Back in the fall of 2010, James Taranto coined the phrase “Green Supremacists” to describe a particularly eliminationist-obsessed subset of radical environmentalists:

What kind of people blow up children?

White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.

Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.

There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.

You can see the 10:10 video embedded above, and earlier examples of green supremacists rounded up here. But Kate at Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog really puts the mindset behind it into context via a recent quote from a German environmentalist, who’s apparently taking Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” book title just a little too literally. As Kate writes, “Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!”

• Adolf Hitler to Heinrich Himmler, 1942; – “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world.”
• Petra Döll, German climate scientist, February 2012 – “Klimaskeptiker sind wie Viren”.

But hey, no pressure to conform, right?

“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.

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.

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.”

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…”

]]> http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/02/05/just-three-inches-of-snow-halts-half-of-all-flights-at-heathrow/feed/ 1 http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/01/22/joe-paterno-1926-2012/ http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/01/22/joe-paterno-1926-2012/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:26:49 +0000 Ed Driscoll http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/?p=50951 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.

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.

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.

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.

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: