A Jewish Female Obama

Here's my take on Kagan: she is a Jewish female Obama.  Why wouldn't he pick her? 

So do I think she's a good pick?  No, not particularly.  She won't be trying to win over an alienated world, she won't be the first Jewish woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court, and she doesn't follow a total incompetent.  She has none of Obama's pluses and many of his negatives.

I wish he would have picked a Protestant (the literal majority of Americans who won't be 'represented' at all on the Court now), or a Buddhist Asian-American (who have never been represented), or or a filthy rich liberal, like FDR, who would feel free to take on the bankers, etc.  How about a Native-American?  How about a Muslim?  (Did you know there are more Muslims in America than Jews--2% vs. 1%?)  Why not a Mormon, for God' sake? There are as many Mormons in America (after all, here is an American-born religion, by Joseph Smith around 1830 in Upstate New York) as Jews (1.3% in 2001). How about three Mormons on the bench?

Why do we have to have another privileged, 'well-educated', non-practicing and secular Jewish pragmatist with few strong convictions but just great at getting along with people? It's so boring.

This will make six Catholics and three Jews on the Supreme Court.  Though those groups make up only, what, about 25% of America, they're 100% of the Supreme Court?  That is not a good idea. The majority of Americans who are Protestants--evangelical or mainline--(52%) will not be represented at all. Our way of life, our culture, our distinctive views on the relationship between politics and religion and culture will not be represented on the Supreme Court at all.

Awful Thoughts on the Housing Crisis

Mike Whitney is a thoughtful writer on the economy for CounterPunch:

In its effort to rescue the housing market, the Obama administration has created a Frankensystem which neither allows the market to clear nor solves the intractable social problems of lost equity and foreclosure. Obama needs to step back and take a look at the mess he's made by following the advice of financial industry reps and bank lobbyists. Housing is in a shambles. The market is presently stitched together with buyer-assistance programs, loan modifications programs, new homebuyer subsidies, foreclosure abatement programs, principal reduction programs, historic low interest rates, "easy-term" financing, and government-backed loans. It's a dog's breakfast of inducements, giveaways and bandaids all designed with one purpose in mind; to keep the banks from taking a bigger hit on their garbage mortgages. To get an idea of how desperate the situation really is; take a look at this article in the Wall Street Journal:

"The U.S. government's massive share of the nation's mortgage market grew even larger during the first quarter. Government-related entities backed 96.5 per cent of all home loans during the first quarter, up from 90 per cent in 2009, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. The increase was driven by a jump in the share of loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned housing-finance giants....

Requirements for the Supreme Court

I love it when John Cole at Balloon Juice gets riled up about something. In this case its how the selection of a new supreme court justice brings out the Stupid in America's pundits (go to his actual post for links to each example of stupidity. I don't know why the links are not copying over). Behold:

In 48 hours, we have learned of a new list of requirements in order to be a Justice on the Supreme Court. The following is a brief summation (to date- will update as necessary)

1.) Titillating David Brooks- no boring career oriented types need apply. Try to squeeze in some college era hijinks to liven up that vita- maybe a possession bust as an undergrad, some racy Facebook pictures, or a term paper supportive of Mao.

2.) Ed Whelan demands a valid driver’s license and there will be a proficiency test to demonstrate “mastery” of the subject.

3.) Paul Campos would like a dissertation on the history of curriculum theory (no slouching and skipping out on the role of hermeneutics and critical theory), a treatise on best pedagogical practices, a complete review of the collected works of John Dewey, and a positive evaluation from every lazy student you may have ever had.

4.) Andrew Sullivan would like proof one way or another of your sexual orientation. I suppose pictures will do, but the apparent gold standards are the assurances of Jeffrey Toobin and Eliot Spitzer.

5.) Somewhat related to #4, K-LO has decided that four out of over one hundred justices have been women, and this poses a grave threat to the white male, so no more va-jay-jays- women need not apply.

Secrecy and the End of America

Patrick Allitt writes about Garry Will's new book Bomb Power:

During World War II, Gen. Leslie Groves supervised hundreds of exceptional people in a vast operation to create a conflict-ending weapon. Secretly, this concentration of nuclear scientists and technologists built the first atom bomb. Secretly, they tested it in the New Mexico desert. Secretly, President Truman, who had only just found out about the project, authorized the use of two such bombs against Japan. Secretly, the Army Air Force carried out the mission and destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Secrecy in wartime was one thing, but should it persist in peacetime? Almost at once, the Truman administration decided that it should, and a mania for classification set in. As the Cold War began, Truman and his successors created new secret organizations to advise them and to gather information covertly. They worked out ways to bypass congressional oversight. The National Security Council, the CIA, the expanded nuclear-weapons program—all were shrouded in secrecy. Political status accrued to anyone with authority to read classified documents. Those denied clearance became outsiders and lost credibility.

Garry Wills has opposed concentrated executive power and secrecy ever since the late 1960s, when he witnessed their abuse by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In Bomb Power,

Smashing for Jesus

This is modern Christianity at its finest...(tongue stuck firmly in cheek):

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Robot Combat Arena

This comment byJames Kunstler on the American stock market is both true and priceless:

Once upon a time, the stock market was a place where people with capital went to look for productive activity to invest in -- say, a company devoted to making soap flakes, an underpants factory. Now the market is a robot combat arena where algorithms battle for supremacy of the feedback loops. Thursday's still-baffling fifteen-minute "crash" was an excellent demonstration of the diminishing returns of technology. People too-clever-by-half, aided greatly by computers, have now gamed the investment indexes so successfully that these markets no longer have anything to do with investment -- they're just about shaving micro-points of profit at high volumes by micro-milliseconds off mere differentials in... math! This is truly quant heaven, a place where only numbers matter and there is no correspondence to anything in the real world. In other words, last Thursday's bizarre action was a warning that the American stock markets have flown up their own aggregate a**.

Why would anybody not heavily medicated stay invested in the stock markets? Well, the answer must be that they're not. The few still hanging around are the institutionals with nowhere else to go, the pitiful pension funds or the pathetic college endowment funds desperately chasing "yield" in a world where once-sturdier instruments yield zirp-o -- and these poor chumps are getting played and played out. The only other remaining marketeers are -- you guessed it -- the too-big-to-fail banks, the Federal Reserve, and possibly the US Treasury itself playing front-running games and algo stunts and black box buy-ups, and carry-trade rackets, and -- let's not forget -- outright swindles.

We tend to forget that all this hugger-mugger once had a relation to real economies. The basic truth about real economies -- at least the industrial-strength ones -- is that they cannot be successfully managed on the basis of revolving debt in the context of no growth -- and no growth is exactly the bottom line of the peak oil story so revolving debt is finished for now.

Western Religion And Its Brutality Toward 'Enemies'

Now this is scary (from the Daily Beast):

Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who set off an international uproar in 2007 by drawing the Prophet Mohammed’s head on the body of a dog, was attacked during a lecture at a university in Stockholm on Tuesday. "The man sat in the first row and suddenly he rushed at me. He punched me in the head and I lost my glasses," said Vilks, who was lucky to escape, by his own description, as only a “little bruised.” Police said that up to 20 people tried to attack Vilks, and they eventually resorted to tear gas to break up the protests. Al Qaeda has offered $100,000 to anyone who murders Vilks.

I guess one could say it's nice for people take their faith seriously. But there seems to be, below the surface, a certain willingness, in every Western faith particularly, to resort to violence in defense of the faith.  (I write this as a Methodist pastor of 33 years, who has taken his faith very seriously.)

I was debating fundamentalist Calvinists recently online, and as a part of that, I did some reading in Christian history to refresh my memory.  I read about John Calvin and his followers in Geneva, Switzerland in the mid 1500's, who defended Calvinist orthodoxy by executing opponents and heretics like Michael Servetus, a Christian who took issue with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.  Servetus was arrested after attending Calvin's church service (where Pastor John was preaching) and was burned at the stake there in Geneva, with Calvin arguing for leniency by recommending beheading instead.  Kind of boggles the mind.  But we forget how brutal Christianity has been toward its enemies and perceived detractors not that very long ago.

Idiotic Fantasies

The brilliant and caustic James Kunstler writes about the crazy Greek bailout:

The European Union came up with a trillion dollar bail-out for itself at the dawn's early light. Plus, each member gets a Latvian prostitute, gratis. The Germans will love this. It already goosed the Euro back above $1.30 -- just when they hoped a lower Euro would help them move a few more export goods off the shelves. I expect that Mrs Merkel is already catching an earful. A few hours earlier, her coalition of Christian Democrats and free Democrats got their joint ass kicked in a North Rhine - Westphalia local election....

I mention these events reluctantly, knowing how averse we Americans are to news out of Old Europe, that boring backwater of sclerotic cafe lay-abouts, socialistic train service, and less-than man-sized portions of things that real men don't eat anyway.

The question begging itself here, of course, is how Europe intends to come up with roughly a trillion in bail-out money. Sell Portugal to China? Cut Greece up into bait and catch whatever fish are left in the Mediterranean Sea? Frankly, I'm stumped. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.... All the European nations are already so hopelessly enmeshed in chains of unfulfillable counter-party obligations that the bail-out might as well be a game of musical chairs played in the Large Hadron Particle Collider, set to the tunes of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The European bail-out is, in fact, an absurdity. I predict that the effect of the announcement will last all of one trading day on the stock markets.

The truth is that the imbalances of global finance are so grotesque now that the whole money system is hanging together with nothing but spit and prayer. I get rafts of e-letters every week warning of a supposedly-coming global currency -- a companion idea to the notion of a one-world government. Both are idiotic fantasies. Events are taking the nations of the world in the other direction: towards break-up, down-sizing, down-scaling. Likewise, if major currencies such as the Euro and the dollar blow up, they're much more likely to be replaced by more local bank-notes backed by gold than by some hypothetical Amero or Globo-buck.

Government Reforming Society

Some wisdom from Daniel McCarthy:

As actual morality disintegrates, politics becomes deeply moralistic. This is not a paradox: it is always easier for the virtucrat to demand that government reform society than for him to reform himself or his own neighborhood. Conservatives no less than liberals have indulged in morality by proxy, according to which the measure of a man is not how he behaves but how he votes and what ideology he professes. Control of government has become a substitute for leading a good life—as Robert Nisbet warned in The Quest for Community, “power comes to resemble community, especially in times of convulsive social change and of widespread preoccupation with personal identity, moral certainty, and social meaning.”

What the American order lacks is not power but integrating institutions that stand apart from ideological warfare and the clash of personal interests. Red Toryism has a chance in Great Britain because that country retains a handful of institutions that keep alive the idea of the nation as spiritual community. The monarchy and the Church of England may be badly degraded, but they preserve at least the memory, and thus the psychological possibility, of a pre-liberal society predicated on something other than the nexus of cash and power. However feeble their voices may be, when Prince Charles praises beautiful architecture or when the Archbishop of Canterbury criticizes a war, some moral instruction takes place. They can shame the selfish interests of commerce and politics.

America does not just suffer from the absence of similar institutions to give authoritative voice to counter-values. We have national institutions, but not of the traditional, pre-liberal kind. Ours are the White House, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve. Everything else is the domain of wealth and private interest—including Congress and our churches. We do, however, have a national religion: the cult of American Exceptionalism that unites everyone from Pat Robertson to Christopher Hitchens. Its high priest is the president, to whom we turn in times of danger when divine help is most besought, such as after 9/11.

What happens if one injects an uncompromising critique of rights, individualism, and liberalism into this national machinery? The product may not be Red Toryism, but more executive secrecy, deficit spending, war, torture, and disempowerment of civil society. No wonder, then, that for all our national-greatness conservatives laud Benjamin Disraeli, they never sound like Tories. They are instead in the tradition of Caesar and Napoleon, of mass democracy and militarism.

Greeks and Germans

Roger Cohen makes a poignant point in the NYT:

Greece, facing the tab for a long free lunch, is now the most hated member of the euro club. Germans are canceling their Greek holidays (and reckon Greece should be selling its islands rather than taking their hard-earned money.) North Europeans don’t think they should be paying for Greek retirement at 53.

I kinda have to agree with that. Why should Germans pay for Greek's early retirement? That won't fly.