The Javelineer

Global warming is bovine scatology.

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves.

This crap was obvious ten years ago. Science constructs mathematical models from observations. Climatology works the wrong way around, making the model primary. That’s just plain ol’ bullshit wrapped in a PhD diploma.

I can hardly believe this.

Election gains in some of these affluent regions have helped give Democrats big majorities in the House and Senate. Of the 25 richest districts, 14 are represented by Democrats, according to Congressional Quarterly. In 1995, Democrats represented just five of those districts.

Recently elected Democrats from higher-income areas also have been cautious about legislation that would make it easier for labor unions to organize, and about legislation imposing tough new rules on banks. Republicans have savaged the new Democrats for supporting legislation to stem global warming by capping greenhouse-gas emissions, then forcing polluters to purchase and trade emissions credits — a “cap and tax,” the GOP says.

But planned tax increases are likely the source of the toughest intra-Democratic tensions.

Let me get this straight. A bunch of rich people voted for Obama, and now they are shocked -shocked! – to discover O! wants to raise taxes, over-regulate business, and punish productivity and entrepreneurship? Seriously? They didn’t know? ROFLMAO

Liberal rich people are stupid. There’s just no other explanation. That’s strange I can believe in.

For the metaphorically challenged: the pit is an economic depression, the prisoner is you, the pendulum is foreign debt, the Inquisition is the Fed, Father Time is Obama, Austrian School economics is the rescuer of the prisoner.

Oh, hell. Just read the charts.

Read it and weep.

Related: Peter Schiff was right

In the 1930s, Walter Duranty travelled to the Soviet Union and witnessed the planned famines that eventually wiped out 20 million kulaks. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty lied. He promoted an idyllic image of the Soviet Union, even as mass starvation and state terror decimated the Soviet peoples.

Near the end of the Great Depression, Americans read Duranty’s idylls about Soviet life. Seeking jobs and a better life, lured by Duranty’s false dreams, some American leftists emigrated to the Soviet Union. Few of them survived.

William Underhill is the new Walter Duranty.

In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”

The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.

Perhaps Mr. Underhill was unaware of the events in Firminy, as are many Europeans and even Frenchmen, because the media are loath to report facts like these. In the Fall of 2005, a wave of nightly rioting by young Muslim thugs suddenly disappeared from the news when the press, at the request of the French authorities, stopped reporting about it.

In France, over 750 territorial enclaves have been given up by the state and are no longer controlled by the French authorities. These are the so-called “zones urbaines sensibles” (ZUS, sensitive urban areas). They have even been listed as such on an official website. The ZUS are run by Muslim gangs, while the inhabitants live under a combination of Shariah law and mafia rule.

Warnings concerning the loss of Europe to Islam is referred to by Mr. Underhill as “rabble-rousing stuff” and “alarming and highly speculative projections.” While conceding that “about half of respondents in Spain and Germany [hold] negative views of Muslims,”Newsweek pretends to know better than the 50 per cent of Europeans who feel uneasy about their daily confrontations with men in djellabahs and women in hijabs (if not niqabs and burkas), and with the construction of huge mosques in their home towns.

Read it all. Underhill is a dunderhead.

The Stoning looks good. I hope it comes to a theater near me soon. From Wikipedia,

Stranded in a remote Iranian village, Sahebjam is approached by Zahra, a woman with a harrowing tale to tell about her niece, Soraya, and the bloody circumstances of her death the day before. Her story exposes the dark power of mob rule, uncivil law, and the lack of rights for women. Her last and only hope for justice lies in the hands of the journalist who must escape with the story – and his life – in order to communicate the violence to the world.

To find a theater where it’s showing, go here.

Paternity fraud. Perpetrated by a dishonest woman and a thuggish family court system.

Frank Hatley has languished in a South Georgia jail for more than a year.
The reason? He failed to reimburse the state for all the public assistance his “son” received over the past two decades.

The problem? Hatley is not the biological father — and a special assistant state attorney general and a judge knew it but jailed Hatley anyway.

“I feel bad for the man,” Cook County Sheriff Johnny Daughtrey said Tuesday. “Put yourself in that man’s shoes: If it wasn’t your child, would you want to be paying child support for him?”

Daughtrey said he hopes a hearing Wednesday will resolve the matter. Hatley has been held at the county jail in Adel since June 25, 2008, costing the county an estimated $35 to $40 a day.

Even after learning he was not the father, Hatley paid thousands of dollars the state said he owed for support. After losing his job and becoming homeless, he still made payments out of his unemployment benefits.

Hatley’s lawyer, Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said two independent DNA tests — one nine years ago and one just a few days ago — prove he is not the biological father.

“This is a case of excessive zeal to recover money trumping common sense,” she said. “What possible legitimate reason can the state have to pursue Mr. Hatley for child support when he does not have any children?”

(h/t Amy)

This kind of book review is why I am a member of the Claremont Institute.

Is history the story of great men? This was a question faced by Claire Berlinski in one of her examination papers when she studied for a Ph.D in Oxford, and any Marxist could effortlessly write many pages refuting the idea. Currently the British government has decreed, in accordance with that rather Marxist paradigm, that history taught in British schools will be “themed.” It will be about abstractions such as slavery, medicine, and war. The fact is, however, that the very beginning of historical understanding is chronology and contingency—dates and details. “Theming” the past turns it into bad sociology. And it happens that Berlinski’s new book, “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, concerns a passage of international events that can hardly be understood except in “great man” terms—at least if we can ignore the fussing feminist who may object to our treating “man” here as generic rather than specific.

In the 1980s, a remarkable conjunction of events changed the then dominant international relations of the Cold War. A number of leaders came into office who happened to be quite different both from their predecessors and their successors. John O’Sullivan’s The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (2006) has brilliantly argued one version of this thesis, in which the personalities were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Mikhail Gorbachev always threatened to ruin the symmetry of O’Sullivan’s argument because he was clearly a pivotal player in the process. In Berlinski’s Thatcher-centered version, the pope drops out and Gorbachev comes in.

Berlinski’s book is part narrative history, part conversation with the people who could throw light on Margaret Thatcher—people such as Thatcher’s press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham, advisers such as Charles Powell, and opponents such as Neil Kinnock, who faced her for many years over the dispatch box at Question Time in the Commons. The book begins with some of the clichés of current journalism—a woman in a man’s world, the grocer’s daughter from a nowhere place called Grantham, the English class system. None of them bothered Thatcher: rather, they tempered the Iron Lady’s mettle. Berlinski’s book improves as it goes along, and becomes a story of the battles Thatcher fought to change the decadent Britain of the 1970s.

It’s a commonplace among New Age types and Environmentalists-as-primitivists: primitive man has a savage nobility that’s missing in the modern technological society.

Bullshit. Total f—ing bullshit.

Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that “war is not an instinct but an invention.”

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

Murray Rothbard called bullshit on this nonsense, a long time ago.

Sotomayor’s racism.

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I [Sotomayor] abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging [...] My experiences will affect the facts that I choose to see as a judge.”

“Inherent physiological differences.”  ”Affect the facts I choose to see.” Outrageous.

This contemptible racist doesn’t deserve a hearing, much less confirmation.

Steven Crowder goes to Canada to test single payer medicine.

Best quote: “We can’t treat you until you have a family doctor. It can take up to three years to get one, but don’t worry, you are young.”

Second best quote: “The guy with the broken clavicle waited ten hours, and then they told him to see an orthopedist the next day.”

Next best quote: “Don’t get sick on Sunday.”

Plot summary: it sucks.

Mort Zuckerman explains why.

The average length of unemployment is higher than it’s been since government began tracking the data in 1948.

The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

If you need more evidence that the family courts are bastilles of injustice, read this.

In 1995, a family court judge ordered corporate lawyer, H. Beatty Chadwick to deposit $2.5 million in the court’s registry to pay alimony to his ex-wife, Barbara Applegate. Chadwick said he didn’t have the money, but the court believed he’d stashed it somewhere during the divorce. So, because Chadwick didn’t pay, the judge jailed him for contempt of court [...]

And Chadwick’s been in stir ever since. During that time, the court hired investigators to find the money. They found nothing, but Chadwick wasn’t released. In his decision to free Chadwick, Judge Joseph Cronin maintained that he could have paid the money, but refused to. Why he believes that in the absence of any actual money escapes me.

This is an outrage. When a judge abuses the people, it should be unsafe for him in the community of civilized men.

Victor Davis Hanson nails it.

Add It Up

1) If one were to add all that up (forget rises in sales taxes, inheritance taxes, luxury taxes, etc.), then one can get to 70% of one’s income. So right this minute, the electrical contractor is thinking:

‘I made $412,000 last year due to Saturday jobs, overtime, risky bidding, gambles on new equipment, and new lines of credit, but under Obama I will pay maybe $50-80,000 more of my income to the government. In other words the cost of, say, hiring two more entry-level electricians, or the cost of outfitting an entire new van with boom and equipment, or what I cleared every Saturday last year — all that will go to the government.”

Ripples of Doubt

And that means rippling throughout this key sector of the economy — even before these taxes have been enacted — are hesitation, stasis, and ultimately constriction — at first for psychological reasons, soon confirmed by the actual facts of less money. In short, very bright people will be thinking how to hide income, how to barter, how to slow down and not produce goods and services, rather than blast full speed ahead and enrich angry others.

A Certain Paranoia

2) Do not discount again the psychological element. This putative electrical contractor also knows that after handing over his profits to the new government, and delaying or ending his plans for enlargement, he will not be praised, but continually demonized (I scanned CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and NBC the other evening, and all the stories had a common theme: the “rich” (yes, you see, ACME Electric is now about the equivalent to AIG and Citibank) will have to pay their “fair share” for all sorts of “overdue” necessities: cap-and-trade, nationalized health care, education grants and freebies, and new social programs.

Remember how it turned out for the Twentieth Century Motor Company? That’s not good.

(h/t Smitty)

Interesting. The guy has standing. The Constitution is unambiguously clear on the matter. I’m not very energized about it, but if the facts hold true, the Congress can’t just ignore parts of the supreme law.

The Judicial Watch lawsuit, filed on behalf of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and State Department employee David C. Rodearmel, maintains that the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution prohibits Mrs. Clinton from serving as Secretary of State until January 2013, and that Mr. Rodearmel cannot be forced to serve under the former U.S. Senator, as it would violate the oath he took as a Foreign Service Officer in 1991 to “support and defend” and “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution of the United States (Rodearmel v. Clinton, et al., (D. District of Columbia)) [...]

According to Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution: “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time.” The text of the provision is an absolute prohibition and does not allow for any exceptions. However, as noted in the motion, “the ‘compensation and other emoluments’ of the office of the U.S. Secretary of State increased during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, including as many as three times during the second, six-year term to which she was elected.” [...]

“Congress must not be allowed to do an end run around the U.S. Constitution,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Hillary Clinton is ineligible to serve as Secretary of State until 2013. The Constitution is crystal clear on this point. We hope the court puts a stop to this naked attempt to circumvent the Constitution in the name of political expediency.”

Christina Hoff Sommers talks about the massive job losses suffered by men and the lame feminist response.

(h/t Dr. Helen)

John Stossel writes about his experiment comparing American and international students.

To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.

Belgian kids cleaned the American kids’ clocks, and called them “stupid.” [...]

The Belgian students didn’t perform better because they’re smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

American schools don’t teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don’t have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids — it’s a kind of voucher system. Government funds education — at many different kinds of schools — but if a school can’t attract students, it goes out of business.

Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.

She told us, “If we don’t offer them what they want for their child, they won’t come to our school.” She constantly improves the teaching, saying, “You can’t afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don’t do their work, because the clients will know, and won’t come to you again.”

“That’s normal in Western Europe,” Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. “If schools don’t perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S.”

Last week Florida’s Supreme Court shut down “opportunity scholarships,” Florida’s small attempt at competition. Public money can’t be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of “uniform . . . high-quality” schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.

This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

This sucks. Disband government schools. Privatize the lot.

CNS tells a horror story that scares the piss out of me.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

I see. Other people read the bills. Um. That’s what we elect Representatives for, Mr. Hoyer.

It’s very simple. If a bill is too complicated for our Representatives to read (much less actually understand), it is too complicated to be a law.

Think about it. The law is so cumbersome these Democratic asswipes can’t even read it! They can’t even read it. Yet, Democrats want to allow the government to enforce the law on the citizenry.

That is quite simply insane. In-freakin’-sane.

(h/t Michelle Malkin)

Michelle Malkin links to a cool image over at Cubanology.

The copious balls of the Hondurans.

Check out Cubanology’s link to the communiqé. If it’s true that José Manuel Zelaya Rosales was subverting the Honduran Constitution, if he was trying to breach the separation of powers to consolidate a Vasquez-style tyranny, then his ouster was a prudent act of the people.

From the Declaration of Independence,

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

If Zelaya subverted the separation of powers, it a serious abuse. Very serious. Critics may argue that Zelaya’s “train of abuses” hadn’t continued long enough. Such arguments must consider that things move faster in the modern world. Perhaps the Honduran constitutionalists had to move faster too.

Update: The evidence is conclusive. Zelaya subverted the Honduran Constitution.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

Update: Senator DeMint challenges the Obama administration over the Honduras affair. Once again, Zelaya clearly acted to subvert the Constitution. The Honduran congress and Supreme Court acted in accord with Honduran law.

James Taranto writes about The Biden Curve.

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing [...]

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem [say liberal pundits] is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking. [...]

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

Something uglier. Hmmm. What could it be? The Socialism of Fools.

Anti-Semitism, someone once said, is the socialism of fools: but he might just as well have said that socialism is anti-Semitism with the Jews left out, for both doctrines appeal to the same resentments, hatreds, and style of thought. It was no accident, as the Marxists used to put it, that Marx himself, though Jewish, was a ferocious anti-Semite who accepted the ancient stereotype of the Jew as a bloodsucking usurer. Socialist and anti-Semite alike seek an all-encompassing explanation of the imperfection of the world, and for the persistence of poverty and injustice: and each thinks he has found an answer.

I first came across the concept of compactness in a course of Mathematical Logic. Frank Morgan has an informative paper, tracing the concept of compactness through several mathematical theories.

In my opinion, compactness is the most important concept in mathematics. We’l l track it from the one-dimensional real line in calculus to infinite dimensional spaces of functions and surfaces and see what it can do. [...]

The universal problem in pure mathematics is to prove that an optimal solution exists. Such a proof helps the applied problem-solver in two ways. First, it is a guarantee that a life-long search for a solution is not doomed to fail. Second, it is what makes many methods of solution work. For example, in calculus, the reason that you have to check only critical points (where the derivative is 0 fails to exist) and endpoints is that the theory guarantees that a continuous function has a maximum (and that a maximum must be a critical point or an endpoint).

The general strategy for proving that an optimal solution exists goes like this. Take a sequence of candidates with values approaching an optimum and get an ideal limit somehow. It is compactness that guarantees a limit.

So, why is it so cool to have a limit?

in many areas of mathematics we would like to endow our ob jects with additional structures, such as a topology, a metric, a group structure, and so forth. Once we do so, it turns out that some ob jects exhibit properties similar to finite sets (and in particular, they enjoy local-to-global principles), even though they may technically be infinite. In the categories of topological spaces and metric spaces, these “almost finite” objects are known as compact spaces. (In the category of groups, the analogous notion of an “almost finite” object is that of a pro-finite group; for linear transforms between normed vector spaces, the analogous notion of an “almost finite” or more precisely, “almost finite-rank” object is that of a compact operator; and so forth.

When you have to deal with uncountable infinities, you gotta’ know your limits. Compactness lets us treat uncountably infinite sets as having convenient finite-like properties, or at least as having properties like countably infinite sets. Pretty cool.

Steve Moxon’s book, The Woman Racket, thoroughly debunks the myth of the historical oppression of women.

The position women are in today is so obviously a good one that those who argue men have ‘power’ over women usually resort to pointing out how clearly women were disadvantaged in the past. Mere mention of the vote or of marriage or child custody in times not so long ago, closes down debate. But it doesn’t take much probing beneath the surface of what apparently used to be the lot of women, to see that very far from disadvantage, women enjoyed privilege…

It’s a mistake to view the past through the eyes of today. Our own perspectives imposed, anachronistically, on the behavior and thinking of people in former times is unfair. It would be silly to take our notions of social justice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and, finding such principles not apparent in Victorian and earlier times, to then castigate society in earlier periods for unfairly disadvantaging women. Disadvantaged compared to whom? You have to make comparison with others at the same time, and take account of what was then feasible.

This is exactly the mistake we make though. We’re blinded to the possibility that conceptions of social justice as they were at different periods in history may have secured the optimum benefits to women under the constraints that were then operating; and that in no sense were women ‘oppressed’, nor men unduly favored. It turns out that, if we take the blindfolds off, it’s apparent not just that people at the time perceived that women were not disadvantaged, but that indeed women were as privileged throughout history as they are today. The privilege that women enjoy is not contingent on any historical factors, but is biologically based.

It’s neither in pre-, nor late-medieval, but in recent history that supposed incontrovertible evidence exists that the lot of women was as the ‘oppressed’. Flagship status goes to the issue of the vote…[but] it turns out that the real struggle for the franchise was that of ordinary men – who paid the taxes and were drafted into the armed forces to fight the wars their taxes paid for. These were the people who for centuries, millennia even, were denied democracy, not women. Where women had a direct interest, they have always had the vote. So it was that from time immemorial women have been enfranchised in their local communities, and when issues that concerned women moved up to the national level, then women were given the parliamentary ballot in an historical blink of the eye.

Get the book. Read it all. It’s brilliant.

Mike Steinberger writes of McDonald’s assault across the Madeleine Line and the rapid collapse of French free forces,

If you believed that McDonald’s was a blight on the American landscape, seeing it on French soil was like finding a peep show at the Vatican, and in a contest between Roquefort and Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this attitude was a belief that McDonald’s had somehow been foisted on the French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn’t true. The French came to McDonald’s and la malbouffe (or fast-food) willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin’ it—the architects of McDonald’s strategy in France were French.

No word of what happens to collaborators. Weight gain, one supposes.

Simon Blackburn expects a proof. He gets a stage play instead. With reservations, he seems to likes it.

This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world’s best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can’t you fail. This is Armstrong’s principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

This is the problem with recent attacks on theism. They attack a small, albeit irritating, strain of Christianity as though it is all of theism. They refuse to acknowledge the good in historical Christianity, namely the creation and sustainment of Western Civilization against dire physical and cultural attacks from the Far East and the Muslim Near East.

Indeed, the scientific Enlightenment seems to have decadenced us, to have made us out of step with one another, to have made our society decadent, incapable of advocating for itself against illiberal, Muslim cultural colonization. Science doesn’t move the passions of the people, nor does it cause them to cohere in troubling times.

While Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris swing hard at a pell, Blackburn’s critique strikes deadly on the real thing.

The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding – only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words.

Yes, just. Yet, isn’t that experience of being moved, the passions inflamed by art, the very thing that – well – moves us. I think Theodore Dalrymple has it right in his book In Praise of Prejudice. Because our minds are finite and because of the economic fact of time scarcity, we rationally and correctly choose prejudice over pure ignorance. Then what is important is to have the right prejudices, the right habits of mind, to keep us generally on the right path. Religion seems to have satisfied that function pretty well over the long history of Western Civilization.

Also, I agree with Madison. Religion has an important function in maintaining our liberties.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic, — is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest? In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Instead of shrouding religion in a white garbage bag and tossing it in a heap, perhaps we should cover it carefully in a clean sheet and store it in the attic with our crazy old aunt. We might need them again.

This fraudulent grabasstic practice has been raised to an art, call it bovine scatology, by tech companies. Now companies in the skilled trades are getting into the cesspool.

A News 8 investigation found that hundreds of aircraft mechanics have been brought into the United States to work at aircraft repair facilities.

Insiders say the companies that are importing the mechanics are so eager to save money, they’re overstating their qualifications. The result may be a threat to safety, abetted by lax enforcement of immigration law.

Hey, officers of San Antonio Aerospace, screw you and the lame horse you rode in on.

(h/t WFAA, who do excellent local reportage. These guys drink their whiskey straight.)

Related: The Archiminister on fraudulent practices by employers
Related: Michael E has the H-1B data

Insty links to a sobering story in The Telegraph about our fiscal future.

The US economy is lurching towards crisis with long-term interest rates on course to double, crippling the country’s ability to pay its debts and potentially plunging it into another recession, according to a study by the US’s own central bank

As I’ve written before, the Fed is skewered upon the horns of a dilemma. The Telegraph article understands the problem as government debt. They are correct. But the rise in interest rates is a result of debt combined with the inflationary bailouts of Bush and Obama.

On one horn, the Fed can’t lower interest rates for fear of creating even more inflation, bleeding the citizenry of their wealth. On the other horn, the Fed can’t raise interest rates for fear of illiquidity, bleeding entrepreneurs of financing. But maybe there is a middle way between the horns. Ben Bernanke asks a liberal congress for fiscal conservatism. Fat chance with the fat cats.

The budget deficit this year is projected to reach $1.85 trillion, equivalent to 13 percent of the nation’s economy, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

“Either cuts in spending or increases in taxes will be necessary to stabilize the fiscal situation,” Bernanke said in response to a question. “The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.”

Bernanke speaks as if he could monetize the debt. How long does he think foreign central banks will prop up the dollar? Perhaps anticipating inflation scares, the US government no longer even reports M3. Shadow Government Statistics estimates the rate of growth in M3.

Their estimates show a huge, compounding rate of growth in the money supply between early 2005 and early 2008.

Inflation favors a debtor and harms a creditor, because the debtor can pay back the dollars owed in the less valuable inflated currency. Suppose you loan ten dollars to a friend. Before he were to pay, inflation devalues the dollar by 90%. Now your friend pays you back, giving you ten dollars. Before the trade, ten dollars would have paid for lunch, but now it wouldn’t even buy a cup of coffee. The debtor comes out ahead, because he gets the pre-inflated use of the money.

The US is debtor nation. We like inflation. Our creditors don’t. With the spectre of hyperinflation stalking every Fed policy move, the Chairman wants to ensure the blame lands on Congress. Bernanke plays the hero, refusing to monetize federal debt that he knows no foreign bank will buy anyway! In other words, he refuses to monetize debt that he can’t monetize. Whoopty freakin’ do. And these are the smart guys running stuff.

There is no middle way. Foreign banks are going to stop buying our debt. It’s only a matter of time. When that happens the dollar is going to crash, leading to massive inflation.

The French detest the habit of the English to make a virtue of necessity. Except for a preternatural desire for their women, and for some lovers of France who I wish would check me out like a chilled juice bottle, ahem, with those exceptions in mind, I am no Francophile. Still, Bernanke’s virtue of necessity is a rather sickening cowardice. It’s more like unthinking chest beating than sprezzatura.

Damn the architects of the bailout. All of them. They have fashioned the instruments of our economic decline. Now they act surprised to find the instruments in their own hands. Pfft.

Michelle Malkin links to this video of Sen. John Cornyn getting booed by Tea Party protesters.

You know. I’ve worked to get Republicans elected for twenty years or so. I live in Dallas. Cornyn is my senator. We can do better for Texas.

Cornyn favors amnesty for illegal aliens. Cornyn sponsored the no-talent ass-clownery called the SKIL Bill. He wanted to remove limits on H-1B and screw American tech workers. A few months later, Cornyn voted to bailout fat cat Wall Street bankers and leave middles class taxpayers holding the bill. What a jerk.

We’re going to remove this crumby legislator from office. We’re replacing Cornyn with an ideological conservative who cares about his fellow citizens and their livelihoods. Problem is, who’s it gonna’ be?

Christina Hoff Sommers kicks some feminist ass.

My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.

Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women’s movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women’s-studies textbooks to women’s advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, “The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy.” He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a “chilly climate.” The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women’s-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.

I like iFeminists. They’re my kind of gals.

From the Mises Institute,

In a free market, wages rise relative to the value of land and natural resources and are thus correspondingly higher relative to profits. This was the record of the United States and the rest of the Western World for approximately 200 years following the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Environmentalism is a movement dedicated to the undoing of the Industrial Revolution. If not checked, one of its results will be the progressive reduction of wages and the further elevation of profit incomes based on the ownership of land and natural resources.

Environmentalism is the economic form of primitivism. It’s economic effects are easy to predict. Just look at California.

The actual unemployment is much, much higher than Obama projected. If you count unemployed people who’ve taken temporary part-time jobs, the unemployment rate is nearly 17%. That’s approaching depression-era levels of joblessness.

Unemployment: what Obama promised and what he delivered.

Yet, despite the dismal facts, Obama thinks he’s done a good job. Who’s he kidding? Only himself.

Obama’s stimulus program has failed. We didn’t need it in the first place.