Friday, July 04, 2008
Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, And…?
Fran here. In college, I was a semi-professional musician; that is; I got paid for playing and singing in public. Never fear; I don't do it any more. But it was then that I learned a number of home truths about relating to an audience. The one most germane to the present moment is this: When you've been upstaged by the opening act, you mustn't attempt a counterstrike by stretching beyond your limits. Just relax, do what you came prepared to do, and hope your listeners derive some pleasure from your efforts.
(I'll get you for that, you diminutive cutie, you!)
Today is, of course, Independence Day, the quintessentially American holiday. In a way, it's misplaced, for independence was ratified by a unanimous vote taken on the Second of July, 1776; the final wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved on the Fourth, and the signatures of the majority of the delegates were affixed to it on the Second of August. Down the decades that have passed since then, historians and others have speculated as to why the delegates waited nearly a full month to sign Thomas Jefferson's immortal document.
Actually, people "in the know" have simply refrained from letting the information get around. It was too embarrassing. It would abrade too many sensibilities. The national psyche could be mortally wounded. Nevertheless, the time has come for full disclosure. The delegates to the Continental Congress refrained from signing the document on the Fourth for the best of all reasons.
They were drunk.
You've been drunk at least once, haven't you? So you know what it's like to awaken gummy-eyed and dry-mouthed, feeling as if you've been knocked down by a dog and run over by a truck. There's this pain somewhere behind your eyes that suggests that your sinuses have been invaded by a regiment of Desiccators from Death Valley. Your joints feel as if someone opened each one up and poured in a handful of sand. When you first sit up, you get a distinct feeling that the world ended during the night, and for your sins you've been named to the cleanup crew. Coffee doesn't really help; it only awakens you still further to the magnitude of your self-inflicted agonies.
And that's if you remember the night before.
Anyway, the ratifiers of our Declaration of Independence surely understood the gravity of their decision. At that time, Britain was the preeminent military power in the Western world, while the American colonies could barely muster an army. To sign the Declaration, putting one's public stamp of approval on a win-or-die rebellion against so powerful an empire, must have evoked intense fears...especially among those delegates who'd have to explain their decisions to their wives. Beyond all question, after the Declaration was approved, the delegates trooped in a body into the nearest watering hole and did their damnedest to drown their anxieties in ale.
(You didn't really think Samuel Adams's name became famous for his insurrectionist activities, did you?)
And a mighty drunk it must have been. For whenever a delegate returned to partial sobriety, he needed only to glance at his partners in rebellion, snoring around him, to remember why he'd embraced Bacchus so fervently the night before. That was more than enough impetus to call for another round.
That classic binge gave rise to one of the most important features of the new republic: the national debt. For the delegates had been sent to Philadelphia by the state legislatures; they were on expense accounts. And when was a politician's claim of "entertainment expenses" ever put to serious scrutiny? Of course, eventually the tab exceeded the delegates' means, at which point the innkeeper rousted them all out. That allowed them to sober up sufficiently to sign the Declaration a mere twenty-nine days after actually ratifying it.
That wasn't quite the end of the affair. The innkeeper harried the delegates from place to place, demanding compensation for their multifarious uses of his establishment. Their frequent relocations owed as much to his wrath as to the danger from the Redcoats. Ultimately, the imperative of national unity compelled a Second Continental Congress in 1777, where their gargantuan bar bill was appended to the war liabilities of the federal government in a "closed" session. They proceeded to draft the Articles of Confederation and, still being hung over, guaranteed national insolvency by neglecting to give the newly formed federal government the power to tax. Thus was the Constitutional Convention of 1787 made inevitable, and the phrase "not worth a Continental Congressman," unfortunately shorn by overprotective historians of its last word, coined.
Happy Independence Day, America. Hoist one or two or six for me, would you please? I'll be sure to do the same for you. For we are all truly blessed...and in my case, in more ways than I can count, but one meriting special mention today: the friendship of a certain brilliant and extremely well shod American-by-choice, whose contributions to the maintenance of my mental health are greater than I could ever say.
The Stopped Clock
When you know a man to be upbeat and forward looking, when he's been that way for all the years you've known him, it can be terribly hard to endure his fits of melancholy. We all have them -- yes, even me -- but the contrast makes his particularly gloomy.
Fran and I were chatting yesterday evening, as we often do after work. I had wonderful news to share: my dear friend Amber, whom some of you have read about at my other site, has left the porn trade and taken up far more wholesome work. She's enthusiastic about it; it's her first "regular job" since high school. I expected Fran to celebrate along with me.
Well, he didn't. Not that he regards it as a bad development; he's simply too low emotionally for it to register with him in a big way. He expressed approval, congratulated me on my contribution, and trailed off. His lack of reaction left me feeling very sad.
I tried to probe a little. I know, it's often the exact wrong thing to do, but I couldn't help it. (It's a girl thing.) It turned out to have a lot to do with today -- Independence Day.
I don't pay much attention to politics, but even I know things aren't going very well for people who just want to be left alone. As bad as they can seem here, the world beyond is in even worse shape.
The wars America fought throughout the twentieth century were all intended to promote freedom. If you were unaware of the outcomes of those wars, from the state of the world today you'd hardly believe we won them. From the state of the nation today, it would be easier to believe the Nazis conquered us.
I say "us," even though I'm less than two decades an American. I love this country with an intensity that verges on worship. But until fairly recently, I didn't think much about why I love it so. Yes, I came here to be free, and I'm as free as I can imagine being. (All right, taxes could be a lot lower.) But until you think seriously about why Americans are pretty much free, and why just about no one else anywhere is free at all, you can't really appreciate it.
Here's what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about it:
I sought for the greatness of the United States in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, her fertile fields, and boundless forests--and it was not there. I sought for it in her rich mines, her vast world commerce, her public school system, and in her institutions of higher learning--and it was not there. I looked for it in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution--and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. [Democracy in America]
Goodness is our greatest national asset. It's hard to see it that way, because you can't heap it up in a mound for people to gawk at, or make a pretty photograph out of it, like a Space Shuttle launch. But it's out there, in quantity, in the hearts of millions of Americans. They respect one another's rights. They insist on justice. They come to one another's aid when it's the proper thing to do. And they don't sit quietly when they see an injustice or an atrocity; they say and do what they think they should. That's the only sort of people that can sustain freedom: good people.
But there are other people working on that goodness -- to destroy it. And we're cutting them an awful lot of slack.
We're not a country full of wimps. We still rear up on our hind legs when it's the right thing to do...most of the time, anyway. But we're letting more and more offenses slip by unpunished. Here's an example from my other site.
I didn't think much of the incident at the time, beyond how badly it upset me. It only occurred to me much later that I'd made myself part of the problem by not counterattacking with all the resources I have. Those two viragoes wouldn't have dared to raise a hand to me. Bullies are always cowards. If I had lashed back at them in my best style, I probably would have sent them running for home. When they next saw a woman in a fur, they would have thought twice about their tactics. As it was, they probably congratulated themselves on a successful foray for their cause. They're more likely, not less, to do it again...or worse.
When a good person confronts evil that way, he has to give at least as good as he gets. I didn't. I failed my responsibilities.
There are a lot of bullies roaming around, these days. They're more numerous and more various than ever before. Muslim bullies. Environmentalist bullies. Homosexual bullies. Union bullies. Anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bullies. Victimist bullies -- like the irony in that? Educationist bullies. Bullies who want to disarm you and bullies who want to suck you dry. You can hardly avoid them, especially if you live and work in a large city.
They're as many as they are because we failed our sacred responsibility as the gardeners of fertile soil: to pull the weeds before the roots go too deep to dig out. We told ourselves that it was our duty to tolerate even the most blatantly evil nonsense. Instead of punching back, we held our tongues. Look where that got us.
I feel a little naughty, writing about this today. This is the secular holiday nearest to my heart. Besides, Fran's the political animal here, so I'm sort of trespassing on his jurisdiction; I'm supposed to write about love, sex, chess, and shoes. (Good thing Eternity Road isn't a union shop!) But if the state of things has got him down, I can only imagine what it's doing to other good people who lack his resilience.
I'm not telling you how to live your life, or how feisty you should be towards people of un-American views, or even how to deal with them when they "get in your face." I'm as averse to confrontation as any of you. But right now, the country is suffering from the proliferation of bullies, all of whom want you to bend the knee to their notions, and the only way to stem the tide is to fight back. I'm going to get to work on that for myself.
Sometimes, your local bully will be someone you've been told you have a duty to tolerate, even respect. A duty to tolerate or respect a bully? Why on Earth? Enough of that BS; I mean to find out if he can take a punch. I don't know what will come of it, but it's a good person's responsibility to try. Anyway, it has to be better than silently allowing them to run over our freedoms.
I discussed this with Fran before I decided to write about it. He had an interesting angle on it.
"We're at a stopped-clock moment in American history," he said. "There's a lot of trouble and anxiety out there. Most people are holding their breaths, awaiting developments, instead of forging ahead with their lives and their ambitions. Only the statists and the Cause People are really in motion, and that's exactly the reverse of how it ought to be."
"How do we get the clock started again?" I asked.
"By fostering goodness," he said. "De Tocqueville wrote that America is great because America is good. He grasped the essence of the thing long before any other European did. A good people can be free, and can hold onto freedom, but a free people who cease to be good will sooner or later be enslaved. If we want to avert a new enslavement, we have to become good again -- good enough to insist on goodness, to fight for it wherever it's threatened, and never, ever to give an inch willingly. We'll lose sometimes, but if there are more of us than there are of them, we'll eventually win."
"Are there more of us than there are of them?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "I used to think so, but these days I'm no longer sure."
Cheer up, America. If there's a fight to be fought, let's not pre-defeat ourselves. I mean, look at all we have to protect:
(My most recent acquisitions. For a change, I struck in time!)
Happy Independence Day!
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
It Isn’t Often…
...that your Curmudgeon, himself a wordsmith of some ability, feels the impulse to bow before another commentator's stellar performance. But two recent cases compel the gesture -- not that it's at all begrudged.
First, we have Esteemed Co-Conspirator Mark Alger's recent series on the global warming scam:
- Air Is Free
- Temperature, Global Warming, and How Far is a Degree?
- You Can't Get There From Here
- Liars, Damned Liars
Few bloggers have done nearly as thorough a job on this critical subject of our contemporary discourse. It should be required reading throughout the eco-Nazi-beleaguered West.
Second, and the equal of the first in sheer rhetorical brilliance, comes ol' Remus's leading editorial in this week's edition of The Woodpile Report. Here's a snippet:
Look at us.We have urban Liberals in control of Congress, a sanctioned Mexican takeover of the southwest with uniformed Mexican Army regulars openly involved, Moslem medieval fanatics infesting town and country alike with official protection, mandatory 'diversity' indoctrination, inflation and deficits eating away the US Peso, a one-party two party system, black jury nullifications, homosexuals given indecent access to grade school kids, college diplomas that approximate a former tenth grade education, foreign oil on the way to $170 per barrel (Arjun Murti of Goldman Sachs says $200) while global warming weenies browbeat us into walking away from our own resources, our once boundless food reserves effectively at zero, catastrophic unfunded government liabilities, the implosion of the no-income-no-credit mortgage market — and on and on.
And, as with the cities (formerly, our cities) the nation is about to be awarded that classic medallion of civic disintegration, a racist Big Man as chief executive. There's no mystery why the idea of the "first affirmative action President" is attractive. We've come to believe the President should champion a Historic Initiative that transforms the nation. Horse hockey. We'll transform ourselves, thank you. The best Presidents were those least remembered, the obscure ones late-night comedians use for comic effect, the ones that fulfilled their Constitutional duties and then went home.
Presidents in our time, like all entertainers, read their reviews at morning coffee and adjust their performances accordingly so the impending degradation of that office will be marginal. More importantly, statesmanship in Congress has descended to that of a dung beetle, most states are in the hands of corrupt fools and opportunists, most big cities are run by openly criminal demagogues, colleges have become feeding pens for otherwise unemployable political lunatics, and the press believes it their duty to cover up the news with don't-fill-in-the-blanks stylesheets. The enemy isn't at the gates, the enemy is the gates.
For pure pungency, ol' Remus is impossible to top. Nor does he sacrifice accuracy for the sake of a pithy phrase, as so many commentators do.
If there were an All-Star team for bloggers, Mark Alger and ol' Remus would make it on the first ballot. Enjoy!
Liars, Damned Liars,
AND STATISTICIANS. In his book, The Deniers, author Lawrence Solomon points out that...
While the likes of former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and Canada's David Suzuki dismiss their adversaries as industry-funded stooges or kooky individuals, The Deniers shows that the doubters are frequently better qualified than the primary proponents of global warming.Mike Byfield in DOB Magazine online
Meanwhile, across town, LabRat, metaphorically speaking:
When you attack a "weakness" of evolutionary theory -- in other words, some specific aspect of nature for which the "evolutionary" explanation in popular parlance is obviously flawed -- the biologist flicks an eyebrow and shrugs, because it's obvious to him that there's so much evidence that a blank area here and there doesn't mean anything other than "...will be filled in later with evolution still standing strong, because we don't know everything all at once." The layman, however, questions the facts as he understands them -- which, functionally, includes evolution.
The denser your knowledge of facts on the ground, the higher the level of abstraction you are capable of. However, with insufficient facts, assumption of the ability to perform abstractions can lead you into traps.
Further, arrogant assumption of intellectual superiority (masking breathtaking ignorance), harnessed in tandem with overweening political ambition -- James Hansen coupled with Al Gore -- has yielded some of the world's most truly awful historic atrocities. Marxism is one recent example in a long line of such debacles.
I apologize for the slow development of this post in my anti-AGW series. My own understanding of the issues involved has been evolving over time as I investigate. As well, the state of the art is being advanced almost daily by informed amateurs and professionals, working in a truly admirable grassroots, ad-hoc network of like-minded and curious individuals.
On Sunday, June 29, Anthony Watts, of Watt's Up With That? published a note about the USHCN station of record in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Watts' Surface Station Project visits and documents metadata on USCHCN (United States Historical Climatological Network) stations -- auditing such factors as site, environment, equipment, and condition which might bias temperature readings. At present, the majority of such stations exhibit some biassing factors -- many of them several. So much so that the responsible body at NOAA is taking the audit into consideration in designing the followon network -- to eliminate biasses as much as possible. At first glance, the Tucumcari station appeared most praiseworthy for its siting and the consistent quality of its data.
On second glance...
I noted that while this station is in fact well sited, and rates a CRN2, it has some oddities with its temperature record around the year 2000, something that looked like a step function to me.
So Watts asks, "Who's Adjusting the Climate in Tucumcari: Cows, Canals, or Hansen?"
James Hansen is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a NASA entity). He's been in the headlines recently as having called for trials of oil company executives...
Hugo Chavez? Crown Prince Abdullah? Mahmoud Ahmedinejad? Queen Beatrix?
I think you'd be looking for the actual CEOs of Citgo, ARAMCO, and Royal Dutch Shell, but... yes. Point taken, although I think Hansen means more like the CEOs of Exxon/Mobile and other, smaller, public corporations, rather than captive state creatures. Probably wouldn't want to deal with messy concepts like sovereign immunity, even though the state actors control a good deal more of the market than the corporate ones.
...calling for trials of oil company executives on charges of Crimes Against Humanity for denying -- not just global warming, not just anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but CATASTROPHIC, ZOMG! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE PANTS-SHITTING HYSTERIA GLOBAL. ::hyperventilate:: WAAAARRRMIINGGGGG. Guh!
In short, the man is a loon with no sense of proportion.
Hansen is not the only proponent of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming), only one of the leading ones. His are not the only models out there, only the most noticeable.
He is also the easiest target -- mostly because he makes himself one. As observed here.
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
Climate Skeptic, Warren Meyer takes advantage of the occasion of that anniversary to offer this assessment of Hansen's record as a prophet.
The chart in the linked post shows three trends predicted by Hansen and tracks them against actual trends. The closest to reality assumed no change in CO2 output over 20 years. The ones with more realistic CO2 levels are wildly offtrack.
In attempting to make the output (predictions) from his models more closely reflect... what?... (surely not reality), Hansen has been adjusting the numbers. Not the numbers of his formulae, no. He's been adjusting the temperature record. He's been... "homogenizing" the temperature records, adjusting data for perceived biasses, based on 1995 nighttime lights maps of the United States gathered from orbit. He's been using a formula which... Well, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has been looking into the formula.
GISS gridded data is online but in a format that is unintelligible to people who are working with modern computer languages, as opposed to Fortran and who do not know whether their machines are "littleendian" or "bigendian" (see here for GISS discussion) -- phrases rather reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, perhaps an apt text for Hansen. (For readers unfamiliar with Gulliver's Travels, at one point in his travels, Gulliver was called upon to intervene in a war between Lilliputians over whether boiled eggs should be cut first at the big end or the little end.)
Keep this in mind when people try to tell you the AGW models have been peer-reviewed. By other modelers, perhaps. By expert climatologists, thermodynamicists, and astrophysicists? Not so much.
Now, the layman might be forgiven for wondering why it's necessary to adjust the data. The data is the data, after all, right? If it shows a warming trend, well and good. If it doesn't, so much the better.
Well... the data, it turns out, isn't all that good. In order to properly model a system as complex and chaotic (in the chaos theory sense) as the Earth's atmosphere and climate, you need to have an excellent data base. You need to have high-resolution, long-timescale records of climatic conditions, of impeccable data quality, and with a thorough understanding of the metadata (sites, equipment, changes in conditions, reading times and their precision, and a host of other factors).
And actually? Not so much.
The siting of weather stations has been chosen more for the convenience of nearby inhabitants than for precision in measuring global climatological trends. The data, therefore, are singularly unsuitable for modelling.
(The updates to the network should address this lack, but they're essentially starting from zero. It will take another 150 years to get even a reasonable short baseline. Who has time to wait for that? DON'T YOU KNOW? GLOBAL WARMING IS UPON US! KATIE BAR THE DOOR! THE SKY IS FALLING!!!1!!)
So Hansen "interpolates" (guesses) to fill in gaps in the record or the network, he "adjusts," "homogenizes," and "smooths" the data to make it more amenable to being modelled, or to overcome perceived biases (such as the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI)).
There may be perfectly valid statistical reasons and procedures for doing all this. But it should be readily apparent that a disingenuous operator can easily make a data set say anything he wants to. Thus the need for transparency of process -- other scientists must be readily able to check Hansen's (or anyone's) work.
You can trust me on this. I know ingenues. My high school sweetheart was one. I can tell you with some authority, James Hansen is not being inenguous when he cooks the books and hides his data and formulae from competitors being checked by his peers.
As human development near stations has progressed, the conditions measured have changed. Near growing cities, temperatures have risen locally, due to the heat-trapping properties of large masses of masonry and pavement, as well as the heat-creating activities of industrial humans. This is the Urban Heat Island effect. A temperature station that was out in the sticks 20 or 30 years ago could be surrounded by strip malls today and skyscrapers tomorrow. This skews the averages. You could move the stations, but that ruins the continuity of the data. A shorter time baseline carries less valid meaning in analyzing trends, throwing both accuracy and precision off.
The Surface Stations initiative has also revealed that a good many stations are in sites that do not conform to the standards set forth by NOAA. Most of this meta-data comes as some surprise from a global perspective. The local folk might know about their station, but the overall authority had (hitherto) only the vaguest notion of how badly biassed the data were. In fact, a horseback guess might be forgiven for assuming that most if not all of the warming trend over the past seventy or so years (what little there's been), has been due to these hidden systemic biasses.
And Hansens "adjustments" only magnify the problem.
A sensible person would, as I say, accept that this is a textbook example of GIGO's Law (Garbage In, Garbage Out) and pay no heed to the output of the models -- at least insofar as determinants for public policy.
But Hansen is a government scientist, dependent for his salary, grants, and professional reputation on the results he delivers. If over 20 years, he can be so spectacularly wrong, it can only mean one of two things -- either his work is useless outside of its academic value (failed experiments are still instructive) -- or he has to persuade that he has not failed.
As time goes on, it appears ever-more likely that the latter case obtains.
Let Hansen serve in metonymy for the entire AGW crowd -- the warmistas.
Now, scientists can disagree, and be mistaken, yet still honest. (Not saying Hansen is, merely granting him the benefit of the doubt he denies the deniers.) Politicians, on the other hand -- such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), U.N. body -- are due no such consideration. One must assume from the outset that they are lying. And, when they are proven to be, well... We have a cure for that, here in the States. Elsewhere, folk are trapped.
The reports of the IPCC, on which most or all of the warmistas' claims to authority on the subject of global warming, have been demonstrated time and again to have been cooked up according to a mendacious political agenda. The article explains, but the essence is that a mere fraction of the scientists involved in the generation of the reports have actually even commented, and not all of them approve or agree with the "executive summary," which is all that politicians and MSM reporters ever read.
This is not science. It is not concensus. It is agenda-driven "truth" (as in Pravda -- the "official" truth).
...
So, to sum up. The claims for anthropogenic global warming are based on unvetted models, generated from suspect data, which itself only tells us that when we've looked where we have looked, temperature averages (Which mean... what?) appear to have risen less than either the precision of the measuring instruments or the margin of error (let alone the combination of the two).
Further, the models both assume facts not in evidence and ignore known facts (such as the feedback effects of clouds, water vapor, and precipitation). The same models appear to be being tweaked, not to improve their predictive ability, but to make the "adjusted" input deliver results which match reality. Like predicting the winner of a race after it's run, the prediction has little value outside of academia.
The modellers themselves appear to be "cooking the books" and, when called on it, engage in ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments against their critics.
The politicians urging massive public efforts to only marginally affect the trends predicted by the modelers are caught in a loop and appear to be several years behind the state of the art in their understanding of the situation. (Thus the expressions of surprise, as in Australia, when the reality on the ground doesn't match the warmistas' expectations.)
If a global average temperature has any thermodynamic meaning at all, it appears the current trend is downward. To the extent that we should be worrying about affecting climate change, rather than our adaptation to the inevitable, that should be our concern.
And finally, this assertion: There is no more-effective engine of change than the free market. Although the motivation is mistaken, one only needs to observe recent shifts in the markets for energy-using devices in general and automobiles in particular to see that. There is no better resource for true conservation of natural resources and the environment than a vibrant and prosperous economy. The public policy prescriptions of the warmistas -- in train as they are to the new marxist internationalists in the "ecology" movement -- will have the effect of damping global prosperity, thus diminishing humanity's ability to either affect or adapt to climate change. The deaths of millions -- perhaps billions -- will almost surely result.
The rest is up to you.
--Part Three, You Can't Get There From Here
--Part Two, Temperature, Global Warming, and How Far is a Degree?
--Part One, Air Is Free.
Cross-posted to BabyTrollBlog.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Arrant Nonsense From Highly Placed Officials
It happens when you least expect it:
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said tightened security on the U.S.-Mexico border has sparked increased violence there and that the border probably will not be fully secure until 2011, three years after the Bush administration leaves office."(Increased violence) is what typically happens when you start to enforce and make it harder to fight over the shrinking pie, so to speak, and who gets the best opportunity to exploit the additional space that's left," Chertoff said at a news conference at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Monday.
"That's a good sign," he said. "The bad news is, it's created a lot of violence and created a lot of havoc, particularly in Mexico."
Chertoff added that quelling the violence will require working with the Mexican government - and millions of dollars from American taxpayers if Congress funds the Merida Initiative. The multi-year proposal would give Mexico $500 million and $50 million to Central America in 2008 to fight the drug cartels - another $450 million and $100 million respectively will be given for fiscal year 2009.
"We have to recognize that both countries (U.S. and Mexico) have a common interest in securing the border," Chertoff said.
Secretary Chertoff was able to talk sense for a bare two paragraphs before descending into lunacy.
That violence and havoc has erupted in Mexico is "bad news?" Why? The Mexican government has made it an overt policy to condone the violation of the American border by Mexican nationals. Indeed, it supports the practice by both overt and covert means. That that government should be punished for its infamies is entirely appropriate; that the punishment should arise from its own population is both appropriate and superbly ironic. This is good news, not bad...unless Secretary Chertoff believes that violations of America's sovereignty should be costless.
Mexico has no interest in securing its American border. Indeed, the permeability of that border constitutes a relief valve for the thoroughly corrupt Mexican system. As long as Mexicans have a reasonable prospect of escaping into the United States, backpressure against Mexican crony-capitalism -- a system of insider dealing and government favoritism similar to the ones that made Ferdinand Marcos and Anastazio Somosa infamous -- will be containable. But were Mexicans to face a firmly held northern border, limiting their options to suffering in Mexico or migrating south to even more benighted lands, the regime would face real danger.
Finally, the United States need not and must not try to bribe Mexico into collaborating on border control. That would be a "poor nation's Danegeld," guaranteed to elicit future extortion by threats to weaken or puncture whatever collaborative measures the regime might put in place. Rather, an appropriate posture for the United States would be to threaten a military intervention should the regime continue to condone and support wetbacking our border. Even with the stresses it currently endures, our military could easily topple the rotten Mexican state; it might even have the assistance of Mexico's citizenry in doing so.
Washington has a choice to make: either our borders are to be defended by American power, or they are not. No other options exist. If our legislators choose to allow the problem to persist and deepen, or worse, trust the Mexican government to assist us in good faith, our grandchildren will confront a map of the United States quite different from the current edition. To surrender the border, or to concede partial authority over it to a foreign government, would be to concede America's sovereignty over its own territory. It would be grounds for overthrowing the federal government and installing something more approximately patriotic in its place.
Apropos of which, John McCain believes that "regularizing" the status of the six to eleven million illegals already on our soil is more important than strengthening the border. He's uninterested in anything but "comprehensive" immigration reform -- that is, a package deal that would grant our current gaggle of illegals the status of legal residents. In light of that, are you still prepared to believe he'd nominate strict-constructionist judges to the federal bench?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Promises, Promises…
Today, Barack Obama made a "promise" that he has already broken. In short, he pledged that he would never question anyone else's patriotism. As noble as this sounds, it impels your Curmudgeon to explore a few definitions.
Patriotism is defined as "love of country." Love is that state of regard for a person or thing that causes the lover to elevate the beloved's well-being to the highest plane of his priorities, equal to or higher than his own welfare. A lover will never sacrifice his beloved's interests to further his own.
By implication, a lover will never treat his beloved's highest values as contemptible. He will not heap scorn upon his beloved's principles, knowing (as he must) that one's principles are inseparable from one's moral position, and thus from oneself. So a "lover" who does such things must be regarded as massively insincere.
In that light, regard well the following Obama statement:
"It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy,” Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid."They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?"
Extraordinary cases notwithstanding, a decent man will always allow that his opponents are themselves decent men, albeit misguided or misinformed. For a politician to speak otherwise is to say: My opponents are more interested in victory than in the well-being of the Republic. Barack Obama, in the above snippet, said: My opponents are willing to slander me, including racial slanders, rather than debate me on the merits. In a less than a hundred words, he accused unnamed Republican activists of deceit, calumny, and racism -- specifically for the purpose of winning the presidential election. That is a flat denial of the opponents' patriotism.
But by now, it should come as no surprise that Barack Obama, a quintessential Chicago machine politician, is a habitual liar.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Assorted
1. Imputing False Motives.
One of the easiest-to-commit of all offenses against another person is to assign him an evil motive without clear and convincing evidence that he really means to do evil. In the political realm, where the Curmudgeon Emeritus spends most of his time, this is getting to be a nearly universal motif. It speaks volumes, none of them good, about the political health of the United States.
I don't except myself from this diagnosis; I've been guilty of this sin, too.
Yes, there are people who consciously mean to do evil. Some of them may be accurately accused of it and justly called to account for it. And some of these are politicians, including a number of persons with national images and prominences. But evil-minded people are typically capable of assuming a pleasant mask; they're good at concealing their intentions. We must take care not to be too certain of our ground, especially since some of the worst damage to our nation has been done by politicians who had only the best of intentions.
We are not authorized to judge persons, only their deeds. Not even the pope, the Vicar of Christ on Earth, has that privilege. There are persons out there from whose mouths the purest distillate of venom regularly pours. It's easy and important to condemn this. It's hard, but equally important, not to condemn the speaker along with it. His fate is in God's hands, as is every man's. It is not meant to be known to us.
Let's try our best to keep this in mind as the campaign season progresses. It promises to be filled with trials of the spirit.
2. Constraints Of Office.
The celebrant at Mass this morning made use of a favorite joke of mine:
Frank Perdue, anxious to find new ways of promoting his chicken, one day hit upon the idea of getting the endorsement of a religious body. Well, the largest and most coherent of all religious bodies is the Catholic Church, so Perdue prepared an emissary and sent him to see the Holy Father in Rome.Upon being admitted to the presence of the pope, Perdue's representative said, "Your Holiness, Frank Perdue has sent me here to offer the Church a gift of ten million dollars, if you will only grant us the tiniest of boons."
The pope's eyebrows rose. "And what is this boon, pray tell?"
The Perdue man smiled and said, "Only that you, Your Holiness, officially change the wording of the Lord's Prayer from 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken.'"
The pope recoiled in horror. "Sir, you're proposing that I meddle with the words of Jesus Christ, the Son of God! I could never do such a thing."
The Perdue man nodded and replied, "But would you consider doing so for fifty million dollars?"
Once again, the Holy Father recoiled in shock. "Sir, my charge is the conservation and promulgation of the words of the Redeemer. I could never be persuaded to edit them...certainly not for a mere fifty million dollars."
The Perdue representative smiled once more and said, "All right, Your Holiness. One hundred million dollars! Will you change the words of the Lord's Prayer for that sum? Imagine all the good works it would enable the Church to do! Imagine the number of people to whom you could bring the Gospels, who've never heard them before! What do you say to one hundred million dollars for 'Give us this day our daily chicken' -- ?"
The pope reflected on the generosity of the offer, and the many good works it would make possible that had gone unaddressed for so long, for lack of funds. Presently, he said, "Please inform Mr. Perdue that we have a deal."
At the next meeting of the Curia, the pope rose and told the assembled cardinals, "My brothers in Christ, today I have good news and bad news. The good news is that, thanks to a most generous donation from Mr. Frank Perdue in America, we will be able to expand our charitable works far beyond their previous limits. The bad news is, we're going to be losing the Wonder Bread account."
Of course it's a joke. Feel free to laugh. But also bear this in mind: a true successor to Saint Peter, a faithful shepherd to the Christian flock, could not and would not do any such thing. He is bound by the words of Christ as they are recorded in the canonical Gospels, and may not depart from them. To traduce them in any way would constitute an unimaginable betrayal of his responsibilities.
I've written before that I don't see eye-to-eye with the Church on certain matters. But as I'm not an anointed priest, my differences with Catholic teaching are my own affair, at least so long as I refrain from proclaiming my convictions to be as authoritative as those of the Church. But the Vicar of Christ is far more tightly confined. If his conscience tells him that some aspect of human conduct is an abomination, he may not say otherwise regardless of what pressure is put upon him. Similarly, if he is convinced that some kind of conduct, in the proper context, is morally obligatory, he is required to teach it so. He does not have the freedom to diverge that a layman possesses; his position and his vows forbid that.
So much for the hope, among sexual profligates, deviates, and promoters of abortion, that the Church will ever bend its teachings to their wishes.
3. "An Older Man."
The story told in last week's Rumination struck several readers as unfinished. Indeed, it is, though it took me a second and a third reading of my own words to reach that conclusion. So it will be continued, and hopefully finished, in a future Rumination.
But not by me.
I'm not going to reveal the identity of my co-author(s) now. I might not do so later, if they request anonymity; personal experiences might be relevant to the conclusion(s) he / she / they construct. When he / she / they present their work, it will be for you to lay it front-to-back with the first part of the story and judge the combination's worth. I expect the finished products to be unique.
Yes, I did say "products." There might be more than one conclusion. That could be rather interesting. Revealing, too.
May God bless and keep you all.
What Seems Reasonable?
IN THE WAKE OF the Heller decision, all the statists are lining up to get the first licks in at defining what are "reasonable" restrictions on the right of the People to keep and bear arms.
Fair enough.
Let's start with the presumption that the law means what it says: "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
As was observed in the majority opinion in Heller, that the right is referred to as it is in the text of the Second Amendment means that the framers of the Constitution did not see that document as granting the right, nor the powers given to the government as granting it. Contrariwise, in all jurisprudence since the founding up until 1934 and the massively unconstitutional firearms act, the right was recognized as being pre-constitutional.
Also noted in all of this discussion is the notion that any provision of the Constitution must be read and interpreted within the context of the entire document.
Fair enough.
I, for one, note that the First Amendment (whose fundamental nature is often brought up in these discussions) begins with the phrase "Congress shall make no law..." To me, this implies that the First Amendment is a limitation placed on Congress -- and Congress alone -- and thus on the Federal government. I understand that the doctrine of incorporation forbids any subsidiary politican subdivision from violating the First Amendment as well.
But the Second, now... There is no mention of Congress, or any other government body. By this, I take it that the proscription lain here -- that the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed -- is absolute. No actor -- public at any level of government or private -- may infringe upon this right.
Nor is there any provision for abridgements of the absolute nature of the text. It doesn't say "except as Congress shall determine for good public order" or suchlike. It says -- as though the words were written in letters of fire by the Hand of God: THOU SHALT NOT INFRINGE! -- "...shall not be infringed."
Period. End of discussion.
Go read up on the difference in law between "shall" and "may," while you're at it.
So, when we decide to have a discussion about reasonable restrictions on Second Amendment rights, let's start with the presumption that the law means what it says. Let us say, for example, that Justice Scalia is dead wrong when he writes...
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller's holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
... because his first sentence is belied by the text of the Amendment. The words of the law itself give it the lie. "Shall not be infringed..." leaves no room for "except for..." and -- scorn quotes -- "reasonable limits."
As Barry Goldwater famously bruited about, extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. If we want to discuss reasonable limits on the right to keep and bear arms, let us begin with the presumption that "shall not be infringed" means exactly what it says. Let us trim the fringe off and start there. Let persuasive arguments, founded in good old common law, be made to restrict matters.
Let us not start from the assumption that any restriction is reasonable.
Now, do I think and believe that citizens should have the right to "keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose"? Not necessarily. But I think that the case against needs to be proven with rigor and against unstinting opposition. Restrictions must rebut the fact that the Second Amendment is absolute in its proscription.
Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The Religion of Economic Suicide
The contradiction behind the green lifestyle [religion] fad is the idea that we can reject industrial civilization -- and the fuel that powers it -- while still enjoying a modern, prosperous, "First World" standard of living.
The more shallow followers of the green [religion] get around this contradiction through "greenwashing": finding a superficial "green" angle to rationalize buying expensive goods and living pretty much the same opulent lifestyle they enjoyed before. My favorite example is a magazine article on "green" houses that advocated buying more expensive, nicer-looking "architectural grade" asphalt roof shingles, because they won't have to be replaced as often and will therefore -- if you can follow this chain of reasoning -- use less resources over the long run. Maybe so, maybe not. But it gives well-off, upper-middle-class types an excuse not to feel guilty about telling the roofer to go with the upgrade.
Among more serious devotees, the green contradiction takes the form of endless, arbitrary debates about which lifestyle choices are really more-green-than-thou. They debate over whether to ask for paper or plastic bags at the grocery store, or whether to buy milk in glass jugs or cardboard cartons, and a whole host of other eco-theological conundrums that turn out to be more convoluted and harder to resolve than the [religious] debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
What both groups are trying to evade is that truly consistent environmentalism demands the sacrifice of all prosperity. The only genuine way to slash your "carbon footprint" is to stop consuming goods. The "lifestyle" it really demands is not about hemp bracelets, bamboo textile skirts, and reusable burlap grocery sacks-the entire Whole Foods scene. It's really about abject, Third World poverty.
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Heller Part 3: Concluding Thoughts
Though the Heller decision is important, its importance lies not in that it "grants" American private citizens the right to own weapons, but in that by recognizing the natural, individual right of persons to keep and bear arms, it limits the State's rationales for infringing on our rights. Every government, throughout human history, has enlarged upon whatever specious justifications it could find for trampling human freedom. The only corrective that's ever existed is armed revolt.
Rights, with the exception of "procedural rights" (which aren't really rights, but promises), do not originate with government. They are innate in the human animal by reason of its nature. This flows from the admission that rights exist at all, for if a rights-bearer has no right to defend his rights against aggression or invasion with whatever degree of force is required, his claim of rights is empty. All rights are rights to use force.
This is nowhere so important as when applied to the relationship between the individual and the State.
The reason for the Second Amendment, it's often said, was to give meaning to the other nine. A citizenry in arms always has the means of correction for State abridgements of its rights...if it has the will and resolve to use it. Until we have been disarmed, we can never say that "there's nothing we can do" about some governmental depredation.
The Founding Fathers were fully aware of this. They had to be, for their revolution was based on the possession of weapons by a rebellious colonial citizenry. Further, they knew, when they convened in Philadephia in 1787, that the government they proposed to construct would look frighteningly powerful to many Americans. The Constitution limited the sovereign states in novel ways, and arrogated powers that had been denied to the federal government by the Articles of Confederation. The impulse to rebellion against what many might perceive as a new tyranny-in-embryo had to be mitigated -- and the only reasonable means was the guarantee that no government shall ever be permitted to infringe upon the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.
Keep that in mind -- and keep your powder dry.
A substantial number of persons, including quite a few who are nominally bright enough to know better, have argued that Heller is a full justification for voting for John McCain for president, on the grounds that he's promised to nominate conservative jurists to the federal courts. Your Curmudgeon marvels at such wishful thinking. John McCain has been the architect of numerous anti-Constitutional laws. He was also the key element in the "Gang of 14," which thwarted several of President Bush's conservative nominees to the federal Courts of Appeals. Finally, McCain has been caught talking out of both sides of his mouth already, most notably on the subject of immigration reform. How could any intelligent, well informed person put any stock in McCain's promise to put constitutional strict-constructionists on the federal bench?
McCain represents the very worst elements in the Republican Party: pols who have no convictions that aren't at least rhetorically for sale. If we go by his record, he'll say whatever he thinks will get him elected, and do whatever he damned well pleases once he's in the Oval Office. What he pleases is all too frequently what will get him an admiring sentence or two from the New York Times. His oral promises are about as good as the paper they're not written on.
A brilliant scene from an old favorite movie, Christopher Plummer's Murder by Decree, comes to mind. In defending his government against the charge that it has conspired in a mass-murder conspiracy and its concealment, the prime minister, played by John Gielgud, says to Sherlock Holmes, played by Plummer, says "You have my word" that nothing of the sort has occurred. Holmes's / Plummer's reply: "I would prefer a more reliable authority."
To vote for a man as unreliable as McCain on the grounds of his campaign promises is to trade the possibility of knocking some sense into the GOP's head for the poor bet that a liberal Republican, already established as a liar and dissimulator, will keep his word against his own interests. Frankly, your Curmudgeon would sooner trust a Muslim.
"When a man shows you who he is, believe him." -- Maya Angelou
The wave of challenges to state and local anti-gun ordinances has already begun , and of course leftist Old Media organs are already in full counterattacking cry:
THE US Supreme Court has ended 69 years of speculation and ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution confers an individual right of Americans to own and use guns. To arrive at this decision, the court performed a grammatical parsing that would confound the best English teacher, deciding that the first 13 words are merely “prefatory” to the “operative clause” of the one-sentence amendment, thus conveniently tossing aside the importance of “a well regulated militia” to the right to bear arms.
And from the Paper of Recorded Leftist Propaganda:
In a radical break from 70 years of Supreme Court precedent, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, declared that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear arms for nonmilitary uses, even though the amendment clearly links the right to service in a “militia.” The ruling will give gun-rights advocates a powerful new legal tool to try to strike down gun-control laws across the nation.This is a decision that will cost innocent lives, cause immeasurable pain and suffering and turn America into a more dangerous country. It will also diminish our standing in the world, sending yet another message that the United States values gun rights over human life....
This audaciously harmful decision, which hands the far right a victory it has sought for decades, is a powerful reminder of why voters need to have the Supreme Court firmly in mind when they vote for the president this fall.
Senator John McCain has said he would appoint justices like Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito — both of whom supported this decision. If the court is allowed to tip even further to the far right, there will be even more damage done to the rights and the safety of Americans.
If the writers of these tirades are unaware that until 1934 it was undisputed that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and that the death rate per thousand residents is highest in those locales that have strict gun control, they have no business writing for publication. If they are aware, they deserve to be tarred, feathered, and run out of the country on a rail.
The strength of your outrage at such perversions of logic and history is an excellent all-around measure of your rationality and decency.
