Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Over at NRO, Jerry Taylor weighs in on why it will be cheaper to keep your cool in the summertime, thanks to Bush (and no thanks to Clinton).

In an op-ed in the NYT, Bjorn Lomborg slices and dices through the fog of “sustainability” and says that development is better for us in the long run.

Why does the developed world worry so much about sustainability? Because we constantly hear a litany of how the environment is in poor shape. Natural resources are running out. Population is growing, leaving less and less to eat. Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers. Forests are disappearing. The planet’s air and water are getting ever more polluted. Human activity is, in short, defiling the earth — and as it does so, humanity may end up killing itself.
There is, however, one problem: this litany is not supported by the evidence. Energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. More food is now produced per capita than at any time in the world’s history. Fewer people are starving. Species are, it is true, becoming extinct. But only about 0.7 percent of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not the 20 percent to 50 percent that some have predicted. Most forms of environmental pollution look as though they have either been exaggerated or are transient — associated with the early phases of industrialization. They are best cured not by restricting economic growth but by accelerating it….
The United States has a unique opportunity in Johannesburg to call attention to development. Many Europeans chastised the the Bush administration for not caring enough about sustainability, especially in its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. They are probably correct that the United States decision was made on the basis of economic self-interest rather than out of some principled belief in world development. But in Johannesburg the administration can recast its decision as an attempt to focus on the most important and fundamental issues on the global agenda: clean drinking water, better sanitation and health care and the fight against poverty.
Such move would regain for the United States the moral high ground. When United States rejected the Kyoto treaty last year, Europeans talked endlessly about how it was left to them to “save the world.” But if the United States is willing to commit the resources to ensure development, it could emerge as the savior.

I read Lomborg’s book. Moreover, I understood it. And he’s right. Specious and unsupportable handwringing over the environment needs to stop, and we need to put the stop to it and MOVE ON. The “brown cloud” in SE Asia wouldn’t be there if people there had an advanced (preferably nuclear-powered) civilization. And it’s interesting to note that there ain’t no brown cloud over the US.
First thing we need to do is kill all the lawyers bring back nuclear power.

…and yet there’s still this little matter of the secret FISA court that doesn’t appear to bother him one little bit, as long as it constrains the Justice Department. [Intrusive and annoying registration required to read the article]
WHY is this court secret? I can understand why its deliberations and decisions would have to be under seal. What I don’t understand is why its membership is secret. And don’t give me this “protection from possible retribution” argument that seems to work in Columbia. There should also be a sunset limitation on how long its records can be kept sealed, eg, 10 years or conviction of the guilty, whichever comes first.
I still maintain that there is a war on, and in this war it’s completely and entirely possible that we have cells of the enemy acting on our own soil. When the first nuke goes off in one of our cities, we’ll know where to point at least one finger of blame. The FISA court was set up in reaction to Richard Nixon’s illegal spying on Americans for political reasons, but long after he left office, therefore being akin to closing the barn door after the horse gets out. There is no reason to believe that any other president (well, except maybe Clinton) would do such things.
There is a point at which we have to get serious and root out the al-Qaeda in our midst, and use every weapon in the intelligence arsenal to do that. We haven’t reached that point yet, apparently. The continued existence of the FISA court and its decision not to allow the Justice Department to do its job is symptomatic of our attitude. We’ll beat up on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but horrors await should we give up, even temporarily, an iota of our personal freedom to beat up on them here.
I am depressed.

…of Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America. You can get it over at the Professor’s.
What I don’t understand after walking away is why Lindgren can’t simply state that the book is a pack of lies, one after another, and that the thesis of the book simply doesn’t stand up under rigorous analysis. Lindgren’s conclusions are fairly damning, yet he can’t bring himself to say what he really seems to think.
I don’t claim to be a working historian, but I am a trained one; have an AB in History and an MA all but thesis in same. I took a graduate-level historiography course and passed it with an A. I understand the concepts of research that are involved. And I come to the conclusion that either Michael Bellesiles is poorly trained in his discipline, or he wrote the book as a shill for the anti-gun lobby and knew exactly what he was doing when he did.
We will probably never know the truth.

[FYI, this is in part what I intended to respond with over at Rachel’s. I’m posting it on my own blog because it’s not my place to take over hers 🙂 It has grown somewhat as I worked on it, and I think I may now have an inkling of how den Beste must feel as he writes. Bear with me.]
I have had my basic liberal democratic principles questioned over on Rachel Lucas’s blog, in the comments to the post there that I linked earlier, by an apparent progressive type who thinks I am an opinionated, self-centered megalomaniac with delusions of godhood. (Hmm, that should get a rise out of Naylor.) Well, actually what he said was that the world doesn’t revolve around me.
But of course it does, sir. I hope it revolves around you, too. I think it has something to do with feelings of self-worth and self-conciousness, an opinion that I can change the world in some ways, and an acknowledgement that there are some things in this world that I can simply do nothing about. If I could kill Yasser Arafat, or Saddam Hussein, I’d be there locked and loaded. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that, short of backing the administration in their efforts to dethrone their sorry asses. So yes, the world does revolve around me. Live with it. I live with the fact that it revolves around you, after all.
The smoke and fire over at Rachel’s had to do with attitudes about noisy children (I believe I characterized them as squalling candy-grubbing brats) in stores and restaurants (in any case, in public spaces). Now allow me to state that in my opinion, noise (particularly that of children) in its place is fine. I don’t object to family reunions or birthday parties because of children running around screaming, or babies crying for whatever reason. Rather, I expect it, and I revel in it.
I think however that we are talking about a different type of noise. In public I expect a different sort of decorum. I expect children to be well-behaved, and their parents to control them if they are not. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the way it was when I grew up, and I expect nothing less of succeeding generations.
I have never subscribed (and will never subscribe) to the idea that control of YOUR children in public space is up to ME (or vice versa, so stay away from any kids I may ever have or suffer the consequences). Your children are not my responsibility (unless of course they have been officially handed over to my responsibility, such as in the Boy Scouts to go camping, or by a relative or friend to spend the weekend), regardless of what Hillary Clinton thinks. (Not that Hillary really thinks, but I digress.)
It does NOT take a village to raise a child, which is what my opponent would have us believe in telling me that I should lend a hand, or make a donation, or suggest that a particular store have a no-candy checkout lane, or shut up and suffer. That is the progressive, left-wing mentality which argues that all people, no matter how far removed — in other words, the “village” — must collaborate in the raising of a child. This is a fallacy perpetuated by the ghostwritten book ascribed to Hillary Clinton with that title. It was never the case in American history that the entire village collaborated per se in the raising of individual children (although I’ll retract that statement if someone shows me an historical example of a purely socialist governmental unit within the United States where parents surrendered their children to central authority to be raised; weird little Utopian religious communities like the ones in Southern Indiana don’t count). Correct them when their parents weren’t around maybe, but that was to be expected, because there was a certain decorum that reigned in people’s lives when the Republic was young, even up until say the 1950’s, and people weren’t expected to have to put up with unruly children. But parents of unruly children always found out about their behavior, even if they weren’t around to correct it in person. My mother and father were fully aware of this system of inter-adult communication while growing up. So then were my sister and I.
So contrary to popular belief on the left, it takes parents to raise a child, not a community of people waving their fingers in the child’s face. Ultimately it is not MY responsibility to correct YOUR child. To paraphrase what Rachel said, “YOU had ’em; YOU correct ’em”. And I won’t threaten to sic the cops on you when you do, unless you do something stupid like lock them in a closet or try to starve them or drown them in a bathtub. There are limits.
The difference between my opponent and myself is that I do not think like a progressive, and I don’t try to win arguments by setting up straw men that make it look like I should. I think like a liberal democrat (please carefully note the small “l” and small “d”) of the Hayek persuasion who believes that responsibility for all actions ultimately devolves on those who are most directly responsible — in this case, parents who should be taking responsibility for their own children — and not on the community at large. Community child nurturing, like central planning, doesn’t work. It’s what has given us the ill-groomed, black-clad, gloom-and-doom teenagers we see all the time who believe in nothing and see no hope in their future.
I do not hate children. I joke about hating children, but I don’t mean it (I helped a single mom girlfriend raise one, how can I hate children?). I simply do not prefer at this time to have them around 24/7. If I did, you can be sure that they would either be at home when Sally and I went out, or on their best behavior when out in public with us. I see no reason to take children shopping, certainly not four of them at a time as was postulated over at Rachel’s, and I see no reason to disrupt entire restaurants by bringing them along until they are old enough to behave themselves. Think about it for a moment — who is the more selfish? The one who complains about the bratty children who won’t shut up, or the parent who brought the children along because it was too much trouble not to? If you choose the first, you’re clearly from the left. If you choose the latter, you must be somewhere off to the right. If you can’t decide, you must be a centrist. (They used to call these people “mugwumps”. You could look it up.)
I can count at least four young men (only one related to me, through my sister) and one young lady who will undoubtedly consider me to be a beloved if curmudgeonly uncle when I’m old. (They consider me that now anyway.) I don’t feel bereft because I don’t have a child of my loins who will carry my name to another generation. Neither does my wife, and for much the same reason (except that she’s got a gazillion kids who feel that way about her).
It may shock a lot of people to know that if Sally and I did adopt children, I would likely be a stay-at-home Dad. And I’d love every minute of it. And I wouldn’t lose a dime in compensation.
How strange our lives are in this age of broadband ethernet and telecommuting … I don’t leave the house to go to work every day, but I make most of the money, which means that Sally was able to quit the job she had before we got married and take a job doing what she really LIKES doing (teaching swimming) that brings home considerably less than she made before. And who cares? It’s all OUR money, and we both enjoy what we do, and we enjoy spending OUR money together. So it works.
And so it goes.

Here’s an interesting left-slanted article.
I’d like to see the proof of this statement:

“The new policy is classic doublespeak,” said Kenneth Kreuschu, 24, of the Cascadia Forest Alliance. “It has been shown time and again that more cutting leads to more fire. The new policy is a hoax.”

The sheer illogic of this statement leaves me breathless. If there is less to catch on fire, how does more cutting lead to more fire?
Now, let’s consider this paragraph:

Under Bush’s proposals, some commercial-grade wood would be allowed to be removed in areas at high risk of fire, but a senior administration source said the plan was not intended to expose forests to widespread commercial logging.

And let’s compare it to a statement I found thanks to Rachel’s blog:

This clearcutting business is retarded. This whole mentality of ‘we’ll chop down half the forests, and leave the other half untouched’ is what is causing these wildfire problems. What we need to do is moderately cut all forests.
Although, admittedly, Bush’s plan does have some merit – if we chop down all the forests, there won’t be any forest fires.

Where exactly does it say “clearcutting” anywhere in what Bush said yesterday? I was sure he said “thinning”. I heard at least part of what he said on TV, and I know I didn’t hear any reference to clearcutting. And here again: Where is the proof that clearing forest promotes wildfire?
And going back to the PMSNBC article:

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., moved quietly last month to exempt some areas of his home state from environmental constraints, attaching a rider to an emergency spending bill to allow some logging in areas of South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest.

Let’s not forget that Tom Daschle is a hypocrite. He’s against logging anywhere else, but he’s got to protect the base back home.
We need the Republicans to take the Senate back. We really do. This isn’t funny anymore.

Researchers find evidence of space rock smashing Earth nearly 3.5 billion years ago
Seems like our money would be better spent on long-range detection and interdiction of Earth-crossing asteroids (and colonization of Mars, etc). Oh well, maybe once we smack Saddam.
Wait, we’re the richest country on earth. Why can’t we do both?

Doesn’t it bother you that there is a “secret court” that has the power to “rebuff[] Ashcroft”?

The documents released yesterday also provide a rare glimpse into the workings of the almost entirely secret FISA court, composed of a rotating panel of federal judges from around the United States and, until yesterday, had never jointly approved the release of one of its opinions. Ironically, the Justice Department itself had opposed the release.

I think this means we’ve had a Star Chamber court in our midst for quite some time, and not as a result of 9/11 or the Patriot Act, either. Sounds like it was started up under our ol’ buddy Jimmy Carter, too, if it’s been around “23 years” as noted in the article. That makes it 1979, well before that dangerous guy Reagan took office.
Then there’s this, from the NY Times version of the story (annoying registration required):

Gregory T. Nojeim, associate director of the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, said the opinion was “astounding” in demonstrating that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have tried an “end run around the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.”
“These disclosures couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Department of Justice,” Mr. Nojeim said. “They’ve just been given vast new intelligence powers and are seeking more.”

We’re AT WAR, numb-nuts. Hadn’t you heard?
I hope the ACLU headquarters gets flattened if there’s another terrorist attack in Washington. I really do. These people are not serious and need to get a serious clue. We have fought wars before and have yet to permanently lose civil liberties. I’ve posted on this before. Also here. And here.

and this is why she should rule the world. Or run for Congress, whichever seems more doable.

Apparently not.
I would certainly consider this protected, if perhaps somewhat ridiculous, speech. They’ve got a point; evolution is a theory. And I’d support their right to say so. So I guess the ACLU is screwed again, or would be if I were the judge. Damn it…I’m not the judge. Oh well.
I wonder what the difference would have been if the school district had distributed a flyer with each book rather than put a sticker on each book?