Thursday, 25 February 2010 by bbbeard.

Valerie Jarrett explains it all.

If the Obama administration wants to  get people feeling better, they should write more knee-slapping one-liners like that.

Still ROFLMAO….

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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 by bbbeard.

I finally got around to seeing Avatar last night. Much has been written about it, often critical of its woolly eco-mysticism, but maybe I can approach it from a slightly different perspective….

This is yet another movie that expands on the theme that “we’re all connected”. The homages to Star Wars and Dances With Wolves were blunt.  This shop-worn theme is not a bad starting point, and it took me awhile to figure out why exactly I found Cameron’s interpretation distasteful. It wasn’t just the perversion of the American Marine into heartless genocidal exterminator — that’s been done to death by Hollywood and anyone offended by that should really avoid nearly every movie touching on the military in the last forty years.

As a Buddhist, I can usually relate to the notion of interconnectedness, and when movies push this, I’m generally okay with that. But what was it about the Na’vi that was so jarring? Clearly these were no Buddhists. In fact they were hysterically hostile, unbalanced, irrational hunters and warriors. And after all the jib-jab about Eywa, it was something of a letdown to be handed a flatly mechanistic explanation for the interconnectedness of the Pandoran biome. It turns out that the explanation provided for a not-so-universal interconnectedness after all — because the “we” in “we’re all connected” pretty much excludes everything off-world. This made for a handy “us vs them” to justify the slaughter by the Na’vi of human soldiers (and of Na’vi by the humans) at the end of the movie. So for me this came across as, “yeah, sure, we’re all interconnected, but we’ve got to have a big massacre at the end because it’s Hollywood and we’re all about the box office”….

Now, there have been times when Buddhism has been perverted into supporting militarism. But by and large the record of Buddhism is pretty good. [BTW the link goes to a paper about Lewis Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, which studied the correlates of war. Richardson’s studies showed, among many other things, that Buddhist countries by and large generated fewer conflicts than did other religions.] But whatever you might think of the Na’vi, “pacifist” doesn’t come to mind.

And the strange organismic interconnection of the Pandorans seemed to me to yearn for a Spock moment: “It would appear, Captain, that the entire planet is a single organism!” at which point Kirk would conclude that a few well-placed phaser blasts would convice Eywa that it was unwise to hold a Federation shuttlecraft hostage… but I digress. There were no heroes in this movie. Sure, Jake Sully was put forth as a hero for siding with the Na’vi, but the whole assimilation thing seemed a bit too Borgish for my comfort.

And a word about the 3D technology: I hope this is not the wave of the future. As a user of monovision contact lenses, the 3D effect seemed uneven and distorted. Much of the left side of the picture was fuzzy. But now I’m resorting to pleonasm….

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Saturday, 23 January 2010 by bbbeard.

Here’s a datum: I listened to NPR for an hour yesterday on my drive home [first time in a long time, but I was curious about their take on the Scott Brown victory]. I heard the results described about twenty times by quite a few different people as “populist”, e.g. “a populist revolt”, “Brown’s populist message”, etc. I don’t recall them using the “c word” at all (conservative). Elite [sic] opinion seems to be gelling around the notion that it’s okay to think of the grave discontent with Obama as “populist”, but they still have cognitive dissonance with the notion that the revolt has any “conservative” component at all. And libertarianism, I think, is not on their radar at all….

The significance of this is two-fold: first, populism per se is neither Democrat nor Republican, and indeed many Democrat proposals for expanding government fit the definition of “populist”. This is why you still hear Democrats arguing that the election results mean that they have a mandate to push through health insurance reform as quickly as possible. So the use of “populist” [in the sense of “policies intended to help common people”] instead of “conservative” [”policies intended to promote individual liberty and initiative”] allows the Democrat conscience to pursue essentially the same anti-liberty, anti-business, anti-individual policies that they did before. This is the core calculation that is driving Obama to demonize the banks – he thinks that by repackaging his Marxism as “populist” all will be well.

Second, it helps to convince Democrats that the connection of Scott Brown to conservatism is accidental at best. Thus, they see no mandate to work with Republicans, who, after all, represent a kind of secular Satanism to them.

We shall see what this particular delusion earns them next November.

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Friday, 6 November 2009 by bbbeard.

The August unemployment numbers are out. Unemployment, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is up again, to 9.7%, the highest of the Obama Presidency.

Politically: a very bad result for Mr. Obama. Despite job losses, the unemployment rate had actually fallen slightly in July (because enough people had been discouraged from looking for work that the labor force shrank). But the August rate is even higher. The numbers are bad enough to support headlines like “Unemployment rate rises to 26-year high“.

But the “other shoe” that is waiting to drop is the crossing of the 10% threshold. It’s a psychological threshold, to be sure. But you can also be sure that financial journalists have already written their columns, obituary-style, for the sad day when we cross that line. Once we cross the threshold, a jump from 10.1% to 10.3% won’t be nearly as dramatic.

But in the meantime, “highest in 26 years” instead of “gradually falling” means that it will be hard for Mr. Obama to win the battles he will be fighting over health insurance and energy this fall. Convincing the American people we are on the right path will be difficult, and as many in Congress learned this August, those people are getting angry with their representatives’ incompetence. If he loses those battles, it would forestall the economic damage his takeovers would inflict — so in a way, this slight uptick in an ambiguous parameter may actually be good news.

Still, unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic growth. We are past the six-month point after the grand inauguration, so in some sense Obama now, or shortly, will “own” the unemployment situation. (”How’s that stimulus working out for you?”) When we look back to the Reagan administration, the last time unemployment was this high, it was several years into his Presidency before his economic policies finally reversed the malaise of the Carter years. Of course, Reagan’s policy was to cut taxes, to slow the growth of spending, and to deregulate. Obama’s policy is to raise taxes, accumulate massive debt obligations, and to nationalize major industries. We shall see whether these Bizarro-Reagan policies reverse the trend in unemployment — or magnify it.

By the way, here is Innocent Bystander’s update.

UPDATE: September numbers are out. 9.8%. Labor force shrinking. Still waiting.

UPDATE: October: 10.2%. Still rising, even with shrinking labor force.

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Wednesday, 4 November 2009 by bbbeard.

Do I detect a sense of panic at the ABC News website tonight?

Just keep saying that to yourself.

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Tuesday, 27 October 2009 by bbbeard.

From Lincoln to Carter to Caesar. Spengler would be proud.

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Monday, 26 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Thursday, 8 October 2009 by bbbeard.

First, a cautionary tale. Some time ago I read a critique of multiculturalism, the central parable of which went as follows: it seems that there was once a classics professor, tasked with teaching a sophomore course in Plato’s Apology. As the professor explains:

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture?  Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?

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Tuesday, 6 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Michelle Malkin has tweaked the other Michelle about her remembrance of things past — specifically, about her memories of sitting in her daddy’s lap while watching Carl Lewis at the Olympics. The fact that Michelle O was 20 years old when Lewis first ran in the Olympics makes her remark a trifle unsettling. Well, okay, in fairness, MO started her sentence by referring to Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, earlier competitors, but the sentence doesn’t parse in any way that is flattering either to her or to her dad. Maybe Barack was borrowing the teleprompter. And fair’s fair, W was pilloried for less creepy assaults on his mother tongue. As it were.

In any case, it put me in mind of our President’s strange detachment from facts about the past. There have been gross errors in interpretation, as when he expressed a belief that leaders like FDR and Kennedy showed the path of virtue by negotiating with our enemies. Well, Kennedy did at least have a summit with Khrushchev, although the summit itself has been described as “disastrous”. But FDR never met with any Axis leader; nor was Joseph Stalin considered an enemy to the United States during FDR’s lifetime. But there have also been peculiar personal exaggerations, as when Obama claimed his parents met because of the (1965) march on Selma — which happened four years after BHO was born. And he has engaged in unnecessary mangling of family history, too, as when he claimed his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz, Buchenwald — so sue me!

My personal favorite is when he credited Muslims with inventing the magnetic compass, an assertion that no doubt came as a surprise to our Chinese friends. This claim came in his Cairo speech, in which he more egregiously (and erroneously) claimed that John Adams wrote “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” Those words appear in the English version of the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, and are attributed to Joel Barlow, not John Adams. Of course, the fact that Obama even thought it was a good idea to bring up the Treaty of Tripoli in an entreaty to the Muslim world is baffling. The Pasha of Tripoli abrogated the Treaty in 1801 when Jefferson refused to pay, initiating a chain of events that are memorialized in the Marines’ Hymn.

Most recently, he visited the United Nations and claimed “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside.” Again, this is a very odd statement from a self-proclaimed “student of history”. One imagines the German and Japanese Ambassadors exchanging puzzled glances over this claim, thinking their translators had malfunctioned.

I fear that we are led by a man whose “study” of history has been seriously distorted by the Marxists he sought out on the Columbia campus, by the race-baiter in the pews of whose church he sat for twenty years, by the political allies he made in Chicago, and by the friends he has chosen to man his administration and to help draft legislation.

In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler urged his readers to understand the times in which they live, in order that they might participate in history and not merely stand outside as spectators. Obama seems to have intuited that, at this moment of world history, the Leader has no need for Comprehension, for Understanding of What Is, for Appreciation of What Has Gone Before, the Leader only has a need to have a vision of What the World Could Be. His dwindling but still-numerous followers seem to agree.

And that is a cause for apprehension.

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Wednesday, 5 August 2009 by bbbeard.

One of the minor stories making the rounds of the blogs this week is about an anonymous artist who is posting a depiction of President Obama as the Joker from The Dark Knight.

Reactions range from chuckles on the right to hysteria on the left.

Personally, I found a revelatory moment in this. My entire life has been lived in the era of “modern art”, promulgated for the most part by talentless hacks who hide behind any of a number of rubrics, e.g. “art is about challenging our preconceptions”, “art is about getting us to see things differently”, “art is about knocking out the scaffolding under the structure of power”, “art is about getting government money from the National Endowment for the Arts” &c.

Here at last is a true specimen of what those modart poseurs were claiming to try to achieve (well, except for the NEA part). The poster attacks and undercuts the most powerful man in the world with visceral imagery — tied cleverly to pop culture — and a single loaded word, “socialism”, that carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. The subversive message cannot be countered or argued away, because the message is visceral and not intellectualized. It is aesthetic precisely because it is a tonic to counter our anesthetic age.

It’s not hard to find commenters who are baffled by the association of the statist Obama with the anarchist Joker, but to me the message is clear: Obama is a person bent on destroying the ‘old’ order of this country (in which freedom is a higher value than equality), and he is using the even older tropes of the left to do it. Obamaphiles can’t see this happening, of course, so they are bewildered by the spreading anger that this President inspires. They lash out with charges of racism, and try to diminish the poster as “dangerous and mean“. They really don’t “get it”. Their outrage is undercut, as usual, by their record of passivity in response to similar images of the previous occupant of the White House.

The anonymity of the artist lends an air of credibility — literally “street cred” in this case — to this satire. An anonymous street artist speaks volumes with a single image, while the Bush-bashing images of incorporated media like Vanity Fair (Bush as Joker) and LA Weekly (Bush as Vampire) and the New York Times (Bush as Frankenstein/Hitler) are merely tired and asinine.

And to those who might find anonymous posters unfair and disturbing, I suggest that the government-organized cult of personality around President Obama is far more creepy.  A thousand U.S. elementary students make the world’s largest beaded mosaic to celebrate the leader’s birthday!? Yes, we can! Remind you of anybody?

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