The "s" word can now be mentioned in polite company

The Wall Street Journal has published an article about the potential devolution of the United States. Surprisingly, it is respectful, even somewhat favorable to the idea.

Paul Starobin writes, "Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society."

For such a thought to be permitted to draw breath in the WSJ, you've got to believe devolution is entering the mainstream, or at least several tributaries of the mainstream. And it is. Individual states passing resolutions declaring their sovereignty -- legally inconsequential, but symbolically important -- is as trendy as twittering.

Searching on Google for solid information about how many states have such urges is frustrating. The big legacy media, true to their calling ("if we decide you should know, we'll tell you"), seem disinclined to recognize the secessionist cause. And I'm not willing to take the word of just any blog for it.

MarketWatch, also part of the WSJ network, says that nine states have declared their sovereignty. They are Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California -- California! -- and Georgia. Its story adds that "possibly" Colorado, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Montana, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Alaska, Kansas, Alabama, Nevada, Maine, Illinois will follow.

The relationship between the states and the federal government has been controversial throughout our history. The struggle to devise a Constitution, and the first few election campaigns, were fraught with disagreement between the federalists and the anti-federalists. School textbooks claim the Civil War settled the issue forever. Wrong. It settled the issue for its time through brute military force, but the ideal of a country where power was divided among a central government, states, and localities has never died, for the simple reason that it is one of the finest political ideas of all time -- a brilliant stroke against potential tyranny.

In his WSJ article, Starobin says:

Devolved America is a vision faithful both to certain postindustrial realities as well as to the pluralistic heart of the American political tradition—a tradition that has been betrayed by the creeping centralization of power in Washington over the decades but may yet reassert itself as an animating spirit for the future. Consider this proposition: America of the 21st century, propelled by currents of modernity that tend to favor the little over the big, may trace a long circle back to the original small-government ideas of the American experiment. The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale—too large to make any rational sense in an emerging age of personal empowerment that harks back to the era of the yeoman farmer of America’s early days. The society may find blessed new life, as paradoxical as this may sound, in a return to a smaller form.

If truth were temporarily in fashion, we would admit that there is no longer a "United States," and hasn't been for 40 years. That's approximately how long the "country" has been deeply split along ideological lines.

I have no wish at the moment to argue for one side or the other. The present point is that with such a wide gulf between sectors of the citizenry, Congress has been increasingly paralyzed. If not for other factors, I'd say that's a good thing on the whole: self-serving as they are, our representatives (to use the quaint old term) have such a dismal record of serving the public weal that for them to do nothing instead of something is usually a blessing.

But a power vacuum never lasts long. The federal legislative branch's dysfunction has allowed its powers to be usurped, de facto, by the executive (presidential) and judicial (federal court) branches of government. Presidents now feel not a twitch of hesitation in sending American armed forces off to fight without a congressional declaration of war (Afghanistan and Iraq are only the most recent manifestations of this constitutionally abhorrent practice, which goes back at least to Harry Truman and the Korean war). The federal courts have the ultimate trump card in their (also unconstitutional) assumed power to declare the will of the people (or of their state legislative or Congressional avatars, anyway) unconstitutional because they don't agree with it. There is no appeal. Look up the definition of "oligarchy."

I'm not entirely on-board with Starobin, who seems to see the secession question through the usual WSJ lens of economics and pro-immigrationism:

California? America’s broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world. And while we’re at it, let’s make this project bi-national—economic logic suggests a natural multilingual combination between Greater San Diego and Mexico’s Northern Baja, and, to the Pacific north, between Seattle and Vancouver in a megaregion already dubbed “Cascadia” by economic cartographers.

I would really hate to see any part of the present-day United States unite with utterly corrupt Mexico, dominated by criminal narcotics gangs. Or Canada, while our northern neighbor is in its current cultural Marxist dreamland. Still, part of the rationale for devolution is that local wishes should have far more scope than they do now, which is virtually zero. California has already in essence agreed, with the encouragement of the federal government, to become an annex of Mexico. To me it's an insane choice, but I'll accept it if California and similar bi-coastal states no longer have the power to enforce their ideology on states that reject it.

Obviously there are many practical problems that would attend secession of one or more areas. The causes for our national divided house are no longer mainly geographic. In a devolution, some people would have to move if they wanted to be where they would feel most comfortable, and some because of lack of means, age, health, or other reasons would be unable to. But many people of "blue" leanings find themselves in "red" regions and vice versa now. Naturally, it is to be hoped that each of the ex-U.S. regions would provide full civil rights including freedom of speech and the press for all its political minorities.

There are no perfect solutions to most problems, especially political ones. I cannot see that secession would create any more tension than there is now. To prevent it, the Washington Leviathan will have to tighten the screws on local government and individual liberty continually. More than anything, secession is the best opportunity to stop the insatiable appetite for growth of a federal government that is becoming an ultimate, unaccountable power over every aspect of our lives.

We should be working out the constitutional rules for peaceful, legal seccession now. Or we can risk having to deal with the wish of large and apparently growing numbers of Americans to leave the union the way we dealt with it in 1861-1865.

Currency exchange

U.S. paper money is widely derided as being drab and uninspiring in appearance. The Dollar ReDe$ign Project wants to fix that.

Some 25 redesign submissions have been made so far, ranging from the presumably serious to the satirical. They might, if you want to look at it that way, say something about what people today think about the country's currency, or the country. Here is a selection of the entries.

In Technology We Trust. If we can't make it, which mostly we can't anymore, we'll import it and sell it. This certificate may be exchanged for Best Buy units.

Legal tender in the North American Union. Honoring Jorge W. Bush-Gonzales, who made it all possible.

Nobody is going to confuse these with Euros. I love the graduated colors in the background.

Kewl. But Im like, what, one dollar? R U kiddin me? Y not call it one iTune? & U get back in change one of those little round things, what do U call em, senses or something?

Hey, Americans! You're special, you know, all of you! You don't have to be smart to be creative! Just open your Crayons On Line software and you're off and running! You're so special! Look what Keeeeleeeey of Omega Park sent in!

The person who designed this obviously belongs to the Deflationary School of economic prognostication.

Immigration nation currency. Comes with a special bar code for wiring to Mexico.

Rather nifty neo-traditional look, what?

The designs below are far and beyond my favorites. Hot colors subtly juxtaposed, contemporary, but respectful of the past in the line-engraving-style background:

Now that many Americans are cutting back on their use of credit cards -- with or without the encouragement of their card issuers -- these last three designs could at least make cash transactions more enjoyable.

Terrorist suspects were aboard Air France 447

In a June 2 posting, I groused about the panting haste with which various official and unofficial parties assured us that the there was no evidence of terrorism in the fatal accident involving Air France 447, which mysteriously plunged into the ocean from cruising altitude, an extremely rare accident script. Technically they were correct; there was no evidence of terrorism. There was no evidence of any causal factors, period. What sense does it make to rule out possible causes when there is as yet nothing to go on? Now we learn that

Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on board the Air France flight which crashed and killed 228, it emerged today.

French secret service staff established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the Airbus 330-200 in Rio de Janeiro on 31 May.

(Tip of the hat: Gates of Vienna)

Furthermore:

They established that the two passengers were on highly-classified French documents listing radical Muslims considered to be a threat. A security service source said the link was "highly significant".

Proof of a suicide bombing? Of course not. Significant? I agree with the French security agency: yes. You might even call it newsworthy.

I'll wait right here while you look for this information in the Washington Post. Or the New York Times.

What, nothing? Come on — zero, rien, nada, niente?

No, the WaPo is predictably devoting most of the home page of its Web edition to stories about the psychopath who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum. (They'll be dining out on this for weeks, with dark hints that all gun owners and conservatives are like the nutter who did the killing, mark my words.) It's a legitimate news story about an ugly event. But the possibility that 228 people (compared with one in the Holocaust Museum) were murdered might also be worth a mention.

The latest Times follow-up limits its revelations to:

Two pieces of evidence have emerged that lend new credence to the theory that the Air France jet that crashed more than a week ago broke up in flight.

That isn't necessarily evidence of terrorism. Airplanes have been known to break up when for some reason they exceed their performance envelope. But it's unusual, particularly in the case of large airliners flown by seasoned crews.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that the French security service was thinking along the same lines as I was on June 2 when I suggested that the backgrounds of every passenger be thoroughly checked.

6/12 A later story said that the French security service withdrew its claim that two men with terrorist histories had been on the plane — confusion caused by the passengers having the same names as "persons of interest." I can sympathize with all anti-terrorist agencies: there are said to be 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, so that's about 600 million males, and maybe a third of them are named Mohammed. I think there are many common family names, too. It's strange to read in the news about, say, Omar Khayyam.

If the revised story isn't disinformation (for instance, to encourage a cell under surveillance to be complacent), then it was a false lead. It doesn't change the main point of my postings, which is that governments and crash investigators have no business ruling out terrorism until they have a reasonable basis for doing so.

The yin crowd

… after decades of promoting yin (i.e. the cosmic female element) and suppressing yang (i.e. the cosmic male element), the West now suffers from yin toxemia. As per Chinese Taoist precepts, this produces an overabundance of the soft, wet, squishy, sweet, flabby, irrational, diffuse energy that characterizes yin, and a shortage of the hard, dry, salty, muscular, rational and compacting male (i.e. yang) energy that could rectify this imbalance.

The yin-soaked West rests on a foundation of feelings. It feels for the plight of the female trapped in a male body, the Somali who has never seen indoor plumbing, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan exchange student who made good. That all such feelings translate into actions that dismantle the West financially, demographically and culturally no longer registers, for reason no longer registers, nor does survival. This is the age of I feel, therefore I am. The essence of yin.

— Takuan Seiyo, "From Meccania to Atlantis, Part 12"

I expect most regular readers of Reflecting Light have followed the series in Brussels Journal. If not, it won't do any harm to start with Part 12, the most recent.

Mr. Seiyo (an acknowledged nom de blog) can be infuriating. Mostly, the fury he arouses is directed at the trends he portrays, but at times he — well, "infuriates" is too strong, but he annoys me.

The exaggeration, the one-sidedness, in his writing can be of a muchness. Whether he realizes it or not, Seiyo is a caricaturist. Caricatures are not false, or need not be: great caricaturists (e.g., Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson) are extreme examples of the saying that "art is the lie that gives the truth." By heightening impressions — okay, exaggerating, if you wish — they cut through an infinite number of stimuli to reveal something of the essence.

I too in this blog am inclined toward my own species of caricature. As a fellow practitioner, or serial exaggerator, I have to admire his way with words, even when they are not literally true or are not the only truth on the subject:

Leviathan as manifest in Snatchland – i.e. all of the West -- exists only to perpetuate itself, and it perverts the social contract any way it can in pursuit of that goal. Like the whale sucking in krill for sustenance, it prospers (until the day of reckoning) by sucking in new groups of dependents. Some of these it creates internally, like the single mothers on welfare who increase their income in proportion to the number of fatherless children they breed with a parade of male pollinators passing through the drunken night. Others are imported aliens from all corners of the globe -- the foreigner and more primitive the better.

There is no better way to fatten Leviathan than by importing people useless to the modern economy and hopeless as prospects for melting in Western society. What excitement at the thought of the many more civil servants who will have to be hired per each 1000 newcomers, to administer ever-larger public welfare and wealth-transfer programs!

Mostly, I don't hold Seiyo's wild-eyed jests against him. But he has so much fun bashing the Western world's guilt baths and wishful thinking that he doesn't seem to have much energy left for pondering how to counteract the pathology. More than a few prominent social conservatives (Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, for instance) enjoy the Dance of Death enough that they don't want the music to stop, or can't imagine that it ever could.

Seiyo seems to imply that a remnant of civilization will have to create its own Atlantean colony to escape the tyranny of the centralized all-powerful bureaucratic State, but if he is serious — I suspect it is no more than a pose — we need to hear a lot more details from him about how that could work.

His over-the-top caricature is, admittedly, bracingly savage invective. But enough. If even half of what he writes is basically true, and I think it is, having a right old time watching the collapse of liberty and justice can take us only so far. We need, as Mark Steyn might say in one of his showbiz metaphors, to turn the beat around.

Don't run for governor of NY if you're white

So says a blowhard New York Democrat, more or less.

Rep. Charles Rangel Friday warned of "racial polarization" if Attorney General Andrew Cuomo challenges Gov. Paterson in a primary next year. Rangel, who is close to the poll-challenged Paterson, ripped Cuomo on New York 1 last night for flatly not ruling out a run for governor next year. ...

Should Cuomo run, Rangel said, it would create a divide that could be "devastating" to New York Democrats. "I think that there might be an inclination for racial polarization in a primary in the state of New York," Rangel said. "Since we have most African-Americans registered as Democrats, and since you would be making an appeal for Democrats, it would be devastating in my opinion."

What can Cuomo be thinking? Doesn't he understand the rules of the modern multi-cultural state? We have made so much progress in race relations that you are expected to vote only for someone of your own melanin tone or ethnicity. And once an office is captured by a member of a tribe, the only challenge can come from a member of the same tribe. Or, to stretch a point, from a member of a different tribe, but never a white person.

Balkanization, thou hast triumphed.

Why do news sources even bother with the traditional party affiliations -- you know, "Flim Plunder (R-Ohio)" sort of thing? They're all Republicrats, or anti-Republic rats, anyway. Unless a district in Vermont has sent its traditional gift wrapped Socialist or Green to the House.

We can pay homage to reality in this year of our Lord Obama and start labeling politicians with the only ID that matters, their genetic or ancestral quotient. Since that will not be, in all cases, evident from a politician's appearance or name, to avoid embarrassing mistakes they could all be tagged on the ear like cattle.

Under the new and more honest nomenclature, news stories about election campaigns would refer to Flim Plunder (White-Ohio) being challenged by John Henry (Black-Ohio). Voters would need to read no further to know where their loyalties would lie.

Of course some politicans are of mixed race or background, so a more precise system would involve a percentage breakdown. Common abbreviations might include, besides the obvious, A for Asian, I for Italian, P for Portuguese, IR for Irish, PAC for Pacific islander, etc. Thus we would have Lucinda Lucerna (75 H, 15 W, 10 A-California), Marcello Marchese (80 IW, 20 H-Rhode Island), Howard Glimmer (50 J, 50 IRW-Massachusetts).

This would also make it far easier for busy presidents, cabinet officials, and election committees to assign weights to various contenders along affirmative action principles. Think of the electioneering possibilities. Obama addressing La Raza's political action committee banquet: "I will raise the vote-count weighting to 1.5 for every H!" Addressing the Jewish Action League: "I will make sure that people of the Jewish faith are overweighted -- excuse me? No, no, ma'am, not overweight, overweighted in the vote count -- at 1.25!" To the CAIR Central Committee: "No longer will our imperialistic country arrogantly assign one vote to one Muslim. I say, to bring peace to the Mideast, an M weighting of 2.0!"

But, hang about, we're forgetting several critical variables. Gender! Sexual orientation! We mustn't fail to plot those on the grid.

"Thank you, thank you for your applause. I'm Flim Plunder, and I want to be your next Senator. My ID -- it says so, right here dangling from my ear -- is M 100 (sorry about that), W 65 (dreadful sorry), but now get this: H 20, yes, twenty! And another 5: Are you ready for this? J! And two more fives: IR, yes, IR! And last and certainly not least ... 5 M! Where are you going to find a combination like that?

"And if all that doesn't distinguish me enough, check out this -- G 50! G, I'm telling you! Fifty percent gay! And, of course, that means I'm 50 percent certified, ready-to-rock heterosexual. Now, it's true my opponent has a strong B component, but when you think of my H and my J and my IR and my M, plus my G, you'll see I'm the most qualified by a mile!"

It's official: Obama declares U.S. a Muslim country

Barack "I'm Too Cool for My Country" Obama can't even wait till he gets to Cairo to deliver the United States into the Muslim world.

Le Monde says that in an interview on the French TV network Canal +, he said, "les Etats-Unis sont l'un des plus grands pays musulmans" ("the United States are one of the greatest Muslim countries").

The full quote:

"Les Etats-Unis et le monde occidental doivent apprendre à mieux connaître l'islam; d'ailleurs, si l'on compte le nombre d'Américains musulmans, on voit que les Etats-Unis sont l'un des plus grands pays musulmans de la planète", a-t-il dit.

My translation: "The United States and the Western world must learn to better understand Islam; moreover, if one counts the number of Muslim Americans, one sees that the United States are one of the greatest Muslim countries on the planet," he said. Native French speakers: is it conventional in France to say, "the United States are"? Or does Obama not think we are very united?

This goes beyond good manners and standard diplo-babble into the realm of debasement. Or even de sub-basement. The fact that, lamentably, our rulers have allowed vast numbers of Muslims to import their footbaths and ideas of sharia law into the U.S. does not mean we are a Muslim country. If His Holiness the Dalai Obama understands what it means for a country to be Muslim, with all the restrictions that entails for its citizens on freedom of speech and practice, then he is a traitor; if he does not understand it, he is a fool.

This will be one of the items given in evidence at my trial for thought crimes in the Dalai Obama's second term. Assuming that there is the formality of a trial.



6/4 Since Obama spoke in English, I wondered if perhaps Le Monde's translation was wide of the mark. Here is the White House press office's transcript of the comment (tip of the hat: Belmont Club):

Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

To be sure, that is not exactly saying that the United States is a Muslim country. Le Monde needs to hire a few qualified English translators.

But what did Obama mean? It makes no sense. First, as a factual matter, and as many commenters at Belmont Club point out, there aren't (yet) that many Muslims in the United States, perhaps three million, or 1 percent of the population. Dozens of countries in the world have larger Muslim components, in numbers and percentages. I myself exaggerated in writing that "lamentably, our rulers have allowed vast numbers of Muslims to import their footbaths and ideas of sharia law into the U.S."

What about "And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples"? It's a non sequitur. Because of the supposed large numbers of Muslims in the U.S., we'd be a large Muslim country, so we have to have a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples? What two peoples, if we are a quasi-Muslim country? And if we had no Muslims, would there then be no need for better dialogue and understanding?

As abstractions, dialogue and understanding are good, but they are also cant words capable of signifying anything or nothing. It's possible Obama meant that the better dialogue and understanding have to come from us, and if we only do that, we need have no fear of Muslim colonization of the West. Alternatively, he might have had no specific meaning in mind at all; he tends to reach into a stockpile of sonorous, feel-good phrases that he delivers in that rich voice with an air of gravitas. Similarly: "framework" (four times in the transcript), "roundtable discussion," "build as opposed to destroy," "remake the world" ...