Lance Burnham runs through the standard objections to the "alarmist" view of climate change:
It's depressing, and therefore incorrect.
Al Gore's house is too big!
Climatologists have demonstrated that the climate changed in the past, even before human civilization existed, so how can they possibly blame humans now?
Teh Commies!!!1
The sun is to blame for climate change, assuming it's actually happening, so lie back and enjoy the ride!
That said, he does have a couple of clever new arguments up his sleeve.
The world is a complex equilibrium and our creator, if that was the case, installed a lot of checks and balances.
At first glance, this is similar to David Limbaugh's claim that the earth's delicate balance proves that it's not delicately balanced. Burnham's innovation is to point out that if a creator gave us us checks and balances, we'd have checks and balances, so we must, so there. Which is a weird argument, given that Burnham worries about the effects of global cooling, and says that "Alberta is known to once have been a tropical sea" (once in a while climatologists actually do get something right, God bless 'em).
In short, dramatic climate change is perfectly natural, which proves that the climate is stable, except when it's not. Or to put it another way, here's a bunny with a pancake on its head.
Let's take a closer look at how these checks and balances work:
The carbon cycle is inherently balanced as an increase in carbon production in the atmosphere is followed by an increase in carbon storage and consumption by plants and algae.
That's not quite accurate...not least because what's pertinent here is the rate of carbon storage relative to the rate of emissions. But what's really problematic is the assumption that the process of achieving "equilibrium" will be pleasant for humanity, which Burnham himself admits is not necessarily the case.
Here's some more of the same:
And in global terms, 70 per cent of the world is covered by water and correspondingly 70 per cent of the climate is set by the sea regardless of what we do on land. If the world gets warmer, more cloud forms over the sea, reflects sunlight, and cools the world.
Again, that's not how it works. And so what if it were? What we're interested in is the transition from one state to another, and what it means for sea level, rainfall, plants and animals, or what have you. In other words, the "awful effects" of climate change, in which Burnham refuses to believe, would result from the very processes he invokes as wise provisions of a loving God.
To Burnham's credit, he understands that "in the form of fossil fuels, energy is a somewhat [!] finite resource." This leads him to the dazzling conclusion that we should "unleash the creativity and power of humanity moving the production and use of energy up the chain closer to where it all comes from which is the sun."
This cheerful outlook is what separates him from "the nihilistic Gore and Suzuki" -- both of whom have consistently recommended mass suicide rather than research into alternative energy -- and obliges him to spout disinformation dreamed up at thinktanks funded by the fossil fuel industry.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to beat my head on Watertiger's desk.
In a column titled "The Polar Bears Are All Right," Michael Goldfarb argues that although Arctic ice has been melting, it's also increased very slightly this winter, which may not impress climatologists much, but what the hell do they know?
"Nobody has much idea of anything," Richard Lindzen points out, while sawing earnestly at the branch to which he's clinging. Some people say we'll see ice-free Arctic summers in a few years; others say it'll take decades. As for Lindzen, he's not so sure; the world is a labyrinth and a continued dark conceit. But still, the ice does seem to be melting, possibly. Goldfarb will grant you that.
Which to any layman will raise an obvious question: So what?
We don't know exactly what this'll do to that special portion of the climate that hangs above our blessed land like the ceiling of a chapel; the sensible thing, therefore, is to assume that it's going to make us happier, richer, more powerful.
The polar bears may not be all right, after all. But what have they done for you lately? If they were good it would be seen, as Donne says: good is as visible as green.
One thing we're gonna do is put the goddamn Eskimos to work. The way it stands now, Nanook catches a seal, and maybe his dumpy wives and his squalling brats eat for a week or two. What do you get out of it? Nothing, that's what. But teach him to work on an oil rig, and he's working for the benefit of you and me and all mankind:
The Inuit might find better work in the oil and gas sector, as high energy prices and melting ice make the Arctic an increasingly attractive area for exploration.
Things are so very uncertain, you understand. An ice-free Arctic may cause problems, or it may not. But in the meantime, there's oil to be had, and the outcome of that is certain: Comfort, convenience, the rosy glow of contentment on the faces of your golden-haired moppets.
Lindzen says polar bears are increasing in number. How could a population increase, and yet be threatened? It just doesn't add up. Besides, "they're not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers." Which, in the Arctic, is a very long way indeed. It's almost the distance from Kotlik to Unalakleet.
And mark this: an economist of Goldfarb's acquaintance has challenged our hidebound assumptions about polar bears and ice and stuff. He observes that some animals have thrived in warmer climates, even as you and I. Why shouldn't polar bears? On the other hand, and this can't be overemphasized, so what if they don't?
Can a polar bear's happiness really be allowed to impede the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations?
Elizabeth Whelan has yet another bone to pick with the Scientific Establishment:
Medical journals now routinely attempt to ferret out what they perceive as "conflict of interest" by requiring that authors disclose any funding they have received from drug companies.
While I'd like to think that these journals have some degree of highmindedness about science, there's no doubt that the appearance of objectivity and transparency helps them to compete in their field. Whelan wants them to forgo this advantage, even though their readership demands it; what she offers in return, besides her personal Certificate of Purity, is unclear.
Oh, and remember that stuff she said a moment ago, about how people are making too much of a fuss about conflicts of interest and guilt by association? Well, don't get too carried away by it.
The Nader-inspired Center for Science in the Public Interest touts its "Integrity Project," which separates what they perceive as integrity-rich scientists (who do not accept industry funding) from the integrity-challenged scientists (with some type of link to corporate dollars).
If it's important for us to know that CSPI was "inspired" by Ralph Nader, you'd think it'd also be important for us to know that a study on coal-plant emissions was paid for by the coal industry. But for some reason, Whelan's brand of kneejerk green-baiting and circumstantial ad hominem doesn't qualify as "scientific McCarthyism." To be guilty of that crimson sin, a journal must attempt to shore up its credibility by strengthening editorial standards that it only relaxed thanks to years of corporate influence.
Whelan managed to overcome her own objections to accepting corporate money quite some time ago, but don't take that as evidence of bias. Her concern is fundamentally humanitarian: she worries that if these journals don't accept her diktat on Scientificacious Integritude, it'll deal a deathblow to Progress.
The current obsession with corporate ties as a "conflict of interest" is not harmless. It has led to regulations and restrictions in government and academia that have restricted scientists, preventing collaboration with external scientific experts and slowing development of new technologies. Such arbitrary guidelines stifle the progress of public health.
Fever-dream laissez-faire horseshit does that too, last time I checked, in part by insisting that public health goals should be set by a handful of catastrophically corrupt private firms that buy scientists as casually as I'd buy a bag of peanuts.
Again, many of these journals are published privately; surely Whelan's splendid libertarian principles would allow them to set strict editorial guidelines, even if scientific ethics didn't oblige them to do so.
As for the scientists who are griping because they can't get published in a respected journal, just because they saw fit to spend a decade or two suckling with robotic fixity at Monsanto's teat, I'd say they deserve the sort of readymade answer libertarians have for the grievances of the poor: Recognition is a privilege, not a right, and you made bad personal decisions.
Having spent the past few weeks insisting that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's paranoid style has absolutely no place in American politics, Townhall's columnists can now return to more pressing concerns, like the War on Fatherhood.
Albert Mohler interviews Stephen Baskerville, who has written a book about this problem. You can tell that it's very serious, because it has a military metaphor right in the title, and deals with the victimization of men.
The root of this crisis is no-fault divorce, an invention of the "Divorce Industrial Complex" which allows one partner to get a divorce even when the other partner doesn't want one:
It really is unilateral divorce — involuntary divorce. It allows one spouse to force divorce on the other without the involuntary spouse having done anything wrong. In other words, your spouse can divorce you without you having done anything legally wrong or agreeing to the divorce.
Lest you think this complaint is directed at the very concept of female autonomy, rest assured that although "the overwhelming victims of this are fathers...it happens to mothers as well." In order to save this minority of wives from the shame of being cast aside like a cigarette butt, it's right and natural that we should imprison the rest of them in miserable or even dangerous marriages until their husbands grow tired of the arrangement.
Legally speaking, Baskerville's claim is that marriage is a contract, and should accordingly remain in effect unless its terms are broken by one or both parties. You'd think that not loving someone anymore would easily qualify as nonperformance. But Baskerville, who's on the faculty at Patrick Henry College, and is therefore competent to "shape our culture with timeless biblical values," answers to a higher authority and expects women to do the same.
Arguing that women must stay married until their husbands say otherwise isn't very popular, so Baskerville switches gears and asks us to think of the precious little moppets who are growing up without the benefit of having their parents trapped in a loveless sham of a marriage.
[T]he father’s contact with the children when it is not authorized by the government becomes a crime. He can be arrested for trying to see his own children without having done anything legally wrong.
Again taking this argument at face value, if marriage is a legally binding contract, then it's a matter for the courts by definition. And one thing the courts are going to decide is who gets custody of any children, and under what terms. Baskerville knows his audience well, which is why he uses the terrifying phrase "authorized by the government." But to the extent that this is accurate, it was at least as accurate back in those dear dead days before no-fault divorce came along, as the laziest perusal of 1950s melodrama will demonstrate.
Still, libertarianism is all the rage, so the problem has to be presented as one of government tyranny:
[W]hat’s most important about it is this huge machine is government based. It’s not just private entrepreneurs in this case, it is government officials. It's lawyers, it's judges and it’s the huge social services bureaucracies … it’s a huge entourage that is not only profiting from divorce, but increasing government power over private lives in very dangerous ways.
One old-school option, as we know, was for the government to force you to stay married to a person you can't stand. That's not good enough for Baskerville, though, who says that "simply repealing 'no fault divorce' and reinstating fault in divorce would not solve the problem."
He doesn't specify what would solve the problem, but it's not too hard to guess. Given that his first aim is to stoke male rage and self-pity, you can bet that his second is to preach of the coming kingdom in which legal rights and men's rights will be synonymous. Like the rest of his crowd, he believes that once he's stirred up enough hatred of government and hatred of women, and extorted enough faith in God The Father, generations of long-suffering men will rise up and force our nation's self-centered bitches back into line. At which point, "the government" can get back to its proper business of rubberstamping the natural order.
Even without reading between the lines, Baskerville's rhetoric is as offensive as it is dangerous. But it'll never seem as outrageous as Rev. Wright's remarks. Invoking conspiracies and nursing grievances always seems worse, somehow, when minorities do it...perhaps because it's so obvious that they're mere puppets of the international neo-Marxist conspiracy, which would like nothing better than to see White America laid low.
You know what I really enjoy? Being lectured on science by people who don't understand the first thing about inductive reasoning. Here's Nigel Lawson, who has a new book on climate change coming out:
Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation.
Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age.
Fun! Now let me have a try. We were previously told that saccharin and coffee could cause cancer. Now, people are calling chromium-VI a carcinogen! As if!
I like the part about running out of natural resources, too. Thank heavens that myth has finally been laid to rest.
You have to marvel at the appetite of amateur climate discoverists for arguments that are based entirely on the author's canny assessment of their own stupidity. Lawson appeals to the everyday resentments of these yearning masses with frequent references to the "fashionable" theory of climate change; it's yet another symptom of bourgie hauteur, y'see, like eating sushi or staring rapturously at blank canvases.
And just in case any of them have some residual or larval respect for scientific expertise, he's not above making shit up:
Now, I readily admit that I am not a scientist; but then neither are the vast majority of those who espouse the currently fashionable madness. Moreover, most of those scientists who speak with such certainty about global warming and climate change are not climate scientists, or Earth scientists of any kind, and thus have no special knowledge to contribute.
The plot thickens! Now, it's not just dissenting climatologists who've been frozen out of the debate; it's climatologists, period. Surely Mr. Lawson is a queer farfetched man.
He goes on to observe that "carbon dioxide, like water vapour and oxygen, is not only completely harmless but is an essential element in our life support system." Since oxygen is completely harmless, I'm sure he'd be happy to be sealed hermetically in a chamber full of it for a day or two. And since water vapor is harmless, there's no reason he shouldn't be able to survive indefinitely at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. After all, it's a matter of quantity, not quality.
From here, the blizzard of nonsense approaches whiteout conditions. Increased CO2 levels are largely a result of population increase, so be fruitful and multiply! Without CO2, plants couldn't exist, so reducing CO2 levels would leave the world as bleak and barren as the interior of Lawson's skull. A warmer climate couldn't possibly reduce food production, because all plants require is high levels of carbon dioxide and plenty of sunlight.
The climate isn't warming, but we'd be better off if it were, so let's learn to adapt to it. Doing nothing is better than doing something stupid, so let's use highly theoretical geoengineering techniques "to cool the planet artificially," while making sure that the developing world has unfettered access to "cheap carbon-based energy."
Climate alarmists are all Marxists, searching for a new creed after the collapse of socialism...and besides, asking workers to reduce their energy consumption is typical bourgeois mystification. Capitalism has made everyone rich and happy, which has led to "a new age of unreason" in the form of doomstruck secularism. Alarmism is the most terrible danger we face, and it's being promoted by a cabal of unregenerate commies and atheists who want to destroy us all.
To put it another way, Lawson never borrowed a kettle from you, and he returned it unbroken, and besides, it was already broken when you gave it to him.
The title of his book, you ask? An Appeal to Reason.
There are few angels that sing. There are few dogs that bark. A thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand. But Cerberilla affinis is an immense angel.
A new Senate bill would prevent Crisis Pregnancy Centers from advertising themselves as providers of "abortion services":
Rep. [Carolyn] Maloney said, "Although I may disagree with their views, many crisis pregnancy centers are forthright and respectful and they have a right to exist. Unfortunately, some take a more underhanded approach to lure in women seeking abortions by using tactics that should be illegal. Many women who face unwanted pregnancies find themselves in a very difficult, very personal situation. They shouldn't have to face the added stress of deciphering whether or not the clinic they choose offers legitimate medical services."
The panty-sniffing faux-Christian ghoul Phill Kline has suffered a legal setback:
A Kansas agency has refused to turn over abortion records subpoenaed by Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline. And if Kline doesn’t get them, Planned Parenthood attorneys said Monday, Kline’s criminal case against Planned Parenthood could crumble.
A federal judge has ruled in favor of an endangered lynx:
A federal judge today ruled that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is in violation of the Endangered Species Act for allowing trappers to set traps and snares that catch, injure, and kill Canada lynx, a protected species. The case was filed on behalf of Born Free USA, united with the Animal Protection Institute, and the Center for Biological Diversity. The court ordered the state to take all action necessary to ensure that no further takings of lynx will occur by trapping activities within core lynx habitat.
In another victory for the CBD, the deranged Shadowrock development has been halted:
In March 2007, the Army authorized the Shadowrock developer to start grading in critical habitat for the Peninsular bighorn sheep and alter and fill in stretches of pristine Chino Canyon Creek, home to the endangered least Bell’s vireo, in order to construct luxury houses and golf courses. The Center for Biological Diversity challenged the authorization and the Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion in federal court in April 2007. That May, the Army Corps suspended the authorization and re-initiated consultation. Finally, this week, the Army Corps revoked the authorization.
I've said it before, but CBD is a remarkably effective organization. If you've got a bit of cash to spare, you might consider sending it their way.
Waterbirds in Cambodia have been making a comeback thanks to relatively modest protections:
According to a report released today by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), several species of rare waterbirds from Cambodia's famed Tonle Sap region have staged remarkable comebacks, thanks to a project involving a single team of park rangers to provide 24-hour protection to breeding colonies. The project pioneered a novel approach: employing former hunters and egg collectors to protect and monitor the colonies, thereby guaranteeing the active involvement of local communities in the initiative.
The report shows that some species, which include varieties of storks, pelicans, and ibises, have rebounded 20-fold since 2001, when WCS and the Ministry of Environment of the Royal Government of Cambodia established the conservation project.
A ban on soy production in the Amazon seems to be having good effects:
"Without a doubt the results show that soy moratorium is being respected and that is good news," Paulo Adario, coordinator of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. The report found no new soybean plantations in any of the 193 areas that showed deforestation of 100 hectares (250 acres) or more between August 2006 and August 2007.
India's telemedicine partnership with Ethiopia seems to be promising, too (despite certain troubling aspects that are noted in the article):
"We want Africans to share expertise with each other and for areas with few doctors to be linked to hospitals in cities so doctors there can fill the gap," said Ratan Singh, project director for the Indian government agency responsible for implementing the technology and training Ethiopians to use it.
Clear Channel and CBS have been trying to argue that a list of their LA-area billboards comprises a trade secret; apparently, billboards stop being effective when people find out where they are. A judge has quite properly told them to bugger off:
“The city is obliged to give out public information,” said Judge James Chalfant at the April 2 hearing that included lawyers from Clear Channel and CBS, the Los Angeles City Attorney's office and the Weekly. Chalfant told the two advertising giants that, despite their claims that the locations and ownership of billboards in Los Angeles should be kept secret from competitors, “Your competitor has the same right to the list"....
Los Angeles officials have long suspected that 40 percent of the 11,000 billboards in L.A. are illegal. Many activists and city leaders have demanded that a list be made public so that activists and others can fight the visual blight problem.
As part of its deadly plot to emasculate honest and vigorous men like Al Smith, PG&E is dramatically expanding solar-thermal power in the Southwest:
Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced today that it has entered into a series of contracts with BrightSource Energy, Inc. for renewable solar power. The first three contracts are for a total of 500 megawatts (MW) of power to be supplied from three solar thermal electric generating projects. PG&E also signed two contracts for options on an additional 400 MW of solar power, which would bring the total amount of power purchased under these five agreements to 900 MW.
Meanwhile, SoCal Edison has noticed that unused roofs are a good place for solar panels (this is an idea that your humble correspondent, who is no slouch when it comes to discovering the utterly fucking obvious, has been shrieking about for years). Here's a Flash animation detailing the project.
One the thing that sun can't do, it turns out, is take the blame for climate change:
New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases. The new evidence shows no reliable connection between the cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover.
Lauded and criticised for offering a possible way out of the dangers of man made climate change, UK TV Channel 4's programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", broadcast in 2007, suggested that global warming is due to a decrease in cosmic rays over the last hundred years....The new research shows that change in cloud cover over the Earth does not correlate to changes in cosmic ray intensity. Neither does it show increases and decreases during the sporadic bursts and decreases in the cosmic ray intensity which occur regularly.
While the Denial Industry wastes time, energy and money trying to spin this PR disaster, Inhabitat reports on a factory that runs on waste oat husks:
Scott’s Porage Oats, a Quaker Oats Factory at Uthrogle Mills in Scotland is installing a combined heat and power biomass boiler that will enable the factory to become carbon-neutral, running entirely on waste oat husks. The husks, removed from the oats during the milling process, will provide 9,709 MWhrs of electricity and 10,902 MWhrs of steam a year, reducing its emissions by 9,000 tonnes a year—equivalent to the annual emissions of 3,000 cars.
It also discusses an interesting new type of solar panel:
The development utilizes specially calibrated ROYGBIV panels to collect solar energy over a broad spectrum of wavelengths, yielding an unheard-of energy efficiency rating that is 7 times greater than conventional panels.
Swing by the Mississippi River a few years from now, and you may be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of miniature electric turbines dotting the fast moving river's bed. All the electricity generated by this massive "in stream" hydrokinetic project - around 1,600-MW - would be enough to power up to 1.5 million homes, according to Daniel R. Irvin, the chief executive of Massachusetts startup Free Flow Power Corp.
Siting and wildlife protection are concerns, course, but the basic idea is a good one.
Meanwhile, Grist has compiled a nice timeline of defeats for the coal industry over the last year.
Five endangered kakapo chicks have hatched in New Zealand:
A species of flightless parrot edged back from extinction with the hatching of five new chicks in New Zealand in recent weeks and two more on the way, officials said Monday.
The latest births of owl-like kakapos in southern New Zealand brought the population of the rare bird to just 91, said Emma Neill, a senior official of a Department of Conservation program to save the parrot.
And on Santa Cruz Island, a pair of bald eagles has hatched two chicks:
Russell Galipeau, superintendent of the park, said it was thrilling to see the birds' recovery on the island.
"In just six years we have progressed from releasing birds to the wild to birds being born in the wild," he said.
A dam has been breached in Montana so that toxic sediment can be removed from its reservoir.
Its breaching represents the first time a dam has been taken out specifically as part of a multiyear process to clean up a toxic river bottom. The lower water level with the dam gone will allow engineers easier access for cleaning.
Contractors will spend several years digging up toxic sediments 25-feet-(eight meter)deep in some places. Eventually, the former reservoir is slated to become a recreation area.
Orion has an interesting article on the debate over what to do with an urban wilderness in Brooklyn:
This is not a park, or a piece of preserved nature, but a previously developed area in the process of reverting to wildness. Urban wildernesses tend to happen by mistake. In a city like New York, where space is at such a premium that former synagogues, sugar factories, and schools have all been reborn as luxury condos, a wilderness can only be the result of inattention.
A new meteor crater has been discovered in Australia...on Google Maps:
Hickman found the crater whilst exploring the satellite imagery of the area on Google Earth. The crater is 270m across but had not been previously discovered. Arthur Hickman has been rewarded for his eagle eyed discovery by having the crater named after him. It is now known as the Hickman Crater.
The Bioscope alerts me to The Open Video Project, which includes "187 Edison production from the Library of Congress, dating from the 1890s and 1900s." It also recommends this book, which I'm going to stumble out and buy this very day; I know of at least one occasional reader who'll be tempted to do likewise.
Message in a Bottle allows you to track the progress of seafaring bottles via GPS:
Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.
Each non-GPS bottle contains a message from residents of Ramsgate to the residents of The Chatham Islands, a pencil and an instruction leaflet which requests anyone finding a bottle to report to this website and record where and when the bottle was found. In addition they are requested to document their find on a form inside the bottle before returning the bottle to the sea to continue its journey. Details of found bottles may be viewed on the view found bottles page.
If you're in Los Angeles, be sure to visit Birdfoot, a photo exhibit on the Mississippi River Delta (the book version is available here). If that sounds interesting, you'll probably also enjoy this map-based artwork by Sue Beyer.
The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection "brings together a remarkable selection of digitised letters, notes, articles and even some of the insect specimens he collected on his travels." It also includes some of his architectural drawings for a proposed natural history museum:
I'll leave you with this scene from the life of Chip, The Wooden Man, circa 1928.
(Illustration at top: "Edward Henry Windred (1875-1953) was a popular painter of racing pigeons between the wars. In the 1920s and 1930s, owners of prize winning pigeons would often commission a painting of them. Windred was one of the most prolific painters, and also ran a barbers shop in New Cross where he lived at 352 New Cross Road. People would bring their pigeons to the shop where he would paint them." Via Transpontine.)
Thers is developing a veritable Barnum Museum of conservatarian bombast. Get a load of this specimen:
Unfortunately, I don’t have time enough right now to give these thoughts the treatment I think they deserve. The importunate urgency in our age is very strong: it militates against my inclination to let them marinate for awhile, in the hopes that a structured essay may issue from the marinade.
This is entertaining, God knows, but it's also educational. In the first few decades of the 20th century, one of the things that made blacks so comical to regular people was their alleged fondness for big words, which was supposedly an attempt to gain status by acting white. The historian Ronald L.F. Davis evocatively describes that era's frenzy for songs and plays that showed blacks "aping white elites to comic effect, trying to ice skate, clumsily walking along a high fashion boulevard, haplessly trying to ride horses in the manner of an English gentleman, and strutting proudly in exaggerated dress at parties and 'darkey' balls."
Reading Cella, it struck me that these stereotypes are much more true of bone-ignorant conservative whites than they ever were of the blacks for whom they were invented. What is Cella doing if not "aping white elites to comic effect"? Der Kulturkampf is essentially a cakewalk, in which hard-right bullyboys vie to represent "civilization" by strutting around in tuxedos made from its scraps. Dime-a-dozen phrases from Plato and Burke, tin-eared attempts at antique eloquence, and metric assloads of earnest exhortation...these are the rhetorical equivalents of the traditional cakewalk contestant's ludicrously oversized top hat.
The difference, obviously, is that cakewalks mocked white elitism; the haughty prancing of Cella & Co is an absolutely humorless celebration of it. It all has to do with monocles, mint juleps on the veranda, and the pleasure that comes with perceiving oneself as a thinker of Elevated Thoughts. Movement Conservatism is a sort of endless Renaissance Faire for people who think saying "prithee" makes them Sir Philip Sidney.
And now, having distilled these lucubrations into a true aqua divina, and served it in nuce lest this too-puissant spirit should overmaster your own, I must away betimes.
Al Smith fires up his coal-powered mindreading machine, and immediately recognizes Earth Hour as a plot that's bringing us several steps closer to our troglodyte future:
No single event has more perfectly revealed the true intent of the radical environmentalist movement than the tragicomic Earth Hour farce staged around the world on March 29. From Australia to the Peoples Republic of San Francisco, "green" zealots convinced gullible individuals, local politicians and frightened business owners to turn off their lights, their appliances and their electrical machinery to "save" energy and retard global warming.
Australia and the PRSF both have some experience with drought, and have accordingly attempted to "save" water by "using" "less" of it. The principle doesn't seem that different to me: there's a resource that you're low on, so you attempt to use less of it. If Smith were threatened by a water shortage, he'd presumably turn his taps on full blast, in order to show the hippies what's what.
When you're attempting to get people outraged about the tyrannical, world-threatening insanity of a voluntary public awareness campaign, it helps if you can point to a single person who was harmed by it in any way. Smith can't, of course, so he proceeds instead to the slippery slope argument: Dim a city's lights for an hour this month, and next month you'll be in the Gulag, reading On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People by the light of the silvery moon.
For the organizers of Earth Hour, the only approved end point is darkened cities, Americans huddled together over the light of flickering candles, vehicles abandoned on deserted streets, silent machines growing dusty in empty factories.
This is inevitable because environmentalists are against all forms of energy generation in principle. See how clear things become when you refuse to succumb to alarmism?
Speaking of which, civilization itself is at stake, the center cannot hold, mene mene tekel upharsin, beware the jubjub bird, someone left a cake out in the rain, and so forth:
One cannot but be reminded of the famous phrase uttered by British diplomat Sir Edward Grey, on the very eve of the outbreak of World War I: "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
On the very eve of it, do you hear? If that doesn't give you some idea of what's at stake here, I don't know what will.
In other news, the dirty fucking hippies at the Royal Society have laid down their hash pipes long enough to announce that "new coal-fired power stations that fail to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2020 should be closed down."
Henry Payne, tanned and refreshed after a cruise in the Caribbean, is ready to apply himself anew to the problems of our time.
Greens, of course, use the world’s islands as poster-children for the destructive effects of rising sea waters, but climate change is the least of the Caribbean islands’ worries. What these poor economies crave is more fossil fuel, not less.
If you know Payne at all, you know that this is his answer to everything. Is your house on fire? You need more fossil fuels! Do you suffer from the suppurating gleet? More fossil fuels! Are you puzzling over the status of diachronic contingency in post-Scotist ontology? Fossil fuels!
Here are the symptoms of the Caribbean's fossil-fuel craving:
Walk the streets of Samana, Dominican Republic or St. John’s, Antigua and you are quickly confronted with families huddled in road-side shacks, small children with no clothes, and stray dogs and chickens everywhere. In Samana, utility poles stop at the small town’s edge, starving its suburbs — much less the countryside — of electricity. In Antigua, Barbados, Tortola, and other Caribbean islands, two-cycle motorbikes are a common form of transportation.
And here's the cure:
And yet these islands are growing thanks to an influx of massive, 3000-berth, 120,000-ton, five-diesel-engine cruise ships (consuming 2,800 gallons of fuel per hour) like the one aboard which my family traveled.
Now, cruise ships have been visiting these islands for many, many years, and they've disgorged tourists by the millions, and these tourists have spent an astronomical amount of money on lodging and food and entertainment and booze and prostitution and what have you. And yet, Payne was jolted out of his tropical reverie by the sight of desperately poor people who were doing without basic amenities.
These are small islands, with small populations; surely the wealth deposited by tourists should at least have paid for reliable island-wide electricity by now. The fact that it hasn't suggests that this is not, in fact, a good way to improve the lot of poor Caribbeans, regardless of whether they're in danger of having their homes submerged by rising seas.
The reason is simple enough: Very little of the money spent in a place like Antigua stays in the country; most resorts are foreign-owned, and most "authentic" souvenirs are manufactured in places like China or the Marianas. The tourist industry doesn't do much good for local agriculture, either; almost all food served to tourists is imported.
Next, Payne explains that cruise ships require a huge amount of fuel:
[I]n order to transport these masses to their diesel ships, other forms of fossil-fuel transportation are also growing — from airplane flights to Miami (the largest port of embarkation), to islands teeming with rental cars, to thousands of boats transporting tourists to beaches and coral reefs, to more coal plants under construction to feed hotels and investment properties....
How this demonstrates that the Caribbean "craves" fossil fuels is no more obvious to me than why Payne imagines that this situation can continue indefinitely. But these mysteries are child's play compared to what comes next:
And who are the tourists driving all this growth? The same rich Baby Boomers that Gore claims support him in his moral mission to dramatically curtail our energy use.
Like Henry Payne and his family, for instance. So there!
To make a long story short, all of this proves that the solution to the Caribbean's problems is more tourism and less fretting over rising seas, and that any regulation of the cruise industry will plunge the world into poverty and chaos.
Next week: Payne visits Saipan, and finds that what contract workers really need is for Big Government to get off their backs!
In one of the most charitable gestures since George Armstrong Custer offered to accept the surrender of the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne at Little Big Horn, Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research is giving climate scientists an opportunity to admit that they're wrong and he's right.
In a column headed "if warming is not a burning issue, let's say so," he points out that "dire predictions about the future of prosperous capitalist living remain trendy." For a lifestyle that's supposedly threatened by everything from Islamofascist terror, to the machinations of Hillary Clinton, to new commuter rail lines, "prosperous capitalist living" seems remarkably resilient; you can almost picture it going on forever...growth begetting wealth and wealth begetting growth, world without end, amen.
If you can picture that, give yourself a pat on the back for being a realist. The alternative, after all, is to embrace Alarmism, the shabby pedigree of which Bradley conscientiously sets forth:
Alarmism as an intellectual movement began in 1798 when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth, resulting in human misery and subsistence living.
Malthus was entirely wrong, of course. The food supply did keep up with population growth, from that day to this, and human misery and subsistence living remained rare as hens' teeth (except among those incorrigible types who sought it out and wallowed in it). Today, the only conceivable threat of mass starvation comes from central planning and organic farming.
That was followed in the 1860s by the "coal panic" in England, brought on by an economist who forecast the imminent decline of the British coal industry. But coal, like agriculture, proved far more abundant than expected, and the alarms faded away.
Bradley's referring to William Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question. Whatever else you want to say about Jevons, his forecast was not "imminent"; what he argued was that the supply of coal is not infinite, and that its price would increase as it became harder to extract:
In every kind of enterprise we shall no doubt meet a natural limit of convenience, or commercial practicability, as we do in the cultivation of the land. I do not mean a fixed and impassible limit, but as it were an elastic obstacle, which we may ever push against a little further, but ever with increasing difficulty.
These are gloomy words indeed, and it's not surprising that they shocked a society whose cornucopian assumptions were more or less identical to Bradley's. (I should mention, in passing, that the famous Tower Colliery closed in January 2008, 13 years after its reopening, because "the coal [had] effectively run out." Perhaps Jevons was on to something.)
Next, the history of alarmism takes a great leap forward to Paul Erlich and the Club of Rome. The latter argued that the world would someday run out of mineral resources...but it turns out that the "shortage dates for various minerals" were exaggerated (all you meth freaks can stop stealing copper wire now).
Even if Bradley's account of alarmism were strictly correct, and the premise that natural resources aren't infinite turned out to be wrong (e.g., because it failed to take magic ponies into account), that wouldn't disprove climate change, any more than the boy who cried wolf disproved wolves or politically motivated terror alerts disprove terrorism. But Bradley knows his audience, and he knows that their appetite for logical fallacies is as boundless as their appetite for cheap gas.
Which is not to say that Bradley ignores facts altogether. He correctly observes that if future events were to contradict James Hansen, then James Hansen would be wrong. And that "scientists are deeply divided about whether global warming increases or decreases either the frequency or intensity of hurricanes." I have no quarrel with any of this.
I'm not at all happy with his solution, though:
It is high time for an open debate over the human influence on climate given that the federal government — after nearly 20 years of debate — is still considering whether to enact mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
Marvelous, isn't it? The lack of progress we've seen after a 20-year "debate" in which industry-fronted hacks like Bradley were allowed to slander honest scientists, and to confuse the public with irrelevant psychobabble about the Club of Rome, is offered here as evidence that more debate - i.e., more industry-funded slander, red-baiting, and psychobabble - is needful if we hope to get at the Truth.
Also, please note that failure to heed Bradley's advice will lead to human misery and subsistence living, and may pose a serious threat to the future of capitalist prosperity.
Don't worry about where this train's headed; the important thing is not to pull the emergency brake.
(Photo: "Stranded Rowboat, Salton Sea" by Richard Misrach, 1983.)
James Lileks is in one of his mischievous moods, and you know what that means: oxen will be gored, and sacred cows made into hamburgers, and the politically correct will wail and gnash their teeth.
Rep. Michele Bachmann has proposed a bill that would repeal the ban on normal light bulbs. They're scheduled to be phased out by 2012 AD, replaced by compact fluorescent bulbs, which are either Godless Death Coils or Sensible Joy Spirals, depending on your opinion. Those of us who prefer incandescently salute the attempt. Oh, I wish I liked fluorescents - they bring your electricity bill down to $1.95 per year, you get to shake a fist at OPEC, and those curly pig-tail tubes look cool. But I detest the light.
If you can overlook Lileks' grueling attempt at jauntiness, which recalls nothing so much as a man trying to tapdance in lead boots, you'll notice that he comes dangerously close to accuracy here: CFLs do use a lot less electricity, and this could have certain political...implications.
So far, so good. The question is, how does he get from there to here?
It's an aesthetic preference, and so there isn't a correct position. It's OK to prefer incandescent. It's OK to prefer CFLs. But some curious form of moral authority has been applied to CFLs....
I certainly can't fault Lileks for forgetting his sentences as soon as he writes them; if I were a theologian I might even see it as evidence of a merciful God. But logically speaking, if you really believe that CFLs reduce your electricity usage, and that this in turn reduces your country's vulnerability to Islamopetrofascism, it's pretty obvious that something more than aesthetics is at stake.
Michelle Bachman (R-Bedlam) calls her bill the "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act," in honor of her belief that everyone should be able to choose lightbulbs calmly and rationally, without being made to feel like they're destroying the earth (especially since CFLs are full of deadly mercury that will kill us all).
This has given conservatarians the freedom to choose between praising Bachmann's commitment to consumer liberty and sound science, and attacking her as a chemophobic alarmist and an adherent of the Precautionary Principle. I'm guessing that Lileks' exceptional incoherence in this column has something to do with the discomfort of straddling this fence.
Lileks isn't actually scared of mercury, natch, 'cause it's perfectly harmless. Which is to say that he knows it isn't harmless, but is being cute by pretending not to know it, while overstating its hazards for humorous effect, in order to reinforce the idea that it actually is kinda dangerous, without having to be so uncool and "eco-correct" as to admit it, or to admit that generating electricity for his beloved incandescents releases lots more mercury than CFLs. This, you understand, is both zany and irreverent.
Then there's the mercury issue. Supposedly each bulb contains actual Alien blood that eats through the floor if you break the bulb, but that doesn't worry me. Heck, we played with mercury when I was a kid. We gargled mercury. We'd rub it in our pants so we could go down the slide twice as fast. Mom made us mercury omelettes, in fact. Dad used to sit down at night with his pipe and smoke up some mercury.
Also, they used to put mercury on your ice cream sundae at the corner drugstore. Nowadays those little silvery balls are made of sugar, but back then they were mercury. And not only that, but we fed the dog on mercury. He was leaving illegible silver streaks on public property long before inner-city teens thought of it. The only bad thing about it was that Mom used to take my temperature by putting his dick in my mouth!
The perils of mercury notwithstanding, Lileks decides to give CFLs a second chance. Unless you've visited a few third-rate casinos and heard struggling comedians make jokes about the difficulty of programming VCRs, you'll never guess what happens next. He tries the CFLs out at home, and wouldn't ya know it...he finds that they're either too bright, or not bright enough, except for the one he kinda likes, which doesn't fit in any of his sconces or lamps (which begs the question of what he was using to test it).
Also, you can't use a dimmer with CFLs. He tries it anyway, though, and the bulb stops working. So much for its nine-year guarantee, ha ha! In summation: he'll switch to CFLs once they work as well as incandescents, and not one minute before! You can buy them, though, if you want; that's OK by Lileks as long as you don't look at him like he eats veal or something (even though he probably does eat veal, in order to show the hippies that they're not the boss of him).
As for Bachmann, she considers the CFL phase-out to be downright tyrannical.
“I was just outraged that Congress would want to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the American people,” she said. “It struck me as a massive Big Brother intrusion into our homes and our lives.”
Which explains why she supports warrantless wiretapping and opposes gay rights.
violet, emerald, azure, the black, pink, rose, oyster white, the orange... this is the orange measurement of the lines as I design them. The joys of Ceratosoma bicolor are fates that command us.
A nonprofit group called Homes for Our Troops builds free homes that are specially adapted for injured vets:
Sgt. Brian Fountaine was recovering in Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he got an unexpected visitor who offered to build him a house – free of charge. The visitor was John Gonsalves, founder of Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit group that builds houses for severely injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sergeant Fountaine, who lost both legs below the knees in Iraq, turned to his father after Mr. Gonsalves left and asked: "Is this guy for real?"
He is. This past weekend, Fountaine moved into a three-bedroom ranch here in Plymouth, Mass., completed with the help of hundreds of volunteers and donated building supplies and land.
A woman who was sentenced to be stoned to death has been released from an Iranian prison:
In mid-October 2007, the Head of the Judiciary sent Mokarrameh Ebrahimi's case to the Amnesty and Clemency Commission, who have now ordered her release. She is believed to have been pardoned by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Shadi Sadr, leader of the "Stop Stoning Forever" campaign, said, "It was a rare ruling… I cannot tell how the commission came up with this decision… But you cannot deny the role of public opinion and domestic and international pressures."
In China, meanwhile, 200,000 women will get a free screening for cervical cancer.
The "Prevention of Cervical Cancer" (PCC) program, approved by China's health ministry, will invest 200 million yuan (28.3 million U.S. dollars) in cash and equipment into promoting standard treatments of cervical diseases and setting up screening and treatment centers in the country.
If it goes ahead this will be the second stage of the program, and women from remote western regions will especially benefit from the project, according to the co-organizers, the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, the TCT Medical Company and the China Women Development Foundation.
A Wisconsin appeals court has upheld the punishment of a pharmacist who not only refused to fill a women’s contraceptive prescription, but also refused to transfer it to another pharmacy:
"Noesen abandoned even the steps necessary to perform in a minimally competent manner under any standard of care," the three-judge panel said. The decision upheld a ruling by Barron County Circuit Judge James Babler.
And Colorado’s senate has passed a bill that would prevent anti-abortion protesters from camping out in front of people's houses:
It would require that protesters have to keep walking along a route about 300 feet long. They wouldn't be able to camp out in front of a house and wouldn't be able to carry signs larger than 6 square feet.
The Kentucky legislature has killed a bill that would've blocked state agencies from providing health insurance to domestic partners. In related news, 54 percent of Vermont residents support same-sex marriage, which is an eight-percent increase over last year.
Yet another study indicates that organic crops are comparable in yield to conventional ones, despite the alarmist claims of conservatarian Chicken Littles:
In this research they found that: organic forage crops yielded as much or more dry matter as their conventional counterparts with quality sufficient to produce as much milk as the conventional systems; and organic grain crops: corn, soybean, and winter wheat produced 90% as well as their conventionally managed counterparts. In spite of some climatic differences and a large difference in soil drainage between the two sites, the relatively small difference in the way the cropping systems performed suggested that these results are widely applicable across prairie-derived soils in the U.S. upper Midwest.
Wal-Mart claims that it has decided to sell hormone-free milk exclusively:
The retailer said Thursday that its change was prompted by consumer demands. "Many Wal-Mart customers have expressed a desire for milk choices," the company's release said. The change means Wal-Mart's Great Value store brand milk will be rBST-free, as will milk offered at the company's Sam's Club warehouse locations.
Доверяй, но проверяй, as the saying is.
Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius has vetoed a truly noxious pro-coal bill:
The bill, approved by the Republican-dominated Kansas legislature, would have allowed Sunflower Electric Power Corp to add two 700-megawatt units at a facility in western Kansas.
Under the bill, lawmakers sought to strip the authority of the Kansas health and environment secretary, who turned down the $3.6 billion project last year because it would have produced more carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.
A new type of window glass has remarkable insulating power:
[T]his new vacuum glass is as insulative as a thick insulated wall. Using the same principle as a vacuum thermos bottle, these glass panels essentially negate two principal modes of heat transfer, paving the way towards windows that actually supply thermal energy instead of leaking it.
A wolverine was spotted in Tahoe National Forest for the first time since 1922:
It’s important to researchers because the nearest population of wolverines is 900 miles away in Central Washington. That means the animal either migrated across an enormous distance or it’s part of a small group of native wolverines that somehow evaded detection for the better part of a century.
Nepal’s Indian rhinoceros population is increasing:
A healthier sex ratio as well as gradual improvements in habitat management have helped boost rhino numbers….Officials say the rhino rebound is also due to new anti-poaching measures implemented in the aftermath of the country's decade-long Maoist insurgency.
As many as 85 percent of the honey bees across the state survived the winter, experts estimate. That's a big change from this time last year, when beekeepers opened their hives to find that a cold snap and a mysterious disease had killed off 72 percent of Ohio bees.
Four Legs Good took considerable pains to inform me that a massive reforestation project is underway in Texas:
The project involves taking highly disturbed areas — places where trees were cleared to convert land for grazing and agricultural purposes — and returning them to how they looked hundreds of years ago. In all, officials expect to plant 55,000 loblolly pine trees on 118 acres this year, and then repeat the process in another part of the park next year.
A far more ambitious project in Costa Rica seems to have some hope of succeeding:
Does the experiment's success mean that rainforests will one day flourish again? Fully rescuing a rainforest may take hundreds of years, if it can be done at all.
"The potential for the forest being able to come back is debatable," Leopold says, but the results are promising.
"I'm surprised," he said. "We're getting an impressive growth of new forest species." After only ten years, plots that began with a few species are now lush forests of hundreds. Who knows what the next few decades - or centuries - might bring?
Degraded land in western Tanzania is gradually being reclaimed — two decades after work began to rehabilitate the declining ecosystems....
The most successful of these has been the use of the Ngitili system. Ngitili requires large areas of land to be left fallow, leaving vegetation to be nurtured over the rainy season. This ensures that there is adequate feed available for the animals during the drier months.
Economists estimate that more than 800 villages in western Tanzania are now using variations of the Ngitili system and, consequently, a positive impact on local incomes has been seen.
I was intrigued by this story about a Brazilian car wash that uses no water:
This company began using a native Brazilian wax to clean cars spotless without the use of water. The benefits? They create "live" capital by insisting on operating under the law, ther system has saved
millions of gallons of water, and their impressive sales have encouraged them to expand overseas and into other services.
Rumor has it that copper surfaces can reduce hospital infections:
Copper reduces the lifespan of infection-causing organisms, which can linger on hospital doorknobs and bed rails for days, to a mere couple hours. While scientists aren't sure how the metal works, they are taking note.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently approved five copper alloy products as "anti-microbial," which will be fabricated into numerous products, including intravenous poles, hand rails and shower heads.
Somalia has not reported a case since 25 March 2007, a landmark moment in the intensified eradication effort launched last year to wipe out the disease in the remaining few strongholds.
This 100 year-old antique electric car will be available in early 2009 from ZAP and China Youngman Automotive Group, proving once and for all that there is no such thing as a new idea. The Detroit Electric is considered to be the most popular electric car in history — and was produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company in 1907 (production ran from 1907 to 1939). This cute little EV could go fo 130 miles on one charge, and had a top speed of about 32km/h. Famous Detroit Electric owners included Thomas Edison, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Speaking of Edison, it turns out that he was not the first person to record sound:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Click here to listen to this 148-year-old performance.
A British artist has installed a number of pianos in public places, with charming results:
The piano in the Erdington suburb of Birmingham is one of 15 which have just appeared, unguarded, across the city. There is one in the Rag Market, and one outside Cadbury World. There is another at Colmore junior school, where a teacher was persuaded into an impromptu recital dressed in white gown with veil fluttering in the icy wind. She had been on her way to her wedding.
The Scottish Screen Archive has released some 1,000 film clips on its impressively-redesigned site....look out for Lord and Lady Overtoun’s Visit to Mcindoe’s Show (1906), a rare early film of the outside of a fairground bioscope show; Dr Macintyre’s X-Ray Film (1896/1909), examples of the X-ray cinematography of Dr John Macintyre....
You never know when The Registry of Mushrooms in Works of Art might come in handy, so please do make a note of it. But don't let it distract you from more pressing concerns, like this enormous and staggeringly beautiful collection of cigarette cards, sorted by subject matter:
Jim Kunder of USAID has cheery news from Afghanistan:
"The U.S. government is on track to provide the aid to Afghanistan that it pledged," Kunder said in a telephone interview from Washington.
Which makes petty carping like this all the more irksome:
About 70 percent of Afghans do not have access to safe drinking water, a government minister said Tuesday at the opening of the first of a chain of hydrological stations to monitor water supply.
An optimist would point out that this means 30% of Afghans do have safe water, and add that 8% have access to adequate sanitation facilities. Kind of puts matters in a different light, doesn't it?
Granted, mistakes have been made. But it's also true that America is not irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
Or to a tragic present, for that matter. The fact that we're concerned at all with something so esoteric as Afghanistan's sewers says much, much more about our essential nature than our alleged failures do. Who can deny that our eye is on the sparrow?
To argue otherwise would be to promote a static vision of America, in which military and economic and racial violence carry more spiritual weight than the ideals of our forefathers and the innocence of our children, and what we have done casts a shadow of doubt over what we might do. Make no mistake: We can do better, and be better, as long as we don't allow the bleatings of the professionally aggrieved to shake our faith in ourselves.
To her credit, Georgie Anne Geyer understands this perfectly. She's currently annoyed by the idea that Muslim women are asking for private access to one of Harvard's gyms (she's been to the Middle East, you see, and has "never seen young women in most of those countries hungering for athletics and workouts").
It's not just the nightmare illogic of Muslim women working out that troubles Geyer's honest heart. She also views this as further evidence that these...these....people don't have the proper respect for what America's all about:
What we are seeing is a wave of arrogance sweeping into America with the wave of Muslim immigrants and students. One searches in vain for an individual or organized Muslim voice showing real respect or even a minimal liking for America or American customs.
How many of these insufferable auslanders have left Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran, or Syria, or some other officially designated cesspool of ethnic menace, I have no idea. How many of them have been singled out for cavity searches, or threatened and abused in our streets and shopping malls, is an utter mystery to me. But I do know this: Even if they hopped here on one goddamn leg after stepping on one of our landmines, and even if they're pelted with rotting garbage every time they step outside, they need to get off their high horses and respect our feelings, which are good and true and fine.
That we're a patient and generous nation, God knows as well as He knows anything. But at some point, we're going to decide that we've had enough of being the world's doormat:
Until America and Europe regain their voices and their self-respect, this problem, exemplified by such a small (but revealing) situation at Harvard, will only continue to grow.
Heh infuckingdeed, with knobs on. I don't know when we'll regain our self-respect, and let our voice once again ring throughout this darkling world, given our masochistic agreement with the gloomy rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright and his ilk. But it'll happen. And when it does, I know of some ingrates who'll have a hell of a lot more to worry about than dirty water.
When bombs go off in Spain, England, Scotland, Algeria, Iraq, Israel it is because it is an ancient War of Civilizations - brought forward to twenty-aught-eight (2008) and beyond.
Basically, the way to win a war of this sort is to kill everyone who looks like a Muslim, or has the poor sense to live among them. But lest this be mistaken for garden-variety bloodlust, let’s remember that we’re not just fighting for our own survival; we’re also fighting for the fearlessly probing intellectual tradition that gives rise to insights like this:
History of the past can be instructive.
What the history of the past teaches us is that “America did not enslave Germany or Japan after World War II.” Der Ewige Muselmann, by contrast, not only enslaves his victims but subjects them to “oppressive taxes.” If you can't understand this, you're obviously stuck in a twenty-aught-aught mindset (or you've been reading Deuteronomy 20:11).
Perhaps you think George W. Bush is up to the challenge of defending civilization. If so, think again:
We observe President George W. Bush backing away, seemingly willing to replace the fields of stars on the American flag with the crescent moon symbol and the single star of Islam. This president might be acting like a loser.
I know it's rather dilettantish to criticize the grammar in a high-circulation call for genocide, but I can’t help myself. Get a load of this:
If the Free West’s adversaries get away with defeating and demolishing Israel, then any of the other Free West’s countries will be next, consecutive or coincidental. So, it is in everyone’s best interest (if they are not Muslims) to protect the tiny Jewish State - in their own best interests.
If I've got this straight, what Winston’s saying here is that acting in our own best interests would be in our best interests, which is why we need to kill all the ragheads - consecutive or coincidental - at our earliest convenience:
Our choice is accepting the blowing up of our families or the blowing up of theirs. A bad choice but, if you didn’t start Armageddon, why die with your pride intact, following rules of acceptable national suicide?
Here, at least, Winston has managed to be marvelously eloquent, while maintaining a perfect transparency...he's a veritable Visible Head of eliminationism.
Why die with your pride intact? This question, amazingly, is asked by a man who frets over Islam’s alleged challenge to the “Judeo-Christian ethos.” Apparently, he has never heard that "we are unsubstantial dreams, impalpable visions, like the flight of a passing bird, like a ship leaving no track upon the sea, a speck of dust, a vapor, an early dew, a flower that quickly blooms, and quickly fades."
Note, too, that he’s not even sneering at some unyielding Tolstoyan pacifism that prefers death to resisting evil by force…he’s talking about honoring the fucking Geneva Conventions (or as he calls them, the “so-called rules of civilized engagement of warfare").
Civilization itself is at stake, you see…so we have to throw not just its ideals out the window, but also the feeble, myopic attempts we’ve made at living up to them.
We must absolutely (as it were) sink to their level - or die.
I'm not so sure about that. I think that if we embrace Winston's ideology, we can manage both.
(Illustration: From Danse Macabre by Frans Masereel, 1941.)
