Ripley: “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

We are in New York City now. Last night they displayed the Towers of Light. It was overwhelming.

Like a the phantom of a limb amputated long ago, it continues to ache.

I still maintain that we were far too nice to the perps that day.

We should have nuked Mecca and Medina on 9/12/2001.

It was the condign penalty for harming the Homeland. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and it cost them two cities. The same rule should have applied to the Arabs.

There would not be another attack on the US for 100 years. Islam would have shriveled up and died.

The backstory is that leading post-modernist "intellectual" Judith Butler, (dubbed by Martha Nussbaum: "The Professor of Piffle") is being awarded the Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt, Germany, together with an honorarium of 50,000 euros, on 9/11/12.

Theodor Adorno was the founder of the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany, which was the fons et origo of the flavor of Marxism out of which the "New Left" (e.g. terrorist bomber and Obama mentor, Bill Ayers) and post modernism grew. (How's that for a Germanic sentence with the verb at the end). So giving Butler a prize named after Adorno seems appropriate to me. Of course, I hate Marxism in all of its varieties including, Butler and Adorno.

However, Butler, although nominally Jewish, is like all good little Marxists, anti-Zionist, and pro-Palestinian. This set Richard Landes, who I admire, off. He has written a bunch of posts on Butler and the disease of leftist anti-semitism. You can start with this one and work your way back: The Post-Self-Destructivism of Judith Butler by Richard Landes. Ron Radosh, one of the few anti-comunist intellectuals put in his perspective: The Case of Judith Butler: The Anti-Semitism that Defines Today’s Western Left By Ron Radosh.

My perspective is that both Landes and Radosh are unwilling to confront the real truth about leftism and anti-semitism. (I use the terms leftism, socialism, and Marxism interchangeably because, in my view they are all the same shitty vodka with different labels)

A political wag once said that anti-semitism is the socialism of fools. I think he was wrong. Anti-semitism is not the socialism of fools, it is socialism. Antisemitism is not an accident of socialism, it is part of its essence.

Socialism asserts the primacy of the social collective over the individual. It sees the socialist state as the only legitimate connection among individuals, who can have no existence outside of the socialist state.

Judaism insists on the connections among Jews and between them and God. Socialism rejects the validity of intra-ethnic connections and the idea of God. Socialism will accept individual Jews, but only if they renounce Judaism.

European Jewish Zionism began with socialist Jews like Herzl, who tried to square this circle by locating a socialist state of Jews in the historic land of Israel. Herzl's first Zionist propaganda was a socialist utopia: "Alte Neue Land". And, at Israel's inception, the Zionists tried to create a socialist state. The kibbutzes, which were its core, were some of the most thoroughgoing experiments in socialist living ever.

However, dreams die hard. Socialism always fails and so it did in Israel, where the socialist state has been dismantled, and the kibbutzes have been liquidated or privatized. Further, many of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Muslim countries turned out be more interested in Judaism and its traditions than socialism.

The remaining Jewish Socialists are a sad lot. The largest portion of the Israeli public now rejects them. Unfortunately many of them are academics like Butler, Finklestein, Chomsky, and the late Tony Judt (may his name be blotted out) who have many routes to afflict their fellow Jews who have remained faithful to the Jewish people and their religion.

The left originally embraced the Palestinians on orders from the Soviet Union, which decided that backing them served its geo-political ambitions. They blacklisted Israel when it abandoned socialism. The Soviet Union is gone, but the malady lingers on. And it will until socialism is extirpated from intellectual life in the Western world.

I have lost all interest in civility. The socialist Democrats have never been civil. they have always resorted to smears and lies. Their entire presidential campaign consist of nothing else.

And the State Run Media has always been their fluffers and peg boys. Enough. I will be civil when I am dealing with civil people, but Democrats have never been civil, and I am sick of fighting them with one hand tied behind my back, and of trying to be nice to them.

Harry Reid is also documented to be a crook. How did he save up a $10 million net worth on Government wages? He is as crooked as any Democrat who has ever held office.

Furthermore, I know for a fact that Harry Reid is a pedophile. A very trustworthy man told me that he saw Harry Reid anally sodomize a ten year old boy in the Senate Gym Shower room.

As I noted below, we have developed the worst ruling class ever. It is so bad, that even David Brooks knows something is seriously wrong in Eliteville.

Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment … dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service. Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. … [They aren't] doing a better job of running [those institutions] than the old boys’ … .

* * *

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. …

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. … they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). …

Brooks is not acute enough to name the disease whose symptoms he has well described. The disease is marxism. Milos Foreman to the contrary notwithstanding*, this is not old fashioned industrial grade stalinism, it is modern academic marxism learned by our academics from the incomprehensible ravings of demented French “philosophers” like Foucault and Derrida. Marxism has caused our elites to shun religion, the military, and American History.

Shallow, cheap, marxist, atheism has caused the mainstream Protestant denominations to go into a tailspin. It has also deprived the elite of a moral language and the moral training necessary to support an elite’s role in society. Further it has severed a very important connection between the elites and the low sloping foreheads in flyover country.

A further consequence is the collapse of sexual morality and the rise of the politics of the pudenda, which holds that sexual behavior is a mere question of taste, the most important thing about a persons identity is his his taste in sexual partners, and that nothing can legitimately prevent sexual gratification like the fear of pregnancy or incurable STDs. Abortionism and gay marriage are political issues created by modern academic marxism, not by the low slopers who are appalled by them.

The hatred of the military by modern academic marxists has grown like a poison ivy patch for the last 50 years. Just re-opening a few ROTC programs will not wash the stain away. It is another theater of service and another connection to the low slopers that our elites have shunned. (Note: if we ever get back the reins, military service should be a precondition to any governmental payment for higher education)

And the anathema on American History has also poisoned the relationship between the elites and everybody else. America is not a nation of blood and soil. It is instead dedicated to the ideals of the liberal enlightenment, and there is nothing modern academic marxism hates more than the liberal enlightenment. The mystic chords of memory do not connect modern academic marxism to anything in American history or to the American people. The sweet sentiment of patriotism is mocked by modern academic marxism, which holds that America is not exceptional except in the enormity of its crimes, and that their patriotism is reserved for an imaginary communist America ruled by them.

*

The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

No Milos, we know that modern academic marxism is not good old soviet communism, or as I say, industrial grade stalinism. But, modern academic marxism is marxism. Just like Unitarianism and Eastern Orthodoxy are both Christian. Further, Obama is just as socialist as the politicians of the leading socialist parties (French Socialist, British Labour, German Social Democrats) in Europe.

Middle class? Upper Middle Class? My foot!

Middle class? Upper Middle Class? My foot!

The Blogfather ran an item today:

Julie Gerstein: Let’s Stop With This “Having It All” Crap. “Being able to ask if ‘you’re having it all’ comes from such a place of middle-class privilege it makes my head spin.”

Actually, it’s upper-middle-class privilege. Most of the debate about feminism is an occupation of upper-middle-class women. Which is why nobody asks — or cares — about whether men can “have it all.” ...

 And it kind of bothered me:

The middle class is (using CBO's 2007 numbers) the 3rd and 4th quintiles of income from roughly $35,000 to $75,000. The fifth (highest) quintile is north of $75,000. The top 10% begins at  $103,000, top 10% at about $142,000, and the infamous top 1% at $353,000.

Now where do you suppose Ann Marie Slaughter (the original subject of this whole flap) sits in the grand scheme of things. She and her Princeton prof husband are easily clearing $500,000 in cash earnings. And are easily in the top 1%, but more importantly, they are professors at Princeton (Not Trenton State CC) and she has had a Deanship at Princeton and a top job in the State department.

I think this is a member of the Ruling Class.

Of course, Princeton profs are notoriously unconscious of their place in the great food chain of life:

"You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence."

"The Angry Rich" By Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20krugman.html

Oh, yes, and the worst Ruling Class ever.

Wretchard Nails American Policy in the Middle East

 One of the very best thinkers about contemporary policy and politics is Richard Fernandez, proprietor of the Belmont Club and one of the Founding Fathers of PJ Media. Today (probably yesterday as his meatspace 20 is Oz) he dissected US policy on Syria, or should I say he gutted and filleted it. Here is a taste:

... in just a little while politicians will be asking themselves, “who lost Egypt”? That would be just one of their worries if the Syrian civil war spreads into Iraq and destroys the fruits of America’s expensive victory there; if it pushes hundreds of missiles into Hezbollah hands and forces the hand of Israel; if it results in a full-scale confrontation between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East based on a conflict fueled by Russia, which could turn around and sell Europe the fuel it need but can no longer get from the region. There may be a nuclear confrontation between Iran, whose WMD program has but been barely inconvenienced by the administration and the Saudi-led Sunnis, with the entire Pakistani atomic arsenal at their disposal.

None of this is inevitable. But those catastrophes are now distinctly within the realm of possibility and palpably nearer. The bulk of America’s forces are in landlocked Afghanistan, dispatched by a genius policy that sought to ‘end the war where it began’. Those forces have scant means of resupply through Pakistan, which has finally manifested its open hatred for the United States. Nor can American forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan except through Russian controlled territory — the same Russia which Hillary Clinton must now face off against in Syria.

The administration has checkmated itself in such an epic manner as to beggar the imagination. Ordinary stupidity could hardly have effected such a comprehensive disaster. Mere imbecility would have been insufficient to the task. Only an arrogance that mistook ignorance and incompetence for “smart diplomacy” could have achieved such a train wreck.

The Syrian Civil War

As they say: RTWT.

 

Walking in Rhythm

 What follows is my attempt at translating a press release from a science lab into English. The original Press Release can be found at this link.

Electrical engineers and neuroscientists at Stanford University have proposed a new theory of the brain activity behind arm movements in an article published online June 3rd by "Nature".

Neuroscientists have long known that the neurons responsible for vision encode specific, external-world information in a form resembling digital electronic video. Many neuroscientitsts thought that motor cortex neurons transmitted signals about direction, distance, and speed, in the same way visual cortex neurons transmit color, intensity, and form.

The co-first author of the study Mark Cunningham said that "Our findings indicate an alternative principle is at play ... the motor cortex is a flexible pattern generator, which sends rhythmic signals down the spinal cord".

The researchers studied the brain activity of monkeys reaching to touch a target. By monitoring the electrical activity of motor-cortex neurons in the monkeys, researchers found an oscillatory response that is not independent from neuron to neuron. Instead, the entire neural population oscillates as one. The electrical signal that drives a given movement is the summation of the rhythms of all the motor neurons firing at a given moment.           

"Each neuron behaves like a player in a band. When the rhythms of all the players are summed over the whole band, a cascade of fluid and accurate motion results."

Mr. Churchland explained that the patterns of activity the primary motor cortex displays presumably derive from evolutionarily older rhythmic motions such as the swimming motion of leeches and the gait of walking monkeys.

"Say you're throwing a ball. Beneath it all is a pattern. Maybe your shoulder muscle contracts, relaxes slightly, contracts again, and then relaxes completely, all in short order," explained Churchland. "That activity may not be exactly rhythmic, but it can be created by adding together two or three other rhythms. Our data argue that this may be how the brain solves the problem of creating the pattern of movement."

"Finding these brain rhythms surprised us a bit, as the reaches themselves were not rhythmic. In fact, they were decidedly arrhythmic, and yet underlying it all were these unmistakable patterns," said Churchland.

"Further research in this area may help us devise more effective technology for controlling prosthetic limbs." said Yuan Liu of NIH.

I think this is very cool and that scientists and engineers can turn this work into thinks that can help suffering humanity as fast as possible. I also think it confirms an older artistic insight into music and dance:

In Celebration of the Jubilee

Last week there was a great deal of to do over the Queen's Jubilee. I saw this headline:

"Royal style: Why Elizabeth II is the queen of color"
by Lauren Said-Moorhouse for CNN on June 5, 2012

The article was nothing, but the picture caught my eye:

I thought of an old song by the Rolling Stones, they are English too, you know. Maybe they were on to something:


Have you seen her all in gold
Like a queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset going down
Have you seen the lady fairer

It wasn't a typical Stones song, it was a late 60s thing, a bit self consciously psychedelic.

Here is the cover of the album:

And the complete lyrics:

[Begins with chorus]
She comes in colors everywhere;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

Have you seen her dressed in blue
See the sky in front of you
And her face is like a sail
Speck of white so fair and pale
Have you seen the lady fairer


[Chorus]

Have you seen her all in gold
Like a queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset going down
Have you seen the lady fairer

[chorus]

One More Picture:

Oh yes, and, God Save the Queen.