Matt Miller writes about a recent talk he gave to some Chinese business students in Shanghai. They were all eager for the man from Washington to tell them when they were going to get their money paid back from the United States. Miller:

According to the IMF, China’s GDP per capita is about $8,400. The United States’ is about $48,000. How can it be that a country nearly six times richer is relying on a country so poor to help finance its current consumption?

Maybe supercommittee members can answer that one as a bonus take-home essay now that they’ve flunked the in-class test.

Related surreal question: What does it say when Europe, where most nations have per-capita incomes ranging from $35,000 to $45,000, is also passing the tin cup to much poorer China in an attempt to backstop its recklessly leveraged banks and governments?

What more proof do we need of the decadence of the Western governing class?

You try sitting in Shanghai and listening to these questions and see if you don’t feel the same dawning sense that we’re squandering a precious inheritance.

“Is our money safe?”

“Is the Fed going to inflate so much that China gets back worthless dollars?”

“What do you think about moving beyond the dollar as the major reserve currency?”

You can see where this is headed.

Yes indeed. Of course, China has huge social and economic problems of its own, and is not the invincible colossus we imagine it to be. Still, the gist of Miller’s column is true. It would be shameful to our governing class, and our financial class — if they were capable any longer of being shamed.

How did I miss this garbage from the fatmouthing nitwit Herman Cain?:

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”

“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign–not that I had anything against foreign doctors–but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s aChristian from Lebanon.'”

“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”

The crowd laughs uneasily.

Seriously, this guy? Ta-Nehisi Coates is right about this:

I do think Cain’s base gets a kick of a black guy being bigoted. But I don’t [think] that a white candidate couldn’t get away with what Cain is doing.

Anybody here see the GOP debate last night? What is that, the 547th? I gather that it was a bad night for Mitt Romney, who did what he doesn’t usually do in these debates: lose. I, for one, cannot believe that in the year of Our Lord 2011, only weeks away from the GOP primaries, that the frontrunner is Newton LeRoy Gingrich. It’s got to be da End Times, cap.

When I think of the unloved Mitt — how he’s really the only chance the Republicans have of defeating Obama, but how much the GOP base does not not not want him — I am reminded of these two well-known Churchill quotes:

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” 

And:

“The Americans always do the right thing — after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.” 

That’s the advice of Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager who foresaw the crisis of European sovereign debt. Michael Lewis writes about him in “Boomerang,” his latest book. It’s a fascinating story. A few years ago, Bass started crunching the numbers on Euro sovereign debt, when nobody was paying attention to it. He took his findings to Harvard’s Ken Rogoff, who was reportedly gobsmacked by them. Bass told Lewis that when he observed that Ken Rogoff, who’s one of the world’s great experts on sovereign indebtedness, didn’t see this coming, he was unnerved by the veil of ignorance surrounding something so important. Anyway, Bass began investing with an eye toward coming sovereign defaults in Europe … and has done very well for himself and his clients.

Bass is a fascinating figure. He advises people to get guns and gold, because it’s all coming crashing down. As he explains in the 24-minute BBC interview I’ve embedded below — well worth your time — he’s not being quite literal here, but he’s saying that it’s all going to come crashing down — Japan’s demise is on the horizon, for reasons he explains below — and people should be aware that cash is not going to be worth anything, and that we’re going to see a lot of social unrest in the years to come. On the Judgment Day thing, Bass says he’s using a theological concept to convey the sense that we cannot escape the judgment of the markets for our years of debt-fueled profligacy. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” says Bass. “There has to be atonement.”

Judgment Day, in Bass’s terms, just got a lot closer today: a sale of German bonds fell flat, a sign that Eurozone contagion has now reached, yes, Germany. As Bass explains, people have the wrong idea about Germany, thinking that it’s an unassailable citadel of wealth. Bass says that unlike the US and the UK, the German government hasn’t recapitalized its banks. When it does so, its debt situation will put it on part with the United States. Tyler Durden, commenting on the German situation this morning, predicts: “As for next steps: first the UK, then Japan, and finally the US…”.

Set some time aside and watch this Bass interview with the BBC.

UPDATE: Ryan Avent, in the Economist, writing about today’s disastrous German bond auction. Excerpt:

The good news, such as it is, is that the stunning German bond-market failure may shock leaders their into recognising their own great vulnerability and pushing for bold initiatives to slow the crisis. The problem is that matters rapidly seem to be spinning out of the control of fiscally-limited governments. It will take the power of the printing press to stop the panic. But the ECB seems if anything more reluctant to save the situation than the German government. As Martin Wolf quips today, “the ECB risks being remembered by historians as the magnificently orthodox central bank of a failed currency union”.

The world can give thanks that a new Depression is not yet upon it. Enjoy the sentiment now, while it lasts.

World Net Daily sounds the alarum:

IMAM, BASEBALL AND APPLE PIE

Has your Thanksgiving turkey been sacrificed to

idols?

Surprise! America’s favorite meal may be secretly dedicated to Allah

Goodness. Here I was thinking halal simply meant that the meat had been slaughtered according to Islamic ritual purity rules, as with kosher meat re: Orthodox Judaism. It turns out that part of the ritual includes pronouncing the words “in the name of Allah, the Greatest” as the animal bleeds out. That’s where the problem comes in, according to a contemporary Desert Father, speaking from his Pacific Northwest hermitage:

Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministriesi n Bonney Lake, Wash., has been sounding the the alarm for Christians to be aware of what he calls the “backdoor Shariah” now nibbling its way across the fruited plain.

Muslims join many Jews and some Christians in avoiding the consumption of certain animals such as pigs and birds of prey, but those of the Islamic faith also have their meat blessed in the name of their god, Allah.

“From the Christian standpoint, Allah would be an idol,” Biltz told WND.

In a sermon that he posted online, Biltz explained, “You could be eating beef, chicken, etc., offered up to Allah and not even know it. I can just imagine at a Passover Seder the caterer unbeknownst to anyone is serving halal meat! It could be on your pizza without you knowing it, or at your favorite restaurant. People don’t realize they could be eating meat sacrificed to idols!”

Goodness. I had no idea that the Islamic version of God is considered an “idol,” in the sense that gods from pagan or polytheistic religions would be. And I had been under the impression from 1 Corinthians 8 that eating food sacrificed to idols is something to be avoided only if it scandalizes fellow Christians weak in the faith. But what do I know? I’m wondering if the free-range turkey I bought from Whole Foods yesterday was sacrificed to Alice Waters. I was looking forward to eating the halal organic free-range chickens from a local Louisiana Muslim couple who live not far from my new home, but I guess I’m going to have to reconsider.

Not really I’m kidding. But there’s a serious point here. It was not a minor issue for the early Christians, the question of which dietary restrictions they had to observe. There had to be some kind of authority to solve questions like this for them. In fact, I could be mistaken, but I think that the early church had different standards for different communities. The New Testament is not entirely clear. The Council Jerusalem, in Acts 15, decreed that food “polluted” by idols shouldn’t be consumed by Christians. St. Paul’s view seems to be more liberal and relativistic, based not on any inherent impurity in food blessed in the name of an idol, but rather on the social effect consuming such food could have on the Christian community.

Anyway, I think you should be afraid that your Butterball is going to turn you and your family into Mohammedans if you eat it. But maybe if you baptize it with gravy first, it will be okay. We await a ruling from the Curia in Bonney Lake.

John Lanchester, in a melancholy mood about our current crisis:

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency—the individual’s ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives: often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren’t conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control—impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.

It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things—who did things on that 0–10 scale—did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on. The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.

The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we’re doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.

“You seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced.” — Jeremiah 20:7

Via Joe Carter, I see that the family scholar Elizabeth Marquardt speculates about how our society is going to end up embracing, or at least talking seriously about embracing, polyamory and plural marriage. Excerpts:

More:

The debate about legal recognition of polyamorous relationships is already well underway. A major report issued in 2001 by the Law Commission of Canada asked whether marriages should be “limited to two people.” Its conclusion: probably not. A British law professor wrote in an Oxford-published textbook that the idea that marriage meaning two people is a “traditional” and perhaps outdated way of thinking. Elizabeth Emens of the University of Chicago Law School published a substantial legal defense of polyamory in a legal journal. She suggested that “we view this historical moment, when same-sex couples begin to enter the institution of marriage, as a unique opportunity to question the mandate of compulsory monogamy.”

Mainstream cultural leaders have also hinted at or actively campaigned for polyamory. Roger Rubin, former vice-president of the National Council on Family Relations–one of the main organizations for family therapists and scholars in the United States–believes the debate about same-sex marriage has “set the stage for broader discussion over which relationships should be legally recognized.” The Alternatives to Marriage Project, whose leaders are featured by national news organizations in stories on cohabitation and same-sex marriage, includes polyamory among its important “hot topics” for advocacy. The Unitarian Universalists for Polyamorous Awareness hope to make their faith tradition the first to recognize and bless polyamorous relationships. Meanwhile, a July 2009 Newsweek story estimates that there are more than half a million “open polyamorous families” living in America. Nearly every major city in the U.S. has a polyamory social group of some kind.

Andrew Sullivan today linked to a personal account of a young man who came to call himself a polyamorist after a girl he met invited him to fly to her home to have sex with her, with her husband’s consent. What’s interesting about this is how the man’s conscience kept trying to stop him. For example:

“Is your husband really ok with this?”

“Do you want to ask him?” she asked.

“No!” I quickly exclaimed.

The whole thing just felt odd.  I tried to put my finger on it, but I couldn’t.  Eventually I concluded that my feelings of weirdness grew purely from the fact that she was married and what that word meant to me.  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to expect someone else to conform to my notion of what a marriage was, so my reticence was not from any concern that could be considered rational.  And as someone who has made a career out of telling people that emotional responses should not take precedence over rational ones (and as someone who likes sex with attractive, super nerdy women), it did not take Christina long twisting my rubber arm until I agreed.

At least once more, when confronted by her husband, he balked. It felt wrong. But the husband talked about his girlfriend, and how cool polyamory was, and, well, that was that. And now:

I’ve learned a lot from Christina and Chris, but chief among them is that I am polyamorous and would have been much sooner if not for a bunch of wonky societal myths.  And so I write blog posts like this, because that’s why we come out.  We come out to normalize something we think are awesome in order to dispel those myths.

We’re going to be seeing a lot of this, I bet. People who have nonjudgmental attitudes about sex deciding that the only thing keeping them from violating taboos is fear. And when that is conquered…

You may recall Justice Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence vs. Texas, when he observed that:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

… The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are “immoral and unacceptable,” Bowers, supra, at 196–the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual,” ante, at 18 (emphasis addded). The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice,”ante, at 17. This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.

Scalia has shown how and why, when gay marriage comes before the Supreme Court, a majority of justices will rule it to be a constitutional right. How could they not, given Lawrence? And having so ruled, what rational basis is there to deny polyamorous, er, entities legal recognition? By then, though, it may not even be controversial, given the progressive liberalization of attitudes toward sex.

What a dispiriting story from Massachusetts. Matt Fitzgerald, pastor at Wellesley Hills Congregational Church, a United Church of Christ parish there, wrote last month about how he was approached by scouts from an Adam Sandler movie project, who wanted to rent his church for filming. Here, as Fitzgerald tells it, is what they wanted to use his church for:

The film’s plot involves a teenager who impregnates his schoolteacher (the Mary Kay Letour­neau story played for comic effect). The wedding scene takes place years later, when the offspring of this illicit union is a grown man getting married. Our sanctuary would be featured in a scene that included a fistfight between a priest and a worshiper whose telephone repeatedly interrupts the marriage ceremony.

He turned them down. But then the production company counteroffered, proposing  $60,000 — six times more money for the rental fee. Given that the church really needed the money, and that that was a lot of money, Fitzgerald felt he should really let the deacons in on the decision. I’m not going to tell you exactly what happened in that meeting, because I want you to read Fitzgerald’s account yourself, but it was a beautiful and noble thing how they arrived at the decision to say no to Hollywood and its money. It’s a great story.

But the scene was filmed in another church — a Unitarian Universalist parish in the area. UU World magazine picks up the tale:

Crucifixes are a rare sight in Unitarian Universalist churches, yet one hung over the pews of First Parish in Brookline, Mass., for nearly ten days this June. The crucifix also came with a film crew of nearly 200 people, who were filming on location for the upcoming movie I Hate You, Dad, starring Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, and Leighton Meester.

The script calls for a wedding in a Catholic church. Producers ran into a stumbling block, however, when the Archdiocese of Boston denied the production company use of any local churches. According to representatives from First Parish, the Archdiocese was concerned about offensive statements about the Catholic Church included in the script.

Wait right there. What “offensive statements”? How did this liberal congregation deal with them? Were they concerned at all about their moral responsibility in this case, given that they were not poking fun at their own tradition, but rather being asked to impersonate a Catholic parish here? Dunno. The story doesn’t say. We do learn that:

After negotiations, modifications, and new decorations, the church was ready to play the part. Inside the sanctuary, the film crew installed the crucifix, depictions of the Stations of the Cross, and a freshly painted mural of clouds pierced by a single sunburst over the pulpit. Outside, workers built a garden full of stone fountains and saintly statuettes of Jesus and Mary. A modified sign in front of the church read “Sacred Heart Catholic Church, est. 1717.” (That date is a bit of Hollywood artistic license. The first Catholic Church was not established in Massachusetts until 1803.)

Congratulations First Parish, Brookline, for kicking your Catholic neighbors in the teeth. I hope you enjoy your Hollywood money. The Wellesley church may be poorer in funds for their decision, but they’re richer in integrity.

Megan McArdle, en fuego over the supercommittee fail and what it says about our paralyzed budget politics. Excerpt:

In a modern democratic state, two things are true of any policy agenda:

1.  You eventually have to pay for it, with actual money.

2.  You have to get those bastards on the other side to agree to it.

We seem to have an electorate who believes neither of these things, and the political class has followed them.  We passed a giant health care entitlement “paid for” with cuts to existing services that should have gone towards deficit reduction, if they can be done at all . . . and with a structure that risks failing spectacularly and making everything worse if the cost projections are wrong, or the necessary changes prove politically unsustainable.  When I pointed this out, I was told “it’s not our fault if the Republicans f*ck it up,” as if it were somehow reasonable policy analysis to assume away the existence of anyone who disagrees with you.

Stop snickering conservatives: you didn’t pay for your tax cuts at all, and you tried to get through an equally enormous entitlement change (remember Social Security reform) without funding it in any way, even a stupid and likely-to-fail one.

At some level, I wonder if our legislators understand that this matters.  Sure, our debt-to-GDP ratio is only in the mid-fifties–but it was in the mid-thirties just a couple of years ago.  And the best forecasts I’ve seen have it heading into the mid-eighties in a very short time.