Let’s Not Go There

A chilling column today from Mark Steyn. He recaps the “progress” of the Obamateur administration to date - and isn’t impressed:

It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly) “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (The Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their own urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both of them.

Do read the whole thing. Steyn is spot on, but somewhat muted today. Usually, Steyn is a wealth of snarky humor. There is not much to laugh at today:

America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality. Or it can buckle its mandatory seat belt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s Mall for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on Earth. Seventy years later….

Think hard about that parallel. Even we Americans are diminished in the power we can project. Pirates are thriving again because the two great powers that used to guarantee the freedom of the seas are down to one - and shrinking. The stimulus bill is a down payment on our decline.

Let’s not go there.

The Dimwitting Of America

The real trouble with excluding conservative voices from college campuses is that it helps turn liberals into blithering idiots.

Take the case of Phil Busse, the moron college prof. who spent his free time destroying McCain/Palin yard signs, wrote an essay detailing his activities, and expected to soak up rapturous applause. What actually happened was quite different: St. Olaf prof resigns after election sign fiasco

Philip Busse, the St. Olaf College professor who admitted to stealing campaign signs in a national political blog read by millions, has resigned.

St. Olaf spokesman David Gonnerman issued the following statement Monday afternoon:

“The St. Olaf College administration first learned of Phil Busse’s self-admitted theft and destruction of campaign signs on the morning of Oct. 31 as a result of his posting on the Internet.

“The St. Olaf administration immediately referred the matter to local law enforcement authorities and commenced an investigation of its own.

“Mr. Busse has tendered his resignation and is no longer affiliated with St. Olaf College.

“In a statement issued on Friday, the administration made clear that Mr. Busse’s actions were in direct conflict with the college’s values and mission and that the college did not in any way condone them.

“The statement also declared that St. Olaf College deplores unlawful interference with political campaigns and expression of speech.

St. Olaf obviously did the right thing in making clear that such behavior is deplorable and fundamentally not in keeping with the spirit of an institution of liberal education. The sad thing is Busse still doesn’t get it.

In an e-mail correspondence with the News, Busse expressed remorse for stealing the signs, saying that the thefts were “immature and impetuous.”

“Writing the essay was an opportunity to explore and talk about political speech and the desire that most of us have to express our politics — both in mature and immature ways, and sometimes a mix of the two,” Busse said in the e-mail. “I’m disappointed that most readers seem to have focused on the thefts, and not on the larger thoughts.”

In the article, Busse likened his thefts to an act of civil disobedience and said that stealing the signs was “one of the single most exhilarating and empowering political acts that I have ever done.”

All this does is prove Busse has no idea what he is talking about. His acts have nothing to do with “civil disobedience” whatsoever. Had he read and understand the classic texts on the subject, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” he would see that real civil disobedience is directed towards the state, and not against the speech rights of fellow citizens. In fact, the only way this could be construed as civil disobedience is if his “larger thoughts” entailed the removal of First amendment protections for citizens who do not hold Mr. Busse’s ideological prerogatives.

There is absolutely nothing noble about Busse’s actions. Thoreau viewed his not paying taxes to the government as a blow against what he felt was an unjust war against Mexico. King Jr. took his actions because he was standing up directly against unjust law. All Busse did was express his hatred of John McCain, or Republicans in general, or all citizens who disagree with him politically, and in the most infantile manner possible. I’m sure he felt his personal experience in performing these acts was “exhilarating and empowering.” The same was probably true of the brownshirts who participated in Kristallnacht.

The comparison is an apt one because Busse actions were not directed towards the government or an unjust law, but were instead directed against people he didn’t like. The mere existence of McCain supporters is enough to enrage Busse to the point he will destroy their property. So what is the larger point there? Or how can we believe Busse’s “larger points” don’t mirror those of the brownshirts who also spent a night destroying the property of people they didn’t like? And, what on God’s green earth does Busse have to do with the high minded aspirations of Thoreau or Dr. King? The answer to the last one is apparent: Not a hell of a lot.

I Cannot Believe This Is The Country Of John Locke

News from a weird but not-so-wonderful England: Gardener ordered to take down barbed wire fence ‘in case thieves hurt themselves on it’

A gardener has been ordered by council chiefs to remove three foot high barbed wire ringing his allotment - in case thieves scratch themselves climbing over it.

Bill Malcolm, 61, took the drastic step of installing the wire in a bid to prevent burglars raiding his tool shed and ransacking his vegetable plots.

Intruders have struck three times in four months, stealing more than £300 worth of hardware, including spades, forks and hoes as well as destroying his potato patch.

The fed-up gardener surrounded his 600 square yard site in Worcester with a single strand of barbed wire, which stood no more than waist high.

But his local council declared the security measure was a health and safety hazard and warned him they would forcibly remove it if he refused.

Bill said: ‘It’s an absolutely ridiculous situation, all I wanted was to protect my property but the wire had to go in case a thief scratched himself.

‘The council said they were unhappy about the precautions I had made but my response was to tell them that only someone climbing over on to my allotment could possibly hurt themselves.

‘They shouldn’t be trespassing in the first place but the council apologised and said they didn’t want to be sued by a wounded thief.

What?

Should we remove locks from our doors because thieves could injure themselves trying to force them open? What about “dangerous” glass windows which could cut thieves should they attempt to get through them? Basically, this boils down to the idea that any defense of private property is illegitimate.

The article even points out that the state will decide what is worthy of protection and what isn’t. Those things the state wishes to protect will be supplied with CCTV. Everything else? Well, sorry, you are SOL there.

This is too stupid for belief.

Hate

Here is Obama supporter Cintra Wilson writing about Sarah Palin on Salon:

Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she’s anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.

That’s right, the nomination of Sarah Palin is now the moral equivalent of the start of the Holocaust.

Please notice, this “piece” was not pulled off of an obscure diary at the Daily Kos; It came off of a supposedly mainstream media organ. This is what the MSM is becoming.

The Left keep saying they want to “change” America, and, oh, they mean it. They just have no intention of making it a better place.

Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
(T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, No. 1 of Four Quartets)

A troubling essay in The Sunday Times by Bryan Appleyard should give you pause. Appleyard realized that he was being "Distracted from distraction by distraction" because of the modern technological tools that inundate our daily lives these days. It worried him. Perhaps it should worry you as well.

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

I'd urge you to concentrate and read the whole thing. It is worth it. I suspect there is a lot of truth in what Appleyard has written. There are so very many distractions, busily distracting us from our distractions these days.

One of the reasons posting here has been so light of late is that I am working very long hours every day in a job that requires fierce concentration. When I get home after 12 hours, I have little desire or ability to surf the web trying to find interesting things to discuss. Much of my day is spent fighting the distractions of relentless email and, to a lesser extent, phone calls. I get home and simply don't want to post. In my way, I'm fighting the distractions.

Is it as bleak as Appleyard paints it? Possibly not. But I do see the lack of focus in younger workers where I am. They try to do engineering while listening to their iPods. They don't focus the way those I started with in this field used to. To this day, I still never have a radio (or an iPod) playing in my work area. It is too distracting.

Read the whole thing.

Wonder Why Food Prices Are Skyrocketing?

I have pointed out for some time now that so-called biofuels are an environmental and economic disaster. Now The Guardian, of all places, reports on a leaked report they have obtained. The report, from the World Bank, says that the biofuels craze has driven the cost of food up by 75%.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

"It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

It isn't the White House, really. It is Congress and European governments that have driven this madness. (No, I am not letting the White House off the hook, either.) Biofuels are nothing more than a grossly inefficient energy transfer scheme - and a way for vested interests to make huge profits off the backs of the people.

There have been many voices raised against the insanity of biofuels, but Europe and the United States keep blindly riding the biofuel bandwagon.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

Speculators and special interests are making things worse. It has never been easier to rape the planet than it is today. Just say you're "saving the planet" and you have a license to destroy. The human cost of biofuels is too high. It is time to stop this madness.

Three Great American Ideas

Go read what Maggie Gallagher wrote.

Rights do not come from the government. The government only exists because we allow it to. Those are the ideas - the ideals - that define America.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Are we perfect? Oh no, we are not. But we are a darn sight better than others have been - and for a longer time, as Gallagher points out.

Obama As Millennialist Aspiration

We live in an age of Millennial aspirations. 

Everywhere you look you can see signs of widely disparate groups of people who believe they are living in an age where established norms will be destroyed by this or that newly arisen force.  This can take the usual religious overtone, as witnessed by the Left Behind devotees, but we are increasingly seeing non-religious forms of Millennialism play out even in the main stream press.

In my local paper today I was treated to a dead serious take by the AP on survivalists up in the mountains:

On the PeakOil.com Web site, where upward of 800 people gathered on recent evenings, believers engage in a debate about what kind of world awaits.

Some members argue there will be no financial crash, but a slow slide into harder times. Some believe the federal government will respond to the loss of energy security with a clampdown on personal freedoms. Others simply don't trust that the government can maintain basic services in the face of an energy crisis.

The powers that be, they've determined, will be largely powerless to stop what is to come.

Determined to guard themselves from potentially harsh times ahead, Lynn-Marie and her husband have already planted an orchard of about 40 trees and built a greenhouse on their 7 1/2 acres. They have built their own irrigation system. They've begun to raise chickens and pigs, and they've learned to slaughter them.

The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents' era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.

By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables. When things start to fall apart, they expect their children and grandchildren will come back home and help them work the land. She envisions a day when the family may have to decide whether to turn needy people away from their door.

"People will be unprepared," she said. "And we can imagine marauding hordes."

So can Peter Laskowski. Living in a woodsy area outside of Montpelier, Vt., the 57-year-old retiree has become the local constable and a deputy sheriff for his county, as well as an emergency medical technician.

"I decided there was nothing like getting the training myself to deal with insurrections, if that's a possibility," said the former executive recruiter.  

While you are contemplating who would win the iron cage death-match between "marauding hordes" and "executive recruiters," notice how this type of thing has come a long way from the "raving loon" territory it would have been consigned to just a few years ago.  As a society we seem to be more willing to entertain such Millennial fantasies, whether it be the belief in "peak oil" or in some "anthropogenic global warming tipping point," that will in effect destroy the Western world as we know it.

Now, part of this might be baby boomer nostalgia for the days when the nuclear holocaust was always due "any day now, so you'd better learn to Duck & Cover," and while it is certainly a horrible prospect it did assign a level of importance to the generation(s) destined to live through it.  Sure, they actually lived lives of suburban contentment, but Jimmy's dad down the street was building a bomb shelter in the basement which was something the boring schmucks growing up in the 1910's or 1920's never got to witness.  So, the baby boomers considered themselves to be the first (and only) generation living in a state of near perpetual existential angst.  As such they created a mythology of their own "specialness" that seems destined to govern the broadcasting decisions of PBS for decades to come. 

So, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that such folk view damn near everything that effects them as being "unprecedented" in some important way.  For that reason, history has no lessons to teach them.  "Those are the old rules!" they protest, "Everything is different now."  And how exactly do they know that?  Well, it seems to be taken as axiomatic.

It also seems to be a belief the boomers have successfully transfered to the present college age generation who seem similarly convinced of their own "specialness."  Take the efforts of E. J. Dionne:

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. predicted in his commencement address to Wake Forest University’s 2008 graduating class that they are part of a group that will become the next “greatest generation.”

Dionne’s comments garnered an enthusiastic response from the crowd of about 15,000 people

They were willing to applaud praise of themselves for their soon to be revealed greatness?  How noble and selfless of them!

Dionne is at least up front about his Millennialism, and he enlists that great prophet, uh…I mean president, FDR for support:

Dionne explained that he drew the title of his address, “The Reform Generation and History’s Mysterious Cycle,” from a speech Franklin D. Roosevelt gave at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, at which Roosevelt said “There is a mysterious cycle in human events.  To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

“I believe those words apply more truly to your generation than to any other since FDR addressed them to what came to be known as the greatest generation,” Dionne said.

Yes, the generation that was forced to live through the horrors of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl is the perfect analogy for this generation which was forced to live through the horrors of Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears. 

One is left with the impression that much of the baby boomer "specialness" is little more than a defensive reflex to hearing their parents drone on about how rough they had it during the depression or WWII.  The historical truth is moments like the Great Depression or World War II are unique in their import and their impact.  Not every generation is going to see the like.  (I wonder if the generation that came immediately after the 30 Years War in Europe reacted the same way.) 

So you are left with a group of people whose very self worth is bound up with an overwhelming need for a heroic quality.  Thus, their wants and desires are not just the expression of their ego, it is the spirit of the age!  And, it isn't just any chronological age. It marks, so the good little Hegelians tell us, the beginning of a new epoch in humanity, for good or ill.  Its a psychology tailor made for Millennial thought.

Such thinking dominates not only in the desire for catastrophism of various kinds, but also in more mundane political considerations.  Historian Sean Wilentz picks up a good deal of this in the current beliefs infusing Obama supporters:

With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River — and the fight for the Democratic nomination has entered its final phases. Having picked up a net gain of nearly 140,000 votes between Kentucky and Oregon, Clinton is now well poised to win the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 - and clinch a majority in this year's popular vote, even if the disputed returns from Michigan are discounted. Under those pressures, the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of "change" - nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.

Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party's inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom "progressive" pundits and bloggers disdain variously as "Nascar man," "uneducated," "low information" whites, "rubes, fools, and hate-mongers" who live in the nation's "shitholes." [emphasis added]

It is this fervent belief that the rules of the political game will change for them merely because of the force of their generational personality that is driving the Obama moment.  It is essentially the same idea that enabled the boomers to walk blindly into the Democratic electoral disasters of 1968 and 1972.  It is also the same force which precludes Obama supporters from learning from that history in the first place. 

Wilentz sums it up nicely:

In every presidential election they have won, the Democrats have solidified their historic link to white workers, not dismissed them. Obama and the champions of a new party coalition appear to think that everything has suddenly changed, simply because of the force of their own desires. In any event, Obama had shown no ability thus far to attract the one constituency that has always spelled the difference between victory and defeat for the Democratic Party. The party must now decide whether to go along with Obama and renounce its own heritage — and tempt the political fates.

The fact is Millennialism is about embracing opposites.  Just like their Chistian analogues, they not only accept a positive view of their destiny (the "Reformist Future" as "Second Coming"), but they also embrace a negative one akin to Armageddon.  For many of these zealots, they would rather walk with righteous fervor into an electoral buzz-saw than bow to the practical necessities of political reality.  Ordinary people would take such repudiation as a signal that their beliefs were misplaced, but we are not dealing with ordinary people.

They will tell you so themselves.   

Wasteful Stupidity At The United Nations

In a move that has outraged a lot of people, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) destroyed about 100,000 books rather than move them. While UNESCO contends that a large percentage of those now-pulped books were obsolete, many of them were books on history, art, poetry and the like.

PARIS — For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.

Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

"This is the intellectual organization of the United Nations system," Aziza Bennani, Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"

Homero Aridjis, Mexico's ambassador, said at the organization's executive council meeting this week, "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO." He demanded an internal investigation.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.

They could have donated the books - and representatives of many countries are furious that UNESCO did not. Modern day "green" book burning or simply bureaucratic ineptitude and waste? Oh, most definitely the latter. The dual waste of both the initial investment in producing too many of the books and then merely pulping them rather than putting them to some good use speaks volumes (pun intended) about the United Nations in general. I have praised some of UNESCO's work in the past. Things like this tend to tarnish the good they do.

Back To The Stone Age

The Washington Post reports on some new studies that call for a reduction of carbon emissions by industrialized countries to zero. Avoid the rush, stop breathing now.

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

"The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about." 

Meanwhile, in the real world, the northern hemisphere ice cover is running slightly below the 1979-2000 mean while the southern polar ice is running above that mean by a greater amount. The snow cover for the northern hemisphere is well above average. Erie, Pennsylvania received about 21 inches of snow over the weekend, almost as much as the 23 inches they had already received in March before the latest storm. Britain is currently being lashed by the strongest winter storm of the year with another one tracking in right behind. 

The Downside Of Serfdom

I posted about the human hamster wheels being touted as a carbon offset scheme by Western companies back in September of last year. The company involved in that scheme was shipping "treadle pumps" to India and touting it as human power to offset global warming. Well, I have no idea if the Indians got wise to this scheme and started shipping the pumps to Malawi, if the same company is involved or if this is a separate development. But farmers in Malawi are protesting furiously. Because operating the pumps all day makes the farmers too tired to have sex.

LILONGWE (Reuters) - Malawi will investigate fears that labour-intensive manual irrigation pumps distributed to poor farmers are hurting their sexual performance.
 
The farmers say using the pump makes them too tired for sex and have voiced their anger to the government.

"The government is aware of the problem, the parliamentarian committee on irrigation is also concerned about it and we intend to start probing and finding out if the pumps are really to blame for the problem," Adrina Mchiela, principal secretary in the Irrigation and Water Development Ministry, told Reuters.

The high-capacity treadle pump, touted as a major reason for improved food security in the southern African country, is designed to lift water from shallow wells and surface sources.

As is pointed out in the link in the other post, treadle pumps were outlawed in British prisons many years ago as being too cruel a punishment for prisoners. But apparently, being a carbon serf makes the punishment acceptable.

One wonders if this side effect was already known about, however. One wonders.

SoylentVOLT Green Is People

Local governments in Britain are planning to burn human bodies for electricity. No, really, they are.

Heat created by burning the dead at crematoria could be used to keep mourners warm under plans to make funerals more environmentally-friendly.

Instead of letting the gases emitted by cremation escape into the atmosphere, councils want to use them to heat radiators or even generate electricity.

They admit some might find the idea of being kept warm by the remains of their loved-ones macabre.

But there are thought to be no religious objections, and ever-tighter controls on pollution mean such systems could become commonplace.

Harmful mercury emissions are created by cremating those with old tooth fillings. To meet tough pollution targets, councils are having to fit filters to crematoria.

Cremation requires temperatures of as much as 1,000C but this must be reduced to around 160C for the mercury to be removed, which requires heat exchangers to be installed in chimneys.

This involves passing the hot fumes through what are effectively cold water radiators. They absorb much of the heat and it is this which can be reused.

Tameside Council in Greater Manchester is planning to link heat exchangers at Dukinfield Crematorium with its boiler system and hopes to use it to generate electricity through turbines.

Soylent Green comes true, in a slightly different way. So far.

Absolutely anything I write about this is going to produce a Godwin's Law violation. I'll leave it at that.

The Authoritarian Left In Oz

The brand new labor government in Australia has wasted no time in setting forth their authoritarian agenda. First up: internet censorship. Civil liberty groups in Oz are going bonkers over this one, the Rudd government, however, is pushing forward.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, a member of the Labor team which ousted conservative prime minister John Howard in a November election, wants filters in place to shield children from online porn and violence.

Under the plan, Internet service providers would provide feeds filtered free of pornography and other inappropriate material to houses and schools.

Conroy has rejected criticism that the move will debase the freedom of the world wide web and represents a step towards the kind of Internet censorship in place in China where sites are regularly blocked and cyberdissidents arrested.

"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the Internet is like going down the Chinese road," he told national radio on Monday.

"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor government is going to disagree."

But chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation Roger Clarke said the plan would not only be ineffective but could have substantial side-effects.

"Many pages will end up getting blocked that shouldn't be blocked," he told AFP. "We don't need that, we need an open Internet."

Clarke said it was the role of parents and guardians, not the government, to protect children from inappropriate material.

"It's not the government's business to control information flows," he said.

"That's the kind of thing that goes on in oppressive countries, in authoritarian countries.

"That's not what the government is there to do."

I'm against these types of government interventions anywhere, including here in the US. Clarke is exactly right: it is not the government's job to control information, no matter what the goal is. Because this is a slippery slope - at some point, the government will decide what else you can and cannot see.

It is ironic that the left, that screams incessantly about perceived authoritarianism, is actually the first to plant a jackboot on the necks of citizens. It's always for the best of reasons, they say. For the children or some such. But the boot comes down.

Even Bono Is Sick Of Bono

Daniel Drezner, writing in the Los Angeles Times, takes a look at celebrity activists, the good, the bad and the ugly of the phenomenon, as it were. He asks whether celebrities should be the ones setting the global agenda.

Celebrity involvement in politics and policy is hardly new. Shirley Temple and Jane Fonda, for example, became known as much for their politics as their films. Actors, including Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fred Thompson, have taken the more traditional star route to power: running for political office. The template for the Live Earth concerts earlier this year was the 1985 Live Aid concert, which in turn echoed the 1974 all-star concert for Bangladesh.

But today, the power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.

Matthew Baum argued in his book "Soft News Goes to War" that a large share of Americans get their information about world politics from such soft-news shows as "Entertainment Tonight," "Access Hollywood," "The View," "The Daily Show" and "The Tonight Show" — or from Gawker, TMZ and PerezHilton. These shows and websites reach an audience that is normally unattainable by the New York Times or "Nightline," according to Baum. Yet hard-news sources cover celebrity politics too. Think of how many times you saw Madonna in Africa on CNN, or Sean Penn in Venezuela. And frankly, if the Washington Post has to choose between an Op-Ed article by Jolie and one by a lesser-known expert on Sudan, which author do you think will be published?….

….But celebrity activism doesn't always achieve its ends. Richard Gere, for instance, has devoted decades to the cause of Tibetan independence, to little avail. And although Bono has been invaluable in promoting debt relief, his (Product) Red campaign, which aimed to generate money for the U.N. Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has been a disappointment.

Even if celebrities are judicious and focused in promoting their causes, there are limits to what they can do. Promoting a policy agenda is one thing; implementing it is another thing entirely. A celebrity who harps on a cause risks generating fatigue with the general public. As Bono recently told CNN: "Look, I'm Bono and I'm sick of Bono. And I fully understand. … I look forward to a time when I'm not such a pest and a self-righteous rock star."

A deeper problem celebrities face is that although they're good at bringing attention to a problem, it does not automatically follow that there will be a groundswell of support for direct action. This is not how politics necessarily works, particularly in the global realm. Any solution to a problem such as global warming or Darfur involves not just goodwill but a willingness to incur significant costs. As people become more aware of the policy problem, it is far from guaranteed that a consensus will emerge about the best way to solve it.

Drezner also dryly notes that celebrities stands on issues can actually backfire. Many Americans certainly think celebrities should stick to entertainment and keep off the global agenda items. There are celebrities that have been relatively effective, depending on what they were supporting. (Think Audrey Hepburn as a good will ambassador for UNICEF.) But the self-righteous ones do become very annoying and probably actually harm the cause they are pushing. (Think Sheryl Crow and her "humor.")

“…To Steer Clear Of Permanent Alliances…”

Karl Inderfurth,  currently a professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, writes an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor excoriating what he calls "Washington's phobia of global treaties." Inderfurth, who served in the Clinton administration as US special representative of the president and the secretary of state for global humanitarian demining, is not exactly a neutral party in this issue. He is arguing that the US should accept UN negotiated treaties on land mines and a number of other subjects.

washington - Three quarters of the world's countries have signed an international agreement to ban antipersonnel landmines. The Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty – to never again use, produce, acquire, or export these so-called "hidden killers" of civilians – reached its 10th anniversary this month. But the United States is still not a signatory.

Unfortunately this "just say no" approach to international treaties has become a pattern for the US, especially under the Bush administration. This trend must change. The president's successor should make it a high priority for the US to rejoin the world and reassume the country's role as a globally respected leader.

In some cases the rationale for US opposition is tied to security, economic, or legal considerations. But in all cases the unifying principle behind the Bush administration's refusal to join these treaties seems to be ideological – not wanting to encumber the US with further international obligations or to constrain America's freedom of action.

This "America unbound" approach is making the US the odd man out on critical global issues. In March of this year, a new human rights treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The convention would ensure that people around the world with disabilities enjoy the same rights as everyone else to equal protection before the law, and in work and education opportunities.

Revisionist history is unbecoming of an academic. The opposition to a lot of these initiatives predate the Bush administration, and in fact hearken all the way back to a rather famous and influential person from the early days of the United States. That would be George Washington, not Washington, DC.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils 7 Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests. (Emphasis added.)

Those words are as true today as on the day they were delivered to the American people in 1796. They are from his farewell address delivered when Washington stepped down from the lead role he had held in the formation of this nation since accepting the command of the Continental Army. I'd also like to point out the highlighted sentence above - then re-read what Inderfurth has written. It would seem that George Washington was more than a little prescient.

The fact is, that no matter how laudable some of the ideals of the UN may be, the organization itself is hideously corrupt, hopelessly inept, downright criminal in many instances and increasingly a venue for thugs and tyrants. Any treaty that is produced by that body should be avoided. Or, as George Washington also said:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world….