UPDATE IV: Don’t Believe Michelle Obama (“Respec”)

Affirmative Action, America, Christianity, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

In time for the release of my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” this week’s WND column explains what the book is about and why it is an important read at this juncture in our history. Here’s an excerpt from “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama”:

“Michelle Obama will travel to South Africa later this month. The First Lady’s trip coincides with the release of my new book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ And not a moment too soon. (Read the Preface on VDARE.COM.) ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’s’ will dispel any myths Michelle Obama is likely to help perpetuate about this writer’s former homeland.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture in our history? Simply this: It is essential that we curb the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental, but equally detrimental, transformation is underway. …

America’s intellectual ‘Idiocracy’—the president and the “Untamed Ids” of the media, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—are egging on revolution in the Middle East. Post-apartheid South Africa should serve to remind this retinue of romantics that stable societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. For better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. …”

The complete column is “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama.”

Purchase “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” from Amazon or from the Publisher (who ships free) by clicking on the “Buy” Button of your choice.

UPDATE I (June 10): Ruth, I am against forced integration. I am for free association, as intended by the founded of this great country, and as is egregiously violated by the Civil Rights Act. If you don’t want to hire or serve a Jew (that’s me) because you have misgivings about Jews qua Jews; I support your natural right as a property owner to associate or dissociate at will.

UPDATE II: It’s interesting how the FB thread on WND was hijacked by one jackass’s complaint, instead of being a forum to discuss the substance of the book. Then two people fell into each others’ pixelated arms had a love fest, giving into sheer vanity and sanctimony. America’s reality-show mentality! For a jackass who hates writers who use words he doesn’t know (my favorite kind of writers), the guy sure spent a lot of time dismissing and dissing me. I think I used a term in the column I learned from the editor of my book (Robert Stove): “Untamed Id.” That’s what’s on display here.

I wrote the book b/c people are dying. But it’s become the topic of reality-show like kibitzing on WND’s facebook thread. There’s the Yiddish my Afrikaner reader Mr. Juann Strauss likes. Sorry: It came to me. My late grandpa’s influence. In the USA you have to apologize for your personal idiosyncrasies; for not fitting a mold.

My complete comment posted @WND (visible if you are on Facebook), in response to the complaint, is this: Imagine having to apologize for using the English to the best of one’s ability! Our founding fathers forewarned against an “Idiocracy” rising. “If a nation expects to be …ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be “a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.” That means not being angered by what you don’t know. (A function of a fragile ego.) For the benefit of the reader who heaps scorn on me for failing to mirror his vocabulary and mindset, I recommend avoiding “The Federalist”- and “Anti-Federalist Papers.” Anything our founders wrote is sure to drive him and his ilk to distraction. May I also suggest reaching for a dictionary, or for Google, instead of the ad hominem? I do the first whenever I read words I don’t know, which is often.

UPDATE III: Rob Stove, who posted below, always reserves his funniest comments to email. I’m sorry, Maestro, I’m outing you:

It’s weird. When I was an undergraduate I was perpetually being rebuked by my lecturers because they found my prose “superficial”. Now I’m being rebuked by these lecturers’ sons and daughters, who find my prose “elitist”. Yet it has been the same sort of prose which I’ve written all along!
Back when lecturers were denouncing my stuff as “superficial”, I was getting quite a few articles published in The Canberra Times, The Weekend Australian, and suchlike recognizably serious newspapers, earning fairly substantial sums as a consequence. The 1980s was a veritable paradise for a literate freelancer in this country. Now that I’m officially “elitist”, I can’t even land an article in The Pig-Breeder’s Gazette.
“Elitist” now gets routinely applied in Australia to any remark above the intellectual level of Britney Spears’s navel-lint.

UPDATE IV (June 11): Hey Roger, dodo, if you can figure it out, please post your impressions of the book to Amazon. Unlike jackass, you will read it and offer a comment on the substance of da book, good or bad, or both. I began reading it to refresh my memory in anticipation of interviews. It’s pretty easy sailing. Even my stats have been, as I like to say, de-Sailerized. I.e., made simple, unlike Steve Sailer’s statistics (which are fit for the smarter cohort), so that jackasses can grasp. Oh, stay tuned: sometime soon I will post a column about crappy writing. A few lessons I learned in journalism school in the country of da Hebes where I be getting some of my learning. The column I wrote yesterday on WND is wicked good, according to those criteria. I will compare it with a crap piece of writing, which the likes of Jackass will find heavenly.

Respec to my peeps.

Afghan GDP Equals US Military Spending There

Drug War, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Military, Neoconservatism, War, Welfare

Belatedly, and after spilling much blood and treasure for nothing at all in Afghanistan, mainstream opinion makers have concluded what we non-interventionists concluded a decade ago. Making Afghans (and Iraqis) wards of the American state will increase their impotence (to say nothing of violating their negative, leave-me-alone rights and ours, as we’ve paid for the adventure in lost lives and livelihoods). “Ultimately, philanthropic wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects.”

A “two-year congressional investigation from Senate Democrats” gives details of the defeat. Via the National Journal:

“World Bank data estimates that 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product comes from spending related to the military and donor community presence, according the report, which warns that a withdrawal could pull the rug out from under the Afghan economy.” …

MORE…

I suspect that slashing and burning the Afghans’ poppy fields hasn’t helped them either. “In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'” (From “Tokers Are Terrorists Now”)

UPDATED: Engorged Organisms & The Porn Aestehtic

Aesthetics, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The genus Rep. Anthony Weiner, an “engorged organism” indigenous to DC, has an exotic-looking, ravishing mate. (Full image posted below.) But men—at least American men—prefer what I’ve termed (in “Sluts Galore”) the porn aestehtic:

Ideas about feminine beauty are bust. The sublime 1350 B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti showcases her fine cheekbones and graceful neck. Her Western contemporary look-a-like, down to the perfectly shaped dainty face, was Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve embodied the French ideal of female beauty, immortalized in the bust of Marianne.
But forget these regal beauties; they, apparently, have nothing on the double-chinned, large, flat expanses that make up Britney Spears’ crude mug. Nefertiti, Hepburn, Deneuve—your patrician pulchritude no longer excites the “porn generation”; the sly, weasel-like looks of a Paris Hilton do.
The culture’s aesthetic preferences are now shaped by the basest of instincts. I call it the porn aesthetic, another example of which is Hue Hefner’s harem of hos. The three kept creatures are currently starring in a reality show called “The Girls Next Door” …

MORE…

UPDATE: The addiction excuse is just that: an excuse and an error. (Read “Evil, Not Ill.”) The liberal establishment—it includes Republicans and Democrats—has accepted that all bad behavior is a disease. From lying to murder: every bit of human nastiness is said to be a biological-based disorder. The premise for this conceit is the Rousseauist notion that humans are all equally good and would remain pristine if not for external agents, namely biological or societal forces. The problem is, as I have shown in my writing, and Dr. Thomas Szasz has done over the course of half a century: there is no basis for this claim—not in biology, much less in morality.

I quote from “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.

UPDATED: The Animal (Spirits) Move Chairman Ben

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Political Economy, The State

John Maynard Keynes wrote impenetrable prose. Likewise, Ben S. Bernanke speaks it. Obscurantism typified Bernanke’s address at the International Monetary Conference, Atlanta, Georgia. The “animal spirits” are lurking everywhere here. See if you can spot them.

UPDATED (June 8): John Maynard Keynes, “the commie who controls economies from the grave,” is alive and well in Fed Chairman Ben’s voodoo economics:

BEN: “[T]he ability and willingness of households to spend will be an important determinant of the pace at which the economy expands in coming quarters.”

“Spooky dude” Keynes, and his acolytes, honestly believed that the fickle consumer’s biorhythms control the economy. If the consumer is spooked, “the economy” gets that way too.

BEN: “[H]ouseholds are facing some significant headwinds, including increases in food and energy prices, declining home values, continued tightness in some credit markets, and still-high unemployment, all of which have taken a toll on consumer confidence.”

The Keynesian mixes cause and effect liberally. After all, the average man hasn’t a hope in hell of grasping the exclusive knowledge and magic formulas to which only Voodoo economists are privy. What Ben fails to mention is this: He is pumping vast amounts of paper, non-stop, into America’s phony economy. With every infusion of fake money, as Austrian economists have warned, the dollar drops like a stone. Assets will continue to devalue. Saving will be difficult; retirement near impossible. Prices will soar, and the currency will eventually collapse (hyperinflation).

Before you blame Obama, the Republikeynsians began this spiral in earnest.

Have at it.