Here’s a graph of Anti-HumanityEarth Hour’s effects in California.
It doesn’t really surprise me. Even if a lot of people dimmed lights, the amount of electricity used for lights in CA isn’t that huge a percentage of the total demand. For instance, one of the biggest drivers, particularly in the Bay Area, 24/7/365, is server farms, and no Virginia, even in the land of fruits and nuts, they’re not going to shut them down for a stupid political propaganda stunt.
[Update a few minutes later]
A new fantasy history about FDR:
Nothing to Fear claims to provide a “riveting narrative account of the personal dynamics that shaped the tumultuous early days of FDR’s presidency.” Although entertainingly written, it provides little new evidence and even less analysis. What it does offer is an account of Roosevelt’s first 100 days—what Cohen terms “the third great revolution in American history”—for readers whose faith in that revolution remains unshaken and who wish to reclaim the New Deal legacy today. Cohen’s heroes gamely overcome the “business interests” and “powerful financial interests” who try to derail or at least temper Roosevelt’s bold policies.
The result is a polemic that inadvertently raises more questions than it answers. Ray Moley, for instance, became an outspoken critic of the New Deal after leaving the administration, writing in 1939 that Roosevelt suffered from “a kind of mental autointoxication.” By 1948 he was warning about creeping statism, and by 1960 he was a full-fledged Goldwater Republican. Whatever doubts Moley had about the New Deal at the time go unmentioned in Nothing to Fear, and his recantation is the subject of just one paragraph in the epilogue. A pivotal character in American political history is thus reduced to a one-dimensional apparatchik.
Well, what do you expect from the New York Times? It took them years to admit the (Pulitzer-winning) lies and propaganda of Walter Duranty.
We now see the consequences of government bailouts and “too big to fail”:
I think anyone who owns auto-sector debt (whether directly or through a pension or life insurance policy) should be very concerned — they can only find their interests made subject to the political interests of organized labor. Further the American people should probably also be concerned, as we will continue to support with tax dollars a company that has simply proven itself incapable of competing in a free market for the last several decades.
Secondly, we should all be very, very concerned that the White House had decided that it is within its writ to decide who the captains of industry are. The CEO of any company should be chosen by its Board, as elected by its shareholders. The shareholders of GM have just been disenfranchised by a Presidential phone call.
Chief Executives being chosen by politicos is probably common in China or Russia, but those are not countries we want to be emulating. I do not like this at all.
Neither do I. And there’s a word for it.
It starts with “f.”
[Update a few minutes later]
Kaus: Obama’s Diem?
And Lileks twitters: “Maybe I’m old-school, but ‘President fires CEO’ looks as wrong as ‘Pope fires Missile.’ Does not compute.”
[Noon update]
More on why this is such a bad idea:
GM is now Obama’s company. If it closes, it will be on his say-so. But Obama is a politician, not a CEO. So his first concern is to avoid bad political fallout, which means he will prop up the company for as long as it takes, regardless of what makes economic sense. This, in turn, will likely make the company either less economically sound or, it will rebound — but only by getting special breaks other companies won’t get. Either way, bad practices will be rewarded and/or good practices will be punished. More firms will see that gaming Washington pays off and the cycle will continue.
Of course, the good news is that being a law professor and community organizer totally prepares you to run huge white elephant multinational corporations.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Another a couple minutes later]
The first quid pro quo for the government giving you money (or “investing”, as President Obama and David Brooks say) is that it gets to regulate your behavior. Not just who sits on your board or (see Sarkozy last week) where your factory has to be. When the government “pays” for your health care, it reserves the right to deny (as in parts of Britain) heart disease treatment for smokers or hip replacement for the obese. Why be surprised? When the state’s “paying” for your health, your lifestyle directly impacts its “investment.”
The next stage is that, having gotten you used to having your behavior regulated, the state advances to approving not just what you do but what you’re allowed to read, see, hear, think: See the “Canadian Content” regulations up north, and the enforcers of the “human rights” commissions. Or Britain’s recent criminalization of “homophobic jokes.”
You’d be surprised how painlessly and smoothly once-free peoples slip from government “investing” to government control.
There is such a thing as American exceptionalism, but the current regime is doing everything possible to obliterate it as quickly as possible. Don’t think it can’t happen here. It can, if we let it.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, one more — the fascist bargain:
The fascist bargain goes something like this. The state says to the industrialist, “You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with—and help implement—our political agenda.” The moral and economic content of the agenda depends on the nature of the regime. The left looked at German business’s support for the Nazi war machine and leaped to the conclusion that business always supports war. They did the same with American business after World War I, arguing that because arms manufacturers benefited from the war, the armaments industry was therefore responsible for it.
It’s fine to say that incestuous relationships between corporations and governments are fascistic. The problem comes when you claim that such arrangements are inherently right-wing. If the collusion of big business and government is right-wing, then FDR was a rightwinger. If corporatism and propagandistic militarism are fascist, then Woodrow Wilson was a fascist and so were the New Dealers. If you understand the right-wing or conservative position to be that of those who argue for free markets, competition, property rights, and the other political values inscribed in the original intent of the American founding fathers, then big business in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America was not right-wing; it was left-wing, and it was fascistic. What’s more, it still is.
What’s amazing is how blind they are to it.
[Update after noon]
I feel much better now:
…starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee [sic].
Yes, because, you know, that’s the proper role of the federal government under the Constitution. To stand behind GM owners’ warranties. To provide for the care-free pursuit of car ownership.
[Late afternoon update]
This seems to be an own-goal by Gates yesterday. It makes us sound weak, when in fact it isn’t true. There are a number of things we could do about it — the administration just thinks that doing those things are worse choices than doing nothing. As the most obvious example, we could simply bomb and destroy the launch site. We could do this today, or tomorrow, or any day up to the launch. This would absolutely guarantee that North Korea doesn’t do the missile testsatellite launch.
Would it be a good idea? I think so. The regime is in violation of so many UN resolutions, bi- and multi-lateral agreements, etc., that it would be a minor consequence for its criminal behavior over the past decades.
But I can’t imagine this administration, of all administrations, wanting to stir up that hornet’s nest. They’re too busy indulging themselves in the delusion that the reason the rest of the world is unhappy with us is George Bush. And of course, even those countries who were secretly happy to see it, including China, would still be pleased to make political hay over it, churn up international outrage, etc. So it’s probably off the table. But we should say that, instead of implying that we’re impotent.
And just how is it that the NORKs get away with overflight of Japan on a launch? While they are geographically disadvantaged, and can’t get to orbit eastward without doing so, Israel doesn’t use that excuse. If they did, they wouldn’t take the trouble to launch retrograde to avoid overflight of their (hostile) neighbors. North Korea should just have to settle for either hiring someone else to launch, or lease a launch site somewhere else, as any other simililarly-situated nation (e.g., Switzerland) would have to.
Perhaps we might persuade Japan to do something about it, with offers to back them diplomatically. They’re more justified than we are. If they have to shoot down the missile, there’s still a chance that it would come down on their territory. Destroying it on the ground would eliminate this problem. An ounce of prevention, etc…
[Update a few minutes later]
Charles Johnson makes another point that I should have:
This is really a stunning statement. Why didn’t Gates say something like, “We’re not prepared to discuss any plans we may have for dealing with the North Korean missile launch”? To tell them outright that we’re not going to do anything at all is unbelievably stupid. What the hell is going on here?
Was this an explicit decision on the part of the Obama administration, or did he wing it? Either way, confidence is not inspired.
Here’s an article that demonstrates the vapidity of thought of those who oppose self defense on campus (and anywhere else):
In April 2007, he was a student at Virginia Tech when his girlfriend and several other people he knew there were gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Thirty-two people died, plus the gunman.
There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.
“Then I learned pretty fast that wouldn’t solve anything,” said Woods, who is now a graduate student at UT. “The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It’s reactive, not preventative.”
Huh?
How did he “learn” that at all, let alone “pretty fast”? Who provided the lesson? Was it in graduate school at UT?
And what’s wrong with “reactive” as a fall back when “preventative” doesn’t work (as it clearly didn’t in Blacksburg)? Particularly when “preventative” seems to consist of putting up “unarmed victims heregun-free zone” signs?
Whatever he learned, or how fast he learned it, he didn’t learn it from these students, who disarmed a gunman up the road from his school back in 2002.
Opponents say that if guns are allowed on campus, students and faculty will live in fear of classmates and colleagues, not knowing who might pull a gun over a drunken dorm argument or a poor grade.
Note, they have difficulty finding any actual examples of this to justify their bizarre paranoia. And they don’t seem to live in fear of the psychopaths among them who ignore the “gun-free zone” signs, who are the only ones with guns under their setup.
Woods, who wore a maroon “Virginia Tech Class of 2007” T-shirt during an interview, said he hasn’t heard from any survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting who supports guns on campus.
And therefore, since he hasn’t heard of any, none must exist. Great logic, that.
He figures a classroom shooting would be too sudden to stop, even if a student or teacher had a gun.
How he “figures” that, just as how he “learned it pretty fast,” remains unexplained.
“Everything happens too quickly,” Woods said. “You either play dead or you are dead.”
Really? Tell it to this woman.
Idiot.
[Monday morning update]
If I am in possession of my faculties, I will refuse to go into a nursing home unless it is a “shall issue” nursing home. I would at least want some of the staff to be armed.
[Update after the Instalanche]
If there are any new readers here, you might want to check out the rest of the blog. I have some thoughts on the president’s south Asian speech affectations, press coverage of the Fargo floods, whether or not there is really nothing that we can do about the North Korean launch, and who controls the means of production.
A photoessay.
Where are all the fake news stories about Mad Max, cannibalism, baby rapes?
And where is the president? Why hasn’t The One graced the benighted with his beneficent federal presence in this disaster? Does he hate white people?
There are plenty of much greater criticisms, and I have them, as any regular reader of this site knows, and no one was more irritated by George Bush’s “nucular” than I was, but I find the new president’s own verbal affectations quite annoying.
“Tahleebahn”? “Pahkeestahn”?
Who talks like this?
As Glenn Reynolds pointed out a long time ago, it’s like the NPR correspondents who work mightily to get their local Spanish inflections exactly correct when reporting on their communist heroes in Central America while not bothering to learn the difference between an auto and semi-auto gun.
Hey, it’s just “Taliban” (like “tally” and to “ban” a book), and “Pakistan” (like “pack” for a trip, and “Stan,” Oliver Hardy’s partner).
And don’t even get me started about “Oreeon.” What does he, think it’s a cookie? That one will be a real problem for the next four years unless he kills the NASA program.
[Monday morning update]
And yes, before anyone asks, while (unlike many, apparently) I had no problem with Sarah Palin’s speech patterns in general, I did find her “Eye-rak” kind of grating.
John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:
The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.
Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.
The old Ten Years After standard should have been the Obama campaign’s theme song, since they told us that’s what would happen if we elected them:
One popular song when I was young was from one of those one-hit-wonder bands who are all but forgotten except for one great tune. The band’s name was Ten Years After and the song was “I’d Love to Change the World.” One memorable line went like this:
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no moreI can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I sang along to that song before it dawned on me: “Hey, that ain’t right! Shouldn’t it be: tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no poor no more?”
I have no way of knowing whether or not Ten Years After advocated the abolition of wealth, or if the line was a tongue-in-cheek way of sniping at the simplicity of the argument that removing the wealthy made the poor better off. But what I did know then was that I finally understood the definition of covet. It was to want something so much that if I couldn’t have it, then I wanted to deny it to anyone else.
That’s the politics of envy in a nutshell. Unfortunately, there’s evidence that it’s an evolutionarily evolved feature of human nature, and one of the reasons that the false promises of Marxism remain attractive and enduring, despite the vast amount of empirical evidence that it not only doesn’t work, but is disastrous from a humanitarian perspective whenever it’s seriously attempted. Read the whole thing
From Mark Steyn:
…speaking as someone who gets called a racist by the left all the time, I’d always assumed, as when the mob take the tire iron to you in the back alley, that it’s all business, nothing personal: just what’s necessary to get the job done. It’s rather sad to find this is the way they talk in private, too. For what it’s worth, I don’t regard that Peretz quote as “beyond the pale”, but, if it is, why bother being a writer? I can’t see why anybody would want to enter a profession in which that passage exceeds the very narrow and strictly enforced bounds within which these subjects can be discussed.
…”[REDACTED] clearly must not have a girlfriend”? Oh, my!
Again, whenever the ever reliable “all right-wing men are secretly gay” charge raises its head – see how this thread quickly dissolves into the critical issue of whether it’s Glenn Beck or I who most enjoys wearing frilly panties (answer: it’s me; Glenn prefers a teddy) – I always assume that, too, is strictly business. It’s heartening to know that, in the echo chamber of the JournoList, they turn their lurid obsessions on their own.
I always wonder myself if these casual libels from so-called “liberals” that people who disagree with them are racists (and “haters,” and “homophobes”) are sincere, or if these are merely just one of the disingenuous cudgels to be brought to their ugly ideological street fights. But even when they form a circular slander squad, it’s still hard to know.