Recently in Corruption Category

The case for the "incontrovertible" and "settled Science" of AGW has suffered yet another series of blows. First, it appears there has been no warming over the past 15 years, claims by the warmists notwithstanding. The the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, home of ClimateGate and ClimateGate 2.0, reports that there has been no appreciable warming in that time period.

None of that stops the AGW faithful, who aren't letting things like actual data get in the way of their beliefs.

Then sixteen prominent scientists sign a letter saying there is no need to panic about global warming. The letter pokes holes in some of the claims made by AGW proponents and questions the motivations of those who have abandoned any pretense of scientific objectivity.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Cui bono? indeed.

As more evidence points to climate change being a natural phenomenon one has to ask this question of the AGW proponents: Who are the 'deniers'? The AGW faithful who pick and chose data that backs their claims while ignoring data that contradicts their beliefs? Or those who look at all the data and find it does not support the claims for AGW?

I caught the end of tonight's World News on ABC. Since it was Friday their usual last feature is Person of the Week.

This week it was the three mayors of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Mesa, Arizona. What is it that moved ABC to select them as Persons of the Week? They want the federal government (specifically Congress) to stop dickering around and do something about America's crumbling roads. After all, the US used to be number one when it came to the quality of our highways and byways. But no longer. We now rate 20^th in the world behind Malaysia and Cypus.

"If they pass the surface transportation bill and America Fast Forward, it will allow us to accelerate the building of that 30-year project in a 10-year period of time, creating 166,000 jobs," Villaraigosa said. "These are the kinds of innovative things that the Congress has an opportunity to do that they haven't done up to now. ... Their failure to address the No. 1 issue in America, the jobs issue, is akin to the captain of the Concordia jumping off the ship before the passengers had been rescued. This Congress needs to get back on that ship and do their job."

I have to admit that I agree with these mayors that our highway system has been seriously neglected over the past few decades. Some states do an admirable job keeping their roads in good shape but they have to struggle to do it, sometimes sacrificing other infrastructure programs to keep the roads open.

But there's something I must point out that the mayors have conveniently forgotten: the ~$800 billion stimulus package put forth by President Obama in 2009. If every penny of that money had gone to fixing roads and other infrastructure they wouldn't have had to try to cajole Congress into dealing with the issue now. We would be almost 3 years into the 10 year rebuilding effort and plenty of people presently unemployed would be working. But no one mentions that out of the entire stimulus package less than 10% went to infrastructure, and not just roads. The rest of the stimulus went to expanding government and lining the pockets of Obama supporters.

Do we really want Congress to drop another trillion dollars on projects that won't do anything but waste taxpayer dollars we don't really have? If we're going to drop a bundle of tax money on roads, then the appropriations will need to be specifically targeted to each state and limited to use on roads only. No "bridges to nowhere", no side projects that have nothing to do with improving roads, and provisions to do away with the Bacon-Davis Act restrictions (saving tons of money in the process).

Very little surprises me about the ever more nonsensical, illogical, and incompetent Obama Administration. Two of the latest examples of this dysfunction: federal fines placed upon fuel companies for failure to blend certain biofuels in gasoline and diesel even though those biofuels don't exist; and new regulations imposed by NOAA that seriously cripple the New England fishing industry even though the need for those restrictions cannot be justified.

With every move Obama and his minions make we move closer to the dystopian hell of Atlas Shrugged. I figure it's only a matter of time before something like Directive 10-289 is handed down by executive order from Obama. (Don't think it won't happen. One clueless leftist on the WSJ Forums suggested stopping the economic abandonment of California by otherwise viable businesses by making it illegal for them to relocate out of state or to trim jobs. Others on the forum informed this idiot that such a thing is tantamount to slavery and illegal seizure of private property without due process or just compensation - the 13th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution, respectively. But then the Left doesn't really like the Constitution, does it?)

Because stupid things like this have been happening a little bit at a time, most of the people in the US don't realize it's happening. But if Obama tried to shove his agenda down our throats overnight there would be armed rebellion by the states and a Second Civil War could result. Except this time it wouldn't be North versus South but Red versus Blue.

Yes, I know it's Christmas Eve. I could easily do a feel-good Christmas story since there are appear to be a plethora of them out there this year. But that smacks far too much of me-too-ism. And while I am just as guilty as many bloggers out there of doing that from time to time, I don't want to do that today. No siree. Instead, I'm going to focus on something incredibly stupid that only a government bureaucracy could pull off.

To which government bureaucracy am I referring?

The EPA.

Let's face it folks, it has become a force for interfering in the business of America, which is business. Nonsense rules with little scientific backing or study have done more to harm our economic revival than just about any other Obama mechanism. It is one of the few federal agencies that can promote two contradictory views at the same time, all in the name of "protecting the environment."

One of the latest B.S directives deals with mercury, specifically mercury emitted by coal-burning power plants. Never mind that the amount of mercury emitted at present is miniscule and that to reduce it even more has reached the point of diminishing returns. But then the EPA also has no concerns for the mercury contained in CFL bulbs which can expose the populace to levels of mercury magnitudes of order higher than what comes out of the smokestack of a power plant.

See? Two contradictory stances at the same time. But then the EPA has an agenda that us purely political, one that ignores science. It's all about feel-good rules that do nothing to protect the environment from real threats while harping on minutiae.

One of the other things the EPA ignores about atmospheric mercury: most of it reaching the ground in the US comes from China. We have no control over Chinese emissions and I doubt very much they'll listen to Obama's EPA. (Obama lost credibility with the Chinese quite some time ago.) China will do what it needs to do to expand its economy and if that means ignoring mercury emissions that affect countries on the other side of the Pacific.

This isn't the first time the EPA has tried to control effects of emissions from outside the US with ridiculous rules that have little effect of the environment but cost businesses in the US millions, if not billions of dollars to implement. This kind of useless bureaucratic incompetence (or malfeasance) must end.

Don Surber gives us a list of the Ten Things Obama Got Wrong, though I think he could have easily gone well past ten to fifty or a hundred.

A few of my favorites:

2. He got Obamacare wrong. Along those lines, President Obama saw how Hillarycare went and decided to do the opposite. Or likely more accurately, the president heard that Hillary lost on health care because it was written in the White House. He decided he would do it differently and have it written by Congress. This was a formula for failure because he lost control of the bill. This meant he was putting his name and reputation on the line for something he never wrote. And what was written was a mess.

Don acts as if this were unusual for the Presdient, but it's not. Most of the programs and ideas and other acts he should have handled himself he handed off to his czars or Pelosi & Reid. In effect, he phoned it in, voting 'present' when his position doesn't really allow him to do that. Then again, that's how he's handled things most of his adult life. Why change now?

3. He got the economy wrong. He overestimated its strength and went full-speed ahead with spending. Budgets for agencies were doubled as liberals wanted to have a field day regulating everything. But tax revenues tanked. That $400 billion deficit he campaigned against tripled. Guess what? The public noticed. So did S&P. He is now President Downgrade.

No argument there. But then he has no real understanding of how an economy works, only how it's supposed to work according to Leftist ideology. Too bad for him the economy itself shows just how wrong Leftist economics can be. Not that I expect him to learn that lesson as he's not exactly known for being open minded, particularly when it come to anything that conflicts with his beliefs.

4. He got the stimulus wrong. The $787 billion stimulus was a grab bag of political kickbacks papered over with an unnecessary, ineffective and ill-advised tax cut. The unemployment rate would have gone to 9% if we do nothing, he said. We did something and it hit 10%. Again, people noticed.

If every penny of that stimulus had been spent on upgrading or repairing infrastructure, then it's possible the economy could have been turned around. (I still have doubts about that, but I'm willing to admit I could be wrong.) But of all that money, only $55 billion was spent on infrastructure. That's just under 7% of the total stimulus. Seven percent. Where did the rest go? To cronies and supporters who had more to do with creating this lengthy on-going recession than helping us get out of it.

One last one:

10. He got TV wrong. It's called overexposure.

I think just about everyone is sick and tired of seeing him read from his teleprompter, particularly since he's not really saying anything new. It doesn't help that he's now been on the presidential campaign trail for 4 years since he really doesn't know how to do anything else.

Call this one a two-fer, covering two different aspects of AGW skepticism.

First, comes a peer reviewed article in Science that covers a study questioning the sensitivity of Earth's climate to CO₂ concentrations.

In particular, the study suggests that the probable sensitivity of the earth's climate to increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far lower than the assumptions traditionally used by the (already discredited) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not only that, the authors find that the existence of a so-called "fat tail" -- the notion that extreme temperature changes in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely -- is illusory.

If this is indeed the case, then many of the defective climate models being used to predict climate catastrophe just became even more defective, and therefore, even less predictive of what future climate might be like.

Then, comes a follow up on the discrediting of the Mann 'hockey stick' graph.

You may be asking yourself "Why is he covering this again?" It's simple, really: far too many true believers still cite the Mann graph as incontrovertible proof of AGW.

I've had more debates with a number of them bringing up the graph as if it were holy writ despite the fact that once Mann allowed both his data sets and the algorithms used to analyze the data to be evaluated, both were found to be so profoundly flawed that the results were meaningless. When random data was used with the algorithms, the hockey stick was still there (though to a different amplitude), meaning the graph was built into the formula. That's not science. That's fraud. (Or possibly it's incompetence, but I'm learning more towards the former than the latter.)

The text of the ClimateGate 2.0 e-mails quoted in the linked post question the validity of Mann's work, with some lamenting their decisions not to question his work. One in particular tested Mann's algorithms, finding them wanting.

4241.txt: Rob Wilson again: " The whole Macintyre issue got me thinking...I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel ... The reconstructions clearly show a 'hockey-stick' trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about. "

4369.txt: Tim Osborn says " This completely removes most of Mike's arguments... "  and Ed Cook replies "I am afraid that Mike is defending something that  increasingly can not be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead."

When colleagues of Mann's are questioning the validity of his work and his emotional investment in his results, then we must question whether they are the results of science or just wishing it were true. In this case it is the second rather than the first.

And so dies the "incontrovertible proof".

Is it possible Booing might get its way in regards to the NLRB action trying to block it from opening its new Dreamliner plant in South Carolina? If this AP report is accurate, the answer might be yes.

However, this 'win' for Boeing might be a Pyrrhic victory as it was contingent upon a new four year bargaining agreement with the Machinists union.

The National Labor Relations Board filed a lawsuit earlier this year alleging that Boeing violated labor laws by opening the South Carolina line. The agency claimed that Boeing was punishing Washington state workers for past strikes and said the company should return the work to Washington. Boeing has vigorously denied the charges, claiming it opened the South Carolina plant for valid economic reasons.

The agreement would call for the new 737 Max aircraft to be built at union facilities in Renton, Wash., said Tom Wroblewski, president of Machinists Union District 751.

Wroblewski said that if union members vote to approve the deal in the coming weeks, the union would inform the NLRB that it has no further grievances with Boeing.

The article goes on to say that since the union no longer has a grievance against Boeing, the NLRB would likely stop pursuing the case. (Even if it does, that doesn't mean the NLRB wouldn't pursue it some future time should the "need" arise...like another negotiation for a union contract.)

I have to ask whether the lawsuit filed on behalf of the union by the NLRB was nothing more than leverage for the union to get a better deal. After all, two of the three sitting members in the NLRB are staunch union supporters, with one of them a former administrator for the SEIU.

Something stinks about this whole thing, something legally actionable if it turns out the NLRB acted against Boeing at the behest of union leaders in order to gain an advantage at the bargaining table. Since we can't count on either the Department of Labor or the Justice Department to investigate this matter, maybe it's time for Congress to step in. It would have to be the House rather than the Senate as a majority of the Senate is beholden the the unions and would be unlikely to allow such an action to take place.

After weeks of hullabaloo about the various OWS protests across the nation, it appears the whole thing was much ado about nothing.

Between unfocused or contradictory messages, hypocrisy, mob violence, rape, murder, theft, drug overdoses, totalitarian 'councils' confiscating donated money, and just plain foolishness, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have proven one thing to the public at large: they're spoiled children filling the role of useful idiots, showing the worst side of society, not the best as they have claimed.

What have they accomplished other than showing the rest of the country that they're mean-spirited wackos with little understanding of history, economics, or human nature?

It shows in hundreds of different ways, with one of the overriding themes I noticed being "We want you to pay for our stuff even though we could pay for it ourselves, but we don't want the rest of you freeloaders to take our stuff that someone else paid for!" This theme has recurred at more than one protest location, with the protesters not recognizing the hypocrisy of their demands.

Some want to replace capitalism with socialism, even though the socialism they're promoting has never lived up to the promises made and usually end up creating nothing but poverty, misery, and terror. It isn't until countless lives are sacrificed that the socialist utopias implode.

Some seem to think that anarchy is the answer, but all that ever leads to is destruction, lawlessness, and in the end, tyranny.

They claim they represent the 99%, but 99% of what? 99% of the spoiled privileged children of the 1%? 99% of the clueless drones feeling entitled to what others have earned through hard work? They sure as hell don't represent 99% of the American people.

In the end, OWS has been about nothing but selfishness, greed, and a sense of entitlement. In other words, a world class FAIL.

I find it interesting that President Obama sincerely believes that those of us Americans still working have gotten lazy.

WTF?

I don't know about you, but all three of us here at The Manse are working our butts off. Deb is working at the local veteran's home and going to nursing school. BeezleBub is going to school, taking part in some extracurricular activities, and working at the farm. Me, I'm working, working, and..umm...working.

What it comes down to is that he doesn't think we're working hard enough to support his socialist agenda. This requires people to give selflessly by working harder to support those who can't work and more specifically, those who won't work.

When productivity from those of us starts falling off it's somehow our fault. Never mind that all he's done is given those of us still working more than enough incentive to not work nearly as hard as we have in the past. After all, why should we? All he's going to do is take it away from us.

How do we know this? Because he's said as much during the beginning of his still ongoing presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber?)

It must be remembered that socialism is based upon two principles: envy, and the belief in altruism.

Of the first, it is envy by those who actually produce little or nothing who have been told that those actually producing the wealth are somehow beholden to them. It usually takes the form of class warfare egged on by the very people who see themselves above all of that. (They aren't.)

The Left sells the idea that the best way to make sure everyone has what they need is to take it away from those who actually provide it. The problem is that eventually the providers will decide it's no longer worth it to do so and they'll stop doing it. Then who benefits? Obviously, no one.

Second, socialist believe big time in altruism, that human condition where individuals put aside their own wants and needs for the benefits of others. There's a problem with this belief: no one can be altruistic all the time because by nature humans are altruistic only now and then, and then only under very specific and limited conditions for a very limited amount of time. Once their 'altruism' starts hurting them and their families it fades away. If we need any proof of that all we need to do is look at the two biggest experiments in socialism to see how well the belief in altruism fared: the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Both tried it for generations. Both failed to live up to the ideal. One utterly collapsed when their socialist economy collapsed like the house of cards that it was. The other one gave up on the idea when they watched what happened to their neighbor and decided they didn't want to suffer the same fate. They backed away from the socialist 'ideal' and embraced a limited form of capitalism, and so were saved (at least for now).

But now we have a president who has been working very hard to take us towards an ideology that has failed by appealing to ideals that have been proven to be false, and in the end, deadly. And he baits those who actually provide jobs, goods, and services by telling them they aren't working hard enough?

What a putz.

As the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests continue, the media still tries to paint them as something entirely grass roots despite the fact that many of them are anything but grassroots. As Bruce Kesler put it, they are nothing more than "Potemkin" protests.

[Occupy Wall Street] is a big media promoted event, one that fits its liberal-left memes, organized by radical "community organizers", funded and added manpower from government-union thugs (just look at the size of the OWC (sic) bouncers).

--snip--

As Glenn Reynolds comments about major media coverage of OWC protests, "When lefties want to make the Tea Party fit their preconceptions, they have to make things up. When righties want to exercise their preconceptions about the Occupy movement, on the other hand, they just have to take a picture."

The contrast is telling. As Mary Grabar notes from her observations of the Occupy Atlanta protests:

As I watched the ragtag group file in, escorted by police, I remembered a Tea Party rally in front of the state capitol in downtown Atlanta, only a few blocks away. There the police and state troopers were omnipresent amidst a group of suburbanites occupying flag-adorned lawn chairs on the sidewalk and listening to speeches about politically legitimate efforts in overturning health care legislation and enforcing immigration laws. Complaints from the podium were specifically about government actions, like taking over the private company, General Motors.

Back then, amidst the flags and bunting, the police were omnipresent, with prison vehicles at the ready and parked along the streets that were the pathway to the prearranged site. Police were omnipresent as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited. They were quite visible as the National Anthem and America the Beautiful were sung, and as prayers for our country were sent up to heaven.

The police stood around, looking relaxed.

The Tea Partiers never blocked a street, and left quietly down the sidewalks after their allotted time, leaving no traces, picking up trash that may have been dropped inadvertently.

The Tea Party never occupied public land illegally. They assembled peacefully with permits arranged beforehand. Yet the media repeatedly characterized them as "angry," "extremist," and "racist."

Tea Party protestors didn't defecate on police cars, didn't disrespect men and women in uniform, didn't try to foment confrontations with police, didn't turn public parks into pig sties, and they didn't use the restroom facilities of local businesses as if they were nothing more than public restrooms.

At least Tea Party protestors abide by the law (for the most part). If they don't like a law they'll try to change it as the Founders intended, by using the ballot box rather than ignoring it as if it didn't apply to them. Tea Party supporters understand where the money comes from to pay for all the "free stuff" many the OWS folks are demanding. A majority of Tea Party supporters are part of the 53% who actually pay income taxes. Most of the young OWS protestors are not. That they believe they are entitled to receive that "free stuff" the rest of us pay for shows us they've been cheated, either by parents that indulged them far too much or schools that filled their heads with that nonsense. And when reality finally slaps them up side their heads it's somehow the fault of the people who make it possible for them to live their indigent lifestyle and they demand that they be "given" jobs they really don't want (because then they'd actually have to work) or aren't qualified to perform.

And so it goes.

A number of bloggers have covered the controversy over the University of Wisconsin - Stout in regards to Professor James Miller and his First Amendment rights to free speech on campus. Apparently the campus police chief doesn't believe in them. Neither does the interim Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The U of W has beclowned itself on this matter and I'm not going to belabor the asininity of the powers-that-be at that fine institution of..ahem...learning. Instead, I am going to address the continuing destruction of our colleges and universities and the concomitant higher education bubble that is about to burst. Or rather, I am going to let Penn and Teller do it for me. After all, I have work to do and money to make so that someday I too can retire a year or so before my employer involuntarily "retires" my ass me because they believe I'm too damn old to do the job anymore. So sit back, relax, and enjoy their expose (in three parts).

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:


That basically covers it.

I particularly liked the part when they talk to the supposedly smartest man in academia, Noam Chomsky. All he did for me is prove that he's a clueless, out-of-touch putz. (Frankly, the smartest man in academia is probably Stephen Hawking, at least in my opinion.)

If this wasn't taking place in Massachusetts I'd be more surprised.

We've all been hearing about Elizabeth Warren's beliefs and opinions about such things as the constitutionally defined limits on government, taxes, spending, and now, such fundamentals as private property rights. In a nutshell, she's against them. She believes that no individual creates businesses and jobs, that it's all The State. I'm sorry, but the state is too stupid and too corrupt to create anything other than more stupidity and corruption.

"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for," Warren says. But the flip side of that equation is that it's the need for markets and goods that helped get the roads built in the first place. It's that need which makes cities and towns, more than public servants do.

The government cannot make towns and cities, China and North Korea have proven that with ghost towns. It is those factories and market that make them.

And the public benefits from having goods and jobs, much more than it does from people like Warren. That is and has always been the black hole in the left's argument. Warren treats the factory as a net benefit for the factory owner-- when it's actually a net benefit for everyone.

She gets cause and effect backwards. Roads won't be built unless there's a reason for them.

Her Marxist colors are showing. I'm expecting her to start talking about the proletariat of the workers and how capitalism is a disease and how it's necessary for the workers to rise up against the bosses.

Little does she realize (or even care) that it's been tried before and it has never worked. It's even been tried here and failed. Does the UAW versus the Big Three provide enough of an example of how not to let "the workers" run the show? ("Workers" in this context refers to the union bosses who work very hard to maintain mediocrity among the rank and file union workers while demanding ever increasing wages and benefits far above what the workers are worth.) I'm not sure shouting her philosophy from the rooftops is going to be a winning strategy in her efforts to wrest away the Senate seat now held by Scott Brown.

We'll see how that's all going to work out for her. It seems the People's Republic of Massachusetts isn't as blue as it used to be, indicated by Scott Brown's election to the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy, and the growing failure of RomneyCare as it takes up even bigger chunks of the state budget while returning less and less care.

I just hope this doesn't give the Left here in the US any ideas, but I'm not holding my breath:

UK Labour Party wants journalism licenses, will prohibit non-licensed journalists.

Oh, yeah, that will go over well. But considering the "shellacking" Labour took during the last election, I'm not all that surprised.

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.

Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the tradition "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations.

So the scheme would even ban unlicensed blogging or Internet posts. Of course I can understand why the socialists in the UK would want to do so - control the dialogue and you control the thought of the "proles" and the results of elections. Truth and fact would become a thing of the past because the socialist/statist/authoritarian Left believe they are the only arbiters of the truth.

You know statists like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid would love nothing better than to control all of the media rather than just the portions of the MSM already in their pockets. If they could silence their critics then everything would be just perfect for them because they'd be able to sell any lie as the truth (Freedom = Slavery, Collective Good/ Individual Bad, and so on).

But there is one big difference between the UK and the US - we here in the US still have our guns and the Left knows it. Our brethren in the UK have been all but stripped of their means to fight back if it ever came to that unless they were willing to emulate the faux Guy Falkes in V for Vendetta.

(H/T Instapundit)

I find it interesting that the AGW faithful aren't using new data to conclude climate change is All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans. Much of the same kind of data they're using to 'prove' global warming is due solely to human activity was used back in 1973 to prove the same thing about global cooling, proposing many of the same 'solutions' to fix the problem.

In 1973 I attended an Ecology Symposium at Ohio State University meant for faculty and graduate students in the auditorium of the engineering school. I was an undergrad, but I sneaked in among the several hundred attendees, an got a seat in the back of the auditorium before the doors were shut. I heard several presentations and lectures by a distinguished panel of professors and researchers from other universities speaking on the approaching perilous demise of planet earth by global cooling. The earth was literally beginning to freeze because mankind was using too much fossil fuels so that the pollution was blocking the suns rays and its warmth.

The consensus of the distinguished panel was that our end was certain by 1980, or 1985 at the latest. The northern polar ice cap was going to expand rapidly, devouring first Canada, then the upper half of the United States. Canadians were going to flood the U.S. and they, and Americans would then flee south to Mexico and Central America triggering a bloody war as those Latinos would have to fight off the invasion. In the midst of this bloody war, America's bread basket would be gone as our fertile land could no longer feed the rest of the world as it would be under ice. The end result would be the loss of at least 75% of the planet's human population.

The solution offered by this august group of distinguished experts: Americans, and only Americans, would have to surrender their cars, single family homes, all of their electric gadgets, and their individual liberties to a strong central government which would hire these, and like-minded experts who would forever manage our society. The rest of the world could be permitted to press on as they were because they were not guilty of our over-consumption of the world's resources.

I also have copy of the Jan 13, 1972 issue of the Columbus Dispatch with lead editorial on the demise of mankind from over-population. It recommended the implementation of the President's Commission on Over-population. . . . president Nixon's commission. According to this AP editorial, we had mere months to get moving on this matter or face extinction. The solution: Americans had to surrender. . . . etc.

You get the point.

Funny how regardless of whatever crisis conjured up by our ruling elites the solution is the same.

I've noticed that, too. Just about any crisis, even a faux crisis, will be used as an excuse to expand the power of our self-defined and self-delusional ruling elite. After all, they know much better how to run our lives than we do. And because they do, they will be exempt from the restrictions placed upon the rest of us because of the 'burdens' they bear on our behalf.

Yeah. Right.

We've seen a few articles dealing with false accusation of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct on college campuses and the rather lax criteria for determining the 'guilt' of the accused by college administrations, in many cases ignoring the evidence presented and even the findings of police investigations that show the accused is innocent. It elicited a response from a Dartmouth alumnus who suffered under just such an accusation even though the accuser was found to have lied about the alleged assault.

That in and of itself is a miscarriage of justice. But it was his experiences and observations that were more telling, especially observations about those who chose to judge him guilty despite overwhelming evidence that no such assault ever took place.

Dartmouth is one of the Ivy League schools, institutions of higher learning that supposed to be a cut above the rest. However, as we have seen over the years, their reputations for churning out the "best and brightest" are showing themselves to be less deserved than in decades past.

One observation of Gonzalo Lira's that struck me as being dead on.

What I didn't realize at the time--because I was too young--and which I would slowly come to realize over the years, was what the episode taught me, about America's elite. About the cowardice of the American elite. A moral cowardice that, I understand now, is far more significant than practically anything else that I learned at Dartmouth College.

The members of the Committee On Standards who sat in judgment of me in the Fall of 1991 were not some lofty group of my "betters", draped in gowns and wearing the wigs of English jurists: They were my peers--run-of-the-mill students of a small liberal-arts college in New England.

But that particular group of run-of-the-mill students is exactly the sort of individual who winds up running the United States. The current Secretary of the Treasury is a Dartmouth alum--Geithner '83. So was the last Treasury Secretary--Paulson '68--as well as a whole boatload of his partners at Goldman Sachs. The current head of General Electric (Immelt '68), the most influential Surgeon General in American history (Koop '37), the current junior senator from New York (Gillibrand née Rutnik '88), the senior White House correspondent for one of the major networks (Tapper '91), the soldier/writer who's experiences in Iraq formed the basis for a major television series on HBO (Fick '99)--

--all Dartmouth alums.

The kind of men and women Dartmouth enrolls and graduates are the bright men and women who find places for themselves in the gears of America society. The men and women on the COS hearing in the fall of 1991 were no different.

And they showed me how fundamentally corrupt the American leadership class really is.

Moral cowardice. I think that sums up the problem we have with those in power. It's more about feelings that about what's right or wrong. They are not willing to take a stand against something that is wrong because of how someone else might feel about it. It seems feelings have replaced morals, have replaced critical thinking. But what do we expect when over the past few decades education has twisted the meaning of right and wrong and replaced it with how one feels about something. (And if you notice, it's never about what someone might think about some event or issue, it's how the feel about it.)

Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with "How do you feel about it?" as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide. And now, as Brooks points out, we see the results. A vast number of American young people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong. The question would strike them as foreign. Why? Because the question suggests that there is a right and wrong outside of themselves. And just as there is no God higher than them, there is no morality higher than them, either.

Could this be why Gonzalo Lira was 'convicted' and suspended by the Dartmouth Committee On Standards for an offense he didn't commit? Was he being punished for the alleged misdeeds of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill (the Thomas confirmation hearings were ongoing at the time). Did they see him as a proxy for all of those out there that had committed such offenses and gone unpunished because they felt it was right thing to do, regardless of the fact that an innocent man was going to pay the price for others' transgressions?

Along this line are the replacement of morals with feelings which is the reason behind such odious things as political correctness, college "speech codes" that violate the First Amendment in an effort to prevent anyone from being offended by anyone else (except of course those on the Left being allowed to offend those on the Right because they feel it's necessary to show them their place), and a whole host of other actions that cast aside traditional notions of right or wrong. By extension, this also means they have no way of recognizing evil because to them it's all relative. ("There is no right or wrong.") It appears they do not believe that some act or some one can be so totally effin' evil that they do not have a right to exist. They explain away the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and a host of other outright evil persons by claiming others drove them to it (the blame usually laid upon Western Civilization). They truly have no inkling that evil does indeed exist, that it can exist in the form of a single person willing to kill as many people as necessary to get their way. It is that moral cowardice that allows many of the aforementioned genocidal despots to do what they do with nary a protest from the enlightened, "feeling" ruling elite.

And we somehow expect these very same people to have our best interests at heart?

By way of Maggie's Farm comes this quote from George Santayana, he of the "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" fame. In this case Santayana was addressing the issue of the modern Liberal, though his quote comes from 100 years ago.

His ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any good done, but on a passionate willfulness. He calls the things he wants for others good, because he wants to bestow it upon them, not because they naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has momentary pleasure in policy.

Even back then they understood that Liberals, meaning the modern definition, feel good only when it is done on their terms, and the heck with what the people may really need.

Gee, that sounds an awful lot like ObamaCare, doesn't it?

Way to go, Mister Hoffa! Let's see about bringing the unions back to their head-bashing, leg-breaking hey-days, shall we?

I guess he didn't get the memo about being more civil during political discourse. But then the unions are on the ropes and not finding much in the way of support from the public these days, so perhaps violent rhetoric is the only tool he and other union leaders have left.

It didn't help that Obama's Labor Day speechifying took place in that bastion of decades long Democrat machine politics and union hegemony, Detroit. As one wag put it, it appears Obama wants to do for the rest of the country what has been done for/to Detroit.

Thanks, but no thanks. I think we'll do much better without that kind of help.

I don't know about you, but I know I'm tired of hearing the uninformed trying to mislead the rest of us about our energy reserves, energy technologies (particularly proven technologies), and so-called "green" energy, which is anything but. They push untruths in an effort to fundamentally change America even though it is in no one's best interests (except theirs) to do so. Do they really think they're saving anything other than the last vestiges of a morally bankrupt and failed ideology?

Probably.

Just listen to this and you'll probably get angry at them, and particularly The One.


(H/T Maggie's Farm)

I think this cartoon illustrates the thinking of those rioting in the UK all too well.


For more head to Spider and Scorpion.

Over the past year and a half I've listened to a large number of people disparaging the Tea party movement. Most of them have been card-carrying Democrats (or at least those with the belief they know how to spend my money better than I do). Others have been RINOs or part of the so-called "Establishment" Republicans.

The Tea party has been excoriated in the press, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other media organs of the Left leading the way. Washington politicians and other Beltway insiders have derided the Tea party as "hobbits", "terrorists", "Nazis", "racists", "jack-booted thugs", and a whole host of other derogatory labels.

As the volume of hateful rhetoric aimed at the Tea party and its supporters has increased, it has made me and others realize that the groups making these accusations must be really getting nervous. As one commenter to this piece wrote, "If you're getting a lot of [flak], you must be over the target." And so it must be as the Tea party gains supporters throughout the country at a local, state, and national level because they're tired of being ignored by the Coastal elite and the Beltway intellectuals.

My most memorable run in with an unabashed Tea party hater took place at our business when one of our customers went on a rant about "those goddamn Tea partiers wanting to take everything away from us!" There was no way I could not respond, so I asked her where she'd gotten that idea. Apparently she'd read it in the paper, in this case the Boston Globe. (One must remember, the Globe is owned by the NYT and has the same editorial policies as its parent corporation.) I calmly informed her that if her opinion was based solely on what she'd read in the Globe, then she'd been misinformed and lied to. She saw the Tea party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists bent on depriving the poor, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, and undoing decades of civil rights advances. I had to remind her that many of the civil rights advances came from the GOP, not her sainted Democrats. I reminded her the KKK were primarily Southern Democrats, not Republicans. I reminded her it was the Democrats who started us down this path of unsustainable spending going all the way back to FDR. I reminded her that it was LBJ who decided his Great Society was the answer to all of our society's problems, that it had failed miserably, and that it was funded by stealing from the Social Security trust fund.. I reminder her it was the Democrat majorities in Congress going back to 2007 that multiplied the annual deficits to many times that of all of Dubya's deficits combined.

I gave her the URL for the Contract From America website which explains the Tea party platform, none of which deals with social issues she claims the Tea party is involved with. She wasn't interested. Instead she chose willful ignorance and adherence to libelous propaganda from those who do not have her best interests at heart.

Maybe she will care when the country is unable to pay its bills and all of the government support she is 'owed' ends because there's no money left to pay for it all. Maybe she will care when all "the rich" she's constantly complaining about are either driven into bankruptcy or flee with their wealth to friendly climes and no one is left to pay for everything she is owed.

But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE:It appears Senator John Kerry has decided to add fuel to the fire by expressing his opinion that the media should not give equal time to those "absolutely absurd notions" voiced by the Tea Party because their opinions "are not factual."

What a putz.