The gray dictators of The Rules.

Three years ago, I proposed a radical theory about what Obama was up to. The explanatory graphs were:

I think I’ve been asking the right questions all along. (I’ll leave it to you all to make the appropriate citations.) I never thought his goal was defined in European terms. If he was a muslim child in the far east, he was also an American visitor in the most heavily populated region of the world, where the American economic model was proliferating in ways no one could have foreseen, with one country after another exploding in terms of capitalist economics, technology, and common aspiration. He was a witness to the unbounded, and unregulated, consequences of the American Way unleashed on a world that had long been governed more by tradition than freedom.

As a result, I don’t think he is as much an enemy of America as he is of the American Way leading the world into a technological chaos we’re not prepared for. I don’t think he’s as much a Marxist as a Luddite. I don’t think he’s as much a totalitarian Maoist as a Mandarin…

I do think he’s planning to slow it all down, dumb it all down, knowing full well that all his dumb-ass, putative allies have it in their power — via stultifying regulations and stagnating economic policies — to recreate something like the old Chinese dynastic cycle, in which a durable professional bureaucracy staffed by “mandarins” ultimately forced every new emperor into the mold of his predecessors.

Now, three years later, National Review’s Kevin Williamson has articulated a similar theory in an essay called The Lawless One.

Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas… This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect…

“Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck… But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

In an important sense, the American people have no political say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead, Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration, through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his many panels of experts.

Glunks Rule.

The modern interpretation of Glunks Rule. Don’t talk to the hand. It just doesn’t matter..

Obama thinks he knows better. He’d prefer being a Mandarin to being Mao. He’s not a communist internationalist. He’s a dynast. He thinks the best way to save America — much like Ron Paul — is to segregate his nation as much as possible from the world at large, abandoning overt attempts to control other nations, and reestablish a dynastic bureaucracy of the kind that managed profitably to suppress Chinese innovation for centuries and keep the people safe by only modest oppression. He may be positively inspired by the fact that it was a dynastic custom of the Chinese census never to report more than 60 million as the population. Stasis is preferable to dangerous change. (Change we can believe in?) He sees himself as Ch’in (builder of the Great Wall), the oppressor who in a few brutal years laid down the framework for 2,000 years of stability and relative freedom from outside interference. I’m thinking that’s the real long-term “vision” of so-called American progressives. They don’t hate us. They just fear and mistrust our vitality as a contagion that could destroy the world.

It’s the residue of Obama’s Marxism we should be skeptical about. The belief that history and human destiny are still somehow controllable by the pronouncements of the smartest rationalists. The last thing he doesn’t understand — that so many of us are eager for the adventure of human life, whatever highs and lows it brings. His arrogance is not that he regards himself as smarter than all human ingenuity and aspiration, but that we need to be protected from these things by a dull, depressive seer like him.

You could read all of both posts. But you probably won’t. On the other hand, Raebert has a response of his own.

Read them all or don’t. There’s a difference between a horse’s ass and a deerhound’s ass. One of them doesn’t constantly raise a tail in your face. Unless you deserve it.

You know? You get tired. I’m tired of most everything. My wife is getting tired of embarrassing stories about her alma mater, Rutgers. Here’s their latest:

This seminar offers a theologically oriented approach to Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics. We will focus on Springsteen’s reinterpretation of biblical motifs, the possibility of redemption by earthly means (women, cars, music), and his interweaving of secular and sacred elements. Springsteen’s work will also be situated within the broader poetic tradition that casts the writer as a religious figure whose message does not effect transcendent salvation, but rather, transforms earthly reality.

Really? I think the professor even said Springsteen explored biblical themes more than any other contemporary musician. What utter bullshit.

Yeah, I’m a Jersey boy, but I’m not a fool. There’s more Christianity in the Tom Waits opus than in Springsteen’s by a factor of 10 to 1. Waits is trying to live and love. Springsteen is trying to get a union card for self-loathing misery. On a motorcycle.

But. As already foreshadowed — because I’m in a mood, what with none of our esteemed commenters having anything to say about the impending humanitarian disaster of ObamaCare — I’ll default to my favorite all-world band, the Rolling Stones.

There are no coincidences. Raebert’s spent a week convincing me I need to use the ear buds and listen to all the music that isn’t Mozart’s concerto for clarinet and oboe all by my lonesome. He’s happy now and so am I.

So Springsteen is a master of the cheap allegory:

Interestingly, Springsteen refers more often to the stories of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) than the New Testament. On a literary level, Springsteen often recasts biblical figures and stories into the American landscape. The narrator of “Adam Raised a Cain” describes his strained relationship with his father through the prism of the biblical story of the first father and son; Apocalyptic storms accompany a boy’s tortured transition into manhood in “The Promised Land,” and the first responders of 9/11 rise up to “someplace higher” in the flames, much as Elijah the prophet ascended in a chariot of fire (“Into the Fire”). Theologically, I would say the most dominant motifs are redemption — crossing the desert and entering the Promised Land — and the sanctity of the everyday. Springsteen tries to drag the power of religious symbols that are usually relegated to some transcendent reality into our lived world. In his later albums he also writes very openly about faith.

Really? Faith in what? Democrat rulers? Seems like it. All he does anymore is parade around campaigning for leftists. No wonder he prefers the Old Testament. Kings beat jacks and deuces every time. The “Promised Land” is Rumsen, where Bruce lives and even gatekeeper cottages cost millions. Got it.

No. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me.

Please spare me the mournful, self pitying dirges that constitute Springsteen songs about growing up so illiterate that none of your song lyrics even scan.

Told you I was in a mood. I promise I’ll stop. But only after four more demonstrations that the Stones have a lot more theological content than Bruce ever did..

Doubt.

Defiance.

Gospel.

Clearly NEW Testament by the way, all of them. Shidooby.

Oops. Did I say Four? Okay. Here’s how you should all think of me.

You can put that on my tombstone. Right after best writer ever.

I still love the triangle things.

I dunno. There was a movie he didn’t like. Caused a multi-day funk.

But this morning he was bounding again. Enough said.

Back on track.

We don’t want him…

So MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has a book about how Republicans can win again.

Like many, I’ve seen enough of Morning Joe. He makes me sick. He takes a paycheck for standing by while legions of lefties assault everything he’s supposed to stand for. Has he stood up and called for the firing of Martin Bashir?

Uh, apparently it doesn’t matter to National Review’s Jim Geraghty or Hotair’s Ed Morrissey. I won’t reproduce their twaddle in support of his book, but I’ll give you the links.

Jim Geraghty at National Review

Ed Morrissey at Hotair

What I will say is that such promotions of an unscrupulous turncoat are useful. The only explanations are 1) you want him to promote your book on MSNBC when the time comes, 2) you guys are all just playing a game in which your supposed differences matter less than the income you get from TV, conferences, and so-called new (but oldtime corrupt) media, or 3) uh, both.

What you don’t get is that all of us in the unwashed are paying attention. We hold Scarborough in utter contempt. As you hold his hand, we withdraw our credulity and respect for what you say.

By the way, everyone, the most important part of the links above is the Comments. Read them all.

He’s on my lap. The round thing at the upper left is my knee. He weighs a ton.

We’re worried. And I feel guilty. He’s been having anxiety attacks. Suddenly starts shaking. The only thing that calms him down is the clarinet and oboe movement of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A Major. That makes him sleep like a baby. But it’s only seven and a half minutes long.

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

Why I feel guilty. Obviously, Raebert doesn’t know or give a fig about ObamaCare. But I do. He has adopted a one foot rule. Either he’s got his head on me or he’s on the floor below me, not to be rousted or otherwise interfered with. He has no appetite. He has to be tricked into going outside. No one in the deerhound community has ever heard of anything like this. We’ve made an appointment with the vet. Friday.

What to do? You can’t exactly explain that there’s no need for him to worry about ObamaCare since he never knew what it was in the first place. I can’t tell him not to worry about the state of a nation that’s nosediving into the abyss because he doesn’t know what a nation is, or what an abyss is, for that matter.

But he seems to be expressing what I am, in some respects, denying in myself. A debilitating sorrow, a fear that is not personal but somehow universal.

I’d settle for him eating the juiced-up breakfast he has disdained all day — his usual pricey kibble mixed with the soft food we got for our aging greyhound, topped off with an ounce of yoghurt and the dregs of a bag of cheddar Goldfish. Doesn’t that sound heavenly? But he hasn’t even glanced at it.

How can I tell him it’s okay, not his problem to worry about? My wife says I should ask myself the same question. But what do women know? I mean, really.

Missa Luba. First heard the album in 1968. Adored it. A Catholic mass rendered by the voices of the Congo. Spontaneous, improvisational, beautiful, alive, and full of love.

Sadly, it took me minutes to recall the name, which I suddenly desperately needed after encountering this quartet of comments from crybabies who should know better.

On the November 14 addition of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” hosts Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser discussed LA Clipper player Matt Barnes recent trouble related to a Twitter outburst that included the “N-word.” The Tweet (since deleted) read:

“I love my teammates like family, but I’m DONE standing up for these N—–s! All this s–t does is cost me money.”

Kornheiser asked Wilbon about the public use of the racial slur. Wilbon, an African-American said, “People can be upset with me if they want, I, like a whole lot of people, use the N-word all day, every day, my whole life.”

Kornheiser suggested that NBA Comissioner David Stern, and his counterparts at the NFL and MLB, would have to prohibit players from using the word in public. Wilbon bristled and said, “I have a problem with… white people framing the discussion for the use of the N-word.” He also likened the commissioners to plantation owners dictating whether African-Americans could use a word that had been thrust upon them.

Charles Barkley agreed with Wilbon.

“White America don’t get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other,” Barkley said, referencing comments made by ESPN reporter Michael Wilbon earlier today. “And they have been trying to infiltrate themselves saying, ‘Well, you guys use it. It’s in rap music’. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not the same. As I tell my white friends, who I love like brothers…They’ve asked me, ‘Well, when is it appropriate (for white people to use the N-word)?’ I said, ‘Well, if you use it around the wrong brotha, the next thing you gone hear is a Glock side your damn head. That’s when it’s inappropriate Earnie.”

The athlete who inspired the ruckus made a semantic distinction.

“(Y)ou guys have to get used to it. This is a new day and age. I think when you put an ‘er’ at the end, that could make people cringe, but if you put an ‘a,’ that’s like saying ‘bro.’ That is how we talk.”

But Oprah told the BBC what everything’s all about regarding Obama’s string of failures and scandals.

“There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

Laughable. These are all people who are among the American rich. Celebrities. Doormen hold doors for them and limo drivers drive them around. Which is probably how they escape the fact that their obsessions, semantics, and rationalizations are not important or insightful. They’re just boring and annoying.

If you want to be treated like an adult, act like an adult. Don’t tell me you hate wifebeaters if you beat your wife. Don’t tell me you’re all about equality if you can’t endure any criticism based on actual performance. Don’t tell me you’re a Christian if you still regard the whole world as an us against them proposition, with different rules for both.

Why I’m listening to the Kyrie and Sanctus of Missa Luba instead of the silver spoon fat boy from Northwestern.

The term ‘asshole’ is not racial. It’s more basic than that.

The unintended consequence? The ones you want to convert, cow, or confuse simply stop giving a shit. Except for the ones who still remember what so many have obviously forgotten.

Not Linear.

From the Mail Online:

Quantum physics proves that there IS an afterlife, claims scientist.

Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism says death is an illusion.

He said life creates the universe, and not the other way round.

This means space and time don’t exist in the linear fashion we think it does.

He uses the famous double-split experiment to illustrate his point.

And if space and time aren’t linear, then death can’t exist in ‘any real sense’ either.

I only direct your attention to it because I reached the same conclusion about 35 years ago, based on pretty much the same evidence.

The article, predictably, tells us this is just science. But it’s more than that. If the precondition for matter is consciousness, then you do the math.

But that’s been the dirty secret of quantum physics since the early 1900s. It doesn’t make sense without consciousness.

I’d quote from the article, but why bother? The ones who are dumber than high school physics will scoff. The ones who are smarter than God will scoff harder.

Besides, the article requires thinking about. Who needs that? It’s also not especially well written. Because journalists don’t understand anything about physics. Aw shucks.

Let me boil it down this far for you. In quantum land, time, location, and distance don’t really seem to exist. Which means the universe is governed by laws we used to call magical and unscientific. Everything happens at once and in the same place, which is actually everywhere and all at once. Giving rise to the possibility there’s no before or after, no here, no there, only a unity that gives the illusion of being separated, dispersed, and causal or sequential.

The implications for religion are, of course, profound. The illusion of cause is a universal classroom. But the death of death is an inevitable by-product of seeing the classroom for what it is.

Talk if you want. Proclaim your atheism, which is so much more satisfying. Or remember Christ and think again about his defeat of death. Or forget all of it and think about living life as a plucked moment of an eternally present singing string in which it’s all here all the time and you’re choosing, just like the photon who is both point and wave, to be both point and wave, pierced by the present point and swept up in the wave of time from where you think you were to where you think you’ll go.

Recently we had a disagreement here between us and commenter Joe about Mark Steyn. I defended Steyn, and I also cited a number of National Review scribes who both write and argue well. I think I may have left one out, or if I didn’t, I did him less than justice.

Charles C.W. Cooke is his name. I know. Another Brit. Hadn’t realized that before I saw him on Gretchen Carlson’s show. Unlike Steyn, he doesn’t tell us all the time that he wasn’t born here. I only started noticing him in the past few weeks when he was covering ObamaCare with meticulous research and outstandingly correct — no, make that talented — writing and reporting.

Okay. For the record. Yes, he’s An Oxford grad. As I looked further into his résumé, I realized that Joe has a point. Compared to Cooke, who is all of 29, Steyn does seem at times callow. As if, and though I hate to put words in anyone’s mouth, I will, Steyn seems to be saying, “I plighted my troth with the USA, but you’re not quite up to it, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, though thank goodness I still have my mordant wit for protection from ultimate heartbreak. As do you.”

Charles Cooke strikes me as substantively different. I can usually detect Brit writing. I didn’t detect his. He is writing as an American journalist, not as an inside/outsider doing us the favor of his insight. My initial take was that he was a serious reporter and a highly competent wordsmith, but I had no guess about his background beyond confidence in what was obviously an excellent education. I’ve come increasingly to rely on his updates about the politics and pratfalls of ObamaCare. He has an editorial opinion but it remains focused on facts.

Then I encountered this essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 presidential election. I’ll give you representative teaser quotes, but if you don’t read the whole thing, please don’t comment.

Why I Despair

Once upon a time, when civic society flourished in Britain, it was uncontroversial to observe that to demur at government involvement in the achievement of an end was not necessarily to consider that end undesirable. Under Leviathan, such distinctions draw blank stares. In 2010, on the BBC’s Question Time — a British current-affairs show on which the guests trip over one other to display the appropriate degree of fealty to whichever orthodoxy is in the news that week whilst the audience tries to be as clever as one can be without doing any reading — the question of impending government spending cuts was raised. One audience member stood up and, waving her hands around, asked who would mow her elderly mother’s lawn if the government no longer did it. The audience clapped. The host looked serious. Not a single person on the panel said, “You!” Neither of the putatively Conservative guests even raised an eyebrow. A particularly oleaginous MP proceeded to tell her that it was a “good question.” I threw a coffee cup at my television…

I quite earnestly believe in all of the stuff that I’m not supposed to. I believe that America is exceptional; that it is an objectively better nation than any other that has ever existed; and that it is, as it was explicitly designed always to be, the last, best hope for mankind. As Winthrop’s sermon poetically put it, America is the “Shining City upon a Hill,” there so that men without liberty have somewhere to turn and a light that they might follow. I followed that light — 3,500 miles from my friends and my family — because I believed that my life would be better here, because I wanted to be free, and because I felt that under American liberty I would be able to be myself more honestly and more fully. There is nowhere else I could have gone…

The president has an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World. Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up? Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.

And yet, he has now won twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) This year, certainly, was not the perfect storm of 2008. Then, novelty and redemption played a role; this time, an insipid bore ran on an openly statist platform and won the day in a country that is supposed to be “center right.” Maybe it no longer is. In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably hadn’t worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward, America chose a different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says a lot about a people. The central problem, then, is not that Obama will be president for the next few years, but that the American people — knowing him — chose to reelect him. Even if this is put down to a failure of Romney’s turnout operation or Hurricane Sandy or Obama’s brilliant targeting, it does not say much for their commitment to classical liberalism that a significant group of Americans stayed away from the fight because they didn’t like Mitt Romney. That this was not a clear-cut repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.

Yes, this whole essay sounds very English. It’s a voice, I suspect, that only emerges when he is speaking from the soul.

And I see here a kindred soul. He fears it’s all over. I feel exactly the same way. But he’s still not giving up. He knows this is the last stand on earth, and he’s resolved to be here and fight to the bitter end, doing the best job he can.

Not so bad if we can receive an infusion of passion from overseas. I know I welcome it. Maybe you will too. You should. A day may come when we’re all manning the last barricade together. And for such occasions Brits always have that cool little half pint silver hip flask full of 12 year old scotch.

Here’s his archive at National Review.

P.S. Yeah, upon review, I should have known he was a Brit. In page after page after page, I can’t find a syntax error, a grammatical error, a usage error, or even a prepositional or comma error. (Well, there was a typo in one of his posts the other day… but it was more of a shock than a proof.) Frankly, I didn’t know they still had those guys. You know. People who really are as accomplished in the niceties as Benedict Cumberbatch sounds. I’d bet the farm he doesn’t even talk about the problems between “you and I,” which the Laborites have embraced along with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.

What is it? Twice a day? Nah. Twice a year? Nah. Twice a term? We can only hope.

In the president’s own words, from the New York Times transcript, health insurance is complicated. Who knew?

One thing that we’ve discovered, though, that I think is — is worth noting, a lot of focus has been on the website and the technology, and that’s partly because that’s how we initially identified it; you know, these are glitches. What we’re discovering is that part of the problem has been technology, hardware and software, and that’s being upgraded. But even if we get the — the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and — and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.

Just discovering NOW? uh, okay. If you say so. And who was it who thought that the best way to reach to reach the chronically uninsured was to give them a laptop app they could access between managing their online stock portfolios and competing in multi-dimensional Star Wars chess tournaments? Rahm and Ezekiel figured they’d be intrigued by the challenge of fighting through the world’s most impenetrable software to inure themselves against the medical bills associated with drive-by shootings?

And everybody knew that the Feds don’t do information technology well. Didn’t they? Well, apparently the president knew. Just not the MSM.

What is true is that, as I said before, our IT systems, how we purchase technology in the federal government is cumbersome, complicated and outdated. And so this isn’t a situation where — on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals.

If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are overbudget, behind schedule.

And one of the — you know, when I do some Monday morning quarterbacking on myself, one of the things that I do recognize is since I know that the federal government has not been good at this stuff in the past, two years ago as we were thinking about this, you know, we might have done more to make sure that we were breaking the mold on how we were going to be setting this up. But that doesn’t help us now. We got to move forward.

Thank you, Mr. President. For two campaign ads that will be replayed verbatim in dozens of 2014 congressional races.

Tick tick tick.

P.S. Sorry. Burr in the saddle time. Thing I couldn’t get out from under. Forty pages of specs. Forty? For a site like Healthcare.gov, the specs should have been more like 240 pages or twice that. Security considerations alone should have racked up the requirements. In IT, efficiency is about knowing what you need to do before you do it. It’s not like passing a bill in congress that promises everything to everybody and gives the control for making it work to 240 different new agencies. It’s not done by Foghorn Leghorn legalese. It’s done by professionals.