mobility society. The second sons of the landed nobility moved down into the upper middle class, living as soldiers and clergymen as fictionalized in Jane Austen novels. The less able in the middle class were downshifted to be farmers, as fictionalized in Thomas Hardy novels, and those made landless could end up as vagabonds and highwaymen. But then came the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. Until now.

Then the lesson to the sneering progressives of the Huffington Post. Right now, you chaps are the little darlings of the ruling class, which enjoys using you as their cats' paws against the racist sexist homophobe Republicans. Have you ever thought about what comes after? When the ruling class no longer needs your services? Or if President Trump succeeds in restarting the economy and moderate voters rally to a winner?

Finally the lesson to the proud liberal ruling class. Do you care what happens to the little darlings of your political projects? I notice, according to Larry Elder, that back in 2013 Sen. Harry Reid was talking about how Obamacare would lead to "single-payer." On "Nevada Week in Review" he said that the country needs to work its way past insurance-based health care.

What we've done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we are far from having something that is going to work forever.

 Er, no, Senator. An administrative program of health care, modeled on Medicare, is not going to "work forever." It's the science, Senator. It is already a century since Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. It was left to others to fill in the details and realize that any government program is doomed to failure because every government program is an attempt to stop the world and order the tide to stop coming in. In real life things change every moment and everyone has to adapt to it, and the more people you exempt from this universal truth the harder it becomes to deal with change. When you pass a bill to make health care "work forever" as a government administrative program you are just fooling the voters and fooling yourself. You are just buying votes, living high on the hog for today and letting the future take care of itself. Settled science, pal.

I notice, Senator, that on climate, you liberals insist that immediate action is needed to head off gthe global disaster predicted by complicated climate models that have failed to predict the future. But on Social Security, which is known to be heading for disaster, you chaps are doing nothing, indeed the excellent Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democrats are proposing an increase in benefits rather than a sensible attempt to match future revenues with benefits. And Medicare is the same, only worse.

We know, not just from the science but from the historical record, that no government program is "forever." Unfortunately, the way that government programs end is not by sensibly adapting every day to reality, or through the temporary pain of bankruptcy as individuals and corporations must enndure. They end in the hurricane of national debt default and the blizzard of inflation. And the horror of defeat in war.

As for me, I wish that the working class had not submitted to the seduction of those 19th century rich kids and abandoned the rugged wisdom of their labor union and friendly society mutual-aid philosophy. But what working girl can withstand the smooth talk of the well-spoken rich kid when he's taking her out to dinner and dancing at swank places and telling her how pretty she is? Yes, we all deplore the vile young Sir Felix Carbury seducing the village maiden Ruby Ruggles who thinks she is too good for the local yokel. But who is out there "peacefully protesting" the vile seduction of honest working folks by ambitious well-born Ivy League graduates and their bribed apologists.

Why is that?

"Single Payer" and the Implicate Order

Yesterday, in the airport at Fort Lauderdale, I overheard a Bernie Bro telling a couple of listeners that “next time” Bernie would win and bring on “single payer.”

This bearded young man had majored in drama and done a bit of theater.

I did not try to enter into a dialog with the young man, so I did not say:

“So, kid, you like guns.”

“Guns? What do you mean? Guns kill people and if it wasn’t for the NRA…”

“I get it. But government is force, and that means, at the end of the day, government men with guns enforcing the law. So you like the idea of government men with guns.”

“What do you mean? I just want a just and rational health-care system.”

“But you want a system, and system means force.”

It is a delicious irony of our modern age that everyone is competing to be Mr. Nice Guy. The lefties talk about bending the arc of history towards justice, but forget that the means appointed comes down to thuggist activists backed up by men with guns, their loyalty bought with handsome pensions. Mr. Nice Guy with a gun?

On the other hand, the amazing emerging order of what we call “capitalism” that has brought the west from the indigence of $1 per head per day to $100 per head per day, is an order of remarkable ruthlessness. It says that if you can’t sell your skill or product on the market for the amount you had in mind, well, too bad for you: get a clue.

It allows you to dabble in a bit of theater, even amateur theatricals, but it doesn’t say you have a right to do that and get health care too.

By the way, did you know that Chinese factory workers are now getting about $3.60 per hour, or nearly $30 per day? I don’t know how that works out for the population as a whole, but it sure looks better than the 30 million that died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.

OK, let’s get to the point. Right now I am reading Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary. It’s a review of human brain science, and the emerging idea that left and right brain are complementary. The right brain takes the whole world as a whole with judgment; the left brain develops a theory of the world. Moreover, according McGilchrist, the right hemisphere is “primary;” for it defines the whole that the left hemisphere reduces to a mechanical theory.

Then there is David Bohm and his idea of the “implicate order,” the notion from post-Newtonian science that the world is not a machine, but something far deeper and more mysterious. In the dumbed-down version in Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialog, Bohm explains that the world is not a whole built up of parts but something more complex, for while the whole and the parts are not exactly one and the same thing they are so interrelated that it is certainly wrong to think of the whole as constructed from the parts. Bohm uses the example of a hologram projected by laser light. If you project the light through a small part of the hologram you will get the whole picture, but it will be low resolution. The more of the hologram that is illuminated, the more resolution will appear in the resulting image.

Now the hologram is a direct demonstration of quantum mechanics, so the experiment is demonstrating that each part of the universe, at the quantum level, contains some encoded information about the whole.

I would argue that my airport friend’s “single-payer” health system is a Newtonian mechanical universe in which the whole is a bolted-together machine of parts. But the Newtonian universe is all about force: action and reaction are equal and opposite.

I would argue that the market “system” is not a system at all but an implicate order where the whole and the parts are intimately connected, where the whole is certainly more than the sum of the parts. Let’s quote Bohm at length:

[I]n each sub-whole there is a certain quality that does not come from the parts, but helps organize the parts. So the implicate order does not deny the significance of parts or sub-wholes, but rather it treats each in its own way as relatively stable, independent and autonomous. Wholeness is seen as primary while the parts are secondary in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in the light of the whole.

In other words, to understand what the molecules in a human cell are doing, it helps to know they are part of a live human.

But the key thing to note, Bernie Bro, is that the cells and the parts of the cell are doing what they do without the clunking fist of the whole human creating a “single payer” to subsume the parts under the hegemony of the whole.

So the president of the nation does not "deny the significance of parts or sub-wholes" of the health care system but "treats each in its own way as relatively stable, independent and autonomous."

On the other hand it is also true that if enough individual parts do not contribute to the health of the whole then the whole will die.

By the way, in his commentary on Kant and Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee comments that Schopenhauer’s most important advance on Kant is to critique the Kantian idea that we can know sense impressions but not “things-in-themselves.” The mistake in Kant  is to talk about plural “things” instead of one “thing,” the whole. Because the whole is not the sum of the parts but completely interrelated with the parts and already encoded in the parts, and the parts are not really the parts but partaking of the whole.

Like I say, the more we know about life, the universe, and everything, the more amazing and mysterious it becomes.

How to Solve the Pronoun Crisis, Senator

Good old Steve Sailer is having fun with the gender pronoun issue. Remember the Pablo Gomez flap, about the transgender activist that up and stabbed someone? Gomez wanted to be called They, so Sailer had some fun with it.

And of course the kindly folks at GLAAD are right in the middle of it.

Really, you have to give the liberals credit. This business of people demanding that you call them he/she/xir/They, because anti-LGBTQ hate, is a brilliant tactic. It wrong-foots everyone that isn't a right-on "woke" liberal.

But I have a solution.

I propose that we conservatives make the following non-negotiable demand.

We demand that all "woke" Americans use the following pronoun when referring to a conservative: God.

Any liberal that does not refer to a conservative as God, as in "Chris Chantrill was discussing the liberal hate against Charles Murray, and 'God' said that Murray is right. Liberals are protesting Murray because 'God' has spent a lifetime writing books to show how liberal policy and liberal governance hurts the very people it is supposed to help. And liberals don't care."

Yes, this could really put the cat among the pigeons. And anyone that doesn't use the pronoun that the person in question wants is a bigot and a hater. Right liberals?

Now, I reckon that using God as a pronoun will get a bit old after a while. So I think that we should have backup pronouns ready for action.

What would work best to really annoy liberals?

Yes. You got it. We should demand to be called "Barack" or "Hillary" or "Maddow," or any headline liberal. How about "Chuck-you," Rush Limbaugh's friendly nickname for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who reportedly harassed a Trump voter on Sunday night at a fancy-pants Manhattan restaurant.

Can you spell "hate?"

Mind you, if Chuck-you Schumer is "going off" on innocent Trump voters at swank Manhattan restaurants like Sette Mezzo, even the wife of Joseph A. Califano and the daughter of CBS founder William S. Paley, well, it tells us that the pressure is starting to tell.

But I think that an arriviste like Chuck Schumer is mouthing off on genuine American top-tier grandes dames is a bit much. I think that the girls of Manhattan -- and you know who you are -- should  get together and do a bit of "I can't believe that Chuck said that." It's the line that rules the world.

And do you know what Chuck was pissed off about. It was that Trump was "a liar."

Golly gee-williikins, Chuck. Ain't you ever heard the one about the politician? You can tell he is lying because his lips are moving.

But you, Chuck. You are not a politician. You are a United States Senator. And that is different.

Hey, that's a good idea. How about we conservatives demand that all liberals call us "senator."

Or they are haters.

But what really gets me is the name of the swank restaurant that is good enough for the likes of Chuck. "Sette Mezzo?" Why do all those pretentious restaurants have pretentious names like that?

Are Trump and the Republicans Finished?

Everyone is in a fine froth about the failure of Ryancare (or Trumpcare) last week, and everybody is busy blaming someone.

It was Speaker Ryan, who should have known that you don't do major health care reform in a month.

It was the House Freedom Caucus that would compromise on anything.

It was President Trump, who didn't appreciate how difficult and complex health care is.

It was Steve Bannon, who threatened the House Freedom caucus guys.

Then there is the meme that Trump, or Ryan, or the Republicans, have spent all their political capital and are finished.

Well, which is true?

I don't know. But my smart retort is that government is a total disaster all the time. Almost everything it does is stupid and wasteful and cruel and unjust. It is almost impossible to get anything worthy and sensible done.

That is why governments employ flacks whose sole job is to tell us what a wonderful powerful guy the president is, on down to the worthy bureaucrat churning out life-saving regulations and "our" nurses and schoolteachers who are saving lives and caring for our children.

So the Republicans in Congress tried to do something really difficult and President Trump was trying to push whatever it was over the finish line.

And they failed.

And leaders are supposed to never fail.

I suppose this is all about the Pharoah being a god, and a god being necessarily omnipotent, and therefore any political failure bringing into question the divinity of the Pharoah.

Or, as the Chinese say, losing the Mandate of Heaven.

But it's pity, because normal human activity on this world constantly encounters problems and setbacks. The measure of a man or a woman is how they handle adversity. It's a bit hard to expect presidents and speakers to be perfect.

And the fear of failure seems to haunt all the folk in the political sphere. They have to appear omnipotent, or nothing at all.

Perhaps it arises out of the impossibility of a political career. As I read once, it is an amazing achievement for a Briton to get a seat in the House of Commons. But backbenchers are nobodies. It is even more astonishing to become a junior minister, practically impossible to become a front-rank cabinet minister, etc.

So every politician is haunted by the fear that the astonishing run of luck is about to run out.

On the other hand, I understand the necessity for oppositions to say See, I Told You So at every opportunity.

But here's a scary item from The Telegraph's eternal pessimist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He says that US corporate credit is contracting at a record rate, almost as bad as 2008, so...

This morning energy stocks are down.

Everyone is Between a Rock and a Hard Place

We conservatives are naturally angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced that he will vote against the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch. And he will probably filibuster Gorsuch too.

But what else is Schumer to do? The liberal base is all riled up and it demands "Resistance!" The great and powerful United State Senators cannot just wink at each other and let a Republican Supreme Court nomination through on a nod. The base wants blood, and by God, they are determined to get it.

But I understand the fury of the base. The liberal cognitive elite has used the Supreme Court to enact its policy preferences -- abortion for upscale women, gay marriage for upscale gays -- in the teeth of reluctance from the broad American mainstream. Suppose the Supreme Court became dominated by conservative "originalist" justices? What would happen to abortion and gay marriage and the rights of undocumented immigrants and criminal defendants then?

Liberals are tied to the mast, and must defend the activist Supreme Court to the knife. Otherwise all the Court's progressive jurisprudence comes into play.

The irony is that I'll bet my nickel that if abortion and criminal rights and gay marriage had been left to legislatures we would have arrived at some sort of messy, human accommodation on these issues. But because liberals on the court rammed all this down our throats we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore.

The joke on liberals is that they are using the courts to enforce their moral agenda, just what they inveighed against when they insisted we get the government out of the bedroom.

The short-term result of liberals fighting over Supreme Court nominees will be the end of the filibuster to resist any presidential nomination, so nominations will be purely partisan. There could be eight years of this, liberals, before you get the whip hand again.

But the Republicans are also between a rock and a hard place on Obamacare. The Republican base hates Obamacare and wants it destroyed. But Obamacare has become yet another entitlement, and you touch entitlements at your peril.

Plus Donald Trump was elected courtesy of the white working class voters, and the white working class voters want their entitlements, thank you very much. They earned it.

And they used to talk about the Democratic Party as a coalition of conflicting interests that somehow got it together to win elections.

So the liberals are hoist by their own petard on the Supreme Court, and conservatives are trapped by the success of Donald Trump.

How will it all end up?

Oh, that's simple. It will end up in war. Either a global war against the Muslims or a civil war here at home. And in the chaos of war and its aftermath all the petty squabbles of today will go up in the smoke of a million funeral pyres.

But why? How come we can't just get along?

That's a good question, Senator.

Healthcare Showdown: Obamacare vs. Trumpcare

Remember when the Democrats were shoving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act through Congress back in 2010?

It seemed like they were all singing from the same hymnal. Everyone knew to repeat the same talking points: If you like your plan... If you like your doctor... etc.

But with the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare it's like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. All the different conservative groups are fighting with one another. There is no single set of talking points.

Today there's going to be a vote on Speaker Ryan's American Health Care Act. Everyone is making predictions about pass or fail, but I'd say that the science says that every vote is a horse-trade, with many Republican votes available to the highest bidder until the last moment.

So we are in the same position as Obamacare, when Harry Reid was buying the votes of Democrats to get his bill passed in the Senate. Only it's the opposite.

I guess that while the Congress is so divided on an issue, it means that things aren't bad enough to warrant a reform.

Because in my view the problem with the government doing anything is that you can't get the votes to fix it until the boat has gone over the waterfall. That is why it is a bad idea for government to do anything other than fight wars.

But why is it that Democrats always seem to speak with one voice, whereas Republicans and conservatives always seem to be at sixes and sevens?

I'd say the reason is power. The left is interested in power, specifically the cultural power to name and shame and the political power to order people around or else. (Economic power comes as a free gift when you have cultural and political power. Corporate CEOs all know which side their bread is buttered.)

But the whole program of the right, excepting chaps like Hitler and Peron, is to limit power. We believe in the remarkable idea that a nation or a people does best when the cultural Torquemadas are kept in check and the political bosses don't have clunking fists to stitch up the whole town under their rule.

So when Republicans get into power we don't have a new cunning plan to buy votes like the Democrats do. We just want to find a way to release the shackles of big government, and every Republican as a different idea about where to start.

Then there is President Trump, the hero of the white working class, and they just want to go back to the good old days of the 1960s and good jobs at good wages, with pensions and health care for dessert.

I expect that all the flap about health care will subside when the west finally gets around to Doing Something about Islam.

But it will still be interesting to see if Speaker Ryan and President Trump manage to stitch together a majority in the House today for the American Health Care Act.