The sky broods over the unexceptional if uninspiring town of Bridgend.

One of the strangest, saddest and most disturbing mysteries for many years is unfolding in the South Wales town of Bridgend.  The discovery at 7.45am yesterday of the body of Jenna Parry, 16, in woods near her home at Cefn Cribbwr, a small village north-west of the town, brings to seventeen the suicides of young people since the beginning of 2007.  All have been by hanging.

The Independent reports

Daniel John, 20, said: “It has been an absolute shock. She was so bubbly and carefree; I can’t imagine why she would take her own life. She loved butterflies and was very girly. She loved pop music and dance music. I last spoke to her yesterday and she seemed normal – perfectly fine. I can’t get my head around why she has done this.”

Lisa Jones, the mother of Jenna’s best friend Jessica, added: “She had everything to live for – this is just so awful. I can’t understand what is going on around here.”

Her thoughts were echoed by Michael Bennett, the 61-year-old security guard who found Jenna’s body. “It was so shocking to find this poor young girl hanging from this tree. I feel shaken to the core by this. Why are youngsters around here doing this? I can’t understand it at all. People of my generation can’t explain it all – what is going on around here?”

Attempts by the South Wales Police to uncover meaningful connections between the suicides have, it seems, come to nothing.  Speculation in the press of a pact or of some on-line Jim Jones artfully leading his trusting victims into the darkness have been firmly discouraged by police and the local Labour MP, Madeleine Moon.  After all, these are not solely angst-ridden teenagers.  The oldest of the seventeen was 26.

“Huge issues” is how the police characterise the driving factor in the majority of cases - a factor given impulsion, perhaps, by the example of others who were sometimes known to later suicides, sometimes not:-

“A number had access to social networking sites but there’s no suggestion that anybody used these sites as a means to take their lives,” said assistant chief constable Dave Morris, who is leading an investigation into the deaths. “I would like to put to bed any suggestion within the media that we are investigating suicide pacts or suicide internet links. They were all young people with big issues. There are a constellation of factors influencing these young people.” These included relationship break-ups, friendship issues and family problems, he said.

Philip Walters, the coroner for Bridgend and Glamorgan Valleys, said he was convinced there was “not one great conspiracy” linking the 17 deaths, although he said there was clear evidence that the first three suicides and two subsequent pairs were linked by the victims knowing each other. “Apart from the three groupings, there are no links that I can see,” he said. “Parts of the media have claimed there is an internet connection but there has been no evidence of that apart from internet tributes after the deaths.”

We are left, then, with a self-sustaining noumenon ... some perfectly deadly, gothic glamour that has come into being in the minds of Bridgend’s most vulnerable and suggestible young people, and easily traverses the spaces between them ... something that trips personality damage or plain depression onward into the will to self-destruction.

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Last month I put up a brief post titled Leviathan Rising.  It speculated on the general policy direction by which the transformation to a Leviathan superstate might be effected.  Of course, the times would be characterised by trauma injury to European societies made raceless, and therefore loveless and powerless - for without love between the people there can be no strength in them.

The approach of this condition we can all surmise from the evidence about us.  We read and write about it every day.  But let’s venture beyond.

In my post I argued that the “detachment into domestic policy blandness and irrelevance, and the shift to action abroad” would be the sign that the totalitarian Rubicon had finally been crossed.  But actually, I’ve just come across a better formulation from Leo Strauss in writings about his teacher, the great German jurist Carl Schmitt: “[It] would be a world of entertainment without politics and the possibility of struggle.”  Recognise that?

Now, sixty-three years after the extinction of the system he helped to theorise, Schmitt is still the pre-eminent authority on matters of total dominion?  Addressing the riddle of how to despatch liberal democracy without triggering what Habermas has termed “the legitimation crisis”, he formulated a legal and philosophical legitimisation for dictatorship.  This he did through a number of influential works in the years up to 1933, when he finally joined the Nazi Party.  His thought, however, reduces to four core concepts:-

1. The concept of “Exception” from the normal restraints on state power in the absence of order.

2. The concept of “The Political”, as the dominion or theatre of action for the state (and the state alone).

3. The concept of “friend/enemy”.  In the racial sense applying in National Socialist Germany, this could be seen as the division into in-group/out-group from the standpoint of the state.  In our age, the “enemy” is European Man.  But it need not be racial, of course, and indeed is really just a means of defining the activism of “The Political” (or the interests of the elite).

4. “Nomos” or the historic dynamic out of which grew the European Age or Global Order of the 18th and 19th centuries, which Schmitt idealised and at the summit of which placed the development of the sovereign state.

It should be no surprise that for well over a decade now Carl Schmitt has been an object of study and fascination both on the liberal-left and the Straussian right.  I will explore some of his ideas in greater depth later on.  But to give you a flavour of the man I’m going to end this post with the transcripts from his interrogations at Nuremberg.

He was arrested by the Russians in Berlin in April 1945, interrogated and then released.  But six months later he was arrested by the Americans at the instigation of German Jews in OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), and interned until March 1947.  He was then interrogated by a prosecutor for the War Crimes Trials, Robert M. W. Kempner, on three occasions.  Here are the full transcripts of those interviews:-

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UDATE (4/5/2008): Relief From All the Fountains of the Deep.

I suggest you not read on unless you want to risk losing sleep, haunted by the fountains of the deep:

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Here are some interesting and even some good news stories from the Brit media.

Lead story in the Times:-

Tide turns as Poles end great migration

A wave of immigration that helped to fuel Britain’s early 21st century boom is over, as the Polish plumber and thousands like him go home.

The Times has established that, for the first time since they began arriving en masse four years ago, more UK-based Poles are returning to their homeland than are entering Britain.

Statistics show that only 38,680 Poles signed up to the Government’s register of migrant workers in the third quarter of 2007, a slump of 18 per cent from the previous year. Polish officials say that Poles leaving the country outnumber thoses coming in.

Hard statistics on the number of Poles leaving Britain do not exist. There are no embarkation controls on EU members so they are are not counted out. But Polish officials, British employment agencies and the Polish media all believe that the tide of immigration has turned. Since Poland joined the EU in 2004, 274,065 Poles have signed up for work permits. They make up 66 per cent of all applications from Eastern European countries.

But a combination of tightening economic conditions in this country, a comparatively weak pound and an unprecendented surge in the Polish economy has made it unattractive for Poles to remain.

“At the end of last year we saw the tipping point,” Krzysztof Trepczynski, Minister for Economic Development at the Polish Embassy in London, said. “It’s a real change. There are now definitely more Poles going back to Poland.

Go Donald Tusk, I suppose.

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by JW Holliday

Guessedworker has expressed interest in the paper An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples, Helgason et al., Science 319:813-816, 2008, from the deCODE Genetics research group.  Therefore, a few comments are appropriate.

This paper demonstrates that, in an analysis of Icelandic couples born between 1800 and 1965, there is a “significant positive association” between kinship and fertility; maximal reproductive success was observed for couples with kinship relatedness at the level of third or fourth cousins.

The authors conclude that these differences in reproductive success (i.e. fitness*) have a “biological basis” - that is, a genetic basis.

I’d first like to reproduce several comments from the paper (blockquote) with some of my own (plain text) comments included.  I will then briefly cite some reviews of this paper, and then, finally, will reintroduce the concept of outbreeding depression which was previously discussed at “Majority Rights” with respect to the pro-miscegenation propaganda of Alon Ziv.

First deCODE:

Although Icelanders have experienced a socioeconomic transformation from 1800 to the present (14, 15), accompanied by a reduction in family size and decreasing kinship between couples (Table 1), essentially the same relationship between kinship and fertility was observed at the beginning and end of this 200-year period (fig. S2). By estimating kinship between spouses at a genealogical depth of up to 10 generations, it was possible to examine the association with fertility and reproductive success at a very fine scale. Thus, for example, there is a statistically significant difference in the number of children produced by couples related at the level of sixth versus seventh cousins (P = 1.4 x 10–7). Relationships at this genealogical distance are rarely known to the couples or their families and acquaintances in their social environment and are unlikely to influence factors such as age at the commencement of reproduction or the practice of consanguineous unions to preserve family property (4, 16).

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Recently on an MR thread the question arose as to whether Latinos and blacks were really at the root of the sub-prime crisis.  Here’s Stan Liebowitz, who is the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas, with a definitive “yes”.  Thanks to “The Fellist” for the link.

THE REAL SCANDAL

How feds invited the mortgage mess

PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mortgage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards - done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards - no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards - at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.

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As Ron Paul today said he will continue his campaign for the Presidency with a reduced staff, it may be appropriate to recognize one of the most important votes he cast during his political career when Ron Paul was the only Congressman to vote against a resolution saluting the 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here is the text of his speech.

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Having passed up the opportunity to acquire an education at the proper time and, anyway, never having been very willing to submit to the tyranny of other men’s minds, I’ve been glad of the theoretical minimalism that inhabits Conservatism.  It is a visceral politics, and might even be a politics of Nature, or as close to it as any politics addressing a complex society is likely to get.  It is certainly a politics of practical men only too inclined to draw a veil across the philosophical obscura of this, our Postmodern Age.

For example, just the other day I happened across a short passage authored in 1999 by the post-Marxist agony aunt Chantal Mouffe.  She was agonising over the crisis in liberalism.  Liberal intellectuals, you should know, are an anxious lot.  They have been tearing their rational hair out over crises in the Enlightenment Project for well over a century (you would think that would tell them something, but no).

Mouffe, while not a neon-light left intellectual like Michael Walzer, Slavo Zizek or Chomsky, has about her the quality of a weather-vane.  She points not so much to her own body of thought as to the theoretical horizon.  Theoretically, Pomo is the undoing of Everything, even rationalism, in the belief that Something must succeed it.  Well, in 1999 Mouffe sensed that it already had, but saw signs of danger everywhere.  “New antagonisms have emerged,” she wrote, “not only in advanced societies but in the Eastern bloc and in the Third World.”

This was certainly true.  Neither the British Multicultural nor French Integrationist models were uniting the rainbow peeps that were the “new West”.  Russia was about to plunge into an ice-pool of seriously anti-liberal New Kremlinism.  And in the Dar al Islam, a dangerously aggressive and expansionist Wahabbism was rising.

The Project, which in its broadest terms is the bringing together of humanity (otherwise known as peeps) in freedom and justice, was heading nowhere but into the history file.  The future would hold no reverential memories of the ironic Fathers of the present.  There would be no la-la land of liberal values.  And probably, caught dancing too soon in the charnel house, the Jewish value of nihilism, Enlightenment’s one enduring gift, would stand naked and shivering, awaiting the inevitable, messy denouement.

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