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David Warren says that Rush was right to hope that Obama fails.
…The stock markets soared in the middle of this week, immediately after Barack Obama turned in a rather dismal performance in a press conference aimed at rallying the troops behind his socialized medical scheme. As Lawrence Auster, and several other rude conservative commentators on the Internet asked, why would it do so?
They also answered their question: Wall Street rallied because investors began to think Obama-care will fail. The president will not be able to get that revolution through Congress. He looks as if he is beginning to realize this himself. Enough cosmetic measures may pass through to do some permanent damage, both economic and moral; but at the end of the day, it will be nothing on the scale that was feared.
There are innumerable other Obama failures for which one might wish devoutly: that he will fail to get out of Iraq, and Afghanistan; fail to pressure Israel into abandoning her frontiers; fail to negotiate with the mullahs in Iran; fail to make a missile deal with Putin’s Russia; fail to reach an international climate accord, while failing to fully cap, tax, and cripple the U.S. energy industry. Likewise, one might reasonably hope that he will fail to stack the Supreme Court with “culture of death” aficionadi, and fall “tragically” short of delivering any number of other domestic horrors. …
Jennifer Rubin writes that the president has more to learn than he has to teach.
…In his self-serving press appearance on Friday, the president instructed the less enlightened of us that the Gates episode would be a “teachable moment” about race. This, of course, is a favorite and frequent tactic by Obama. Call it the “politics of condescension.” You see, Americans don’t understand race and need to learn about “police brutality” and “race profiling.” (No, there is no evidence either occurred in this case, but we’re teaching here, so the facts don’t matter.) Jewish leaders are told to engage in “self-reflection” about Israeli-U.S. relations. (Yes, they have spent their lives doing so, wrestling with morally agonizing issues, but Obama doesn’t think they’ve gotten it right. So back to school for them.)
The irony is that it was the president who got it wrong. The “teachable moment” might well be utilized by him, not the rest of us. Michael Moynihan reminds us that Cambridge police officer Sergeant James Crowley taught race-profiling classes and was a model officer. Hmm. It seems he’s had plenty of instruction on race. Then there are the specifics of this case…
…None of this has prevented Gates from seizing on the incident to, as Moynihan explains, also insist this is a “teachable moment.” Hmm. The president and Gates seem strangely and perfectly in sync. The purpose of Gates’s directive (and the president’s, we suspect), he told an interviewer, was to make sure we all know that America ”is just as classist and just as racist as it was the day before the elections.” Got that?…
Robert Gibbs admits the prez was prepared for a Gates query. This from a Corner post by a pseudynomymous LA cop who has some advice for all of us.
… And now we are told, in a further attempt at damage control, that the Gates arrest can serve to educate all those mouth-breathing cops out there who may yet stumble into an unpleasant encounter with some other Ivy Leaguer. It’s our hope, said Gibbs, invoking that insufferable locution that one hopes will soon fade from common usage, that the Gates arrest can be “part of a teachable moment.”
So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: …
Theodore Dalrymple reviews Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
…In this well-written and wide-ranging examination of the causes and consequences of the mass immigration into Europe, Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell gives us the history of the shifting justifications for that immigration employed by the European political elites. First, of course, Europe had a labor shortage after the war, and tried to prop up its decaying and obsolete industries for a time by the importation of cheap labor. This was short-sighted, because, in a world of free, or free-ish, trade, cheap labor in expensive countries can never be as cheap as cheap labor in cheap ones, and so cannot be the basis of successful competition. …
…Not surprisingly, Caldwell devotes more than half his book to the question of Islamic immigration into Europe. Is there a specific problem attributable to Islam? It certainly seems so. In Britain, for example, both unemployment and imprisonment rates for young Hindus and Sikhs are below those of young whites, while those of young Muslims are well above. While Hindus and Sikhs outperform whites in education, Muslims have even lower educational levels than whites. Unless British racists are pro-Hindu and pro-Sikh, but anti-Muslim, which seems prima facie unlikely, the racism of the host country cannot explain these differences. They must reside in the characteristics of the immigrant groups. …
…For Caldwell, the problem boils down to a confrontation between a civilization that has lost confidence in itself and a resurgent religion that is self-confident. The Europeans now have such a foreshortened sense of history that they suppose that homosexual marriage and an equal representation of women in parliament and the boardroom have been their core values since at least the time of Julius Caesar; the religious roots of their civilization are to them either not evident or a cause for embarrassment and apology. This means that they think it normal to apologize for the Crusades and for Muslims not to apologize for Islamic imperialism; this is a manifestation of the strange European complex of self-denigration and arrogance, according to which only Europeans are sufficiently human to do real wrong. …
Antonia Senior in the London Times compares greenism with fascism and communism.
Britain is, thankfully, an ideologically barren land. The split between Right and Left is no longer ideological, but tribal. Are you a nice social liberal who believes in markets, or a nasty social liberal who believes in markets? Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls.
Blunt talks of “the religious quality” of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in today’s developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green.
His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx. Blunt evokes a febrile atmosphere in which each student felt his own decision had the power to shape the future. Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to today’s college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar. …
Nicholas Wade gives us a fascinating glimpse of academic conformity.
“Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.”
So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.
Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.
The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.” …
Mark Steyn posts a picture of Thomas Friedman’s “super-sized carbon footprint”.
Mark Steyn discusses global warming.
…But I like the way Professor Ian Plimer puts it:
I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.
In the mid-nineties, which climatologist and which model predicted the cooling trend of the turn of the century and the oughts? And, if they didn’t, on what basis do you trust their claims for 2050 or 2100?
The Economist looks at Israeli innovations in solar energy. They’re in a race with the Arab world to create viable solar. Ha Ha!
ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. And that is what two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to do. …
Volokh Conspiracy tipped us to The 100 Best Movie Line in 200 Seconds.