Bill's Notes

Much to be thankful for.

Response to this. Go read it and come back, if you like.

I grew up during the Cold War, and recall the profound pessimism of the West and especially Western intellectuals during the 70s. The press beat out its negativity every day -- we were losing the Cold War, our economy was shot, things were not going to get better (I'm not kidding -- I have a few books that said things were simply not going to get better, economically, in the West). We were DOOMED.

I was profoundly affected by this. When President Reagan came along, and switched our country to the economics of Milton Friedman, peace be upon him, all that pessimism turned out to be a lie. What surprised me was that liberals didn't take the lesson (even me). It wasn't until the Wall came down in November 1989 that I got it -- Reagan had been right all along. The West had dramatically underestimated its strength ... we had simply crushed the Soviets under an economic juggernaut.

And liberals did something shocking. After decades of relentless doom-mongering, they changed tactics: They said the Soviets were never a real threat and of course we would beat them. That's when I began to understand that most left-liberals were not merely wrong, that they were mentally sick. Arguing in the alternative is fine for defense lawyers -- but not for public intellectuals trying to explain public events.

Perhaps I'm conflating two groups of people ... by liberals, I'm talking about a certain kind of liberal, not all.

By the time Bill Clinton came around, some liberals had gotten it. Clinton was one -- he was an optimistic guy, with a ready smile, and a belief in the future and the United States. He didn't touch the economics, except to work with Congress to be more fiscally responsible, and combined with a few other factors, road an economic boom.

Anyway, in the past few years, one thing that worries mean is the return of this Defeatism. I find myself prone to it, too. We look at our divisions and our weaknesses in the West, and the skill of our opponents in exploiting them. And it's both the Left and Right and Middle who have defeatists.

But are we seriously going to lose to Muslims? Or are we going to steamroll them economically and culturally and afterward, listen to people saying that the Islamic threat was always overblown?

That is, as in the Cold War, we may lose battle after battle and all our intentional efforts may come to nought. But I wonder if our unintentional efforts -- that is, the fact that we're all at work today being productive and arguing with one another and selling this and that -- I wonder if in the end that will just bury them.

Don't get me wrong. The Muslims have us over a barrel, just as Gates of Vienna says. Cheap oil. Until we have energy independence, they have a serious weapon against us ... they can inflict severe economic pain on us, and relieve that pain as well. And they have used that leverage just as a good behaviorist would.

That's why I've come around to the belief that our No. 1 national priority must be energy independence. Right now there's an Israeli company that alleges it can create shale oil at $17 a barrel. Granted, we don't know just how environmentally friendly they're being, but we have in Colorado shale oil reserves that are at least three times the known Saudi reserves. (Coal-to-diesel is another option -- and we have plenty of coal, just in Montana). We can, within five to 10 years, become energy independent and remain energy independent for decades, if not a century, just from our known reserves in Colorado.

Anyway, I doubt we'll do it until we're forced. We have to remove that leverage ... and once we do, we'll see that we're free to conduct foreign policy as we see fit.

As it says in Gates of Vienna, it's important not to overestimate the enemy, just as it's important not to underestimate him. Muslims add very little to the world, are essentially parasitic to the west, and deprived of their oil revenues, don't have a lot of options.

FWIW. YMMV.

Good advice.

Particularly hitting home is this:

Your friends and family also may get into the act, telling you it's okay to stretch to pay that mortgage, since your income will eventually rise and make the payments more comfortable.

Maybe, maybe not. But anyone who's been house-poor knows the emotional, psychological and financial stress of stretching too far....

Buying too much house could mean giving up other things you want: vacations, eating out, a college fund for your kids, a sufficient retirement kitty. Or it could mean ever more debt, as you borrow to try to maintain your lifestyle.

I had exactly this advice given to me and against my better judgment (and to my regret) I ignored it. I've had to give up virtually everything for the past two years -- including maintenance on my home, my car and yes, even medical appointments for myself. Etc., etc., there's just no end to it.

Fortunately, I didn't stretch to buy my house. But a land purchase together with my house has been a financial bridge too far, especially considering the high land taxes, and has induced ongoing, severe emotional and financial stress.

The good news: I can get out of this mess by selling my land. The bad news: it's been on the market for eight months and no offers. I'm switching real estate agents and lowering the price next week. I'll probably take a bath, but at this point merely getting out from under the payments will be worth it. And there's a good chance I can keep the losses to under $10k.

Plus, in the future I know to stick to my guns and listen to my better judgment.

Israel signs up for the Brave New World and creates homosexual "marriage" via judicial fiat.

Not that there is ever a good time to spit in God's face, but with all the threats from Iran and Hezbollah and Gaza, now seems like a particularly inopportune time to tell God to buzz off.

Fran Porretto applies his prodigious intellect to the topic of the cultural war and sex here.

I quote (and clip) at length, because this is partially what I was getting at in my less clear posts:

Conservatives have been fighting an uphill battle for the allegiance of the two post-Baby Boom generations for one giant reason — the one highlighted by Miss Johansson's scurrilities about President Bush:

SEX.

The perception that political conservatives are eager to return the nation to Puritan sexual mores enforced by law has a lot of otherwise sensible people too badly spooked ever to pull the Republican lever....

Our small coterie of "party conservatives" such as P. J. O'Rourke and the co-creators of South Park aren't nearly enough to countervail the leftist media's promotion of [cameras in the bedroom] nightmare....

According to the most recent census data, 74% of Americans self-identify as Christian. No doubt the majority of us are at least troubled by the rash of contraceptive abortions. God knows ... But other surveys seem to indicate that the fraction of us eager to ban abortion completely is a small minority — a minority, incidentally, of which I am not part. As for the reintroduction of laws against "fornication" (sex between unmarried persons), "vice" (sexual acts other than standard genital intercourse), and contraception, perhaps five percent of Americans would support such an initiative — and not because the rest of us are hypocrites who fear that we'd be [haled] into court to answer for our own sins.

We've simply accepted that sex between consenting adults is not a fit subject for legislation.

[...] [T]he truly stupendous irony of it all, that sex is the only subject on which the Left even nods to individual freedom, is completely drowned by the cacophony.

I submit that sex is the field upon which conservatives have their toughest row to hoe. We'd bloody well better get to work on it. In particular, we'd better think hard about how to separate our political posture from our personal convictions about the morality of private sexual acts, and in such a fashion that the Left and its Old Media allies can no longer deceive the public about the cleavage.

____________


Meanwhile, Spengler expands the concept to war.

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards.

in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

It's an ugly thought and an article about an extremely distasteful subject, but it's worth a read.

This story indicates that the Pentagon review is down to "Go big" "Go long" or "Go home."

My vote is "Go long." That is, we just stay. And stay and stay. And stay.

Go big has the problem of "what if it doesn't work?" And unless we're ready to address Syria and Iran militarily, it won't. My false assumption in supporting the Iraq War was it was simply a tuneup for Iran (and a way of getting into Syria). Without addressing Iran and Syria, Go Big seems to be just sending more targets to the front.

Go home would be an unmitigated disaster. This would mean the end of U.S. ground troops abroad for a very long time, absent an extraordinary provocation (and even then). We'd embolden our enemies and show them that we won't stand up for ourselves, ever.

Go long isn't ideal, but if we can get a bipartisan, cold war-style consensus that we're simply gonna stay and keep military bases there, we might outlast the Jihadists or make this drag on for so long no one will remember what it's about. I mean, we're probably looking at staying for 10, 15 or 20 years. The War on Terror is currently locked into a stalemate in Iraq — fine, let it stay locked. Let it be a magnet for the jihadists worldwide ... and keep them the hell out of anyplace else.

At least that's the thought. My guess is we'll try all three. We Americans have ADD after all.

Or maybe there's another solution.

This kind of nonsense is where I was getting the crazy idea that the culture war, particularly from a perspective of elites, is largely about sex. Not that it's not about drugs and rock-and-roll, too.

I recognize that I've left my cultural war posts uncompleted. I haven't really gotten into the crux of my argument ... mostly because I'm still thinking it through. On one hand, I believe the abandonment of traditional Jewish and Christian teaching on sexual morality has been an unmitigated disaster, leading to unnecessary heartbreak, broken families and the inevitable expansion of government. On the other, I'm not going to pretend that somehow there existed some time when there was ideal sexual morality practiced in this country.

As a native New Jerseyan (now in exile--thankfully) I can do some things you non-natives can't, such as easily and safely navigate a traffic circle (knock on wood).

Here's a list of traffic circles in New Jersey. I think I've been through every last one of them at one time or another. When I drove between Philly and Toms River, I had to go through seven of these circles each way. Most are gone (alas)(thank God).

Worst: Little Ferry circle. Too small, too much traffic coming off Route 46, where trucks would be coming down hill and just have too much speed. Fortunately, I think I was only in it once.

Runner-up: Somerville Circle. Completely hair-raising way to get on Route 206 south; intersection of 202 and 206 and 28, and not far from 78 and 22. I used to take it for those six months in 1984 when I had a girlfriend in Hillsborough.

Runner-up 2: Laurelton circle. A five-point circle, forgotten which roads outside of Princeton and Hooper since my mind now confuses it with the Brielle Circle, both of which I used to go through all the time. I was always in this circle, both driving and biking my way through. Was close to where I lived in Toms River.

Easiest: Asbury Park circle. Route 35 and something I've forgotten, which is sad because I took that highway all the time between the Parkway and Neptune. Route 66? Route 18? It's a big circle and that means the traffic tends to flow pretty easily through it, despite heavy traffic.

Closest to home: Hasbrouck Heights, Passaic Avenue and Boulevard (the only place my father ever had a car accident in 60-plus years of driving (knock on wood)): I had to walk next to this circle each day on my way to elementary school.

Second closest to home: Lakehurst Circle, Routes 70 and 37 in Lakehurst. Also pretty easy to get through because it's a three-point intersection, IIRC.

Keys to navigating a traffic circle: Heck if I know. I just sorta get through alive. Prayer helps.

Victor Davis Hanson sums up the stakes in Iraq. Regardless of how it started, or what a mistake it was, or how it's been mishandled, the U.S. is in a grave situation there, and the stakes are extremely high.

In short, while the Islamists get bolder and crazier, we become more timid and all too rational, quibbling over this terrorist's affinities and that militia's particular grievances--in hopes of cutting some magical deal with an imaginary moderate imam or nonexistent reasonable militia chief or Middle East dictator.

Well beyond us now is any overarching Churchillian vision of our enemies. We lack the practical understanding of an FDR that all of these Islamists loathe us far more than they despise each other. Their infighting, after all, is like the transitory bickering of thieves over the division of loot that always pales before their shared hatred of the targeted bank owner.

So we are at a crossroads of all places in Iraq. The war there has metamorphosized from a successful effort to remove a mass-murdering dictator into the frontlines of the entire struggle between Islamic radicalism and Western liberality. If we withdraw before the elected government stabilizes, the consequences won't just be the loss of the perceptions of power, but perhaps the loss of real power. What follows won't be the impression that we are weak, but the fact that we are--as we convince ourselves we cannot win against such horrific enemies, and so should never again try.

That stumble will send a shudder throughout the so-called West that will be felt worldwide. It will insidiously show that the premodern world proved the master of the postmodern, as al Qaeda's Alfred Rosenberg, the pudgy Dr. Zawahiri, boasted all along--whose followers will not be happy with a successful defense when they think they can go back on an even more successful offense. [Emphasis mine.]

Read the whole thing.