Month: September 2010

Announcement: Jim Bennett and I are working on a book together.

by

It will be about the American way of life, where it came from, where it’s going and what we should be doing. So far it looks like we will have everything in there: The Magna Carta, the Singularity, Resilient Communities, the Haymarket Riot, the Anglosphere, the Constitution, Libertarians and Conservatives having a group hug, the inevitable doom of our would-be overlords, pretty much everything including the kitchen sink. We are still working on the book proposal. But we are moving along.

So far the awesomeness is only nascent, but the grandeur of the vision is beginning to grip me.

I will be posting on the blog, shamelessly seeking assistance from our staggeringly brilliant readers, as we get into the research and writing. The CBz hive-mind is a juggernaut which nothing can withstand for long.

I plan to pick your brains, dear friends.

You have been warned!

I Think I See What Glenn Beck is Doing (Updated)

by

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

[bumped]

[UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD]

Read more

The real narrative

by

[A modified version of this article was published in the September issue of the British monthly magazine Standpoint. For reasons of space it had to be shortened. This is the original version.]

Not so long ago I was taking part in one of those interminable discussions on a forum about the situation to do with Islam in Britain where people who have not set foot here or know anything about this country assure those of us who live here that we do not understand at all what is happening. At one point somebody asked me scornfully how many of the British Muslims’ ancestors had “come to England’s aid during the war”. After I finished explaining that it was the wrong way of phrasing the question and the country is Britain I added: “Quite a few, as it happens, especially from the Indian Empire. Have a look at the gravestones in British war cemeteries.”

There are many Muslim names among those 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers listed on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres and many Muslim names together with the Sickle on the gravestones; there are war graves of Muslim soldiers in many parts of the Far East, such as Hong Kong; the Brookwood Military cemetery contains two dozen graves of Muslim dead who died in Britain of their wounds, had been buried in the Muslim Burial Ground in Horsell and were transferred in 1968. One could go on and on with lists of British war cemeteries in Europe, in North Africa, in the Middle East and in the Far East. Everywhere there are fallen soldiers from the Indian Army in both world wars and many of them are Muslims.

In World War I the volunteer Indian army played a huge part in Western Europe and the Middle East. It numbered 1.3 million and about 400,000 of them were Muslim. 74,187 Indian soldiers died in the war and tens of thousands were wounded. It is hard to distinguish exactly how many were Muslims except by the signs on the gravestones as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims had all volunteered, all fought and all suffered casualties. We do know, however, that the first VC awarded to an Indian soldier was to a Muslim, Khudadad Khan from the Punjab district of present day Pakistan. He had distinguished himself at the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914.

Between the two wars the Indian army was reduced in numbers and was down to 200,000 men in 1939. By August 1945 it numbered around 2.5 million, the largest volunteer army in history. It fought on all fronts but distinguished itself particularly in the Far East. Over 36,000 Indian servicemen were killed in the ferocious Burmese and other campaigns and 34,354 wounded; 67,340 were taken prisoner; 4,000 decorations were given to members of the Indian Army, including 38 VCs and GCs. A good many of these went to Muslim soldiers and NCOs.

According to an article in the Defence Journal in September 1999 by Brigadier (Retired) Noor A. Husain the All India Muslim League’s sympathies from the very beginning of the war were clearly with the Allies against the Axis powers. (On the whole, this can be said for most political groupings in India. Despite later explanations, support for the pro-Japanese Indian National Army was considerably smaller than for the Allied war effort.)

The Brigadier also points out that after 1942 the proportion of Muslim soldiers went down not because of any paucity of volunteers but because of the growing political demands for Pakistan and Indian government policy. But, of course, not all Muslim soldiers came from what is now Pakistan, whose own army after 1947 had a close working relationship with the British military establishment. Over 380,000 Punjabi Muslims joined during the war, which makes it the largest single group.

The role of the British Indian Army in the two world wars, the fact that in both it constituted the largest volunteer forces to take part in the fighting, the soldiers’ bravery and the huge number of casualties tend to be forgotten at times. The role of the Muslim soldiers, while the equivalent to that of the Hindus, Sikhs and Gurkhas, needs to be emphasised for a very good reason: the real narrative of British Muslim history includes those glorious and courageous episodes. It is a narrative that cannot be disputed (unlike the rather dubious assertions of Mohammed being a feminist and conservationist); it is a narrative to be proud of.

Laboring Under a Delusion

by

I have always been a little suspicious of the official unemployment rate, just from observing the ways people can be in or out of work, and the many ways it can be measured. Disability and workers compensation claims seem to rise when jobs are scarce. People may decide to go to law school, stay home with the kids, take temporary jobs, or start drawing a pension rather than continue a fruitless search. None of these substitutes show up in the unemployment figures.

I find the labor force participation rate a lot more straightforward. It includes anyone over the age of 16 who has a job, whether permanent or temporary. The rate of participation declines as a population ages, of course. You can drill into the Bureau of Labor Statistics database for more details, but the overall picture is pretty bad.

At the end of 2008, it all went south in a hurry:

Labor force participation rates
Labor force participation rates

The National Bureau of Economic Research nearly called the end of the recession as July 2009 at their April 2010 meeting, based on positive GDP reports, yet job losses are accelerating (unexpectedly). There is very little point in trying to stimulate the economy while making it less attractive to hire American workers. How long before someone in the Obama administration figures that out?

Just a couple more observations, based on this chart and some of the other things I found rummaging around in the data:

  • The jobs lost in the 2000-2001 recession don’t seem to have ever come back. The percentage of people in the workforce stabilized, but never recovered. This time, it looks like the re-employment picture will be even worse.
  • The biggest change in the rate since WW II was caused by the massive entry of women into the workforce (not shown in this chart). In the past few years, the rate of workforce participation for women has actually decreased slightly. Men’s employment picture is far more dire, but the change in women’s employment rate, while much smaller, is unprecedented.
  • The Boomers are not retiring. Their workforce participation rate is well above forecast. Have you looked at your 401(k)?

… is Enemy Action

by

Another drilling rig has exploded in the Gulf and just days after the House (maybe) overturned the drilling moratorium.

Hmmmm,

We went 31 years without a major oil spill in the Gulf prior to Deepwater Horizon. Now we have a second explosion so soon. Meanwhile, some Greenpeace “direct action” types are attacking an oil rig off Greenland.

Hmmmm,

There’s no evidence of any human agency in either explosion. Still, when you look at the utter frothing hysteria directed against drilling and the oil industry in general, it’s pretty easy to imagine a group deciding that a little violence now will save a lot of lives later. After all, don’t environmental activists always tell us that they’re fighting for the survival of the entire earth and humanity itself? With such high stakes, it would be easy for someone to talk themselves into a “you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet” rationalization.

Certainly, if the situation was reversed, the left would have no trouble using the same level of proof as evidence of nefarious plots by the right wing. After all, they think the right engineered a war that killed hundreds of thousands just to make a few bucks. Blaming the right for something like blowing up an oil rig would be chump change compared to that.

At present, the FBI considers ecoterrorists the most active domestic terrorist groups. It wouldn’t be much of a step from burning down buildings to blowing up oil rigs. With the resources and training that Greenpeace and other environmental groups have demonstrated they possess, they certainly have the physical ability to carry out such an attack.

Hmmmm,

We will have to wait and see I suppose. Even if sabotage was the cause it might be hard to prove with all the evidence thousands of meters below the sea. Still, you know the old axiom: Once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, three times…

[Update (2010-9-3 7:58am): From reading the comments, I think this post came out sounding more serious than I intended. I intended a more of a tongue-in-cheek tone to serve as a reminder of how easy it would be to see human agency in such events especially given the hysterical levels of leftwing rhetoric against the oil companies. We could eventually see the environmentalist version of the Weathermen if the hysteria continues.]