Protect the Queen!

Many years ago, someone published some racially insensitive commentary under Dr. Ron Paul's name while he was out defending the Constitution. Ever since then, the Democrats, the RNC, the media, ZOG and the rest of the usual suspects have been using a desperate "guilt by association" strategy to link Dr. Paul with the writings published for years beneath his name and above his signature.

Unfortunately for the statists, this slander is doomed to fail because no hard evidence supports it. Where's your 48 kHz ADAT recording of Dr. Paul expressing solidarity with the KKK? Where's your hi-def video of him burning a cross on a black person's lawn in June of 1980? Where are his white-power tattoos? On which Skrewdriver album does he sing backing vocals? Where's his tweet that says "I hate darkies and I don't care who knows it"?

Face it: In the absence of compelling evidence, all you Paul-haters have is a bunch of racially charged rants published under his name for his direct financial and political benefit.

Which amounts to less than nothing, because Ron Paul is no racist, as evidenced by the fact that he can't be a racist because he isn't one, period. Ron Paul's supporters aren't racists either. When they found themselves receiving newsletters containing these arguably offensive comments, they immediately complained that someone was writing potentially horrible things under Dr. Paul's name. And as we all remember, Dr. Paul promptly reassured his subscribers by apologizing publicly for the articles and severing all ties with the person or people he paid to write them. Most important of all, he conceded that as the captain of his soul and the master of his fate, the whole dreadful episode was nobody's fault but his.

And I'm sure we all recall how shocked Dr. Paul was when he started getting letters and phone calls from subscribers saying things like "thanks for giving us God's honest truth about the nigras!" Once again, he identified the cause of this misconception, took Full Personal Responsibility™ for it, and announced that he'd prefer to do without the support of people who were praising him for hateful views that he doesn't actually hold.

To the limited extent that none of this actually happened, it's possibly because not only did Ron Paul not not not write the newsletters, but he also didn't mail them. Why? Because no one subscribed to them. Why not? Because subscription lists are a form of collectivism and the USPS is an outpost of Soviet Russia, where the mail checks you. To imply that Dr. Paul would use The Socialized Mail despite his steadfast adherence to the consistent principle of principled consistency is utterly beyond the pale, even for his reptile detractors. Furthermore, it's quite possible that when his subscribers received the newsletters they left them sealed on purpose. They probably said, "To open this newsletter and read it would be to subject Dr. Paul to an interrogation of sorts. It runs the risk of vandalizing the private property of his thought, without giving him the opportunity to defend it against my accidental misapprehensions or — God forbid! — my inadequate purity of intent."

That's what I'd do, anyway. And I don't flatter myself that I'm unique in that regard. If I'm right, as we have reason to believe, then not only did Dr. Paul not write the newsletters but his supporters didn't read them and the whole thing's a teapot in a tempest.

This is not to suggest that Ron Paul's views are necessarily in perfect lockstep with those of the multiculturalist elite, especially as regards homos. But consider this: He's a product of an earlier era and a different culture. Surely you don't expect the poor man to transcend these early formative experiences through the self-interested exercise of Willpower and Rationality? He can't help how he was raised! Cut him some slack, for Christ's sake.

And remember, a vote for Paul is a vote for peace in our time. There's no other unelectable third-party candidate you can say that about, anywhere. And even if there were, that person probably has some baggage too. After all, nobody's perfect!

And now, let us never speak of this again.

UPDATE I: I was perfectly well aware when I put the careful thought and ran the grave personal risk into and of compiling this unexceptionable summary of facts that only moral pygmies could deny, that the aforementioned moral pygmies would not only deny them, but also put their inquisitorial zeal on display by attempting to torture my words into revealing some consequence, some omission or some agenda that I could then be said somehow to have overlooked or attempted to obscure. These self-appointed Witchfinders General believe that by literally plunging their needles into my arguments, they will find some rhetorical devil's mark that will excuse them from the sad duty of facing the uncomfortable facts that shroud them in guilt. Regardless, ipso facto and notwithstanding, I will continue to speak the truth and literally let the chips fall where they may.

UPDATE II: Given their Manichean zeal to act as Lord Inquisitors against principled voices of dissent -- no matter how calm, rational or impossible for a good-hearted person to disagree with -- one can easily imagine the sort of Kristallnacht my bland statements of demonstrable fact are even now driving the Enemy to plan and launch. This robotic devotion of literally brainless shills to falsehood and viciousness not merely as political tactics, but as supreme ends in themselves, is the litmus test that distinguishes the Obama era's ever-dwindling authentic humanity from hyperpartisan personality cultists. Suffice it to say that the binary thinking to which these apologists for evil are prone typifies everything that any reasonable person must concede is wrong with people like that.

UPDATE III: It pains me to imagine the lengths some people will undoubtedly go to twist my remarks here into something other than what I have already repeatedly stated that I intend them to be; viz., an honest assessment of a situation that others have not only failed to examine in any depth — for reasons we hardly need to guess at — but also to notice at a time when noticing them was in fact a moral obligation of citizenship, properly so called. Has it really come to this? Q.E.D.

UPDATE IV: What can one even begin to say when the putatively highest soi-disant "principles" of one's opponents are manifestly the mere delusions of situational ethicists who literally wallow in the entrails of the foreign babies they murdered by proxy for the greater glory of the assassins who slaughtered these innocents in their name? All one can hope is that if these cultist shills can't bring themselves to agree with me when circumstances ineluctably demand it, they can at least be honest about their motivations. They can say, "I don't care who the President hunts down and kills in this Brave New World of foreign adventurism; it's all worth it because some coal plant got closed down in Kentucky, even if that's probably just a prelude to invading Wales." Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

UPDATE V: I consider this matter closed. Those who wish to beat this dead horse are welcome to chase their tails in perpetuity, or until their batteries run down.

The Next President of the United States

Roy Edroso recently made an offhand remark to the effect that if you want consistently conservative governance, a robot is your only man.

He's got a point. The problem is, robots come from Old Europe; they come from the pit of Hell. And while they may be a bit more gemütlich than Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann, they require expensive maintenance and they're not as adept with stairs. It's bad enough that Obama bows to foreign dignitaries; the last thing we need is a president whose clockwork runs down in the middle of singing "Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille" to Hu Jintao.

The Commodore PET is a safer choice. It's adorably retro, hearkening us back to that simpler, more innocent time before all of us hated everything. It was made down home in Pennsylvania by square-eyed, steely-jawed men, so you know Peggy Noonan's gonna get on board. You can have a beer with it, or at least near it. It can repeat the numerals "9-9-9" with all the hebephrenic fixity of Herman Cain and twice the conviction. It blows Rick Perry out of the water with a whopping 8K of RAM. You can easily store replacement units at Mount Weather. And its dependency on the extraction industries is no mere metaphor; if you want the President to boot up in time for World War III, drill baby drill!

And of course, it's ideologically consistent. Bedrock principles in, bedrock principles out:

10 PRINT "FUCK YOU, HIPPIES! TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

The only downside is, when it inevitably turns on humanity, no one will notice.

A Dangerous World

Given the number and scale of the disasters underway in this nightmare country, I assumed that no further outrage could coax this mopey z-list blogger out of drunken semi-retirement.

But I had not reckoned with Joe Fucking Lieberman:

LIEBERMAN: I want to indicate today to my colleagues that Senator Coburn and I are working again on a bipartisan proposal to secure Social Security over the long term, we hope to have that done in time. To also forward to the special committee for their consideration. So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.

So to avoid "a day of horror like no other," we must commit ourselves to days of horror like every other...days on which hundreds of Americans find out that they can't protect "entitlements" like food, shelter and medicine while they're fighting disease or disability. In doing so, we'll torture and kill more Americans than Osama bin Laden managed in his wettest dreams. But as long as the networks don't show these commonplace deaths in a slow-motion loop at dinner time, I suppose we can occupy our minds with happier thoughts...like the relative risk of getting beheaded by some Palestinian kid, versus a Mexican drug lord.

You know what my definition of a dangerous world is? It's a world where people routinely lose their homes because they get sick. It's a world where you wind up eating cat food so that the guy who shipped your job overseas can get a tax cut for supporting the politicians who slashed your benefits. It's a world where we starve children so that we can afford to blast foreign wedding guests into bloody shreds, while patting ourselves on the back for being "exceptional" (and therefore not subject to the pretty moral axioms we impose on other countries at gunpoint). It's a world in which a sociopathic cipher like Joe Lieberman can strut around in the borrowed plumes of theological gravitas, to polite applause from his slack-jawed media courtiers. It's a world, above all, in which a cowardly, brutal, willfully stupid, morally and spiritually bankrupt country like the United States can hold up its grotesque anti-values and its hopelessly atomized version of "freedom" as things worthy of envy, let alone emulation.

It'd be terrible if the Islamic extremists took over, wouldn't it? Granted, they might have some cultural or religious prohibition against letting the elderly die in the gutter, or some limits on what they'd be willing to do for money, but think of the downside: The state oppression of gays and women. Bans on abortion and birth control. A theocratic attack on education and science. Imperious demands for public prayer. Harebrained conspiracies presented to schoolchildren as fact. A zero-sum approach to difference that promotes endless strife between races and genders. A violent hypersensitivity to real and imagined insults. And the unedifying daily spectacle of smug, vicious, power-hungry thugs trying to pass themselves off as God's right-hand men. Let's all pray it can't happen here!

I know it won't mean much, ultimately, but it ought to be said that our political and economic betters, whose "success" is due largely to the fact that conscience rarely tells them anything they don't want to hear, are the actual dregs of society, and a burden this country doesn't need and can't afford. To call them "vultures" would imply a utility in the scheme of things -- a grace and a purpose -- that they don't actually have. They're parasitic encumbrances, fifth wheels and exorbitant sponges. They're welfare cheats in the only morally meaningful sense of the term: people who rob the poor and the helpless of comfort and dignity. They are to politics, culture, religion, science and ethics what thumbtacks are to nutrition.

Among the poor, you'll routinely find people who will resist the urge to steal small change out of a blind beggar's pencil cup, despite living under stresses that are as unimaginable as honor to people like Holy Joe Lieberman. For our Galtian Overlords, however, the primary objection to stealing a blind man's loose change is that it doesn't pay enough to justify the millisecond drudgery of emptying his cup into your pocket. Fortunately, economies of scale are available to our best and brightest; with one stroke of a solid-gold pen, it's possible to rob thousands of blind people (and sick people, and children with autism, and teachers, and firefighters) at once. Yes we can!

Having presided for years over this shell game, these chattering husks are insisting yet again that we take a "realistic" look at programs like Social Security. These programs are threatened, y'see. And who'd be in a better position to know this than the people who've been piling sticks of dynamite in the vault?

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Most of us will never find ourselves on the business end of an Islamic radical. Many of us, however, will struggle to stay housed and fed if we're too old to work, or we fall seriously ill. "National defense" that focuses on cartoon figures of ethnic menace, as opposed to the prosaic and preventable disasters that cause most of the actual suffering and death in this country, is a cruel joke, and I suspect its extremely dark humor is not entirely lost on heartless neo-feudalist chatterboxes like Lieberman and Coburn.

I suppose I should be grateful that as Anders Breivik recently noted, socialists are on the brink of world domination. Otherwise, things would be looking much worse.

The Spill So Far

Jonah Goldberg objects to claims that the Deepwater Horizon disaster is "Obama's Katrina," on the grounds that Katrina wasn't that big a deal, and this spill probably won't be that big a deal either, when you look at it from the Historical Perspective (i.e., the point at which it stops being news and we all go back to worrying about celebrity sexaholism).

The only similarity, really, is that the media are getting people all upset for no good reason, just like they did back then.

Many outlets reported that rape gangs were rampant in New Orleans, that snipers were keeping the feds at bay, that the Superdome was littered with rotting bodies, that poor black people were left to die in disproportionate numbers. None of that was true....

Indeed. Poor black people were left to die in proportionate numbers, which is a whole different thing. As for the Superdome, you definitely can't say it was "littered with rotting bodies," because only six people died and their bodies weren't in the building long enough to rot. Although I haven't actually checked the statistics, I have a hunch that more Americans die in the bathtub every single day. But would any of us seriously argue that bathing should be outlawed? Besides hippies, I mean? Of course not.

Goldberg, you will recall, was the funny fellow who advised hurricane refugees in the Superdome to "hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents." (I hasten to add that he wouldn't approve of calling them "refugees," because to do so would be to "sanctify them" with "victim status"; we need to save our sorrow and pity for people who deserve it, like Augusto Pinochet.)

Bygones, though. We were all a little upset back then, thanks to the media, and we all said things we didn't mean, or meant things we didn't say, or something. Now we have an oil slick to worry about, so it's time to stop worrying and put things in perspective. The spill is pretty big, area-wise. But who knows how deep it is, depth-wise? Suppose it's only a couple of...uh....micrometers thick and the whole thing would fit in a swimming pool or two?

Estimates of how much oil has been spilled have varied wildly, in part because satellite imaging is great at capturing the "sheen" from a spill but not so good at measuring its thickness. Even if the higher estimates turn out to be true, the spill so far is relatively minor in size compared with others in history.

Yes, even if the spill continues to get bigger, it's relatively minor so far. Hell, the Valdez spill wasn't that dramatic either, compared to lots of other disastrous oil spills. Let's keep things in perspective! Saddam Hussein dumped anywhere from 2 to 500 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf (views differ!), and all it did was kill a bunch of animals and plants and affect the regional economy in ways that are difficult to quantify and therefore irrelevant.

The point is, the sky didn't fall. And isn't that what really matters? Disasters are inevitable, but the future will remain bright so long as we refuse to learn from them.

Academic Ghettoes

Robert Maranto is worried, and here's why:

Academia's ideological homogeneity harms education by limiting the views students are exposed to.

Don't laugh! It's a serious problem. If this stranglehold is not broken, how will students develop an unexamined faith in free markets and American exceptionalism? What other authority figures will defend the orthodox viewpoint on God, gays and guns? Where else will they hear the truth about welfare Cadillacs, African slave traders, leprosy among immigrants and the Clinton Body Count? Unless America's colleges clear a conceptual space for the subaltern micronarratives of the corporatist right, the day may come when America forgets that taxes are too high.

One of the ways academia marginalizes conservatives is by providing them with specialized facilities in which to conduct their groundbreaking research into the totally awe-inspiring awesomeness of Freedom.

My friend Steve Balch wants university alumni to push for the establishment of centers studying free institutions and free markets, as already operate at Duke, Brown, Princeton, Villanova, and elsewhere. I fear that these will become academic ghettoes.

Yes, ghettoes! What else would you call it when a few brave defenders of the Free Market are huddled together in a prestigious center funded by grants from major corporations, voiceless save for their easy access to op-ed pages, Sunday news shows and the White House? It's like Watts, if it had been full of angry white guys with money. Or Greenwich Village before Stonewall, only with more closet cases.

Confining conservatives to "centers" and "thinktanks" is like saying they don't deserve to be in charge of everything, everywhere, in perpetuity. The time has come for these huddled masses to speak truth to power, according to the rules laid down by Saul Alinsky (who is the movement's new guiding light, as one can tell from the fact that its members complain about him as obsessively as they once complained about "postmodern relativism").

As the radical Saul Alinsky wrote, the powerless can discomfort the powerful by pointing out when the high and mighty fall short of their professed ideals.

In practice, this involves asking clever questions like "if you libtards are so goddamn tolerant, why don't you tolerate homophobia?" No one has ever tried this tactic before, so it's no wonder Maranto is giddy with the thrill of discovery.

If universities are open-minded, why do they never sponsor debates?

Beats me. I'm guessing it has something to do with ACORN.

If "social justice" theorists like Jonathan Kozol are really in it for the children, why don't they donate their $20,000 speaking fees to scholarships?

It's a good question, so long as one assumes that Kozol never does this, or anything like it (Maranto's odd focus on "scholarships" makes me a bit suspicious, however). Whether Kozol actually gets $20,000 for speaking is another good question. If this is Maranto's idea of academic argument, it's not surprising that he's been "denied a job or two."

What exactly is a non-researcher like William Ayers doing on the governing board of the American Educational Research Association?

Well, let's see. AERA is committed to "advancing educational research," which is not necessarily the same thing as conducting it. And the AERA site says that "the broad range of disciplines represented by the membership includes education, psychology, statistics, sociology, history, economics, philosophy, anthropology, and political science." And Ayers' UoI page claims that his interests include "narrative and interpretive research."

Therefore, the goal here is clearly to impose Islamo-Socialism on Our Innocent Children, given the incontrovertible fact that OMG BILL AYERS!!!11

Anyway, if hard-right activists can somehow find it within themselves to ask tough, probing questions like these, people will finally start listening to them! Everything must change, yet again, so that everything can remain the same.

The Greater Scheme of Things

NRO's Jim Manzi has dared to give aid and comfort to the Warming Cult (and not for the first time, either). Since modern conservatarianism has pretty much dispensed with all emotions but anger and self-pity, Manzi's remarks have naturally been met with a heapin' helpin' of both.

Andy McCarthy has written a response to Manzi, and it's nothing if not illuminating. Loyalty seems to be the main issue: The denialists may be fools, but they're our fools. If you hold them to the same standards you apply to the Left, you lose. And if you lose, you're nobody and nothing.

Then there's the issue of AGW, and whether it's true even though it has no right to be.

As for your dilation on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), I don’t write much about the subject. I haven't taken the time to study it, as you have. But I have read enough to roll my eyes at most of the public debate.

Dude, I can totally relate. I don't know much about accretion-powered pulsars. But I once heard this goddamn egghead say something about 'em, and it wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it, with that smug look people like him get when they say stuff like that to people like me. If I'd gone to some Brainiac School and gotten into this guy's field I probably would've proved him wrong by now. And yet he's lecturing me on accretion-powered pulsars? Fuck that noise. I know plenty about gravity. Hell, I once heaved a 63-2 in the junior college decathlon. I'd like to see Faggy McPulsarson try that.

Anyhow, Manzi's a jerk not just for "dilating" on the subject of his own essay, but also for being comparatively well-informed about it. McCarthy trusts his gut, like all honest men, and his gut informs him that AGW ain't strictly on the level.

From the premise that AGW is undeniable, the alarmist side leaps to the extravagant conclusion that we are therefore capable of, and obliged to, do something meaningful about it.

To put it another way: How can you say that I'm not engaging with the alarmists' arguments, when I've just referred to them as "alarmists"?

The only appropriate response to AGW is to drop "an atom bomb of derision" on anyone who suggests that it could very well be a serious problem. This is so self-evident to McCarthy that one can almost empathize with his pain at having to explain it to a colleague.

Imagine that you've spent years working shoulder to shoulder with a comrade at the agricultural collective, and one fine day he claims that Stalin didn't actually invent the tractor. He's wrong, he's a liar, he's betrayed the Revolution...and yet, you can't help weeping, even as you denounce him to the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. For there was a time when you loved him as a brother.

Next, McCarthy describes the AGW debate in terms so simple that even he can understand them. Alarmists say that over time, lots of little things can add up to big things. Skeptics acknowledge this provisionally, while pointing out that they don't care because "denying it makes sense in the greater scheme of things."

And these are the thanks they get:

[T]he alarmists deride the skeptics over their denial as if they were denying something as basic and incontestable as that two plus two equals four.

In reality, they're simply denying that it matters whether 0.0002 and 0.0002 equals 0.0004. That's a whole different thing, as you can tell from all those zeroes.

[T]he skeptics continue denying — even if they are wrong in absolute terms — because they fear alarmists have set the table in such a way that to concede the premise is to concede the draconian remedies alarmists have in mind.

Whether they're absolutely wrong or absolutely right, you have to admit that what they say makes a lot of sense. And isn't that what matters most, when you stop to think about it without thinking about it too much?

I would say that, given our finite capabilities and the shortness of life, AGW may not be a problem at all, and, if it is a problem, it is not urgent enough to obsess over.

McCarthy himself concedes that he doesn't believe this because he's "taken time to study" the science. He believes it because it's the proper thing to believe, even — or especially — if it's "wrong in absolute terms." That, amazingly, is his response to Manzi's claim that people on the Right have been displaying an "unwillingness to confront the strongest evidence or arguments contrary to [their] own beliefs."

Perhaps because he senses some problem with this line of reasoning, McCarthy quickly retreats to the epistemological bedrock of Islamofascism: There's no point worrying about the climate when we're in "a global war against jihadists whose mass-murder attacks — and their catastrophic costs — are impossible to predict."

Apparently, uncertainty is sometimes a threat, rather than a comfort.

Please don't conclude from all this that McCarthy is an ineducable zealot. As it happens, he can imagine — just barely — a situation in which it would be quite reasonable to take action on AGW. For instance, suppose Modern Science were able to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that:

1. There's a real problem


2. It's more dangerous, at this very moment, than Islamic Terror™


3. It can be solved without doing things of which McCarthy disapproves, like regulating industry
   


4. Scientists aren't just making the whole thing up in order to hasten the Dictatorship of the Proletariat


5. No relevant scientist has any conceivable financial interest in the outcome of the debate
   

In that case, McCarthy would immediately stop being a skeptic, as long as no other excuses for skepticism had come up in the meantime (e.g., news that a leading climatologist had rented a DVD of Avatar, or dined on arugula).

Please note that this is not evidence of bias: he applies exactly the same standards to skeptical scientists like Richard Lindzen (except for #5, which only applies to anti-capitalist greedheads like Al Gore, natch).

That's fair if anything is, so let's have no more of this alarmist talk about "epistemic closure." After all, it may never happen!

Utopian Dreams

Robert H. Nelson puts on his thinkin' cap, adjusts the chin-straps, spins the little propeller on top, and delivers himself of the opinion that environmentalism is a Religion Without God.

Where does that leave conventionally religious people who happen to be environmentalists (or some reasonable facsimile thereof)? Under the rug, where they belong! Earth Day is celebrated, Nelson claims, by more than a billion people in 190 countries. Presumably, some of them see their environmental interests as compatible with some conventional religious viewpoint, while others are committed atheists who simply think it's stupid to mow down forests to make disposable chopsticks.

But so what? Let's just go ahead and treat 'em all as irrational cultists who are responding to the ontotheological crisis of [blah blah blah] with a postmodern neo-primitive embrace of [yadda yadda yadda fap fap fap].

Environmentalists see humans engaged in acts of vast hubris, remaking the future ecosystems of the Earth. By playing “God” with the Earth, humans seek to become as God themselves.

The Bible’s book of Deuteronomy reveals dire consequences for those who try to “play God.” We learn that God will strike down sinners who “worship other gods,” causing them to suffer “infections, plague and war. He will blight your crops, covering them with mildew. All these devastations shall pursue you until you perish.”

It is no mere coincidence that contemporary environmentalism prophesies virtually the same set of calamities resulting from the warming of the earth — rising seas, famine, drought, pestilence, hurricanes and other natural disasters.

I suppose it isn't a coincidence, inasmuch as we still have crops and oceans and diseases and weather, just like folks did back in the Bible Days. But the thing is, the fact that the Bible addresses human concerns does not make all latter-day expressions of those concerns Biblical. I could just as easily claim that seismic building codes prophesy "virtually the same calamities" that befell the Three Little Pigs, and interpret them as a veiled belief in the Big Bad Wolf.

If you think that's a stretch, too fucking bad. You can't argue with analogy!

Thus the Endangered Species Act is the new Noah’s Ark; genuinely wild places are the new cathedrals to find spiritual inspiration; Earth Day is the new Easter.

This is due to the pernicious worldwide influence of Calvinism, as anyone can tell from the fact that Nelson says so, duh.

While the language is now different, environmentalists today, no less than the Calvinists of old, see “excessive” consumption — the constant demand for bigger and better, more and more — as a threat to the Earth’s future.

Hail the new puritan! What is Portland, Oregon but a new Geneva, and Randal O'Toole its Servetus? If you doubt this, consider the fact that Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion says God “revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe." Game, set, and match, ya goddamn treehugging reformist supralapsarians!

Just to make matters worse, these Neo-Calvinist Gaiabots present their religious delusions as fact, and insist that they be allowed to influence public policy, which is not how we do things in America. And besides:

Success in stirring powerful religious feelings about the environment does not automatically lead to wise and effective policies.

Which is a shame, because the environment does matter, to an extent: no one wants to see the Grand Canyon filled with garbage unless it's absolutely necessary. Where environmentalists err, as always, is in trying to force us all to eat acorn mash by candlelight in cruelty-free yurts.

When environmental religion seeks a return to an earlier primitive and natural existence, it is embracing utopian dreams that easily can pose a danger to man and earth alike.

So, to recap: Earth Day = religion without God = Calvinism = a primitivist utopia = no more toilet paper, electricity, or dental anesthesia. And don't say it'll never happen, 'cause what if it did?

Now let us purge our minds of these ancient superstitions, and speak calmly of money.

Ideological Formations

John J. Miller visits Luray Caverns with his family, and finds that its bizarre formations remind him of FREEDOM.

I haven't visited enough caves to say how this one compares to others, but it did make this top-ten list and I recommend it highly. It's also a private business that sells tickets and souvenirs, not a public park that consumes taxpayer dollars. Luray Caverns may not be a model for balancing tourism and conservation at every natural wonder in the country, but it's probably a better one than most people realize. Americans can perform a lot of wonders on their own.

His enthusiasm is understandable. I mean, they actually play Luray's stalactites with mallets! That's a wonderful example of the creative solutions you get when you unleash the power of the Free Market.

I'm assuming Miller has never been to Carlsbad Caverns, where they also sell tickets and souvenirs (just like most other national parks). As for consuming taxpayer dollars, that's a complex subject...but for whatever it's worth, a recent study claims that while Carlsbad Caverns has an annual budget of about $6 million, "the total impact of the park is almost 1,000 jobs and $17 million in income in the county."

That doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me, even if the caverns do lack spectral mood lighting, pipe organs, and an animatronic figure of Ronald Reagan welcoming visitors to the snack bar.

One can only hope that despite Miller's excruciating political correctness, his family managed to enjoy the cave for its own sake. My parents had their faults, God knows, but at least they didn't reduce the scenic wonders we visited to economic case studies.

Command and Control

This morning, I had the odd experience of agreeing with Larry Elder for upwards of three seconds, thanks to the first line of his latest column:

The most disturbing part of the ObamaCare debate is not about where Republicans and Democrats disagree, but where they agree.

I'd been pondering a post on the very same topic, so imagine my chagrin when I found that Elder had beaten me to it.

After reading a little further, though, it became clear that Elder and I don't quite see eye to eye.

Take this issue of those with pre-existing illnesses. Many Republicans actually support government action to prevent insurance companies from refusing to insure them.

"Many"? If you say so.

What should these apostates be doing instead? Insisting that "free market competition" will solve every problem worth solving, natch. 'Cause when you're wondering how to provide affordable health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions, the logical solution is to cling tighter than ever to the very ideology that forbids it. And if that doesn't pan out for some reason, there's always charity, to say nothing of prisons and workhouses and a tough but fair cleansing of the gene pool.

Elder knows all this as well as he knows anything, so it's no wonder he recoils from the grudging concessions a few Republicans have made to our common humanity as though he's being sprinkled with Holy Water.

On the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by his father, Bush bragged about the law's importance and effectiveness. That such an assault on private employers engenders praise says much about the GOP's acceptance of federal government's command and control.

Yes, an assault! What else would you call it when the Nanny State won't let you discriminate against some useless fucking cripple in favor of a hot chick with plenty o' thems 'n' those? That able-bodied citizens should find themselves squirming in the cold prosthetic fist of "Americans with Disabilities" is a crime not just against Teh Constitution -- which clearly prohibits stuff like this, somewhere or other -- but also against Nature itself. Besides, if Big Government rewards this sort of carelessness with gainful employment, what's to stop cynical opportunists from sawing off their own feet, in order to outmaneuver honest people who demand no special privileges other than those bestowed upon them by fate?

You probably remember being driven stark raving mad, over the last few months, by the Right's mandrake shrieking about death panels and socialism and the deficit and Obama's secret plan to boil Grandma down into Patchouli-scented soap. Curiously, Elder seems to have missed all that, perhaps because he was down in his bone-strewn subterranean lair, torturing puppies with an oxy-acetylene torch.

Are Republicans sounding the alarm about government's present intrusion in health care and its counterproductive effect on quality, affordability and accessibility? Government, they should argue and persuade, grows at the expense of the productive.

Interesting idea. I wonder if they'll take his advice?

In summation:

A collectivist, whether an active or passive one, is still a collectivist.

The most disturbing part of the debate is not where Republicans and Democrats disagree, but where they agree.

Immense Complexity

A new op-ed by Jeff Jacoby illustrates the rapid evolution of denialist lies. Not long ago, you'll recall, the IPCC corrected a forecast for glacial melting in the Himalayas. The Wall Street Journal noted the error, reassured us that the Himalayan glaciers are unlikely to disappear "anytime soon," and implied that the forecast was wrong primarily because it was too depressing. (The only alarming predictions that have any hope of being correct are those having to do with terrorism, socialism, and homosexuality.)

Jacoby takes the next logical step:

The case for global-warming alarmism is melting faster than those mythical disappearing Himalayan glaciers, but Al Gore isn’t backing down.

Initially, they were disappearing more slowly than the IPCC said, bwahahaha. Now, it seems that they're not disappearing at all. I wonder how long it'll be 'til we hear that the Himalayas never actually had any glaciers?

The rest of the column is mere boilerplate: Algore is a fat alarmist liar who has made huge investments in alarmist technologies like solar power and therefore can't be trusted, so let's all listen to Jeff Jacoby instead.

We may as well look at the highlights anyhow. After all, Jacoby's not the only one with space to fill.

1. If AGW is real, how come I can engage in arch semantic quibbling over the meaning of the word "pollutant"?


2. If we reduce CO2 emissions, there'll be no more trees for you filthy hippies to hug!


3. Thanks to CO2, the Chinese have enough money to buy US debt.


4. Climategate! Climategate Climategate Climategate! Climategate Climategate Climategate Climategate Climategate! (PS: The significance of Climategate is that no one has doublechecked the evidence for AGW and if they ever do they'll find out it's all lies! OMG CLIMATEGATE!!!)


5. The public feels that climate science is somewhat less credible than it used to be. Who, I ask you, would be so undemocratic as to gainsay them?
   


6. We all remember how the Goracle said it would never snow again and each year would be hotter than the last, everywhere on earth, unless we gave him all our money and worshiped him as a god. But now that it's snowing, he suddenly changes his story!


7. AGW is a religion because the scientific evidence for it vanishes if you ignore it or don't understand it, just like the scientific evidence for God.


8. Glaciers are robust, just like public ignorance.

Almost exactly a year ago, by the way, Jacoby was counseling sober humility in the face of "the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate." Now, apparently, all the data are in and we can conclude that Algore's Warming Theory is a hoax to rival Piltdown Man, just as we always suspected. Hooray for scientific progress!

(Illustration: "The cumulative specific mass balance curves are shown for the mean of all glaciers and 30 ‘reference’ glaciers with (almost) continuous series since 1976. Source: Data from WGMS.")

Increased Runoff

When you're conducting a massive, semiconscious experiment with the climate of the only planet you have, it's important to remember that things may possibly turn out well, for some people.

Certain "experts" argue that we're running a terrible risk, but that's only because they've focused ghoulishly on the worst-case scenario. Which tells you all you need to know about their priorities: Who but an enemy of capitalism would weigh the costs of a devastated world against the benefits of a very slightly improved one, and come down on the side of realism and responsibility?

With these concerns firmly in mind, Anne Jolis of the WSJ does something the Warmists never do. She looks at the science:

According to a 2004 paper [link added, since Jolis couldn't be bothered] by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world's total number of people living in "water-stressed watersheds"...even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased "water stress" by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that "water stress" could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages — but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.

According to Jolis, the IPPC emphasizes the negative scenario and "largely ignores the greater number likely to see more water courtesy of climate change."

The problem is, you can't simply balance drought here with extra rainfall there, as though they were debits and credits in some cosmic ledger. What matters is where and when droughts and rainfall and snowmelt occur, and the overall effect on ecosystems as well as population and infrastructure. As a simplistic example, more runoff (and perhaps flooding) in Turkey isn't necessarily going to make up for drought, forest loss, and wildfires in the Amazon. As Arnell himself explains:

People living in these watersheds have an apparent decrease in water resources stress, but in practice the extra water may not alleviate water stress because it may occur largely during increased flood flows.

Jolis gets her information from Indur Goklany, a cornucopian dingbat whom she claims was formerly "with the U.S. Department of the Interior" (even though his career with thinktanks like Cato and the Heartland Institute should be far more impressive in her circles). Needless to say, Goklany is neither a climatologist nor a hydrologist. But then, neither is Al Gore, so it all evens out.

Since Arnell's work provides the evidence Jolis requires in order to trash the IPCC, you might think she'd treat him with a bit of deference. But it turns out that he's part of the problem:

Mr. Arnell, who helped author the summary and some sections in the full report, told your correspondent he is "happy" with the way his work was represented. He said one reason for the omissions was "space"....The other reason Mr. Arnell cited — which he emphasized in his 2004 paper — is that increased and decreased water stress are asymmetrical indicators, and comparing them is "misleading."

"Having a bit more [water] is not as good as having a bit less is bad," Mr. Arnell explained....

Jolis complains that "Mr. Arnell's 22-page paper is rife with caveats and uncertainties," but this doesn't prevent it from being a sturdy club with which to beat the IPCC. After all, "uncertainties" in climate science always support the status quo, even when authors emphasize (as Arnell does) that they're probably understating the problems we face.

What's really sad is that some of the uncertainties in predicting water stress depend on our own willingness to mitigate or prepare for warming, which in turn depends on the extent to which know-nothings like Jolis are allowed to influence the debate.

As a working scientist, Arnell has more recent papers and more current statements on this issue, and they underscore the fact that there really isn't a "bright side" here. But who cares? All that matters is that the IPCC has taken some hits lately, and lots more mud needs to be thrown as quickly as possible. Since Goklany had a readymade complaint from several years ago, which could be recirculated with a minimum of effort, Jolis is dutifully trotting it out.

If you claim that a warmer world will be better world, readers might be tempted to leave all their lights on 'round the clock, regardless of personal expense, in hopes of making their own small contribution to human happiness. That's a slippery slope indeed, and so Jolis is careful to stress that what's needed here is not activism but complacency:

The point here is not to suggest that pollution and any resulting warming will deliver the Third World from its troubles, or that emitting ever-more carbon dioxide should be pursued as humanitarian policy. Clearly any benefits of global warming are extremely speculative — but then so are the costs.

Lovely, isn't it? When Arnell projects water decreases in Europe and North America and China, it's "extremely speculative" and therefore not worth worrying about. Meanwhile, there may be a bit more water in some areas of the Third World, for reasons and with results that don't bear going into. This is also extremely speculative, but it's still useful as a counterweight to the hysterical claims of "alarmists"...like, for instance, Nigel Arnell.

In other news, Brazil intends to dam the Xingu River.

Critics say the Belo Monte plant will be hugely inefficient, generating less than 10% of its capacity during the three to four months of the low-water season.

The New Feudalism

According to Joel Kotkin, the fifty-year War on Suburbia ended definitively in 2005, then restarted a year later, then threatened to re-restart in 2009 because of Obama's tendency toward eco-Malthusianism, and has now been launched in earnest.

In everything from land use and transportation to “green” energy policy, the Obama administration has been pushing an agenda that seeks to move Americans out of their preferred suburban locales and into the dense, transit-dependent locales they have eschewed for generations.

When Kotkin says that Americans prefer suburbs, what he really means is that they generally prefer single-family homes. And of course, there are single-family homes in cities and small towns, just as there are apartments and condos in suburbia. But as I've complained before, Kotkin tends to treat all non-urban communities as functionally equivalent. It doesn't much matter whether you're in Old Westbury or Lost Hills, Grosse Pointe or Palmdale; as long as you don't live in a big city, your "choice" tends to prove whatever anti-urban point he wants to make.

Unfortunately, the smug urban sophisticates in the Obama administration lack Kotkin's grasp of Human Nature:

[T]he Obama administration seems almost willfully city-centric.

For example, Obama is in favor of high-speed rail.

Economics writer Robert Samuelson, among others, has denounced the high-speed rail idea as “a boondoggle” not well-suited to a huge, multi-centered country like the United States.

'Cause when you think about it, what possible value could high-speed rail have in a country like ours, where multiple urban centers are separated by large distances?

Obama is also threatening to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions, which we can all agree is egregiously city-centric.

[R]egulators can use the threat of climate change as a rationale to stop funding—and permitting—for even well-conceived residential, commercial, or industrial projects construed as likely to generate excess greenhouse gases.

Next thing you know, they'll be using the toxicology of lead as a rationale to deny permits to well-conceived residential projects that just happen to use lead water pipes.

Since Kotkin doesn't seriously believe in global warming, or peak oil, or carrying capacity, or resource depletion, or anything else that could conceivably be invoked as a sensible argument against cornucopian happy talk, he's baffled and a little frightened by people who choose to live in a nightmare world of limits, no matter how tentatively those limits inform their actions.

Administration officials have also started handing out $300 million stimulus-funded grants to cities that follow “smart growth principles.” Grants for cities to adopt “sustainability” oriented development will reward those communities with the proper planning orientation. There is precious little that will benefit suburbanites, such as improved roads or investment in other basic infrastructure.

That "precious little" includes $27.5 billion in highway funds, which my trusty abacus informs me is a lot more than the $300M allocated to smart growth "smart growth." (Scare quotes like these are central to Kotkin's argument, so it'd be unfair to edit them out.)

As you'd expect from someone who's very fond of military metaphors, Kotkin seems to see urban planning as a zero-sum game: every federal dollar that doesn't explicitly benefit his beloved suburbs is part of a scorched-earth attack on the middle class, and therefore on humanity itself. The idea that good urban planning might actually benefit suburban residents seems alien to him. For instance, he treats suburban growth around Portland, OR as a rejection of that city's planning decisions...as though people were flocking to these areas despite their proximity to Portland, rather than because of it.

Although we're in terrible danger, what with all these New Urbanist radicals threatening our way of life, Americans are sensible people, so everything will be fine.

[S]uch policies have little or no chance of being passed by Congress. Too many representatives come from suburban or rural districts to back policies that would penalize a population that uses automobiles for upwards of 98 percent of their transportation and account for 95 percent of all work trips.

In other words, the fact that we currently have low walkability and poor mass transit is the reason we can't have high walkability and better mass transit. The system works!

Better yet, technological advances will soon make cars much more fuel-efficient, without improving the efficiency of mass transit in any way. This means that we get to compare the glorious new supercars of the Kotkinian workers' paradise with today's antiquated buses, which are ridden primarily by basilisk-eyed welfare queens and hoboes with 100-proof vomit all over their shoes. Never underestimate the power of new technology to carve conventional wisdom in stone!

Speaking of which, did you know that many of our environmental problems can be solved by telecommuting? From suburbia, I mean? Laugh if you want, but modern technology has allowed Kotkin to retool the same pro-sprawl arguments again and again, and send them electronically to various media outlets without leaving his gracious single-family home. Multiply that gain in efficiency by, say, 150 million people, and you can see that federal regulation of CO2 emissions is a waste of time, in addition to being immoral.

From here, we proceed directly to Kotkin's traditional litany of complaints against liberal snobbery and doomsaying. Tweedy academics say suburbs are drab and ugly, even though the people who live in them seem to like it just fine. Liberals say suburbs are "the racist spawn of 'white flight,'" just because "in 1970 nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white." Environmentalists say it's possible to run out of oil and water and land, even though that kind of talk makes people feel bad. With enemies like these, suburban developers and homebuyers (and the banks who lend to them, and the politicians who subsidize them) must be doing something right!

In conclusion, Kotkin warns us about a looming "new feudalism," in which "questions of land ownership and decision making would be shifted away from citizens, neighbors, or markets and left in the hands of self-appointed 'betters.'" As if anything could be "better" than market decisions with which Kotkin agrees! Nulle terre sans seigneur, motherfuckers!

Be sure to tune in next month, when the War on Suburbia will either end again or start anew, depending on whether the coin Kotkin flipped came up heads or tails.

(Image at top: Oppressed cottagers use appropriate technology to create a locavorist "garden city" on a royal desmesne in 12th-century Northumberland.)

The Anxieties of Our Time

When we last encountered Frank Furedi, he was using the principles of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology to prove that environmentalists are wrong because they say depressing things that frighten people. Bourgeois complacency, to him, is as integral to human excellence as stereo vision and opposable thumbs, and anyone who challenges it has no more ethical sense than a spirochete. For Furedi, it'd be insane to wonder whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz; he prefers to attend to practical matters, like whether the poem should be about babies or unicorns.

His latest column begins by considering the snowstorms in the UK. Like Mona Charen, he knows perfectly well that weather isn't climate. And like Charen, he sees something sinister in the fact that scientists keep reminding him of this. If global warming is a real threat, why are scientists trying so hard to convince us that it's actually happening?

There's a bigger problem, though. Furedi is able to tap into the Collective Unconscious as easily as you or I might order a pizza, so he knows that when we talk about "extreme weather," we're really talking about ourselves.

Extreme weather is not so much a scientific as a cultural metaphor that expresses the anxieties of our time. The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning.

First off, weather per se is not a scientific or a cultural metaphor; it's fucking weather, for fuck's sake. Second, the "conceptual linkage of weather with extreme" is based on the hard-won knowledge that some types of weather are more powerful than others, which is why we place, say, hurricanes into different categories depending on their strength. Third, the word "extreme" has no moral meaning whatsoever in this context; it's simply a measure of relative force. As much as Furedi might wish to pretend this is some sort of bizarre value judgment that stands in need of glibertarian deconstruction, I'm pretty sure that like most people who have the choice, he's more likely to stay indoors during episodes of "extreme" weather.

Last, you have to be a truly monumental asshole to complain about the "growing (!) tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning" while arguing that decades of scientific data on natural phenomena, extreme and otherwise, should be dismissed as evidence of a collective character flaw.

Speaking of which...you know what this crazy idea that human activity can affect the climate reminds Furedi of, when you come right down to it? A belief in witchcraft!

Today unexpected weather conditions are blamed on the impact of human beings on the environment. In medieval times unusual climatic episodes were seen as the handiwork of wicked demonic forces. Witchcraft was used to account for virtually every misfortune and unpleasant act. It was the climatic change brought by the so-called Little Ice Age in the 16th century that led to a resurgence of witch-hunting in Europe. From 1380 onwards, accusations of magic and weather-making increased dramatically in inquisitorial trials.

This is fertile ground indeed. In medieval times, witch hunters used to prick moles and warts with knives and needles in order to "prove" that people were witches. Today, climatologists take core samples from the polar ice caps in order to "prove" that people are using some sort of magical, unquantifiable power to affect the climate. When you treat these obsessively penetrative, probing behaviors as cultural metaphors, they're almost identical!

Thanks to Furedi's psychohistorical Doctrine of Signatures, we can easily ascertain which sciences are on the right track, morally speaking, and which signify the return of some repressed irrationality from the Bad Old Days. Monsanto's genetically engineered seeds are simply an improvement to the gentle art of gardening; you'd have to be insane to let it worry you. But as for ecotoxicology...weren't Jews once accused of poisoning wells, much as mining companies are now accused of contaminating groundwater? That being the case, couldn't one argue that the extraction industry is, in fact, the Jew of enviro-fascism?

The answer is plain to all those who are versed in Naturall Philosophy, for so universal and perpetual an Analogy can arise from nothing but its Pattern and Archetype in the infinite God our Maker.

Incidentally, Ferudi is the author of a book called Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?. Which just goes to show that it's lonely at the top.

The Last Days of Man on Earth

As you all know, American universities are run and staffed by Marxists, hippies, beatniks, queers and Frenchmen. From Sarah Lawrence to MIT, higher education is a hotbed of Blame-America-Firstism, Deleuzian rhizomatics and quasi-pornographic ruminations on the Lesbian Body.

One American institution, however, has always served as a hard, rigid, jutting bulwark against the feminine softness and decadence of postrationalist academia: The University of Chicago.

During the interminable anticapitalist Bacchanalia of the Cold War era, UChi stood out like a gleaming, sanitary thermos in a yurt strewn with handmade wineskins. No matter how disgustingly carnivalesque other schools became, with their toga parties and their human-rights petitions and their pleas for responsible condom use, UChi wasn't afraid to "rock the boat" by providing serious, nicely dressed white men with a place to speak authoritatively about money.

And we're all better for it. If it hadn't been for these nonconformist visionaries -- and the countless political, industrial, media, and military leaders who worshipped them as gods -- Jimmy Carter might well have made Ram Dass chairman of the Fed, and today's currency values would be based on something totally intangible, like karma.

But now, according to Candace de Russy, everything may be about to change...forever!

[A]s Mal Kline demonstrates in a substantial paper, UChi is increasingly coming to resemble much of the rest of academe. By way of example, Kline notes that the campus is the current workplace of Steven D. Levitt, the self-described “rogue economist” who co-authored Freakonomics and who posits that legalized abortion leads to lower crime rates.

Milton Friedman would be spinning in his grave, if he weren't already wailing in Hell. How sad it is to see this Mecca of libertarianism become a mere sandbox for a bleary-eyed sentimentalist like Levitt, whose rigidly reductive opinions on human nature, self-congratulatory "heretical" views on global warming, hatred of political correctness, and unbounded admiration for Milton Friedman clearly mark him as a creature of the Radical Left.

Levitt's not even the worst of this new breed of UChi professors. There's one guy with an ethnic-sounding name who actually talks about "the economics of disadvantage," instead of defending capitalism against tie-dyed naysayers like Levitt. And there's at least one female professor whose behavior can only be described as...well, let's just say "immodest." A hardheaded, no-nonsense, unblushing approach to the moral failings of the poor is one thing, but matter-of-fact discussions about S-E-X are quite another.

Kline also dissects looks at Jane Dailey’s magnum opus, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” which he calls notable for its "sheer salaciousness."

OMG that sounds totly hawt! I'm gonna have to see if I can find a copy. Online porn has been seeming a bit tame to me lately, so this could be just the thing to put the lead back in my pencil.

Anyway, it's clear enough that the University of Chicago is falling prey to the same sort of hypersexualized Foucauldian anti-market dirigo-etatiste secular-relativist dogma that's made a national laughingstock of Yale and Stanford.

Unless, of course, this is yet another of those pulse-quickening danger narratives that conservatarians invent for motivational purposes, like Kuwaiti babies being tipped out of their incubators or balsawood planes carrying anthrax spores across the Atlantic. In which case, it seems fair to say that the whole thing's pretty fucking silly.

Connecting the Dots

Government bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything right. That's why it's so shocking that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wasn't prevented from boarding a plane in Amsterdam, as he would've been if the Obama administration were competent, which just goes to show that government-run healthcare can't possibly work, the VA and Medicare notwithstanding, especially since the USPS sometimes misdelivers packages during the Christmas rush.

That, more or less, is the considered opinion of Star Parker. If you want to understand it, all you have to do is "connect the dots."

First, think about this: How can a government that didn't adequately inspect Abdulmutallab's underwear hope to offer adequate healthcare?

Despite extensive information on the would-be terrorist, each piece of which was incriminating on its own, the man evaded a vast government bureaucracy and almost blew up a plane filled with Americans.

Yet, Democrats, with the health care bill they are now piecing together behind closed doors, will bring all American lives and health care under the purview and control of government bureaucracy.

Talk about an inability to connect the dots.

Unfortunately, that's just how bureaucracy is. Unless we're talking about corporate bureaucracy, in which case we need to remember that nobody's perfect. Just as white conservative men who go on shooting sprees tell us nothing about white conservative culture, corporate bureaucrats who make fatal errors while toying imperiously with people's lives tell us nothing about corporate bureaucracy.

The plain fact is that government is hopelessly unreliable and untrustworthy, except when it comes to administering the death penalty, bombing foreign capitals, and regulating our sex lives. To deny this is to be an idealist of the worst sort.

Obama himself admits that the horrific act of violence Abdulmutallab (would've) committed (if he'd been able to) is "not the fault of a single individual or organization, but rather a systematic failure across organizations and agencies." Like the existential threat of taxation, this underscores the need for spontaneous collective action:

What saved the lives of innocent Americans were private citizens, using their own brains and initiative that acted to bring this terrorist down.

Think of the money and lives we'd save if we let airlines rent guns and Tasers to American air travelers, instead of relying on Interpol to protect them! And besides, who's gonna be better at screening airline passengers: a vast, dithering bureaucracy that's been corrupted by quotas and diversity training, or a spontaneously organized group of concerned citizens with an inbred skepticism of names like "Abdulmutallab"? I say we give obviously non-Islamic passengers access to metal detectors, specula, and bulletnosed flashlights, and let rational self-interest and the Wisdom of Crowds work their magic.

Parker goes on to report that during this past holiday season, a package she mailed went astray. Imagine that the USPS is the Obama administration, and the package is the physical well-being of your dimpled, golden-haired children, and you can see just how dangerous this error would be, if it actually were. And consider this: If you can't trust the government to deliver an autographed copy of Liberal Fascism to a centrist relative in Houston, how can you trust it with the health of your sigmoid colon? Connect the dots, people!

FedEx, by contrast, is a private company and never loses or misdelivers anything. Star Parker knows someone who heard this from his dentist, so that settles that.

None of which should be taken to imply that government is completely useless:

National security is a job of government.

We can only pray that these freedom-hating bean-counters will restrict their blinkered, incompetent, inefficient efforts to this fundamental task, before someone gets killed.

(Illustration via The Fed. Thanks to Abie for the reminder.)

The Sum of All Fears

According to Jillian Bandes, there's a troubling downside to publicly funded healthcare, apart from that whole "death panels" thing: it may make it harder for mentally ill people to get the firearms they'll need in order to take their final, bloody stand against the Culture of Death.

Government health care reform "will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database...that can preclude you from owning firearms,” said Gun Owners of America, in an email notification to their members, shortly before the health care debate on Saturday.

Worse, the government might decide to treat mental illness as a preexisting condition, and charge more for coverage:

GOA said that diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorders or other mental illnesses could be a reason the government uses to charge you more for health insurance under the public plan, or as part of co-op regulations.

That being the case, it's much safer to stick with private insurance companies. Granted, they already treat diagnosed mental illness as a preexisting condition, and price their plans accordingly. But they do it in a patriotic, God-fearing way that preserves our fundamental American right to buy lots of guns while suffering from persecution mania and delusions of reference.

Calls to Sebelius’ office were not returned, though a member of her press office laughed out loud when questioned about the prospect of health care being tied to gun ownership, saying, “that’s crazy.”

But Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, said such regulations were quite possible.

Indeed. And once healthcare is tied to gun ownership, we all know what will (probably) come next: a mathematically perfect One State in which all radical nonconformists -- e.g., ordinary folks who are offended by Obama's outlandish thirst for orange juice -- will be sent to the Gas Bell Jar for asphyxiation.

Harry Reid would probably laugh out loud and say this is crazy, but these guys say it's quite possible. It's one thing to maintain a sunny disposish in regards to global warming, which is either not happening, or beneficial, or both...but when you're talking about gun rights, the slightest possibility of an imaginable scenario that could conceivably lead to the eventual threat of a theoretical outcome that might turn out to be a slippery slope to the hypothetical brink of a potential disaster is grounds for immediate, uncompromising action.

You can't be too careful.

(Photo by cometstarmoon.)

Insalubrious Cereal

At the risk of seeming immodest, I've always had a moderate talent for sarcasm. When Bush invaded Iraq, for example, I was quick to say, "Oh sure...that'll work."

But I'm a babe in arms next to David Harsanyi:

How can Americans be expected to wrestle with the myriad dangers that confront them each day? Insalubrious cereal? Unregulated garage sales? Pools of death? Sometimes it's too much to process.

You know what we desperately are crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?

Believe it or not, this veritable pyroclastic flow of snark is his response to the news that General Mills will no longer be able to make false claims about the health benefits of Cheerios.

I am grateful that one courageous soul finally has stood up to the menacing influence of Big Cereal. Yes, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg has had enough of deceitful infiltration of Cheerios, demanding that General Mills cease and desist a marketing campaign that peddles the fallacious claim that the oat-based cereal can lower cholesterol.

The proposition that we are all less free because General Mills can no longer lie to us about Cheerios is somewhat counterintuitive, and it's fascinating to watch Harsanyi try to defend it.

Why stop with oats? Trix are not only for kids, you know. Lucky Charms are nowhere close to being "magically" delicious.

Good point...except that you can't really compare these branding slogans to specific, demonstrably false scientific claims. Calling a breakfast cereal "delicious," or claiming that kids love it, is permissible. Saying that it's "nutritious," or "part of a balanced breakfast" is also permissible, even though it's arguably misleading. But claiming that your particular formulation of oat hulls, sawdust, and carnauba wax will cure the Watery Gripes is another matter entirely, and even in my darkest moods I believe that most American consumers -- even conservative ones -- are still able to make this distinction. (The ones who can't, meanwhile, are the best possible argument for enforcing federal laws against false advertising.)

Harsanyi also takes a delicious swipe at teh PC Thought Police, by pretending -- just for laughs! -- that Lucky the Leprechaun is a stereotypical drunken Irishman, and therefore qualifies as a form of hate speech (or would, if white people weren't such good sports about stuff like that).

That's absurd, granted. But is it really more absurd than any other complaint about racial stereotyping...or false advertising, for that matter? I mean, when you stop and think about it?

Maybe Harsanyi's goal is simply to remind readers that they're angry about the government's "preferential" treatment of minorities, in hopes that this will color their reading of the Cheerios story, and keep them from wondering whether General Mills actually has a right to mislead health-conscious consumers with whatever mountebank nonsense it pleases.

Whatever the case, the gist of Harsanyi's column is that there's a right to mislead, but no right to be told the truth. If you've been wondering what a healthcare system based on the glibertarian ideal of "consumer choice" would look like, this should give you a pretty clear idea.

Family Values

Conservative astroturfers who are looking for more strident and garish forms of political protest would do well to consider this:

Revelations the Italian mafia has been disposing of toxic waste by putting it onboard ships and then sinking the vessels has sparked health fears along the nearby coastline.

A Mafia informant confessed to sinking three such ships and it is estimated the mob may have sunk 32 more in the last two decades, as European regulations covering waste disposal grew tougher and it became more expensive to comply with them.

Surely this is a cause that all good conservatarians can support, once they've been told to. Modern Republicanism has rallied behind far worse environmental crimes than this, and hailed them as downright Jeffersonian.

The Mafia has some other good things going for it, from a conservative standpoint. Hypermasculine posturing? Check. Achieving social dominance through bootlicking submission to authority? Check. Enforced privatization of public services? Check. Racism and misogyny? Check. Loyalty to the group first, and the country second (if at all)? Check. Unctuous sentimentality about family and children? Check. Gun fetishism? Check. Arms trafficking? Check. A rigid social code based on the bottomless demands of male egotism? Check. Loan sharking? Check. An uneasy marriage of homoeroticism and homophobia? Check.

But all of that is small potatoes, compared to the Mafia's decisive stand against the European Nanny State. The enemy of the friend of my enemy is my friend, and just as it was formerly necessary to arm Iraq against Iran (and vice versa), it is now necessary to stand with organized crime against enviro-socialist tyranny.

Teabagging and going Galt is all well and good, but here's a chance to make an even grander statement, simply by doing what comes naturally. Why shouldn't real Americans dump their garbage in rivers and lakes, in order to assert the inalienable right of legitimate businesses to do the same? It makes at least as much sense as agitating against public health on behalf of the insurance industry, God knows.

And unlike racial and sexual taunts, which linger only in the mind, it'd provide a stark visual reminder of bedrock conservative principles, among which taking unapologetic pride in one's own personal ugliness currently seems to be foremost.

Plus, think of how much fun it'd be to contrast the normal garbage of the workin' man with the effete biodegradable detritus of the Coastal Elite! This is the sort of extra-fancy-grade cultural theorizing that could keep Jonah Goldberg busy for months. (Dig it, man: it's not the garbage that freaks out the Establishment. It's, like, the Truth that the garbage represents.)

It might seem like a bad idea, at first glance, to side publicly with the Italian Mafia. (They're foreigners, after all.) But for a movement that takes an almost erotic pleasure in transgressing social norms, and turning logic on its head, the main danger of declaring that it'd be better to be ruled by the Cosa Nostra than Obama is that it might not be heard above the general din. Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin say stranger things, and defend worse people, almost every day.

Which is why Massey Energy had better get busy, and base a spontaneous grassroots movement on this idea before it's too late. If the general tone deteriorates much further, the moment will be lost, and it'll be like trying to palm off Spooks Run Wild on an audience that's expecting Cannibal Holocaust. The sad truth is, even an über-patriotic orgy of illegal dumping may eventually seem unremarkable, or even quaint.

Hell, if people can get used to this, they can get used to just about anything.

Human Needs

If there's one thing our troubled nation needs more than ever, it's a newspaper editorialist who's willing to take a principled stand for human needs.

And I'm not talking about clean air and water, or food, or education, or affordable healthcare, or the right to marry the person you love. I'm talking about real human needs, like building parking lots, sneering at science, conflating vulgar-libertarian claptrap with the Word of God, elevating willfully ignorant contempt for nature to a moral imperative, and turning environmental management decisions over to the extraction industries.

The first thing you need to understand is that things you've never heard of don't matter.

Ever hear of the Yellowstone sand verbena? Probably not, since the only place this plant is currently known to grow in North America is a beach in the Wyoming national park bearing that name.

Know how you can tell valuable things from worthless things? Valuable things become more valuable as they become more scarce.

Consider this: If Yellowstone sand verbena were of any use to anybody, people would be growing it on purpose and selling it. Since they're not, it's pretty clear that it does not meet human needs, and probably never will. (Unless it turns out to cure some disease or something, but what are the odds of that?)

And no, the desire to look at Yellowstone sand verbana doesn't count as a human need. On the contrary, it's an affectation. And not the good kind, like smoking a cigar while wearing a bowtie.

How about the meltwater lednian stonefly that is only found in Glacier National Park in Montana? That one will be gone by 2030, thanks to global warming — assuming global warming is a reality, as claimed by some scientists. Or, it may be frozen by the new little ice age predicted by other scientists.

If these educated fools had the sense to cast aside their astrolabes and alembics, and consider the world in the hard astringent light of Oeconomics, they'd know that both of these outcomes are a) impossible (or at least unlikely); and b) inconsequential.

People are fretting over bugs and weeds that can only be found in Montana's national parks. The conclusion is inescapable:

[S]uch policies will “essentially sequester large swaths of private property from all use for years.”

Which would be bad enough. But the more serious problem is that they are guided by "a fundamentally unbalanced view of the proper relationship between man and nature." These policies emanate from some topsy-turvy dreamworld in which human avarice is constrained by intangibles like humility, and science, and law, and...and a sense of personal responsibility, instead of being allowed to trample everything in its path.

And for what? Here's a perfect example of how we're coddling these dime-a-dozen parasites, instead of forcing 'em to shift for themselves as God intended.

Last summer, Bureau of Land Management officials lifted environmental restrictions designed to protect one variety of sage grouse — aka “prairie chickens” — from seeing or hearing oil or natural gas wells. But, as The Examiner then predicted, environmentalists have since sued, seeking federal court orders directing reclassification of other prairie chicken varieties as endangered species.

"Sage grouse," indeed. This reminds me of the ginned-up controversy surrounding the "marbled murrelet," which despite its five-dollar name is basically nothing more than a common seagull.

Besides, if I have to hear a garbage truck every week at 6 AM, why the hell shouldn't a chicken have to hear the occasional oil well? If they don't like it, let them roost behind the moon, as the old song says.

Though these objections to conservation are unanswerable, they may seem somewhat abstract to people who are busy working, and shopping, and watching TV, and disrupting town-hall healthcare meetings in order to protect Granny and Grampy from liberal-fascist Selektion.

How will protecting useless, redundant species ruin your life, you ask? Get a load of this:

Environmental law that puts more emphasis on forever preserving the current condition of nature also shortchanges America’s ability to provide housing for a growing population. As Hewitt explains, “The proposed Clean Water Restoration Act would vastly expand federal control with private property and greatly complicate and increase the cost of bringing new homes to the market.”

Since housing is a key engine of employment and economic growth, hobbling this essential industry doesn’t just deny people shelter, it also prevents the creation of millions of needed new jobs.

It's infuriating, isn't it? The nation could be in the midst of a well-nigh unstoppable housing boom at this very moment, if it weren't for the sage grouse's interference with oil and gas leasing, and the little-known weeds and bugs that are cluttering up Montana's national parks.

These are just some of the reasons America needs a new national discussion of which is more important, the needs of the sage grouse or those of the people with whom such creatures share the natural world.

Sounds reasonable to me. Strictly in the interests of balance, and fairness, and equity, and impartiality, and stuff like that, I say the decision should be made by people who stand to benefit financially from throwing ESA protections out the window.

Because the plain fact is, we've been ruled by the sage grouse for far too long. It's time we cast its hateful yoke from our shoulders, and started the great work of catering to human needs. As Frederick Douglass said, in a remarkably similar situation, "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

(Photo by Jeff Brouws.)