RedStateEclectic

Break on through to the Other Side

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Ray Manzarek, keyboardist of The Doors, may have finally broken on through to the other side, having passed away yesterday.

One of my absolutely favourite groups.

 

Also listen to this:

 

A Ship with the Engine Off

Notes Steven Kates, author of the best introduction to economics there is:

If even Chris Matthews is done with Obama, who’s left? You can even watch the video here but this is the text:

‘What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,’ Matthews said.

‘So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,’ Matthews continued. ‘But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.’

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama ‘a ship with the engine off.’

“A ship with the engine off.” He’s actually much worse than that and far more destructive but it will do for now.

The source.

Compare this with what Richard Epstein has to say (in the first 2 minutes of the below video) about his former colleague.

 

Despicable Optimists

For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

Palatine Boors

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [ie Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

The source.

 I'm asking you, Benjamin, don't let's be beastly to the Germans.

See also A Plea to James.

PS

The above image represents the distribution of German Americans according to the 2000 census.

The Great Deformation

In the below podcast, the always insightful David Stockman talks about some of the topics dealt with in his new book The Great Deformation.

 

See also here.

Coolidge

Amity Shlaes just published a biography of Coolidge.

“When in 1929 the thirtieth president climbed onto a train at Union Station to head back home to Massachusetts after his sixty-seven months in office, the federal government was smaller than when he had become president in 1923.”  Why, you may ask, do we not know more of this man, this American leader?

The source.

 

See also Ships Not Shops, and Amity Shlaes on the Forgotten Man ...

Reverie

I was wondering how to translate "Träumerei" into English. Consulting the dictionary, I discovered the German word is accurately reflected in these meanings of the English term reverie:

1. a state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing: lost in reverie.

2. a daydream.

3. a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea: reveries that will never come to fruition.

4. Music. an instrumental composition of a vague and dreamy character.

The source.

 

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Allgemeinbildung

There is a monstrosity of a term in German: Allgemeinbildung - general education or educational background. What turns the German term - for me - into a monstrosity is its historical and institutional background. For Lincoln's dictum certainly holds true in the case of Germany, where homeschooling is a crime and institutions of private education are strictly content-controlled by the state:

“The philosophy of the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”

Nothing could be more antithetic to the idea of genuine education than a monopoly on asserting what it is.

Education is the ability to acquire, handle and advance human knowledge. For these purposes, freedom and competition are of the essence.

Instead those who ought to be protected against any kind of conscription are being conscripted into a behemoth broadcaster of prejudices - as Arthur Schopenhauer said:

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

Robert E. Peterson at The Freeman offers an account of a far better model:

The results of colonial America’s free market system of education were impressive indeed. Almost no tax money was spent on education, yet education was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including the poor. No government subsidies were given, and inefficient institutions either improved or went out of business. Competition guaranteed that scarce educational resources would be allocated properly. The educational institutions that prospered produced a generation of articulate Americans who could grapple with the complex problems of self-government. The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today, even in our universities, were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today. A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.

See also Sapere Aude.

A Dip in the Lake ...

... Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity.

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This is the full title of the above piece from the works of John Cage currently exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

This post is to salute a good friend of mine who has the privilege of visiting Chicago for almost a fortnight. She'll be dancing around town somewhat in the manner captured in Cage's piece.

War - Spectator Sport for Western Consumers of Government Propaganda - Mali

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The German caption translates into: Get ready for blind flying!! Yet again?

Killing people all over the world has become a sort of half thrilling, half boring pastime for the Western consumer of government propaganda (see also Panem et Circenses).

As a manoeuvre in self-importance, Western governments kill and create havoc in hapless foreign countries, carefully chosen for being the weakest and poorest in the world.

Who would risk, say, his job to safe a few lives in Mali? And if they kill one another, why should we not share in it, at least we bring the right values to the brawl.

The habit is so fashionable nowadays, i.e. politically correct, even the Germans put a toe in the pond.

It is the failure to understand that heavy handed intervention itself creates new problems has been the central failure of American policy makers ever since 9/11, witness the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. Blowback is the intelligence term used to describe the development of a new and larger problem due to a military or political action that is not carefully considered.

In order to avoid making a mistake, Washington inevitably and automatically magnifies every hiccup internationally into a threat, mobilizing massive resources that lead to the proverbial flea being smashed with a sledge hammer. That there is some kind of existential threat resulting from international terrorism is pretty much a myth. There are lethal insurgencies and terrorist groups to be sure but most have strictly local agendas and nearly all are being hunted and hounded successfully by every police and intelligence agency in the world. Terrorists ready, willing, and, most important, able to travel to Europe or the United States and successfully undertake a terrorist action are few, which means that the United States alone is spending some hundreds of billions of dollars to counter at most a handful of extremists.

Which brings us to the alleged terrorist threat in Africa in general and to Mali in particular, which might well be considered a case study of how non-traditional military engagement driven by interventionist policies can develop willy-nilly when some bad choices are made. What kind of terrorist threat does Mali actually represent and how did the current situation come about?

Read on at the source.

See also:

The Fuzzy Image War ..., Libya - Is It the Oil? as well as The Sport of Facile Killing - A Democratic Pastime (note, to read the article by P.T. Bauer scroll downward until the advertisement is out of sight.)