“James Cameron: The Titanic is Like Climate Change or Something,” JWF writes:

For the most part the Titanic special on NatGeo Monday night was an interesting look at the disaster of a century ago. But then moonbat director James Cameron had to go off the rails at the end. Thanks for wrecking two hours of viewing with political screed at the very end, Jim.

Cameron’s final word at the end of the documentary compared the modern system of the rich benefiting from an economic machine that plunges blindly headlong into disaster while the poor suffer the most in the fallout. Cameron compares the machine to global warming and the economic crisis. Unless there is a change, we’ll continue to relive the Titanic disaster, which is based on arrogance and greed regardless of future consequences.

The jump from the Titanic disaster to more metaphorical ideas about the economy and global warming is a bit of a stretch. Worst of all, Cameron comparing this to the Titanic makes these modern threats as unavoidable and dooming as an oncoming iceberg.

Fair enough. So when will Cameron take the pledge and renounce both his industry and his own personal life so that we know he’s serious about his pet cause, and not merely posturing?

6 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

Could Al Gore’s Current TV help to reduce global warming by going off the air? Linking to a Reuters report, Breitbart News notes:

If its ratings are any indication, there’s a solid shot that Time Warner Cable could kick the channel off the air. As Reuters reported today:

Time Warner Cable Inc’s carriage agreement with Current TV stipulates that, if the left-leaning political news network fails to meet a minimum threshold for overall viewers in a given quarter, financial penalties such as Current TV being required to increase marketing and promotion spending on the cable operator’s systems are triggered.

If this continues for a second quarter, Time Warner can dump Current on the side of the road. The loss of Keith Olbermann is apparently a big hit for the little cable channel that couldn’t; his replacement, Eliot Spitzer, premiered with a tiny audience. Brad Agate, a senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, commented skeptically, “If Olbermann couldn’t get to where he was at MSNBC on Current, I don’t see how Spitzer can get to where he was at CNN there.”

The sad fact of the matter is that Current TV never had a real market. CNN and MSNBC are already liberal; a third competitor that is even more to the left than MSNBC was superfluous. Right now, Current is in approximately 60 million homes, but Olbermann, its biggest show, was getting less than 200,000 viewers per night. The only reason, apparently, that Time Warner even signed a new deal with Current after the last go-around was because top level executives at Current – possibly even Al Gore himself – called Time Warner executives to beg and plead.

And the early numbers for The Client #9 Show are even grimmer than Olbermann’s.

Setting aside its current (pardon the pun) loony far left politics, in retrospect, MSNBC’s sense of timing actually hasn’t been too bad, for a channel long thought an excess appendage to NBC and CNBC. MSNBC first emerged in the mid-1990s, arguably at both the height of Microsoft’s power and just as the first round of Internet fever was building. From what I remember of watching the channel back then, it had very much a nascent Tech-TV/Wired magazine sort of vibe, with Soledad O’Brien as one of its hosts talking tech, long before she emerged as one of Rev. Wright’s public boosters at CNN. After the dot.com bubble burst, MSNBC sort of zig-zagged around the politics of the left and right in the mid-naughts (recall that Jesse Ventura and Michael Savage were two of its failed hosts around 2003). It finally came out officially as a hard left channel in November of 2007, when it earned a stamp of approval from the only slightly more genteel, but also openly liberal, New York Times. No coincidence that by then, when an election year was gearing up, the hard left was growing angrier at President Bush by the day, and counting down the clock to when they could replace him.

Pages: 1 2 | 14 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

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

Hey, remember back in the fall of 2008, when establishment Republicans such as Christopher Buckley, the Axis of Davids (Frum, Brooks and Gergen), Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan and likely Condi Rice all convinced themselves that Barack Obama was the cool, composed, telegenic centrist choice to lead the nation over John McCain? That worked out really swell for both the American people and the reputation of those GOP insiders, right?

Yesterday, Peggy Noonan wrote:

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault.

Ace is having lots of schadenfreudelicious fun today:

Uhhhh … ok. You can read the rest of her reasoning, but, honestly, why bother?

I guess it makes sense if you believed the crap Obama was selling in 2008.

Oh, wait. Peggy did!

The rest of us, though, get to say “we told her so“. Over, and over and over. And, not to leave out Iowahawk …

Meanwhile, in a post that also has some thoughts on “Dame Peggy,” Allahpundit links to this melancholy new video produced by the HuffPo:

Note that its premise, that Obama voters, particularly his diehard supporters on the far left, have the same amount of “hope” as 2008, while amusing, simply isn’t true. The shiny Turtle Wax and New President Smell wore off long ago on Obama, leaving an sputtering used car with enormous upkeep, repair bills and terrible gas mileage.

And speaking of gas, the American Energy Alliance reminds voters of the mindset of Obama and his cronies (including the MSM, incidentally) when it comes to desiring energy prices to skyrocket:

Shorter version of the pop-a-gasket response from the DNC: how dare you use our words from 2005-2008 against us — and Koch brothers too, dammit!

Update: No Atlantic drilling for you — for five years!

2 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

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

I don’t know about you, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, C-Span’s Booknotes program was required viewing for me on Sunday nights in those pre-World Wide Web, pre-browsing at Amazon.com, pre-Blogospheric days. This 1999 article by David Brooks* in the Weekly Standard helps to explain why, in the wake of Brian Lamb’s recent retirement announcement:

The quintessential C-SPAN moment came during a Booknotes program in 1991, while host Brian Lamb was interviewing Martin Gilbert, the author of a biography of Winston Churchill. Gilbert was talking about the interplay between private scandal and public life when the following exchange took place:

GILBERT: When Churchill was 20 and a young soldier, he was accused of buggery, and, you know, that’s, you know, a terrible accusation. Well, he ended up prime minister for just quite a long time.

LAMB: Why was he accused of buggery and what is it?

GILBERT: You don’t know what buggery is?

LAMB: Define it, please.

GILBERT: Oh dear. Well, I — I’m sorry. I thought the word we — buggery is what used to be called a — the — an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type is how it was actually phrased in the euphemism of the British papers. It’s — you don’t know what buggery is?

Over the twenty years that C-SPAN has been in existence, its founder Brian Lamb and his colleagues have pioneered a distinct interviewing style. The questions are flat, short, and direct. And they are centered around facts. The guests might be longwinded or erudite or both, but usually what sets them off is some six-word question about a specific fact. You get the impression that if Brian Lamb were called in to interview Jesus the first questions out of his mouth would be: “It’s said you fed the multitudes with loaves and fish. What kind of fish was that? How many people does it take to make up a multitude?”

It seems like such an easy thing to ask direct questions about simple facts. But when you zap up and down the TV dial, you notice that few of the other talk shows do it. The broadcast network interviewers ask mostly about emotions and feelings. On many of the cable talk shows, the host is the star so the questions are really rococo essays that render the answers superfluous. And when you cast your eye out to the broader culture, you see even more that curiosity about simple facts has been submerged amidst the more sophisticated interest in theory and perceptions.

Found via Orrin Judd, who actually described an even better “quintessential C-SPAN moment” — or at least quintessential Brian Lamb moment — back in 2000, when he reviewed then-Democrat presidential nominee Al Gore’s sci-fi classic, Earth in the Balance:

Has Al Gore, or any of his fellow travelers, even stopped to consider whether there has ever been a human society that was able to maintain a growing and vibrant economy during a period of declining population?  I do not mean to suggest that population growth is necessary to economic growth, but I would like to hear some examples that demonstrate that it is not or even just some philosophical argument about why it is not.  Or consider his call for government to dictate the development of new technologies–does anyone seriously think that some cadre of World Government bureaucrats would be competent to pick and choose what technologies are most likely to succeed, never mind the likelihood that such a system would simply be riddled with corruption.  If the Twentieth Century proved anything it is that government is the enemy of human progress, perhaps even the enemy of mankind.  But here is a prospective President of the United States who believes that government should be massively expanded and given an enormous range of powers over our lives.  I find that pretty disturbing.

The most interesting aspect of all of this though remains the fact that baby boomer Gore apparently arrived at this radical totalitarian position as a result of his mid-life crisis.  When you tell folks that your favorite TV program is Booknotes, you often receive somewhat disconcerted glances in return.  But there is a certain naive genius to Brian Lamb’s interrogatory technique.  Consider this exchange:

GORE: I went through a change in my life when my son was almost killed a couple of years ago. It was a shattering experience for my family. He has had a miraculous recovery and we’re very blessed and very grateful to all the doctors and the nurses who — who — who helped to make it possible. But during the long weeks when my wife and I were in the hospital room with him, I began to really look at life a little bit differently and ask questions about what’s most important in life and, having already long since been deeply involved in this issue, I began to look at it differently also.

Instead of seeing it just as an outgrowth of the new scientific and technological salt on the Earth and the population explosion which is adding one China’s worth of people every 10 years now, I began to feel that the deeper causes are within our own lives as individuals. What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in — in which we live out our lives. And I began to explore, in a very personal way, what it is that leads to these false assumptions and how we can get on with the task of solving thi — this crisis and organizing a response that gives our children and grandchildren and generations to come an Earth that is not diminished and degraded by virtue of what we’re doing in our short lifetimes.

LAMB: How is your son?

That is simply brilliant.  This middle aged hack pol goes prattling on about how a sudden realization of human mortality forced him to reexamine his entire world view and deadpan Brian cuts to the quick to find out how the kid is.  The answer, thankfully, is that the Gores’ son is fine, which only makes their extravagant reaction to the accident even more frightening.   Suppose, God forbid, that Gore becomes President and something like this happens; you have to question whether a person who undergoes such a seachange in their personal philosophy at a moment of admitted stress but surely not of catastrophe is even fit to govern.

* Incidentally, whatever happened to that version of David Brooks? He seemed like a fine conservative writer before believing he could determine that a man was fit for the highest office in the land based on the cut of his trousers.

24 Comments

The above clip brings new meaning to the question we’ve been asking for a decade now: What’s gotten into the water at CNN?

To paraphrase Iowahawk, Fire Make Sea Gods Angry, cause sharks to “Have Sex at Alarming Rates” according to the Chyron under this story told by CNN newsreader Erin Burnett. All that undersea aquatic humping will produce baby “Super Sharks,” Burnett adds.

Needless to say, Tim Blair is having lots of fun with this Fish Story:

What’s truly disturbing is that the story is more than two months old yet CNN still managed to get it completely wrong. No “experts” speculated that hybrid sharks were caused by climate change. That line emerged from a piece by angry leftist AFP reporter Amy Coopes, whose expertise is mainly in the field of conservative devil babies.

Actual shark expert Jessica Morgan, one of the researchers for the University of Queensland’s study, had this to say back in January:

Quote not correct – I have now stated numerous times that it is extremely unlikely that climate change caused the hybridization event …

Sweet dreams, Erin. Don’t let the super sharks bite.

And speaking of CNN’s news readers, just as Soledad O’Brien had attempted to spin Critical Race Theory into something it wasn’t — and failed so badly that she was forced to cry uncle on all of the negative Tweets she was receiving, Flopping Aces notes that she had previously tried to claim that Obama wasn’t familiar with Saul Alinsky. Good luck with that:

• Obama first learned Alinsky’s rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel’s website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)

• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which he lamented organizers’ “lack of power” in implementing change.

• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.

• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.

• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.

• Obama also taught Alinsky’s “Power Analysis” methods at the University of Chicago.

• During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at “Camp Obama,” a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.

• Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky’s vision of a new “vanguard” of coat-and-tie radicals who “work inside the system” to change the system.

• After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama’s legislative agenda using “Rules for Radicals.”

• Obama’s favorite rule is No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” You see that in his attacks on “fat cat bankers,” “greedy health insurers” and “millionaires and billionaires.” He also readily applies Alinsky’s fifth rule of “ridiculing” the opposition.

“Obama learned his lesson well,” said David Alinsky, son of the late socialist. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing.”

The post at Flopping Aces is titled, “This was not the first time Soledad O’Brien tried to rewrite history.”

Well, that’s what CNN does; of course in O’Brien’s case, sometimes you rewrite history at CNN — and sometimes CNN rewrites you:

(H/T: SDA)

2 Comments

Well, too late for that.

But to borrow a long-running riff patented by Kate McMillan of Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog, now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose:

• “Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe.”

– Headline at Scientific American yesterday, as spotted by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, where above link goes to.

• “Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?”

– Headline at Scientific American on February 24, 2012.

And just as a reminder:

• “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”

– Headline at Editor & Publisher magazine, August 28, 2007

Walter Cronkite could not be reached for comment.

Update: Don’t sugarcoat it, James — tell us how you really feel.

2 Comments

“Obama Likens Doubters of His Failed Green Energy Scams to Flat Earthers,” blogger “Jammie Wearing Fool” quips:

So what if he’s blowing billions of our tax dollars on failed green energy scams?

How dare you question him!

Obama strongly defended his plans to make America a leader in new energy sources like biofuels, and wind power and solar power, and rebuked Republicans for opposing his plans to cut subsidies to profit cranking oil producers.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail … they would not have believed that the world was round,” he said, at a Community College in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington DC.

Wait, you mean he’s actually trying this line as an attack on the side of the aisle that doesn’t get the vapors every Columbus Day? Or as its now known in the academia that shaped Obama’s punitive worldview, Native American Genocide Remembrance Day.

Given the Black Armband revisionist history that most of his mentors (Wright, Ayers, Derrick Bell, etc.) have deeply embraced, I’d love to see Obama’s reaction if a journalist asked him, “Mr. President, given the great leaps forward in technology, science and health the West has made as a result, do you think that Christopher Columbus discovering America was ultimately an unalloyed good thing?”

And as JWF notes, even the Obama boosters at the leftwing Talking Points Memo site are, for once, howling at the gaffes in The One’s latest speech. How often do you see a headline like this at TPM? “Obama Mangles U.S., World History In Energy Speech:”

In mocking the GOP, Obama cited an anecdote about [President Rutherford B. Hayes] in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, he said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”

“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”

But Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, told TPM that the nation’s 19th president was being unfairly tagged as a Luddite.

“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”

While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.” You can read the full story here.

“He was pretty technology-oriented for the time,” Card said. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”

As for why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore, Card noted that popular history tends to favor wartime presidents in the long run.

Obama’s invocation of the “flat earth” theory in the context of Christopher Columbus’ journey across the ocean also contained some dubious (if incredibly widespread) history.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Obama said. “They would not have believed that the world was round.”

In fact, historians have long contended that the notion Europeans widely believed the Earth was flat, let alone 15th century Spanish scholars, is a myth developed centuries later.

Oh sure, next you’re going to tell me that John Kerry was lying about Thomas Jefferson and that whole “dissent is patriotic” shtick.

You sort of wish somebody could fire a silver bullet into all of this revisionist history — which brings us to Ed Morrissey, who links to a video from the RNC which tracks how the prices of gas rises whenever Obama deploys one of his worst rhetorical tics:

As Ed jokes, a few more Silver Bullet references, “and Bob Seger and Coors may have a case for trademark violation.”

Finally, at Commentary, Ted R. Bromund’s reaction to Obama’s latest gaseous rhetoric is to joke, “Who Writes This Stuff?”

Look – writing welcoming remarks must be a tedious job, and I wouldn’t like to do it for anything. But would it be too much to ask that his speechwriters avoid obvious solecisms? If you’re going to use the tired “the British burned the White House” joke, don’t follow it up, two paragraphs later, with the claim that “through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant – the rock-solid alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom.” So, except for the whole burning thing, it’s a constant?

No one is a more enthusiastic supporter of the Anglo-American alliance than I am, and I mean that literally. But it’s just not true that the alliance is a constant. It reflects, yes, shared interests, but it was also made, with considerable effort and by taking real political risks, by leaders like Churchill. That was the point of the speech at Fulton – not to celebrate the war-time alliance, but to make the case for its continuance in the nascent Cold War.

But when Obama says that “the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is the strongest that it has ever been,” just after his administration has announced a “strategic pivot” to Asia and refused to back Britain over the Falklands, he’s not taking any risks, or making any effort, for the alliance at all. He’s just talking. And truly great speakers, like Churchill, don’t believe that assertions can substitute for arguments or actions.

Speaking of Churchill and Obama’s revisionist history, whatever happened to the bust of Winston Churchill that Obama shipped back to England immediately upon taking office?

From the White House, the bust went to the home of the British ambassador in Washington. An experienced Washington hand tells the following story: One night after dinner, the ambassador and an American visitor were looking at the bust. The Ambassador remarked to his visitor, “We are keeping it here for the time being, trusting that your next president, whoever he is, will want it back.”

As Troy Senik writes at Ricochet, “The Special Relationship … in Storage,” which metaphorically sums up our current relations with England — and many of our former allies perfectly. This November, you can help ensure that it’s taken out of mothballs for 2013.

Related: Via Instapundit, Nick Gillespie quips, “When Wall Street Makes Crap Loans, It’s a Crisis; When DOE’s Steven Chu Does It, It’s Green Energy.”

3 Comments

Despite the myriad of Chicken Little “Final Countdowns” over the last 40 years, somehow mankind will muddle through, Rob Long writes at Ricochet:

All of this doomsday talk is nonsense, says the New Scientist:

In 2008, researchers attending the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference in Oxford, UK, took part in aninformal survey of what they thought were the risks to humanity. They gave humans only a 19 per cent chance of surviving until 2100. Yet when you look more closely, such extreme pessimism is unfounded. Not only will we survive to 2100, it’s overwhelmingly likely that we’ll survive for at least the next 100,000 years.

Take calculations by J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Based on 200,000 years of human existence, he estimates we will likely last anywhere from another 5100 to 7.8 million years (New Scientist, 5 September 2007, p 51).

According to most rational calculations, human beings will outsmart the various threats to their existence — runaway technology, killer viruses, supervolcanoes, that sort of thing.  There will be fewer of us, sure, if any of that stuff happens — death toll estimates in the case of a supervocano eruption that clouds the atmosphere with deadly ash are in the billions — but a hardy billion or two will still be writing television comedy or working the drive-thru window.

In other words, civilization will survive.

But only if we take action Right! This! Minute! on Goreball Worming, right? Well…

Our regular feature, “Quote of the Week” just doesn’t work here. Neither does decade or century. No, a whole new category all by itself is reserved for this quote from the newly appointed Climate Commissioner of Australia, Tim Flannery, noted zoologist and author of the book The Weather Makers.Here it is, brace yourself:

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Lest you think that is an errant remark out of context, here’s the follow up from Flannery:

Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.

And speaking of the AlGore himself, he’s now claiming “Our democracy has been hacked” — which pretty ironic coming from a guy who considers the opposition to be a gang of “digital brown shirts,” but it’s simply the Goracle’s latest attempt at dissembling how right wing media bias cost him the election in 2000 and the rest of his fellow Democrats a couple of years later. To overcome that, he’s launched his “Current TV” “network” — which is what you’d do too, to blow your carbon footprint even further into the stratosphere, if you thought we had less than four years left to save the earth before “an irreversible slide into destruction,”right?

Or to put it another way, “Gaia Worship: Like the Enlightenment Never Happened.”

1 Comment

Shortly before heading back to New Jersey this past Thursday for a few days, I started rounding up the latest reports of California’s myriad woes. Ready to survey the train wreck? First up, in the Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Boskin and John F. Cogan flip Thomas Friedman’s memorable headline in the New York Times last year on its head. “Can Greeks Become Germans?,” Friedman queried. Boskin and Cogan write that California has become America’s Greece:

The state’s progressive tax-and-spend experiment is broken, threatening basic services, from courts and parks to education and health care for its most vulnerable citizens. Mr. Brown’s tax initiative only exposes the state to an ever more dangerous roller-coaster ride.

No wonder many Silicon Valley CEOs say they won’t expand in California because of high taxes and burdensome regulation. And no wonder net migration has recently reversed, with hundreds of thousands of workers and their families leaving the state in search of better opportunities.

California still ranks first in technology, agriculture and entertainment among the 50 states. But it is near the bottom in business and tax climate and state bond ratings. It’s a complex picture, but at its core is the high-tax welfare state run amok.

Many Americans fear the federal fiscal train wreck will turn us into Greece. But, barring major change, they need look no further than California to see what this future portends. Relying on ever-higher taxes to fund payments to an outsized population of benefit recipients is a recipe for exporting prosperity. That is one California trend that other states emulate at their peril.

Part of California’s woes is that this once more-or-less Red State has devolved into a self-contained world of Blue and Bluer. So much so that, as Victor Davis Hanson asks at NRO, “In California, Whom Will They Blame?”

Here in California, students just marched on Sacramento in outrage that state-subsidized tuition at the UC and CSU campuses keeps climbing. It is true that per-unit tuition costs are rising, despite even greater exploitation of poorly paid part-time teachers and graduate-student TAs. But the protests are sort of surreal. The California legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The governor is a Democrat. The faculties and administrative classes are largely Democratic. Who then, in the students’ minds, have established these supposedly unfair budget priorities?

Sales, income, and gas taxes are still among the highest in the nation (and are proposed to rise even higher) — prompting one of the largest out-of-state exoduses of upper-income brackets in the nation. The state budget is pretty much entirely committed to K–12 education (whose state-by-state comparative test scores in math and science hover between 45th and 49th in the nation), prisons, social services, and public-employee salaries and pensions. Whom, then, can the students be angry at?

Are students angry at public-union salaries and pensions that are among the highest in the nation? Do they think the many highly compensated retired Highway patrol officers have shorted students at UC Davis? Are they mad at the 50,000 illegal aliens in the California prison system that might have siphoned off scholarship funds from CSU Monterey Bay? Or is the rub the influx of hundreds of thousands of children of illegal aliens who require all sorts of language remediation and extra instruction in the public schools, and so might in theory divert library funds from UC Santa Cruz?

Perhaps the students don’t want billions to be committed to high-speed rail that might rob Berkeley of needed funding, or environmental efforts to introduce salmon into the San Joaquin River, in which the $70 million spent so far in studies and surveys might have come from nearby CSU Fresno? Are they mad at state social services, whose medical expenses have skyrocketed to address the health-care needs of millions of illegal aliens, and thus in theory could curb the choice of classes at CSU Stanislaus? Are they angry that some $10–15 billion a year probably leaves the state as remittances to Mexico?

If one cannot blame the wealthy for “not paying their fair share” (the top 1 percent of Californians now pay about 37 percent of all income-tax revenue — and their numbers have decreased by one-third in recent years, as the state has come to rely on the income tax for half its revenue), or Republican majorities in government, who, then, is left to blame?

But then, that’s been the problem with the Occumutants from the start, and not just in California: they loathe Wall Street — which supported Obama in 2008 and formed his fiscal brain trust. They loathe their student loans — and yet the university system is as blue as it gets. And they themselves can’t or won’t protest President Obama, making themselves the first protest fighting for the establishment status quo.

And if they get their way and real Hopenchange doesn’t come to America this November, at Human Events, Roger Hedgecock warns, “If you were wondering what living in Obama’s second term would be like, wonder no longer.  We in California are living there now”:

In California, we hate the evil, greedy rich (except the rich in Hollywood and in sports, and in drug dealing).  But we love people who have broken into California to eat the bounty created by the productive rich.

Illegals get benefits from various generous welfare programs, free medical care, free schools for their kids, including meals, and of course, instate tuition rates and scholarships too.  Governor Perry, California has a heart.  Nothing’s too good for our guests.

To erase even a hint of criticism of illegal immigration, the California Legislature is considering a unilateral state amnesty.  Democrat State Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes has proposed an initiative that would bar deportation of illegals from California.

Interesting dilemma for Obama there.  If immigration is exclusively a federal matter, and Obama has sued four states for trying to enforce federal immigration laws he won’t enforce, what will the President do to a California law that exempts California from federal immigration law?

California is also near fulfilling the environmentalist dream of deindustrialization.

After driving out the old industrial base (auto and airplane assembly, for example), air and water regulators and tax policies are now driving out the high-tech, biotech and even Internet-based companies that were supposed to be California’s future.

The California cap-and-trade tax on business in the name of reducing CO2 makes our state the leader in wacky environmentalism and guarantees a further job exodus from the state.

Even green energy companies can’t do business in California.  Solyndra went under, taking its taxpayer loan guarantee with it.

No job is too small to escape the regulators.  The state has even banned weekend amateur gold miners from the historic gold mining streams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In fact, more and more of California’s public land is off-limits to recreation by the people who paid for that land.  Unless you’re illegal.  Then you can clear the land, set up marijuana plantations at will, bring in fertilizers that legal farmers can no longer use, exploit illegal farm workers who live in hovels with no running water or sanitation, and protect your investment with armed illegals carrying guns no California citizen is allowed to own.

The rest of us only found out about these plantations when the workers’ open campfire started one of those devastating fires that have killed hundreds of people and burned out thousands of homes in California over the last decade.

But wait! There’s much more news of fresh disaster, right after the page break.

Pages: 1 2 | 66 Comments

Daily Show executive producer/writer Rory Albanese, perhaps tired of having to assuage his boss’s ego or simply wishing to inadvertently confirm recent poll studies on the intolerance of “liberals,” drops the mask and unloads a dense cloud of flatulent smugness:

Albanese said the 2011-2012 Republican primary campaign, with such colorful candidates as Rick Perry and Hermain Cain, has been comic gold for “The Daily Show” and other jokesters.

“With all due respect to the candidates, there is the view that all of them are insane. A guy like Santorum, who’s taking an anti-college stance? That’s funny. I mean, who the f— is against college?

Speaking of the bipolar clown nose on/off setting, I love that “With all due respect” throat clearing before Albanese’s reactionary trashing of the GOP. But to answer his question on “who’s the f*** is against college,” in a sense, the Daily Show’s core audience is. One of the chief obsessions of the Occupy crowd has been their own enormous student loans incurred in obtaining nonsense degrees on such topics as postmodern Nicaraguan hermaphrodite deconstructionist poetry — not to mention Derrick Bell-inspired “Critical Race Theory.”

At Big Hollywood, Christian Toto responds to the Daily Show’s producer:

Should political comedians want to find the funny from the left they can just tune in to Rush Limbaugh on any given afternoon. Or, listen to President Obama offer his latest silly defense for the wilting economy or how algae will help power the nation.

“The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart would have teed off on a GOP candidate who talked about algae in such a fashion. When it comes from Obama’s lips, you can hear the crickets.

The sooner comedy writers like Albanese admit that they have little interest in mocking the left, the sooner we’ll see comedy programs like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” tackle politics in an unbiased fashion.

I’m not sure I agree with conclusion that Christian reaches — while I’m also happy to see MSM producers such as Albanese admit their biases (and more and more have over the last decade), the end result likely won’t be a return to the comparatively brief period of “unbiased” media, but more and more hyper-partisan shows, narrow-casted to their target audiences. But as long as these shows disclose their biases and there’s something for everyone’s worldview, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

6 Comments

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

Like most Americans on the West Coast I began buying Japanese cars after a host of mishaps with American brands — chronic alternator failures on a Chevy S-10 pickup; a Chevy Malibu whose brakes lasted about 10,000 miles, and whose air conditioner went out every six months; a Dodge Dakota whose electrical system failed three times, twice on mountain roads — once in a rain storm, the other at night … and so on. Like millions of others, I reluctantly started buying either Hondas or Toyotas. But suddenly in this new pod world, I am noticing cars are now becoming political statements — and buying them a political act. Toyota has been demonized over what empirically seems to be an isolated accelerator problem. The subtext, however, is that the now number one automaker threatens U.S. union jobs and the now federal GM brand. Indeed, buying a GM product is becoming patriotic, at least more so than Ford, which did not participate in the federal bailout. Indeed, the evil GM Corporation of Michael Moore’s fantasies within a year has transmogrified into something akin to Social Security or Medicare. What will Palo Altoans or Carmelites do with those Priuses? A year ago, they were signatures of environmental caring, replete with Obama bumper stickers and fading  “No blood for oil” slogans. Now, however, are not they anti-American, anti-union, anti-Obama administration, anti-consumer, pro-corporate greed fetishes?

– Victor Davis Hanson, “We Are All [Pod People] Now,” PJM, March 30th, 2010.

In a piece of video that shot across the Internet Thursday like a sports car doing zero-to-60 in four seconds, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power that he does not own a car. But The Daily Caller has confirmed that Chu’s wife does — and it’s quite an automobile.

There’s no Chevy Volt in the Chu household’s driveway. TheDC has obtained motor vehicle registration records showing that Jean Chu (née Fetter) is the owner of a 2002 BMW 325i, a sports sedan with a gas-guzzling 6-cylinder engine.

And its engine requires premium gasoline. AAA determined on Thursday that the average U.S. price for that grade of fuel was $4.03 per gallon.

When the car was first sold, its EPA-estimated fuel economy was rated at 18 miles per gallon in the city and 27 mpg on highways, according to FuelEconomy.gov, a website run by Secretary Chu’s own Department of Energy. The website reports that the car’s average fuel economy was 21 mpg — back when it had zero miles on its odometer.

The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics has reported that the average fuel economy of light-duty passenger vehicles for the 2002 model year was 29.0 mpg, putting Mrs. Chu’s car in the less-than-efficient column.

– “Energy Sec. Chu doesn’t own car, but his wife drives BMW gas-guzzler,” David Martosko, the Daily Caller, today.

To sum up, “This administration seems to have a very theoretical connection with reality,” Ace wrote yesterday, linking to an article on the increasingly appropriately-named Fisker Karma. Add that to the reported battery-bricking risks of the Tesla and the complete overall suckitude of the temporarily(?) discontinued Chevy Volt, and you’ve got serious crony corporatist sparky car woes for the Oba-ministration. “If you’ve ever wondered what Government By Hippies might look like, now you know.”

Did Iowahawk call this at the end of 2008, or what?

7 Comments

Apparently the Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition had to be disqualified after winning too many years. But as Ben Shapiro writes at Big Government, in a post with a headline that sums up the Government Motors electro-stinker perfectly:

It was just a few days ago that General Motors announced it was killing the Chevy Volt. The King Was Dead. Well, long live the European King: today, the Geneva Auto Show named the Volt its 2012 Car of the Year. The Auto Show said that the car was a “mature product … the first example of an electric vehicle with extended range.”

Here are the facts about the Chevy Volt. According to Chevrolet, “Volt is unique among electric vehicles because you have two sources of energy.” You can even drive “an EPA-estimated 35 miles” without gas! Which means you can hit the 7-11, Whole Foods, and pot dispensary in one trip before having to recharge for three hours. About a month ago, those vaunted batteries jolted the Volt, necessitating the call back of 8,000 Volts sold in the U.S. Why? It turns out that after crash tests done by federal safety regulators, the batteries burst into flame.

A lot more fun than the battery bricking, I guess. And speaking of fun, as the video at the top of the post highlights, the right ad man knows how to turn GM’s bug into a feature…

As Samuel Gregg writes at the American Spectator, obsessions with radical environmentalism and crony corporatism (is there any other kind?) are but two of the facets of “The American Left’s European Nightmare:”

Then there are the pointed criticisms of the European model expressed in a recently released World Bank report. Outside the parallel universe inhabited by Occupy Wall Street and assorted fellow-travelers, few would accuse the World Bank of harboring many radical free marketers, let alone the “neoliberal” bogeymen regularly conjured up by European politicians.

Among other things, the report refers to weak work incentives, anemic entrepreneurship levels, feeble venture-capital markets, over-regulated service sectors, European businesses choosing to stay small to avoid compulsory unionization and extra red-tape, labor markets crippled by powerful restrictions on companies’ ability to dismiss employees, research and development steadily falling further behind America, and on-going declines in annual work hours. The report also notes that Europe, with just 10 percent of the world’s population, accounts for an astonishing 58 percent of the entire world economy’s spending on social protection.

Such is the long-term economic price associated with what amounts to many Europeans’ near-obsession with securing economic security and equality through state action. It also has made a continent that once literally ruled most of the world into a textbook example of the basic un-workability of the Social Democratic dream.

Hence, it’s little wonder that Krugman and others dismiss those who warn of disturbing parallels between Europe and America as having “no idea what they’re talking about.” The purpose of such remarks is to shut down discussion — just one of American liberalism’s many illiberal traits — in the face of awkward truths and facts.

In a way, we’re been here before. Prior to Communism’s defeat in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, many American liberals were in denial about the performance of command economies. Another Nobel Laureate, the late Paul Samuelson, argued in the thirteenth edition of his renowned textbook Economics, that “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive.” Providentially, this edition was published in the year, ahem, 1989.

Such tragically mistimed observations, however, reflected decades of ignoring the realities of life in command economies. In the tenth edition of Economics (1976), for example, Samuelson claimed: “It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.”

Vulgar? A mistake? Well, I guess all those secret police, informers, “re-education facilities,” barbed-wires, and Soviet troop concentrations in the “workers-paradises” were just there for decorative purposes.

In the real world, of course, there are genuine arguments for us to have about what Europe’s present drama means for America. Even some of Krugman’s New York Times‘ colleagues have engaged such questions, albeit rather tentatively.

…And some haven’t, as Clay Waters writes at Newsbusters. “NYT Mag Writer Delights in ‘Dizzy Exuberance’ of London Rioters: Promotes Socialism, Annoying Subway Riders,” in a piece that sounds like something out of an underground alternative rag from the ’70s:

Novelist (and Socialist Workers Party member) China Mieville wrote the main essay for the London issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “‘Oh London, You Drama Queen.’” According to him, London is a mess of racism and youth alienation, and only free public housing and celebration of loud music on the tube will save it. He also excused last summer’s burning and rioting, motivated by a “deep sense of injustice”: “Youths taking TVs, clothes, carpets, food from broken-open shops, sometimes with dizzy exuberance, sometimes with what looked like thoughtful care.”

Even the photo captions are replete with leftist smuggery, contrasting an old-fashioned butcher with a bleak-looking dance club: “Smithfield Market, in Central London, is rooted in the past./The scene at Plastic People, a club in Hackney, looks to the future.”

I wonder what American retailers who pay for to advertise in the very expensive real estate in the Sunday Times magazine think about its writers’ cavalier attitudes towards shoplifting and looting?

Incidentally, the Times article and its author’s love of euro-squalor dovetails well with an observation James Lileks recently made about the mid-’60s François Truffaut version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”

Of course, as Glenn Reynolds writes in the Washington Examiner, “The future will be better than we think if politicians don’t ruin it:”

Who looks after society as a whole? Our political leaders are supposed to, but things don’t always work out that way. As P.J. O’Rourke comments: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”That’s right, and one finds members of both parties on the take. The more powerful the government, the more tempting it is to purchase influence — and, in fact, if your competitors are buying influence, you’ll have to respond in kind in self-defense.

And when everyone responds that way, the burdens on innovation, new business formation, and wealth generation keep growing.

Several decades ago, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein observed: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances, which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all Right-thinking people.

Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ ”

Will our “luck” turn good or bad over the next few years? A lot depends on what happens in November, and after. Especially after.

Which could well be problematic no matter who wins in November.

Related: “The [British] government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long?“

3 Comments

Hey, it’s a GOP primary event today, and you know what means — time for Obama to Barack the Oxygen out of the room yet again. Today’s press conference contains this classic howler:

At the president’s news conference this afternoon, Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked the president about Israel and whether talk of attacking Iran was driving up gas prices. Henry then asked, “Your critics will say on Capitol Hill that you want gas prices go go higher because you have said before that will wean the American people off fossil fuels on to renewable fuels. How do you respond to that?”

The president conceded that, in an election year, he wants gas prices to go down.

“Do you think that the president of the United States going into a reelection wants the prices on gas to go higher?” Obama asked incredulously. “Is there anybody here that thinks that makes a lot of sense?”

Yeah, you did, champ — remember 2008?

And of course, the obvious question is what happens after the election year. Although Obama and old media are on record –and in agreement — on that topic as well.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in his latest column on “The Gaseous Policies of Barack Obama,” no worries, “we have two Nobel laureates in Dr. Chu and Barack Obama to see us through:”

Give credit to Steven Chu. He’s not backing down and most recently reiterated to Congress that high prices are not much of a concern of this administration. (But Mr. Chu: if they go up any more, you will soon be out of a job, yes?) In contrast, and faced with reelection, the president now brags that we are using less fuel and pumping more of it than when he took office. Again, examine that surreal logic: because unemployment is high and GDP growth low, there is less demand for gas, and that is suddenly a good thing? (Note how — for the first time? — Obama does not blame Bush for lowering gas demand as he had serially for causing the economic doldrums: “Bush wrecked the economy but I was smart enough to make it far worse to lower gas demand.”)

Then the president boasted further that domestic production is at an all-time high. Consider that weird reasoning as well: although he curtailed production on federal lands where there are now record levels of known oil and gas reserves, private industry has developed horizontal drilling and fracking — despite, rather than because of, the president — on mostly private land in the Dakotas and elsewhere. Is the reasoning, then, something like: “Congratulations to the oil industry for ignoring me”?

In sum, from January 2009 to January 2011 — in the pre-Climategate days before Al Gore was a “sex poodle” and when the Himalayan glaciers were to be swamps and polar bears extinct — new gas and oil production was considered “bad,” given that Obama was pushing wind, solar, and “alternative” energies. In those giddy cap-and-trade days, he could afford to pontificate because he was not up for reelection and world demand was sluggish, dropping oil prices at the wellhead. When the world economy began rebounding, demand picked up, prices spiked, and now Obama is in campaign mode: suddenly high gas prices are bad and he claims not that he wants his House-approved cap-and-trade bill pushed through his Democratically controlled Senate, but rather that all along he has encouraged private enterprise to drill while successfully persuading us to cut back our consumption (as if we did so because of the impressive oratory of Barack Obama rather than because he had managed to ensure millions of Americans now had no jobs to drive to work to).

And on Israel, Obama has to temporarily pose as being their friend, at least until November, or when he appears impotent yet again in the wake of Iranian prevarications, whichever comes first. Even the Democrat house organ the Daily Beast has noticed. “It wasn’t long ago that the White House was angering Israeli leaders with statements seen as critical. But 2012 is an election year, and that makes all the difference.”

Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.

Comments Off

Or thuggishness, misanthropy and nihilism, depending upon how you look at it, as our enlightened betters on the left demonstrate their love of mankind:

• “UNC-Greensboro Declares Christianity Not a Religion.”

• “Exclusive Audio: Harvard Anti-Israel Conference: The Jewish People Does Not Exist.”

• “Civility alert: Liberal radio host says tornado victims forsaken by ‘their God’” What is it with the left and hurricane lust, anyhow?

• “Sebelius: Decrease in Human Beings Will Cover Cost of Contraception Mandate.” John Holdren’s 70′s-era ZPG obsessions updated for the 21st century?

Or to sum it all up, “We’re not really people to them. It’s not an accident that New York Times columnist referred to his critics on Twitter as “right-wing lice.” — and as someone noted on Twitter, not at all getting — or losing too much sleep over — the historical eliminationist rhetoric implicit in such a phrase.

3 Comments

At the American Thinker, S. Fred Singer writes that “Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name,” and near the end of his article, rounds up some fascinating quotes from the folks who seem to bring you new “Final Countdowns” and news of fresh disaster seemingly every day:

• “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

• “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University

•  “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace

•  “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC [Update: A reader flags us that Houghton has denied these words are his -- Ed]

• “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

As I’ve written before, it’s a fascinating development when people start admitting that they’re willing to lie for their cause.

Late last month, as a result of “GleickGate,” an author at Scientific American asked, “Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?” It sure seemed to me that he was trying to answer the headline of his article in the affirmative, however reluctantly he arrives at his ultimate conclusion.

Given that the author was attempting to use the century-old “Moral Equivalent of War” argument, I wrote here in reply that as the old cliché goes, truth is the first casualty of war. Even eco-war, I guess. But perhaps what’s relatively new are members of the left who are willing to publicly admit they’re lying, as we explored in 2010, when a member of the Journalist, the self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama in 2008 tweeted:

As I noted back then, legacy media house organ Editor & Publisher ran a piece in 2007 that advocated similar tactics for the man-made global warming crowd titled “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”

Not to mention former CBS anchorman Dan Rather telling Bill O’Reilly back in 2001 that “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things:”

Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”
Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.”
O’Reilly: “Do you, really?”
Rather: “I do.”
O’Reilly: “Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?”
Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?”
O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?”
Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “
O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?”
Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.

And Democrat former  Congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who lost his reelection bid in 2010, telling his constituents in 2008 this his party lied to take back Congress in 2006:

“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”

Video here:

Just this past month, “NY Democrat Rep. Kathy Hochul Admits at Raucous Town Hall: ‘Basically, We’re Not Looking to the Constitution’ when it Comes to ObamaCare Mandates.”

Back in 2004, Thomas Sowell said:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

And justifying lying. Fortunately, then and now, the American public as a whole are much smarter than “the nature fakers,” as Theodore Roosevelt once call them, and they don’t much like being bullied, Steve Hayward writes in the Weekly Standard:

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

Which, incidentally, sounds very much like the worldview of someone who was willing to charge right into those Goliaths.

(H/T: Maggie’s Farm.)

3 Comments