…according to Bjørn Lomborg, a voice of sanity against the Malthusian humanity-hating watermelons. I’m a little surprised, actually, to see such a politically incorrect piece in Newsweak.
Category Archives: Business
Appreciating America
…from abroad. Some trenchant and depressing thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
It is wise to navigate through the news and elite wisdom through two landmarks: anything that Barack Obama says will be airbrushed, improved, or modified to fit facts post facto; anything Sarah Palin says or does will be contextualized in Neanderthal terms. Teams of Post and Times volunteers now sort through Sarah Palin’s email; not a reporter in the world is curious about what Barack Obama once said about Rashid Khalidi or the Columbia University GPA that won him entrance to Harvard Law School. Accept that asymmetry and almost everything not only makes sense about these two cultural guideposts, but can, by extension, explain the 1860-like division in American itself.
Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.
We can still change it next year.
The Broken Light-Bulb Promise
I think it’s time for Michigan Republicans to look for a new primary candidate to replace Fred Upton. Don’t let him play Lucy pulls away the football any more.
The Shuttle Is Retiring
“….why I’m glad.”
“Unexpectedly”
Thoughts on the useful idiots in the media and (more importantly and unfortunately) in the voting booths who really believed that electing a socialist law professor with zero business experience would actually result in an improved economy. He needs to get the return key repaired on his keyboard, though.
Peak Oil
…isn’t likely to happen any time soon.
Unless, of course, we keep in power people who want to see it happen.
[Update a few minutes later]
The oil-fracking boom in south Texas.
That’s how you grow an economy. You produce stuff that (unlike, say, CFLs or high-speed rail) people actually want to buy.
The Bump On The Road To Nowhere
Thoughts from Mark Steyn on the state of the economy:
The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I’ll bet it’s got no plans to downsize.
Nor has the TSA. A 24-year-old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. “We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience,” said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Dude, Where’s My Freedom?
A call to arms from Paul Hsieh. These people don’t realize what totalitarians they’re becoming.
[Update a few minutes later]
A ranking of the fifty states for freedom. As expected, California is among the worst. I was a little surprised to see South Dakota come out so well. I’m also surprised to see that Alaska is so bad.
Mitt Romney’s Energy And Economic Ignorance
Sigh…
I really don’t want him to be the nominee. I think that Pawlenty would be much better. He at least had the sense to change his mind on cap’n’tax.
In Which The Dalai Lama
…declares himself an economic and ethical ignoramus:
“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.
Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.
Well, he can afford to be. The rest of us? Not so much.