A Global Laughingstock

Cliff Kincaid says that if we allow gay people to serve openly in the military, we'll have to allow transgendered people to serve openly in the military. Which means that we'll have to allow men to wear frilly little lacy things when they go forth to fight the Hun. Which means the Hun will laugh at us. Which means they'll win, in some obscure but frightening sense, no matter how many thermobaric shells the Barney Frank Brigade lobs into their subterranean lairs.

And that's not all:

While it is tempting to think that the only damage that would be done would be the turning of our once-feared military into a global laughingstock, there are important national security and health implications to the homosexualization of the Armed Forces.

You think men in dresses is funny, soldier? Well, you'll be laughing out the other side of your piehole when you get splashed with faggot blood and catch Teh AIDS.

[A] profusely bleeding gay soldier could threaten those caring for him on the battlefield, ultimately taking the lives of his fellow soldiers....

A position of opening the military to individuals with a documented history of exposure to deadly diseases, when there is no guaranteed way to screen their infected blood out of the blood supply, is obviously reckless and irresponsible.

It's worse than Kincaid lets on. Suppose a sniper's bullet traveled through a gay man's testicles and then lodged in a straight man's lower intestine? That would give him double AIDS, at the very least!

Being as the MSM is owned and operated by gays and gay-fanciers, they're naturally hiding the Awful Truth about "gay blood on the battlefield." Instead, they insist that gays have a right to serve openly, in dresses, despite being infected with the deadly gay plague of homosexual AIDS.

But the thing is, if DADT were repealed, most straight soldiers would immediately quit the military, leaving the gays in charge of everything. That means we'd need a new draft to replenish it, and that means straight soldiers would be forced to serve under queers, if you get my drift. It brings a whole new meaning to the term "recruitment."

They will demand sexual favors to rise in the ranks, creating even more problems down the road. It is a recipe for national suicide.

Indeed. Consider the sad plight of Israel. And Great Britain. And Australia. And all the other countries that allow gay people to serve openly, and are therefore doomed to die of AIDS any day now.

And think on this: How can Obama claim to be against obesity when he wants to give the US military AIDS by mandating risky practices like "bare-backing," which is a deadly and also dangerous form of gay sex in which one gay man gives another AIDS on purpose (assuming he can find one who doesn't already have it)? What's the point of cutting down on junk food if you're just gonna catch AIDS* and die, thanks to "the Hollywood-backed and well-funded homosexual lobby"?

In summation, we mustn't allow gay veterans to pervert the meaning of their own sacrifice by granting them the rights they fought for. For as a wise man once said, "AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS!"

*AIDS!

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.

Lurid Warnings

Peter Preston, an opinion writer for the Grauniad, has noticed that lots of people don't believe global warming is real, or manmade, or serious. And he knows exactly who's to blame.

It isn't hard to collate the factors that drive disillusion. Professors with a colloquial touch writing "awful" emails; a recession so tough that it blows future shock away; a cold, cold winter the Met Office didn't forecast; scientific angst about swine flu revealed as way over the top; dodgy figures, dodgy reporting, dodgy issues way up to UN level.

Note that the denial industry and the media that cater to it are conspicuous by their absence. Scientists must take most of the blame for public disbelief: this sort of "disillusion" is what naturally happens when experts treat influenza as a dangerous disease, or fail to reckon with the cold hard reality of winter.

Preston is very upset about all this, because global warming is a damned serious business, dash it all, and something bloody well needs to be done about it...as long as it's OK with "voters."

Voters have to clamber on board when sacrifices are required. They have to see the need for pain, to sense the danger of doing nothing. They have to lead their leaders as well as follow....

How do we get voters to sense danger and lead their leaders, as they did when they found out that Saddam's stormtroopers were tipping Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators? Good question! "Re-examinations of existing evidence" are useless, it seems, because no one's going to listen to professors now that denialists have methodically lied about them their work has been shown to be full of "dodgy figures." And no one's going to listen to Al Gore, because he obdurately insists on being Al Gore, with malice aforethought.

More jaw and Gore from politicians can't cut it. They have come to seem secondhand sources, merely parroting a frail scientific thesis. That goes, alas, for journalists, too – and for pressure groups issuing lurid warnings or staging angry demos....

Journalists, op-ed writers, and their editors can't help (presuming for the sake of argument that they actually want to). And "pressure groups" can't help either, because the public strongly objects to anger and lurid warnings unless they're directed at Al Gore or Phil Jones or the IPCC or the concept of taxation. And that goes double for pressure groups comprising climate scientists:

[M]ore of the same is exactly what we seem to be getting. More re-examinations of existing evidence, monitored by the people who failed to monitor it last time. More supposedly transparent attempts to say precisely when Himalayan glaciers will melt. More United Nations panels, flying lugubriously hither and yon in the cause of consensus. More declarations signed by hundreds of scientists on behalf of a notional "scientific community"....

As the person who may very well have coined the term "concern troll" (over at Eschaton, roughly six years ago), I think I'm qualified to say that Preston is a concern troll par excellence. He ignores the existence of a well-organized denialist movement. He ignores its ongoing support from a variety of business interests, including the media. He downplays the extent of scientific consensus. He reinforces any number of denialist narratives while claiming to be worried about declining belief in AGW. And he treats attempts to set the record straight -- the record, that is, that he himself goes out of his way to misrepresent -- as shabby, dishonest, and ultimately pointless.

So what's his solution?

[T]he plain fact is that we surely need a prophet, not yet another committee. We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince – not because he preaches apocalypse in gory detail, but in simple, overwhelming terms. We need to be taught to believe by a true believer in a world where belief is the fatal, missing ingredient.

In other words, we need someone who can serve as the public face of Scientific Non-Lurid Semi-Alarmism. We need someone whose personal credibility will represent the integrity of climate science, so that both can be pulled down together once he or she is accused of profiteering or preaching apocalypse or what have you, just like every other scientist who has played this role, intentionally or otherwise.

And you know what would be really, really clever and not at all self-defeating in any way? To describe this person in advance as some kind of charismatic, quasi-religious figurehead: an "eco-prophet," if you will. That's just the sort of sensible rhetoric that's been missing from this debate!

I suppose that once this new prophet has been demolished, and his or her "followers" stand revealed yet again as doomstruck cultists, Preston can write a column demanding a new and better figurehead...one who's not so prone to Scientific Angst and Lurid Warnings.

Because the alternative would be to "plod across the wastelands of borrowed time" without ever achieving anything. And that would be a real shame, given what's at stake.

(Illustration at top via Media Matters.)

One More Argument

Denis Boyles halloos John Stuart Mill's name to the reverberate hills of The Corner:

One more thing on Andrew McCarthy's NRO piece and its lede-line: "If Obamacare passes, Obamacare is forever."

I made a few notes, then went into a philosophy seminar I lead for the boys at Chavvers — Chavagnes, a perfectly eccentric, old-fashioned English boarding school which is located conveniently in deepest France. Our topic lately has been John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I mentioned McCarthy's premise and then, as we were finishing, came across this:

Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

One more argument for tempering with caution what Mill called "the tyranny of the prevailing opinion" and all that. Okay, now I'm done.

Boyles' post is entitled "J.S. Mill on Obamacare," and why not? Mill does use the word "wrong," after all, so QED.

This seems like fairly light work. Let's see if I can do it too.

J.S. Mill on Obamacare

Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good, or at least with an even greater degree of practical consideration for it. He comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence....

In the comparatively early state of human advancement in which we now live, a person cannot indeed feel that entireness of sympathy with all others, which would make any real discordance in the general direction of their conduct in life impossible; but already a person in whom the social feeling is at all developed, cannot bring himself to think of the rest of his fellow creatures as struggling rivals with him for the means of happiness, whom he must desire to see defeated in their object in order that he may succeed in his.

Ha! It's easy and fun! Let's try another.

Schopenhauer on Denis Boyles

I got appallingly drunk on Pernod, then staggered into my office wearing a dented top hat, a monocle, and assless chaps trimmed with cerise crepe de chien. There, I harangued my kitten about the preening stupidity on display at The Corner, while hunting for a glassine envelope of PCP I'd concealed in Schoepenhauer's On the Basis of Morality. As I was finishing, I came upon this:

One day this era will be known as the "period of dishonesty." For here the character of honesty, of an investigation in common with the reader which the works of all previous philosophers bore, has disappeared. The philosophaster of this period tries not to instruct but to fool the reader, and every page is evidence of this.

One more argument for treating the average Cornerite as a sociopath who would be quite capable, as Schoepenhauer put it, of killing a man "simply to rub his boots with the victim's fat."

Okay, now I'm done, so be a dear and fetch me a tissue.

If only everything in life were as easy to understand as philosophy.

The Maternal State

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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?

Knowing Energies

If you want to understand evolution, there are two basic approaches you can take. You can read books, take classes, and talk to experts in order to establish what the theory does and does not say, and how the evidence supports it. Or you can go on a piratical whirlwind tour of the history of ideas, plundering concepts from dozens of disciplines in order to force evolution into a philosophical tradition that can be dismissed prior to any real consideration of the evidence, and prior to any real consideration of the intellectual history on which your dismissal is ostensibly based.

Linda Kimball favors the latter approach, possibly because she's fallen prey to the deadly sins of sloth and covetousness. Thanks to The Goldberg Method, she has uncovered the connection between Renaissance Hermeticism and modern evolutionary biology. It's all a matter of knowing where to look and -- more important still -- knowing where not to look.

First, let's define our conclusion, so we'll be ready to ignore any facts that can't be made to support it. Daniel Webster said that we mustn't turn our backs on religious instruction and authority. He was right, obviously: why else would he have said it? And yet some people dare to disagree, especially when it comes to the study of biology. This is a sin against "the rational, personal God," who demands that we ignore the information our senses give us about the world He created just for us.

As a result, scientists have become "practical atheists" who wander around looking for meaning in the world's complexity and grandeur, which they can't properly appreciate because, unlike Ms. Kimball, they're paying way too much attention to how it works. If they'd stop fussing over natural phenomena, they might begin to appreciate the gift of rationality that was bestowed on them by a loving God.

But now, the whole house of cards is about to come down, because Linda Kimball has read -- or at least skimmed -- a book about the "occult intelligentsia" of the Renaissance.

Sound familiar? Well, it should, because there's an occult intelligentsia in our time too, as you can plainly see if you're willing to accept "occult" as a synomym for "materialistic."

If that sounds too difficult, never fear: Kimball has done the heavy lifting for you.

[T[hey eagerly embraced the pantheistic /materialistic occult traditions — Hermeticism, Theosophy, Buddhism, esoteric Cabbalism, alchemy, neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism — sweeping into Christendom at that time.

Right. 'Cause if you were asked what philosophy linked "Hermeticism, Theosophy, Buddhism, esoteric Cabbalism, alchemy, neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism," your answer would naturally be "materialism."

I love the reference to "esoteric Cabbalism," too. That's the sort of fine historical distinction that tells us we're in the presence of a really serious thinker.

Perhaps because she hasn't exposed herself to the earnest pieties of Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, Kimball has no problem identifying Renaissance Hermeticists as "the real powers behind what has been variously called the Progressive Underground, the Anti-Establishment, and the Counter Culture." If we're to have any hope of understanding this, we must first agree on terms.

Under the term occultism are included various practices broadly categorized as animism, astrology, divination (called channeling today), fetishism, shamanism, and underlying all of these is magic.

So the next time a shaman uses astrology to tell your fortune, please remember to refer to it as "channeling."

You also need to understand what magic is:

Magic is generally understood to be an interference with the normal 'way things work' in the course of nature. In short, it is an attempt at procuring godlike powers in order to "unmake" reality and then to recreate a second reality, which is really an illusion.

I guess you could say magic is "generally understood" in those terms. Unless you're talking about Renaissance magic, in which case it's absolute fucking nonsense, as anyone who has a general understanding of Cabbala or alchemy or Hermeticism or Neoplatonism can tell you.

Last, you need to understand that people who believe in magic -- materialists, in other words -- "claim to possess deep inner-gnosis," as opposed to shallow outer-gnosis.

Now that we've defined our terms, let's see how the rise of Hermetic inner-gnostic materialism led humanity away from the commonsense understanding that decaying meat turns into flies and geese grow from barnacles.

Western occult-pantheism speaks of animating spirit or soul while materialism speaks of miracle-producing 'knowing' energies that in their modern forms, animate and inform what can be viewed as either discarnate entities or 'force and/or voice ideas' called memes, genes, dialectical matter, chance, causation, determinism, evolution, and neurons, for example.

Alright. It seems that Kimball objects to the double reification of occult "knowing energies" into discarnate entities like neurons and genes, which are apparently the modern-day equivalent of the Paracelsian Archaeus or some such pagan devilry. The fact that we can look at photographs of neurons just goes to show how tirelessly the Father of Lies works to lead people astray. Besides, 1 Corinthians 13 says we see through a glass, darkly, and Renaissance scientists often referred to microscopes as "glasses." (All together now: So universal and perpetual an Analogy can arise from nothing but its Pattern and Archetype in the infinite God our Maker.)

A few centuries after Teh Renaissance, the Italian socialist Enrico Ferri also talked, more or less, about "knowing energies." You may not have heard of him, but you've heard of socialism, so you know he's bad and wrong. And of course, the Occult Intelligentsia of the Renaissance was bad and wrong too. See how all the pieces are starting to fall together?

A few short decades after Ferri, along came "madman Gustav Wetter," who explained that "the dialectical materialists attribution of 'dialectic' to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones." (If you can't trust a madman to explain dialectical materialism, who on earth can you trust?)

Next, we need to lock horns with the "master-magician" Hegel, who as everyone knows "informally aligned himself with "Hermetic societies, the materialist-Freemasons, and the pantheist-Rosicrucian's" [sic, sic, sic]. And of course, we must note that when Marx "reworked" Hegel's magical dialectic, he inevitably included "the Hermetic science magic of Hegel's system," because of course he did. I mean, he's Karl Marx, for chrissakes. Why wouldn't he?

Now, we have to define yet another term. (I know this is complicated, but that's true of all hard sciences except climatology and biology, so bear with me.) Hermeticism "is the secret science of magic created by Hermes Trismegistus Thoth who lived in ancient Egypt."

Well, not exactly. But instead of quibbling over where Hermes Trismegistus lived, or when he lived, or whether he lived, or whether his "science" was in fact "secret," let's jump ahead to the good stuff:

The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurias Trismegistus relates Hermes mystical encounter with The Great Dragon. Calling itself Poimandres, the Mind of the Universe, the Dragon transformed itself into a glorious being of Light and proceeded to 'illuminate' Hermes with the forbidden knowledge that would eventually find its' way into Hegel's dialectic and from there into Marx's dialectical materialism.

Let's see now...giant allegorical dragon, universal mind, divine illumination, forbidden knowledge, Hegel, Marx. Yep, it all checks out. Which means that all we have to do now is link Hermes Mercurias Trismegistus Termaximus Thoth to the naturalistic pseudoscience of magico-dialectical occulto-materialistic endo-gnostic "evolution." And despite what you may be thinking, this is actually pretty easy. In fact, it's a lot like those word-search games you probably played as a child. The difference is that instead of looking for target words in a small square of jumbled letters, you look for target words in whatever books you happen to stumble upon while seeking an a posteriori justification for your own willful ignorance.

Though taught under the guise of empirical science, naturalistic evolution is really a spiritual concept whose taproot stretches back to the dawn of history. It was then, reports ancient Jewish historian Josephus, that Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament) used terror and force to turn the people away from God and toward the worship of irrational nature.

Dig it, man! Nimrod forced people into nature worship, Renaissance Hermeticists sought illumination from the divine mind, and evolutionists dreamed up discarnate entities like neurons. No wonder everything sucks nowadays.

Now, let's move "forward in time to the Greco-Roman world," when evolution served "as the mechanism of soul-transference in metempsychosis and transmigration of souls." And then let's move backwards in time to the ancient East, where the concept of evolution was "refined" by "the mystical Upanishads" and became "the mechanism of soul-movement in involutions, emergences, incarnations, and reincarnation."

Involutions and emergences! Write that down in your notebook. And add this:

In that both rationalist/materialist/secularism and its' counterpart Eastern/occult pantheism are modernized nature pseudo-religions, it comes as no surprise that evolution serves as their 'creation mythos'.

Those of you who don't understand what "evolution" means should now turn to page 224 of the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, which explains that it "covers three basic areas: the origin of the universe; the origin of first life, and the origin of new life forms." Apropos of which -- sort of -- let's assume not only that evolution is "a rational process of development" set in motion by a "transcendent rational, personal God," but that any science which fails to present this proposition as an incontrovertible fact is unscientific, on the grounds that "it is Christianity and not naturalism that is the mother of modern science."

I know, I know. We've just gone on a global quote-mining expedition to prove that modern science is basically a pagan-gnostic homunculus cooked up for laughs by Renaissance alchemists. But it turns out that Christianity actually gets all the credit for modern science -- the good kind of modern science, that is -- because J. Robert Oppenheimer and Alfred North Whitehead both say it should, sort of. Also, medieval scholastics believed in the rationality of God and thus in the intelligibility of the world (unlike Renaissance Hermeticists, who were besotted with non-Christian philosophers like Plato and accordingly concluded that God was crazy as a loon and a liar to boot).

It may seem improvised. Contradictory, even. But the important thing to remember -- and this applies to climate science, as well -- is that once you've determined that a proposition ought to be false, all arguments against it are logically consistent, whether you consider them separately or en masse. Thus, Kimball is pleased to report that "original Darwinism" has been rejected by modern scientists as "useless," without considering why they rejected it or whether that rejection is really consistent with her vision of evilutionists as Thoth-addled occultists. All that matters is that they decided to replace it with bigger and better delusions, like punctuated equilibrium and panspermia. And how do we know for certain that these are delusions? Because new agers have embraced them and thereby refuted them for all time, just as Deepak Chopra's fascination with quantum mechanics revealed the Schrodinger equation as ugly nonsense.

Noted in passing: OMG Wiccans! OMG the unbearable queerness of gay shamanism!! OMG people who support disability rights want to hire people with disabilities even though they're crazy retarded cripples!!! OMG what's up with that???? OMG HITLER!!!!!

If you're not convinced yet, prepare to have your smug occultist satano-gnostic ecotopian materio-Zoroastrian worldview shattered by a veritable fusillade of hyphens, every one of which is a deadly arrow in the heart of the unbeliever:

In short, the age of irrationalism, lawlessness, hedonism, megalomania, and utopia-madness commenced when the rational personal God, His Revelation, unchanging Truth and Universal Moral Law were cunningly displaced by naturalistic evolutionism, astral-plane spirit-revelations, pantheistic-conceptions of god-forces, christ-consciousness, animated 'thinking' dead matter , 'force and voice ideas, ' inverted morality and moral relativism, Orwellian doublespeak, and terrible-willed megalomaniacs claiming to be supermen and god-men. These are the unifying factors of Bolshevism, Nazism, and America's Progressive Liberalism.

And that's "in short," mind you. You don't want to see what happens when Kimball has the room and the inclination to be expansive.

All of this is essentially an appetizer for the idea that it's Christian fundamentalists who are truly scientific. On the basis of a study (of sorts) by William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, Kimball argues that fundamentalism makes people more skeptical, rather than less: it's in communities of unbelief that pseudosciences tend to flourish.

Granting that people are pretty credulous across the ideological spectrum, for better or worse, and that atheism and rationality are by no means synonymous, there are a few problems here. First, disbelief is not the same thing as skepticism: rejecting astrology because the Church views it as unlawful is not the same thing as rejecting it on scientific grounds. Indeed, it's not even the same thing as disbelieving it, necessarily.

Second, if you want to take stock of American credulity, the distinction between fundamentalism and new age pseudoscience seems a bit arbitrary. Worse, it gives fundamentalists a rather unfair advantage, in that they get to believe in the Rapture without being scolded for holding an "unscientific superstition."

Third, the study seems to focus on belief in pseudoscience, as opposed to disbelief in science. Is someone who believes in the Rapture, but not in evolution or astrology, really more skeptical than someone who believes in evolution and astrology but not in the Rapture? And is it really necessary to figure out people's exact position on this continuum? I think there are grounds for debate, to put it mildly. But here's what Bainbridge and Stark have to say on the matter.

"It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions."

Fair enough. I've made more or less the same point myself, as have lots of other people. But somehow, we get from there to here:

It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today.

It's not quite that simple. If I assume that homeopathy doesn't work because God would not let it be otherwise, I don't get to pat myself on the back for my grasp of scientific standards. To put it another way, fuck you.

Let's recap: We can speak confidently of an evolution from the Hermetica and the Upanishads to modern biology, during which these ancient heresies become "fitter" as they progressed from paganism to Rosicrucianism to Hegelianism to Darwinism to Marxism to atheism to evo-devo. And naturally, this descent from a common ancestor is no more "blind" than any other kind of evolution: it's directed toward a specific end (OMG gay marriage! OMG death panels!).

One of the many ironies here is that the Hermetic writings appealed to many Renaissance thinkers because they seemed to support the truth of Christianity, once the appropriate genealogical methods were applied (e.g., citations from Lactantius). In other words, the facts were distorted in order to support the preferred narrative. This process of verification is not much different from the one Kimball favors: history, like science, is "true" to the extent that it serves as support for what you already believe.

If our biology textbooks were a bit more like Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher, and waxed ecstatic over the divine gift of retrotransposon-induced mutations, I suspect Kimball would have no serious problem with these "force and voice ideas": evolution would simply be another stick with which to pummel her enemies. It's science's failure to be useful, from this authoritarian standpoint, which causes her to interpret it as a tangled web of occultist "knowing energies," while pining for a true science that is rightfully hers and must be reclaimed ASAP so's she can use it to beat up fags.

As she sees it, science must be Christianized, much as the Hermetica had to be Christianized during the Renaissance. Which necessitates "finding" a hidden narrative that will explain how this useful tool ended up in the wrong hands, and why it must be taken back. (Kimball may try to disagree, but how can she? I've made an analogy, and everyone knows those are logically unanswerable.)

Just to prove that I, too, can dig idly through old books, I'll leave you with this passage from Henry Corbin's "The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms":

[S]ince the hidden meaning is nothing other than the letter raised or transmuted into symbol, and perceived henceforth on the level of the imaginal world, the symbol itself is no longer something which hides the thing symbolized. It is, quite simply, the form assumed on this level by the transcendent reality, and this form is this reality. Thus, instead of allegory, one could perhaps speak of tautegory.

The Art of the Possible

Even though Reagan proved deficits don't matter, the Obama administration has proposed budget cuts that will affect Endangered Species Act protections:

The Obama administration has proposed to cut funding for listing of endangered species by 5 percent. Currently, there are 249 species that are designated as candidates for listing as endangered species. Candidate species, including the New England cottontail, yellow-billed loon, Yosemite toad, and many others, are species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined do need protection, but for which they claim they lack the resources to actually provide that protection. Many animals and plants have been waiting decades for protection, and most are gravely endangered. To date, the administration has only protected two species under the Endangered Species Act. By comparison, the Clinton administration protected an average of 65 species per year....

The proposed budget also cuts funding for candidate conservation, which is supposed to provide protection to candidate species in the absence of listing, by almost 9 percent; cuts funding for endangered species law enforcement by almost 4 percent; and is nearly flat for recovery.

Oddly enough, the administration has also declined to raise the federal fee applied to livestock that are grazed on public lands:

On Friday the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management announced that in 2010 it would not increase the paltry $1.35 monthly fee charged for each cow and calf that the livestock industry grazes on western public land. The fee remains far below what the agencies spend to administer grazing permits, it remains far below market rates, and it remains far short of providing revenue needed to correct the severe ecological damage caused by livestock grazing.

Habitat destruction caused by livestock is a primary factor contributing to the decline of threatened and endangered species including the desert tortoise, Mexican spotted owl, southwestern willow flycatcher, least Bell’s vireo, Mexican gray wolf, Oregon spotted frog, Chiricahua leopard frog, in addition to dozens of other species of imperiled mammals, fish, amphibians, and spring snails that occur on western public land. Livestock grazing is also a primary factor contributing to unnaturally severe western wildfires, watershed degradation, soil loss, and the spread of invasive plants.

Could a higher grazing fee prevent cuts to ESA protections that are necessary in part because of the livestock industry?

Who knows? Who cares?

In other news, Phoenix, AZ will make up its budget shortfalls by taxing staple foods:

Phoenix's mayor argues that while people need to eat, they also need basic services like police and firemen, and without closing gaps in the city's budget with a food tax, they wont be available.

(Photo: "A trough stands out on a landscape made barren by grazing. - Awapa Plateau, Dixie National Forest." Via Utah Environmental Congress.)

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.)

Struggling to Cope

If it's snowing in the Northern Hemisphere, in the middle of winter, global warming must be a hoax. It's just common sense!

Granted, South Australia recently "issued a statewide 'catastrophic' fire danger warning after temperatures passed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit)." And people are collapsing from heat stroke in Melbourne, which "sweltered overnight, with the mercury hovering above 34C for most of the night." And Australian farmers are expecting "massive crop losses" thanks to prolonged high temperatures.

But none of this does anything to change the fact that the UK has been decidedly chilly. Greg Pollowitz has the details of this developing scandal, which you won't hear about in the MSM. Apparently, Great Britain is covered in snow and ice and sleet; these are empirically verifiable phenomena that all honest readers must concede are the polar opposite of "warming." How's that for an inconvenient truth, doomsayers?

A garden-variety liar would leave it at that. But Pollowitz has bigger fish to fry, and so he quotes this dispatch from the frontlines of Teh New Ice Age:

Hospitals have been struggling to cope with rising numbers of patients who have broken bones after falling on icy paths.

Brace yourself, friends, because here's what Pollowitz has to say about this sad news:

"Struggling to cope?" I guess socialized medicine only works properly on sunny days.

Bwahahahahaha! This is funny, see, 'cause there's a natural disaster underway, and many more people than usual are seeking medical attention, and it's overwhelming local medical facilities!

Aren't you glad it it can't happen here?

(Photo via NASA/GSFC.)

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 Big Questions

Barry Goldman is worried that we are becoming "a nation of fruitcakes." Once upon a time, y'see, Americans were reasonable and had a certain inborn respect for whatever authority they happened to find emotionally or intellectually or legally compelling. But nowadays, we're prone to syncretic religion and communication with the dead and Lord only knows what else.

A new poll by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life concludes: "Large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts."

Shocking. It makes me long for the good old days, when Americans entrusted their souls to Madame Blavatsky, or the Mormons, or the Free Market, and the belief in ghosts was as rare as a sober Irishman.

On second thought, maybe the problem isn't simply that Americans believe outlandish things. Maybe it's that they can easily find confirmation of these beliefs on the Internets. It used to be that if you wanted to know the divine meaning of a monstrous birth in the next village, you had to buy a broadsheet from some itinerant peddler. Now, you can simply visit www.poughkeepsiedevilchild.com.

On third thought, maybe the problem is that "people feel entitled to make choices about things that used to be within the exclusive purview of the priestly class." The recent activities of Anne Hutchinson are a sobering example of this tendency, and a reminder that we who dwell in in these latter days must keep close watch against the spirit of Apostasy.

Then again, perhaps this national crisis really boils down to a lack of consensus. Perhaps the trouble is not so much that we embrace false beliefs, as that we don't embrace them unanimously.

This is genuinely scary. And it's scary in a new way. For the last several thousand years, large groups of human beings enjoyed consensus about the big questions. We may have believed that the universe rested on the back of a giant tortoise and the tortoise rested on the back of an elephant...but at least there was widespread agreement.

To be fair, some people "enjoyed" this consensus a bit less than others. But I suppose it served them right for feeling entitled to make choices about things that used to be within the exclusive purview of the priestly class. As John Winthrop wisely said, "Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you."

Of course, the larger problem is that for the first time in recorded history, "we have no agreement on what constitutes a fact." As William of Ockham recently noted on his blog:

[I]t is absurd to claim that I have scientific knowledge with respect to this or that conclusion by reason of the fact that you know principles which I accept on faith because you tell them to me.

All the same, there's a lot to be said for accepting things on faith, so long as it leads to the sort of widespread agreement we enjoyed before the Internets came along and ruined everything.

We used to be a nation with a broad consensus. If you had a religious question, you asked a religious leader. If you had a scientific question, you asked a scientist.

And if you wanted to know something about history, you asked a historian, instead of cobbling together a bunch of harebrained bullshit in order to flatter your own hopelessly confused prejudices.

Those were great days, indeed. And their like will not be here again.

Our Watermelons Grow Big

If you're a teabagger -- and who isn't, deep down? -- WorldNetDaily has an offer you can't refuse:

For just $29.95 you can send an individualized notice to every member of Congress in the form of a "pink slip" with their name on it and your name on it.

WND informs us that more than five million of these pink slips have already been sent. Of course, that doesn't mean five million pink slips went out to each member of Congress (though I doubt they'd be upset if their slow-witted readers came to that conclusion). Five million is the (alleged) grand total, meaning that each congressperson would've gotten roughly ten thousand copies.

"It's an amazing feat, to get that many slips to Congress," [Rep. Steve] King told WND.

Rep. King is the man who revealed that illegal immigrants murder 12 Americans every single day, so you know you can trust his down-home, folksy brand o' figgerin'.

The slip itself is a little masterpiece of agitprop, comprising "four governmental plans that are unacceptable":

• government health care
• cap and trade
• "hate crimes"
• any more spending

No more spending! You have to admit, $29.95 is a small price to pay to baffle your representatives with an impossible, incoherent ultimatum that you'd soon come to regret if it were actually honored. It'd cost you well over a hundred dollars to troll each member of Congress yourself (to say nothing of the hours you'd have to spend in a Soviet-style line at the Post Office, wedged between an overweight welfare queen and an illegal immigrant with Morgellons disease).

The only thing that could possibly stop this populist juggernaut is a shortage of pink paper.

In the first week, suppliers of paper reported the campaign had completely tapped the nation's reserves of 8.5 x 11 inch pink paper. As the last full pallet of pink paper was delivered to the printer, new supplies had to be ordered and manufactured.

The funny thing is, WND has photos of the slips, and they're clearly much smaller than 8.5 x 11. I'd say you could probably get three on a single page, or maybe even five. But for the sake of argument, let's say you can only fit two. That'd require 2,500,000 sheets, which is 5,000 reams, or 500 bales. I'm not convinced that's going to make a huge dent in "the nation's reserves."

Once you put aside these minor quibbles, though, it's hard to argue with campaign organizer Janet Border's statement that "this is already the most successful grass-roots effort in history."

In other news, I'm happy to announce that Bouphonia had its one-billionth visitor today. According to my calculations, this makes it the most popular blog ever. Tonight, my 80 wives and I will be celebrating this milestone with several thousand drinks at more than a hundred of our favorite nightspots. If you happen to run into us, feel free to regard me from afar in an attitude of hushed reverence. Since I'm well over ten feet tall, with fists the size of Christmas hams, I tend to stand out in a crowd.

(Photo via the Wisconsin Historical Society.)

Data and Logic

Steve Levitt explains economics:

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering....

And ocean acidification:

"Of course, ocean acidification is an important issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it's actually, that's actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that."

(Photo by Rakka.)

A Critical Standpoint

Over at Phi Beta Cons, David French discusses creationism, evolution, and related stuff about things. The occasion of his remarks is an interesting article detailing conflicts at Christian colleges "between those Christian biologists who...believe that God created the heavens and earth through evolutionary processes, those who believe in a six-24-hour-day creation and a 'young earth,' and those who fall somewhere in between." (Believe it or not, some Christian college professors can actually lose their jobs for teaching standard biology; I thought only intelligent design theorists suffered that sort of persecution.)

French's basic position is that religious schools are not obliged to hire professors who believe in evolution. Which is quite true. But somehow, he gets from there to here:

In many ways, the community of Christian schools represents a "marketplace of ideas" far more open than the parallel community of secular schools — where ideological orthodoxy is rigidly enforced not just within but among the institutions.

Amen, brother! Christian schools are at liberty to teach that God created the cosmos in six days, or six years, or six millennia, or whatever: Thus do a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend. But secular schools are prejudiced in favor of dreary dogmas like descent with modification, and an earth that's older than 7,000 years. And where's the fun in that?

It sounds as though French would like to see colleges teach different versions of biology. Yale could focus on neo-Lamarckism, MIT on evo-devo, Patrick Henry on craniometry and psychometrics, and so forth. (As for community colleges, they can teach whatever theories are popular in their respective locales. After all, the customer is always right!)

I'm as committed to problematizing exclusivist metanarratives and delegitimating monologic desire as the next gink. And yet, I can't quite manage to take French's brand of cultural pluralism seriously. Although I don't know where he stands on ebonics, I remember that conservatives tended to be very upset by the idea that anyone would dream of teaching it. And I've read Phi Beta Cons regularly enough to know that its authors will often cast aspersions on a given college simply by noting that it offers a course in Latina/o studies or postcolonial literature.

Apparently, it'd be intellectually healthy for evolutionary biology to fracture into five thousand bickering splinter groups...but God forbid anyone should suggest that there's more to studying literature than defending the reputation of Teh World's Greatest Authors against the upstart claims of ethnic arrivistes. Certain fields need more orthodoxy, not less, and the folks at PBC know 'em when they see 'em.

Here's a theory you've probably never heard before. According to French, schools that teach young-earth creationism are still teaching students what they need to know about evolutionary biology, if only to reveal it as a snare and a delusion:

I would be surprised if the principles of evolutionary biology were not taught even at schools dominated by a "young Earth" viewpoint. Professors know evolutionary biology and students learn it. They may learn it from a critical standpoint, but they still learn it.

If a teacher were to tell me, on the authority of Lord Kelvin, that airplanes can't fly because they're too heavy, I don't think I could say that I'd learned the basic principles of aviation. Putting that little detail aside, I'm sure French would be just as happy to apply this clever argument to, say, the Marxist critique of imperialism: Students may be learning about the Spanish-American War from a "critical standpoint," but they're still learning about it! And if David Horowitz doesn't like it, he's cordially invited to go fuck himself.

And another thing:

I hate the use of the term "literal" or "literalist" when describing those who believe the Bible is God's word. I have never in my entire life met any single person who believed there was no metaphor in the Bible. So, the actual debate within orthodox Christianity is not between "literalists" and others; it's between those who disagree over the meaning and intent of words, when both sides believe those are the words God intended to use.

He's right, in the trivial sense that no one takes every word of the Bible literally. Most of the people who claim that the universe was really created in six days, and that Eve was really fashioned from Adam's rib, are still able to recognize suggestions like "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor" as confoundingly polyvalent metaphors.

But he's wrong in the context of his own goddamn post, since the conflict he's discussing is not "within orthodox Christianity," but between scientists and young-earth creationists. And since the latter treat the Bible's account of Creation and the Flood as actual events whose traces are detectable by science, calling them "literalists" seems pretty reasonable. So there.

As for the strife at Christian colleges, we can only hope that it'll be resolved amicably once the Conservative Bible is wrested at last from the world of Ideal Forms.