McCarthy remark

Anecdote from Cormac McCarthy’ sheriff in No Country for Old Men:

“I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other… She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: ‘I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion.’ And I said, ‘Well mam, I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep.’ Which pretty much ended the conversation.”

Quite right, quite right

Hugh Hewitt has the right idea about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination. GOP Senate reps need to be careful.

Splat

A North Korean newspaper stated today that U.S. sanctions toward N.K. were “like striking a rock with a rotten egg.” Which is actually a pretty good analogy. North Korea as a political institution is not exactly sound, but qualifies as rocklike in what are, right now, the most important respects: they’ve got all the weapons they need to kill South Koreans, and they aren’t slowed down by starving civilians. And we’ve got a rotten egg in the White House.

Harharhar

I feel little shivers of pity going up Chris Matthews’ leg. Today’s lesson: if you don’t want to die, don’t buy that extra lettuce with your government expense account. Don’t do it.

Interlude

Readers and folks:

The Bean is getting old and pursuing stodgy grownup things like financial independence. Conceptual Coffee will probably get limited attention for a few months.

I trust that the conservative resistance will not let Mr. Obama mess up our country in the meantime.

It begins…

Polls have opened in Israel. Forecasts suggest Israelis are leaning Likud. Good news for those of us who stand unabashedly pro-Israel.

Grooves

It’s Over is an underrated bit of Waits excellence. I’d probably get sued if I embedded the file, but you can listen to it here.

There’s a difference…

… Between excuses and motivation. We Westerners, in the spirit of tolerance, like to point out that Middle Eastern militants often attempt to justify their actions as retaliatory. An examination of the scale of  brutality in comparison to complaint wipes that away pretty quickly.

The way we tell when people aren’t being cruel for the reasons they say they’re being cruel is by watching their behavior when no good excuses are available.

Par example: The Jerusalem Post tells us that several Arab teenagers attacked a Jewish-American student studying in Israel this week. He did not flush a Quran, write a cartoon, or paint his nails. He didn’t make an anti-Islamic video. He didn’t even play Britney Spears at unacceptable volume.

No, gents, he asked for directions in Hebrew.

The Arab chappies then got medieval on his neck and cheek with a utility knife.

A wise woman once remarked to me that “a good theory is predictive.”  Let’s try a couple of theories for this situation and see if they pass muster.

Theory 1. Everybody (except Bush) wants peace; we just need to understand people’s culture and we’ll get along.

Prediction: You ask Arab youths for directions and you get both directions and a hug.

Hmmm…

Theory 2. Ancient racial and religious hatreds run strong in the Middle East. Some people rise above them, some don’t.

Prediction: You ask for directions and are probably ignored. Maybe sullenly helped. Maybe very politely helped. Maybe you get your face and neck adjusted.

Double hmmm.

Now a bonus question. You are a Jewish-American college student lost in Jerusalem. You need directions and you like your neck. You can ask (a.) three Arab males or (b.) (insert any other chosen subset of the Israeli population). What’ll it be?

Conceptual Coffee

Human life was a pretty stable business pre-1700. Nasty, brutish, short. Bright moments in that era were usually brought about by some combination of humanism (and its ilk–Confucianism, Jewish law, and the like) and representative democracy–outside that, broadly speaking, the average chap still had a more or less dirty, ignorant existence.

As the Renaissance and the Enlightenment progressed, humanism and Christianity became uncomfortable, often vying bedfellows in the West. The moral uncertainties of humanism that decayed so often into the weakness and cynicism that Athens and Rome displayed in their latter days was countered by the demanding moral standards Christianity imposed. Humanism taught reason and the value of self-creation; humanism taught us to build, cooperatively if necessary. Christianity taught us to live with each other and to fulfill often ugly moral duties unflinchingly in the name of absolute certainty of conscience.

Starting with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, humanism’s rebirth in Christian civilization fostered scientific and technological inquiry. The modern world is a fruit of that almost entirely Western development. The Industrial revolution and liberal democracy gave us a freer and more comfortable world.

Much of the harshness and prejudice of blacker days faded out as a less desperate Western humanity gained education and some manners. In a safer environment, the Progressives picked up on the West’s newfound inclination toward being nice to women and minorities and told us that it was the progress and the root of this better modern lifestyle. Marx, Freud, and Dr. Spock turned us toward a mentality of victimhood and we lost sight of where we had come from and why the desperation that made us cruel had gone away.

The West’s counterweight in all this was communism. The Cold War was the greatest single conflict in human history because it was the only conflict that actually threatened to (a.) destroy all human life, or (b.) bring the whole world to tyrannical subjugation. When we finally pulled ourselves out of a stupor and spent our excess cash, the weakness of central planning showed itself. America inherited the world’s lead. By any measure–GDP, infant mortality, literacy rates, etc, the post-Soviet world is a better world to inhabit than anything before it.

Now post-humanistic, post-Christian moonbat silliness has made us weak again, and Europe is succumbing to over-civilized self-extinction. European post-materialism and the European twit’s coffee-shop hyper-intellectual lifestyle doesn’t welcome children. Islam, on the other hand, a force more compatible with humanity’s savage roots, has an issue with birth control and no issue at all with women being baby machines. Europeans are going and  Middle-Eastern immigrants are coming. European civilization, as a functional entity, will be obsolete within a couple of generations.

This side of the water, we’re flailing about in increasingly self-deluded fantasies of imminent environmental catastrophe and fear of our own “intolerance”. Hope, change, and vague slogans populate the new American vision.

Those of us who still have some realistic connection to what civilization means and what the alternatives are need to figure out how to knock down the spineless ideologies that are killing the West. The alternatives are ugly.

Hollywood says nice things about grownups…?

Taken, the action movie that wandered into theaters this past week, gets a surprised A from this bean. Its hero is a midlle-aged father (check) rescuing his daughter (check) from a ghastly operation rooted in the Islamic traffic in women (check). The action followed the deft, gritty Bourne-made style (check) and there was almost no sex (check). Not terribly complex or original, but definitely a credit to Liam Neeson’s talent and a good conservative film.