Category: Attitude

Beavis and Butthead Conservatism

I know I’ve written bunches about the sorry state of mainstream “conservatism.” I think I’ve specifically pointed out a ubiquitous add at TownHall.com’s columnist page, featuring lame slogan T-Shirts tightly fitted to shapely young females.

Well it’s Summertime, summertime, sum, sum, summertime, and the camera has pulled back a bit:

Yes boys, conservative chicks are HOT (nudge! nudge! wink! wink!). Ann Coulter!!! Michelle Malkin!!! Wouldn’t you like to give her them something to exercise “freedom of choice” about!? (Heh, heh, heh!)

I’d like to think that our fallen soldiers fell for something worthier than this merde.

(For the record, I know this is the softest of softcore. So what? It still offends me.)

Choose your own Jesus

Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.

…

[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!

“Hostess Twinkie Market” – no nutritional value

A very important but taciturn investor (that explains why I hadn’t heard of him) speaks to the Wall Street Journal, and his prognosis ain’t pretty:

  • He compared the financial markets to a Hostess Twinkie. “There is no nutritional value,” he said. “There is nothing natural in the markets. Everything is being manipulated by the government.”
  • “The government is now in the business of giving bad advice … By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an adequate return for the risks they are running. People can’t stand earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the investing public to speculate….”
  • “[I]t was in some ways helpful to carry a Depression mentality throughout their later lives, because it meant they were thrifty with their money and prudent in their investment decisions … All we got out of this crisis was a Really Bad Couple of Weeks mentality.”
  • He is buying “way out-of-the-money puts on bonds”—options that have no value unless Treasury bonds plummet. “It’s cheap disaster insurance for five years out,” he said.
  • “All the obvious hedges”—commodities and foreign currencies, for example—”are already extremely expensive,” he warned.

I’d tell you how I’m hedging, but since I have an audience of dozens, some with money in the bank, I don’t want to risk driving up the price before I’m more fully invested. 😉

HT: Patrick Deneen at Front Porch Republic.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat says the demographic crunch every sentient creature knew was coming has arrived way early – now instead of the late 2010s: a “lost decade.” I’m not sure he’s right blaming Bush (he at least is clear that he’s talking hindsight) except that Bush had what tort lawyers call the “last clear chance” to avert catastrophe.

Rand Paul Civil Rights Act retrospective

Townhall.com has a pretty interesting set of reactions to the kefuffle over Rand Paul’s initial equivocation on the public accommodations portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

They’re interesting partly because they are better than the usual charges of media bias that follow a conservative embarrassment in “gotcha moment.”

For my money, Goldberg is the funniest (not surprisingly) and closest to my view of the deepest meaning of this pretty shallow episode:

[T]he only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals.

And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

How many activist groups insist that their plight is sublimely analogous to the civil rights struggle? How many times did the Democrats try to make health-care reform a continuation of civil rights? …

What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.

But Harsanyi’s opener is good, too:

Isn’t it time we started querying our political candidates on issues that really matter?

Let’s start with this one: If you were a convention delegate in 1778, would you have voted to ratify the Constitution of the United States?

If the answer is yes — and you don’t hate America, do you?! — it’s only fair we conclude that you support restricting voting rights to male landowners exclusively. Surely, from your position, we can also deduce that you support slavery.

A City the Devil Built

If the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human, Atlanta would surely be that place ….

So William Howard Kunstler opens his blog this week, but not so much to excoriate Atlanta as to introduce it as, ironically, the site of the 18th Congress of the New Urbanism. The blog is a pretty good 30,000-foot view of what’s most endearing about Kunstler’s thought. If you want an overview with spoken words and pictures, check here.

Or rummage through your own wetware if you’ve ever walked Boston’s Freedom Trail or Beacon Hill, or gawked at the dense cheek-by jowl homes of New York’s Greenwich Village, or ambled through Charleston’s Battery neighborhood, smelling the linseed oil of summer painting, or strolled, sweating, under the Live Oaks of Savannah’s old streets near the River (out in “Garden of Good and Evil” territory). There’s something human about those places, and it’s not just nostalgia — though nostalgia plays its part.

The New Urbanists, in my conviction, are advocating something — the only thing I know of — that makes sense for urban living, as opposed to the urban-suburban auto treadmill, waiting for the Oil Fairy to make peak oil go away. It needn’t be rank imitation of the places I just named, but they’ve got the scale right.

As my friend, Practicing Human, wrote this morning:

[W]e would be doing well to ask about consumption of energy resources on a micro-, meso- and macro-scale.  Managing our energy diet towards a sustainable rate means more than just changing our light bulbs.  We can think creatively about building and community design.  And we can adjust national priorities, which always proves to be incredibly difficult.

America is a country working foremost in a consumptive paradigm.  Until we can think differently about standards of living, then we are going to recreate the same problems.  But I think a different economic paradigm is still very far removed as it requires a significant leap in economic, political, and sociological thinking.

Sadly, the economic crisis is hurting the good guy developers along with the bad. Kunstler again:

I heard a lot of stories during the meeting in Atlanta last week but one really stood out. It was about the money and revealed a lot about what is going on in our banking system these days. A New Urbanist developer had gotten a small project going for a traditional neighborhood. Despite the global financial [crisis], the developer was able to meet the payments of his commercial loan.  But the FDIC sent bank examiners around America and they told the small regional banks that if they had more than twenty percent of their loans in commercial real estate (CRE) they would be put out of business. The banks were ordered to reduce their loads of CRE by calling in the loans and liquidating the assets. Ironically, the banks only called in their “performing” loans, the ones that were being regularly paid off, because they were ignoring and even concealing the ones that weren’t being paid.

The developer in question had his loan called in when the FDIC descended on his bank. He couldn’t pay off the $3 million in one lump, of course. The FDIC’s agents are going to seize and sell off his project if he can’t get it refinanced in short order.  He can’t get it refinanced because there is now such a shortage of capital in the banking system that no one can get a loan for anything. Also, since it is now well-known that the bank failed, the vultures are circling above his project hoping to buy it for a discount, so even the few private investors who have money won’t throw him a lifeline. By the way, the FDIC agents told him they are doing this because they now expect that virtually all commercial real estate loans in the USA will fail in the months ahead. Pretty scary story, huh?  And he was one of the good guys.

I suppose it was a tragic thing that the New Urbanists made themselves hostage to the same banking system that was behind suburban sprawl …

I have no great overarching point, but if people will read Kunstler, we are likelier to make the paradigm jump we need.

Paradigm Busters

My crystal ball has never worked very well, but the part of me that longs, that aches, for something better than our Ponzi-scheme economy refuses to give up on dreams of a humane future.

This sort of thing – rumored for weeks – could be it:

PITTSBURGH – The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada.  The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”

“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard.  “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: “What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”

Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, “We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn’t take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control.  We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration.  Mr. Ugarte commented, “We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities,” Gerard added.

In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.

…

About MONDRAGON:

The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity.  MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.

Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment.   In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world’s largest industrial workers cooperative.

About the USW:

The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.

Here’s the Ocholphobist – a guy who’s experienced at making beautiful objects with his hands, but who seldom writes on such things any more – weighing and balancing the workers’ cooperative model:

I recently spoke with an old Catholic Worker friend of mine who told me of a talk given recently in which he heard that Mondragón is worried that an EU style bailout of Spain along the lines of what happened in Greece would actually hurt the cooperatives (Mondragón is not the only one) in Spain. Large financiers generally do not like cooperatives like Mondragón because they do not run with the sort of debt load and constant large debt shifting that a typical corporation does, and the debt they have tends to be decentralized – spread out over a number of smaller financial institutions (note that one of the “four areas of activity” Mondragón is engaged in is finance – this is common among worker cooperatives in Europe — just as many communities and groups of workers in America have local credit unions and many large corporations have their own finance divisions) . And these EU bailouts, like the American bailouts, buttress large finance, with the de facto result that midsize, small, and micro finance options are left in a less competitive position than they would be were there no bailouts, or less centralized bailouts.
The labor movement in the U.S. has little leverage against corporations and its impotence is increasingly pathetic. Often in the American context, when a union does manage to maintain some real power it uses it in as corrupt and abusive a manner (often abusive toward their own, these days) as corportatist power brokers do. But usually American unions are in the business of losing what power they have had so this is less and less a concern. It seems to me that if there is to be any future in workers organizing for their own protection and aid in the United States it will primarily be along the lines of models such as the one Mondragón provides. But I rather doubt that will happen beyond a few small scale efforts and the occasional lipservice. Worker cooperatives do not really fit into the destructive plutocratic order in which we find ourselves today.
It should be noted that in most worker cooperatives (I daresay nearly all of them that last for more than a few years) there is not a utopian vision of financial egalitarianism. There is still a meritocracy at play, arguably more so than in current corporatist models. A worker (or a small worker owned business seeking membership in the cooperative) is not guaranteed to be vested in the cooperative, but must earn it over years and invest himself or herself in a manner which shows to others competence and seriousness and follows well established protocols, with a system in place to curb abuses and address complaints. One will see in a worker cooperative, however, more money staying within the communities where the cooperative is found, and nothing like the radical disparity between the wages of workers and the salaries of executives such as we see in most U.S. corporations, in which execs are paid for their skills in social networking and an ability to manipulate government and lying to the public with that perfected air of banality we routinely see from our suits.
All that said, the ethos of Mondragón Corp has undergone something of a change since EU integration and taken something of a more EU character. The EU is a sly dog. Within the EU constitution there is a mandate which requires the EU to follow the principle of subsidiarity, but as we see with the recent bailout of Greece (along with a host of other moves), the EU is often the furthest thing from an institution which follows the principle of subsidiarity. There is the possibility of a convenient use of subsidiarity rhetoric whilst actually following centralized, top-down, corporo-statist models. It is quite conceivable that cooperatives could be formed which, on paper, look like cooperatives, but which actually function more like corporations.
It is now not uncommon for American Orthodox to argue how neo-con, paleo-con, or libertarian political and/or economic orders are somehow in keeping with Orthodoxy. I suppose an Orthodox embracing subsidiarity would simply be another act in that circus. The chief fault of subsidiarity, as I see it, is that the notion is too vague to be of serious use when applied to any macro-economic vision. One finds both Leftists and those on the Right espousing the ‘true’ version of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity works best as a flexible guiding model in particular micro-economic environments, a part of an economic order with a wide array of labor structures, such as we see with Mondragón Corp in the context of Spain. I have a friend who says he would never fly Distributivist Air, were there such a company. I am not sure that a well run worker cooperative airline would be any less safe than the typical corporate airline, but I have worked for a family owned business of which the thought of the coworkers I had at said business owning that business sends shivers down my spine. Another business I once worked for did go for a varient of the subsidiarity model, and is now in dire straights with half of the staff let go, instead of being sold to a friend of mine who could have actually kept the business thriving, seeing as how he had run it successfully for some years. The original owner, instead of selling to my friend, decided to follow a hasty subsidiarity minded scheme presented by an employee with many ideals and little actual experience in the business and now, out of desperation, the company mimics corporate stores more than it ever did. I suppose that in business, as in most of life, there is a charism to doing things well and any economic order can get in the way of a given charism at a given time.
I was unaware of this book until the Ochlophobist linked it. It’s on my wish list now. And here’s more about Mondragon (in a Wikipedia article that the Wikipedia poobahs would like to see rewritten for greater objectivity).

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left,  has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

Porn on my mind

I have pornography on the mind lately.

You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.

Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.

City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.

As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”

Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.

I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.

I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!

Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”

My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.

I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.

I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.

Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.

Alternate energy follies – and a cold slap in the face about current cars

The Wall Street Journal must have an imp running around the office tying knots in knickers.

First, in The Price of Wind, the Editorial Board (I assume; it’s unsigned) inveighs about wind power at Nantucket Sound. It’s not because they’re NIMBY liberals, who have ferociously opposed it (seemingly for selfish aesthetic reasons), but because of the intricate subsidies and the cost of the power produced – double power from conventional sources.

There’s comic irony in this clean energy revolution getting devoured by the archaic regulations of previous clean energy revolutions. But given that taxpayers will be required to pay to build Cape Wind and then required to buy its product at prices twice normal rates, opponents might have more success if they simply pointed out what a lousy deal it is.

Then Homan Jenkins greets the reader with “Congratulations. You’re about to buy a fancy new Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt . . . for someone else.” He is shocked that the first wave of electric cars won’t cost $40,000 after all, but roughly 70% of that, because of – gasp! – subsidies!

And so a boondoggle is born. Last month, after a meeting with White House Car Czar Ron Bloom, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers produced a multipoint proposal for how the handouts can be made to flow more or less in perpetuity.

“In perpetuity“? Can you think of another transportation subsidy that’s perpetual (until the collapse that’s surely coming)? No, not Amtrak. Bigger than that.

How about roads, highways, streets, block after block of lovely downtown buildings leveled to make room for public surface parking or parking garages, and such? Do you think that our auto-centric communities happened naturally and spontaneously? Gimme a break!