Category Archives: Social Commentary

American Character

is at stake:

A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.

In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.

It’s not just a fiscal problem, or a governance problem. It’s a moral problem, when so many think that they are literally entitled to live off the productivity of others. It can’t go on, so, one way or the other, it won’t.

Antonio Villaraigosa

…”is the Hispanic Obama”:

Clean, articulate, well spoken, and full of shit beyond reckoning.

Though as another commenter points out, he’s not actually all that articulate or well-spoken. Of course, neither is Obama, when off teleprompter.

Fortunately, he’s only been Peter Principled to a position where he can just wreck Los Angeles, instead of the whole country, as Obama was. It is amazing that they made this clown head of their convention. Everyone I know in LA split a gut when they heard about his new role. As is noted, unlike the Republicans, with Rubio, Cruz, Martinez, etc., he’s the best the Dems can come up with as their token Hispanic.

Of course, in fairness to Dr. Peter, the Donkeys seem to have a knack for promoting hacks to far above their level of incompetence.

Dog Whistling

past the graveyard:

…now that “golf” and “Chicago” — along with “Clint,” “Medicare,” “debt,” “jobs,” “foreign policy,” and “quantitative easing” — are all racist code words, are there any words left that aren’t racist? Yes, here’s one:

“Negrohood.”

Not familiar with it? New York Assembly candidate Ben Akselrod used it the other day in a campaign mailout to Brooklyn electors, arguing that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50 percent in our negrohood so far this year.”

Like Messrs. Dunn, Matthews, and O’Donnell, Ben Akselrod is frighteningly pasty white, and a Democrat, and so presumably has highly refined racial antennae. Had a campaign staffer suggested that Mr. Akselrod’s opponent was wont to wear “plus-fours” and had a “niblick,” obviously such naked racism would have been deleted in the first draft. But the more subtly allusive “negrohood” apparently just slipped through.

Mr. Akselrod now says it was a “typo.” Could happen to anyone. You’re typing “neighborhood,” and you leave out the “i,” and the “h” and “b,” and the “o” and “r” get mysteriously inverted. Either that, or your desktop came with Al Sharpton’s spellcheck. And then nobody at the campaign office reading through the mailer spotted it. Odd.

It’s only the beginning of September. So we’ve got two more months of this. I don’t know how it will play in the negrohoods of Chicago — whoops, sorry, I apologize for saying “Chicago” — but let me make a modest observation from having spent much of the last few months traveling round foreign parts. When you don’t have frighteningly white upscale liberals obsessing about the racist subtext of golf, it’s amazing how much time it frees up to talk about other stuff. For example, as dysfunctional as Greece undoubtedly is, if you criticize the government’s plans for public-pensions provision, there are no Chris Matthews types with such a highly evolved state of racial consciousness that they reflexively hear “watermelon” instead of the word “pensions.” So instead everyone discusses the actual text rather than the imaginary subtext. Which may be why political discourse in the euro zone is marginally less unreal than ours right now: At least they’re talking about “austerity”; over here we’re still spending, and more than ever.

One of the encouraging things is that I think the race card has been so overcharged that no one can proffer it up any more, and be taken seriously.

How Long Do You Want To Live?

I think that this guy is asking the wrong question. “Forever” isn’t the option, it’s “indefinitely,” or “as long as I want to live.” No one is going to live forever, unless you think we’ll get around the heat death of the universe somehow, and there will always be accidents, regardless of how advanced biomedical technology becomes. But ignoring that issue, given my experience with cryonics, the numbers don’t surprise me at all. Of course, it’s one thing to say you only want to live to be eighty when it’s a theoretical issue, decades from now. A lot of those people change their minds when the time actually approaches.

The Wages Of Leftism

Thoughts on the reality avoidance of the “elites,” from VDH:

…tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.

Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.

When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.

But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.

California is on its way to becoming Greece.