I thought I was done blogging for the morning, but then How much will the NFL cost this city? (Indianapolis) came in.
The pro-sports, bread-and-circuses, Chamber-of-Commerce-conservative, corporatist boondoggle (did I leave out any hyphenated adjectives?) has become white noise. It shouldn’t be.
We don’t even have a nominee yet, but the posturing — academic and political — is shaping up, as signaled on the editorial page of today’s Washington Post.
In the right corner, weighing in with the mantra of “commitment to the text of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers,” is senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
In the left corner, weighing in with the historical untenability of ascribing to the Founders any unified “original intent,” is Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.
Ellis is would win the match on points, but Sessions has a knockout punch: by and large, Americans agree with him, whether or not original intent is tenable historically.
It is perhaps probably significant that neither one speaks of abortion, the issue that, whether explicitly or encoded, has dominated confirmation hearings for decades. The current hot button issues for Sessions are political speech, guns, and eminent domain.
The buzz about the new book Red Families, Blue Families continues with a conservative columnist I greatly respect, Maggie Gallagher.
Maggie, author of The Abolition of Marriage and a tireless advocate of traditional western marriage, thinks the culture wars start with different views about abortion and those different views ramify in earlier marriage versus later, out-of-wedlock birth rates, etc., rather than the latter ending in controversy over abortion (the quintessential Culture War issue).
It would be interesting in this regard to test how much the “red state, blue state” differences were shaping up before Roe v. Wade, and (if reliable data is available – very unlikely), how the blue states and red states stacked up on abortion rates, legal and illegal, before the Supreme Court basically gave us one, utterly permissive national abortion law.
A very interesting post at FPR clued me in to a Jonathan Rauch article in National Journal, which in turn discusses a new book that essentially publishes a Grand Unification Theory of the origins of “Red” and “Blue” America.
I hesitate to summarize. Read either the Front Porch Republic piece or Rauch’s for a summary instead.
What this leaves me with is a couple of intuitions, none of which I’m remotely prepared to defend to the death:
I have written before of the very, very serious business of glamor and glamorization. After its blog feed seemingly went dead for a while (it may have been my error – who knows?), Virginia Postrel is back online and, today, on dead tree with a Wall Street Journal review of “Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House,” by Meghan Daum, who has followed the maxim “write what you know” in this book that, as Postrel notes, needs no subtitle.
Postrel helpfully introduces her WSJ essay at her blog as well. Here are the key links:
Watchers of HGTV, Food Channel and such take note.
I have several things going right now that are either time-consuming or interesting.
I’m reading David Bentley Hart’s book “Atheist Delusions,” which is, it seems to me, not just a deserved mocking of the inadequacies of the famous “New Atheist” authors, but a robust defense of the legacy of Christianity which, Hart would wager, none of the New Atheists would care to give up. It seems that Nietzche is just about the only atheist Hart takes seriously, because Nietzche alone dared savage Christianity for what it really is, while today’s pantywaists set up straw men, betraying either their dishonesty or their ignorance.
Not unrelated, but not by design either, I’m planning to re-listen to, and to outline, two Ancient Faith Radio “Illumined Heart” podcasts on “Living in the ruins of Christendom” that I essentially overlooked last fall when they came out. The blog post on them is begun, but not ready for prime time.
I need to think on good, kind, pure and “of good report” things after my last rant. An incident this evening makes that easy.
A few hours ago, the phone rang. My wife, upstairs, answered and directly called my name down the stairs that it was for me.
I knew it was going to be a charity or a “would you hold for an important recorded message Grand Poobah Sen. Slicksy from Southern North Dakota?” political pitch. Indiana’s no-call law has reduced to naught the commercial cold-calls, but charities and politicians are bidding to fill the gap. Continue reading “Interlochen Center for the Arts”
A few questions, please.
Has it come to this? “A law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion” is described as “strict” and a “highly restrictive abortion measure.” Continue reading ““Strict abortion measures”?”
“Goldman Sachs” is not a term of endearment at my favorite websites, such as Front Porch Republic. And I have reflected my own ill-ease with such too big to fail concerns in recent weeks, as well as passing along some counter-arguments.
Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz today defends Goldman Sachs in his own way: short selling a derivative signals the market that a sector may be ready to collapse. I certainly agree with that – just as short selling a stock signals that a particular stock may be ready to tank.
The most telling point for me in Crovitz’s column – apropos of why the SEC may lose its case against Goldman Sachs rather than why derivatives are good – is simply that once you accept the premises that (1) shorting a derivative is beneficial because it signals the market of a possible sector collapse, and (2) long buyers in these specially created securities knew someone else was selling short, it seems to follow that “it would be hard to prove that it mattered who [the short seller] was.” That John Paulson was selling short and that Goldman Sachs bundled the derivative for him seems to be what SEC thinks GS should have disclosed.
All this, of course, ignores John Médaille’s, invocation of Aristotle and Aquina to distinguish natural from unnatural market exchanges, but Distributist economics are, for the time being at least, so far out of the mainstream as to be easily ignored. Considering the repeated failures of mainstream economics, that may be ripe for change.
The Democrats have a bright if peurile idea: “Hey, guys! I’ve got a great idea! Regulation utterly failed to prevent the economic collapse, and voters are mad at Wall Street, so lets grab this chance to make Washington bigger with even more regulation! Whaddya think, guys?!” (I’m not sure the Republicans have a counter-plan. They’re just in denial that a market could fail.)
Pretending to regulate something as complex as derivatives is destined again to fail, so I would be remiss were I to pass up, before Congress passes “the most sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the aftermath of the Great Depression,” not to sing another rousing chorus of “if they’re too big to fail, bust ’em up!”
I started a month and a half ago to try to write a very trenchant post taking this music video as its point of departure.
Maybe someday I’ll get around to it, but to say what I wrote wasn’t ready for prime time would be a great understatement.
So just enjoy the video, chuckle at human folly, and then say a few “Lord have mercies” for us all.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 