April 17, 2014

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Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club posted on Leland Yee the California Dem caught in a gun running scandal. He closed the post with the following pull quote. You can forget about the rest unless you wish to learn about the ins and outs of CA Dem politics.

 

… America was founded on the notion that most politicians can only be expected to be ornery,  low-down, crooks. Nobody in those days was fool enough to believe they could be Light-workers, Messiahs and create a world without guns. Thus in the Founder’s view the only way to guard against rogues was to ensure that government remained as small as possible relative to its essential jobs; to change those in office frequently and often, like we change underwear.

The Founders saw roguery as the byproduct of high office.  And so they wrote a constitution — you know, the document more than a hundred years old that nobody smart reads any more — to keep the weeds down. For they knew better than our modern enlighteneds that any politician sufficiently powerful to disarm the people is sufficiently powerful to sell missiles bought from Russia to Muslim rebels in Mindanao.

Unless one remembers this there is no defense against crooks in high places. The Yee scandal highlights the single most important problem in contemporary American politics: the absence of an anti-central government insurgency within the Democratic Party.  The Democrats and Republicans are now two factions of one party: the Party of the Establishment.

Only the Tea Party, and groups loosely occupying the same political space, are actively fighting for smaller government. They represent a faction which threatens to divide the GOP and may  deny nominal Republicans the success which the Democratic Party has so far achieved.  Like them or hate them, they are an authentic rebellion which is why the Washington establishment despises them so.

But for some reason the Democratic Party has no equivalent. The base will never vote against the collectivists.  In the end better a Yee or a “D” than Tea. Success has been bought at the price of betraying one of the founding tenets of America, limited government. Democrats of all persuasions are agreed that more government is better; that the individual is the enemy; that the collective is the wave of the future. This lockstep guarantees the permanent majority. If so then such a party — whether you call it Democrat or Republican — has traded off that guaranteed majority for the expense of an unlimited number of Leland Yees.

Perhaps the choice is not between Democrat and Republican in the long run — but between individual liberty or subordination to rank hypocrisy. If history is any guide many, perhaps even the majority, will choose welfare over freedom. Give me bread and call me stupid, but only give me bread. Lord Bevin boasted upon creating the welfare state “I stuffed their mouths with gold.”  People today are not so demanding.  They’ll be happy with chump change.

 

 

This is fun. Steven Malanga in City Journal writes about an anthropologist whose research results defied conventional wisdom. Malanga describes it as “Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy.” The savages in the academic world are the more dangerous. Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage, which has created more mischief than any other philosophical concept, has never been debunked as well as by Chagnon’s studies. No wonder he has to be attacked by the bien pensants.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s heart was pounding in late November 1964 when he entered a remote Venezuelan village. He planned to spend more than a year studying the indigenous Yanomamo people, one of the last large groups in the world untouched by civilization. Based on his university training, the 26-year-old Chagnon expected to be greeted by 125 or so peaceful villagers, patiently waiting to be interviewed about their culture. Instead, he stumbled onto a scene where a dozen “burley, naked, sweaty, hideous men” confronted him and his guide with arrows drawn.

Chagnon later learned that the men were edgy because raiders from a neighboring settlement had abducted seven of their women the day before. The next morning, the villagers counterattacked and recovered five of the women in a brutal club fight. As Chagnon recounts in Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (originally published in 2013 and now appearing in paperback), he spent weeks puzzling over what he had seen. His anthropology education had taught him that kinsmen—the raiders were related to those they’d attacked—were generally nice to one another. Further, he had learned in classrooms that primitive peoples rarely fought one another, because they lived a subsistence lifestyle in which there was no surplus wealth to squabble about. What other reason could humans have for being at one another’s throats?

Chagnon spent decades studying the Yanomamo first-hand. What he observed challenged conventional wisdom about human nature, suggesting that primitive man may have lived in a Hobbesian state of “all against all”—where the concerns of group and individual security were driving factors in how society developed, and where a sense of terror was widespread. His work undercut a longstanding politically correct view in anthropology, which held that Stone Age humans were noble savages and that civilization had corrupted humanity and led to increasing violence. Chagnon’s reporting on the Yanomamo subsequently became unpopular and was heavily attacked within some academic circles. He endured accusations and investigations. Noble Savages is Chagnon’s engrossing and at times hair-raising story of his work among the Yanomamo and the controversies his discoveries stirred up. …

… Chagnon’s observations led him into dangerous intellectual areas. From his initial contacts with the Yanomamo, he’d noticed how prevalent violence was in their culture. He determined that as many as 30 percent of all Yanomamo men died in violent confrontations, often over women. Abductions and raids were common, and Chagnon estimated that as many as 20 percent of women in some villages had been captured in attacks. Nothing in his academic background prepared him for this, but Chagnon came to understand the importance of large extended families to the Yanomamo, and thus the connection between reproduction and political power. As Chagnon notes, biologists found his observations unsurprising and consistent with much they already knew; but to anthropologists, the notion that primitive societies fought extensively, and did so over women for the sake of reproductive rights, made Chagnon a heretic.

Undaunted, Chagnon plunged even further into the thicket of political incorrectness. In a 1988 Science article, he estimated that 45 percent of living Yanomamo adult males had participated in the killing of at least one person. He then compared the reproductive success of these Yanomamo men to others who had never killed. The unokais—those who had participated in killings—produced three times as many children, on average, as the others. …

… Critics, meanwhile, charged Chagnon with faking his data and branded him a racist. He found it difficult to get back into Venezuela to continue his studies. His problems intensified as the field of anthropology changed and cultural anthropologists increasingly began to reject the scientific method that Chagnon pursued in favor of a postmodernist approach. Chagnon calls these new anthropologists believers, not scientists. They saw their field not as a path of inquiry but as a means of social change—one that condemned the industrialized, capitalist nations for exploiting natural resources and “peaceful” primitive peoples. …

 

 

We have a few items that look at GOP fortunes in coming elections. Paul Mirengoff looks forward to 2016 and sees Wisconsin’s Scott Walker doing well.

Scott Walker has a 16 point lead (56-40) among likely voters in his race for governor, according to a poll from Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert’s. Among registered voters, his lead is essentially the same (55-40).

The survey was conducted between March 24 and April 3. A Marquette University survey conducted between March 20-23 also showed Walker with a nice, though smaller, lead. In that poll, Walker outdistanced Democrat Mary Burke 48-41.

Revealingly, Walker fares well in an electorate that does not seem particularly conservative and that, if anything, appears to be slightly to the left of American voters in general. Among those surveyed in the WPR/St. Norbert’s poll, 48 percent had a favorable view of President Obama; 50 percent had an unfavorable view. Obama generally fares worse than that in national polling. In addition, Wisconsin’s liberal Senator Tammy Baldwin had a positive rating — 44 percent approve; 33 percent disapprove.

In this context, Walker’s popularity is particularly striking. 59 percent approve of his performance, while only 39 percent disapprove. …

 

 

Jennifer Rubin says Virginia Republicans are starting to smile.

Ed Gillespie’s Senate campaign is touting big fundraising numbers, $2.2 million in the first quarter, for the GOP adviser-turned candidate who is challenging Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). Campaign manager Chris Levitt announced in a statement: “In less than a full quarter, the Gillespie campaign raised more money than any other Republican Senate challenger in the country. Virginia voters know that they have an opportunity not only to replace a Senator who’s voted 97 percent of the time with President Obama, but to replace Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. Our first quarter report shows strong support from across the Commonwealth and reflects enthusiasm for Ed Gillespie’s plans to put Virginians first and unleash job creation.” He will need that money since Warner is a prodigious fundraiser himself (bringing in $2.7 million during the first quarter).

Gillespie’s numbers reflect a few positive trends for the GOP. The Virginia state party was down in the dumps just a few months ago after losing the gubernatorial and two other statewide races in the wake of the federal government shutdown. Now with a viable Senate candidate, donors and activists have perked up. …

 

 

And Jason Riley says there will be a race in New Hampshire.

In the second half of March, Republican Scott Brown raised an impressive $275,000 to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

“That sum came despite Brown not holding any fundraisers or paying any staff to work on raising money for him,” reports the Hill newspaper. It came “simply from donations contributed to his website or via check in the mail, while he toured New Hampshire in his truck on a listening tour.”

Before Mr. Brown entered the race, Ms. Shaheen was expected to win in a walk; the closest GOP challenger, former U.S. Sen. Bob Smith, trailed her by 14 points. Ms. Shaheen is still the favorite, but Mr. Brown’s fundraising ability and name I.D. mean that she now has a real race on her hands. …

 

 

Mirengoff also posts on FL -13, the race that was so closely watched a month ago.

There will be no replay this November of that closely-watched special congressional election in Florida last month in which Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink. The Democrat says she will not run.

This leaves the Dems searching for a respectable candidate to challenge Jolly. Meanwhile, Jolly can accrue the advantages, financial and otherwise, of incumbency.

Rep. Steve ( “Not all Republican law makers are racists”) Israel, the Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman, had lobbied hard for Sink to have another go, according to the Washington Post. Now he is trying to put a happy face on his latest setback:

Pinellas residents have voted time and again for commonsense solutions instead of reckless partisanship, which is why we are confident our Democratic nominee can prevail on Election Day.

I’m sure Bill Young, the longtime Republican congressman from Pinellas for whom Jolly once worked, would have appreciated the compliment.

Not all Democrat politicians are bullshiters, but Israel is.

The Republican take is closer to the mark. “Washington Democrats can’t even convince their die-hard career politicians to walk the plank this November,” said Katie Prill, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.