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Andrew Malcolm says, “Welcome back mr. president. Here’s your worst job approval ever.”

For consuming a week of presidential time and Lord knows how many millions of borrowed dollars, Barack Obama’s admirable Asian adventure was not terribly productive.

The much-anticipated trade agreement with Japan fell through, as trade talks with Japan are wont to do for decades now. Obama did sign a new base agreement with the Philippines.

But on the home-front John Kerry pulled one of his own “bitter clinger” moments, saying revealing things he shouldn’t about Israel on the incorrect belief no one in the room was recording his words. “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence strike some as resignation-worthy.

The first lecture for any freshman public figure is: “Nothing is ever private or off the record. Period.” But John was probably wind-surfing the morning of that class.

Not that Obama cares about polls you understand, but there are also some really discouraging new numbers for him out this morning. More on that shortly. …

 

… Since he’s been overseas a lot this year and this month, maybe foreign affairs remain Obama’s forte. Well, actually not. For example, on Ukraine, which drew new administration sanctions on Russia Monday, Obama’s job approval is barely one-third, 34%.

Perhaps most ominously for Obama’s second-term agenda — whatever that is — a majority of Americans now prefer a Congress completely controlled by Republicans.

As poll director Gary Langer puts it:

“Registered voters by 53-39 percent in the national survey say they’d rather see the Republicans in control of Congress as a counterbalance to Obama’s policies than a Democratic-led Congress to help support him. It was similar in fall 2010, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and gained six Senate seats.”

Another six-seat gain on Nov. 4 gives the GOP control of the Senate. And Obama can finally focus on his presidential library.

Writing in the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein says polling shows peril for Dems in November. 

President Obama’s approval rating remains ominously weak among the constituencies that could tip the battle for control of the Senate in November, the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll has found.

Obama’s overall approval, standing at just 41 percent, remains near the lowest level ever recorded in the 20 Heartland Monitor Polls since April 2009. And only one in four adults say his actions are increasing economic opportunity for people like them, also among his worst showings in the polls. His numbers are especially meager among the non-college and older whites that dominate the electorate in the seven red-leaning states where Democrats must defend Senate seats in November.

These findings are taken from the 20th quarterly Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll conducted by the Strategic Communications Practice of FTI Consulting. The full results, exploring Americans’ views on how to drive social and political change, will be published next month in National Journal’s magazine.

The one solace for Democrats in the new poll is that Congress is even more unpopular than the president. Just 11 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Congress’s performance, while 80 percent disapproved. In the five times the Heartland Monitor has tested Congress’ rating since November 2012, only last November did it score more poorly, with just 9 percent approving and 84 percent disapproving.

Generally, though, attitudes toward the incumbent president have played a bigger role than views about Congress in shaping the results of mid-term elections. And attitudes toward Obama, and the nation’s direction, remain distinctly chilly.

Just 27 percent of those polled said they believed the country is moving in the right direction; 62 percent say they consider it off on the wrong track. That’s slightly better than the results last fall, but much gloomier than the assessment around Obama’s reelection in fall 2012. The racial gap on this question is huge: 41 percent of minorities say the country is moving in the right direction, but only about half as many whites (22 percent) agree. (Among whites without a college degree, just one in six see the country moving on the right track, only about half the level among whites with at least a four-year degree.)

In the new survey, 41 percent of adults said they approved of Obama’s job performance while 52 percent disapproved. Since 2009, the quarterly Heartland Monitor Polls have recorded lower approval ratings for him only last November (at 38 percent) and last September (at 40 percent). The difference between those showings and the latest result falls within the survey’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error.

In the latest poll, Obama also faces a formidable intensity gap that could foreshadow turnout challenges for Democrats: The share of adults who strongly disapprove of his performance (39 percent) is nearly double that of those who strongly approve (21 percent). …

Joel Kotkin, under the influence of HBO’s new Mike Judge comedy, Silicon Valley, says Tech moguls are focused first on profit. Saving the world is down the priority list.

The $300 million payout from tech giants like Google and Apple to settle a lawsuit brought by employees makes it clear that Silicon Valley is out for profit, not to change the world.

Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe—reached a settlement today in a contentious $3 billion anti-trust suit brought by workers who accused the tech giants of secretly colluding to not recruit each other’s employees. The workers won, but not much, receiving only a rumored $300 million, a small fraction of the billions the companies might have been forced to pay had they been found guilty in a trial verdict. 

The criminality that the case exposed in the boardrooms the tech giants, including from revered figures like Steve Jobs who comes off as especially ruthless, should not be jarring to anyone familiar with Silicon Valley.  It may shock much of the media, who have generally genuflected towards these companies, and much of the public, that has been hoodwinked into thinking the Valley oligarchs represent a better kind of plutocrat—but the truth is they are a lot like the old robber barons.

Starting in the 1980s, a mythology grew that the new tech entrepreneurs represented a new, progressive model that was not animated by conventional business thinking. In contrast to staid old east coast corporations, the new California firms were what futurist Alvin Toffler described as “third wave.” Often dressed in jeans, and not suits, they were seen as inherently less hierarchical and power-hungry as their industrial age predecessors.  

Silicon Valley executives were not just about making money, but were trying, as they famously claimed, to “change the world.” One popularizing enthusiast, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, even suggested that “digital technology” could turn into “a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.”

This image has insulated the tech elite from the kind of opprobrium meted out to their rival capitalist icons in other, more traditional industries. In 2011, …

Explaining the lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review is a rather long piece by Charles C. W. Cooke. Long, but worth the read.

Everyone is in favor of free speech,” Winston Churchill once wrote. “Hardly a day passes without its being extolled.” And yet, he added dryly, “some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

This aphorism, generally applicable as it is, could easily have been issued to describe the attitude of one Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist and opponent of free inquiry who is currently suing National Review for libel.

Mann, a professor of meteorology at PennsylvaniaStateUniversity, rose to prominence for his “hockey stick,” a graph that purports to depict global temperature trends between the years a.d. 1000 and 2000. The graph takes its name from its shape, which shows a mostly flat line of temperature data from the year 1000 until about 1900 (the handle of the hockey stick), followed by a sharp uptick over the 20th century (the blade). Based on this graph and related research, Mann has built a noisy public career sounding the alarm over global warming — a plague, he argues, that has been visited upon the Earth as a result of mankind’s sinful penchant for fossil fuels.

In the course of his evangelizing, Mann has shown little tolerance for heretics. A recent op-ed he penned for the New York Times is illustrative. “If You See Something, Say Something,” the headline blares, mimicking New York subway warnings and suggesting a not-so-subtle parallel between the dangers of global-warming “denial” and the murderous terrorism that brought down the Twin Towers. In the opening paragraph of the piece, Mann castigates his critics as “a fringe minority of our populace” who “cling[] to an irrational rejection of well-established science.” These aristarchs, Mann contends, represent a “virulent strain of anti-science [that] infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist.” Alas, such comparisons are commonplace. In the rough and tumble of debate, climate-change skeptics are routinely recast as climate-change deniers, an insidious echo of the phrase “Holocaust deniers” and one that has been contrived with no purpose other than to exclude the speaker from polite society.

Secure as he appears to be in his convictions, Mann has nonetheless taken it upon himself to try to suppress debate and to silence some of the “irrational” and “virulent” critics, who he claims have nothing of substance to say. To this end, Mann has filed a lawsuit against National Review. Our offense? Daring to publish commentary critical of his hockey-stick graph and disapproving of his hectoring mien. …

 

… The law of defamation is useful for awarding civil damages against those who peddle outright lies — that is, against those who do real damage to a person’s reputation by abusing plain facts that can be easily verified and adjudicated in court. In such cases as it is claimed that Jones beats his wife or Smith is a drug addict, the relevant facts fall easily within the competence of a civil tribunal, and litigation does not threaten to impose a chill on the public discourse. But when a plaintiff files a libel suit involving a matter of political or scientific controversy, the calculus is quite different indeed. When the merits of a libel claim implicate contested questions of science and statistical methodology, judges and juries are so ill suited to pronounce a verdict that allowing the public authority to have the final say is inconsistent with the very concept of free inquiry. The whole point of the scientific enterprise is to resolve controversies through open debate, not through the final decree of government officials.

Even where no verdict of guilt is ultimately pronounced, allowing litigation over criticisms of the validity of scientific research has a deleterious effect on the public discourse. It prompts critics to trim their sails in order to avoid the cost and headache of a lawsuit, thus establishing a climate of fear and quiet rather than of boisterous agitation and open discussion. Hanging the prospect of punishment above the heads of participants in scientific disputes serves not to yield greater accuracy but to invite censorship, the toning down of rhetoric, and the avoidance of hyperbole — of anything, indeed, that could invite a libel complaint. Which is to say that it shuts up the dissenters.

Linguistically, Mann exhibits an approach that is best described as “hyperbole for me but not for thee.” Apparently, the two terms that prompted his present litigiousness were “fraudulent” and “intellectually bogus” — a pair of judgments that his legal team contend to be beyond the pale of lawful discourse regarding his work on climate change. But Mann himself has used these terms liberally when it has suited him. In a Mother Jones interview from 2005, he assured his readers that, “as it plays out in the peer-reviewed literature, it will soon be evident that many of the claims made by the contrarians [i.e., skeptics of the global-warming hypothesis] were fraudulent.”  …

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Good WSJ Essay on our limitless natural resources.

How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called “markets” or “prices” to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. …

Ship breakers in Bangladesh reported on in Daily Mail, UK.

The sad beauty of these incredible images cast a light on the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh, where workers face death and injury from accidents and environmental hazards for just a few dollars a a day.

Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard is the largest of its type in the world. Around 80 active ship breaking yards line an eight-mile stretch of the coast, employing more than 200,000 Bangladeshis and accounting for half of all the steel in Bangladesh.

Ship breaking is the dismantling of ships for scrap recycling. Most ships have a lifespan of a 25-30 years before there is so much wear that repair becomes uneconomical, but the rising cost to insure and maintain aging vessels can make even younger vessels unprofitable to operate. …

The Cliven Bundy stand-off with the Feds never seemed to have a foundation we could understand. So, other than John Fund’s piece on the proliferation of SWAT teams at all levels of government, we have ignored the kerfuffle. Thank God.  Jonathan Tobin posts on Commentary’s reluctance to champion that cause too.

You may have noticed that among the many and varied topics touched upon by COMMENTARY writers in recent weeks, none of us chose to weigh in on the Bundy Ranch controversy that attracted so much notice on cable news, talk radio, and the blogosphere. The reason was that none of us considered the standoff between a Nevada tax scofflaw and the federal government over grazing rights fees to rise to the level of an issue of national interest. The government may own too much land in the West and may have acted in a heavy-handed manner in this case but anyone with sense understood that stiffing the feds is likely to end badly for those who play that game, something that even a bomb-thrower like Glenn Beck appeared to be able to understand. Moreover, there was something slightly absurd about the same people who froth at the mouth when “amnesty” for illegal immigrants is mentioned demanding that Cliven Bundy be let off the hook for what he owed Uncle Sam. …

… The Bundy ranch standoff is a teachable moment for libertarians and conservatives. We don’t need to waste much time debunking the claim that a belief in limited government and calls for an end to the orgy of taxing and spending in Washington are racist. These are risible, lame arguments that fail on their own. But like liberals who need to draw a distinction between their positions and those of the anti-American, anti-capitalist far left, those on the right do need to draw equally bright lines between themselves and the likes of Cliven Bundy. If they don’t, spectacles such as the one we witnessed this week are inevitable.

Jennifer Rubin has more on the subject with warnings for the GOP.

Even before uttering his disgusting, racist remarks, Cliven Bundy was bad news. He waged a legal fight over a fee for grazing rights for more than a decade – and lost everywhere. His solution? Meet federal officials with guns when they tried to enforce a lawful court order to remove his cattle from government land. Why in the world would talk show hosts and U.S. senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) think such a character was admirable?

On this I am in full agreement with the Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook: “Cliven Bundy is no hero of any kind. No conservative would pick and choose the laws he intends to obey, defy the rest, and challenge the rule of democracy with guns. No hero would adopt the terrorist’s tactic of placing innocents in harm’s way. Any fool can pick up a weapon and aim at an officer of the law; the moral power of civil disobedience lies in the willingness to defer to the law and accept punishment on principle.”

The Bundy situation is not an isolated one. The far-right — including talk show hosts, bloggers and some elected officials — often show zeal for bad causes because they imagine harebrained or illegal ideas are true expressions of liberty and opposition to the scourge of big government. These are the people who thought the shutdown was a great idea because it is “important to fight.” Many of them perpetrated the falsity that the National Security Agency was “listening to your phone calls” and that a surveillance program with zero instances of abuse that was helpful to our national security had to be dumped.

They are drawn to unsavory cranks like a moth to a flame. Not only did Rand Paul, for example, embrace Bundy before his racist comments, he also hired on the pro-Confederate “Southern Avenger” and dubbed Edward Snowden a modern-day Martin Luther King Jr. Others in the right-wing groups spent hundreds millions of dollars and climbed on the bandwagon for crank Senate candidates who challenged strong conservative incumbents. …

Where did they come from? In Pickerhead’s factory they’re called “ghost turds.”  The NY Times calls them packing peanuts.

In 1960, a research chemist named Maurice Laverne Zweigle packed a raw egg and a few handfuls of skinny, bendy, polystyrene noodles into a small cardboard box, sealed the flaps and tossed it off a third-floor roof. His invention worked: The egg was unscathed.

‘‘At first we called it ‘spaghetti,’ ’’ said Zweigle, now 88 and still living near his former employer, the Dow Chemical Company, in northern Michigan. The tubular shape was Zweigle’s key discovery: Whereas plastic spheres would have slid around the fragile item and let it fall to the bottom, the noodles tangled together to form a secure nest. …

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George Will writes on the adolescent president.

Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”

Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground. …

… he talks like an arrested-development adolescent.

Anyone who has tried to engage a member of that age cohort in an argument probably recognizes the four basic teenage tropes, which also are the only arrows in Obama’s overrated rhetorical quiver. He employed them all last week when he went to the White House briefing room to exclaim, as he is wont to do, about the excellence of the Affordable Care Act.

First came the invocation of a straw man. Celebrating the ACA’s enrollment numbers, Obama, referring to Republicans, charged: “They said nobody would sign up.” Of course, no one said this. Obama often is what political philosopher Kenneth Minogue said of an adversary — “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”  …

In normal times the unfortunate unintended consequences of a president’s bad policies take years to unfold. And usually this is after the miscreant is safely out of office. But this president is so abysmally ignorant, the bad effects of his foolishness have borne fruit during his time in office. Of course, this would not be the case if the media was not in the tank for him. But they are. So to its everlasting shame, the American  public returned him to office. The bright side is we get to see him try to construct ways to fix the problems he created with his special brand of left-wing stupidity.

From the WSJ Editors we learn of efforts to fix the student loan program taken over in the affordable care act. I know it has nothing to do with health care, but it has a lot to do with increasing federal power. And that is the point.

The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide.

Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who’ve signed up for such plans has increased to more than 1.3 million from less than a million, with total balances rising to $72 billion from $52 billion. Maybe the White House didn’t understand that when you give people an economic incentive not to repay a loan, more people won’t repay.

Taxpayers can suffer in many ways from federal education lending, because most loans are issued regardless of a borrower’s ability to repay. So loose is this form of credit that in the slow-growth Obama economy it has become a vehicle to fund basic living expenses, with tens of thousands of borrowers consuming aid even when they’re not enrolled for courses. …

Even this corrupt media can’t cover for the fool forever. Time has this on his foreign policy;

In a rough month of a rough year of a rough second term for Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Thursday was a particularly rough day.

It began with dour news from the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he won’t negotiate with a unified Palestinian government that includes both moderate Fatah and radical Gaza-based Hamas. Shorter version: the already-gasping Middle East peace process is likely dead for the remainder of Obama’s presidency.

The day ended with Secretary of State John Kerry’s angry speech accusingRussia of violating the diplomatic agreement Kerry co-signed a week ago in Geneva, …

And the NY Times has this;

TOKYO — President Obama encountered setbacks to two of his most cherished foreign-policy projects on Thursday, as he failed to achieve a trade deal that undergirds his strategic pivot to Asia and the Middle East peace process suffered a potentially irreparable breakdown.

Mr. Obama had hoped to use his visit here to announce an agreement under which Japan would open its markets in rice, beef, poultry and pork, a critical step toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the proposed regional trade pact. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was not able to overcome entrenched resistance from Japan’s farmers in time for the president’s visit.

In Jerusalem, Israel’s announcement that it was suspending stalemated peace negotiations with the Palestinians, after a reconciliation between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the militant group Hamas, posed yet another obstacle to restarting a troubled peace process in which Secretary of State John Kerry has been greatly invested.

The setbacks, though worlds apart in geography and history, speak to the common challenge Mr. Obama has had in translating his ideas and ambitions into enduring policies. He has watched outside forces unravel his best-laid plans, from resetting relations with Russia to managing the epochal political change in the Arab world. On Thursday, as Russiastaged military exercises on the border with Ukraine, Mr. Kerry denounced broken promises from the Kremlin but took no specific action. …

Jennifer Rubin says the first term set all these problems in motion. Once we get these fools out of Washington, it will take decades to clean up the mess.

… We can draw a number of conclusions from all of this. First, the disasters may be popping up now, but it is hard to argue that the first term did not set in motion (by inaction in Syria, a faulty arms deal with Russia, contentious relations with Israel) the failures we see now playing out. For that, the president and his first-term national security team are directly responsible. Second, the left- and right-wing dream that the United States could recede and let others deal with their problems proved once again just plain wrong. Third, the adage that small steps early can obviate the need for big, costly commitments later on has been borne out in Syria. Fourth, the United States needs a president fully engaged in national security who can assess how U.S. actions are interpreted by others. Finally, when things get worse (first Crimea and then Ukraine, a few hundred dead and eventually over 150,000 dead in Syria) they will continue to get worse until we try something new. Passivity is a recipe for chaos, instability and violence. In Europe, for the first time since the Cold War the sovereignty of U.S. allies is at risk.

We can therefore expect additional crises, more aggressive behavior and less cooperation from allies as they assess American fecklessness. The president who wanted to rid the world of nukes is convincing Sunni monarchs and Eastern European countries that it is foolish to rely on the American nuclear umbrella. How many countries will insist on their own arsenal to protect themselves against Russia, China or Iran?

When Republicans choose their candidate for commander in chief, they’d be wise to pick someone who understood this all along — not simply when it all went haywire in 2014.

Turning to another execrable miscreant, Fred Barnes writes on Harry Reid.

The Romney strategy is back. Not the flawed campaign plan of Mitt Romney for the 2012 election, but the effort by President Obama and Democrats to malign Romney, even before he’d become the GOP nominee, as morally unfit for the presidency.

Now the strategy is focused on Republican Senate candidates, some of them still running in contested primaries. From Democratic TV ads, we learn that Dan Sullivan in Alaska may not be “one of us,” a true Alaskan. Tom Cotton in Arkansas, having worked for insurance companies, is “a politician we just can’t trust.” And Bill Cassidy in Louisiana sought to “cut off hurricane relief for Louisiana families.”

There’s a name for this strategy—the politics of personal destruction. It was successful in 2012 in transforming Romney’s image into that of an uncaring, greedy corporate boss who made millions while shutting down companies and throwing workers out of jobs. In one Obama ad, Romney was falsely blamed for the cancer death of a worker’s wife.

The chief practitioner of the Romney strategy today is Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is desperate to keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate in the November midterm elections. The ads are the handiwork of Reid’s Senate Majority PAC or its sister organization, the Patriot Majority PAC.

What’s striking is their emphasis on personal matters rather than major public issues like health care or the economy and their frequent inaccuracy. Cotton, for example, has never worked for an insurance company. Nor did Cassidy seek to curb disaster relief. …

Scott Johnson posts a Reid summary.

It seems to me that in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid we have something new under the sun. He revives old-fashioned, LBJ-style corruption in office, as Adam O’Neal’s understated RCP column suggests. He brings pure partisan prevarication and hackery to his office, as Fred Barnes suggests in “Mudslinger in chief.” And he disgraces the institution that he leads, as Victor Davis Hanson judges in “A McCarthy for our time.”

Liberal commentators observe Reid’s shenanigans in the spirit of detached amusement. In this respect Chris Cillizza is representative. It’s the best he and they can do, but it is pathetic.

If that’s the best Cillizza can do as a supposed political junkie — if the chairman of the Republican National Committee is a truer guide to the Reid phenomenon than Cillizza — it’s time for him and his ilk to pursue other opportunities.

As Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has brought his office to an unprecedented low. There is no lie he will not recite, no libel he will resist so long as it advances some narrow partisan purpose. As Majority Leader, he holds the mirror up to President Obama. They illuminate each other. It’s not a pretty sight. …

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Hidden among the many wonderful things to see during my first Moscow visit, was the disturbing sight of old Russian women standing along buildings on Gorky street as it left Red Square and passed the Lenin Library and the Hotel Moscow. It was December 1991 and cold and snowing, They stood in the lee of the buildings and offered items for sale to passersby. Pathetic things they hoped would attract interest and money. One woman held out a spoon. Another, a bar of soap. They stood shuffling their feet warding off the cold, their heavy coats covered in snow. This was the new Russia.

Teenagers on Arbat Street’s open market had things to sell too and they could instantly spot westerners trailing the scent of hard currency They claimed they were “biznessmean” in a Freudian slip of pronunciation that promised very little for those in Russia too poor and too old to surf the trends engulfing their country. Those Russian women came to mind when reading Daniel Greenfield’s post on The Environmental Apocalypse. The progress of civilization is the growth of human efforts to find ways to protect those least able to cope. But we have become unhinged as the left admits to no limits for their vote buying schemes. Now, in an orgy of progressive environmentalism, our culture creates more spoon sellers. Those Russian women are easy to find in Greenfield’s post.

Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and finally printing out a receipt.

The interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the homeless man who is barely holding it together… and the machine is a stark contrast between what the new smart clean green economy pretends to be and what it actually is.

The machine, like so much else that we design, is impressive, but its existence depends on someone digging through the trash with their hands for much less than minimum wage to extract a generally useless item.

The entire bottle economy, which has more than a passing resemblance to the trash sorting operations in the Third World carried out by despised and persecuted minorities, like the Zabbaleen in Egypt, is artificial. The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.

The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of marginalized people digging through the trash.

Every time politicians celebrate a recycling target met and show off some shiny new machine, hiding behind the curtain are the dirty weary people dragging through the streets at the crack of dawn, donning rubber gloves and tearing apart trash bags. They are the unglamorous low-tech reality of environmentalism.

These are the Green Jobs that aren’t much talked about. They pay below minimum wage and have no workplace safety regulations. They are the Third World reality behind the First World ecology tripe. It’s not that the people who plan and run the system don’t know about them. But they don’t like to talk about them because they come too close to revealing the unsavory truth about where environmentalism is really going.

Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It’s the exact opposite. It’s every bit as modern and progressive as those sacks of cans being hauled by hand through the streets to the machine. …

 

… Communist modernism was a Potemkin village, a cheap tacky curtain and behind it, the sweating slave and the stench of Babylon. The modernism of the progressive is the same facade covered in sociology textbooks, New York Times op-eds and teleprompter speeches. Behind it lie the ruins of Detroit, tribal violence in the slums of every major city and an economy in which there is no more room for the middle class except as clerks in the government bureaucracy. And it doesn’t end there.

The elderly Chinese woman picking through the trash in search of empty beer bottles isn’t the past. She’s the future. Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It’s just one example of an artificial economy and it’s small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.

The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can’t sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.

The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power over every man, woman and child on earth. …
… Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn’t even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable. …

… The sustainable logic of the slum that makes us better people by making us more miserable.

The Soviet idea of progress was feudalism dressed up in Socialist red. Environmentalism dresses up feudalism in Green. It seeks to reverse all the progress that we have made in the name of progress. Environmentalism is as sophisticated as a Soviet collective farm, as modern as the homeless people dragging bags of cans along on sticks to feed the machine and as smart as a slum made of trash.

Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery.

Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people.

And the Keystone decision is a part of this. Stephen Moore on how the administration is choking the middle class by selling out to watermelons – people who are green on the outside and red all the way through.

… Obama has made the laughable claim recently that the pipeline would lead to “only 50 permanent jobs.” So a $3 billion multistate pipeline that stretches more than 1,000 miles shouldn’t go forward, because it won’t boost employment permanently? Someone might want to explain to the president that in the private sector there is no such thing as a permanent job. (Those are to be found only in the government.)

We will surely see more of these blue-versus-green economic-development battles emerge in the months and years ahead. Already West Virginia has flipped from Democratic blue to Republican red in recent years because of the Left’s war on coal, while other resource states — including Colorado, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Virginia, and, who knows, maybe even New York — could shift into the red column once the old blue-collar Reagan Democrats realize that the greens who run and now finance the Democratic party have become unhinged, and constitute a clear and present danger to the jobs and livelihoods of middle-class America.

Hollywood elites, and billionaire hedge-fund managers like Tom Steyer, can live with that result. A Pew Research poll has found that Keystone is unpopular with only two demographic groups: Democrats who earn more than $100,000 and Democrats with postgraduate degrees.

But the working class in America that cares a lot more about a paycheck than about stopping the rise of the oceans is tiring of being the frontline victim of this green menace. Barack Obama won the 2012 election because he persuaded middle-class voters that he cares more about them than do the Republicans. The latest Keystone XL pipeline travesty is the most recent evidence that this is a lot of bunk.

Switching gears, we’ll spend some more time on the Court’s affirmative action ruling. Charles Krauthammer sees much to celebrate.

Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court’s ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race.

The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6 to 2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer’s rationale. It couldn’t be simpler. “The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”

Finally. After 36 years since the Bakke case, years of endless pettifoggery — parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance — the court has its epiphany: Let the people decide. Not our business. We will not ban affirmative action. But we will not impose it, as the Schuette plaintiffs would have us do by ruling that no state is permitted to ban affirmative action. …

… As with all great national questions, the only path to an enduring, legitimate resolution is by the democratic process.

That was the lesson of Roe v. Wade. It created a great societal rupture because, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, it “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the [abortion] issue.” It is never a good idea to take these profound political questions out of the political arena. (Regrettably, Ginsberg supported the dissent in Schuette, which would have done exactly that to affirmative action, recapitulating Roe.) …

John Fund notes the scatter-brained aspects of Sotomayor’s dissent and Eric Holder’s agreement.

You can often tell when advocates of one side in an argument fear they will ultimately lose. They change their branding. A few years ago, warnings about “global warming” were replaced with scare stories about “climate change.” One reason? The Earth had stopped appreciably warming in the late 1990s, making the change a PR necessity.

Supporters of affirmative action are now signaling similar weakness. What was called “racial quotas” in the 1970s and has been referred to as “affirmative action” since the 1990s is giving way to a new term: “race-sensitive admission policies.” The language shift is telling — race-based preferences are losing intellectual, judicial, and political support. …

… In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder made an eye-opening statement during an appearance at ColumbiaUniversity. In backing racial preferences, he said he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease. . . . The question is not when does [affirmative action] end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

I submit that many Americans — regardless of race — are increasingly exhausted by what Chief Justice Roberts declared in 2006 was this “sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” 

It’s clear where Eric Holder would take us — an endless fixation on race that inevitably brings its own racial discrimination. It’s clear Justice Sotomayor would take us in pretty much the same direction. She would just pretty up the “sordid business” by coming up with new euphemisms for it.

Paul Mirengoff has more on Holder and Sotomayor.

As I noted here, Justice Sotomayor dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision upholding what should be a truism: the Constitution permits a state to prohibit race discrimination by public institutions. Sotomayor was joined by the ultra-leftist Justice Ginsburg. However, she failed to persuade the only moderately leftist Justice Breyer, who joined the 6-2 majority.

Attorney General Holder calls Sotomayor’s dissent “courageous.” Her dissent is lots of things — verbose and nonsensical, for example. But it’s difficult to identify a sense in which it is courageous.

Will the dissent bring disapproval from those whose approval Sotomayor values — the mainstream media, academia, and the folks with whom she hangs out in New York and Washington? Of course not; it will be applauded in these precincts.

Will it bring disapproval from Sotomayor’s friends in the Obama administration? Of course not; it will be applauded there too, as Holder’s statement shows.

Will Sotomayor’s dissent cause her to be criticized in her presence by President Obama before a crowd of rowdy politicians and a national television audience? No. Obama reserves that treatment for conservative and center-right Justices.

Will Sotomayor’s dissent cause her taxes to be audited by the IRS? I don’t think so.

To view Sotomayor’s dissent as remotely courageous one must pretend to be living in the America of the 1950s. It’s no coincidence that one must adopt roughly the same pretense to discern any sense in her dissent.

Now the important stuff. Last week we learned beer is good for grilling meat. Today’s great news - chocolate is good for us. NY Times has the story.

In recent years, large-scale epidemiological studies have found that people whose diets include dark chocolate have a lower risk of heart disease than those whose diets do not. Other research has shown that chocolate includes flavonols, natural substances that can reduce the risk of disease. But it hasn’t been clear how these flavonols could be affecting the human body, especially the heart. New findings from Virginia Tech and LouisianaStateUniversity, however, suggest an odd explanation for chocolate’s goodness: It improves health largely by being indigestible. …

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Mark Steyn on the slow death of free speech.

These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:

In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘F**king Zionist, f**king pricks… Get the f**k off our campus.’

In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

In Massachusetts, BrandeisUniversity withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that. …

… I’m opposed to the notion of official ideology — not just fascism, Communism and Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘climate change’ and ‘marriage equality’. Because the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam, ‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. As your cynical political consultant sees it, a commitment to abolish Section 18C is more trouble than it’s worth: you’ll just spends weeks getting damned as cobwebbed racists seeking to impose a bigots’ charter when you could be moving the meter with swing voters by announcing a federal programmne of transgendered bathroom construction. But, beyond the shrunken horizons of spinmeisters, the inability to roll back something like 18C says something profound about where we’re headed: a world where real, primal, universal rights — like freedom of expression — come a distant second to the new tribalism of identity-group rights. …

Peter Wehner posts on the affirmative action decision. 

For some of us, one of the great intellectual delights is reading the opinions of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. That’s because he’s not only a brilliant legal mind; he’s also a fantastic writer. 

I was reminded of this in reading Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion (joined by Justice Thomas) in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, in which the Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s ban on using race as a factor in college admissions. 

The Court, in a 6-2 ruling (with Justice Kagan recusing herself), declared Michigan voters had the right to change their state constitution in 2006 to prohibit public colleges and universities from taking account of race in admissions decisions. (The justices said that a lower federal court was wrong to set aside the change as discriminatory.)

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. But it was Scalia who, as usual, put things best. Here’s how he begins his opinion:  

It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (SCALIA, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding—the correct understanding—of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did not simultaneously offend it. [italics in original]  …

Joel Gehrke of the Examiner posts on Justice Scalia’s thinly veiled criticism of Sotomayor’s comparing Michigan voters to the Democrats who sponsored and tolerated Jim Crow laws in the South. .

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia faulted Justice Sonia Sotomayor for making what he regards as a “shameful” suggestion that the Michigan voters who decided to ban affirmative action in college admissions were motivated by racism.

Scalia wrote a concurring opinion upholding a 2006 ballot initiative that amended Michigan’s constitution to ban affirmative action.

“As Justice Harlan observed over a century ago, ‘[o]ur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,’” Scalia concluded, quoting the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “The people of Michigan wish the same for their governing charter. It would be shameful for us to stand in their way.”

And then, the Parthian shot: “And doubly shameful to equate ‘the majority’ behind [the constitutional amendment] with ‘the majority’ responsible for Jim Crow,” he added in a final footnote, citing the first two pages of Sotomayor’s dissent. …

Mark Perry uses the occasion of Earth Day to celebrate the benefits of fossil fuels.

On Earth Day, according to various advocates, “events are held worldwide to increase awareness and appreciation of the Earth’s natural environment.” As we observe the event Tuesday, it might be a good time to appreciate the fact that Americans get most of their plentiful, affordable energy directly from the Earth’s “natural environment” in the form of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum).

It’s largely those energy sources that fuel our vehicles and airplanes; heat, cool and light our homes and businesses; power our nation’s factories; and in the process significantly raise our standard of living.

Shouldn’t that be part of “increasing our awareness and appreciation of Earth’s natural environment” — to celebrate Mother Earth’s bountiful natural resources in the form of abundant, low-cost fossil fuels?

Fuel Of The Future

From 1949 to 2040, fossil fuels have provided, and will continue to provide, the vast majority of our energy by far, according to President Obama’s Department of Energy. Last year, fossil fuels provided almost 84% of America’s energy consumption,nearly unchanged from the 85% fossil-fuel share in the early 1990s. …

In Forbes, Henry Miller says when Earth Day is celebrated. science and technology should be at the party.

A few years ago seventh graders at a tony private school near San Francisco were given an unusual Earth Day assignment: Make a list of environmental projects that could be accomplished with Bill Gates’ fortune.  This approach to environmental awareness fits in well with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid worldview that the right to private property is subsidiary to undertakings that others think are worthwhile – the redistributive theory of society.  And how interesting that the resources made “available” for the students’ thought-experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of one of the nation’s most successful, innovative entrepreneurs.

Another Earth Day assignment for those same students was to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects.  As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable 2012 analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts.”

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides in spite of the fact that “Silent Spring” was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct.  Carson’s observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, Professor of Entomology at San JoseStateUniversity, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.  In his stunning 1992 essay, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and called attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.

Consider this quote from Edwards: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false.  Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects.  Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result.  The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The World Health Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.’” …

Now for the important stuff. The Economist says beer makes charcoal grilling safer. Is there anything that beer can’t do? If there is, bacon can do it.

GRILLING meat gives it great flavour. This taste, though, comes at a price, since the process creates molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which damage DNA and thus increase the eater’s chances of developing colon cancer. For those who think barbecues one of summer’s great delights, that is a shame. But a group of researchers led by Isabel Ferreira of the University of Porto, in Portugal, think they have found a way around the problem. When barbecuing meat, they suggest, you should add beer.

This welcome advice was the result of some serious experiments, as Dr Ferreira explains in a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The PAHs created by grilling form from molecules called free radicals which, in turn, form from fat and protein in the intense heat of this type of cooking. One way of stopping PAH-formation, then, might be to apply chemicals called antioxidants that mop up free radicals. And beer is rich in these, in the shape of melanoidins, which form when barley is roasted. So Dr Ferreira and her colleagues prepared some beer marinades, bought some steaks and headed for the griddle. …