Design for the One Percent

A Daily Caller columnist recently argued that the government should force food stamp recipients to buy low-grade food in drab packaging, in order to teach these soi-disant "poor people" a tough lesson about freedom and responsibility and taxation and so forth.

I seem to be suffering from outrage fatigue, because instead of fantasizing about the guillotine, I found myself pondering the logistics of setting official specifications for poor-quality, revenge-oriented food, and of creating a style guide for socially stigmatizing package design.

With these interesting issues in mind, I've taken a stab at designing some product labels for a new taxpayer-funded line of shameful, marginally nutritious foodstuffs. While I can't pretend that they'll deliver the stern dose of humiliation hungry poor people and their hapless children deserve — only the withering patrician scorn of a God-appointed billionaire can do that — I do hope they'll inspire crueler people to produce uglier work.






(Image at top: "The Rich Man and Lazarus the Beggar" by Gustave Doré.)

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.

And Your Wife

As you all know by now, Michelle Obama was caught red-handed appearing to express something along the lines of the hate-filled rhetoric we would've heard on the infamous "whitey tape" if its owner hadn't joined Vince Foster in the Valhalla of political martyrdom.

While there's some doubt as to what she said, there's no doubt at all about who said it; if she wasn't insulting the flag (or "dissin' it," as Teh Blacks say), why were her lips moving? If she didn't intend to sully this most hallowed of days with her malign presence, why did she show up?

Intruders. There's no other word for Hussein and Moochelle, except for the one I'm thinking constantly, but can't quite bring myself to say. Yet.

In other news, here's the latest track from the Heatless.

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.

Point / Counterpoint

Brent Bozell on the massacre in Tucson:

The star of the media's Smearing Olympics was Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat who rushed to the readily available media microphones to proclaim the shooting was the natural outgrowth of hot "anti-government" talkers, that "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from the people in the radio business and some people in the TV business" was to blame

Brent Bozell on a television ad for Doritos:

[N]ever underestimate the ability of some people to go too far, where talent and imagination are rejected for sophistry and shock....

Oh, I'm sure they knew there would be outraged Christians, but there would also be a "free media" bounce, as in some "buzz" on the Internet.

Michelle Malkin on the massacre in Tucson:

Despite desperate attempts by the progressive left to pin the massacre on the "harsh tone" of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.

Michelle Malkin on rap music:

What kind of relief do we get from this deadening, coarsening, dehumanizing barrage from young, black rappers and their music-industry enablers who have helped turn America into Tourette’s Nation?

Janice Shaw Crouse on the massacre in Tucson:

In a pseudo-sophisticated culture that is put off by the notion of the existence of evil, commentators have to go on a witch hunt to find someone to blame when the human capacity to replicate Cain’s murderous behavior becomes glaringly obvious.

Janice Shaw Crouse on promiscuous sex:

As promiscuous sex has become “normalized” — thanks in part to Hollywood’s incessant push to expand the borders of the sexual revolution — the percentage of children born outside of marriage from 1970 to 2006 has mushroomed.

Maggie Gallagher on the massacre in Tucson:

[I]s our climate of hate so entrenched that rather than seek solutions we prefer to say this is yet another reason to hate Sarah Palin?

Maggie Gallagher on Kate Michelmen's responsibility for the murder of a 7-year-old child:

[T]he feminist leaders of Kate Michelman's generation, still painfully peddling sexual liberation as a path to empowerment for women, have never accepted responsibility for the carnage that has been unleashed in feminism's name.

Michael Reagan on the massacre in Tucson:

In Dubnik's twisted logic, Loughner may be a murderer but somehow or other it's all Rush's fault for his unforgivable habit of calling a spade a spade and referring to liberals as being mentally disjointed as the majority of them are.

Michael Reagan on the decline of civility:

The America in which I grew up had standards, and people’s public behavior was judged by how well they measured up to those standards. One was expected to toe the line when it came to the way they communicated with one another....

In a society headed for the sewer, anything goes. And when anything goes -- when the most extreme forms of language and behavior come to be seen as normal -- civilization is transformed into barbarism.

Sarah Palin on the massacre on Tucson:

[J]ournalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Sarah Palin on the Obama administration's sacrifice of innocent children to its false gods:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

George Will on the massacre in Tucson:

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate."

George Will on valid moral norms:

[B]iology and environment interact. And the social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire....

[C]onfusion can flow from the notion that normality is always obvious and normative, meaning preferable. And the notion that deviations from it should be considered "disorders" to be "cured" rather than stigmatized as offenses against valid moral norms.

Andrew McCarthy on the massacre in Tucson:

It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism.

Andrew McCarthy on the rhetoric that caused the violence in Tucson:

[E]lites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.

And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.

The New Groups

Elena Kagan is — let's face it — a Jew. Georgie Anne Geyer ponders what this means to you and me and the man in the next street:

[S]hould she be approved, it will mark the first time in history that no Protestant has been a member of the supreme judicial body of the land.

The court would have six Catholics and three Jews, and what a change that would be for the country founded on a "Protestant ethic."

"Protestant" is Geyer's shorthand for "the Eastern Establishment," which is her shorthand for wealthy and well-mannered white people who dwell "in polished and unostentatious enclaves, in New York, Newport and Palm Beach," just as the Founders intended.

See, the Founders believed that "the interest of their class...was the interest of the nation." And they were right, because as the Eastern Establishment flourished, so too did the nation, as evidenced by the flourishing of the Eastern Establishment.

This process culminated in the election of George H.W. Bush, who was the Ben Hancock of our time:

George H.W. Bush was the last president of the Eastern Protestant Establishment, and there is little question that the values that informed him from that heritage led to his becoming such a great, balanced and successful president.

Now we're preparing to shoehorn yet another Jew into the SCOTUS, and the courtly era of Bush the First seems very far away indeed. As Geyer says, "the Americans who gave us affirmative action now may effectively need affirmative action programs for themselves." Pobrecitos!

Soon, one can imagine a new old movie being made of "the Protestants," sort of like an American Western where the song is over but the memory lingers on.

Yes, it's just like whatever that means!

No, wait. On second thought, it's more like whatever this means:

Or, to lift the entire scenario to a far (far!) higher and certainly more elevated level, one might remember Thomas Mann's great novel, "Buddenbrooks," the iconic story of the decline of a Northern German industrial family, which travels the famous literary route from the first family days of the military, to the second of the commercial class, to the final days when the last generation lives only in and for the theater.

Mayhap. On the other hand, there's a part in Treasure Island where Jim hides in a barrel. So who's to say?

Anyhoo, the Protestants have labored mightily to ensure that American society would not be closed and elitist. This was a noble and generous idea, though not, perhaps, an entirely wise one.

It's not that Geyer dislikes Jews, or anyone else. It's just that she tends to prefer the Eastern Protestant Establishment, like all thoughtful people who appreciate Civilization. It's nothing personal, though: Ethnic arrivistes like Kagan may seem vulgar and contentious and ill-bred, "at least compared to the old establishment with its fine manners. But that is simply natural, for the new groups, no matter their talents, have no common faith, principles and duties at their core."

One must be tolerant, within reason, no matter how culturally and spiritually defective one's inferiors may be. This, too, is part of the Protestant legacy.

Speaking of which, the Protestants really are great, aren't they? I mean, seriously. They're just really, really, really...great.

The form that America took from this remarkable group of people is the form that every progressive country in the world must start with, as it tries to develop. This is why communism gave way to social democracy and why Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Tunisia, and even monarchical countries like Oman and Bahrain are essentially involved in the original Protestant thesis.

And what is "the original Protestant thesis," exactly? Oh, you know...good manners, noblesse oblige, sexual discretion, summering in Kennebunkport, the Five solas, hostility to the Welfare State...stuff like that. You know it when you see it, basically.

Be sure to turn in next week, when Geyer laments that baseball has become much (much!) less gracious and civilized since Kenesaw M. Landis died.

UPDATE: I edited this post to remove a couple of jokes that, on reflection, weren't very funny.

A Landscape of Death

The Globe and Mail interviews Camille Paglia on the vital issues of the day, and discovers that — wait for it, now — modern academia is besotted with multiculturalism.

Not that there's anything wrong with other cultures per se; they're perfectly alright in their place, if you get my drift. But when you start portraying Caribbean or African authors as "important," where does that leave Shakespeare? Where does that leave real art, as defined for all eternity by middlebrow snobbery the illustrious dead?

See, when colleges validate the artistic pretensions of minorities and women and so forth, it can lead to the creation of "institutional fiefdoms." It'd be much better to have a single fiefdom, presided over by the Immortals of Art, whose irrevocable judgments on the modern scene will be made known to us by Camille Paglia.

Educators need to take "the long view." And they need to direct it uncritically toward an Official Past. Only then will they see that the artistic productions of women fade into nothingness when compared to the genius of Michelangelo. Why did he get to paint the Sistine Chapel, instead of some chick? Because he was way better than any of the bitches who applied for the job, duh.

Again, this is not to imply that "world culture" has no value. For instance, Hollywood and jazz are wonderful. But when you start making grand claims for the scribblings of some goddamn wog...well, it's very dangerous, obviously, because you're going against decades or even centuries of settled belief and what if you turn out to be wrong? What if your experience of art becomes mired in subjectivity, instead of being a ritualized expression of forced belief, as God intended?

You might think that some "ethnic" novel is powerful or meaningful or what have you...but a hundred years from now, will someone like Paglia be treating it as a spiritual pinnacle that no modern writer can challenge? If not, you'll have to admit you were wrong. Great art lasts, and in doing so it brutally limits human possibilities. That's how you tell it from mere trash.

Although she was "the first to advocate the Web," Paglia is troubled by its tendency to misinform: It can be hard to tell "whether something is solid, dubious, or whether it’s a joke or a scam." (Books are different, because the solid ones bear tokens of authenticity, like a blurb from Harold Bloom on the back cover.)

Which brings us inevitably to global warming. Previously, the sciences were a unified whole, thanks to the groundbreaking work of Aristotle, whose scientific accomplishments no woman has ever matched. But in the intervening years, thanks to feminism and postmodernism, they've splintered into institutional fiefdoms that don't communicate with each other. And this is the result:

This whole thing about global warming – I am absolutely incredulous at the gullibility of people. What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears? And finally I realized, people don’t know polar bears can swim!

See how it helps to take an interdisciplinary approach? Speaking of which, what is this hysteria over the Gulf Coast oil spill? Has no one noticed that birds can fly and fish can swim? If they choose to wallow in oil, how is that BP's fault? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

People nowadays are too emotional, too melodramatic. It's one thing to call the humanities "a landscape of death" because you don't like Foucault. But to worry about polar bears, even though they're very nearly capable of swimming from Kotlik to Unalakleet? That's just silly. If people studied geology, as Paglia recommends, they'd take a much more sensible view of the matter.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'll leave you with this quote from Sinclair Lewis:

The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trouser-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

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.

Reasonable Suspicion

Good news, folks! George Will likes the new racial-profiling law in Arizona. And really, what's not to like? It won't affect normal people, nor will it affect legal immigrants except inasmuch as they may have to show identification papers to prove that they're not unassimilable Untermenschen who are rotting this country from within.

That could be slightly inconvenient if you're in a hurry, I suppose, or if it happens several times a week. But apart from that, the innocent have very little to fear. If they don't like it, they can go to Russia.

Will says the federal government has no right to criticize Arizona's law, since it's the federal government's fault that Arizona has a problem with filthy stinking Mexicans illegal immigrants in the first place.

He's right, of course. Obama could have dug a border moat a mile wide and a mile deep, filled it with Candiru, surrounded it with minefields, and patrolled it with drones bearing thermobaric warheads. But he dropped the ball. And as everyone knows, if Washington DC fails to resolve a state's problems in an emotionally satisfying way, that state is constitutionally allowed — nay, obligated — to pursue brutally stupid pseudo-solutions cribbed from authoritarian dystopias.

Thus, one mustn't view the Arizona law as "presumptively unconstitutional" just because one of the things that constitutes "reasonable suspicion" of non-citizenship is the color of a person's skin. After all, airport screeners pass their wands over white people, even though white people are generally good-natured and harmless. It's precisely this national commitment to fair play that will restrain Arizona's police from abusing their powers any more than they already do.

Besides, there are so many "Hispanics" in Arizona that there's no way the police could harass all of them; they'll naturally be forced to pick and choose. Therefore, they're far more likely to pick up the bad Hispanics who steal and rape and spread leprosy than the good useful Hispanics who mow our lawns and wash our dishes. That's just common sense!

Joking aside, I firmly believe that in any given year, the WaPo's op-ed page does much more damage to this country, and displays much more contempt for its laws, than undocumented immigrants.

(Illustration via Phronesisaical.)

This Present Era of Violence

Like everything else Georgie Anne Geyer bothers to notice, the violent reaction to Obama's timid healthcare reforms underscores the need for a new era of Civility, as exemplified and made holy by wealthy white people from the East Coast circa 1950.

When I look back at our recent history -- say, from after World War II to today, in effect from our high point of respect and influence in the world to our low point -- I see a steady, outwardly inconsequential but inwardly poisonous loss of respect for authority. Americans never were very comfortable with authority, but that discomfort was balanced by a respect for the law and for the vote. Once an election was held, the man or woman elected was, generally, respectfully regarded and treated.

Somewhere between, say, 1954 and 1964, we started to lose some of our respect for the law and the vote, for some reason. And things have only gotten worse since then, what with the permissiveness, the multiculturalism, the illegal aliens, and all the other signs/causes of "our" "cultural" "decline."

Surely, there were great down-to-the-mat political fights and nasty name-calling, but the difference is that before, this country's drama was largely acted out within its own four borders. Today, it is acted out before the entire world.

We're squabbling in front of the help, in other words. It's just not done!

In earlier years, too, as the Eastern Establishment held sway over the electoral choices of both Democrats and Republicans, it was their elegant, upper-class manners that were to be mimicked, especially by immigrants.

Honestly, I think America is a pretty awful place, what with its brutal policies and its ludicrous anxieties and its hateful self-regard and its preening ignorance. But unlike Geyer, I don't think we can fix these problems, or any others, by insisting that our politicians start wearing cummerbunds and affecting a Transatlantic accent. The fact that her dream world is vanishing is one of the few things I actually find heartening about living in this goddamn snake pit. And that goes double for the fact that it's become slightly more difficult to conceal one's bone-deep racism under a veneer of bourgeois civility (as Geyer herself demonstrates in most of her columns).

I see no reason for our immigrants, documented or otherwise, to buy into Geyer's version of Kultur. It wouldn't gratify me to see them wearing top hats, quoting Shakespeare, calling for smelling salts when vulgar language is used, or learning any of the other social graces that would make them Serious People according to tedious middlebrow reactionaries like her. If they're truly in the process of destroying "her" America, I can only hope that they do a thorough job of it. (In reality, though, she could probably learn more about civility from them than vice versa.)

Which is not to say that Geyer has no valid points. We're both troubled by "the cultural vulgarity of the greedy and the chaos of the philosophically unrooted." Where we differ is that I tend to see Geyer as exemplary of both. (I also object to being lectured about cultural vulgarity by an admirer of Tom Tancredo, and about philosophical deracinement by an admirer of Shelby Steele.)

It's nice that she thinks all Americans deserve healthcare -- really, it is -- but that stance is undermined, in my view, by her snobbish inability to hear the 200-decibel echo of her ugly racial obsessions in the anti-healthcare rhetoric she denounces.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we really are suffering from a poisonous lack of respect for authority, too much fucking and sucking in Hollywood films, and immigrants who don't know any better than to use their salad fork for the main course, what's the solution? As Maxine Nightingale explained back in 1975, we've gotta get right back to where we started from:

How to go back? That is the question. How to recover the style and polish and decency that once were yearned for in our public life? That is the challenge. The hope is that this present era of violence, name-calling and threats will awaken us to where we have come -- and to whence we must return.

At which point, it will have served its purpose.

(Photo via Morons with Signs.)

Calm Despair

America was murdered yesterday, and those who loved her best are swearing revenge. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, "The Tree of Libertarianism must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of anyone who says otherwise. ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!"

As an illustration of what you get when you cross Yosemite Sam with The Turner Diaries, this stuff is funny for about five seconds. But I prefer the elegaic mode, and thus I turn to John Derbyshire, who understands that human societies inevitably follow the sad arc of his own dissipating life-force: As he flags and fails, so too does Civilization. It's as inevitable as sagging breasts, or humorless women at a dinner party. One can't prevent it; one can only look upon it with calm despair.

I see plainly that Western civilization, over my lifetime, has been a slow-sinking ship. The few who have known what is happening have worked desperately to seal the watertight doors, repair the fissures, pump out the flooded zones. It's been a losing fight, though. The tilt of the decks is harder and harder to ignore. Last night, a major bulkhead gave way. Soon a funnel will topple over with a great crash and a shower of sparks. Yet still the band is playing, the people are dancing, the food coming up from the galley.

Just so, just so. Mere anarchy is loosed, the centre cannot hold, and the blood-dimmed tide of the white man's burden slouches toward the widening gyre and gimbles in the wabe. It is not a wonder that the world is so bad, but that there should be any good left in it.

It'll be over soon. We'll be down in the cold, lightless depths of imperial despotism — in which, after all, the great majority of human beings, throughout history, have always lived. It's the natural way: liberty is an unstable temporary aberration.

Or as Robert Falcon Scott wrote, with the last of his strength, in a diary that was found eight months later, beside his frozen corpse,

We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

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.

Regular Guys

Maggie Gallagher has a new political heartthrob, in the predictable form of Marco Rubio.

And why not? He grew up among the poor, so he knows what's best for them and can increase their burdens with a steady hand and a dry eye. "He understands economics in deeply moral terms," unlike the rest of us. He dislikes gay people, and may even be heterosexual. He's "unapologetically pro-life," which means he need never apologize for the cavalier bloodlust that marks all Gallagher-approved GOP daddies as children -- or perhaps even brothers -- of God. Best of all, his ideas are "timeless," as anyone who has elevated Babbittry to a cosmic principle can plainly see.

This sempiternal man is competing with Charlie Crist for one of Florida's senate seats. In order to highlight their substantive differences on policy, Crist has accused him of getting expensive haircuts, which is the last thing we want from our kneekerk defenders of unearned privilege and redundant wealth. Crist's hair, by contrast, is staunchly democratic: it's cut, when absolutely necessary, "by a man named Carl the Barber," to the tune of $11, just as Hayek recommended in The Road to Serfdom. Whether they sing "Sweet Adeline" afterwards, Crist leaves to our imagination.

Anyway, Gallagher's in love, so naturally she doesn't want to hear anything bad about Rubio, especially if it's not only true, but worse than she's prepared to admit. How dare a cynical career politician like Crist try to play "the regular guy card" against this humble public servant, who seeks high office strictly out of necessity, and needs to look his best if he's going to defeat the blow-dried metrosexuals in both Democrat Parties? No wonder she issues this stark warning to Crist:

Charlie, I'm telling you: Don't kill our dream. The political blood on the floor will be yours.

Don't kill our dream! Someone really needs to put that on a t-shirt and sell it to the Teabaggers at $49.95 a pop.

It strikes me that although conservatives like Gallagher claim to have an unmatched philosophical grasp of human wickedness, it doesn't seem to stop them from prostrating themselves like cats in heat before smirking hypocrites wearing tinfoil halos. You heard it here first!

If you doubt the justice of this observation, please be advised that I cut my hair with a Bowie knife and brush my teeth with a twig, like all preternaturally honest and perceptive people.

(Illustration: "Shuffleton's Barbershop" by Norman Rockwell, 1950.)

The Capacity for Truth

Call me crazy if you will, but I just can't seem to get enough of Carol Iannone this week.

Some years ago, she tells us, a young woman she knows went to France and had a wonderful time. Today, though, things are very different...as evidenced by the fact that a young woman she doesn't know went to Italy, and now stands accused of murdering a British woman in the course of an attempted gang-rape.

Iannone says this about that:

How different was Amanda’s situation from my friend’s.

Yea, verily. All we need to do now is sort out why. First off, you can't deny that if this Amanda woman had been properly chaperoned, the murder of which she's accused never would've happened. Let's face it: her life abroad lacked "accountability and regularity," which is exactly how this sort of thing gets started. Given the permissiveness of continental culture, it's no wonder that the sidewalks of Europe are quite literally awash with the blood of murdered exchange students.

But of course that's only part of the story: technology is also to blame. Just as the easy availability of tape recorders inspired Ian Brady and Myra Hindley to commit the Moors Murders, digital technology has eroded the vital sense of hierarchy that formerly discouraged young people from slaughtering noncompliant sex partners:

The whole thing is reminiscent of Mark Bauerlein’s point in his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 — that in our culture today, young people are oriented mainly or even only toward each other and have no hierarchy in which to locate and organize themselves.

And consider this: We know that the accused woman was a student, and we also know that students are obliged not just to study but to embrace postmodernism. Could this explain why she allegedly tried to pin the murder on an innocent black man?

Amanda’s odd behavior after the murder; her giving fuzzy, conflicting reports of her actions; and falsely implicated an innocent black man, Patrick Lumumba (her boss at the bar she worked at), give rise to speculation about how much postmodernism has eroded the capacity for truth. But that could be the subject of another post.

Here's hoping, 'cause I really think she's on to something. The only way I could see her being wrong is if there turned out to be evidence that a suspected murderer had acted oddly, or falsely implicated an innocent bystander, prior to the publication, in 1979, of Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. And honestly, what are the odds of that?

I hope my jaunty tone here won't obscure the fact that I find Iannone's "speculations" to be irresponsible, ghoulish, and fantastically stupid. As for her typically cartoonish view of "postmodernism," I hardly need to point out that it's pretty rich coming from someone who treats the "text" of this sad event as an occasion for grotesque interpretive excesses founded on nothing more rigorous than kneejerk intuitions.

Which reminds me of something that's not pointed out often enough: The Sokal Affair is utterly inconsequential compared to the delirious gibberish that kulturkampfers like Iannone spout every fucking day, in perfect seriousness and to general applause from their public and peers.

Cleansing and Clarifying

Georgie Anne Geyer doesn't get out much anymore, and this has led her to take a new interest in "classic American movies" (we all know just what she means, of course).

You arrogant young moderns may think this is mere escapism, or an inability to appreciate bold cinematic statements like August Underground's Mordum, but it just so happens that Geyer is learning quite a bit about our own era and why it sucks.

For one thing, the stars of "classic American movies" were all different people. Guy Kibbee, William Bendix, Wendell Corey, Rondo Hattan, Shemp Howard...they were all individuals, and their like will not be here again. But nowadays, everyone's exactly the same, pretty much:

Hollywood talks endlessly about "diversity," but almost all the leading young actors and actresses look, talk, dress and only pretend NOT to be alike. The women are all Jennifer Anistons, with long, straight blond hair, and the men are all Brad Pitts. Gable? Astaire? Cagney? Kelly? Cooper? Nowhere to be found.

Unless you visit the graveyard, that is.

Kidding aside, she's right. I can't hardly think of a single popular actor who doesn't look like Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt (or both, thanks to Hollywood's fashionable obsession with androgyny). Whatever happened to film stars you could actually tell apart, like Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland? Furthermore, a fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached.

When you think about this problem carefully, as though it were true, it becomes obvious that everything comes down to race, as it usually does in Geyer's cramped little world:

Virtually the only diversity one sees today is a series of slight -- very slight -- differences in skin color. And here we face an interesting, if disappointing, conundrum: Race, which is not supposed to be important in a supposedly colorless multicultural world, has instead become the only distinction.

I think Geyer's mixing up her conservative tropes here. Multiculturalism is not supposed to be "colorless"; it's supposed to be a dystopian nightmare in which the eternal verities of Western Civilization are subordinate to the whims of wise Latinas. By contrast, a "colorless" society is one that has overcome discrimination by insisting it doesn't exist anymore.

That's nitpicking, I admit. Other than that, her argument is sound, unless you're the sort of pedant who objects to arguments that proceed from false premises to false conclusions.

If you are, you probably won't like Geyer's explanation for the Good Old Days, either. See, back in Chicago when she was a girl, ten-year-olds would rollerskate down to the Loop and play the piano all night. Wingy Manone and Miff Mole would sit in sometimes, and Al Capone himself once gave her a lollipop! Hence, Cary Grant. Nowadays, ten-year-olds sit around playing so-called "video-games" and acting like they're geniuses just 'cause they know how to operate the Internads. Hence, Brad Pitt.

And another thing: I'll tell the pop-eyed world youse mugs had better get wise to yourselves already, 'cause believe you me, what I say goes and how, you get me?

The next thing that hit me in our old movies was how often I saw variations on the theme of the "man from outside." He was sent in to cleanse and clarify bourgeois American society. These films ranged from the brilliant "High Noon" to the religious "Elmer Gantry" to even musicals like "The Music Man."

Oh fucking hell. [gets up, lights a cigar, paces the floor, wishes this Geyer dame was in Tophet, plague take her]

Look. American film studios made lots and lots of movies of all different types and you don't simply get to take a handful of the ones you've watched while lolling around in a haze of racial resentment and use them as evidence of...of....some kinda preening middlebrow monologic social-hygienist weltanschauung that suffused everyone from Fred Astaire to Victor Mature with moral clarity until it ran out their goddamn ears, for fuck's sake. And especially not when your examples of "cleansing bourgeois American society" comprise one instance of shooting people and two of grifting.

Anyway:

Instead of the man from outside, there is a tendency today to portray the man and woman inside, trying to survive under waves of change.

Yeah. I was just thinking the same thing, after watching a triple-bill of The Magnificent Ambersons, How Green Was My Valley, and The Crowd at my local Octoplex.

Geyer's pals with the great Hollywood director Garry Marshall -- you may've heard of him, he made The Runaway Bride, which starred Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston -- and he has some thoughts on why the industry has changed. In the old days, see, you had to have honest-to-God talent to get ahead, like Charles Lamont. But now, you can be a pandering hack, like Garry Marshall, and no one will notice because they have no basis for judgment anymore, like this one actor Marshall knows who's not sure where El Salvador is, which just goes to show you how low we've sunk, doesn't it?

It's a dreadful world, in short. One tries not to live in it, but they make you.

So what's the solution? As far as I can tell, censorship. Not the silly PC kind we see these days, but the heroic kind that prevented films like Baby Face from including the Money Shot. Also, we need more monocles and cummerbunds, 'cause actors today don't know "crass from class" (why can't they be elegant and refined, like Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly or Spencer Tracy in Dante's Inferno or Lon Chaney in West of Zanzibar?). We also need less rock 'n' roll, by gum, because it's a "minor genre" that has an unfortunate tendency to make overnight sensations out of vulgar young people. For shame!

The sooner this sort of malign influence is purged from Hollywood, the better. Because otherwise, we face "the final debased egalitarianism of our culture," which would be a tragic betrayal of everything Hollywood once stood for.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I see some kids on my lawn. Why can't the little bastards be more like Freddie Bartholomew?

A Sense of Security

Richard Cohen says "there is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer." At the risk of shocking you, this leads him to make an imperious demand for less civilization and more torture.

Which reminds me of something I said in this post:

Having a wingnut tell you that you're weak on national security is like having Howard Hughes tell you that you don't wash your hands often enough. The obvious problem with this is that you can't wash your hands often enough to satisfy a maniac; there's not enough soap and water on earth.

As well as something I said in this post:

Cohen insists that the accommodation his own defective nature has made to brutality comprises some self-evident spiritual axiom for the rest of us.

If I could leave it at that, I'd probably be a better person. I'd certainly be a happier and calmer one. But Cohen's beliefs are too grotesque not to repudiate at greater length. It won't impress him, natch...but at least our supremely rational transhuman descendants will have evidence that some of Cohen's contemporaries thought he was an absolute fucking monster.

Here, he explains why we should be allowed to lock people away in perpetuity:

It's true that the world does not like Guantanamo, but then it's also true that the world is not an al-Qaeda target.

I thought the unique horror of al-Qaeda was that they intended to force the entire civilized world under the yoke of sharia, and then cut everyone's heads off. I was also under the impression that they'd attacked and killed people in a variety of countries, including Muslim ones.

But apparently, they're only angry at us. Which means that no one's allowed to criticize us for indefinitely detaining suspects, or suspected suspects, or alleged associates of suspected suspects, or their next-door neighbors. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do!

No doubt George Bush soiled America's image abroad with what looked liked vigilante justice and Dick Cheney's hearty endorsement of ugly interrogation measures. But more is at stake here than America's image abroad -- namely the security and peace of mind of Americans in America.

And what could America's image abroad possibly have to do with its security? Barbra Streisand probably thinks there's some sort of connection, but real Americans know that furriners who perceive the USA as a land of cruel, lawless, hypocritical bullies are much less likely to launch deadly attacks on our cities. And they also know that other countries are much more likely to help us fight terrorism when we make it perfectly clear that we don't give a fuck what they say or think about our methods. That's just common sense.

As is this:

[T]he paramount civil liberty is a sense of security....

Not even security, which would be bad enough, but a sense of security: the kind you get when you see photos like these and realize that they're not just comforting, but also sort of arousing.

I don't know about you, but I don't want my government to do whatever it takes to help Richard Cohen sleep peacefully, partly because I have no desire to live in a neo-monarchist police state that's run like a game of Calvinball, and partly because I don't think a monomaniacal warmonger like Cohen deserves to sleep peacefully. It irritates me that despite the widely acknowledged horrors of the Iraq War, and Abu Ghraib, and every other act of unjustifiable cruelty that this awful little man cheered as though it were Yanni's third encore, Cohen still mistakes his chickenshit bloodlust for the promptings of our collective soul.

That's how come I've decided to take up a collection in order to make Cohen as secure as possible. I say we inoculate him against smallpox and anthrax and Q-fever, put him in a heavily padded suit of armor, seal him in an unmarked bathyscaphe well stocked with potassium iodide and duct tape, and drop his sorry ass into the Marianas Trench so he can run out the clock in perfect safety, just like the Prince of Pompadoodle. To keep him happy as well as safe, we'll broadcast clips from Salo and tell him they're excerpted from US interrogations conducted in the underground prison complex of some Near Eastern client state.

Of course, he won't be able to write any more of this ugly crypto-fascist nonsense, lest the jihadists trace his Intertube signals and blow him up with suitcase nukes. But who wouldn't give up the right to make an abject fool of oneself in print, in order to gain a sense of security?

In related news, Daniel Pipes advises Obama to salvage his approval ratings by attacking Iran. I feel safer already!

UPDATE: Instead of impotently cursing the darkness a la yours truly, The Editors offer to protect Lower Manhattan from the forces of Islamo-liberal constitutionalist juridicalism.

(Image at top via lurkertech.)

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.)