Month: May 2012

With a column at VDARE, natch. It appears he is liberated to say what he truly believes:

White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don't see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

His take on the conservative movement:

Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people's movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding. Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain't too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!)

 No, this isn't in the Onion. 

Morazan, Honduras, 12 pm

"What we have, what we wish we had – ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed … investments won, investments lost … elections won, elections lost – these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us. And each of them is subject to the vagaries and serendipities of life. Our relationship with our Maker, however, depends on none of this. It is entirely in our control, for He is always at the door, and knocks for us. Our worldly successes cannot be guaranteed, but our ability to achieve spiritual success is entirely up to us, thanks to the grace of God.

The best advice I know is to give those worldly things your best but never your all, reserving the ultimate hope for the only one who can grant it. Many a preacher has advised the same, but few as memorably as Martin Luther King, Jr. 'As a young man,' he said, 'with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.'" – Mitt Romney, Liberty University.

Beautifully put. He had one sentence on marriage in the speech.

Previous videos of Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Mataconis records it. Romney went from saying this:

"I know many gay couples that are able to adopt children. That’s fine,"

to saying this:

"I simply acknowledge the fact that gay adoption is legal in all states but one.”

The Etch-A-Sketch shake took only 24 hours. And Romney had to say something untrue to get there:

It is true that most states permit single-parent adoption when the parent is homosexual, but the majority of those states also bar joint adoption by a gay couple (with some states having an exception if the child in question is the natural child of one of the partners). Since it was adoptions by gay couples that Romney was originally referring to on Thursday, his comment on Friday essentially involved moving the goal posts, in addition to wimping out on standing up for something for once.

David Link's view:

Obama hip-checked Romney into the absolutists, and as the adoption episode shows, Romney is going to have a hell of a time getting back on his feet.  Whatever political instincts he has toward fairness cannot survive the melodramatic abstractions of the religious fervor he has to manage among his base.

Niall Ferguson has a brilliant encapsulation of Europe's travails here. The only way forward is, ahem, a full German takeover of the continent:

Since November of last year the European Commission has been actively considering how to create “Stability Bonds” that would put the full faith and credit of the EU (i.e., Germany) behind at least part of the national debts of the member states. Taken individually, some of these debts are hopelessly high. Added together and compared with total euro-zone GDP, they are manageable. What stands in the way is not French socialism or Greek populism. It is quite simply German complacency.

Life in Berlin is good. In Munich, the capital of the German manufacturing machine, it is even better. You should try explaining to the average Bavarian beer drinker at the Stammtisch why he needs to get ready to finance an annual transfer to the Mediterranean countries of up to 8 percent of German GDP. I never get very far.

Here, then, is the twist in my tale of national character. For two generations, the Germans really did want to take over Europe—by force. But today, when they could do so peacefully, they can’t be bothered.

Obama plays it:

The logic behind its collapse is getting harder to refute.

Highly, according to Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review:

Today, most owners of mobile devices read news and features on publishers' websites, which have often been coded to detect and adapt themselves to smaller screens; or, if they do use apps, the apps are glorified RSS readers such as Amazon Kindle, Google Reader, Flipboard, and the apps of newspapers like the Guardian, which grab editorial from the publishers' sites. A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers' app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.

Christopher Mims agrees and disagrees:

I definitely spend more time reading news in apps than in the browser. So do millions of other people. Of course, we're not using the bloated, walled-garden style apps that publishers want us to, even if they're free with our print subscriptions. We're reading in Instapaper. And News.me. And Zite, and Flipboard, and Read it Later. … In this era, social — Twitter and Facebook — are how we find things to read. And then we time-shift our consumption of this material. It's TiVo for the web…