Signs of the times
Mark Steyn has a piece at NRO on Israel's current battle with Hamas.
...if you're as invested as most western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as "England's demise is on our agenda" becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he's a genocidal realist - look at the threads linking North Korea to Iran and to Iran's clients in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza - and we're the fantasists.
Read the whole thing, and while you're at it, read this by Mona Charen, this by Victor Davis Hanson and this by the editors of NRO. Enlightening pieces, all.
Recently a Russian sage opined on the demise of the United States, with us fracturing into 6 different "states," each with different political and economic focus. Clearly the Russian elites have discovered "projection," the nasty disease that plagues our elites: the seeing (wrongly) in others your problems while being blind to being terminally infected with the problem yourself. From the WSJ by Leon Aron:
Such a predicament is most dangerous politically for a country whose population has become used to incomes increasing 8%-10% every year since 2000. Growing disappointment is sure to follow, first among the elites and then people at large.Despite the reduction of the poverty rate to 14% from 20% in the last five years, tens of millions of Russians continue to live precariously: A recent poll found that 37% of all families have money enough only to cover food. Unemployment and inflation (already 14%, year-on-year, in November) may well push these people over the edge and into the streets.
Aron signals a need for great wisdom and caution in the coming Obama administration, neither trait being evident so far in the transition, in dealing with Russia. Read the whole article here as well.
Happy New Year.
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A very nice article, Shepherd. The bit about proportionality was a nice generalization: rather Marxist, isn't it?
I'm astonished by people who do not remember the children in the schoolyard who utterly and implacably hated other children. There was no forgiveness. Who has not worked in an office where two women detested each other, and without a fight to clear the air, everything around them was poisoned? And yet all can be sorted out by letting people have a chance at the things that we are all supposed to want. Childish, but then I've said that most liberalism, of the honest sort, is essentially arrested emotional development.
The Russian's view about the fracturing of the US made me laugh. The idea that we would crack up and that we would come under the influence of neighboring states. Look at these GDPs.
Texas' GDP, from other sources, is $1.09 trillion, almost twice that of Mexico's. And our per-capita income is seven times that. This is Texas only and not the other presumptive states.
But there are other reasons I think that the gravity would still be toward a Republic of Texas. There is more than one reason that Mexicans sneak over here. Rule of law. And manners. I was recently in Tucson at a nice resort and at 2 AM there was much drunken laughing and shouting in Spanish, and someone wolf-whistling to make as much noise as possible. The venue was of decent quality, and bore the tariff, pricing out anyone who sneaked across the border. So the revelers, the obnoxious, full-of-themselves, heedless rakes, were the so-called upper-class Mexican nationals.
Who were not nearly as pleasant or well mannered as the Mexicans who were working there.