…to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It
Yup. As many reviewers note, “climate change” isn’t really about science–it’s just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
In response to my previous post on the subject, from Eric Scheie:
If we see the two anti-freedom strains as “your money or your sex,” it becomes quite obvious that it’s easier — a hell of a lot easier — for the government to grab your money than your genitalia.
Yet even though the anti-sex people are by no means a majority in the GOP and cannot possibly implement their schemes, more people fear the Republicans.
A great con job, if you ask me.
Yup. And it continues on.
…Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.
Soylent Green, 1973
The New York Times predicts that “if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048.” Their solution: lower energy content by eating sardines instead of feeding them to farm-raised salmon.
Mistaking energy content for price is a common mistake. Chew on this: organic lettuce is more expensive than a hamburger.
Wild fish will be eclipsed by farm-raised fish just as farm-raised beef has eclipsed free-range beef. Get used to it, perhaps by preparing to pay an extreme premium for free-range fish. Don’t expect the Chinese middle class to prefer wild cod once a year to farm-raised salmon once a month. Expect the coastal waters to be fenced into fish farms just as the Great Plains was fenced in during the 19th century.
It’s time to manage the pollution and reserve the wild fish parks upcurrent. This tide isn’t going to be turned back by pondering how the old days were until we’re eaten up.
I have thoughts on “Change!” and free markets this morning, over at PJM.
As long as I’m dredging up golden oldies on space, I might as well do one on politics as well. I’ve talked to and emailed (and Usenetted) a few “moderate” Republicans who were turned off by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, because they thought the choice was simply pandering to the religious right, and they bought the caricature of her sold by the MSM. I don’t agree with that (I think that there was a confluence of factors, including the desire to pick off some of Hillary! supporters), but I really do think that a) he thought that she would be a reformer like him based on her record and b) he did and does have a high regard for her intelligence and capabilities, because most people who meet her, Democrats and “liberals” included, seem to.
Anyway, I really don’t understand this fear of the religious right, though I am neither religious, or “right” (in the social conservative sense). I explained why in a post about six and a half years ago. I think that it’s relevant today, and in fact wish that I’d reposted it before the election (not that the fate of the nation hinges in any way on my posts).
Instantman, in reference to an article about women and the sexual revolution, says:
This kind of stuff, by the way, is the reason why a lot of Democrats who are basically in agreement with the Republican party are still afraid to vote for Republicans.
This seems to be a common attitude among many libertarians (and to the degree that labels apply, I think that one fits Glenn about as well as any), particularly the ones who approached that philosophy from the left (i.e., former Democrats). I once had an extended email discussion (back during the election) with another libertarian friend (who’s also a blogger, but shall remain nameless) about how as much as he disliked the socialism of the Democrats, he felt more culturally comfortable with them. Again, this is a prevalent attitude of products of the sixties. You know, Republicans were uptight fascists, and Democrats were idealistic, free-living, and hip.
While I’m not a conservative, my own sexual and drug-taking values (and life style) tend to be. I just don’t think that the government should be involved in either of these areas. But my voting pattern is that I’ll occasionally vote Republican (I voted for Dole over Clinton, the only time I’ve ever voted for a Republican for President), but I never vote for a Democrat for any office. The last time I did so was in 1976, and I’d like that one back.
There are at least two reasons for this.
First, I’ve found many Republicans who are sympathetic to libertarian arguments, and in fact are often libertarians at heart, but see the Republican Party as the most practical means of achieving the goals. There may be some Democrats out there like that, but I’ve never run into them. That’s the least important reason (partly because I may be mistaken, and have simply suffered from a limited sample space). But fundamentally, the Democratic Party, at least in its current form, seems to me to be utterly antithetical to free markets.
But the most important reason is this–while I find the anti-freedom strains of both parties equally dismaying, the Democrats are a lot better at implementing their big-government intrusions, and there’s good reason to think that this will be the case even if the Republicans get full control of the government.
This is because many of the Democratic Party positions are superficially appealing, if you’re ignorant of economics and have never been taught critical thinking.
Who can be against a “living wage”? What’s so bad about making sure that everyone, of every skin hue, gets a fair chance at a job? Why shouldn’t rich people pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes?–they can afford it. Are you opposed to clean air and water? What’s wrong with you? How can you be against social security–do you want old folks to live on Kibbles and Bits?
To fight these kinds of encroachments on liberty requires a lot of effort and argument and, in the end, it often loses anyway. Consider for example, the latest assault on the First Amendment that passed the Senate today, sixty to forty. Many Republicans voted against it. I don’t think any Democrats did.
[Thursday morning update: Best of the Web notes that two Democrats did vote against it–John Breaux and Ben Nelson. Good for them. They also have a hall of shame for the Republicans who voted for it.]
On the other hand, the things that libertarians like Glenn and Nameless fear that conservatives will do (e.g., in matters sexual), are so repugnant to most Americans that they’ll never get made into law, and if they do, the legislators who do so will quickly get turned out of office. So, you have to ask yourself, even if you dislike the attitude of people who are uncomfortable with the sexual revolution, just what is it, realistically, that you think they’d actually do about it if you voted for them?
The bottom line for me is that Democrats have been slow-boiling the frog for decades now, and they’re very good at it. I tend to favor Republicans, not because I necessarily agree with their views on morality, but because I see them as the only force that can turn down the heat on the kettle, and that they’re very unlikely to get some of the more extreme policies that they may want, because the public, by and large, views them as extreme.
Nothing has happened in the interim to change my views in this regard. The real disappointment was that the Republicans gave us the worst of all worlds this election–a Democrat (in terms of his populist economic thinking and his own antipathy to the free market, despite his Joe-the-Plumber noises about “spreading the wealth”) at the top of their ticket, with a running mate who was perceived (falsely, in my opinion) as being a warrior for the religious right. But that’s what happens when you stupidly have open primaries, and allow the media to pick your nominee.
Exploding the myths of Clintonomics:
The bull market took off precisely when then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan took his foot off the brakes and hit the gas in 1995. It was also then that Republicans took control of Congress — further blunting the effects of the Clinton tax torpedo that had taken effect the previous year.
Clinton also benefitted from innovations long in the making, including the Pentium chip released in March 1993 and Microsoft’s Windows program released in August 1995. These together made the Internet boom possible.
As for the budget surpluses, they came as a complete surprise to Clinton economic forecasters, whose static models only predicted their tax hikes on the rich would narrow the budget gap, not get it into the black.
Their “deficit-reduction plan” didn’t create the surpluses at all. They were a direct result of a tidal wave of capital-gains revenues generated by the GOP-led stock boom.
Relieved that Washington would no longer threaten to take over 14% of the economy by socializing medicine or raise taxes even higher, the market took off like a shot at that point. And capital gains tax receipts exploded, flooding federal coffers.
Clinton’s own long-term budgets predicted no surpluses of any kind during his administration and beyond.
Bill Clinton never had a plan to end deficits. The Republicans and economic circumstances did it for him. But I’m sure that this myth that Bill Clinton balanced the budget will prevail in the minds of the media and Democrats, just as the false myth that Roosevelt, and not the war, got us out of the Depression continues to prevail many decades later. They have to rewrite history to justify their continued plunder. And of course, the near-term danger is that President-Elect Obama and the Congressional majority will use this mistaken history as a justification for tax hikes in a recession, which could be economically ruinous.
That’s the word from Michael Yon, reporting from Baghdad.
No thanks to the Democrats, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who tried to keep it from happening. I see that they still can’t bring themselves to utter the word “win” with respect to the war. They continue to talk about “ending” it. Well, it looks like George Bush did that for them, and he won it as well. But winning wars is bad, you see, because it just encourages the warmongers.
Stephen Green says that President-Elect Obama isn’t off to a very good start.
And Brian Doherty is concerned about the cult of personality. Really? He just noticed?
Rich Lowry has been talking to Rick Davis:
The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people–like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann–were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, “It’s the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter.”
By many accounts, the relationship between Palin and the staff assigned by the campaign to travel with her on her plane was dysfunctional and even hostile from the beginning. “She would have been better served if she had asked a couple of people to be removed from her traveling staff,” says one McCain aide.
Some McCain loyalists think the Bushies assigned to Palin let her down and then turned on her. This is a representative quote from someone from McCain world holding that view: “Look, she wasn’t ready for this, obviously. Their job was to make her ready for this and they failed. So they unloaded on her. If they had an iota of loyalty to John McCain, they wouldn’t have done it.”
It was a mistake to bring “Bushies” into the campaign, given the competence level of “Bushies” as a general rule (unfortunately, the president seemed to value loyalty over competence, though there were notable exceptions). Yes, they won a couple previous campaigns, but only barely. Of course, there was something dysfunctional about a McCain campaign that didn’t see this happening and do something about it. And then there’s this:
On putting Palin out in big, hostile network interviews at the beginning: “Our assumption was people would not let us release her on Fox or local TV.”
On the Couric interview, which Davis says Palin thought would be softer because she was being interviewed by a woman: “She was under the impression the Couric thing was going to be easier than it was. Everyone’s guard was down for the Couric interview.”
On the clothes fiasco: “We flew her out from Alaska to Arizona to Ohio to introduce her to the world and take control of her life. She didn’t think ‘dress for the convention’, because it might have just been a nice day trip to Arizona if she didn’t click with John. Very little prep had been done and if it had, we might have gotten picked off by the press. We were under incredible scrutiny. We got her a gal from New York and we thought, ‘Let’s get some clothes for her and the family.’ It was a failure of management not to get better control and track of that. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, what it was worth or where it was going. No one knew how much that stuff was worth. It was more our responsibility than hers.”
What does that first graf mean? What “people” did they think wouldn’t let them release her on Fox or local television? And as to the second, all I can say is…WHERE DID THEY FIND THESE IDIOTS?! They thought that hyperliberal hyperNOWist hyperidiot Katie Couric was going to be “soft” on her? In a taped, easily edited interview that could be dribbled out over days? On what planet have they been living? These are people who are supposed to understand media relations?
They deserved to lose, and as I’ve said before, I’m not unhappy that they did. But I’m quite unhappy that Senator Obama didn’t.
I don’t generally think much of Chris Hedges, and the comments are nutty, but I largely agree with this piece:
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
Can democracy survive for long, with such an electorate? Of course, he doesn’t finger the primary culprit–our fascist public school system which manufactures exactly the sort of people who will keep it in power.
[Late afternoon update]
Are individualists losing the IQ war with the left?