Earlier today, I linked to Roger Kimball’s upcoming book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. The title is reminiscent of an observation Mark Steyn made five years ago regarding a warning from Allan Bloom, the late author of The Closing of the American Mind, concerning the dangers of a “present-tense culture:”

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

“Students at East Orange school named for Whitney Houston mourn singer’s death,” the Newark, NJ-based Star-Ledger reports. The school was renamed in 1997; it was previously called Benjamin Franklin Elementary School.

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“‘The history of philosophy,’ Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), ‘can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.’”

In addition to the books I linked to yesterday, another title arrived while I was in New Jersey last week — the galleys for my PJM colleague Roger Kimball’s forthcoming book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, due out the end of May, which presumably fleshes out the article that Roger wrote with the same title for the New Criterion:

“The history of philosophy,” Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), “can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.” That fight has escaped from the parlors of professional sceptics and has increasingly become the moral coin of the realm. As Anthony Daniels observed, it is now routine for academics and intellectuals to use “all the instruments of an exaggerated scepticism … not to find truth but to destroy traditions, customs, institutions, and confidence in the worth of civilization itself.” The most basic suppositions and distinctions suddenly crumble, like the acidic pages of a poorly made book, eaten away from within. “A rebours” becomes the rallying cry of the anti-cultural cultural elite. Culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may be a second-rate novel, but it has turned out to have been first-rate prognostication. Published in 1932, it touches everywhere on twenty-first-century anxieties. Perhaps the aspect of Huxley’s dystopian—what to call it: fable? prophecy? admonition?—that is most frequently adduced is its vision of a society that has perfected what we have come to call genetic engineering. It is a world in which reproduction has been entirely handed over to the experts. The word “parents” no longer describes a loving moral commitment but only an attenuated biological datum. Babies are not born but designed according to exacting specifications and “decanted” at sanitary depots like The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre with which the book opens.

As with all efforts to picture future technology, Huxley’s description of the equipment and procedures employed at the hatchery seems almost charmingly antiquated, like a space ship imagined by Jules Verne. But Huxley’s portrait of the human toll of human ingenuity is very up-to-date.

Indeed, we have not—not quite, not yet—caught up with the situation he describes. We do not—not quite, not yet—inhabit a world where “mother” and “monogamy” are blasphemous terms from which people have been conditioned to recoil in visceral revulsion. Maybe it will never come to that. (Though monogamy, of course, has long been high on the social and sexual revolutionary’s list of hated institutions.) Still, it is a nice question whether developments in reproductive technology will not soon make other aspects of Huxley’s fantasy a reality. Thinkers as different as Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama have pondered the advent of a “posthuman” future. Scientists busily manipulating DNA may prove them right. It is often suggested that what is most disturbing about Brave New World is its portrait of eugenics in action: its vision of humanity deliberately divided into genetically ordered castes, a few super-smart alpha-pluses down through a multitude of drone-like Epsilons who do the heavy lifting. Such deliberately instituted inequality offends our democratic sensibilities.

What is sometimes overlooked or downplayed is the possibility that the most disturbing aspect of the future Huxley pictured has less to do with eugenics than genetics. That is to say, perhaps what is centrally repellent about Huxley’s hatcheries is not that they codify inequality—nature already does that effectively—but that they exist at all. Are they not a textbook example of Promethean hubris in action?

In the seventeenth-century, Descartes predicted that his scientific method would make man “the master and possessor of nature”: are we not fast closing in on the technology that proves him right? And this raises another question. Is there a point at which scientific development can no longer be described, humanly, as progress? We know the benisons of technology; are we about to become more closely acquainted with its depredations? For example, if, as in Brave New World, we manage to bypass the “inconvenience” of human pregnancy altogether, should we do it? If—or rather when—that is possible, will it also be desirable? Well, why not? Why should a woman go through the discomfort and danger of pregnancy if a fetus could be safely incubated, or cloned, elsewhere? Wouldn’t motherhood by proxy be a good thing—the ultimate labor-saving device? Most readers will hesitate about saying yes. What does that tell us? Some readers will have no hesitation about saying yes; what does that tell us?

As Huxley saw, a world in which reproduction was “rationalized” and emancipated from love was also a world in which culture in the Arnoldian sense was not only otiose but dangerous. (This is also a sub-theme of that other great dystopian novel, 1984.) Culture has roots. It limns the future through its implications with the past. Moving the reader or spectator over the centuries, in Arendt’s phrase, the monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present. They escape the obsolescence that fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires. They speak of love and hatred, honor and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice—permanent realities of the human situation in so far as it remains human.

While you’re waiting for Roger’s book to be published, the article itself is also well worth your time.

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Just a reminder that South Park’s “Smug Alert!” episode was a warning, not a user’s guide.

Related: “‘An Inconsistent Truth’ Debunks Gore’s Global Warming Hysteria.”

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Heathrow’s flight controllers would never cut it at O’Hare or Minneapolis:

Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.

BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.

The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.

But why wouldn’t Heathrow’s flight controllers be unnerved at the thought of any snow, based on the stories that their hometown newspapers were running a decade ago?

Related: “Global Warming Engine Unexpectedly Slows,” Walter Russell Mead writes. Though not before England’s James Delingpole writes at Ricochet.com, “Memo to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven’t had quite enough death threats yet…”

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As you may already know, legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died today at age 85, having spent the last months of his life embroiled in the Jerry Sandusky scandal. (And understandably so, given that Paterno apparently did indeed look the other way regarding the scandal). Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel writes:

Paterno died Sunday at a State College, Pa., hospital, suffering in his final days from lung cancer, broken bones and the fallout of a horrific scandal that not only cost him his job, but also his trademark vigor and a portion of his good name. He was 85 years old.

This is a complicated passing. What was once the most consistent and basic of messages – honor, ethics and education – seemingly lived out as close to its ideal as possible was rocked Nov. 5, 2011, when a grand jury indicted Paterno’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, of multiple counts of sexual abuse of children.

Many, including Penn State’s Board of Trustees, believed Paterno could have and should have done more to stop Sandusky, especially after allegations of misconduct arose in 2002. Within days Paterno was fired from the program and school to which he’d become synonymous.

Now, a little more than two months later, he’s gone for good, a bitter, brutal ending for an American original.

He was the winningest college football coach of all time, compiling a 409-136-3 record. He won national titles in 1982 and 1986 and recorded four other undefeated seasons, including consecutively in 1968 and 1969.

He was a bridge from a simpler time to the cutthroat business college football has become, somehow serving as both a progressive force (he believed in players’ rights, a playoff system and welcomed advancements in television) and a stubborn traditionalist (the Penn State uniforms remained basic, he never learned how to send a text message and he still used old-school discipline).

If you’ve got a mild sense of deja vu over this news, perhaps it’s because several news and opinion sources jumped the gun badly last night.  Perhaps the biggest media source with a slight case of egg on heir face was CBS — whose news reputation is already shaky (see also, origins of this Website’s original name) — flashed this on their sports division’s homepage last night in their attempt to be the first of the Big Boys to break the story. The Washington Post reports:

The Paterno incident demonstrates the consequences of reporting unverified information from an obscure source. It also suggests once again how quickly information, including the inaccurate kind, can move in the digital age. The entire life cycle of the Paterno story — from initial death reports to face-saving corrections — took about 45 minutes.

The episode brings to mind the media chain reaction that followed NPR’s erroneous report a year ago that U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) had died after being shot in Tucson. Giffords was severely wounded in the shooting, but survived.

Even as news organizations and journalists scrambled Saturday to correct their misinformation, the initial accounts touched off a massive wave of Paterno-is-dead postings on Facebook and Twitter.

“Say it ain’t so,” one Penn State student posted to Facebook around 9:45 pm. “RIP, JoePa.”

Another student posted a quote he attributed to Paterno: “’They asked me what I’d like written about me when I’m gone. I hope they write I made Penn State a better place, not that I was a good football coach.’ Joe Paterno, RIP.”

A few minutes after that, another student responded, “I heard he’s not dead.” And still another scolded: “Just thought everyone should know: Paterno family is denying the story he’s dead. Do some research, people.”

Several journalists took to Twitter late Saturday and early Sunday to criticize their own. “Paterno mess should teach journalists to — G-forbid — report before reporting,” tweeted Joe Flint, the Los Angeles Times’ media reporter. “Unlikely, as we we live in age of shoot first and aim later.”

In a note posted Saturday night on Onward State’s Web site and Facebook page, managing editor Devon Edwards retracted the Paterno story and said he was resigning. “There are no excuses for what we did,” he wrote. “We all make mistakes, but it’s impossible to brush off one of this magnitude. Right now, we deserve all of the criticism headed our way.”

Of course, for the Washington Post, the problem typically isn’t in breaking news too quickly; it’s keeping the news bottled up in their palace guard role as the President’s Official Gatekeeper.

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“The Washington Post has discovered something heretofore not known to mankind,” Robert of Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog quips. “Giving fake praise to children isn’t such a good thing!” He links to a WaPo article with such unintentionally hilarious lines as, “A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities.”

Everybody (not named Barack Obama) repeat after me: I need a study to tell me this?

But such remarkable “discoveries” from one of the leading temples of what is euphemistically called “liberalism” and “progressivism” is a reminder that that worldview has two directions it which to proceed. Since, to paraphrase a recent Encounter Books pamphlet by Richard Epstein, liberalism is not sustainable, it can either continue on its path towards the Great Reprimitivization (let’s ban or make prohibitively expensive everything! From malaria-preventing DDT to light bulbs and electricity.) Or it can start to embrace what Tom Wolfe once called “The Great Relearning.”

The latter will proceed one way or another, but unfortunately, society (read: liberalism) invariably must relearn its lessons the hard way.

See also: the Costa Concordia.

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“Occupy Wall Street Takes Aim at Student Debt,” Yahoo reported on November 28, 2011:

With the ever-increasing chance of eviction facing “Occupy” movements across the country, Occupy Wall Street has been forced to consider its next step. Whether the movement morphs into a political group capable of reform through the ballot box is yet to be seen. However, some specific action is already taking place. One thing Occupy Wall Street has taken aim at is the growing student loan debt carried by the nation’s college students. Here are some interesting facts relating to the “Occupy” campaign and student debt in general.

* According to Washington Square News, protesters in Zuccotti Park are trying to gather one million signatures from students vowing to ignore their loan payments. The campaign is consistent with the “Occupy” movement’s larger belief that college education is a fundamental right of citizens.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as this New York Post story titled “Columbia offers ‘Occupy 101’” highlights today:

Does getting pepper-sprayed count as extra credit?

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit.

The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park.

As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says.

The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.

In recent months, Glenn Reynolds has extensively explored the growing danger of a higher education bubble about to burst. But allowing students to rack up more student debt studying a moment obsessed with nullifying their mounting student debt seems much more like a higher education Mobius Loop. Although to be fair, it does perform a useful, if unintended function for employers, making it that much easier to screen out undesirable new hires.

Related: “Occupy Movement Comes to Elementary Schools,” PJM columnist J. Christian Adams reports at Big Government, noting at one point, “Remember, these are third graders.” Gotta get ‘em while they’re young.

More: In contrast to the above cycle of postmodern nihilism, at the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis wonders if education reform is the future of supply-side economics:

Education reform, in particular, should be the next great battleground for supply-siders. And just as the supply-side tax revolution started at the state level with California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, supply-side education reform is starting local, too, in Wisconsin and New Jersey as Republican governors there battle government teachers unions. This is going to be one my big policy themes for 2012, and hopefully I won’t be alone.

I don’t think he will be.

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At Power Line, Steve Hayward spots Paul Krugman phoning in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column, and asks:

I wonder if Krugman also credits Keynes’s views on Jews, which British blogger Damian Thompson of The Telegraph brings to our attention.  From Keynes’s diary:

[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs …

It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.

Thompson adds:

If Keynes was an intellectual hero of the Right, rather than the Left, do you think those quotes would be so little known?

Anti-Semitism used to be a property of the Right, yet it’s worth pointing out that today many of the intellectual heroes of the right are Jews, such as Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, etc., or that anti-Semitism has become almost wholly the province of the Left today.

As Jonah Goldberg asked in 2005, “So which leftwing martyr/icon is left?”

Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn’t looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. — small flaws aside — is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don’t look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson’s going to look awful to historians.

Who’s left?

Well, in part thanks to Jonah’s book, not Woodrow Wilson or Margaret Sanger. Though as I’ve quipped before, hey, there’s always John Kerry and Bill Ayers.

But more seriously, in recent years, the left tried to cast off its “liberalism” moniker, itself a base stolen around the time of FDR in the 1930s from traditional laissez-faire classical liberalism. Some of its more prominent ideological exponents, not the least of which were Obama and Hillary, tried to start calling themselves “progressives” once again. But there’s a lot of negative baggage from the first half of the 20th century that comes with that territory — and which may likely increase, as the Internet helps to spread some of the more inconvenient truths about its most prominent intellectual forefathers that have been airbrushed out of history.

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We’ve discussed the “Cold Civil War” around these parts a few times — and even did a slightly too convoluted video on the topic as well. At the Bookworm Room blog, guest contributor Charles Martel speculates on the phase to come afterwards: “The Coming ‘Soft Dark Ages:’”

We were discussing the dark ages, which not only were characterized by the disintegration of the Roman political order, but also the loss of an immense store of practical technological knowledge: agricultural practices and implements; construction techniques—it would take until the 19th century for Europeans to match the Romans’ road-building prowess—war machines; distribution and warehousing; science; art (which in Roman times was the realm of artisans, not self-absorbed “transgressive” pricks).

I said that I think we are headed for a “soft dark ages.” That took him aback. “How are we headed there,” he asked, “and how would they be ‘soft’?”

I answered his last question first. They would be “soft” because unlike what happened in Roman times, we have the ability to store gigantic amounts of information in small spaces. One person can carry around encyclopedic knowledge on a flash drive. Multiply him by the millions, and you have a vast repository of recoverable knowledge that is private, widely dispersed, and replicated many times over. No matter how determined or persistent this era’s barbarians—Marxists, Muslims, Democrats, unionists, academicians—they simply would not be able to track down and destroy all modern technological knowledge.

But beyond furtive individual efforts at hiding and protecting the knowledge we would need to create a New America or a New West, there would be vaster, more organized, more collective efforts to protect knowledge until better days. I suggested to Bob three institutions or concepts that would become the next dark ages’ hallmarks: The new castle fortress; the new monastic life; and the new Europe.

Read the whole thing, which dovetails rather nicely both with some of the topics that were explored in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and with this cartoon found by Don Surber:

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Back in September, Peter Wehner of Commentary explored “Our Lack of Moral Vocabulary:”

Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote a fascinating column on young people’s moral lives, basing it on hundreds of in-depth interviews with young adults across America conducted by the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his team.

The results, according to Brooks, were “depressing” — not so much because of how they lived but because of “how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.” Asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life, what we find is “young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.” What Smith and his team found is an atmosphere of “extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism.” The reason, in part, is because they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to “cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading.”

This is part of a generations-long phenomenon. In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom​ wrote, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” And the university, Bloom argued, is unwilling to offer a distinctive visage to young people. The guiding philosophy of the academy is there are no first principles, no coherent ways to interpret the world in which we live.

And while that’s likely still very much true for most kids entering college, there’s one thing that the children of the Me Generation are pretty darn sure of, as William Pannapacker, (a.k.a “Thomas H. Benton”), an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan wrote earlier this year in “A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education” at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities. So college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of tears and tantrums: “But I earned nothing but A’s in high school,” and “Your demands are unreasonable.” Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable.

And just wait ’til they get out into the job market!

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who adds that “To some degree, the higher education bubble is a creature of the lower education bubble.”

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Everybody hurts:

“The Frankfurt School of philosophers emigrated from Nazi Germany and became dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”

– Adam Cohen in The New York Times in February of 2010, a newspaper that drunk deep from the Frankfurt School’s Jurassic-era political correctness.

Flash-forward nearly three-quarters of a century and the punitive worldview of “progressivism” stands still:

For almost 20 years I’ve lived in Iowa, where as a professor at the University of Iowa I’ve taught thousands of university students. I’ve written a couple of books on rural Iowa, traveling to all 99 counties, and have spent much of my time when not teaching, visiting with and interviewing Iowans from across the state. I haven’t taken up hunting or fishing, the main hobbies of rural Iowans, but I’m a fan of University of Iowa Hawkeye football, so I’m a good third of the way to becoming an adopted Iowan. I even have a dog, born and bred in Iowa (more on that later).

– “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life” in the Atlantic this month by Stephen G. Bloom, whom the magazine describes as “Professor and Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar at the University of Iowa. This year, he is the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan.”

James Lileks proffers a handy annotated version of Bloom’s Frankfurt School-style cri de coeur from the heartland — best read over the veal scaloppine marsala in the Olive Garden.

Related: While Bloom is sending out an S.O.S. from Iowa to his fellow “liberal” elites in the Northeast Corridor, the Washington Post is busy having similar palpitations over another Midwestern state with locals far more conservative than their “progressive” betters can stand. After all, their self-professed diversity and tolerance for a multicultural society have their limits, you know. “WaPo’s Gowen Hits Hard at Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s First Year in Charge,” Tom Blumer writes at Newsbusters.

Still though, look at the flip-side:  linking to the same hyperventiling Post article, Jim Geraghty paraphrases, “The Tea Party Is Now ‘Completely in Charge’ of Kansas!” Running a whole state? not bad for less than three years work. Take that, OWS!

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Glenn Reynolds links to Phil Bowermaster, who writes:

One of the tragedies in the history of human learning is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. There are conflicting accounts of the library’s destruction attributed to various perpetrators, beginning with Julius Caesar in 48 BCE and ending with the Muslim invaders in 642 CE.

However it was destroyed, it was a tremendous loss. The Library of Alexandria was the Library of Congress of the ancient world. It is believed that many great works of antiquity –  known to us today only by title, or in quoted fragments, or not at all — were lost for all time. Our knowledge would be richer and, potentially, our path from the ancient world to the modern world would have been shorter and easier, had some of these works survived.

This week we see history repeating itself on a smaller scale as another library in Egypt is burned down:

Volunteers in white lab coats, surgical gloves and masks stood on the back of a pickup truck Monday along the banks of the Nile River in Cairo, rummaging through stacks of rare 200-year-old manuscripts that were little more than charcoal debris.

The volunteers, ranging from academic experts to appalled citizens, have spent the past two days trying to salvage what’s left of some 192,000 books, journals and writings, casualties of Egypt’s latest bout of violence.

Bowermaster’s post is titled “Backing Up Civilization,” which unintentionally cuts both ways in this case. I concur with his sentiments, though it’s a little disconcerting seeing them come from someone who uses the letters CE and BCE. I guess as long as you do your airbrushing slowly, rather than with the wide nozzle of post-Arab Spring Egypt, you’ll both get to Start from Zero eventually — it’s all just a matter of pacing yourself.

Related:  The dead tree equivalent of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, or life imitates the ending of Fahrenheit 451.

Just a reminder though — no matter how carefully you back up western civ, the component parts remain infinitely malleable.

Update: Welcome Mark Steyn readers clicking in from the Corner, where Mark writes, “Egypt is now falling into the hands of men who revel in Taliban-scale parochial stupidity and are bent on imposing it. From 1922 to 2011, the country got worse. It’s now getting worser.”

As Wallace Shawn liked to say in The Princess Bride,  inconceivable!

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Former Obama booster Robert Reich, later yet another self-identified rube, has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich’s memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch’s Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, “in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly.” The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that’s far more pedestrian.

I wonder how Reich will morph this exchange:

George Will on Sunday marvelously told liberal economist Robert Reich something that many conservatives have been dying to say for years.

During a fascinating Right vs. Left debate on ABC’s This Week, after Reich predictably pined for higher income tax rates to solve all that ails us, Will struck back with the line of the weekend, “You are a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

See, it’s all true! Robert Reich really did debate the man on the Monopoly box top — he just did so 15 years after writing his book. But what’s a decade and a half amongst postmodern fabulists?

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…Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 X 18 = 37. If that is granted, all else follows — at least in Emory University’s marketing materials.

(H/T: 5′F)

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“Is This Hell? No, It’s Iowa.” And who else but Iowahawk himself can find — this time in a dumpster behind the Hamburg Inn — such items as “the first draft of University of Iowa professor Stephen G. Bloom’s anthropology dissertation for Atlantic magazine explaining the bizarre cultural mores of the primative Aborigines who pay his salary:”

IOWA CITY — On January 3, Iowans will trudge through snow, sleet, sludge, mud, ice, corn, beans, pig feces, flaming lakes of ethanol, gale-force blizzards — whatever it takes — to join their neighbors that evening in 1,784 living rooms, barns, community halls, recreation barns, silos, wigwams, and public-school Corn God sacrifice altars in a kind of Norman Rockwell-meets-HR Geiger old timey bygone-era past-that-never-was town-hall folksy-regular-folks go-to-town-meeting at which they’ll eat and debate, and then battle with corn hoes and pitchforks to choose their presidential candidates along party lines. The local tribal elders call this “Kaukkassqaatsi,” the Iowa word for “run on sentences.”

We now know these as the Iowa Caucuses, which create a seismic shift in the presidential nominating contests. In 2008, after Obama catapulted to the top of the Democrats’ rain-dance card, the resultant seismic tremors swept him to victory at the Democratic Convention. The tremors were also thought to be the cause of the volcanic eruption of long-dormant Mount Pleasant, which tragically destroyed over half the final term papers of my students in C3101, Introduction to Communication Studies.

Since Obama is the presumed Democratic candidate in 2012, this year it’s the Republican candidates who must now woo the sad, semiliterate populace of this benighted barren outpost beyond the frontier of rational civilization. They’re falling over each other in front of grain elevators and cornfields, over biscuits and hogslop in breakfast cafes, in ghost-haunted tornado-ravaged baseball cornfields, and at potluck dinners (casseroles are the thing to bring), under the covered bridges of Madison County with lonely sex-starved Italian war widows, glad-handing and backslapping and eyepoking as many Iowa voters they can. Great photo ops, you know. Hoisting a baby in the air is good politics. So’s gulping down a brat (short for “bratwurst” – contrary to popular myth, Iowans seldom eat misbehaving children).

You know what to do next.

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The Ottawa Citizen reports, “Hurricane experts admit they can’t predict hurricanes early; December forecasts too unreliable:”

Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, famous across Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice of making a seasonal forecast in December because it doesn’t work.

William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no predictive value.

The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities of hurricane seasons in December. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do in the long run.

Fancy that — weather and climate experts seemed much more confident a decade ago:

The New York Times was also pretty despondent about snowfalls never returning to New Yorkback then.

RFK Jr. also wrote in the L.A. Times in September of 2008 that global warming has made snow in the DC region “so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled.”

That was before “Snowmageddon” arrived in the region in February 2010…which was also blamed on global warming by Time magazine.

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“The Brits Tune Out The Greens,” Walter Russell Mead writes:

The long retreat of the global green movement continues, with new news about the collapse in public concern about climate in Britain.

In 2007 19 percent of those asked told British pollsters that climate change was one of the most important problems in the world.  These days, despite unremitting green efforts to publicize the view that global warming is driving the world to catastrophe, the Economist informs us that just 4 percent of Brits polled still put it high on the list.

Really? Gaia only knows why they would think such a thing:

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If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium. If it’s Wednesday, it’s time for Barbara Boxer’s 19th million breakdown:

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) blasted skeptics of climate science Wednesday, alleging they are “endangering humankind.”

“The message I have for climate deniers is this: you are endangering humankind,” Boxer said during a press conference in the Capitol. “It is time for climate deniers to face reality, because the body of evidence is overwhelming and the world’s leading scientists agree.”

How exactly does one become a “climate denier?” That would require living in a desiccated vacuum-filled world even more hermetically sealed than Boxer’s. But if those pro-choice consumer advocates do indeed wipe out “humankind,” grammatically-speaking at least, they’d certainly be doing the world a huge service, for reasons Theodore Dalrymple explores here.

In other news from the world of Goreball Worming (as Tim Blair would say), great catch by blogger Tom Nelson, as linked to by Anthony Watts:

“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″

Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was [Chris Jones of the Climatic Research Unit] hoping for warming?

And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?

To merge quotes by Glenn Reynolds and Donna Laframbois, I’ll believe there’s a crisis when people whose “Paycheque Depends on a Climate Crisis” start acting like there’s one.

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One of the key themes in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind is that Germany won the war against America — no, not the Nazis, but the Weimar Republic, and the German intellectuals of the late 19th and 20th century such as Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein and Heidegger (who also courted post-Weimar Germany, IYKWIMAITYD), whose ideas flourished in that 1920s hothouse atmosphere. Add to that Otto von Bismarck as the father of the modern welfare state, plus Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who imported Bauhaus architecture to the US, and Wernher von Braun who created the American space program, not to mention the Frankfurt School putzes. The result, as Bloom wrote, was a surprisingly Germanic intellectual culture in the US after the war, even if it was rarely acknowledged as such. Earlier this year, Thomas Friedman famously asked in the New York Times, “Can Greeks Become Germans.” Bloom posited a quarter century ago that in effect, well, we did, didn’t we?

But what of post-war Germany today? On the PJM homepage, Bruce Bawer has a fascinating review of I Sleep in Hitler’s Room: An American Jew Visits Germany by Tuvia Tenenbom, a book that the author describes as “a psychological and literary travelogue of Germany and Europe.” Here’s a key highlight from Bawer’s review:

All too many Germans, Tenenbom suggests, “want to erase the shame of being the Jew killers of yesterday by uniting with the Jew haters of today. … Peace and Love, they say, a thousand times a day, and it’s a thousand times empty. They flash two fingers, front and back, for Peace and for Love, but their hearts sing Sieg Heil.”  The German media not only don’t expose the Jew-hate, moreover; they strive to hide it. “Eighty-two million Germans,” he notes wryly, and they “have nothing better to do than be obsessed with 106,000 Jews living among them.”  Why?  One of his interviewees, a businessman, has this to say: “There are basically no Jews in this country, just a very few. The relationship the people here have to the Jews is theoretical, not real.” As for Tenenbom himself, he has these reflections to offer:

“The Germans, and sorry for generalizing, will do everything and anything to look good, to appear beautiful, to sound smart. But who are they, really?  They are the most narcissistic nation on the planet. They think the world of themselves, and they want everyone to agree with them. … More than any other nation in the world, the Germans concentrate deeply on visual beauty – and they get results. But they don’t stop there. Subconsciously the Germans think that if they occupy themselves with the  Palestinians of Gaza they will erase from memory the Brown Bears of Buchenwald – and will look beautiful in the eyes of the world.

Tenenbom’s conversation with the young man at Buchenwald is far from the only arresting exchange recorded in these pages. Visiting the concentration camp at Dachau, Tenenbom meets an “average” couple who live in the town and is invited to lunch at their home. He devotes four pages to a stunning account of his unrelenting questioning of them. (It is in such passages that one is reminded that he is a playwright.) He asks them about Dachau’s past. At first they profess indifference. But eventually he breaks them down. The man weeps and confesses that he doesn’t want to look into the past because it would be like looking into a mirror. He is the Nazis; the Nazis are him.

Then there is the fatuous “peace activist”—an ethnic German woman who thinks she is furthering the cause of intercultural harmony by planting a rose garden on the grounds of a mosque. “In other words,” Tenenbom explains to us, “this is a p.r. tool for promoting an image of the mosque and of Islam as being full of friendliness and love.”  He grills her like a first-rate prosecutor. “You will achieve world peace, love between the three religions, because of a rose?” he asks. “Why will those who hate the Muslims come to your garden?”  And how, while we’re at it, can a feminist support Islam?  When she tells him that Islam means peace, he corrects her; this woman who has been working on a pro-Islam project for years has apparently never heard that Islam actually means submission to Allah. “Nobody,” Tenenbom realizes, “has ever challenged her before, and now she feels like a total idiot.”

Read the whole thing — it’s fascinating, if disturbing stuff.

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A Virginia CBS affiliate is reporting “Virginia Tech confirms two people killed. One of those is an officer.” Shooter reported still at large.

Zombie has an open thread, with regular updates on the incident, at the Tatler.

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