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Interesting shorts from John Fund. One on Irish documentary film-makers taking on the global warming folks. Another on the tea party preparations.
… The film reminds us that environmentalists have been wrong in the past, as when they convinced the world to ban the pesticide DDT, costing the lives of countless malaria victims. The ban was finally reversed by the World Health Organization only after decades of debate. The two Irish filmmakers argue that if Al Gore’s advice to radically reduce carbon emissions is followed, it would condemn to poverty two billion people in the world who have yet to turn on their first light switch. …
… The protestors at tea parties so far are just getting used to the modern tactics of media-savvy demonstrations. Jenny Beth Martin, a conservative activist organizing the Atlanta rally, admits that “conservatives aren’t known for their protest abilities” and that the first event she attended featured many people “in business suits and umbrellas.”
But organizers and participants have since become more imaginative. At one recent rally a protestor sported an armband that read “POOP — Prisoners of Obama’s Policies.” Another held a sign that read “Let Them Eat Pork!”
Looking at video of several of the recent protests, I’m reminded how similar they were to the protests that fueled Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts some 30 years ago. Those demonstrations led to real, earthshaking political consequences. Some guy named Ronald Reagan said they ignited a “prairie-fire of protest” that created a backlash against the big-government policies of Jimmy Carter and helped the Gipper himself become president in 1980.
The pseudonymous Spengler is outed … by Spengler.
… The 300 or so essays that I have published in this space since 1999 all proceeded from the theme formulated by Rosenzweig: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie, and unadaptable Islam.
Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive.
I needed to tell the Muslims that nothing would alleviate the unbearable sense of humiliation and loss that globalization inflicted on a civilization that once had pretensions to world dominance. I needed to tell Asians that materialism leads only to despair. And I needed to tell the Americans that their smugness would be their undoing.
In this world of accelerated mortality, in which the prospect of national extinction hung visibly over most of the peoples of the world, Jew-hatred was stripped of its mask, and revealed as the jealousy of the merely undead toward living Israel. And it was not hard to show that the remnants of the tribal world lurking under the cover of Islam were not living, but only undead, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of modernity, throwing a tantrum against their inevitable end.
I have been an equal-opportunity offender, with no natural constituency. My academic training, strewn over two doctoral programs, was in music theory and German, as well as economics. I have published a number of peer-reviewed papers on philosophy, music and mathematics in the Renaissance. But I came to believe that there are things even more important than the high art of the West and its most characteristic endeavor, classical music, the passion and consolation of my youth. Western classical music expresses goal-oriented motion, a teleology, as it were – but where did humankind learn of teleology? I no longer quite belonged with my friends and colleagues, the artists.
G K Chesterton said that if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything, and I was living proof of that as a young man, wandering in the fever-swamps of left-wing politics. I found my way thanks to the first Ronald Reagan administration. The righting of America after it nearly capsized during the dark years of Jimmy Carter was a defining experience for me. I owe much to several mentors, starting with Dr Norman A. Bailey, special assistant to President Reagan and director of plans at the National Security Council from 1981-1984. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the US would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s. I thought him a dangerous lunatic, and immediately signed on. …
Mark Steyn takes a look at the tea parties and the media reaction.
… The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf – fake grass-roots, not the real thing.
Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:
“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right …”
But Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”
Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from “A Man For All Seasons”: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for a $400 tax credit?” …
… Doing the job the Boston Globe won’t do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet’s Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they’re just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is, in the end, about freedom. Live Tea or die!
Charles Krauthammer takes on BO’s “New Foundation.”
… Obama could not explain how — when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction — the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.
This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.
For some strange reason George Will writes a column dissing denim. Ed Morrissey has fun with it.
… Did I miss a memo? Have we solved all of the world’s problems? This doesn’t even make for an interesting blog post, let alone a nationally-syndicated column from an erudite political commentator. This is a Seinfeldian “What’s up with all the denim?” piece of elitist fluff.
I’d say Will needs to get out of the DC cocktail circuit more and meet the people whose motives he pretends to comprehend. This isn’t a proletarian pose. People don’t wear denim as an affectation to seem indifferent to sartorial splendor. They wear jeans because they’re (a) mostly inexpensive in comparison to other sportswear choices, (b) remarkably durable, and (c) resistant to the whims of fashion. They match almost every kind of shirt or blouse, and they work in almost every kind of weather. …
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