The Price Of ‘Certainty’

Debt, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Republicans

Sec. 401. of the ‘‘Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013’’ (on page 2 of 77 pages) stipulates the obvious “Increase in contributions to Federal Employees’ Retirement System for new employees.” Well of course.

Conversely, Sec. 403. of the same impenetrable document stipulates an “Annual adjustment of retired pay and retainer pay amounts for retired members of the Armed Forces under age 62.” Judging by the apoplexy among members of the military, the verbiage means cuts to the warfare arm of the welfare-warfare state.

New York Time:

Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, all Republicans, will bring military families to the Senate on Tuesday to protest the cuts. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained of “a real hit to military retirements,” and said the measure did not do enough to reduce the deficit.

Those gullible enough to serve Uncle Sam without questioning whether going abroad in search of monsters to slay is indeed tantamount to defending “American Freedoms”—should wisen up. Of course your pay will be cut first. To your masters, your life is also forfeit.

And:

Under the budget deal, spending on defense and nondefense programs would rise from the $967 billion slated for this fiscal year to $1.012 trillion, mitigating the impact of across-the-board spending cuts and allowing congressional lawmakers to draft detailed spending plans for the first time in several years. Spending in fiscal 2015, which begins Oct. 1, would rise from $995 billion to $1.014 trillion. Though total spending would rise $63 billion over 10 years, the measure would trim the deficit slightly.

Here’s Judge Andrew Napolitano’s take on the agreement struck between Rep. Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee chair, Democrat Patty Murray (here they are on Meet the Presstitutes):

The speaker has demonstrated a poverty of leadership,” Napolitano said. “He did get 332 votes because he got the Democrats to vote with him and he lost the Republicans who retain the value of small government. This doesn’t decrease the deficit, it adds to it. It doesn’t decrease the debt, it adds to it.”
“This is an absolute fraud. They’re afraid of reality. They have no sense, the Republican establishment,” he continued. “They have no sense of small government values that they were elected to put into law.”
“Wow, tell us how you feel,” co-panelist Juan Williams joked.
“There is no distinction between John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi on this,” the judge asserted.

Mitch (McConnell), Mark (Levin), And The Military Industrial Complex

Military, Republicans, The State, Welfare

In an effort to further marginalize those “Republican challengers further to the … right who have few qualms about trimming military budgets,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been rattling the defense industry with threats that “spending cuts” favored by tea party-aligned Republicans will come at the expense of “robust national-security spending.”

We can only hope so.

Writes Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker:

What he’s really saying is that he’s a big spending Republican [IM: is there any other kind?] who will take care of these special interests if they help him in the primary …’It’s, you scratch my back, I will scratch your back.’

What I don’t get is this: This story I got from an exercised Mark Levin. The broadcaster, an unwavering champion of the warfare state and the welfariate that mans it, was irate. Why? Isn’t Mitch, on this front, more aligned with Mark than “tea party-aligned candidates,” some of whom wish to cut military spending?

Why I Miss Lawrence Auster, RIP

Conservatism, Critique, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Brilliantly did the late Larry Auster dissect the demise of Russel Kirk’s conservatism at The American Conservative (TAC) magazine. Division of labor being part of a natural intellectual order that arises, Auster would have likely left it to me to point out the pimped intellectual principles this AC “writer” evinces in her meandering Mandela entry, in which “Madiba” is contrasted, in a manner, with George Washington. (Compare that AC crap with “Mandela Mum About Systematic Murder Of Whites.” You can’t!)

Auster was at his rhetorical best when deconstructing the “typically shapeless pieces”—or “weird and solipsistic” was another of his wonderful coinages—that this unthinking “conservative” crowd disgorged. About the American Conservative’s pipsqueak writers, Mr. Auster wrote with the studied contempt they deserve.

I won’t lie. Larry could be incorrigibly and unforgivingly deceptive (as detailed here). Other than to respond, when he took license with the truth (as I did in said post), I always uttered a silent “thank you” for the dirty work Larry did. (As did I donate to his account, in appreciation of the originality of a “View From The Right.” Its author was always most gracious.)

If Made To Choose, My Favorite Celebrities Would Be …

Celebrity, Foreign Policy, Gender, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

So, the wonderful Mike Tyson slapped a woman. Shut up! Who hasn’t felt like doing that!

MIKE TYSON. I’ve always thought he sounded interesting in interviews, but I lacked the interest and time to pursue further. Today, while reading the Wall Street Journal, I stumbled upon this by Mr. Tyson (I can identify with Tyson’s motivation for reading-material choice):

I love reading philosophy. … Nietzsche’s my favorite. He’s just insane. You have to have an IQ of at least 300 to truly understand him. Apart from philosophy, I’m always reading about history. Someone very wise once said the past is just the present in funny clothes. I read everything about Alexander, so I downloaded “Alexander the Great: The Macedonian Who Conquered the World” by Sean Patrick. Everyone thinks Alexander was this giant, but he was really a runt. “I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity,” he said. I so related to that, coming from Brownsville, Brooklyn.
What did I have to look forward to—going in and out of prison, maybe getting shot and killed, or just a life of scuffling around like a common thief? Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, even a cold pimp like Iceberg Slim—they were all mama’s boys. That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother. In general, I’m a sucker for collections of letters. You think you’ve got deep feelings? Read Napoleon’s love letters to Josephine. It’ll make you think that love is a form of insanity. Or read Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband before she loaded her coat up with stones and drowned herself in a river. I don’t really do any light reading, just deep, deep stuff. I’m not a light kind of guy.

So Tyson slapped a woman. Shut up! Who hasn’t felt like doing that! (This is my version of a Jeselnik-style Joke.)

If forced to choose someone other than Anthony Jeselnik, another favorite celebrity would be … DENNIS RODMAN.

Dennis Rodman has a road-map to peace: “building trust and understanding through sport and cultural exchanges,” as he put it. It’s slow, laborious and precludes lobbing bombs at North Korea or depriving its poor, long-suffering people of contact with the world.
Rodman says this about his frequent visits to Pyongyang: “I know in time Americans will see I’m just trying to help us all get along and see eye to eye through basketball and with my friendship with Kim I know this will happen.”
These are baby steps, but it’s one man’s way of opening up a closed and cloistered society to outside influence: through positive, voluntary exchanges and interactions.

Fortunately, I don’t have to choose.