Hey, Greaser!

Will Wilkinson, channeling yerz trooly, directs my attention to an hilarious eruption of righteous . . . blawging. In general I think it safe to say that people who display no outward indications of appreciating the distinction between business income, profit, salary, and taxable income are not, whatever their claims to the contrary, occupying the lofty brackets that Obama proposes we liquidate or nationalize or blast into space or whatever as we make the final transformation into the People's Republic. Quoted therein:

“We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama’s tax plan,” she added. “Why kill yourself working if you’re going to give it all away to people who aren’t working as hard?”

There is, I admit, a certain demented logic entailed in plotting to join the impecunious masses seeking to soak the rich so as to benefit from their Bolshevism. It's like Lenin said, you find the person who will, uh, you know what I'm trying to say.

On a more Weberian note, it appears that the Protestant Work Ethic is in immoderate decline among the double-ply bourgeoisie of this great nation. Yeah, why kill yourself working? I'm a fan of permanent disability myself, methodologically, even if the paperwork's a bitch. Let me state straight up that I do not believe these people actually exist, but if they did, they'd be a credit to morons everywhere.

Wilkinson accurately outlines the flaws in the Galt comparison based on his having, evidently, actually read the book. Would it be impolite of me to note that in addition to lacking a certain fidelity to the text-as-written, these people are making a handbook out of a work of turgid speculative fiction in which the oft-repeated symbolic trope, its rosy-fingered dawn, its wine-dark sea, is the lit cigarette--yes, man's mastery of fire as represented by a carcinogenic drug that doesn't even get you high. It also has holograph projectors and sound weapons and I am reasonably certain I saw Doc Seldon lurking around one of the party scenes at Hank Reardon's house, trying to sell his lush of a wife on a new-age religion called psychohistory. Ayn Rand wrote an entire book about railroads without once mentioning The Pacific Railway Act, whereby the eeeevil government gave railroad companies millions and millions of acres of land. Trying to construct a coherent personal economic ideology out of a Rand novel is as realistic, likely, and sane as trying to set up a street gang using The Outsiders as your manual.

Ejaculatio Praecox, Once More

American conservatism -- intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history -- is now staring into an abyss. It has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

-Michael Gerson

Gerson is cute when he puts on his thinkin' cap. What happened over the last three decades was this. Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The "engine" of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4" interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

The "greatest accumulation of national wealth in history" was accompanied by the greatest accumulation of national debt, and when the payables exceed the receivables it is wise to reconsider your business model, even if day-to-day cash flow means you're still making payroll. There was of course one other major domestic industry that remained productive, and that was the industry of Death, the great Mammon of Defense, the now-in-the-trillions annual expenditure of wealth on maintaining the national capacity to destroy the world. This lovely companion to our cossetted lifestyles was likewise built on a totally faulty premise: that the ability to destroy the world equates with an ability to control it. Our capacity to maintain colonial possessions being somewhat lesser than we imagined it to be, despite the awesome ability of our various cocksucker missile jockeys to blow shit the fuck up, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of looking like loudmouth punks and being broke-ass bitches. Sucks to be you, America! Guys like Gerson view America through the moronic, Trump-like, combed-over gaze, congratulating its gaudy-suited, pin-striped, shiny-tie self on masculine vitality as it buys bottle service for all its bitchiz and roolz up in the club, a three-decade-long, brain-addled, boozified, crunkulated, ape-gape, roof-raised, two-turntable fuckwit bridge-and-tunnel courtship that has finally stumbled with its big-titted, probably-a-tranny conquest back to the charge-plate penthouse suite wherein, thishasneverhappenedbeforebaby, America's teeny weeny peenie shoots its paltry load all over the inside of its Calvins before she can even loosen America's fucktarded Regis Philbin tie.

Foodie Friday - Eyetalyan

Bavette with spicy olive sauce

Bavette is similar to tagliatelle, which is to say a wide, long, flat noodle, but is generally more rustic, made without egg. I prefer the Cara Nonna brand if you can find it. Here is a recipe I love for this time of year, when it's starting to get warm and I can cook with the windows open. As an accompaniment, I recommend the Decca recording of Mefistofele. A simple and easily prepared dish, it has a remarkably deep and complex flavor, at once spicy and salty, especially for a (damn!) vegetarian (horrors!) preparation. Serve with a crisp Italian white and a lightly dressed green salad.

1 yellow onion, finely diced
4-5 medium cloves garlic, finely diced
2 medium chilis (cayenne, or similar), chopped
1/2 red bell pepper or sweet italian pepper, finely diced
2 1/2 cups of brine-cured Gaeta olives, pitted and rough chopped
1 1/2 cups dry white wine
1 tbspn cumin, freshly ground
sea salt
extra virgin olive oil
1 lb. bavette (or substitute another flat, thick, and rustic noodle)
Pecorino siciliano, grated

Put on a large pot of water, well-salted, to boil.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, over a medium high heat, heat a generous pour of olive oil. When it is hot, add the onion and garlic. Salt lightly. Cook until they begin to soften. Add the sweet and hot peppers. Toss together. Cook until it all softens and the juice of the sweet pepper has begun to turn the oil red. Add the cumin and olives. Toss for a minute or so over high heat, then add the white wine. Let it boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer together for five minutes or so.

Add the pasta to the water, stirring occasionally to keep it from sticking. After several minutes, when the water has begun to get cloudy with starch, ladle approximately 1 1/2 cups of it to the sauce. Increase the heat on the sauce. The point here is to control the boiling-off/evaporation of liquid from the sauce so that it is wet but thickening just as the noodles finish.

When the noodles are underdone by a minute or so, drain them. Return to their pot. Return to the stovetop over high heat. Add the still-wet sauce (a bit of liquid still visible in the pan) and cook together for a minute. Remove from heat and let cool for a couple of minutes, then transfer into a large, shallow serving bowl and garnish thoroughly with grated Pecorino Siciliano, my favorite sheep's milk cheese ever--one mentioned, no less, by Homer himself.

At the Mountain of Sanity

I call bullshit on Jim Henley. This is like the time that he tried to convince us that the only thing necessary to secure a supply of oil was a petroleum market in which those who wanted oil bought it from those who wanted to sell it. This man is clearly off his meds.

Oh No, France!

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work.

-Roger Cohen

Comment dit-on mmm-hmm en français?

First a few inconvenient facts. For the past several decades social mobility in France, and in most of Western Europe, has exceeded that in the United States. As for the entrepreneurial spirit, France exceeds the US in per capita small business ownership as well. And while all nations jiggle their unemployment statistics, the US is particularly aggressive in doctoring its unemployment numbers. Yes, France has generally had higher unemployment than America. No, it hasn't traditionally been so much higher as to suggest an abiding civilizational difference.

My personal sympathies do not lie with European social democracy, but neither do I begrudge Western Europe the fact that it has constructed what seems to be, for all intents and purposes, a stable, peaceful, and reasonably decent society. The notion that the French are somehow stultified by the "stifling attentions of the European nanny state" is patently absurd, self-refuting to anyone who's ever spent a day as a tourist, let alone "lived for about a decade." Yes, the French are often miserable racists, and their treatment of Muslim immigrants is a particular stain. Then again, Katrina; New Orleans. Pot. Kettle. A chacun son goût.

France, likewise, is a very, very wealthy country, full of thriving metropolises, giant businesses, high-tech infrastructure, advanced medicine, etc. To lose sight of this fact while gazing at comparative per capita GDPs or median household income stats is asinine. Statistically, Americans may be a bit wealthier. By global standards, it matters not a whit. Europeans are rich, healthy, and long-lived.

Their are plenty of reasons to look askance at the mighty stimulus without pretending that we are about to embark on a project of cultural copycatism.

Toughts on The Lush Bimbo and the Roman Dictator

Obama has an ideal foil to placate his Left.

-The Stiftung

Truer words, my friends.

While I personally prefer the endlessly self-immolating genius of Michael Savage-Weiner, I find myself oddly drawn to the largely incoherent Limbaugh, whose restless-leg energy seems so thoroughly at odds with the current fortunes of the Republican Party . . . until you accept The Stiftung's taxonomy of host and parasite and realize that the Rush-embodied worm in the contracting stomach of modern American conservativism is taking its last big bites before disengaging and allowing itself to be shat out by the dying host. Perhaps another will come along to gobble it up.

Anyway, the Leftrootz crowing glee at Limbaugh as the "face" of the Republican party has indeed distracted them from mild dissent as Superjesus Black Reagan codifies the new friendly face of executive über-prerogative. Equally clever has been the simultaneous docu-dump of the various Bush-era Laws for the Preservation of the Reich or what have you, in which combination of almost obscene idiocy-in-reasoning with jaw-dropping audacity-of-scope in claims the Donk finds ample gristle to chew on, even as the Obama administration fails utterly to repudiate--indeed, embraces--the most central proposition: that an executive who avails himself of so-called war powers is a law unto himself.

Drat! Curses!

I’m worried. We’ve just elected a talented young president with many good instincts about how to propel our country forward, extend health care to more people, make our tax code fairer and launch a green industrial revolution. But do you know what I fear? I fear that his whole first term could be eaten by Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and the whole housing/subprime credit bubble we inflated these past 20 years.

Thomas Friedman is afraid that Barack Obama's "whole first term could be eaten" by the proximate cause of Barack Obama's election. Nobody voted for a "green industrial revolution," whatever in the vast annals of oxymoron that might be. Lehman Brothers exploded, the market headed south, while Grampappy Highwaist Crazypants and his Tundran Valkyrie said "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" on auto-repeat until America finally changed the channel and voted for the commie Muslim negro from Manchuria. Has this narrative history fallen into dispute while I was blowing lines and sucking cock in the bathroom?

For now, though, the banks still threaten to consume the Obama presidency. Indeed, I’m sorry to report that if you just type two letters into Google — “b-a” — the first thing that comes up is not Barack Obama. It’s “Bank of America.” Barack Obama is third.

Hum, I sez to myself. Meanwhile, over in the results column, we see Barack Obama safely leading by a hair over sixty-five million.

Schadenfreudenous sonofabitch that I am, I can't help but to delight in the theatrical spectacle of Obamites complaining how terribly unfair it is that the lousy economy that propelled their man to the seat of power is not only not his fault (true enough) but a real drag, anchor, weight, buzzkill on his ambition to turn America into a post-scarcity society. Ha ha, joke's on you, losers, the Singularity will have to wait. The leftern end of the internosphere loves to point and laugh at such baubles as Glenn Reynolds' robotic penis, but I propose it is really they, not he, who see in Barry O an end-historical moment of wind farms, supertrains, and immortality wrung from newly-released-to-experimentation fetusies. Meanwhile in the real world the shit and the fan continue their little pas de deux. The shit is full of antibiotics and rBGH. The fan is drawing power from a coal-fired plant.

Over-Nite Sensation

When I read this, I immediately thought of this:

Points Relative

We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.

-David Brooks

Its fecklessness and vapidity stem from its contingency. You can locate a rough center between two drifting coalitions of political interests, carve out positions in the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other model, and make a virtue out of false reasonableness, but you can't make it an influential force. Its positions are entirely inflected. First you must admit that the major parties aren't ideological groupings. Repeat the phrase: drifting coalitions of political interests. They share an ideology. The ideology is American primacy, hegemony, the preservation of the system State Capital. Within the broad consensus are particular groups, factions, committees, industries, pressure groups, etc. Different interests do not imply different ideologies.

The dream is to split the difference between competing interests and rule from the midpoint. But there's no there there. The thing about interests is that they have interests. A man treading water between ships just gets towed along, no matter how tightly he tethers himself to them.

Movies I Have Not Yet Seen

David Kahane adopts a sort of sub-Vidal I-wuz-there salon-spiel for his latest in the National Review. It fails. Father Gore claims that he does not believe in homosexuals, but has the advantage of being one. He knows how to charm a room with an anecdote, and how to keep self-contradictory ideas in the air, a natural juggler. Kahane lacks the bitchiness necessary to make insinuation work as a writer's device. He's also not much of a moviegoer, evidently:

So — Chance the Gardener in Being There or the Manchurian Candidate? At this point it doesn’t really matter, does it, because how could you tell the difference?

People who haven't seen these movies but have heard of them within the general realm of popular reference often confuse these points, so you'll pardon the obviousness of the corrections: neither Chance nor the Manchurian Candidate became President. The former never actually tried. The latter, well, seems to confuse his invokers on plot points. They confuse Raymond Shaw for Senator Iselin, the latter of whom, though a witting communist agent, rose to power through McCarthyesque demagoguery and was supposed to be the Veep candidate anyway. If anyone fits his role in the dramatis personae, it's Joe Biden! And, since not, not.

Chance the Gardner, on the other hand, may in fact be Jesus Christ. Which is to say that Kahane and gang may wish to keep Mr. Obama as far from the reflecting pool as possible, lest the cameras catch him walking on it.

Rules for Radicals

Rush Limbaugh:

We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause] Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Responding to a crisis of identity, Rush Limbaugh explains that "We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are because we make the mistake of assuming people know." And just basically who are you?

I defy anyone to extract an identity from the linked speech. Conservatives are for opportunity, but not equality of outcomes, but we are born equal, but we succeed or fail on our own merits, but conservatives will try to stop you from failing, but if you do, that's too bad, and we need everyone to succeed as an individual for the country to succeed, except for those who don't, because it's their fault, and the fault of the war on poverty, or . . . some such. The Donk is deluded by the allure of technocracy, by the notion of scientific government; the Gopster is a set of cultural phobias, affected regular-guy affinities, and catch phrases. It's probably appropriate that they draw their inspiration and spokespeople from the ever-more-irrelevant and anachronistic medium of radio.

The Donk complains that the Republicans are crass obstructionists. Would that it were true. The contemporary GOP wears the guise of obstructionism but lacks the wherewithal to oppose effectively. Superjesus Black Reagan rules the airwaves, and the supposed opposition is sequestered away in a chintzy hotel ballroom listening to C-list newsmedia celebrities extemporize around the posthumous legacy of Romulus and Remus Ronald Reagan. If there is anything we need right now, it's a cranky minority party that reacts with zealous incredulity at the vast outpouring of expenditure and views with innate suspicion the claims of managerial liberalism. Instead we get awkward governors mumbling anathemas at the US Geologic Survey and talk-radio hosts giving recursive stemwinders to the choir. The Donk spent eight years under George Bush getting along by going along, but as polite acquiescence seems to have been bred out of the rightward faction of national politics, they'll endeavor to continue the trend by creating the most thunderously loud irrelevance the world has ever known.