« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »

June 30, 2006

It works for France!

Nobody can properly support a family of 4 on less than $50,000/year after taxes and union dues(4 being the minimum family size needed to keep our population neither too big nor too small but just right).

Therefore the minimum wage should be $50,000/year. Of course greedy business owners will want to raise prices and so all prices should be frozen and all jobs should be guaranteed and workers should get tenure just like teachers do.

And working mothers should get unlimited full pay leave for family care and employers should provide free daycare.

Also everyone should get 1 month of vacation every year, plus all 27 holidays.

This works for France.

In the comments of a blog post, "More on partisan hackery," Asymmetrical Information, June 25, 2006

Posted at 08:29 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Humor

June 23, 2006

"Godless: The Church of Liberalism"

Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it's been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn't that great?" and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.
...
But in 2004, the Jersey Girls publicly endorsed John Kerry's campaign for president: they inserted themselves into the political arena and chose sides. That being so, to demand that they be insulated from the normal rough 'n' tumble of partisan politics merely because of their biography seems absurd. There are any number of 9/11 widows. A few are big George W. Bush supporters, many are apolitical. I was honoured to receive an email the other day from Deena Gilbey, a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center and remained in the building to help evacuate his colleagues. A few days later, U.S. Immigration sent Mrs. Gilbey a letter informing her that, as she was now a widow, her residence status had changed and they were enclosing a deportation order. Having legally admitted to the country the men who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act after having enabled his murder is to further traumatize the bereaved.

The heartless brain-dead bonehead penpusher who sent out that letter is far more "mean-spirited" than Miss Coulter at full throttle. Yet Mrs. Gilbey isn't courted by the TV bookers the way the Jersey Girls are. Hundreds of soldiers' moms believe their sons died in a noble and just cause in Iraq, but it's Cindy Sheehan, who calls Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," who gets speaking engagements across America, Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters, the media don't go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now "rot in hell," nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers "arseholes," nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who's invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is "the real terrorist" rather than the man who beheaded his son.

But it wasn't until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry's pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush's Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he's still down there. It's gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can't attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you've got most of your arms and legs and he hasn't. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn't have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry's speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, "If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards."

"Ann Coulter: America's fiery, blond commentatrix. One crack about 9/11 widows and the author of Godless loses her audience. Too bad," by Mark Steyn, McLeans, June 21, 2006

Posted at 09:17 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: America

June 22, 2006

The End Is Near!!!!!

I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios. I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!

Bah.

I’m a stupid optimist. Either the vehicle that takes me to the boneyard will get six miles per gallon of processed dinosaur, or it will run for ninety days on a milliliter of Sea-Monkey urine. Either way, all in all, we’ll make it.

James Lileks, The Bleat, June 22, 2006

Posted at 08:47 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Stupidity

June 17, 2006

The left's fascination with the propaganda of murderous tyrants

The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognising reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe – and increasingly, it seems, of America – with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home.

"The big lie," by Melanie Phillips, June 30, 2005

Posted at 08:57 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Nihilism

June 12, 2006

Wikipedia - "online collectivism"

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a toss up, while there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn't care much about. "Kinetic isotope effect" or "Vesalius, Andreas" are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.

"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," by Jaron Lanier, Edge, May 30, 2006

hat tip: ALD

Posted at 07:57 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Technology

June 11, 2006

John Witherspoon: Forgotten Founder

[John] Witherspoon was particularly important as a political activist, an advocate for and architect of American independence. As early as 1774, in an essay called “Thoughts on American Liberty,” [3-page pdf] he wrote that “We are firmly determined never to submit to, and do deliberately prefer war with all its horrors and even extermination itself, to slavery riveted upon us and our posterity.” He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the only clergyman among that group of fifty-six. In May 1776, when the colonies teetered on the edge of war with England, he preached a sermon titled “Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.” [html] The church historian William Warren Sweet called it “one of the most influential pulpit utterances during the whole course of the war.” Arguing that “There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire,” Witherspoon articulated a link between spiritual and temporal liberty in a way that that spoke vividly to the passions of the moment. In July 1776, when the question of succession was hotly debated and one delegate argued that the country was not yet “ripe” for independence, Witherspoon shot back: “In my judgement the country is not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of becoming rotten for the want of it.”

"The forgotten founder: John Witherspoon," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June, 2006

More

. . . . . . . . .


Posted at 12:07 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: America

June 10, 2006

Looking for love in all the wrong places ...

A Muslim religious leader in Toronto who knows some of those charged in the suspected bomb plot says the young men underwent rapid transformations from normal Canadian teenagers to radicalized introverts.
. . .
Amiruddin also has a theory as to why Khalid may have been open to such influences.

"His mother passed away and let's say within the first month of his mom passing away, his girlfriend, who was not Muslim, dumped him. And then from that within a year you have this radical turnaround right? Even Fahim Ahmad, he was in love with a girl who constantly rejected him, right? Maybe he was just looking for love? I can't say for certain, but this was something I found common with these young guys."

"Teacher witnessed transformation of some bomb-plot suspects," CBC News, June 8, 2006

Posted at 01:17 PM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Gynephobes

June 08, 2006

"Any student of Marxism is perforce a student of intellectual and political pathology...."

But what impresses one about Main Currents of Marxism is not only Kolakowski’s breadth or learning but also his economy. This is a book from which the reader benefits from the author’s great powers of distillation. It is a long book. In the hands of most writers, it would have been much longer. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to seize upon and express the essential features of the doctrines he discusses. No doubt this is partly a matter of talent. It is also a testament to the huge labor, not only of reading but also of sifting and synthesizing, that went into the book. Kolakowski gives us not his first thoughts but his considered judgments, honed of the superfluous. Anyone who reads these sobering volumes will come away with not only an understanding of the intellectual and spiritual precursors of Marxism, but also a good grasp of the essentials of “classical” Marxist doctrine and its hybridization in the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School, and other left-wing impulses. Writing about the amorphous New Left of the 1960s, for example, Kolakowski notes that although
    the ideological fantasies of this movement … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades. … The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of “revolution” without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; … the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge.

Sound familiar?

Any student of Marxism is perforce a student of intellectual and political pathology, and Main Currents of Marxism, in addition to its other accomplishments, is a pathologist’s scrapbook, a catalogue of brutal, often phantasmagoric, deformations. Kolakowski’s approach is generally more descriptive and diagnostic than polemical, but he can wax polemical to deadly effect when the occasion arises. The title essay of My Correct Views on Everything is Kolakowski’s devastating response to a 100-page “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” published by E. P. Thompson in the Socialist Review in 1973. Thompson is the author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an object of pious veneration among the Marxist and socialist brotherhood. His “Letter” is an expression, by turns righteously indignant and cloyingly sentimental, of his feelings of “injury and betrayal” at Kolakowski’s criticisms of Communism. “We were both voices of the Communist revisionism of 1956,” Thompson sniffed, “we both sought to rehabilitate the utopian energies within the socialist tradition.” What happened?

Kolakowski’s response is a salvo that would have made Cato the Elder proud. Recalling Thompson’s refusal to sit down at a table with Robert Cecil because he once worked in the British diplomatic service: “O blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the ’40s and ’50s, which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labor and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on these grounds?” Kolakowski quotes this effusion, reminiscent of the more utopian passages of Marx’s German Ideology: “My own utopia,” Thompson wrote,

    two hundred years ahead, would not be like Morris’s “epoch of rest.” It would be a world (as D. H. Lawrence would have it) where the “money values” give way before the “life values,” or (as Blake would have it) “corporeal” will give way to “mental” war. With sources of power easily available, some men and women might choose to live in unified communities, sited, like Cistercian monasteries, in centres of great natural beauty, where agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits might be combined. Others might prefer the variety and pace of an urban life which rediscovers some of the qualities of the city-state. Others will prefer a life of seclusion, and many will pass between all three. Scholars would follow the disputes of different schools, in Paris, Jakarta or Bogota.

As Kolakowski notes, “This is a very good sample of socialist writing. It amounts to saying that the world should be good, and not bad.” Nice work if you can get it! But of course, Thompson cannot get it, and neither can anyone else. It is just unadulterated hokum, nauseating in its sentimentality, dangerous in its appeal to the credulous. Thompson dreams of a world in which “corporeal” war gives way to merely “mental” war (Lawrence and Blake would be among his heroes), but Kolakowski is right that this dream is thoroughly utopian “We do not know how to harmonize the contradictory tasks contemporary society imposes upon us. We can only try to reach an uncertain balance between these tasks because we have no blueprint for a conflictless and secure society.”


"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005

Posted at 07:47 AM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Marxism , Nihilism

June 03, 2006

"Darth Vader Calls the Emperor"

"What do you mean they blew up the Death Star?! ... What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?! ... Oh, oh, oh. I'm sorry! I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only two meters wide! That thing wasn't even fully paid off yet!! Do you have - do you have any idea what this is gonna do to my credit!?"

"Darth Vader Calls the Emporer." Video starts when you click link.

Posted at 04:15 PM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Humor

Global Warming and Fear Mongering - more

If you like glaciers, you'll enjoy Rocky Mountain National Park. That any glaciers exist there in 2006 might have surprised readers of the Nov. 7, 1937, Rocky Mountain News. According to the 1937 News, scientific measurement of the glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park showed that "these sheets of 'eternal' ice, within a few short decades, may be 'eternally gone.' "

The News pointed to climate graphs showing that "winters are not what they used to be in the Never Summer Range." Thus, the glaciers were "inexorably retreating to extinction."

"Can it be possible that the Earth is undergoing a slow, but steady climactic change?" asked another Denver paper. The article pointed out that the "The winters are becoming colder, and the summers drier and hotter." The changes were taking place "all over the continent", while "In Europe we hear of climatic changes as strange as they are unaccountable." The newspaper was the Denver Tribune, and the year was 1874.

As the Tribune noted, climate change is nothing new. As the News demonstrated, neither are alarmist, inaccurate media predictions about climate. The Business and Media Institute, a branch of the right-wing Media Research Center, recently published Fire and Ice, a study detailing the national media's terrible record of climate hysteria over the last century.

For example, The New York Times in 1895 predicted widespread global cooling. In 1924, the paper reported "Signs of New Ice Age." But in 1933, 1952, 1959, and 1969, the Times declared global warming. Then in 1974 and 1975, the Times decided that the new ice age was coming, with catastrophic consequences: "the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade" leading to "mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence."

The Washington Post announced a "New Ice Age" in 1970, and, in 1974, Fortune agreed, touting a scientist who predicted that a billion people would die from starvation caused by global cooling. Time magazine declared global warming in 1939, global cooling in 1974, and currently believes in global warming.
. . .
Colorado's most prominent skeptic is Colorado State University professor of atmospheric science William Gray, who has directly harmed his own financial interests by speaking out.

As detailed in a major profile in The Washington Post, Gray has lost most of his government grants because of his relentless presentation of evidence in support of his view that man-made global warming is a hoax. While the Boulder Daily Camera reprinted the story of Colorado's controversial scientist, The Denver Post - which has access to Washington Post articles - did not.

The News and The Denver Post do recognize Gray as an expert on atmospheric science, and have published dozens and dozens stories citing his hurricane forecasts and analysis, including stories this Thursday. They have quoted Gray's accurate prediction in the late 1990s that decades-long lull in hurricane activity on the Atlantic Coast was coming to an end, and his spring 2005 predictions for very intense hurricanes in the summer; such stories often quote other scientists affirming Gray's pre-eminence in the study of atmospheric science. Yet in the News and Post combined, one can find only a few paragraphs even mentioning Gray's analysis of global warming.

"Climate alarmism a perennial: Study: Journalists have often blown hot and cold on issue," by Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain News, June 3, 2006

Posted at 03:48 PM   ·  Comments (0)   ·  TrackBack (0)   ·  Categories: Ignorance