Bill Whittle explains why “The love of theory is the root of all evil.” If you question the oncoming horrific effects of “climate change,” watch before your house is allowed to burn down, as a Forbes columnist recently suggested.

1 Comment

Exceptional video by Free Market America, which they note on their homepage was “inspired by Paul Harvey’s classic essay, ‘If I were the devil.’” Just click.

Update: For a palate cleanser, this Earth Day video mentioned by Greg Gutfeld on Twitter is lots of fun. Its spotlight on earth-digging tools seems particularly appropriate on this day.

(Bumped to top.)

2 Comments

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in February, “Now What? The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?”

The same question applies to the MSM, which is but an extension of the Obama administration.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around. In any case, you can NBC see the cognitive dissonance at work by comparing two quotes; the first from the happy shiny birth of Hopenchange, when the Office of the President Elect was punking President Bush, the second from earlier today, during the administration’s possible twilight.

Here’s Tom Brokaw, hosting NBC’s Meet the Press, interviewing President-Elect Obama on December 7th, 2008, with a question that will live in infamy for the MSM:

Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

Brokaw’s sentiments were echoed during that same month by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Flash-forward to NBC alumnus Keith Olbermann on ABC’s This Week, earlier today. Despite his most recent former employer also being in favor of high gas prices (except during an election year), for Olbermann in 2012, high gas prices are suddenly a mysterious conspiracy with the potential to derail Mr. Obama’s reelection bid:

One of the things I turned to, to try to establish that was to look at the average gas price at various key moments, and the lowest price in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president’s inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a president’s career, where you’re not going to — you’re not going to hurt them, you’re not going to harm him that way, and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.

There must be! Perhaps Faber College’s Eric Stratton knows the answer.

2 Comments

At Newsweek, the sky is always falling, but it does so in different ways:

• “The Cooling World”

– Headline at Newsweek, April 28, 1975.

• “Earth Day: Discussing the Coming Climate Crisis With Heidi Cullen.”

– Headline at the Daily Beast, Newsweek’s successor, today.

However, give Tina’s magazine its due. While it has called for the deaths of Wall Street bankers, Dick Cheney, and George Zimmerman, and cheered the death of Andrew Breitbart, (and that was all just in the last four months), to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to suggest that the houses of religious non-believers be allowed to burn down. That dubious distinction goes to ordinarily calm and reserved Forbes.

Related: “Next They’ll Say We Have Too Many Polar Bears.”

Comments Off

Peggy Noonan walks us through the daily horrors of the TSA (with a nice reference to a video shot by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit), and the GSA partying on our dime in Vegas, before observing the Secret Service scandal:

That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes.

What’s terrible about this story is that for anyone who’s ever seen the Secret Service up close it’s impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best. That has been their reputation because that has been their reality. They have always been tough, disciplined and mature. They are men, and they have the most extraordinary job: take the bullet.

Remember when Reagan was shot? That was Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who stood there like a stone wall, and took one right in the gut. Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the car, and Mr. Parr was one steely-eyed agent. Reagan coughed up a little blood, and Mr. Parr immediately saw its color was a little too dark. He barked the order to change direction and get to the hospital, not the White House, and saved Reagan’s life. From Robert Caro’s “Passage of Power,” on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, Nov. 22, 1963: “there was a sharp, cracking sound,” and Youngblood, “whirling in his seat,” grabbed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and threw him to the floor of the car, “shielding his body with his own.”

In any presidential party, the Secret Service guys are the ones who are mature, who you can count on, who’ll keep their heads. They have judgment, they’re by the book unless they have to rewrite it on a second’s notice. And they wore suits, like adults.

This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles.

Special thanks to the person who invented casual Friday. Now it’s casual everyday in America. But when you lower standards people don’t decide to give you more, they give you less.

Gee Peggy, too bad that last sentence didn’t occur to you in the fall of 2008, when you laid out “The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:”

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.

To borrow one of Obama’s favorite words on the campaign trail in 2008, you were certainly bamboozled, Peggy:

As Glenn Reynolds notes:

Pictured on the left, above, is Jon Favreau, who still works for the White House at a salary of $172,200 a year. According to the linked article, Obama calls him his “mind reader.”

This leaves reader Paula Colozzi unimpressed: “$172,000 for recycled speeches, as recent reviews of Obama’s speeches have been shown to be. A bit overpaid perhaps.” Hey, recycling is going green.

Peggy concludes her latest column thusly:

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don’t they? And again, these are only from the past week.

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this.

To recycle one of Mencken’s lines, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” That was certainly true in 2008, and the aftermath was the very opposite of the MSM’s favorite adverb in the years since, at least to those of us who didn’t drink the Obama-Kool-Aid at the time.

2 Comments

“Don’t Strand the Holocaust in History,” Jonathan S. Tobin implores at Commentary:

This evening, Jews in Israel and around the world will mark Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust. For most, it will be a moment of mourning as well as an occasion to ponder the lessons of history and to ask whether humanity has learned anything in the 67 years since the end of the Second World War. But for some on the left, the Holocaust has become a political liability that must be drained of all relevance to the contemporary world.

Of course, Europe itself is one giant Orwellian Memory Hole. Or as this headline at the London Daily Mail notes, “WWII referred to as the European Civil War: The EU cannot be serious?”

Yes, it’s a rhetorical question:

Today we learn that the European Union (our real ruler) is opening a £44m museum that will be a House of European History. This vanity project in and of itself is an offensive waste of money as governments and peoples tighten belts across Europe.

But what I found most offensive of all is that World War II is to be described as “the European Civil War”.

That’s right: a European Civil War that saws millions fight and die in theatres around the world in places as diverse as Tobruk, Pearl Harbour and the Burma Railway.

What greater calculated insult can there be to those from India, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and across the world who fought and died to defend freedom from Nazi and Japanese tyranny?

Also, the phrase (which has its own Wikipedia page; who knows how much Oceania-style airbrushing it’s had?) is itself a nice piece of retconned Manifest Destiny. Or as one of the commenters at the Tatler quips:

Orwellian doublespeak taken to new heights!

Last I checked, a ‘civil war’ is defined as a conflict between people of the same nation and nationality. Even the European Theater of WWII was between separate and distinct nations.

Obviously this nonsensical description is meant to reinforce ‘European unity.’ You see, Europeans were ‘always the same people,’ but just didn’t know it!

In the 1990s, the Smithsonian went out of its way to warp Hiroshima through the PC Play-Doh Fun Factory; we shouldn’t be too surprised when the Europeans, who invented PC, really go to town with the concept.

Furious, yes. But not surprised.

Update: Much more from Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club:

The whole problem of explaining the present is so nettlesome that the European Union’s “House of European History” museum decided to omit the mention of World War 2 altogether by the simple expedient of declaring 1946 the Year Zero for European history. “It celebrates the creation of the EU with barely a nod to the crisis raging all around. France’s recent history is marked by a picture of the Tour de France, and Germany’s by the famous Berlin address by Barack Obama in 2008.”

Farcically, it’s been decided to omit any exhibit on which agreement cannot be reached. And because of their differing views about World War II, the museum will begin with an EU ‘year zero’ of 1946.

But of the unpleasantness of 1939-1945 it will only say that there was an event called the “European Civil War”, which presumably was fixed by the European Union, without the slightest input from things called the United States, the former Soviet Union, China and the Empire of Japan.

Yet these absurd naming conventions are only further signs that the Narrative is now developing yawning gaps. For the current world crisis, like almost every other crisis is caused as much by what went right in the last 70 years as what went wrong. And the problem with the Narrative is that what should have gone wrong went right and what ought to have gone right went wrong.

Read the whole thing. But first, did you catch the “Year Zero” reference? Europe has already had its share of “Starting From Zero” moments in the last century. And they worked out just swell for all concerned:

Related: “Celebrate Diversity . . . Or Not,” Michael Walsh adds at the Corner:

From its formation, the goal of European integration (chiefly a French-German notion) was to beat the nationalism out of the former Great Powers, so as to avoid a repeat of the first and second World Wars. But the EU assumed a static-state entity, one with free movement between borders but not across borders from an historically inimical part of the world. The huge flood of Muslim immigrants from Italy to Scandinavia changed the equation. The only question now is how the Europeans react to it, once they realize that “multikulti” is not peaceful coexistence, but a cultural suicide pact.

Short answer? Badly. About as badly as the last 100 years of Europe’s history (or in its museums and universities, the lack thereof) has gone.

4 Comments

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

Obama is no longer the master of his fate. During the 2008 campaign, Obama could and did seize the initiative in the face of unexpected events. His agile response to the mid-September financial meltdown propelled him into a lead that he never surrendered. In 2012, by contrast, he will be at the mercy of events that he cannot control. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act. A military confrontation between Israel and Iran would put the administration in the no-win situation it has struggled to avoid, with incalculable consequences for our national security as well as our politics. If job creation returns to the strong pace of the late winter and remains there through the fall, he will be reelected with room to spare. But if the middling March employment report is a harbinger of things to come, the electorate’s evaluation of his performance will be harsh, and the road to reelection very steep indeed.

No politician wants to be in a position where he’s not the master of his fate. More than most presidents seeking re-election, though, that’s the situation Obama finds himself in. To win re-election, Obama needs most things to go right for him and most things to go wrong for Governor Romney. That scenario isn’t out of the question, but it’s not a terribly comforting thing to have to base your re-election on. Yet it’s all the president has right now. A record of nearly uninterrupted failure will do that to a campaign.

Which is why Obama, his immediate cronies, and his media enablers will go all negative all the time on Mitt Romney, as we saw last week. “It’s Romney’s to Lose,” William Tucker wrote at the American Spectator on Friday.  “Call me crazy, but I think Mitt Romney has more than an even chance of winning this election against Barack Obama. If he plays things right — and I’m pretty sure he will — I think there’s a very good possibility a surge of voter sentiment will put him into office.”

Tucker compares 2012 to the 1993 New York mayoral election pitting Rudy Giuliani against David Dinkins. After losing to Dinkins in 1989, Ed Koch was famously quoted* as saying, “The people have chosen, and now they must suffer.” And they did. After recounting some of the horrors of the Dinkins era, Tucker writes:

In short, after four years New Yorkers were wondering if electing Dinkins had been such a great idea. And so in a city where only 10 percent of the electorate is registered Republican, the people of New York closed their eyes and pulled the lever for a former Republican prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani as mayor. The rest is history. To this day there are die-hard liberals in New York who are reluctant to admit they voted for Giuliani in 1993, but that’s why we have a secret ballot. Right up until the election Giuliani trailed in the polls and there was never any broad expectation that he might win. But he did.

And that, I suspect, it pretty much the way things could happen in this election. I wouldn’t expect to see Romney piling up any lead in the polls. It’s almost better that way. If people start expecting Romney to win they may have second thoughts or start feeling guilty about abandoning Obama. Changing leaders is a very big deal for Americans, especially when it’s an incumbent who has only had one term in office. It’s not something people want to talk about too much. That’s the way things went when President Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980. Reagan never led in the polls. He was 25 points behind at this point in the campaign and still trailed going into the final week. Only after their first and only debate did the electorate start to swing toward him. The surge came only in the final three days and was never apparent to the public. Only Pad Cadell reading his daily polls saw it coming and grimly told Carter the situation had become hopeless. That’s the way it could go this time as well. If people go into the polls still trying to make up their minds, they’re very likely to say, “Oh, what the heck, let’s give someone else a try.”

So what should be the strategy for Romney’s campaign? It’s simple. Be positive. Obama is going to run a nasty, nasty campaign. What else can he do? He can’t run on his record. People know he’s been a failure and he probably knows it, too. So what else is there but to run an ugly, ugly campaign trying to brand Romney as “weird,” “rich,” “selfish,” “uncaring,” “a Social Darwinist” and whatever else come to mind. It’s going to be downhill all the way.

All Romney has to do is ignore it. Don’t get into spitting fights and mud-slinging contests with the President. Be above it all. Let Obama stew in his own anger. Romney should be the happy warrior, delighted to be out mixing among the people, learning about their problems, becoming more and more comfortable with the backslapping and glad-handing. He’s already improved quite a bit and the press is starting to notice. There will be a drama in watching him become more relaxed on the stump and that will build momentum. People will become absorbed in it.

Especially as the Obama administration seems to have gotten a bad case of the yips that all administrations seem to get — at the end of their second terms, when the A team has long departed, and those who are left are emotionally exhausted and can’t wait for it to be over. Of course, for some hapless administrations, that moment arrives sooner rather than later.  As John Podhoretz wrote in September of 2010,  “Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit:”

I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”

Obama is heading in that direction right now. It’s hard to imagine what could have possessed him to take to the microphones this morning to claim that the unemployment numbers released this morning were “positive news” and that the “economy is moving in a positive direction” when the unemployment rate rose a tenth of a point.

Flash-forward a year and a half. As Don Surber writes today, along side a photo of Hillary Clinton partying in Colombia like a drunken wannabe teenage frat girl,  Katie Couric or Madonna (but I repeat myself) or heck, her husband,  “Obama’s actions show it is over:”

The undignified display of raucous partying by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Colombia shows that this administration cares nothing for the American people or the United States of America. Her spend-it-all attitude toward America’s goodwill, Treasury and reputation in the world shows more than any poll will just how slim the president’s real chances are for a second term. Secret Service agents partying with hookers reflects directly on this administration. Hard to imagine wither President Bush tolerating such nonsense. The fish rots from the head down, and this fish head is Barack Obama.

And then there’s the GSA scandal — run away, boys! Run away! (Perhaps some time in the jacuzzi will calm everyone’s nerves.)

And speaking of Bush-style gaffes:

THIS MUST BE MORE OF THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” STUFF WE WERE PROMISED: Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives. “President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name. Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India.”

It would have been an error to call them the Malvinas anyway, since the Argentines might have interpreted that as support, but this is just sad.

UPDATE: Reader DRJ emails:

It is sad. I think this also tells us Obama supports the Argentines, or at least doesn’t support the British. Otherwise he would have called it the Falkland Islands — as the British call it — or the Falklands Islands (Malvinas) — as the UN calls it: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/gacol3225.doc.htm.

It also tells us Obama doesn’t do his homework well enough to even get place names correct. The sad part to me is this happened on a trip when he knew or should have known this would come up, and he probably planned on talking about it.

Just a reminder that for our sophomoric president, Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky-style anti-British colonialism obsessions are never far from the surface.

Still though, Romney needs to ignore all of this advice and campaign as if he’s 20 points back — not as if, as Don suggests in a follow-up post, he’ll capture a “40-state sweep.”

Never campaign assuming your opponent is the second coming of Jimmy Carter — even if, as the Professor likes to say, “a Carter rerun is now the best-case scenario.”
(more…)

6 Comments

“Would you rather your teenager smoke or cheat?” Dennis Prager asked back in 2003:

Decades of lecturing around America and of speaking with parents on my radio show have led me to an incredible conclusion: More American parents would be upset with their teenage children if they smoked a cigarette than if they cheated on a test.

How has this come about? This is, after all, an entirely new phenomenon. Almost no member of my generation (those who became teenagers in the 1960s), let alone a member of any previous generation, could ever have imagined that parents would be angrier with their teenage child for smoking than for cheating.

There has been a profound change in American values. In a nutshell, health has overtaken morality. Or, if you prefer, health has become our morality.

Which makes sense, given the age of moral relativity we live in. Prager’s article was written in the decade in which Gaia replaced God amongst American “progressive” elites, and concurrently, global warming was an infinitely more important battle for them than global terrorism.

Of course, moral relativists can become mighty inflexible when they want to be. Or as as Peter Wehner writes at Commentary, “Even Relativism is Relative.” Wehner believes that Allan Bloom “was only partially right” in 1987′s The Closing of the American Mind:

It’s quite true that an unwillingness to believe in objective moral truth is widespread in the academy and among those on the left — but only on certain issues. On other matters –gay rights and same-sex marriage, race-based affirmative action, a constitutional right to an abortion, gun control, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, Guantanamo Bay, rendition, the right to a Palestinian state, anthropological global warming, the Tea Party v. the Occupy Wall Street movement, Rush Limbaugh v. Sandra Fluke, and others — those on the left don’t believe truth is relative. They believe, in fact, that their positions are right, moral, and objectively true and better. If a social conservatives debates a social liberal on gay marriage, the odds are quite high that the latter will not say to the former, “Your values are as good as mine. Truth is relative. Who am I to judge?” If you ask liberals “whose truth?” they will gladly tell you, “my truth.”

But then, Bloom’s book is in part, an exploration of how Germany won the war of ideas against America, as I wrote late last year:

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?

To return to Prager’s observation at the start of our post, it can be boiled down to two quotes: “Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose,” as Mike Bloomberg said last year. Or more briefly, “gemeinnutz geht vor eigennutz.”

(more…)

Comments Off

Back in 2007, Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica (five years before that august institution would become fully digitized) asked, “Who Really Writes History?”

Rod Dreher, an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has posed an interesting question in this blog post on Beliefnet. He begins by offering a passage from a book about local communities in Chicago in the 1950s in which the author, Alan Ehrenhalt, writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters.

This is a much more useful insight and one that fits with other things we know or intuit. By “history,” I take Ehrenhalt to be referring not just to academic tomes or schoolbooks but to the public memories and attitudes that evolve with respect to past times and events. For example, we have all learned to think of the 1950s as a time of materialism and conformity and cultural blandness. This has become our shared historical viewpoint. But who told us that? Wasn’t it precisely those who weren’t, or worked very hard not to seem to be, like that?

It’s only been in the last few years that a counter-argument has emerged that far from being a squaresville L-7 drag, daddy-o, the 1950s intellectually, were a pretty vibrant time, both laying the groundwork for the decade that followed, and generating a middlebrow culture that succeeding decades would have a tough time equaling, as Fred Siegel argues in this month’s Commentary. 

But then, (a) all of the conventional wisdom you know about the 20th century could well be wrong, and (b) as Matt Welch writes at Reason in a must-read new article, what you know about history really does depend upon who wrote it in the first place, what institution he occupies, and which axe he’s grinding:

Most journalists are familiar with the arch observation, made famous by Winston Churchill, that history tends to be written “by the victors.” Less known and more cheeky was Churchill’s prediction (mostly accurate, it turned out) that “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

To make even preliminary sense of the hotly disputed and remarkably fluid landscape of modern media, it helps to recall Churchill’s axioms about historiography, and recognize that something closer to the inverse is warping our basic view of journalism. It’s the losers, not the winners, who are writing the early historical drafts of this transformational media moment, while those actually making that history—the people formerly known as the audience, in critic Jay Rosen’s apt phrase [And Rosen would have his own issues with some of those who transformed journalism -- Ed]—are treating their legacy interpreters not with kindness but contempt. So much misunderstanding and breathtakingly wrong-headed analysis tumbles forth from this one paradox.

Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.

That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.

Glenn Reynolds links today to a 1996 Atlantic piece by James Fallows titled “Why Americans Hate the Media,” with the following subhead: “Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media’s self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country’s real problems.” Fallows’ article is an excellent summary of the state of the elite MSM at their peak, the moment before first Matt Drudge and then Drudge, Breitbart and the Blogosphere began occupying wide swatches of the MSM’s cerebellums, very much rent-free. (Fallows’ article also makes for quite a contrast with the current incarnation of the Atlantic, but that’s a whole-’nother blogpost).

Fallows begins by very carefully recounting one of the roundtable discussions that Fred Friendly produced* for PBS in the 1980s, the episode which featured the now-infamous exchange between Peter Jennings, and the now recently deceased Mike Wallace. They were joined by William Westmoreland, a pre-Contract with America Newt Gingrich, and Frederick Downs, whom Fallow describes as “a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion,” and “the man getting the roughest treatment” on the panel. The show was moderated by Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School.  Fallows does an excellent job of recapping that moment when Wallace revealed just how far removed from reality the MSM thought of themselves back then and convincing Jennings that he should be as equally craven. Perhaps Jennings’ “temper-tantrum” moment first began incubating in his brain during that panel.

But it also tells you how far we’ve traveled, since that moment is now preserved (thanks to the invaluable Media Research Center) on YouTube as a video clip for anyone to call up and watch:

Still though, my favorite scene describing the MSM before the lights went out is an anecdote from around that same time by the Wall Street Journal’s David Gelernter:

Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ’96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

That’s no longer true, as we’ve seen with CBS’s RatherGate being first noticed by the readers of Free Republic in 2004 and now NBC’s “Edit-Gate” by Dan Riehl of Breitbart.com. Not to mention this very 60 Minutes-style moment brought to you today by James O’Keefe. As with the ACORN sting, which for the MSM to condemn with as much force as they praised Wallace’s similar tactics on 60s Minutes.

(more…)

18 Comments

“Former Interior Dept. adviser: Administration’s report on dam removal ‘intentionally biased,’” the Daily Caller’s Alex Myers reports:

A former science adviser to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation was fired in February, shortly after he alleged that the Obama administration intentionally falsified scientific fact in a proposal for dam removal in the Klamath River.

Professor Paul Houser of George Mason University, in an allegation to the Office of the Executive Secretariat and Regulatory Affairs in the Department of the Interior, said that Sec. Ken Salazar’s determination to remove the dams resulted in “intentional biased (falsification) reporting of scientific results.”

He also alleged that when he voiced his concern about the scientific integrity of the press release involving the dam removal in September, very few of his concerns were taken into consideration.

Houser was later terminated from his government job.

Salazar wants to go ahead with the project because there is a possibility it will bring salmon back to the basin, despite the loss of low-cost hydroelectricity, water for irrigation, and the effect it would have on human life.

Just like his boss, Salazar has gone on the record that he really doesn’t care much about low-cost energy:

“Remember, Obama is the All of the Above Energy Candidate,” Ace of Spades adds. But given that today is Easter, this is as good a time as any to recall the late Michael Crichton’s observation in 2003 that radical environmentalism is “the religion of choice for urban atheists,” and hydroelectricity violates the enviro-left’s religious impulses. Plus it’s been proven to reliably work for nearly a century, so from the left’s POV, it’s got that going against it, too.

More from Ace:

Salazar says removing the dams will bring back salmon populations, but the whistleblower says there are nine factors suggesting salmon won’t come back, dam or no, and yet Salazar is determined to destroy yet another source of domestic energy on what amounts to hope.

I like this “expert’s” quote. It says so much about environmental science.

“There are no guarantees that removal of dams will solve disease problems,” Oregon State microbiology professor Jerri Bartholomew told The Daily Caller, “but returning the river to a more natural system is expected to bring it into better balance.”

There is nothing in that statement that is scientific — there are no numbers, there are no tangible predictions.

He’s talking about “natural” states and bringing “balance” to things.

Balance?

Is this about chakras?

Yes, it’s an alternative religion, with broad corporate support, as we’ve noted before. The American Express Card — don’t destroy dams without it:

Back in November of 2010 at the Politico, Joel Kotkin contrasted today’s reprimitivist left (a topic we explored last year in video form, in a two-part edition of Silicon Graffiti) with their more enlightened forerunners:

When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century.

Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: “You will never see another federal dam.”

Salazar’s call for the removal of dams actually goes that edict one better. No word yet from MSNBC on this development, though this is the rare issue to which they’ve actually defended both sides — the pro-construction side most dramatically — and amusingly — taken up by Rachel Maddow, in a commercial directed by noted flood-control expert Spike Lee:

Related: “Durbin Says We Must Buy Hybrid Cars Because Of Tornadoes: ‘It’s Your Money Or Your Life.’”

That’s pretty much the motto of all Chicago politicians isn’t it? But seriously Dick, you convince the president of that notion, as well as convince him to ground Air Force One, and you both take this pledge and provide proof that you live by it, and then we’ll talk.

6 Comments

At Popular Mechanics, Glenn Reynolds (whom I believe has taken up blogging recently as well…) writes that “The future isn’t what it used to be. And neither is science fiction:”

While books about space exploration and robots once inspired young people to become scientists and engineers—and inspired grownup engineers and scientists to do big things—in recent decades the field has become dominated by escapist fantasies and depressing dystopias. That could be contributing to something that I see as a problem. It seems that too many technically savvy people, engineers in particular, are going to work for Web startups or investment firms. There’s nothing wrong with such companies, but we also need engineers to design bold new things for use in the physical world: space colonies instead of social media.

If I’m right, that’s bad for all of us. But are we really losing the will to do big things or are the big things just different than they used to be? I asked around and, on this subject, found science-fiction writers to be pessimistic.

One of today’s best SF authors is Neal Stephenson, whose books include Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age. In a recent article in the World Policy Journal, he writes that during science fiction’s so-called golden age—roughly the late 1930s to the late 1960s—the stories being published were about big things and big breakthroughs: moon rockets, Mars bases, robots, and teleportation. Perhaps by coincidence, those were times when the United States was actually doing big things and making big breakthroughs. Now, writes Stephenson, “[s]peaking ­broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a darker, more skeptical, and ambiguous tone.”

Those stories can be good—some credit Stephenson’s own 1992 book, Snow Crash, with anticipating the social media revolution—but are they good for us? Or have we been focusing our imagination and efforts on things that are amusing but unimportant? Stephenson recently told The New York Times, “We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo.” He is calling for new ways to expand civilization, not new forums for gossip.

I called Stephenson and asked him to elaborate. “There was some moment in the late ’60s and ’70s when people thought we had enough tech,” he says. “Technology was too dangerous, and people became reflexively skeptical of new ideas. If you stay that way for a couple of decades, it can come back to bite you. There’s also a less obvious danger, which is that if science and technology stop wowing us, people start to develop skepticism about the scientific method.”

I think in terms of cinematic science fiction, the flip-over date was 1968; as I’ve written before, during that presidential year, Bobby Kennedy explicitly rejected the optimism of his late brother’s New Frontier, instead calling for “men who riot” and producing depressing campaign ads such as this:

Couple the dawn of the seemingly permanent liberal malaise with sci-fi’s one-two punch that year — 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes – and you have the beginnings of the dystopian sci-fi that would rule movie houses until the present day, with only intermittent timeouts during the late ’70s and ’80s for the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Planet of the Apes (spoiler alert!) deposited Charlton Heston onto a futuristic Earth decimated by nuclear war, with less than hospitable inhabitants to greet him. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey presented a technological vision of the future that Wernher von Braun presumably loved — his vision of a space station, a moon base, and routine manned probes to rest of the solar system fully realized in glorious Cinerama. But populated with Nietzsche’s Last Men, blank cyphers cocooned inside their overwhelming technology, and spiritually dead.

As Glenn writes, “In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists could cite antibiotics, nuclear energy, and moon flights as evidence that science just plain worked. This gave them credibility on a range of issues.” But after those two movies, science began its current path of telling man why he couldn’t, or shouldn’t do anything, and even if he did, overpopulation, global starvation, and global cooling (later global warming) would doom him anyhow:

Not coincidentally, it was also during the late 1960s that younger members of the left during the 1960s made an even more pronounced return to their reprimitivized Rousseauian roots; the efforts of the old left and the new could be seen by all in the summer of 1969, the year that modernism died:

Today’s scientists continue to spend far more time standing athwart history (to coin a phrase) than attempting to build a better future. An obsession with global warming continues to enervate progress. And today’s dystopian science fiction, and the rest of Hollywood’s now-decade long creative malaise isn’t exactly setting the box office on fire, either.

Kubrick’s 2001 posited that man was in need of spiritual rebirth, a trope that appears throughout the history of Liberal Fascism, as Jonah Goldberg noted in his book. But the self-styled “progressives” who dominate Hollywood and academia, and are responsible for the stasis that demoralizes both of those realms, are certainly in need of a creative rebirth, at the very least.

102 Comments

Last week, after the left’s terrible, horrible, no good, just plain awful week (actually entire month, come to think of it), there were several articles describing the train wreck that had just occurred. One of the best is Dennis Prager’s, who explores why “They Don’t Know Us:”

For 30 years I have had leading left-wing thinkers on my radio show, and I continue to be shocked at their lack of awareness of conservative arguments. About two years ago, for example, I asked one of the most powerful Democratic members of Congress — a major force behind every tax increase — what tax rate he thought might be too high. He replied that he had not given it thought. I asked a leading liberal writer who maintained that all American wars since World War II had been imperialist, if he thought the Korean War was also imperialistic. He replied that he didn’t know enough about that war to respond.

After interviewing leftists, liberal listeners frequently ask me why I don’t invite the best liberals on to my show.

The answer is that I have had some of the best liberals on my show. They just don’t tend to do well when challenged by thoughtful conservatives.

That may be why the majority of influential liberals refuse to go on conservative talk radio or to debate conservatives.

I bumped into New York Times columnist Tom Friedman at Dulles Airport a few months ago and asked him if he would ever come on talk radio. He said he doesn’t do such shows. Yet, shortly thereafter he went on NPR. What he meant to say was that he doesn’t go on conservative shows.

Why don’t liberals read us or listen to us or debate us?

Because the Left has convinced itself that the Right is unworthy of such attention.

They are certain that conservatives are sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and bigoted, not to mention anti-intellectual and anti-science.

The Left has a mutually reinforcing dynamic at work here. Because liberals believe conservatives are all these terrible things, they do not bother acquainting themselves with conservative arguments. And because they do not acquaint themselves with conservative arguments, they are able to go on believing that conservatives are all these terrible things.

QED.

Or as Ann Althouse wrote a year and a half ago:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

Call it “epistemic closure,” to coin a rather pretentious phrase.

Related: “Conservatives Able to Go Both Ways.”

Comments Off

As Paul Johnson wrote in the early 1980s in Modern Times, the 20th century was the age of relativity and relativism, a trend that has only accelerated in recent years:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: ‘Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.’ Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

Concurrent with moral relativism becoming the law (or the lack thereof) of the land, to paraphrase TV writer Anne Beatts, the avant-garde, who first spread this notion, simply became garde. How they did so is a topic that the recently deceased Hilton Kramer, then the chief art critic of the New York Times (before founding The New Criterion a few years later, a publication now edited by fellow PJM columnist Roger Kimball) explored in a 1974 Commentary essay titled “The Age of the Avant-Garde” that’s well worth your time reading in full today:

At a time when avant-garde claims are enthusiastically embraced by virtually all the institutions ministering to middle-class taste, the old pieties about what Trilling calls “the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention” of modernist art are clearly out of date. An accommodation has obviously been reached—an accommodation that makes nonsense of established notions of cultural warfare. We have, in fact, been witnessing a startling reversal of roles. The appetite for innovation is now voracious on the part of the new public for art, but it is more and more a source of impotence and despair among artists, who recognize that this volatile and often heartless taste for the “new” can be quite as destructive of any real attachment to the objects of the artistic imagination as the old philistine resistance ever was. It is now the artists who represent “tradition,” if only the paradoxical tradition of the avant-garde, and the “informed” public that is likely to be quickly bored with what is established and familiar. Under the circumstances, we have ample reason to wonder what it is exactly that modernist art intended to subvert—to wonder what the once exacerbated relation of the avant-garde to the middle class has come to, and indeed, what it actually was in the epoch of its legendary conflicts.

I doubt if we can fully appreciate the fate that has overtaken the avant-garde in our own day without some drastic alteration in our understanding of the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon—without a clear understanding, first of all, that it is a historical phenomenon rather than an immutable fixture of cultural life. Contrary to the romance that encloses so much of its history for us, the avant-garde belongs ineluctably to the world of the middle class, and is barely conceivable in isolation from it. The avant-garde has been, from the start, a vital coefficient of bourgeois culture. Beginning as an avowal of the life of feeling that the defensive and insecure institutions of the middle class could not bring itself to acknowledge, lest its precarious hold on its own self-esteem be shattered, the avant-garde developed into the critical and increasingly combative conscience of bourgeois civilization. The cultural history of the bourgeoisie is the history of its gradual and painful adjustment to this conscience—an adjustment that made the bourgeoisie, despite its own worst inclinations, the moral and aesthetic beneficiary of the avant-garde’s heroic labors.

In 1987, Allan Bloom would take up the role of the avant-garde versus bourgeois society in The Closing of the American Mind, about which Andrew Ferguson writes this month in the Weekly Standard:

Bloom wrote a moment before the population of modernity’s Holy Trinity​—​Marx, Freud, and Darwin​—​decreased by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that had been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and an unreliable one besides. Only Darwin survives, undiminished and if anything enlarged, as the font of a new materialism whose effects Bloom foresaw even then and witheringly described. I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties; Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion. But this one carries a special urgency. As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism​—​of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone​—​had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive.

The crisis was​—​is​—​a crisis of confidence in the principle that serves as the premise of liberal education: that reason, informed by learning and experience, can arrive at truth, and that one truth may be truer than another. This loss of faith had consequences and causes far beyond higher ed. Bloom was a believer in intellectual trickle-down theory, and it is the comprehensiveness of his thesis that may have attracted readers to him and his book. The coarsening of public manners, the decline in academic achievement, the general dumbing down of America​—​even Jerry Springer​—​had a long pedigree that Bloom was at pains to describe for a general reader.

“The crisis of liberal education,” he wrote, “is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.”

He asked readers to consider contemporary students as he encountered them. They arrived ill-equipped to explore the large questions the humanities pose, and few saw the need to bother with them in any case. Instead, he said, they were cheerful, unconcerned, dutiful, and prosaic, their eyes on the prize of that cushy job. They were “nice.” You can almost see him shudder as he writes the word. “They are united only in their relativism,” he wrote. “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate.”

Relativism, in fact, was the only moral postulate that went unchallenged in academic life. Defenders of relativism often defend it by denying it exists: No one, they say, truly believes that one idea is ultimately as good as another. And of course they’re right that none of us in our own lives act as though we believed this. But most of us profess it nonetheless, especially if we’ve got a college education, in which case we will be careful to use air quotes when we are forced to say the word “truth” in polite company. In a genial but harrowing review of Closing, a professor at -Carleton College, Michael Zuckert, told of canvassing the students in his class on American political thought. He asked whether they agreed that the truths in the first lines of the Declaration of Independence were indeed “self-evident.” Seven percent voted “yes.” On further conversation, he wrote, it turned out “that they were convinced there is no such thing as ‘truth,’ self-evident or otherwise, in the sphere of claims of the sort raised in the Declaration.” He would have gotten the same response in almost any college classroom today, and I’m not too sure about the 7 percent.

What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable​—​he doubts, finally, that they even exist. It’s no mystery why fewer and fewer students in higher education today bother with the liberal arts, preferring professional training in their place. Deprived of their traditional purpose in the pursuit of what’s true and good, the humanities could only founder. The study of literature, for example, was consumed in the trivialities of the deconstructionists and their successors. Philosophy curdled into positivism and word play. History became an inventory of political grievances.

Into the vacuum left by the humanities comes science, which by its own admission is unconcerned with the large questions of meaning and purpose. Even so, on campus and elsewhere, science is now taken as the final authority on any important human question​—​and not always the rigorous physical sciences, either, but the rickety, less empirical, more easily manipulated guesswork of behavioral psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, developmental studies, and so on. Nowadays, if we seek insight into the mysteries of the human heart (not high on the academic agenda in any case) we are far more likely to consult a neurobiologist or a social psychologist than Tolstoy or Aristotle. This is not progress.

Bloom himself was rather blunt in The Closing of the American Mind as to one of the causes for the moral relativism of the last 45 years or so:

This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.

Although these days, the ride doesn’t seem as much fun — particularly when the bill, both emotionally and fiscally, is increasingly coming due.

Related: Glenn Reynolds explores why skepticism over science is rising. Say, I thought from the academy’s point of view, skepticism was a good thing.

2 Comments

Millions of people are expected to switch off their lights for Earth Hour Saturday in a global effort to raise awareness about climate change that will even be monitored from space, ” Agence France-Presse reported today.  Later in the day, AP added, “Hundreds of world landmarks from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to the Great Wall of China went dark Saturday, part of a global effort to highlight climate change,” by returning us for an hour to the Dark Ages:

The WWF, the global environmental group which organizes the event, said the number of countries and territories participating has grown from 135 last year to 147 this year.

“Global warming is a big issue,” said Rudy Ko, of Taiwanese environmental group Society of Wilderness. “Everybody can help reduce the problem by turning the lights off.”

Ko said children should invite their parents “to turn the lights off, go out, go to the parks to do some exercise, and enjoy some family time instead of watching TV or play video games.”

In Europe, 5,000 candles were lit in the form of a globe in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate before city officials switched off the monument’s lighting.

Ahh, Springtime for AlGore. Gee, nothing like a candlelight rally in Germany to bring back memories of an early period of tribalistic neo-paganism, as what Condé Nast’s Traveler magazine described in in 2010 as Germany’s “Eco–Anschluss” rolls on.

But back to the lede of the AFP article — let’s get it over with and declare Earth Hour some sort of weird pagan holiday, rather than attempting to sell it under the catch-all rubric of “awareness.” It’s 2012; how much more awareness of global warming do we need?

As Steve Hayward recently noted at Power Line, with photographic examples, Time magazine has been running global warming covers since the 1980s, the decade prior, global cooling was the enviro-doomsday flavor du jour at Time and Newsweek. Is there anybody left who isn’t “aware” of this issue at left’s obsession with “climate change?”

But as, the boys in the Delta House would say, this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part! And Earth Hour fits the bill perfectly, as even Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science editor at BoingBoing is forced to note at, of all places, the HuffPo:

First, some people are going to be very easily disillusioned when they find out that Earth Hour doesn’t actually do anything — on its own — to combat climate change. In fact, in places where lots of people participate, there might even be a small, temporary uptick in emissions. When fossil fuel power plants are forced to rapidly increase or decrease the amount of electricity they produce, they also produce more emissions, just as your car burns more gasoline if you’re rapidly accelerating and decelerating than if you maintain a constant speed.

So, when everybody turns the lights back on at the end of Earth Hour, it means that some coal and natural gas power plants will have to quickly work extra hard to meet that sudden increase in demand. In order to do that, they produce more emissions than they otherwise would have. Now, just as turning your lights off for an hour won’t save the planet, this short-term increase in the emissions output of a few power plants won’t seal our fate, either. Yet there is a real risk that discovering this fact will convince some people to mistrust any effort to get them to change their energy-use behavior.

Seen from that perspective, Tim Blair’s solution — let ‘er rip, turn everything on for the hour! — is actually a beneficial service to local power plants, helping to equalize the flow and reduce the sudden increase in power demand that Koerth-Baker describes above.

Pages: 1 2 | 19 Comments

A couple of interesting financial stats popped up today, and we’ll see if we can tie them together in our usual tendentious fashion in just a moment. But first, found via blogger/financial author Christopher Fountain, Henry Blodget of Business Insider.com notes that “Households Earning Less Than $13,000 A Year Spend 9% Of Their Income On Lottery Tickets.” Having worked for a time during school vacations selling them, that stat doesn’t surprise me at all:

It has often been said that lotteries are a tax on the poor.

And that’s a fair description.

Joe Weisenthal pointed out yesterday that poor people regularly buy lottery tickets, while rich people only buy them when the jackpots have gotten huge.

What’s less commonly realized is just how much money poor people spend on lottery tickets.

According to a 2008 study, reported by PBS, households that earn less than $13,000 a year spend a staggering 9% of their income on lottery tickets. (via Scott Heiferman).

That’s 9% of an income that is presumably extraordinarily hard to live on to begin with.

Rich, educated people tend to ridicule lottery players because the odds against winning are so astronomical.

[UPDATE (4/1/12): A reader notes in the comments below that Business Insider is now questioning that percentage, though I've seen plenty of people spend a small fortune -- and good percentage of their income -- on lottery tickets.]

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, “Good Grief. 12% of US Millionaires Are Educators,” Jim Hoft writes at Gateway Pundit. Jim links to a Wall Street Journal article and a clip from Fox News on the topic. Keep that stat in mind next time someone (more often than a not a teacher, it seems) complains about how unfair it is that the latest superstar athlete is earning a multimillion dollar salary.*

Initially, I was going to link to these stats with an SDA-style “juxtapose” riff, or with a reference to either Jungian or Sting-ian Synchronicity. But how they’re related is, in one sense, pretty obvious, as Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club. They’re both byproducts of the excesses of what Walter Russell Mead would call the Blue State model, which, after a century, and after particularly rapid growth in the last few years, is rapidly fraying at the edges:

The chief problem with money, as Walter Russell Mead observes, is that the Blue Model is running out of it. Once upon a time the money was just out there. The dollars were mooing and lowing like the buffalo on the Great Plains. The only problem was divvying it up. But now that it’s getting harder to come by, a whole host of professions based on the dollar hunting and skinning business is becoming endangered. Mead describes the situation in his vivid prose:

The dream machines of the blue social engineers don’t sail serenely across the azure sky anymore. Think of the various carbon exchanges and environmental planetary schemes; think of high speed rail proposals like California’s $100 billion train to bankruptcy; think of Obamacare. These days the experts, “social entrepreneurs” and smart young blue twenty somethings fresh out of the Ivy League whomp up social programs with as much verve and dedication as their New Deal and Great Society predecessors, but the new Dreamliners don’t take off. At most they roll around the runway, emitting clouds of noxious smoke; wings fall off, windows pop out, turbines misfire and the tires go flat.

The Big Tent is the house that  jack built. And jack has left town.

But for the foreseeable future, the distorting effects of the Blue State model will be very much in existence, to the point where they can cause a noted educator, former terrorist and buddy to the most corporatist-obsessed president in recent decades to say things such as this:

I get up every morning thinking today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but…I’m back again tomorrow.

Dude, FDR beat you to the punch ages ago.

(more…)

4 Comments

It’s no coincidence that global warming took off as an issue just as the Soviet Union fell; it’s top-down centralized government’s last best hope of controlling the masses. And like other forms of totalitarian worldviews, it doubles as a religion as well, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus noted late last year:

“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature,” said Klaus, an economist by training. “That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished.”

Of course, it’s no fun for totalitarians unless they can punish people en masse. An article at Live Science titled, “Engineering Humans: A New Solution to Climate Change?” should leave all but the truest believers of “global warming/climate change/climate chaos/whatever it’s called this week” more than a little terrified:

So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven’t delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geoengineering, and it could augment changes to personal behavior or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

“We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this,” said Anders Sandberg, one of the authors and an ethicist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. “What we are arguing is we should be taking a look at this, at the very least.”

Their suggestions

In their article, they put forward a series of suggestions, intended as examples of the sorts of human engineering measures that people could voluntarily adopt. These include:

-Induce intolerance to red meat (think lactose intolerance), since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. “Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children,” they write.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic. As a result, people would be more willing to act as a group and more sensitive to the suffering of animals and other people caused by climate change.

Given the nostalgie de la boue propensities of some of the zaniest of environmentalism’s true believers (read: biggest hypocrites), let’s hope they can build in the Old Spice gene as well.

At the Online Library of Law and Liberty, Jeffrey Bossert Clark pushes back against the concept, in an essay titled “Re-making Man by Choice and Decree:”

A few days ago, the Drudge Report brought me to a link that I thought for a time simply had to be an early April Fool’s Day joke, but is instead dead serious: How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change.  In this article, Atlantic correspondent Ross Andersen ably interviews S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University.  Liao and his philosopher co-authors have a forthcoming paper in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment that proposes genetic engineering and other “biomedical modifications” of body function for the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s obviously crazy, but it illustrates the absurd lengths to which eco-fanatics will go in the quixotic quest to fix the weather.

Let’s begin with Liao’s defense of his “modest proposal.”  In response to this question, “[s]ome critics are likely to see these techniques as inappropriately interfering with human nature.  What do you say to them?” Liao responded that it’s no different than “giving women epidurals when they’re giving birth,” since that also interferes with human nature.  I think my wife, who requested an epidural when giving birth to our oldest son, would beg to differ.  Liao is clearly proposing prescriptions that are more radical than epidurals — a lot more radical.  By the end of this blog post, you’ll see what I mean.

Don’t worry, says Liao, the reason you get twitchy when you hear that the human race should be re-engineered in some respect is that you “generally worry about interfering for the wrong reasons.  But because we believe that mitigating climate change can help a great many people, we see human engineering in this context as an ethical endeavor, and so that objection may not apply.”  Ah. Until Liao ‘splained things, I failed to see that global warming provides a good reason for changing the human body—even while letting parents genetically select for blue eyes, athleticism, high IQ, or good looks in their future children are all bad reasons for genetic engineering in humans (though Liao never actually explains what an ill-motivated “bad” biomedical modification would be).

If “trust us, we come in peace” doesn’t work for you, consider Liao’s second line of defense:  Your body must be re-made so as to pay for your past sins.  “Andersen:  Taking a look at this from the perspective of deep ecology — is there something to be said for the idea that because climate change is human caused, that humans ought to be the ones that change to mitigate it — that somehow we ought to be bear the cost to fix this?  Liao:  That was actually one of the ideas that motivated us to write this paper, the idea that we cause anthropogenic climate change, and so perhaps we ought to be bear some of the costs required to address it.”  In short, just when you thought hair shirts and self-flagellation were so 1270 A.D., Liao and company are proposing genetic modification as sin expiation — a kind of self-mortification of the bodies of current and future generations.

It’s more than a little ironic that the article at the top of this is titled “Engineering Humans: A New Solution to Climate Change,” since the concept, like many of the elements that make up …oh, call it Liberal Fascism, for want of a better phrase, is itself is nearly a century old.

Pages: 1 2 | 58 Comments

The left wing of the Democratic Party is made up of liberal interest groups whose initial involvement stemmed from humane concerns but whose continued involvement was driven by much more personal concern of how politics could advance their own lives. Eric Hoffer is reported to have written something to the effect that causes begin as movements, evolve into businesses and end up as rackets. Left wing aggression in the academy is essentially a racket, where it is driven by the desire to use “correct opinions” as a weapon to secure all the benefits small and large that were formerly apportioned as a reward for good scholarship, teaching and honest service in promoting good teaching and scholarship. Victim politics has become the basis for demanding positive tenure outcomes, merit raises, promotions, appointment to important committees, creation of staff positions, growth of administrative staff, the inventions of departments and programs outside traditional disciplines and above all the creation of a pervasive ideology that says that all this self-aggrandizing activity is justified by the claim all objections to any of this is the result of a deeply ingrained institutionalized culture of prejudice and oppression. This ideology has become so self-evidently obvious that the unwillingness to confront its obvious stupidity gives academic life the feel of a cult rather than a place were ideas can be discussed in an open and honest way.

– PJM commenter Jonathan Cohen, responding to a post on the intellectual collapse of the New Republic (and much of the rest of the left) by Ronald Radosh. Read the whole comment.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

Related: Victor Davis Hanson on “The New Anti-Semitism.”

Comments Off

Liberal pieties in the 1970s, aimed at children — “We’re gonna turn it on; we’re gonna bring you the power!”

Liberal pieties in the 21st century, aimed at turning us all into children — “We’re gonna turn it off, we’re gonna ban your power!” (And light bulbs, gas, shopping bags, proper hygiene, etc.)

Canada’s Ezra Levant says nuts to all that, in the feel good video of the week, posted above.

It may all be academic; Scientific America inadvertently tells its readers that there may soon be a ceasefire in the Goreball Worming moral equivalent of war, though as Doug Powers writes:

These “deadlines” come and go, and those who push them remind me of Robin Williams’ old bit about Colonel Gaddafi’s warning: “This is the line of death: Cross it and die! — Alright, cross this line and die… Okay, cross this line and die…”

Besides, who knows if they’re lying, as Scientific American sorta kinda admitted was OK when it came to being a warm-mongering advocate?

3 Comments

Ace quotes from John Fund’s recent look back at Saul Alinsky’s radical crankery (which we linked to here) and concludes:

This actually encapsulates the difference between a classic liberal and a left-wing radical pretty succinctly.

The classic liberal believes that there should not be a war in society, nor a state of unrest approaching a war. There are rules of good behavior, within a society. There are lesser rules of good behavior owed to foreign actors (as in a war against an alien state). But within the actual “family,” a higher standard of conduct is required towards one’s fellow citizens.

The leftwing radical of course holds the opposite — nearly every leftwinger believes that war against foreign states is somehow illegal, and that we owe greater standards of good conduct to those outside the family.

And within the state? They believe in the rules of war.

They fundamentally see their fellow citizens — at least those not part of The Cause — as hostile enemies to be defeated By Any Means Necessary. And that includes violence, where needed.

Or to put it another way, as we noted in mid-2009, Obama, following Alinsky’s lead, is the inverse of von Clausewitz — he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means.

1 Comment

In Andrew Klavan’s latest post, on “The Left’s Con Man Logic,” one of the cons he notes is the left’s selective utterance of the phrase, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” As Andrew writes:

The Wall Street Journal this weekend had two writers of opposing opinions address the question: Has the sexual revolution been good for women? The feminist who answered yes began her argument with this masterpiece of disingenuousness: “Here’s the thing about revolutions — you can’t take them back….If you feel that the sexual revolution destroyed the American family by giving women power over their reproductive choices, and that power turned daughters and wives… into a bunch of wanton hussies, well, stew over your feelings all you want, but you might as well give up thinking that it is possible to herd us up and drive us back into the kitchen….”

Do lefties really fall for garbage like that? Why? Everything about that argument is meant to make you stop thinking. I need hardly point out that the relative chastity of the Victorian era in Britain followed the relative promiscuity of the Restoration period and was in turn followed by the roaring twenties which were followed by the fifties — so that, while, yes, there’s no going back, one can always go forward in a new direction. Nor need I point out that some of us who feel the Sexual Revolution hurt women may have our fellow creatures’ good at heart. The only thing you really need to know is that the writer is trying to obscure, not illuminate, the situation. That alone should make you start asking questions.

Like this one: Are you stupid…  or what?

Beyond the example of promiscuity waxing and waning that Andrew mentions, hasn’t the entire mission of the Left been one attempt after another to either “take back” a revolution, or put the toothpaste of civilization back into the tube — or both? In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared God is Dead — and Time magazine would take their own whack at Him 84 years later, just for good measure. During the same period that Nietzsche was upending religion, Karl Marx rifled through the millenia of experimentation and accumulated wisdom that made up commerce and the marketplace, called it “capitalism,” and declared it similarly dead. (It certainly would be, wherever Marx’s ideas were implemented.) In the 1920s, the Bauhaus in Germany and Le Corbusier in France decided that a millenia of  accumulated wisdom in architecture could be swept aside to “Start From Zero” — and Corbusier believed Paris as a whole could be swept aside to Start From Zero — a decade later, Albert Speer and his chief patron entertained similar notions about Berlin. Likewise, in the 1950s, American urban planners, explicitly following Corbusier’s lead, would bulldoze whole neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal,” which proved ultimately disastrous. In the 1930s, FDR and the New Dealers thought that the American Revolution, which gave birth to the most laissez-faire federal government ever known to man could be yoked under an endless alphabet soup of agencies and stifling regulations. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, which sought to judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of skin has been upended by the left into tribalization based on skin color, and in academia, a de facto return to Separate But Equal.

What is environmentalism (which Andrew addresses earlier in his post) but staring down the freedom that the Industrial Revolution brought to the American middle class, including comfortable homes in suburbia, electric light, cars and planes to transport them everywhere, and endless information and entertainment at the press of a button, and taking it all back in the form of higher energy prices, even more regulation, less reliable energy generation systems, and the overall ennui that the true believers of global warming want to foist upon all of us?

No wonder the MSM and the left (but I repeat myself) wadded their panties into such a tight bunch when the Tea Party emerged — they know better than anyone that while it’s not easy, how entirely possible it is to reshape society and how fragile their own hold on power could ultimately be.

Related: At the Tatler, Robert Wargas spots a writer at the far left New York Review of Books railing against the failures of the American education system in a similar — if screedier — fashion as Woody Allen shouting about New York City’s downhill slide in the ’60s and ’70s, without stopping to consider that in both cases, it’s his ideological brethren that controls the terrain. As David Solway adds, “The decline of education, which means also the fading out of historical memory and the dimming of literate curiosity, has been the case for some considerable time now. The insistent question is: how does one go about trying to rescue a culture in the throes of custodial dissolution?”

Update: Related thoughts from Kathy Shaidle.

More: From the comments, “As people living in today’s progressive utopias like Cuba or North Korea might ask, ‘What’s toothpaste?’”

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

11 Comments