- JHK’s four-step plan for America.
- Enemies within.
- Better to fall apart?
- A Bureaucratic mind looks at TBTF.
- Joe Frazier.
James Howard Kunstler has a plan for America. After colorful epithets (heck, even some dictionaries don’t recognize “catamite“) and some speculation about a really serious third-party candidate for 2012, he lays it out:
- “[T]he first order of business is to get corporate money out of politics … Corporations are sociopaths. They need to be tasered!”
- “The second order of business is to enforce the existing laws in money matters and bring back laws … that were recklessly thrown away in the systematic bid to loot the working public ….”
- “The third order of business is to shut down the war industry and close hundreds of overseas military bases that are draining scarce public capital.”
- “The fourth order of business is to prepare the US public for the realities of the post-Global economy and the post-cheap-energy way of life ….”
Lots of ellipses so I’m only making “fair use.” But here’s a little fleshing out of the need for shutting down the war industry.
Thomas Peters at Catholicvote.org warns that liberal Catholics are handing the Church over to the State. Quoting Cardinal George, he warns of the consequences:
What history teaches clearly […] is that when the dominant culture and its laws eliminate religious freedom, the state becomes sacred. No appeal to God or to a morality based on religious faith is allowed to break into the closed circle of civil legalism. The state’s coercive power is not limited to keeping external order; it invades the internal realm of one’s relation to God. The state becomes a church.
That strikes me as the heart of the matter, with the rest being largely elaboration through quotes.
Elizabeth Scalia at First Things spots another kind of sell-out, whereby the Church isn’t even allowed to keep its “private opinions” while adapting publicly because the legitimate Krustian opinion is a version of American Exceptionalism cum consumerism, indistinguishable from the Zeitgeist:
Perhaps God is tired of the idolatry that has snuck into some hearts disguised as patriotism—where the pledge is nearly equated with prayer and an excellent but earthbound document written by men is treated like the word from on high. Maybe he is tired of the idolatry of the parents whose darlings were over-indulged into stupidity, or the idolatry of the consumer who will stand in line overnight for the latest “must-have/already-obsolete” iToy, or the idolatry of mere ideas that trend and pass and carry off with them our charity and our clarity, leaving us more confused and distanced from God and each other, than we were before. Maybe it is the idolatry of our own earthly “power,” that has brought us to this shaky place.
(HT Rod Dreher) The liberal Catholics and the conflaters of patriotism and prayer need never fear the coming persecution, because they’ll be leading the mob:
Almost everything is now in place for a full-scale legal persecution of the Church, all concocted under the aegis of government protection of “human rights.” The meaning of “rights” the government itself defines in the name of “freedom” and “equality.” It is noble-sounding, but as Plato said: “Entreaties of sovereigns are mixed with compulsion.” This admonition includes democratic sovereigns.
Peters needs to know that many Orthodox will be alongside as we all burn at the stake. It’s oddly comforting to be in a Church that knows that persecution and martyrdon have been Christians’ ordinary lot for much of the last two millennia.
I Tweeted about this column yesterday, but didn’t forget about it thereafter. Pat Buchanan acquits himself tolerably well as he describes what he fears will be the baneful effect of polyglot, polyracial, polyreligious immigration:
First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe. Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history.
We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.
We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.
What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?
Regular readers will know that “what, then, will hold us together?” is a question much on my mind (when I am feeling up to the anxiety of acknowledging “nothing that I can see”). So this resonates with me — to a point.
But I fear that our “republic, European and Christian in its origins and character,” is already gone and for reasons more of European Christian apostasy from the faith than from immigration of The Other. As Dmitri Aleksandrovich commented to Buchanan:
What does assimilation even mean nowadays when most Americans of European ancestry have become increasingly rootless, lacking any culture and with just a vague idea of Christianity if any. In such a country assimilation only means adopting the materialism of today’s popular culture in which we are no longer Americans but consumers.
What common faith we retain is a counterfeit, and it’s hard to know whether being held together by it is a nobler fate than falling apart.
I’m glad someone is still sorta kinda paying attention to “too big to fail”:
I have a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses …
[I]t’s time for a fundamental reform: Any person who works for a company that, regardless of its current financial health, would require a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed should not get a bonus, ever. In fact, all pay at systemically important financial institutions — big banks, but also some insurance companies and even huge hedge funds — should be strictly regulated …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk engineering at New York University Polytechnic Institute, is the author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” He is a hedge fund investor and a former Wall Street trader.
This is not my “final answer,” but it seems to me that trying to strictly regulate is just another round of hiring a bunch of Lucy Van Pelts to collect nice salaries while getting ever deeper in thrall to the forces they’re supposed to regulate, and that we Charley Browns will find no football to kick and end up flat on our backs again. It’s the sort of solution a “professor of risk engineering” is apt to float to prove how important his expertise is.
If the trigger is “a company that, regardless of its current financial health, would require a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed,” why don’t we just force them to break up until the individual pieces would not require bailout?
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 