This is an actual New York Times correction, which ran yesterday:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor.No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

What is it about gravity that gets the Gray Lady into such trouble?

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At the Corner, Rich Lowry explores President Obama’s flawed Sputnik analogy, and notes, “In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project:”

As Walter McDougall documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, one of the heroes of the Apollo project, NASA administrator James Webb, fed the misunderstanding. He thought the space program constituted a breakthrough in the management of large systems that could be widely replicated.

McDougall writes that “the James Webbs had, by their talent and energy, made command innovation look easy — and ‘American.’” In a letter to LBJ, Webb told the president, “The space program lies in your first area of building the Great Society.” And build it he did. “A new political symbolism had arisen,” McDougall notes, “to discredit the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism.”

LBJ himself remarked on the catalyzing effect of the space program. According to LBJ, people said, “‘Well, if you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare?’ And so we passed the Medicare act, and we passed 40 other measures.”

One of Lowry’s readers notes that the deadline that JFK set for Apollo was “overcome by the power of infinite funding alone.” In reality, “A closer reading of the history demonstrates this position as fallacious.” Men with big steely cojones were willing to put them on the line to see Kennedy’s vision through, at considerable risk to their reputations. Witness:

1. George Mueller’s decision to adapt an ‘all-up’ testing regimen for the Saturn V booster
2. George Low’s decision to fly Apollo 8 in 1968

When Mueller was appointed Associate Administrator of the Office of Manned Space Flight he quickly realized that the conventional approach to testing new booster technology would result in years of delays and NASA would be unable to meet the objective of a manned landing by 1969. To the chagrin of many at NASA, he instituted the policy of testing the entire booster system as a whole rather than testing each individual component separately and conjoining them over time. This approach was anathema to the engineering community and broke with all tradition. I cannot speak to the psychology of his decision-making process but it is my belief that it derived from his desire to assist in meeting specified national goals. It was selfless to the extent that had the approach been a failure he would have been vilified in his community and his future prospects imperiled.

Needless to say, the modern NASA (when it isn’t cooking the books) has very different priorities these days, as the era of the Right Stuff has long been superseded by the PC world of not accomplishing very much — but not hurting anyone’s feelings in the process. Or to paraphrase John Derbyshire, better dead than rude — or in the case of NASA, better brain-dead than rude.

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Back in 2005, when President Bush appointed John Bolton to shake up the UN, Mark Steyn reminded readers of Reagan-era Secretary of State George Schultz’s test for incoming ambassadors:

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government’s foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan’s embryo world government.

And not China, something that James Hansen, NASA’s most visible global warming zealot has yet to figure out:

November’s election made it quite clear that the people of the United States do not want to radically change our society in the name of global warming. Pretty much every close House race went to the Republicans, while the Democrats won all the Senate squeakers. The difference? The House on June 26, 2009, passed a bill limiting carbon-dioxide emissions and getting into just about every aspect of our lives. The Senate did nothing of the sort.

The nation’s most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the “best hope” to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China‘s will.

NASA laboratory head James Hansen‘s anti-democracy rants were published while he was on a November junket in China, but they didn’t get much attention until recently. On Jan. 12, the hyperprolific blogger Marc Morano put them on his Climate Depot site, and within hours, the post went viral. In a former life, Mr. Morano was chief global-warming researcher for Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are “the barbarians” with a “fossil-money- ‘democracy’ that now rules the roost,” making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. Here’s what he blogged on Nov. 24:

“I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast to the West with its short election cycles. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient.”

Has this guy ever heard of the Gang of Four? Or the Cultural Revolution, which killed those who were inconvenient? Or the Great Leap Forward, which used the best technical information to determine that a steel mill in every backyard was a good idea?

Clearly though, Thomas Friedman will love Hansen’s anti-American, growth-stifling rhetoric, presumably almost as much as the president does.

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“Wonderful: Military not sure yet who fired ‘big missile’ off California coast,” Allahpundit writes, linking to a CBS article that’s getting blown out (figuratively) by a Drudge-lanche, and offering three possibilities as to the cause. Plus this video:

Update: “Pentagon says it’s baffled, but scientists suggest it’s just a jetliner with spectacular contrail.”

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“This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order,” P.J. O’Rourke wrote last week. If you need any more incentive to vote today, perhaps these clips will help:

Who Are You? Who Are You?

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“This is my town hall meeting for you. And you’re not going to tell me how to run my congressional office:”

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“N-Word. 15 times:”

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So, how do you create a job?

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Bonus video: Dick Blumenthal’s Full Dinner Jacket:

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That’s right — you tell your constituents that you’re the boss!

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“This is not bulls***, this is what I’ve been doing!”

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Time magazine works hard at rebuilding its subscriber base:

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Helen Thomas builds outreach:

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“Crazed Democrats in Virginia attack opponents, throw signs:”

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Steve Cohen (D-TN) thinks you look smashing in white:

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The peasants are revolting — they stink on ice!

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In the clearing stands a ma’am:

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You’re face to face, with the man who sold the world:

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As Noemie Emery recently wrote, “This meritocracy has created an ‘elite’ without merit. In everyone’s eyes but its own:”

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Legislation is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’ll find inside:

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And from January, after Scott Brown’s victory, a reminder from top political pundit Roger Ebert about the importance of the two party system:

In February of 2009, Newsweek proclaimed:

First read this, then prove them wrong today.

In other words, hit it.

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“Space tourism to accelerate climate change” screams this Nature.com article that Matt Drudge links to — but then, doesn’t everything?

Climate change caused by black carbon, also known as soot, emitted during a decade of commercial space flight would be comparable to that from current global aviation, researchers estimate.

The findings, reported in a paper in press in Geophysical Research Letters¹, suggest that emissions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone. The simulations show that the changes to Earth’s climate could increase polar surface temperatures by 1 °C, and reduce polar sea ice by 5–15%.

“There are fundamental limits to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant impact,” says Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles, California and an author of the study.

But just last year, AP reported with a straight face when John Holdren, President Obama’s Malthusian, Strangelovian in-house mad scientist said that he wanted to dump plenty of soot into the atmosphere to stop global warming:

The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air. John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Or as Jim Treacher quipped on Twitter, that whole “‘Obama is a megalomaniac’ thing is such a ridiculous right-wing smear. By the way, now he wants to take over the weather.”

Besides, it was just last April (though sadly not April 1st) that the L.A. Times ran an article titled “Why cleaner air could speed global warming” — no, really:

But even as industrialized and developing nations alike steadily reduce aerosol pollution — caused primarily by burning coal — climate scientists are beginning to understand just how much these tiny particles have helped keep the planet cool. A silent benefit of sulfates, in fact, is that they’ve been helpfully blocking sunlight from striking the Earth for many decades, by brightening clouds and expanding their coverage. Emerging science suggests that their underappreciated impact has been incredible.

Researchers believe greenhouse gases such as CO2 have committed the Earth to an eventual warming of roughly 4 degrees Fahrenheit, a quarter of which the planet has already experienced. Thanks to cooling by aerosols starting in the 1940s, however, the planet has only felt a portion of that greenhouse warming. In the 1980s, sulfate pollution dropped as Western nations enhanced pollution controls, and as a result, global warming accelerated.

There’s hot debate over the size of what amounts to a cooling mask, but there’s no question that it will diminish as industries continue to clean traditional pollutants from their smokestacks. Unlike CO2, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries, aerosols last for a week at most in the air. So cutting them would probably accelerate global warming rapidly.

Since the Nature.com article claims that climate change from commercial space flight “would be comparable to that from current global aviation,” none of their writers ever get on airplane, right? But then, we know they personally don’t take their own fears about global warming all that seriously, since they have a Website powered by racks of servers in air-conditioned rooms.

I would suggest that they shut voluntarily shut their site down, but no pressure, though.

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Now is the time when the Small Dead Animals blog juxtaposes!

Arthur C. Clarke, on the moon landing;

PLAYBOY: As it turned out, during the moon landing in 1969, you were a commentator for U.S. television, along with your friend Walter Cronkite. You cried then, didn’t you?

CLARKE: When you go to a launch, it is an emotional experience. Television doesn’t give you any idea of it, really. Walter wiped away a tear or two, as well — as did Eric Sevareid. The last time I’d cried was when my grandmother died, 20 years before.

Margaret Atwood, Arthur C. Clarke Award winner;

Interviewer: I was told recently that you were one of the believers who is of the opinion that the Moon landing was actually filmed … could possibly have been filmed here.

Atwood: The question about the Moon landing is “why haven’t we been back?” and it was done in an age when computers were as big as a couple of rooms. If you even look at the Space Odyssey, 2001, HAL the computer – and I think that movie came out in the late ’60s – HAL the computer is huge. So we didn’t yet have microchips so I just wonder how did they do that? Why haven’t they done it again if it was so easy?

Please, please, please ABC, book this woman to appear on The View with fellow lunar truther (with her own background in futuristic sci-fi, naturally), Whoopi Goldberg.

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“So I’m through with this story.  The edited video was unfortunate, but the true racist stripes of the NAACP, the Sherrods, and the Obama Administration have certainly come out over a week’s time.  So bravo, Mr. Breitbart.  You hit the target.”

Breitbart is also receiving support from a surprising source: Jon Stewart, who tells his viewers, “Andrew Breitbart may be the most honest person in this entire story.”

Glenn Reynolds adds:

Dan Riehl: Sad, Jon Stewart Has More Ballz Than Many Right-Side Pundits On Breitbart, Sherrod. That’s true. When the lefties target someone, whether it’s Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh, too many rightish pundits instinctively distance themselves. That’s a reflex left over from when things were very different.

Of course, as with self-admitted communist/truther Van Jones, some of the more reactionary on the left long for that period to return. As economist Arnold Kling recently wrote:

I think that ideology is partly endogenous. I do not think that it is an accident that an ideology of rational technocratic control grew up as America urbanized and as enormous scale economies emerged in the industries made possible by the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, radio, and television. I do not think it is an accident that the Progressive ideology will be challenged as the Internet starts to alter the economy and society, reducing the comparative advantage of mass production and mass media while increasing the comparative advantage of local autonomy and individual expression. The Internet serves as a constant reminder of the wisdom of Hayek.

To this post into last week’s other big story, Looking at the JournoList from the perspective Kling describes above, one could argue that it was a way to recreate the mid-20th century dinosaur period of monolithic journalism in the 21st century era of demassified media.

Update: The effectively state-run Media Matters continues to spin, swing, and miss on behalf of the Obama administration’s incompetence and rash judgment. Also just in, suns sets in west, rises in east.

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If you missed it on Sirius-XM today, click here to join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a look at Washington and beyond:

• Steve has Five Questions for James Lileks, the Bard of Jasperwood to get his take on the JournoList scandal, Sarah Palin’s “Refudiate” malapropism, and the shocking surprise to be revealed on Mad Men tomorrow!
• Glenn Reynolds interviews former Senator Dan Coats (R-IN), who’s running again this November.
• Allen Barton of PJTV, Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily on the recent Aspen Ideas Festival.
• Bill Whittle of PJTV on the future of commercial space flight.
• Ed Driscoll interviews Gary Bruce, author of the new Oxford University Press book, The Firm: the Inside Story of the Stasi. (This interview was heavily edited for time; the complete version can be heard here.)
• Produced by your humble narrator.

Click here to listen!

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Megan McArdle, The Atlantic’s resident in-house World’s Tallest Female Libertarian Econoblogger Who Nonetheless Voted for Obama, wrote yesterday:

Random thought of the day: what if Lord Keynes was right . . . but only in 1932?

Actually, that timeframe makes a certain amount of sense — we know Keynes wasn’t right from 1933 to 1941, when, as UCLA noted a few years ago, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” Or as Mark Steyn presciently noted, in late October of 2008, other nations had economic Depressions at the start of the 1930s; the US had a Great Depression, earning that added sobriquet due to its needless longevity.

And we know that Keynes’ medicine — spend ‘til a nation is even more broke than it was at the start of the Depression — wouldn’t go over well with the American people during 1932, since it wasn’t a part of Roosevelt’s platform. FDR, to listen to him, seemed most concerned with ending Prohibition, and far from promoting massive Make Work Projects, in some ways, ran to the right of Herbert Hoover.

But thanks to almost three quarters of a century worth of self-perpetuated myths, today’s liberals actually couldn’t wait for the 21st century economy to collapse before literally promising to dust-off 70-year old programs. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski was quoted in May of 2008 as saying:

“All we’re doing is going into the basket and saying, ‘Damn, what did they do in ‘32, what did they do in ‘34, what did they do in ‘36,’ and we’re pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we’re using them…To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we’ve got to make these old programs work, and we’ve got to be as inventive as hell.”

In May of 2008, the Dow-Jones was 2000 points higher than it is today, and unemployment was at about 5.5 percent, half of today’s national average.

At least though, most of FDR’s Keynesian programs were focused on temporarily creating jobs by building things. But that’s the paradox: pace Rep. Kanjorski, we can’t do what they did in ‘34 and ‘36. Thanks to a morass of political correctness, NIMBY “Not In My Backyard” extremism has gone BANANAS — “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.”

In his op-ed this week, Jonah Goldberg squared the circle:

Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn’t have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means “coordination.” The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay “independent.” If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state’s ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.

Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.

And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper–mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina’s aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual-harassment training (which most already had).

Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let’s not even mention public schools.

The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, “shovel-ready” weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union “prevailing wage” rules for each of more than 3,000 counties.

Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.

But Didn’t Candidate Obama realize this when he was running in 2008? Mickey Kaus recently wrote:

On page 85 of his excellent quick-history, The Promise, Jon Alter discusses Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill:

The biggest frustration involved infrastructure. Obama said later that he learned that “one of the biggest lies in government is the idea of ’shovel-ready’ projects.” It turned out that only about $20 billion to $40 billion in construction contracts were truly ready to go. The rest were tied up in the endless contracting delays and bureaucratic hassles associated with building anything in America. [E.A.]

a) Good that Obama is still learning, but the realization that the expensive projects he repeatedly assured Americans were “shovel-ready” actually weren’t comes a little late, no? The economy needed stimulating 18 months ago. How many unemployed Americans could have had jobs for the last year and a half if Obama had realized the House Dems’ “shovel-ready” pitch was a crock and pursued other, quicker forms of stimulus–like an instant payroll tax cut?

Mickey quipped, “And here I thought the coming to power of the Democrats was a voyage of discovery only for their youthful journalistic enthusiasts.”

Heh. Or as somebody said in early September of 2008, “My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.”

Fortunately though, California’s state government, knowing that its unemployment rate is even higher than the national average, shows that when it wants to cut through the red tape, it can, as J.E. Dyer writes today on Commentary’s Contentions blog:

Thousands of people in the farming industry have lost their livelihoods and property since California’s “man-made drought” became reality three years ago. In some counties, unemployment tops 20 percent. The state has lost billions in revenue from its largest industry: agriculture.Advocacy groups this spring brought the central dispute, which is over the celebrated Delta smelt in the San Joaquin River delta, to a judicially brokered compromise that now allows some level of water pumping. (A good summary of the process is here.) But this is a conditional outcome: not sustainable and not intended to be so. New development is what’s needed to transcend the limitations of our state water infrastructure, which set us up for the crisis to begin with. But legislators in Sacramento aren’t serious enough to prioritize taking action; they have to wangle votes from each other with unseemly pork, which only makes their “fix” more difficult to present to tax-weary voters.

There is, however, something on which the political leaders in Sacramento were able to take unified action this week. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 2, which mandates a set of humane conditions for the hens tended by egg-producing farmers. This year’s legislature has passed a law that will require out-of-state egg producers to conform to the mandate as well, if they want to sell eggs in California. The governor signed it yesterday, demonstrating that they can get things done in Sacramento. The things just have to be on their list of priorities.

What will it take for California’s political class to recognize that prosperity, public order, and human survival are not givens? They can collapse under the weight of hostile regulation. The Golden State’s sour economy and staggering deficit are the chief exhibits in that lesson today, and worse is probably looming. But by all means, let us fight to ensure that hens across America can spread their wings without bumping into each other.

So how does one fix a worldview that’s so trapped in an imaginary glorious past that it thwarts its ideology’s technological advancement?

Good luck — not even NASA knows how to solve this issue.

Update: Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, her brilliant 2007 look at human cost of the Great Depression, has an op-ed at AOL that dovetails well with this post: “Is Obama Spurring Growth, or Knocking It Down?”

(Originally posted during my stint as part of the team of guest-bloggers at Hot Air this week — and a big thank you once again to Ed and Allah for allowing me to sit-in this week; title suggested by one of the commenters to my post there.)

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Victor Davis Hanson attempts to make sense of the Ministry of Truth-style PC run amok in the Obama administration and asks, “What is going on here? The president is setting the tone, and a host of truth departments are his choruses.”

Not the least of which NASA, whose current motto seems to be,  “No Air or Space Anymore,” Myra Adams writes at the Daily Caller.

Fortunately, Cuffy Meigs solves two of Obama’s more intractable dilemmas in one stroke: Turn Gitmo into NASA’s Math Camp Delta!

Giving America’s Devil Island a friendly, new “can-do” face — CHECK!

American rocket scientists patting medieval barabarians on the head while cooing, “Who can do long division? Who’s a big boy? You are! You are!” — CHECK!

Streamlining government operations — CHECK!

Closer to Florida — CHECK!

Everyone wins. Except for that dunce who can’t grasp Pi; he gets waterboarded 3.141592 times.

As Cuffy writes, “Don’t say I never helped the President.”

Heh, indeed.™ And don’t miss the accompanying photoshop.

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At Hot Air (where I’m also guest-blogging this week, as part of the five(!) person team Allahpundit assembled to almost make up for his keenly-felt absence during his vacation, the Anchoress invites us to revisit “Rome, Circa 450 AD:”

In the late 1970’s the genial science historian James Burke wrote and presented a ten-part series entitled Connections, which became appointment-tv for my husband and me. He had a way of applying past lessons to present circumstances that was both fascinating and entertaining and sometimes–as in this video–loaded with the prescience that comes from actually listening to history.

At about the 3:30 mark, you find Burke once again presenting past as prelude:

” The last time a world empire fell apart, it was about 1500 years ago. Then, the empire was Roman…. … What led the Barbarians walk over Rome is something that won’t take you a second to sympathize with. The taxes were too high, to pay for the army that was losing all the battles, and a bunch of freeloaders in government, and of course, and to pay for thousands of civil servants.”

Stick with this all the way through; you will be very, very surprised as to where it leads. Well, regular readers of The Anchoress might not be.

At his PJ Express blog, Bill Whittle spots another Roman analogy:

[Obama] is a product of his time; a product of a civilization that has been dynamic and successful long enough for its prosperity to feel inevitable and indestructible. It’s not even really his fault. It has always been pretty clear from his record who he is and what he believes, and we elected him because the country was in the mood for a “progressive” president.

But Progressivism is not progressive – it’s ancient. Cyclical. It’s circular. It is, in fact, the symptom and the eventual cause of impending collapse.

In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.

I said that what we today call Progressivism is in fact ancient and circular. Don’t believe me? Well, the great roman orator Cicero, speaking in defense of his friend Sestius, around 55 BC, said – quote:

“Gaius gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw the state treasury would be exhausted.”

When a society – after generations of hard work, sacrifice and hardship – reaches a certain level of prosperity, “Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell and Gaius Gracchus – that last Progressive died in 121 BC – assume that the prosperity is endless, and push for more and more people to get more and more goods and services for less and less work. Why? Because – as today, in America, as with the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, Rome, Greece, Eqypt, Babylon… They do it for political power. They live for political power. This “Progressivism” is ancient, recurring, tyrannical and ruinous.

And we voted for it. Just like the Romans did.

We can see from Cicero that throughout history, the disease is always the same – too much security and prosperity breeds laziness, narcissism, resentment and entitlement.

Don’t miss the rest of Bill’s essay, which moves from the Bridge of the Titanic, to the classrooms of the Frankfurt School, the birthplace of “Political Correctness” And speaking of which, as Jonah Golberg asks, “What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung?”

Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn’t have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means “coordination.” The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay “independent.” If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state’s ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.

Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.

And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper–mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina’s aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual-harassment training (which most already had).

Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let’s not even mention public schools.

The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, “shovel-ready” weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union “prevailing wage” rules for each of more than 3,000 counties.

Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.

President Obama likes to say that “if we could put a man on the moon,” we can do anything, from socializing medicine to abandoning fossil fuels. That’s nonsense on stilts for a host of reasons. But it’s also ironic, given that we can’t even put a man on the moon anymore. Not when NASA’s foremost priority is boosting the self-esteem of children and Muslims.

Needless to say, modern-day NASA operates in sharp contradistinction to its Right Stuff-era predecessor, where the motto was, “Waste anything but time,” Jonah writes.

Ironically, unlike today’s NASA, that’s the one commodity that may be in awfully short supply for the space agency’s current overseers, James Pethokoukis notes.

Update: Micheal Ramirez graphically illustrates “Big Shoes and Small Steps.”

Update: Jules Crittenden adds:

Time to check our math on the O admin. NASA chief thinks Job One is Islamic outreach. Security chief thinks Threat One is conservatives and returning war vets. The boss, meanwhile, is all about the deficits … OK, punch in the numbers … error message: does not compute …

Sounds like a recipe for a a no-win scenario to me.

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Jim Geraghty quips, “Obama’s new NASA policy: We won’t go to the moon, but we will reach out to nations that have the moon on their flag.”

As Paul Mirengoff wrote on Sunday at Power Line:

In the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the “foremost” task President Obama has given him is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” Thus, NASA’s primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of “predominantly Muslim nations.”

Bolden’s use of the word “foremost” is a combination Freudian and Kinsleyian slip that’s very much reminiscent of recent utterances on similar topics:

• “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

– General George William Casey Jr., chief of staff of the United States Army, Meet The Press, November 8, 2009, on Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s apparent (very apparent) case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome at Fort Hood.

• ‘This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

–- Archliberal Howell Raines, then the New York Times’ editor, on the recruiting efforts of his newspaper, as quoted by Mickey Kaus, Friday, May 9, 2003.

It’s a curious development when “diversity” becomes the explicitly stated chief objective of an organization’s figurehead. I had assumed that the goal of NASA was to explore space (I know, I know, I’m really dating myself with that one), the goal of the New York Times was to put out the best newspaper possible, and the goal of the Army was to protect the nation.

When did making the employees of those organizations feel warm and fuzzy trump all of that?

(H/T: 5′F)

Update: “The Obama administration: Erasing the line between satire and reality since January 20, 2009.”

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As Byron York asks rhetorically, “If we can put a man on the moon, Mr. President, then why can’t we stop the leak?”

But we can’t put a man on the moon — at least the US government can’t for the foreseeable future. The previous US president wanted to, but President Obama said Nyet.

Rand Simberg, who has a must-read post on why “the if we can put a man on the moon” cliche is often such a facetious argument, has noted that LBJ saw the space program as a sort of latter-day TVA, using it “as a means to industrialize the South,” Simberg wrote last year.  And as Jonah Goldberg noted in Liberal Fascism, JFK’s moon program was his version of the Moral Equivalent of War, a bit of rhetorical slight of hand which has driven “progressives” since the days when William James first coined the phrase at the dawn of the 20th century.

Which dovetails into John Podhoretz’s article in the New York Post late last night on “Obama’s 9/11 envy:”

What’s most notable about 9/11 and the oil spill is how essentially different they are. One was a brilliantly conceived and diabolical act of war; the other a horrific accident that was the last thing anybody wanted to happen. One was designed to decapitate the US government and deliver a mortal blow to the world’s financial system; the other wasn’t designed at all.One was purposeful destruction intended to harm. The other is a purposeless catastrophe that was in no way intentional at all but will do great harm. One was an attack on the United States. The other was an accident.

So what on earth could the president have been thinking?

The first possibility is that there is some kind of perverse wish being expressed in these words. They have a wistful quality, as though the president wished he had a different crisis, a more popular crisis, on his hands.

Of course the fact that 9/11 would prove to be a net political benefit for George W. Bush was not the result of happenstance. It was due to the way he responded.

After a few days of discomfiting uncertainty, Bush found his voice and his purpose, delivering a series of powerful speeches that suggested a seriousness of purpose in regard to his presidential responsibilities that no one had actually expected of him.

Whatever happened afterward to shake that perspective on him in the minds of so many, the fact was that Bush had to meet the moment to secure the political advantage.

Obama has had no such moment in relation to the oil spill, because he couldn’t have. BP didn’t mean to do it and has been laboring desperately to fix what got broken. It is liable for what it did, it does not deny its own culpability, and it may itself be capsized as a result.

What the deployment of the 9/11 analogy suggests is that Obama would like to treat BP as though it were al Qaeda, at least rhetorically — a villain for him to confront on behalf of the wounded American people.

That may seem politically shrewd to Obama and his team, but it will have parlous consequences. The analogy muddies and obfuscates.

By comparing an unwanted disaster to a conscious act of war, Obama is adding an improper moral dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf — a moral reckoning that will make it harder rather than easier to focus on the task of actually plugging the damn hole.

By likening the murder of 3,000 people and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good leadership.

But this isn’t all that new: the left have been trying to equate environmental issues to 9/11 and the (second) Gulf War since the mid-naughts. Nearly a century ago, Freud called it displacement; about the same time that James called it the Moral Equivalent of War. You can see both at work in the Time magazine cover from mid-2008 above.

Finally, James Pethokoukis watched last night speech and watched “Obama’s clean energy pivot [go] awry.”

But that can happen when your ideology requires you to pivot more often than Tony Hawk on a slalom course:

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Update: And speaking of the Moral Equivalent of War, Allahpundit’s patented “Exit Question” asks, via CBS: “Now that we’ve declared war on the spill or whatever, is BP an Allied country or an Axis power? (Exit answer: Grudging ally, same as Uncle Joe!)”

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Ever since the days of “Deep Throat,” liberal journalist Bob Woodward has had a slightly dubious reputation regarding the accuracy of his interviews. Add the late Stephen Ambrose, whose reputation was already shaky do to the plagiarism claims late his career (a problem shared with Doris Kearns-Goodwin), to the list as well. In the New Yorker, Richard Rayner writes:

Nonfiction writers who succumb to the temptations of phantom scholarship are a burgeoning breed these days, although most stop short of fabricating interviews with Presidents. But Stephen Ambrose, who, at the time of his death, in 2002, was America’s most famous and popular historian, appears to have done just that. Before publishing a string of No. 1 best-sellers, including “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,” Ambrose had made his name chronicling the life of Dwight D. Eisenhower. More than half of the thirty-plus books that Ambrose wrote, co-wrote, or edited concerned Eisenhower, and Ambrose spoke often, on C-SPAN or “Charlie Rose” or in print interviews, about how his life had been transformed by getting to know the former President and spending “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing him over a five-year period before Eisenhower died, in 1969.“I was a Civil War historian, and in 1964 I got a telephone call from General Eisenhower, who asked if I would be interested in writing his biography,” Ambrose said in a C-SPAN interview in 1994. In another interview, he added, “I thought I had flown to the moon.”

In Ambrose’s oft-repeated telling of the tale, Eisenhower contacted him after reading his biography of Henry Wager Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff. “I’d walk in to interview him, and his eyes would lock on mine and I would be there for three hours and they never left my eyes,” Ambrose told C-SPAN. “I was teaching at Johns Hopkins and going up two days a week to Gettysburg to work with him in his office.”

Last November, Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas, moderated a panel that celebrated Ambrose’s writings, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the completion of his two-volume Eisenhower biography, a work that is still regarded as the standard. Rives was looking for items to put on display at the event when he came across previously unpublished source materials that debunk the Boswellian tale that Ambrose loved to tell.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Terry Teachout. Of course, as Ellen Goodman noted in 2002, there are some industries where truth telling is less important than others; these are on both coasts.)

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Given the number of comments (300 and counting!) on Dr. Helen Smith’s article at PJM, “How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left’s Disrespect and Lack of Empathy?”, you’ve probably seen it already. If not, definitely read the whole thing™, as her spouse would say.

Smith’s article was inspired by a post by Jeff Goldstein, and found via Helen’s blog, Jeff responds to it, with a reminder that “Of course, to be fair, the ‘right’ exhibits its share of intolerance — which, like that from the left, generally manifests in a kind of ostentatious public sanctimony:”

The difference is, for all the worry we consistently hear about the “religious right” threatening to turn the US into a theocracy, very rarely will we see any actual agitation from mainstream conservatives to turn religious doctrine into state or federal law. Whereas the churches of environmentalism and government-mandated “charity” (which isn’t; charity tends not to be backed by fines and guns) have joined up, of late, to fortify the Church of Progressivism, which is very quickly becoming a de facto “official” church of the United States.

How proud the founders would have been…

The Church of Progressivism was a topic that Dennis Prager addressed recently:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend. This confusion is all the greater now that President Obama has humiliated the Israeli prime minister and created the tensest moment in U.S.-Israel relations in memory.

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

There is an explanation.

Leftism, though secular, must be understood as a religion (which is why I have begun capitalizing it). The Leftist value system’s hold on its adherents is as strong as the hold Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have on theirs. Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life, which inspired her passion for the health-care bill, is as strong as a pro-life Christian’s belief in the sanctity of the life of the unborn.

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Now, most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s. But this argument only reinforces my argument that Leftism has conquered the Christianity and the Judaism of Leftist Christians and Jews. If there is no difference between Leftist moral values and those of Judaism or Christianity, then Christianity is little more than Leftism with “Jesus” rhetoric and Judaism is Leftism with Jewish terms — such as “Tikkun Olam” (“repairing the world”) and “Prophetic values.”

But if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along? And, if Judaism is essentially a set of Left-wing values, does that mean that the Torah and the Talmud are Leftist documents? Or are the two pillars of Judaism generally wrong?

More questions:

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

Why are so few pro-life Catholics and Protestants on the Left? Do they not care about the poor?

Of course, that is what people on the Left believe. As the former head of the Democratic party, Howard Dean, said, “In contradistinction to the Republicans, we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

They believe such things despite the fact that traditional Protestants and Catholics have created more institutions to take care of the sick and needy than probably any other group in the world, and despite the fact that religious Americans give more charity and volunteer more time than secular Americans do.

And why have the great majority of Orthodox Jews rejected the Left? For Jews on the Left, the explanation is simple: Orthodox Jews have primitive beliefs and, therefore, primitive values.

For the Leftist, all opposition to the Left, secular or religious, is primitive and usually worse (Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Xenophobic, Ignorant, Bigoted, Intolerant, Mean-Spirited, etc.). So this doesn’t tell us much. What might tell us much? This: With a handful of exceptions, Orthodox Jews know Judaism far better than non-Orthodox Jews do. Given how few of them are Leftist, this would suggest that Judaism and Leftism are indeed in conflict.

But that doesn’t matter to most Jews on the Left, because to be a good person (and, to those for whom it matters, to be a good Jew), one need not know Judaism, let alone follow Judaism. One needs only to feel what is right (Leftism is overwhelmingly based on feeling); and, when in doubt, one can determine what is right from the New York Times, not from sacred Jewish texts.

Related: Ed Koch discovers who the rubes were.

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Steven Crowder’s great video from late last year vividly illustrated Detroit’s wretched conditions after being ravaged by a half-century of continuous liberal economic “stimulus.” At the New Ledger today, Ben Domenech writes that it’s necessary to nuke the city in order to save it. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of the rest of the nation’s fate in the years to come, after the Obama administration’s domestic war is concluded:

In March of last year, I posed the admittedly radical question: is there anything worth saving in Detroit? Wouldn’t the city where sirens never sleep be better off if we just burned it to the ground and started afresh? Dubbing it “urban policy chemo,” I got some significant pushback from some corners of the internet.

The best help to Michigan’s economic woes might come from razing much of the Motor City… This is beyond broken windows theories — we’re talking about broken houses, buildings, skyscrapers; an entire broken community, economy and polity.

Now, the Mayor of Detroit himself has come around to my view — and the views of professional urban policy experts. The city, facing $300 million in deficits and an unemployment rate approaching 50%, can no longer afford to patrol the husks of the city. His plan: bulldoze roughly a quarter of the buildings.

“Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who is among the urban experts watching the experiment with interest. “There is now a realization that past glories are never going to be recaptured. Some people probably don’t accept that, but that is the reality.”

I have to applaud Mayor Dave Bing, son of Northeast Washington, for making this decision, which has to cost some significant political capital and destroyed any illusions about an easy path to revitalization. But the point is, spending less than $30 million in federal funds to tear things down and start afresh is the only way to have any hope of a comeback. One-third of Detroit’s lots are vacant anyway.

Those can bombed back into the agrarian age.

Related: Monica Conyers, former Detroit councilwoman, viral video star and wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) gets 37 months for bribery. No word yet if Rep. Conyers will order his wife to undergo self-impeachment.

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And now for news of fresh disaster, via Kate of Small Dead Animals:

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose:

• BBC – California ‘protects’ Apollo 11 landing site on Moon.

• Mercury News – California controller: State will run out of cash before April.

• Bonus link.

Fortunately, all of California’s fiscal woes may soon be solved in fell swoop by this novel revenue generating plan.

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We choose to fight global warming. Err, climate change. We choose to fight global warming — err, climate change in this decade and do the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are easy, because that goal will serve to protect our bureaucracy without having to actually accomplish anything, because that lack of challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to waste plenty of time on, to protect our phony-baloney jobs.

Actually going back to the moon? Ehh, not so much.

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