thenamesofthings

[thenamesofthings]

If a stripe forms under Control but not Test, then the result is negative. If one forms under T but not C, then the result is invalid. But, if stripes form under both…

I don't see how I managed to dodge it for so long, only to get it now. Has anyone but me had it in the last year? Extreme achy joints, raging fever and insane dreams all last night, intermittent floods of liquid mucus from the nose that start and stop abruptly, and a horribly painful cough. It's the same set of symptoms as a really bad cold or flu, yet somehow different. Even when I don't feel feverish I note my thoughts are deranged.

I almost wish I hadn't stopped drinking all those years ago. A very large glass of red peasant wine would probably cure it. Well, if you don't hear anything else from me, lol.

#fucking stupid covid

[thenamesofthings]

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Symphony no. 10 in F Sharp Major, 1910 (unfinished); Barshai Performance Version. Rudolf Barshai conducting the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. Presto Music sells the .flac.

…In 1925, after the first performance of Krenek edition of the first and third movements, Richard Specht recanted his belief that Mahler had wanted the sketches to be destroyed after his death, and he informed us that the composer had entrusted them to Alma to do with as she thought best. But the prohibition against performance of Mahler’s music in Nazi Germany caused interest in completing the sketches to wane. After the Second World War, however, that interest revived through the efforts of a few Mahler scholars, among them Jacques de Thore. He asked both honored Schoenberg and Dimitri Shostakovich to complete the symphony, but both declined. Since then, the sketches were made more accessible, and several musicologists have taken up the project in an effort to complete the symphony, Joseph Wheeler and Deryk Cooke produced performing versions of the 10th that stay close to the boundaries of the sketches, only filling in gaps and completing the orchestration. Clinton Carpenter and Remo Mazzeti Jr. have made valiant efforts to venture beyond the confines of the sketches and produce what they call full realizations of the symphony that add musical lines to what Mahler notated. Other versions, such as those by the Italian team of Somalian Masuka, and Rudolph Barshai are labeled reconstructions. Although these versions are distinguishable from one another, they retain the overall structure and order of the movements, as well as the basic musical material that Mahler had supplied in his sketches. Only the second and third edition of Deryk Cooke’s performing version and the Samale and Mazzuca reconstruction have been published. All of the extended versions have been recorded, except for the Somali Masuka.

Cooke’s performing versions have been recorded more often than the others. Alma Mahler, despite her willingness to allow the sketches to be studied, refused to permit a public performance of a completed version. She had apparently not heard the performance of Deryk Cooke’s work in progress in 1960, under the baton of Berthold Goldschmidt, three years later, after being reduced to tears upon hearing a rehearsal tape of this performance, she was convinced by conductor Harold Byrns and two American Mahler experts, Jack Diether and Jerry Brook to allow further performances…

—Mahler Foundation

#youtube

[thenamesofthings]

The Mizrahim Step to the Plate

“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se”;

– a state that would enshrine Jewish political, legal, and military exceptional rights.

“[At that time] … Muslim nations [were] seeking the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasingly epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?”

To be plain, what was apparent even then – in 2012 – was “that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What [would] be the consequence – as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”

If, twelve years ago, the protagonists were explicitly moving away from the underlying secular concepts by which the West conceptualised the conflict, we, by contrast, are still trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of secular, rationalist concepts – even as Israel quite evidently is seized by an increasingly Apocalyptic frenzy.

And by extension, we are stuck in trying to address the conflict through our habitually utilitarian, rationalist policy tool-set. And we wonder why it is not working. It is not working because all parties have moved beyond mechanical rationalism to a different plane.

The Conflict Becomes Eschatalogical

Last year’s election in Israel saw a revolutionary change: The Mizrahim walked into the Prime Minister’s office. These Jews coming from the Arab and North African sphere – now possibly the majority – and, with their political allies on the right, embraced a radical agenda: To complete the founding of Israel on the Land of Israel (i.e. no Palestinian State); to build the Third Temple (in place of Al-Aqsa); and to institute Halachic Law (in place of secular law).

None of this is what might be termed ‘secular’ or liberal. It was intended as the revolutionary overthrow of the Ashkenazi élite. It was Begin who tied the Mizrahi firstly to the Irgun and then to Likud. The Mizrahim now in power have a vision of themselves as the true representatives of Judaism, with the Old Testament as their blueprint. And condescend to the European Ashkenazi liberals.

If we think we can put Biblical myths and injunctions behind us in our secular age – where much of contemporary western thinking makes a point of ignoring such dimensions, dismissing them as either confused, or irrelevant – we would be mistaken.

As one commentator writes: “At every turn, political figures in Israel now soak their proclamations in Biblical reference and allegory. The foremost of which [is] Netanyahu … You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible, and we do remember – and we are fighting…“Here [Netanyahu] not only invokes the prophecy of Isaiah, but frames the conflict as that of “light” versus “darkness” and good versus evil, painting the Palestinians as the Children of Darkness to be vanquished by the Chosen Ones: The Lord ordered King Saul to destroy the enemy and all his people: “Now go and defeat Amalek and destroy all that he has; and give him no mercy; but put to death both husband and wife; from youth to infant; from ox to sheep; from camel to donkey” (15:3)”.

We might term this ‘hot eschatology’ – a mode that is running wild amongst the young Israeli military cadres, to the point that the Israeli high command is losing control on the ground (lacking any mid-layer NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) class).

On the other hand

The uprising launched from Gaza is not called Al-Aqsa Flood for nothing. Al-Aqsa is both a symbol of a storied Islamic civlisation, and it is also the bulwark against the building of the Third Temple, for which preparations are underway. The point here is that Al-Aqsa represents Islam in aggregate — neither Shi’i, nor Sunni, nor ideological Islam.

Then, at another level, we have, as it were, ‘dispassionate eschatology’: When Yahyah Sinwar writes of ‘Victory or Martyrdom’ for his people in Gaza; when Hizbullah speaks of sacrifice; and when the Iranian Supreme Leader speaks of Hussain bin Ali (the grandson of the Prophet) and some 70 companions in 680 CE, standing before inexorable slaughter against an 1,000 strong army, in the name of Justice, these sentiments simply are beyond the reach of western utilitarian comprehension.

We cannot easily rationalise the latter ‘way of being’ in western modes of thought. However, as Hubert Védrine, France’s former Foreign Minister, observes – though titularly secular – the West nonetheless is “consumed by the spirit of proselytism”. That Saint Paul’s “go and evangelize all nations” has become “go and spread human rights to all the world”… And that this proselytism is extremely deep in [western DNA]: “Even the very least religious, totally atheists, they still have this in mind, [even though] they don’t know where it comes from”.

We might term this secular eschatology, as it were. It is certainly consequential…

—Alistair Crooke, 22 Apr 24

[thenamesofthings]

Paul Gottfried on the Historian Eugene Genovese (1930–2012)

The problem with fitting Gene [Genovese] into my conception of the academic Left is that he did not resemble the three types of leftists I had previously encountered — and whom I have been encountering ever since. The first two types were Jewish but divided easily into two categories. One, the representatives of which were predominantly Central European in ancestry, were conspicuously bookish and spent considerable energy working to make the world conform to a Marxist scheme of reality. Such leftists were usually multilingual and typically shared my interest in German philosophy. But they also slavishly supported the Soviets and had a blind spot when it came to the many acts of mass murder committed by Communist regimes. Although themselves the products of elitist humanistic educations, they also professed great love for the unwashed, a group whom they rarely dealt with. I would have greatly enjoyed the company of such leftists except for one source of friction. I found their denials or whitewashing of the most gruesome tyranny in modern history, equaled only by the crimes of the Third Reich, to be inexpressibly repulsive.

The second, and more tedious, type of academic leftists was composed of New York Jews of Eastern European origin who were fixated on one overriding fear: anti-Semitism. They seemed to experience this danger in proportion to how far they traveled outside of the New York metropolitan area. They were and are the most insecure group I have known, and their prominence in today’s elite history departments testifies to the decrepitude of an older Christian establishment they easily replaced. In this case I can locate no conceivable fit between the radicalism of these radicals and anything that connects to classical Marxism. In preparing my book on the post-Marxist Left, I had in mind among others these denizens of the academic fantasy world. But I would also note that the neurotic Jewish intellectuals under discussion have formed an exceedingly harmonious relationship with the yuppie Left. The enablers of Type Two now abound everywhere, and whenever Type Two members are moved to scream “fascist,” “racist,” and “anti-Semite,” droves of non-Jewish academics can be expected to rush to their defense and call for therapeutic and political action.

The third type of academic leftist, the PC gentile, is the one whom I have come to like the least. While Type Two consists of Woody Allen–like neurotics who think that they are protecting themselves and their group against a pervasive external gentile enemy, Type Three is arrogant and suicidal. In Europe and the U.S., Type Three representatives coddle or excuse Islamic terrorists, and they regard their own civilization as so worthless or so evil that they seek to “enrich” it by bringing in never-ending supplies of Third World immigrants. The faculty and administrators influenced by this persuasion are eager to remove all references to Christmas from school programs but never stop celebrating Kwanzaa and jabbering about Ramadan. They also treat Martin Luther King Jr. as a replacement for the vanished savior in their old religion, and they go into high gear during black and women’s history months, pointing out our continued sins of omission in dealing with these designated victims.

As a leftist, Gene was so different from all of these types that it was impossible to relate him to any of them, except for his occasional associations with Type One. Like those particular leftists, and like former Communists James Burnham and Will Herberg, his interest in Marxism seemed largely cerebral. Perhaps in trying to make sense of the present age, Gene simply adopted a fashionable model for historical interpretation that was associated with intellectuals, one that combined “scientific” claims with apparent humanitarian concern. Over the years, as I have studied his monographs and essays, starting with his early The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), I have never stopped noticing how much of a structural conservative, in the nineteenth-century sense, Gene has always been. His obligatory references to oppressed black slaves and the Marxist dialectic notwithstanding, his works are essentially tributes to precapitalist societies based on hierarchy and a Christian sense of order. His overtly traditionalist later writings, such as The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of An American Conservatism (1994) and the massive volume that he copublished with his wife in 2005, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview, are not significantly different in their interpretive framework or moral assumptions from what Gene produced as a putative Stalinist.

His most conventionally leftist book remains, in my opinion, From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), a slim volume that Gene might have done to appease his mounting critics on the left who found him insufficiently sensitive. In this work he attributes to black slaves a consciousness that arose independently of their capricious masters. He tries to trace among these slaves the emergence of a revolutionary élan that might have resulted in class war. More dramatically than his other writings, From Rebellion to Revolution dwells in excruciating detail on the physical suffering of the slave class. This last theme had been of special interest to University of California-Berkeley historian Kenneth Stampp, an outspoken critic of Gene’s previous analysis of the slave economy.

I once discussed my perceptions about Gene’s relation to the Left with a longtime correspondent, Aileen Kraditor, who knew him while both were associated with the Communist Party. Aileen argued that Gene was expressing immaculately Communist historical views when he treated black slaves as reflecting the worldview of the Southern planter class. Gene was applying the view of the Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who had expounded the notion that the ruling class typically imposes a “hegemonic ideology” that paralyzes the revolutionary potential of those they oppress. The slaves acted and thought like their masters, in Gene’s narrative, because their minds and bodies belonged to their masters.

In spite of the plausibility of this argument, I never believed that Gene was simply adapting a Gramscian form of Marxism, a theory that in any case is not orthodox Marxism but rather a view of social consciousness based on Hegelian philosophy more than historical materialism. What Gene did with the theory looked very different from what had been done with it by neo-Marxists, and particularly by feminists and black nationalists. More conventional leftists poured wrath on the master class, but Gene admired the “mind of the slaveholder,” and he devoted long respectful disquisitions to those Southern Presbyterian theologians who had defended the South’s peculiar institution.

A friend quipped that after Gene had returned to his ancestral Catholic faith in 1996 and had begun denouncing Communist atrocities, his politics began to slide leftward. As long as he had presented himself as a Stalinist and Gramscian, he could afford to treat the Southern planter class sympathetically and play up Southern Agrarians as perceptive critics of world capitalism. Once, however, Gene had become a regular fixture of the establishment Right and developed friendships with neoconservatives, he supposedly had to monitor his right-wing sympathies more carefully. Given the neoconservatives’ funding of and prominence in The Historical Society, a nonradical alternative to the American Historical Association that he and Betsey launched in 1998, the idea that Gene was put under restraints that had not operated in the past seems correct.

But the continuity between his past and present convictions is still sufficiently evident that it would be difficult to describe him as having swerved in an entirely different direction since the early ’90s. His recent work on the religious outlook of the slaveholders shows continued empathy for its subjects; and despite his Catholic practices, Gene does not hide his theological affinity for Southern Calvinists, about whom he writes with obvious respect. At the very neoconservative National Association of Scholars annual gathering several years ago, at which I happened to be present, Gene delivered a speech after having been given an award. His remarks were a glowing defense of Old Southern virtues and pieties, and at least by implication, this Italian-American from Bayside, Brooklyn, took aim at the current conservative movement for repudiating its Southern heritage. From the faces of his listeners, it seemed that his observations went over about as well as a ringing endorsement of Hamas would have…

—Paul Gottfried, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and other Friends and Teachers 2009

[thenamesofthings]

Voices Against Progress: What I Learned from Genovese, Lasch, and Bradford

The first time [Christopher Lasch and I] met again face-to-face was at a conference held in 1990 at Elizabethtown College. By then I greatly admired his work on the therapeutic state (his magnum opus dealing with this vast subject, The True and Only Heaven, was about to be published by Norton), and a thematically related project that I would eventually pursue was taking shape in my head. The conference, on the future of community, had been arranged by the board of Telos magazine. When Kit got around to speaking about “scientific” administration as a threat to cultural identities, I found myself strongly seconding his remarks. But he also had a tendency to appeal to the consciousness of “real people,” whom managerial government had supposedly marginalized. Claes Ryn, who was also present, criticized Kit for his “romantic populism,” whereupon a firestorm erupted. Kit taunted Claes as an “elitist,” a description that fitted and still fits this soft-spoken Nordic gentleman who appears everywhere in elegant attire. Claes retorted that you can’t escape from elites; you get them no matter what, because the “people” have no sense of self-government. Indeed they want others to look after their needs.

I was caught in the middle in more than one way. The two disputants were both friends; and although I agreed with Claes that we ought to resist the impulse to romanticize the “people,” Lasch had a certain populace in mind to which his designation undoubtedly applied. His rugged German ancestors who had settled in Nebraska as farmers, and the working-class families whom he contrasted to the sybaritic cosmopolites in his last book, Revolt of the Elites (1995), instantiate the “real people” — that is, those whom Lasch wished to re-empower. The question might be raised whether “the real people” form anything approaching a significant demographic part of today’s America — or whether they exist for the most part as an idealized memory. But such a picture of the “people” informed Kit’s populist conceptions. The good types who redeemed his dualistic universe were often the progenitors of the Catholic blue-collar working families that I can still vaguely recall from the 1950s. These families were marked by multiple offspring and by wives who prepared their husbands’ lunch pails. Lasch’s evocation of the females in his ideal but perhaps archaic nuclear family caused the feminist Susan Faludi to designate him as the “leading American sexist of the ’90s.”

I was puzzled by the mindset at the New York Times and New York Review of Books when their editors presented Kit after his death in 1994 as an archetypically leftist social critic. By then Lasch might have been moving to the right of Pat Buchanan on many social issues, despite the obvious fact that he retained his lifelong hatred of consumer capitalism, a trait that he might have inherited from his socialist mother. His devotion to a nonmainstream form of socialism was something he discussed with me after I had learned about it from his contributions to the Catholic, anticapitalist fortnightly New Oxford Review. Despite his Presbyterian affiliation and general theological skepticism, Kit earnestly read the English Catholic distributists and the essays of the Catholic advocate for labor, Dorothy Day. His project was to find a religiously based communitarianism that could serve as an alternative to multinational capitalism. This communal identity would focus on service to one’s family and neighbors, and it would supposedly take everyone’s mind off consumption and the false idea of “Progress.” No popular idol exasperated Kit as deeply as the American fixation on making everything better, even at the cost of abolishing stable institutions. This theme is a leitmotif running through his early work, when he was still identifiably leftist, until Revolt of the Elites. His posthumously printed writings, edited by his daughter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, confirm the impression created by what Kit brought out during his all too short life.

Unlike my other well-known correspondents, I have managed to preserve only one letter from Kit. Other missives came before this one, which is dated March 22, 1990, from his home in Pittsford, New York, but those were mostly scribbled responses to my occasional queries. In this typed letter, Kit pours scorn on Commentary magazine, a publication that, he writes, “I never read if I can help it.” In a recent issue Midge Decter had slammed him for contributing to the dissolution of middle-class morality, a charge that I brought to his attention in a humorous way. Kit, who personified an old-fashioned Presbyterian way of life, took umbrage at the slight: “That is the first time I’ve been attacked as an advocate of sexual promiscuity. It’s kind of nice to be attacked from the right for a change. It’s the attacks from the left that still bother me.”

Two thoughts flashed through my mind as I read these observations. First, on the basis of what Kit had recently published — soon expanded on in The True and Only Heaven — all traditional distinctions between “left” and “right” had broken down. Since both sides now believed in consumerism, Progress, and centralized government, it was misleading to go on drawing critical distinctions between them. Two, if Midge Decter really knew what Lasch believed, she would have attacked him from the left rather than the right. What she had mistakenly attributed to him were the countercultural stances that had come out of the ’60s, positions that in fact he had never taken.

Another reason I’ve only one of Lasch’s letters is that by 1993 he was writing to his friends collectively about his deteriorating health — specifically, about the spread of his cancer. I found the topic inexpressibly painful, since my own wife was then dying of cancer, so I probably discarded the communications after having looked at them. Kit’s unhappy fate still makes me think about a lunch at a local restaurant that he had with me and two of my colleagues when he was visiting Elizabethtown. On that occasion Kit smoked a cigarette and ordered a dark beer in order to make the point that “people are too damned concerned about living forever.” These gestures might have been intended to make a statement about health-conscious yuppies; I myself could have been one of the “health nuts” whom Kit was trying to shock when he smoked and drank at lunch. By then (alas) his life was coming to an end — sooner than any of us realized…

—Paul Gottfried, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (2009)

[thenamesofthings]

Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Darden School of Business, 1996. UVA.

[thenamesofthings]

Sir David Chipperfield (1953–). Fayland House, 2013. The Chilterns.

He's playing an interesting game with symmetry and scale in his handling of the columns.

#Chipperfield

[thenamesofthings]

The habits of mind that Ortega attributed to the masses are now, I submit, more characteristic of the upper levels of society…

When Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses in 1930, he could not have foreseen a time when it would be more appropriate to speak of a revolt of the elites. Writing in the era of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of fascism, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war that had tom Europe apart, Ortega attributed the crisis of Western culture to the “political domination of the masses.” In our time, however, the chief threat seems to come not from the masses but from those at the top of the social hierarchy, the elites who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production, and thus set the terms of public debate. Members of the elite have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West. For many people, the very term “Western civilization” now calls to mind an organized system of domination designed to enforce conformity to bourgeois values and to keep the victims of patriarchal oppression–women, children, homosexuals, people of color–in a permanent state of subjection. In a remarkable tum of events that confounds our expectations about the course of history, something that Ortega never dreamed of has occurred—the revolt of the elites.

Keep reading

[thenamesofthings]

Marked "I. Miller." Windsor Settee, c. 1790. Philadelphia. Tulip poplar, hickory, and ash: 75 in. Deaccessioned by Winterthur, now Levy Galleries, New York, New York.

#windsor #American decorative arts #the early Republic

[thenamesofthings]

Congrats, Welcome to the Third World

…[T]he jobs report shows that the United States is continuing its collapse into third worldism.

A first world economy is characterized by high productivity, high value-added manufacturing and industrial jobs. A third world economy is characterized by low productivity service and government jobs. As I have reported for 30 years, the US has transitioned from the first to the third world.

The jobs report shows that. In March America lost jobs in primary metal manufacturing, fabricated metal product manufacturing, machinery manufacturing, computer and electronic product manufacturing, computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing, communications equipment manufacturing, semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing, electrical equipment, appliance, and component manufacturing, furniture and related product manufacturing, food manufacturing, textile product manufacturing, apparel manufacturing, plastics and rubber products manufacturing, leather and allied product manufacturing.

190,000 of the jobs are in services, and 71,000 are in government. In other words, 86% of the jobs gain reflect the third world pattern. The service jobs are in wholesale and retail trade, health care and social assistance, and waitresses and bartenders.

The high tech jobs we were promised in exchange for offshoring US manufacturing industry are hardly visible and certainly did not provide opportunities for displaced manufacturing workers. Moreover, most tech jobs–AI, robotics, software programs–are aimed at displacing humans from the work force.

The offshoring of US manufacturing destroyed the middle class, state and local government budgets, the ladders of upward mobility, and concentrated the wealth of the country in one percent of the population.

That one percent itself is a massively wide wealth range from $11 million to 200,000 million, which are certainly not comparable wealth positions. The difference is the same as between $11 and $200,000. American wealth is concentrated in the hands of multi-billionaires who comprise one-tenth of one percent or less of the population.

The tell-tale sign of a third world economy is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. In the United States this is called “democracy.” And an increase in third world jobs is misrepresented as economic progress.

They will never stop lying to us.

—PCR, 8 Apr 2024

#Paul Craig Roberts

[thenamesofthings]

…The “administrative state” is a general term used to describe the entrenched form of government that currently controls almost all levers of federal power in the United States, with the possible exception of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The premature leaking of the SCOTUS majority decision concerning Roe v Wade to corporate press allies was essentially a preemptive strike by the administrative state in response to an action which threatened its power.

The threat being mitigated was the constitutionalist logic upon which the legal argument was based, that being that authority to define rights not specifically defined in the US Constitution as being federally granted vests with individual states. Played out under the political cover of one of the most contentious political topics in modern US history, this was merely another skirmish demonstrating that the entrenched bureaucracy and its allies in the corporate media will continue to resist any constitutional or statutory restrictions on its power and privilege.

Resistance to any form of control or oversight has been a consistent bureaucratic behavior throughout the history of the United States government, and this trend has accelerated since the end of the Second World War. More recently, this somewhat existential Constitutionalist threat to the Administrative State was validated in the case of West Virginia vs The Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court determined that when federal agencies issue regulations with sweeping economic and political consequences the regulations are presumptively invalid unless Congress has specifically authorized the action. With this decision, for the first time in modern history boundaries have started to be imposed on the expansion of the power of unelected senior administrators within the Federal bureaucracy.

Legal underpinning for The Administrative State

Administrative law rests on two fictions. The first, the nondelegation doctrine, imagines that Congress does not delegate legislative power to agencies. The second, which flows from the first, is that the administrative state thus exercises only executive power, even if that power sometimes looks legislative or judicial. These fictions are required by a formalist reading of the Constitution, whose Vesting Clauses permit only Congress to make law and the President only to execute the law. This formalist reading requires us to accept as a matter of practice unconstitutional delegation and the resulting violation of the separation of powers, while pretending as a matter of doctrine that no violation occurs. The non-delegation doctrine is a principle in administrative law that Congress cannot delegate its legislative powers to other entities…

[thenamesofthings]

Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” 

It sounds boring. Actually, it would have fundamentally changed, in the best possible way, the entire functioning of the administrative bureaucracy that rules this country in a way that bypasses both the legislative and judicial process, and has ruined the checks and balances inherent in the US Constitution.

The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary.

The gradual rise of this fourth branch of government – which is very much the most powerful branch – has reduced the American political process to mere theater as compared with the real activity of government, which rests with the permanent bureaucracy.

Keep reading

[thenamesofthings]

"You want a great change. We want a great Russia."

—Pyotr Stolypin

"Grab the Revolution by the Throat"

How Pyotr Stolypin wiped out Russia's leftist violence and almost saved an Empire.

[thenamesofthings]

The Pillars of Historic Liberalism: Private Property, Equality before the Law, and Freedom of Contract, Speech, and Association 

Under cover of the welfare state, and warmly seconded by their allies in the media and education, politicians, judges, and public administrators conduct an ongoing crusade against every form of inequality and “discrimination.” Deploying the expanding power of the managerial and therapeutic state, the political class is engaged in an “assault on what the old liberals called civil society” (1999: 25). The result is the calculated subversion of private property, equality before the law, and freedom of contract, speech, and association, the pillars of historic liberalism. The interventionist state, in the words of a German historian of state power, now claims the right to “shape society if necessary even against the will of the majority or at least of a large minority,” and reveals itself as a “mere soft version of the total state” (Reinhard 1999: 467). Today, the complaint that Herbert Spencer voiced over a century ago (1981: 23) rings truer than ever: “Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of Liberal; and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of extended freedom!”

—Ralph Raico (1936–2016), Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School 2012

[thenamesofthings]

VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes:

I launched VDARE.com on Christmas Eve 1999. So it is perhaps appropriate that, on Good Friday 2024, the anniversary of Christ’s death, I must announce VDARE.com’s crucifixion by New York State’s communist Attorney General Letitia James.

On March 27, 2024, in another of her lightning-fast NYAG James-compliant rulings, New York State Supreme Court Judge Sabrina Kraus held us in Contempt of Court because we have not yet complied (because we were fighting it) with her January 23, 2023 order that we meet NYAG James’ massive and crippling subpoena demands.

Judge Kraus did modify her earlier order to reflect the intervention (much appreciated) of the Institute for Free Speech. So now we no longer have to reveal, explicitly, the names of our pseudonymous writers, some of whom would certainly be fired from their jobs if their identities leaked.

But we are still required to review 40 gigabytes of emails, an enormous amount. And of course these could in fact reveal the names of those pseudonymous writers, as well as our donors, privileged communications with lawyers, etc.

Judge Kraus has also now allowed us to redact these emails. But this is a huge task, which our lawyers estimate could cost as much as $150,000.

An observer tells us this order is more typical of major corporate litigation, not a tiny charity.

And, perversely, although Judge Kraus has now modified her January 23, 2023 order, she is nevertheless now fining us $250 a day for not complying with it.

We have fought NYAG Letitia James, at a cost of up to $1 million, for nearly three years. But now we are literally hanging on the cross.

REMEMBER, VDARE.com HAS NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING—BECAUSE IT IS NOT GUILTY OF ANYTHING.

[thenamesofthings]

Unz captures our near-present moment as well as anyone (the interview was given Oct 23). I wish he would run for the WH.

https://www.patrickcasey.com/p/the-israel-hamas-war-ft-ron-unz

[thenamesofthings]