If there was one overarching goal of the Marxist project, it was refashioning human nature.  Whether religion or politics, the Marxists argued that an obsession with God and a belief in national identity had to be challenged and defeated.

       

An ideology based on the common man ultimately had little confidence in his beliefs.  Marxists maintained they were endowed with an understanding others didn’t possess.  While Marxism is dead; this distaste for the opinion of the common man persists.

       

Instead of Marxism, it now takes the form of expert opinion or what I would call the fraternity of experts who are eager to regulate human behavior.  These are the new progressives, many of them former Marxists and many who believe that American patriotism should be subordinated to transnational loyalty.  Some call these people liberal internationalists who rely on U.N. prerogatives and other international bodies for guidance. 

       

On the home front this fraternity of experts has answers for everything that ails us.  If health care is a problem, the experts contend a government engineered system must be put in place, rather than rely on the aggregate intentions of the marketplace. 

 

 

The gathering storm in the Middle East is gaining momentum. War clouds are on the horizon and like conditions prior to World War I all it takes for explosive action to commence is a trigger.

            

Turkey’s provocative flotilla often described in Orwellian terms as a humanitarian mission has set in motion a flurry of diplomatic activity, but if the Iranians send escort vessels for the next round of Turkish ships, it could present a casus belli.

            

It is also instructive that Syria is playing a dangerous game with both missile deployment and rearming Hezbollah. According to most public accounts Hezbollah is sitting on 40,000 long, medium and short range missiles and Syrian territory has served as a conduit for military material from Iran since the end of the 2006 Lebanon War.

            

Should Syria move its own scuds to Lebanon or deploy its troops as reinforcement for Hezbollah, a wider regional war with Israel could not be contained.

            

In the backdrop is an Iran with sufficient fissionable material to produce a couple of nuclear weapons. It will take some time to weaponize missiles, but the road to that goal is synchronized in green lights since neither diplomacy nor diluted sanctions can convince Iran to change course.

There is a contagion of madness in Western Europe. It is not merely the preemptive conciliation that afflicts politicians who are ready to subordinate Christian civilization to Islam; it is the wholesale program to promote socialism, even if it leads to economic ruination. While over-extended socialist Europe faces collapse from Spain to Greece, overtaxed Sweden is eager to instruct immigrants on how to get free benefits from the government.

            

According to a proposal from Swedish Immigration authorities all newly arrived immigrants will undergo courses in “societal values” and be taught about the unique qualities of the society. “Without knowledge of fundamental societal values an important prerequisite to be able to live and work in Sweden is lacking,” writes Erik Amna in a debate article in the Dagens Nyheter daily.

            

Amna contends that the municipalities should offer a 60 hour course on three areas: values, the welfare state and everyday life, i.e. practical knowledge of how the welfare state works. Not only will Sweden have generous give-away programs, but it intends to instruct new arrivals on how to obtain them.

            

Here is an unvarnished version of the plan that is destroying Europe. The idea that you can obtain these government benefits without a cost is absurd. There is no such thing as a free lunch even if Swedish authorities challenge that idea. Someone has to pay and the extortionate tax rate in Sweden indicates someone is paying.

 

The road map to Armageddon has been established. Recently the Obama administration gave Moscow two concessions that in my judgment could have alarming influence on the course of current history: lifting sanctions against the Russian military complex and agreeing not to ban the sale of advanced anti-aircraft batteries to Iran.

            

Presumably these concessions were given as “carrots” after Russia agreed to a package of United Nations’ sanctions against Iran. While the U.N. resolution bans weapons sales to Tehran, it would not prohibit Moscow from completing the sale of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, a contract that was suspended due to pressure from the U.S. and Israel, but not cancelled. This sophisticated defensive system complicates any military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

            

These concessions are the latest moves by President Obama to bolster U.S.-Russian relations and might be considered an adjunct to the Start agreement on nuclear delivery systems. However, administration spokesmen said this understanding was not a quid pro quo for Russian acceptance of sanctions, a denial that seems inconsistent with the timing of the decision.

            

Most significantly, the concessions are “premature and unwarranted” according to David Kramer, a former State Department official. A Russian transfer of the anti-missile system is far more significant by any standard than the resolution of sanctions. John Bolton, former acting Ambassador to the United Nations, argued that the Russians got the upper hand. They sensed desperation on the Obama team and “extracted all that the traffic would bear.”

There isn’t any need to say “I told you so” for Euro skeptics. They knew what few would admit about the European Union. The fractures in the union now apparent were there all along merely waiting for one crisis to make them self evident.

            

With demonstrations over tough austerity measures in Greece, the E.U. is experiencing the first of what could be a host of violent reactions across the continent. In a sense, Greece is the canary in the proverbial mine foreshadowing what might occur in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland.

            

In conversations in Austria the typical response is “why should we bail out the Greeks for their profligacy?” Alas, this is the typical German response as well. The Germans were willing to be an underwriter of the Greek bail-out, as long as the IMF is a major partner. But there are limits. Borrowing costs for Europe’s most vulnerable countries are soaring and the euro’s value is plummeting. E.U. officials warn of “high uncertainty” surrounding the region’s economic recovery. Despite a $141 billion rescue package offered the Greek government, it is not clear this sum will cauterize the problem or stop its spread elsewhere.

            

It is instructive that pensioners took to the Athenian streets in protest against financial retrenchment. In news interviews, the point was often made that these aging citizens saved for retirement and counted on a pension during retirement. Now they find themselves in a financial quagmire they did not create.

To cite a cliché, the more things change the more they remain the same. This applies to many areas of life, but arguably it is the essence of educational reform.

Recently the ACT, an independent organization that provides assessment, research and program management in broad areas of education, issued a statement on the “essentials for college and career readiness.”

What it found is precisely what evaluators of education in the United States have been saying for decades. Despite an enormous per capita national expenditure for education, exceeded only by Switzerland, “high school learning standards are still not sufficiently aligned with postsecondary expectations.”

Across the curriculum, college instructors and high school teachers differ on the level of preparation for college assignments with many more high school teachers than college instructors reporting that graduates are prepared. At the same time, while college math and science instructors agree that reading is one of the most important skills needed for success in this century, “overwhelming majorities of them report spending little or no time teaching reading strategies in their courses.”

Apparently findings indicate that students are shortchanged in high school and post secondary courses, despite the fact many high school teachers believe their students are adequately prepared for higher education study. There is simply a huge disparity between skill level and performance expectations.

To address this concern the ACT contends high school standards should focus on fewer – but essential – college and career readiness conditions and a rigorous core curriculum should be mandated for all high school graduates. These are sensible recommendations that have been advocated for at least half a century. The key question is why haven’t these recommendations been put into practice if everyone – or almost everyone – knows what should be done.

A Book Review - After The Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road To Recovery

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Thomas Nelson, 2010 pp. 272

 

Although Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, argued the Conservative movement is “dead” and interred, the redoubtable R. Emmett Tyrrell in his latest book After The Hangover tells us reports of conservatism’s death are greatly exaggerated. With his usual panache, Mr. Tyrrell offers a remarkable distillation of conservative history and, most significantly, how it is unfolding in the United States circa 2010.

            

Sitting on his perch at The American Spectator, Tyrrell has lanced the boil of contemporary liberalism and has offered a valuable critique of conservatism, both its wisdom and failures. In what can only be described as a tour de force, Tyrrell chronicles the ebb and flow of contemporary politics from the Republican success in the ’94 congressional elections to the defeat in the 2008 presidential election.

            

Despite an inclination to embrace conservative ideas and what Tyrrell calls the conservative “temperament,” he includes a scathing indictment of conservation as often “pinched by a smallness that has set the movement back and encouraged intramural squabbling.” Alas, based on my own experience, this is an accurate portrayal.

            

Without the heavy handed club conservatives sometimes employ to attack media myrmidons, Tyrrell notes that gaffs of a truly amusing variety by President Obama and Vice President Biden are given scant attention by members of the press corps (pronounced as “core” for President Obama’s edification). Tyrrell recognizes the obvious bias, but doesn’t dwell on it; what he does dwell on is the difference between elites and the man and woman in the street. He recalls with nostalgia a time when there was genuine solidarity among conservatives, the height of what might be called the William F. Buckley era and the founding of National Review.

 

In Darwin’s Origin of The Species the theory of evolution through natural selection is made to appear simple and inevitable. Certain biological variants argued Darwin, are more robust than others, i.e. better suited to survive and thrive in the environment in which they find themselves. Over time the robust variants supplant the less robust varieties. In a world of limited resources, the better adapted versions stand a better chance of survival. Darwin assumed that natural selection could transform one species into another and eradicate some species, leaving the field to its tougher competitors.

            

While social Darwinism attempted to take Darwin’s theory and apply it to social settings (“Root, hog or die”), the lack of compassion and the imposition of human needs sent the social version of Darwinism into the political interstices. However, since evolution ultimately deals with success and failure, survival and disappearance, it may be appropriate to resuscitate Darwinism to explain global conditions of the moment.

            

Needless to say, there is a logical danger in pushing the analogy too far, but on some level the Darwinian model offers insight, even if the conclusions are not dispositive.

            

In an effort to appease or comfort America’s foes, the Obama administration is attempting to redefine, perhaps transform, our system of government, law and basic economic assumptions. Presumably Obama adherents would contend that this adaptation is necessary for survival in an evolving global stage. However, the question that emerges is whether this conscious transformation enhances survivability. Is America more robust or less robust as a consequence of the change? Can this nation transform other national variants or will other nations transform the United States?

“Aquarius,” the show, is in revival on Broadway and in revival in the Obama administration. The utopian idea of “the zero option,” of eliminating nuclear weapons, of an apollonian globe where lions and lambs live in harmony, is alive and well and evident in the new Start treaty.

Of course it would be wonderful if we had a world without nuclear weapons, but the genie is out of the bottle and weapons of mass destruction offer influence, prestige and power even for nations that cannot adequately feed their people.

While the Start treaty reduces delivery capacity of Russian and the U.S. missiles, planes and submarines using arcane accounting methods, the real issue, as I see it, is that Russia reserves the right to withdraw from the treaty if it deems missile defense deployment in Eastern Europe threatening.

The obvious question is why should the United States Senate ratify a “conditional” arrangement? If the treaty is ratified (a likely prospect) the United States is committing itself to unilateral compliance. In other words, Russia determines on its own whether the treaty remains in effect. This is a truly unprecedented matter, one that may indeed violate national security interests.

Moreover, in an effort to convince other nuclear powers that they should embrace our disarming impulse the president has circumscribed “no first use policy” to only those adversaries employing nuclear weapons and has announced that the U.S. will not develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. I’m sure that this heartfelt gesture has resonated appropriately with Kim Jung Il and Ahmadinejad. It would take a leap of illogical proportions to assume that if the U.S. does not modernize, China, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan will follow suit.   (read more.....)