Annals of Self-Awareness, #24

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Annals of Self-Awareness, 10

Thought I'd revive this occasional series because of two stellar recent entries.

First up, The New Republic asserting liberals are known for this. Yes, dears. Also for their penetrating and unflinching self-knowledge.

Liberals are notoriously loath to take their own side in a fight. But their reticence may well be changing in an age of vigilante, white nationalist terror. https://t.co/8tUsgvkdoI

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) July 6, 2019

And then there's good ol' Joe Biden.

Biden: Russia Election Interference Wouldn’t Have Happened ‘on My Watch and Barack’s Watch’ | Breitbart https://t.co/kEprURRV4y

— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) July 5, 2019

Annals of Self-Awareness, Here's A Doozy

This tweet, and much of the rest of the feed in question makes me think someone needs to do his Meyers-Briggs inventory.

“Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.” - Edmund Burke (1730-1797)

— James Comey (@Comey) December 9, 2017

That'll Teach 'Em!

Whatever else may be said about yesterday's "Day Without Women" (and many people amply covered the fact that it was more a day without privileged women, as working class stiffs and single moms needed their pay and possibly had to scramble for childcare due to closed schools and such), I'm just not sure women are good at protest.

When we want to protest the objectification and sexualization of women, we go topless through the streets or wear vaginas on our heads.  And when we fear that Trump is going to roll back women's rights and return us to stereotyped gender roles, we... stay home and let the men handle things?

Ok, then. (It was sort of refreshing to have the most self-righteous voices on my FB wall silent for a day, though.)

Annals of Self-Awareness, Infinite Jest Version

I thought we had reached the un-toppable peak of lack of self-awareness when Planned Parenthood tweeted about babies being unwelcome at Trump rallies.

Add babies to the list of people @realDonaldTrump would kick out of his campaign rallies. https://t.co/UaqVpv35bd

— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) August 2, 2016

But now Joe Biden has pointed out to a crowd his aide carrying the nuclear football in an effort to make a point about Trump's lack of judgment about the nuclear football.

Sigh. Have we reached peak preposterous yet?





P.S. I think some folks are making a little too much of Biden's "breach." It's not as if we make all that much effort to hide the nuclear football guy or what he does -- you always see pictures of the football being loaded onto planes and helicopters. But you're supposed to be a bit discreet about it. Sheesh.

Taxation & Statesmanship

Daniel Henninger has a devastating column in today's WSJ: Panama Bernie (behind the paywall, but it was also at RealClearPolitics this morning; currently some kind of glitch or hack is interfering with that link for me, but presumably that will resolve shortly).

His thesis is that while Bernie, Hillary & the President rail on about rich people and "offshore accounts" it's government policies that cause them.

Spare me the crocodile tears over the immorality of tax avoidance. Panama is an indictment of government greed..... 

Most governments, including ours, overtax their citizens to feed their own insatiable need for money. Then the legal thieves running the government and their cronies, unwilling to abide the tax levels they created, move their wealth offshore to places like Panama. Arguably, all the world’s people should be able to move their assets “offshore” to escape governments that are smothering economic life and growth, which has stalled in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Blah, blah, blah. Not that I disagree with the point, but given how ticked off I am with the hypocritical, corrupting, cronyist, cowardly, virtue-signaling and bullying business community, I can't muster any fellow feeling for the individuals who head its companies. Big Business deserves anything negative it gets as far as I'm concerned.

The important point he makes, though, is that it's not just rich people who dodge high taxation. EVERYONE does.

Suppressed for generations by high tax rates and regulatory minutiae, most Europeans survive in an economic half-life of gray and black markets, with their assets protected by cash-only transactions, bartering, and endless hours devising off-the-books deals involving family real estate, inflated art prices and anything else they can hide from the taxman.

This is the point that not only progressives, but also many distributists and sincere social justice types, miss. No government, whatever its form, has infinite power to simply plan an economy and gain compliance from its citizens. To paraphrase Jurassic Park's Dr. Malcolm, people find a way. Wise law-givers --even on the rare occasions where they actually are more far-seeing than their citizenry-- are nonetheless bound by what their people will actually bear. 

It's nice that you think tax rate "x" or regulation "y" will contribute to the common good, but if it's so onerous that no one will pay it or abide by it, all you have done is create black markets and inventive ways to skirt the law. And every time you do that, you make it easier for people to beak the law again next time. 

Corruption is the main problem in Third World countries. Progressivism is just the West choosing voluntarily to become more and more corrupt -- all the while blathering on about immorality. 

As Menninger concludes: 

When private capital is under public assault, it will hide. From the wealthiest to the poorest, it creates a world of chiselers, not productive citizens.

Exactly The Same Ones Ticked Off at the Treatment of Galileo

Is it me or is this report on American science knowledge unintentionally amusing? We're told 25% of Americans don't know the earth revolves around the sun -- and then that these same Americans join their countrymen in believing "the benefits of science outweigh any dangers."

Like they would know.

Why I Never Worry About the Apocalypse

Brush with death this afternoon: traveling 65 mph on the highway, the driver in the next lane just about pulled into me before he looked up from his text message just in time.

Wouldn't mention it but for the irony that it was a State Farm insurance agent, driving a company logo car. He was probably reading about his next claim.

Annals of Self-Awareness, 6

This piece would be annoying enough if it weren't running the same week as the JFK retrospective. I will let John Zmirak comment, copying and pasting from his Facebook page.

The NY Times ran the column [linked above] by a liberal Pole contemptuous of those who think that the plane crash that decapitated the Polish government in 2010 on the way to visit Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre. Because it is SO absurd to suspect anything like that of the Russian secret service, right? (I'm not saying it was a conspiracy, but it certainly had the smell of one.) The column presents the mourning over these conservative politicians' deaths as a sick fetish cult, and the suspicion as proof of paranoia--TWO WHOLE YEARS after the investigation was completed.

So what do we think of the NY Times' fetish cult of JFK? Of liberals' STILL trying to blame Dallas conservatives for a shot fired by a Communist into an anti-Communist president? Of the endless conspiracy theories, peddled by crackpots like Oliver Stone? FIFTY YEARS LATER.

That's okay, though. Americans need time to heal.

Annals of Self-Awareness, Campaign Edition

The President, campaigning in Richmond:

I don't think any male politicians should be making health care decisions for women.

Alert Cardinal Dolan: we can save our schools and hospitals if we just put women in as administrators! And women are exempt from IPAB decisions!

Annals of Self-Awareness, Atheist Edition

Heh.

Fish In A Barrel

I'm tired today, so let me just place this item under categories perennial to this blog "Sophomores" and "Annals of Self-Awareness" and allow it to fisk itself. Obama: I Can Do Every Job Better Than Those I Hire To Do It.

From Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, page 66:

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Smacks of a man with no vision of something higher he himself wishes to accomplish.

Annals of Self-Awareness, 8

At the grocery store just now, a coverline from Spanish Cosmo caught my eye:

Auxilio! Mi madre es una cougar!

Is that not the target audience of Cosmo?

Annals of Self-Awareness, 7

Warren Tax-Me-More Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owes taxes going back to 2002.

I'm not a believer that high taxes are salutary for the economy, but it's at least debatable. I'm a little unclear on the Buffett-Geithner-Daschle-Holder-Sebelius-McCaskill-Rangel model in which our programs are sustained by unpaid taxes.

Annals Of Self-Awareness, 6

Anecdote from an essay by Anthony Esolen

One of the young fellows told me that his professor in Introduction to Sociology -- a typical course assigned during orientation to unsuspecting freshmen -- expressed her disdain for our twenty-credit Development of Western Civilization Program, required of all students.  "You should be studying something that will be of use to you in the Real World," she said, "like feminist sociology."

Let's Repeat The Non-Conformists' Oath

Anyone remember Steve Martin's bit about the non-conformists' oath? Thought of it today when I saw the following bumper sticker (on a prius, natch, with a bunch of other stickers as well).

Annoy Conservatives: think for yourself.

That could go in the "annals of self-awareness" file, except that I got to free-associating about what it means to think for yourself, and decided that "thinking for ourselves" in the manner the bumper sticker envisions is precisely our problem. That kind of thinking for yourself usually precludes learning anything about the topic or listening to anyone.

Which sort of relates to this piece I had in my reader (I am too lazy to make a 2nd post and that's all the segue I can muster) but decided was too funny not to give more attention to it. It's about how "natural" ain't human...or at least about how very selective we are about what we deem "natural." If you read me, you're already familiar with the argument. But the picture captions amused me. And it all winds up to this defense of art and holiness, neither of which is "natural."

Cutting down and processing trees to make paper, grinding bone and plant matter to make ink—all artifice, perfected over centuries. All true poetry is profoundly artificial, a laborious distillation of language: who talks in iambic pentameter?
Even charity is a kind of artifice: we’re not born with the ready-made ability to love our neighbor. Our hearts have to be molded like clay until they start to resemble something beautiful. But that beautiful thing, the thing only achieved in fear and trembling, is our deepest self. We’re made in the image of the great Artist, the great Technician, and our charge is not only to tend the garden, but to complete it.

Somebody Never Came Out Of The Malaise

From the "annals of self-awareness" files...

I don't know about lust in his heart, but Jimmy Carter holds a grudge longer than anyone I ever heard of. I'll never forget seeing a Frontline bio of Reagan in which Walter Mondale managed gracious admiration for an old political foe -- and relished Reagan's line about his "youth and inexperience" in the re-telling. But poor old Carter had to get his digs in, even 25 years later.
Now he's going back even further in time to attack another dead foe. Deeply jealous of Obama for getting health care through, he's letting the world know it would have happened on his watch...if not for Teddy Kennedy.

CARTER: The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or 1979.

STAHL: And you blame Teddy for the failure?

CARTER: Exactly.

STAHL: Health care, his issue.

CARTER: Exactly. It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill.

STAHL: Just to spite you? That’s the implication.

CARTER: That’s the implication. He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of American life.

Let's pretend for a second that's true. Can you imagine a more ungracious remark? Or one that reveals more about the inner workings of the heart? Sad.

Update: Who is Mr. Carter's biggest fan?

Annals of Self-Awareness, 5

So a bunch of Corner-ites, beginning w/ Ramesh Ponnuru, think they have outed themselves as Brie-eaters. In "Brie at Last," one of them writes,

Ramesh, you wrote the post I didn't have the courage to.

Spare us. You're National Reviewbies, of course you eat Brie.

Mark Steyn goes off on an amusing tangent in Live Brie or Die!

You'd be surprised at how many Continental dinner parties the general tastelessness of American cheese comes up as evidence of the pointlessness of U.S. federalism: as one Frenchman put it to me, at least in Europe they have the federalisme du fromage, whereby every ten miles you'll come across a different unpasteurized cheese. Whereas USDA has successfully imposed ruthless centralized cheese homogeneity from Maine to Hawaii. 

On the Continent, it is better to have interesting cheese than liberty. It's an argument.

Womyn Priests Can Solve Anything!

We knew he was a humorless and deeply bitter and vindictive old man, but I begin to believe this former president is not right in the head. Jimmy Carter blames the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists for genital mutilation in Africa. Apparently barbaric ancient tribal practices are caused by the failure of those churches to permit women in the clergy today.

I almost made this an Annals of Self-Awareness entry, in that Carter also blames the Church for sex-selection abortions.

Got that? Using, as he did, our foreign aid dollars to promote Western promiscuity and casual acceptance of abortion world-wide has nothing to do with it. Funding International Planned Parenthood clinics has nothing to do with it. Opponents of all abortion are at fault.

Yes, Dear.

Update: St. Paul leaves an amusing comment.

Annals Of Self-Awareness, 4

The junior senator from West Virginia, on his colleague, Senator Kent Conrad (who opposes Rockefeller's effort to open Medicare to people under 65):

it's always about North Dakota and it's never about any other part of the country.

Oh, please, let's have more lectures from WV senators about putting state interest aside.