Monthly Archives: May 2014

Am I the Only one Seeing a Pattern Here?

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Via a link at Althouse, I stumbled this morning across a 2006 interview transcript from an NPR broadcast.

The interview subject was the fellow who was publishing a biography of Upton Sinclair.  Most Americans (at one time) knew him as the author of The Jungle, his 1906 exposé novel of the Chicago meat-packing industry.  Whatever its purely literary merits (and they seem to have been patchy enough), it was enormously effective in getting America stirred up about what was on its plate.  Literally.  Sinclair was disappointed because as a socialist (he was in fact hired to write the book as a socialist tome, not a public-health pot-boiler) the parts of the book he was least interested in got the most public attention.  We’ve all heard how the book was instrumental in prompting introduction of a federally-mandated inspection regime, which generations of high school teachers have solemnly informed us was fought tooth-and-nail by “the industry.”  Except it wasn’t, at least not by the large operators.  Inspection regimes are fixed costs.  Large operators can spread those fixed costs over larger production, so the price-per-final-product is less.  Small operators have to recapture that cost over a smaller number of products with a correspondingly larger price increase.  The desired result, from the big boys’ perspective, is that their competition will be priced out of the market and new market entrants faced with a large barrier to successful entry.  And so it proved to be.  Whether meat inspection is a good thing or bad can be debated.  But what is interesting in retrospect is the extent to which Sinclair may have gilded the lily on the hygienic conditions in the industry.

So Sinclair, the socialist, had a track record of service to Larger Truths.  In 1927 two Italian immigrants, Sacco and Vanzetti, were executed for murder.  Ever since we’ve been told by all our well-meaning teachers how they were just two innocents, framed up because they were (i) immigrants; (ii) Italian; and, (iii) avowed anarchists.  So obviously the fix was in, wasn’t it?  That’s the premise that Sinclair took with him when he went to write his novel, Boston, about the case.  Sinclair’s later biographer thinks he was pretty fair in presenting the case and the evidence.  Notice how Mr. Biographer words his statement:  “I think he was fair in his representation of the evidence and the case.”  The evidence and the case are not the whole story.  Do remember, please, that trials, especially criminal trials, are highly artificial proceedings.  That’s intentionally so; giving effective meaning to the presumption of innocence requires it.  Anyone who expects “the truth” necessarily to come out in a trial is a gull who deserves to blow $4,800 on penis-enlargement surgery which goes wrong.

And as it turns out, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty as hell, and their lawyer presented a fraudulent defense.  Let’s hear it from Sinclair himself, as related in a letter from 1929:  “Alone in a hotel room with Fred [the defense attorney], I begged him to tell me the full truth. He then told me that the men were guilty and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”  Did he disclose that?  Well no, no he didn’t.  At least he had the common decency to admit, privately, where his duty lay:  “I face the most difficult ethical problem of my life.”  And how did he resolve that “most difficult ethical problem”?  Well, being the good lefty, he went out and served that good ol’ Larger Truth.

From his biographer:  “I think he felt that the climate of opinion and the representation of their foreignness, they were Italian, and their political beliefs, which were anarchism, had almost condemned them out of hand before they had a chance at a fair trial. . . .  Even if the men were guilty, he felt that the larger context of the world in which they were living rendered their guilt perhaps less important than it might have been otherwise.”  Ummm.  Fair trial?  No, they did not have a fair trial.  They got to put on a fraudulent defense.  Their lawyer lied to the jury.  A “fair trial” does not mean “the defense wins.”  And somehow their guilt was “less important” because they were anarchists?  No, it was even more important precisely because they were anarchists.  Recall in the 1920s there was tremendous debate going on about the fundamental nature of all these (later revealed as monstrous) political movements which had welled to the surface of post-Great War Western society and were tearing European societies to pieces.  The lefties here assured us that all of us troglodyte Americans were just too hard on those folks.  They only wanted Justice for the Common Man; they were for Peace (sort of like our left-extremists nowadays keep proclaiming the Religion of Peace, and refusing to call outfits like Boko Haram what they are: bloodthirsty terrorists, even when pressed to do so by their own colleagues in government).  In the Sacco and Vanzetti case America got to see what these thugs were really all about.  So it was critically important that the correct verdict be reached precisely because it ripped the mask off.  And as it turns out, notwithstanding they were lied to, the jury got it right.

Then come the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel.  Rivers of tears were shed for those poor innocents, done to death by a bunch of red-baiters.  Except that Julius definitely was, and Ethel may well have been, guilty as sin.

Fast forward to the Chambers and Hiss ruckus.  For decades the left extremists swore up and down that Alger Hiss was simon-pure and no more than the victim of a witch hunt.  Except he wasn’t.  He was guilty as sin.

And then we come to Tailgunner Joe, a distasteful person by any means, and a drunk, and a mountebank.  When Eisenhower, whom General Marshall had made (it was Marshall who promoted Ike directly from Lt. Colonel to Brigadier General; it was Marshall who tapped him to command TORCH; it was Marshall who handed him OVERLORD, even though he dearly wanted it for himself (Marshall had never commanded troops in battle, and he knew this would be his last chance) and even knowing that the commander of the invasion could easily have the presidency, if he wanted it) stood on a podium and listened, in silence, as McCarthy slandered Marshall as a traitor, Truman so lost respect for Eisenhower that he would never thereafter speak his name in public.  In Plain Speaking he refers to “that fellow who followed me.”

McCarthy famously brandished his list of however many hundred people who were communist infiltrators.  No one ever saw any such list, of course, and it’s undeniable that the 1950s Red Scare tarnished many people, ruined their careers even.  On the other hand, since publication of the VENONA files (Wikipedia has a list of American names appearing in the decrypts; some of them are breath-taking, and that’s not even a complete list: more are known), it’s likewise undeniable that McCarthy was dead-on right about the degree to which senior government positions had been infiltrated by the Soviet Union.  Alger Hiss was just one of many.  Hollywood still moans about its black-listed performers, producers, and others.  On the other hand the Soviet Union in fact did make a concerted effort to subvert American popular culture.  Their most effective and lasting capture, still loyally defending his blood-soaked master decades after the facts were known, was Pete Seeger (on whom more here, from his former extremely close friend, Ron Radosh).

I could go on.  I could trot out the new left-extremist notion of “fake but true” (which fits under the rubric of “dialectics”).  I could observe that the closest that Hollywood’s got to the Katyn massacres is a tangential reference in “Enigma.”  But why go on?

The common thread in all of those is that to the left, facts just do not matter.  What must be served is the Higher Truth, or what today’s left-extremists call the “narrative.”  It’s what was at the heart of Journolist, the news-manipulation cabal run from The Washington Post and whose mission was to elect Dear Leader.  I cannot and so do not deny that there are those on the Right for whom inconvenient facts get deep-sixed.  I am unaware, though, that the air-brushing of history is formally a part of Rightist philosophy and is not only engaged in on an organized basis but is actually an approved method.  Where is the right-wing Saul Alinsky, after all?

I suppose I really ought to give up on one of my favorite expressions:  You can’t make this stuff up.  You most certainly can, and we’ve got an entire chunk of the American political spectrum that regularly does.  Because that’s what its doctrine tells it to do.  Gentle Reader might study on that.

Food (and Indigestion) for Thought

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Yesterday evening I attended a presentation by an analyst from the George C. Marshall Foundation.  They’re the outfit that was (of course) named after General of the Army George C. Marshall — to date the only professional military officer to receive, deservedly, the Nobel Peace Prize — and the purpose of which, in addition to preserving the documentary legacy of the man, his times, and his activities, also is to perpetuate Marshall’s legacy of magnanimity, cooperation, and commitment to the practicalities of creating those domestic and international structures and systems which form the framework upon which peace can be built.

If this sounds a bit unusual for an outfit that is not only named for a life-long soldier, but to this day is headquartered at a military college (the Virginia Military Institute), you really ought to read a bit more about Marshall.  For an officer who was scrupulously non-political (at least in his dealings with his civilian masters in FDR’s White House and in Congress), he was acutely sensitive to the fundamental political nature of the American military.  Again, that’s not a contradiction.  FDR famously addressed everyone by his first name.  These days it’s become fashionable because it’s considered egalitarian; perhaps it is, when everyone calls everyone by his first name.  But of course no one called FDR “Franklin”; his assumption of the prerogative was therefore diminishing to the addressee.  It’s a gentler form of the same method vulgarly practiced by LBJ in appearing naked in front of men he wished to intimidate.  In any event, FDR tried that business on with Marshall, who replied, “It’s ‘General Marshall,’ Mr. President.”  Congress recognized in him someone who was so straightforward with it he could appear before a committee, explain what he needed, and he was accepted at his word.  Mostly.  Once a particular senator from Missouri who headed an eponymous committee to investigate fraud, waste, and abuse in the war effort got to poking around in areas that weren’t exactly public.  Marshall got wind of it and put the word out that Senator Truman was simply not to be told certain things.  But it was Marshall who realized, and was greatly concerned about, the disruptions to American civil society that threatened from a long war.  He understood that an American wartime military must be a political expression of its society.  This directionality of the relationship was in contrast to, for example, the Soviet Union or Germany, in which civil society (to the extent they even had any left) was an adjunct to, and formed by, the military.  It was Marshall who looked Winston Churchill in the face and told him, with respect to some cock-eyed proposal to invade Rhodes, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddam beach.”  And finally, it was Marshall who put his credibility behind the effort to re-build the societies destroyed by the war, in a way that hadn’t been tried after the first go-round.

Truman it was who described Marshall as “the great one” of his era.  When you look at his breadth of comprehension and his iron-clad character it’s hard to disagree much with that statement.

In any event, the topic of yesterday’s presentation was the Ukrainian situation and its implications for Europe and Europe’s relationship with the U.S.  The presenter is a German lawyer with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and extensive experience as a reporter/analyst not only in Europe but also in central Africa.  She was in Rwanda in 1994, within weeks after the genocide.  And so forth.  Very impressive C.V., all in all.  She’s now based in the foundation’s Berlin office.

Her take on the situation is that the Ukraine represents the gravest crisis for the West since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.  Putin is trying to re-establish, not the Soviet Union, but rather the Soviet sphere of influence.  That effort is bound to de-stabilize not only the countries targeted (especially Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine) but also Russia itself.  This is principally because, as she phrased it, other than a pile of cash, Russia’s not got any of the things needed to make the program work over time.  Once the cash is gone, and it will go (she didn’t mention the fracking revolution, but that technology may be the deadliest threat to Putin, even moreso than any nuclear deterrent), they’ve got nothing.  Their demographics are headed for societal implosion.  Their education system is awful.  Their economy is awful.  Their healthcare system is awful.  Their transportation system is awful.  Over everything lies the suffocating blanket of corruption.  And on and so forth.  For the long haul — she predicted “a generation” of turmoil in Eastern Europe — she was pretty sanguine.  Didn’t seem to think military action likely.  I wish I could join her in her optimism.  When someone is playing against long odds, as Putin is, the only way he wins the game is on a long shot.  With each gamble that doesn’t pan out, his objective motivation to double down increases because the aggregate odds against him increase with each lost bet.  There’s a reason, after all, why Germany’s and Japan’s losing phases of their wars got so vicious.

Another of the threads of her presentation, and of her responses to some specific questions afterwards, was the current state of the German-American relationship.  Once more, she had a fairly positive take on the connections at the policy-maker level, although she was pretty up-front that the NSA spying revelations had badly shaken people in Berlin.  She also shared something that I hadn’t thought of.  She allowed that a very great deal of “public” comment in newspapers and other mass media, including specifically the internet, is and is known to be bought-and-paid-for trolling.  Propaganda, in other words.  Beyond citing her connections inside German media she didn’t describe how this is known to be.  It certainly is possible; George Soros and his fellow left-extremists maintain several operations here in the U.S. who monitor various public-forum communications and regularly flood the waves, so to speak, with astroturf outrage.  The Occupy “movement” was little more than astroturf in the streets.  So it can be done.

One thing she also mentioned, and which got me to thinking (difficult, I know), was her observation that for many years America has been a foil for the streak of Romantic idealism that is so strong in German culture and politics.  Years ago while studying in Germany I took a lecture course in American colonial history.  The professor’s particular specialty was colonial New England history.  It was fascinating to see an outsider’s take on one’s own world.  One of the points he made, several times during the course, was the extent to which Puritan idealistic sensibilities still inform American society and especially its politics.  So when our presenter yesterday evening mentioned the repulsive aspects of the German view of America (as opposed to its simultaneous attractive aspects) as being rooted specifically in German idealism, the thought struck me that what you’ve got is competing idealistic sensibilities, and I wondered to what extent their incongruity traces back to the distinctions in the religious traditions that gave rise to them (Pietism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other).  I wonder if anyone’s ever looked at it from that angle, and if so what their conclusions were.  Sort of like neighboring families who’ve been picking at each other so long no one even remembers what it all started about, it would be amusing to tease out whether we’re grousing over two religious traditions that go back over 300 years.

I just wish I could feel as confident in the long-term future as she seems to.  My boys are 12, 10, and 8.  That “generation of turmoil” our presenter sees on the horizon will consume their childhoods and young adulthoods.  And it may consume them, depending on how badly the parties miscalculate.

What a Difference a Word can Make

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The headline of this article over at Inside Higher Ed, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice?” has drawn ire, agreement, and counter-example in the comments.

The sequence of events that prompted the article seems, honestly, to be more than a bit of a tempest in a teapot.  Someone saw a student traipsing about without shoes, and (not to the student’s face) described the appearance as “hillbilly” for that reason.  Cue the sensitivity brigades.  For starts, other than the location of the school where it appears to have happened (University of North Georgia), I’m not sure exactly why “hillbilly” was the first description to pop into the mind of this particular person.  I mean, genuine hillbillies are almost by definition extraordinarily rare around college campuses.  In contrast, you can’t swing a cat even on the most Podunk campus without hitting what a cousin of mine (who’s lived in San Francisco for decades now) terms “stinky-foot hippy chicks” and their male equivalents.  If the sight had even registered with me, oblivious as I tend to be, my reaction would most likely have been, “Oh, another granola.  Look out you don’t slip on an organic banana peel.”  And my reaction would have been that because that’s by a wide margin the most statistically likely correct explanation for why someone who’s got enough resources to attend college and thus shoe him/herself properly would nonetheless appear unshod in public.

Perhaps because this is the U. of N. Ga. they’re more than usually sensitive to accusations of “y’all are just a bunch of rednecks up there,” sort of like the black sergeant in “A Soldier’s Story” tearing a strip off the musically-gifted, slow-witted buck private for playing “that guitar-pickin’, sittin’-around-the-shack music” (highly recommend the movie, by the way).  Whatever.

I’ve lived a good chunk of my life outside my native South.  While doing so I never attempted to hide my antecedents.  To my cost.  So I know for a fact that anti-Southern bigotry is both very real and something that people elsewhere feel perfectly comfortable not only expressing to one’s face and in public, but openly acting on in their personal decision trees.

The commenters to this article do have valid points, though.  There are a lot of other groups that come in for their share of chaffing.  Who’s not seen on a sit-com at some point a gag about Jewish mothers and chicken noodle soup?  Or Roman Catholic priests and prelates (although preachers in general are fair game, as are politicians and lawyers)?  Or fundamentalist Christians of pretty much any stripe (pay attention, though: you see them portrayed as Southerners, as a general rule, and not just fundamentalist Christians, almost as if the Christianity thing were simply an attribute of the Southern stereotype).  Even homosexuals get portrayed in pop culture not infrequently highlighted by what can only be described as stereotype behavior or appearance, and only a lunatic is going to argue that homosexuality is still looked down upon in those circles these days.

All that having been said, while it may be “acceptable” to play to those other stereotypes (and by the way, a “stereotype” is not necessarily a specifically hostile prejudice; it’s just a mental cartoon we form for ourselves, and whether we make it something hateful, or humorous, or admiring (East Asian brilliance at math and the sciences, anyone?) is largely up to us individually) or even to poke fun through the medium of them, my own personal impression is that trashing Southerners and the South is not just acceptable, but fashionable, in a way that poking fun at our Jewish mother for whom chicken noodle soup is the universal specific simply is not (or at least not in pop culture, itself an imperfect mirror of our society).  It’s sort of like a ritual of introduction, by the observance of which one asserts his initiation into The Enlightened.  You seldom see it done in any other than an explicitly vicious spirit.

Thought experiment:  It’s simply not imaginable, nowadays, to think of someone “who knows better” asking a black acquaintance where he prefers to buy his fried chicken.  In contrast I’d wager a small sum that most Southerners who’ve lived outside the South and not bothered to hide their background have had that sort of “someone who knows better” ask them something about indoor plumbing, or shoes, or in-breeding.  And do it in a manner which proclaims that, “No, I’m not saying this as a joke; I’m saying this to make sure you understand these are my assumptions about you and where you grew up.”  I use, by the way, the expression “someone who knows better” because I don’t think you can draw proper inferences for how tacky people behave.  That’s what they are: tacky; that’s how they act.  So I use that expression to refer to someone who at least claims some degree of refinement, of broad outlook and accepting disposition.

Just my two cents.  Do I know for a fact that these attitudes have cost me personally, in the form of refused employment, among other things?  I sure do.  Do I harbor a grudge about it?  Not really.  They weren’t obliged to like me as I was and am.  I could have tried to suppress who and what I am, and I chose not to make the effort.  I have to accept those costs.  Being an introvert helps, of course.  But I’d be less than honest to claim that it doesn’t rankle even a tiny bit.

Well, if You State all Their Assertions in the Same Sentence

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. . . You arrive at Iowahawk’s formulation:  Colleges are hotbeds of rape and racism that everyone should attend.

Of the two sets of accusations, the one that doesn’t really concern me is the “racism!” screech.  If Dear Leader and his fawning acolytes in the lamestream media have accomplished one single useful thing in the past six years, it’s having so cheapened the “racism!” ejaculation that pretty much everyone now recognizes it as meaningless.  When everything is racist, then nothing is.  If you want to see genuine “racism” in action, you can watch what’s going on in the Ukraine between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.

The development that concerns me more is the system of kangaroo courts that are even now being set up on campuses across the country, all under ukase from the Holder DOJ.  For those who haven’t been following it, the federal government is now mandating, more or less openly, that colleges address accusations of rape on campus not through careful preservation of crime scenes and other physical evidence until the police (you know, those folks who not infrequently have entire teams of people with specialized training in investigating sexual crimes) get there, but rather through a system of “discipline” that seems designed to do little more than make college administrators (and federal bureaucrats) feel good about themselves.

In truth, these panels and how they operate are easily recognized by anyone who has read his Solzhenitsyn.  They’re neither more nor less than the Cheka’s revolutionary tribunals or the OSO administrative sentencing system (most people sent to GuLAG were sentenced by OSO, and not by others of the organs).  From the linked article over at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E; if you’re looking for a worthy object for your charitable giving, you could do a very great deal worse than these folks):

“Foremost among the demands since 2011 is that colleges use the ‘preponderance of the evidence’” standard of proof for adjudicating sexual misconduct accusations — a 50.01 percent likelihood standard that is our nation’s lowest. (In real courts, rape must be proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ a 98-99 percent likelihood standard.)

This low standard is then used in a disciplinary procedure where students nearly always lack lawyers, no legally trained judge oversees the process, testimony is not under oath, hearsay is freely considered, relevant evidence or even proper notice of the charges may not be given to both parties, students may be forced to incriminate themselves, and whatever ‘jury’ is empaneled may not be of one’s peers.

The task force report from Tuesday actually encourages colleges to make this situation worse. Perhaps recognizing that college hearings are delivering shoddy justice, the task force speaks highly of moving to a ‘single investigator’ model that would entirely dispense with niceties like ‘hearings’ or ‘the ability to face one’s accuser’ by appointing one administrator to act as detective, judge, and jury for campus crimes.”

And that’s just the lousy deal for the guy wrongly accused.  Not mentioned but nearly as objectionable is that the college’s ham-fisted treatment of the case may well irretrievably compromise what otherwise might be a successful criminal prosecution of a genuine rapist.  Remember that state universities are state agencies, their actions can be attributed to the state, and to the extent their functionaries are delegated police powers, you raise all manner of constitutional concerns about how they conduct themselves.  Those constitutional violations — and they will occur, and be legion (hell, colleges nowadays can’t even get the First Amendment right, what with stunts like disciplining students for passing out . . . copies of the Constitution) — are going to create legally cognizable problems for the actual law enforcement agencies when they actually do catch someone who actually has committed a rape that they otherwise could actually prove up beyond a reasonable doubt.  In short, they’ll manage to kick the rapist out of school, but he’ll still be on the street, looking for his next victim.

But none of that matters, though, does it?  Because our administrators can pat themselves on the back and loudly proclaim how tough they are on sexual misbehavior.  And that’s what matters, that educrats feel good about themselves.  That next victim, when he finds her?  She’s just collateral damage, and besides, she may not even be a student.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have three boys.  The oldest is seven years from college (assuming he goes).  Given the half-life of stupid ideas, it’s more or less a certainty that these lynch-mob Chekist systems are going to be still going strong when my boys go to college.  I’d like them to be able to enjoy the experience without having to adopt the survival habits of the zeks.  But this system may as well have been purposely designed for abuse, if not outright extortion.  Remember we’re dealing with the Laws of Very Large Numbers.  How many tens of millions of college students are there at any given time?  Now that a majority of them are female, how many millions of female college students does that work out to be?  By that time it will have been impressed on the female student body over the course of years that if you want to get rid of a male you don’t particularly care for (whether for personal or political reasons, or just because you can, because you’re looking for a scalp) all you have to do is engineer a bogus accusation of sexual assault and you will not only have blown up his college attendance, but you will have ruined his life (job interviewer: Why did you change colleges?  job candidate: Errmmmm, ahem, I, uh, just decided to.  interviewer: I see.).

Any system that is set up to be easily abused will be abused.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about tax loopholes, government benefits, military supply contracts, absentee voting, political police-state enforcement, or sexual conduct enforcement on college campuses.  When you spread that sort of opportunity before a sufficiently large population, abuse will occur and it will tend to become systemic as the abusers are seen to profit from it (Hayek’s chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in The Road to Serfdom is a good illustration of the phenomenon in a different context).

I feel as though it’s 1937, and I’m watching my boys get ready fill out their applications to join the Komsomol (the leadership of which was shot, several times over, during the purges, and huge numbers of whose members fetched up in the camps).

How to Ruin an Otherwise Valid Point

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Let’s say you have an argument to make about Issue X.  And let’s say there’s a great deal of merit to what you have to say.  Perhaps there is some part of your argument that reasonable people could disagree on in good faith, but you’re firmly convinced that your position on that much is valid, and as to the rest of it, you can prove it up to anyone’s reasonable standard of validity.

And then you pull some nickel-assed stunt like citing some alleged “study” in support of your argument, a “study” that you don’t provide a link to, and that is purportedly done by an outfit that, when you run a Google search, you find nothing at all directly related to that organization.

This is what some website doing business under the name “National Report” has done.  Under the breathless headline “New Study Reveals 89% of Nation’s Food Stamps Squandered On Junk Food,” they report that some group identified as “Malbeck Data Institute” has released a study involving alleged interviews with “over 100,000 men and women who are currently accepting SNAP assistance” (as reported at Conservative Frontline).  Neither site provides a link to any report of a study.  Google searches on “Malbeck Data Insitute,” “Malbeck Data,” and “Malbeck Institute” produce nothing that directs you to any website or other location where any such study results are available for public inspection, or even to a website under any variant of those names.  We are therefore to understand that an institute which has the wherewithal to interview “over 100,000” individual respondents does not have an online presence, does not publish its research online itself, and does not do so with some reputable online resource like Social Science Research Network.  A search there for a recent publication on the subject of “food stamps” also produces nothing along the lines of this alleged study, although there are articles addressing the subjects of food stamp fraud, recipients’ purchasing decisions, and so forth.  [Note (10 May 14):  I started this post yesterday after seeing a link to that article on Instapundit.  Apparently I wasn’t the only person who went checking around for this alleged study’s bona fides.]

Not content with the carnival-huckster headline, the author over at National Report favors us with lines like this:  “However, judging by what these individuals are choosing to purchase, it is evident that the majority of those who receive benefits are criminally milking the system for all it’s worth.”  This piece is not presented as an opinion piece, by the way.  Most of it is in fact presented as a write-up of what they allege to be their own, informal cross-check done through the simple method of watching what people at a Wal-Mart were buying with food stamps one day.

“Criminally milking the system,” though?  I didn’t see anything in that article, anywhere, to suggest that anyone purchased or attempted to purchase a single item not legally permitted to be bought with food stamps.  News flash:  If the program rules permit it, it isn’t “criminal.”  If it’s not illegal, it’s not even necessarily abusive.  I’m not aware that buying junk food somehow increases the amount of money you get to put on your SNAP card, so if this emaciated drug addict mentioned was loading up on candy bars then that’s just that much less money he had to buy something that would (as my mother used to say) “stick to his ribs.”  Another smiley-faced Wal-Mart customer mentioned, the 29-year-old mother of six (!), who disclaimed knowledge of who were the fathers of four of them (!!), is castigated for buying “microwavable entrees.”  Well, so what?  There are a great number of perfectly wholesome microwave family-sized dishes out there.  I’m not willing to conclude without more that this woman’s dietary choices were as flawed as her bedroom habits.

And this is where I get my butt chapped.  You see, there is tremendous waste in the SNAP program.  It shouldn’t be the case that you can buy candy and soft drinks and junk food with SNAP.  A few months ago I ran across a link to an article on Appalachia (I thought I’d linked to it in a blog post, but apparently I didn’t), and specifically to its gray market.  This article named names and places, by the way.  One of the phenomena described was how on the days that everyone’s SNAP card gets credited, you can see people pushing shopping carts through the grocery stores, and they’re entirely loaded with soft drinks.  As in hundreds of cans of soft drinks.  And nothing else.  What’s going on is that they’ll buy a case of soft drinks for $X, then turn around and sell it back to the store (or another store, assuming the case hasn’t been opened), for $0.50 on the dollar (the article in fact describes how some people will stock-pile soft drinks at home and use them as quasi-currency among themselves).  Store then repeats the process, and the SNAP recipient now has a pocket full of cash to go and spend on whatever else.  In Appalachia that all too frequently works out to mean meth and Oxycontin.  Notice, however, how the store is a critical player in this fraud.  There are many fewer stores to audit than SNAP recipients.  What does this suggest about where is the vulnerable link in this scheme?

Given the miracles of modern bar coding of absolutely everything under the sun that is sold at retail, it would be childishly simple to control very tightly for nutrition and quality everything that SNAP recipients buy.  Want your product to be eligible for purchase with SNAP?  Fine, you must put a bar code on each container sold separately at retail, and you must apply to HHS for that container of that product to be white-listed.  HHS then updates its master white-list monthly or so, and thus if our mother-of-six trots up and plops down the jumbo-sized pork rinds, the cash register spits it back out.  But that would of course make the cashiers’ jobs harder when mother-of-six looks at him and lies, “I didn’t know you couldn’t buy these things with food stamps.”  At which point he grabs the tub of butter she also bought and directs her attention to the tiny SNAP logo printed right beside its bar code.  “You see this logo, ma’am?  Show me that logo on that bag of pork rinds.  Everybody’s stuff you can pay for with your card has that logo on it.  If it ain’t got the logo you can’t buy it with food stamps.”

But, Gentle Reader objects, that would put unconscionable burdens on the manufacturers.  No it wouldn’t.  They’re asking the American taxpayer to buy, at his expense, their products for someone else to eat or drink.  Color me Scrooge, but I’m just not seeing that as an imposition beyond the pale.

Gentle Reader further objects to some government agency “dictating what poor people buy.”  That’s not what is proposed.  For starts, there will be thousands of products of all sorts which would be registered by their producers, and if you tell me I may select from among 17,500 potential items, but may not buy 4,750 others, you’re just going to have to pardon me for declining to think of that as dictating what I must buy.

Secondly, the application for approval process can be used in a secondary role to increase the quality of what poor people are eating.  For instance:  Go to your favorite deli (or refrigerator case) and look at the bologna, or cooked ham, or turkey, or whatever.  Somewhere on there it will state how much of that product, by weight, is . . . water.  In a lot of instances you’ll find that you’re paying $11.99 a pound for something that’s upwards of 30% water.  In Germany, by contrast, until recently (you can thank the EU-slugs for changing it) you could, by law, put two classes of ingredients into processed meat products:  meat and spices.  Period.  Or how about breakfast cereals?  Want the taxpayer to subsidize your customer’s purchase of your product?  Fine; just don’t put more than X% sugar or high-fructose corn syrup in it.  And so forth.  It’ll still be plenty sweet, but the sugar and corn industries won’t be getting a massive double subsidy out of the bargain (their production is already highly subsidized), and maybe the poor won’t be snookered into developing diabetes by age 45.

Will that increase the cost to the SNAP recipient of what he’s buying?  Yes; good food tends, overall, to be more expensive than cheap food (largely, no doubt, because cheap food products typically rely on heavily-subsidized ingredients like sugar and corn syrup; look at the top five ingredients in the junk foods sold in your local store, and then compare them with the comparable ingredients listing on the better-quality products).  On the other hand it is also a characteristic that junk foods by their metabolic effects tend to make your body crave them all the more, the more you eat.  Better-quality foods do that less.  So while our hypothetical SNAP recipient is “paying” (read: we’re paying for him) more for food, he’s getting a more lasting appetite satisfaction from it.  So in the long run he’ll need to eat less of it, and in fact will feel himself not hungry for longer.

What would be the net effects of all this on the food-intake needs and desires of SNAP recipients, both in their own terms and relative to the benefits they’re eligible to receive?  Can’t say, beyond the fact that they would be eating better overall.  And if the net effect is still an unacceptable overall price increase, because by hypothesis these things are going to be paid for electronically and will be linked to a computer database, HHS can negotiate price breaks with producers and/or retailers.  Remember it’s their customer who is being subsidized, and therefore their bottom line that’s being subsidized.  It’s no different from the exclusion of interest on municipal bonds from the bondholder’s gross income under § 103 of the Internal Revenue Code.  That is point-blank a subsidy for state and local government borrowers (they can borrow at significantly lower rates because their lenders won’t have to pay taxes on the interest), and Congress sure as hell is entitled to place such restrictions on the use of those borrowed funds as are necessary to ensure that the subsidy is not being abused.

Here I’ll also confess to something of sympathy with mother-of-six (if she exists).  I do about 70% of the cooking in our household, meaning I cook for myself and my three boys.  The wife won’t eat what I cook, by and large, so I gave up on that years ago.  If there are leftovers I’ll offer them but there’s a limit to how many different things I can cook for one meal.  When I cook for my boys, they get a meat-and-two minimum, and more typically a meat-and-three (daddy usually eats much more simply).  And then I do the dishes.  I also do a good bit of the laundry, and the overwhelming majority of the grocery shopping (when I go I bring back meat, vegetables, fruits, and primary ingredients; when the wife goes she brings back candied breakfast cereals and junk food, mostly).  And I work six days a week.  So I know what it means to bust ass and still try to put a more-or-less healthy meal on the table.  It’s not easy.  But it can be done.

You see?  I managed to make all of the above suggestions without once using words like “criminally” or “abused” or “lay-about” or “parasites” or “dead-beats” or similar expressions, or citing to some non-existent study to “prove” my points.  But over at the National Report and Conservative Frontline they’ve got to go that extra mile.  Given how fragile trustworthiness is in a universe like the internet, I can’t say that I could ever trust again something from their sites.  Pity.

[Update (12 May 14):  In reply to M. Simon’s question (thanks for commenting, by the way) as to whether “this post” was based on real studies or bogus ones, I’m assuming he’s referring to my post and not the posts I linked to.  I wish I’d remembered to bookmark that article on Appalachia I referred to, but I didn’t.  It was, however, in a “reputable” publication.  I can’t recall whether it was The Atlantic, or Bloomberg, or some other, but it was in a publication with some reputational stake in not just making stuff up.  As to overall observable purchasing patterns, I refer not only to what I’ve observed over the years myself, but also to several decades’ acquaintance with people involved in retail food, all the way from cash register jockeys to store owners.  They all have the same sets of comments, many of which boil down to, “You wouldn’t believe what gets bought with food stamps!”

As to the presence of processed sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in the national diet, by odd coincidence at lunch today I saw a physician from New York getting interviewed on Fox News on exactly this point.  He quoted numbers:  600,000 food products sold in America, and 80% of them contain “added sugar,” generally in the form of processed cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.  He held up a vial of what he represented was the sugar contained in one regular 12-oz. soft drink; it was a pretty thick test tube.  He then explained why high-fructose corn syrup is so insidious.  Apparently it suppresses release (he used the expression “shuts down”) of the hormone that tells your body you’re full and can stop eating.  And they showed side-by-side brain scans of the effect of sugar versus cocaine.

This doctor feller attributed the corn syrup’s popularity with food manufacturers to its comparative price relative to cane sugar.  And there’s a tie-in to M. Simon’s comment here as well.  Cane sugar is extortionately expensive in the U.S. because of ridiculously high tariffs on imported sugar.  Can’t recall the source any more, but once upon a time I saw the figure of a factor of five (or thereabouts; it’s been years since I saw that figure) is the cost increase that’s passed along to the American eater just in order to make domestic production pay.  And notwithstanding cane sugar is not a “natural” crop in our part of North America (in the sense of maize or wheat, both of which will grow just jim dandy in most of the continent), pay it does.  To give an illustration of just how high up these ties go and how lucrative they are for the welfare recipient:  Apparently the person whom then-President Clinton was talking to on the phone while a now-famous intern was pleasuring him was one of the principals in the leading domestic sugar producer.  Not that “ordinary” processed cane sugar is healthy by any stretch, but this particular piece of corporate welfare is not only massively increasing the cost of living to Americans at large, but it’s also indirectly contributing to significant increases in the incidence of morbid obesity.]

[Update (19 May 14):  While checking the weather for the next few days over at The Weather Channel, I ran into this link on the subject of added sugar in breakfast cereal.  They’ve got a slide show on a group of cereals each of which is at least 50% sugar by weight.  The winner is 88% sugar.  Plop a bowl of this in front of Junior and almost nine-tenths of what your child is shoveling into his face is processed sugar.  One pattern which struck me is how many of the cereals on this list are puffed-wheat products.  I remember having un-sugared puffed wheat cereals when a child, and they tasted like Styrofoam.  I also remember having un-sugared rice puff cereal, and it tasted that way but even more.  Regular corn flakes aren’t exactly packed with flavorful sensations either.  So why so many wheat puffs and not rice?  Why only one frosted flake product?  Maybe rice puff cereal has finally been moved over to the section with the monofilament tape, corrugated cardboard boxes, and other packaging products where it belongs?  In any event, if this Hall o’ Shame won’t put you off your feed, it ought to.]

[Update (15 Dec 14):  And for more on the subject of fructose’s effects on the body’s ability to recognize when it has taken on board enough fuel, we have this report.]

Because it Worked out so Well for General Motors

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. . . When management airily assumed 8-9% annual rates of return on investment to fund its benefit obligations.  Excuse me, that’s Old General Motors, the one that soaked up several billions in outright taxpayers’ money (and was stolen from its creditors to be handed to the UAW in payoff for its electoral support), as well as about $16 billion worth of tax subsidy created by rifle-shot in the tax code (fuller details here).

Mayor De Blasio has presented his first city budget to the New York City council.  In true leftist fashion, he “balances” it by grinding his seed-corn, specifically reserves left from Bloomberg’s tenure.  I don’t carry a brief for li’l Nanny Bloomberg, but you have to give some sort of respect to a mayor who can squire a city through the upheavals of the September 11 aftermath, the implosion of the industry whose epicenter it is (the financial services industry), as well as five-plus years of general economy-wide decline and stagnation . . . and leave his successor a surplus at the end of the day.

I know that De Blasio is too “progressive” (he used the word something like five times in his presentation) to look back for reactionary purposes like seeing how his notions have played out for others who tried them.  He really ought, I suggest, to ponder the lessons of the Holodomor.  When Stalin announced compulsory collectivization, the peasants did the only thing they could to get at least some benefit from their generations’ toil.  They slaughtered and ate their livestock.  Then came the requisitioning commissions, and they took everything, leaving nothing even to plant for the next season.  How’d that work out?  Read about it, if you have the stomach, here.  Or here.

Also in true leftist fashion, he cranks up spending by 6% while “paying” for it from fantastical assumptions about unknown future revenues and unspecified, unenforceable “promises” from the city’s unions to cut healthcare spending — in the future, of course — by $3.4 billion.  Without any premium increases passed on to the rank-and-file.  This is in a world of “Affordable” Care Act plans the uniform feature of which is they cost fabulously more than what they’ve (compulsorily) replaced, because they’re mandated to cover a smorgasbord of benefits that earlier plans typically didn’t.  Like maternity care for 63-year-old males.  We are told not to worry, though, because if the unions don’t voluntarily comply with that pie-in-the-sky $3.4 billion promise, the cuts are going to happen forcibly.  Actually, the article’s paraphrase of De Blasio’s promise to respect them in the morning is “the city reserved the right to enforce some of the terms.”  Some; get it?

Left unmentioned is how they’re going to fit any of the “Affordable” Care Act’s Cadillac-plan tax burden into that $3.4 billion savings.  Dear Leader can utter executive orders all day long, but unless Congress actually chops that provision from the statute, eventually a large number of those union plans are going to get popped, and hard.  At which point they’ll discover something that the rest of us have long since figured out:  Taxes like that work out to be dead-weight losses.

The provision of the budget that really makes my head spin, however, is the bit about the hand-outs to unions (only the teachers are specifically mentioned, but there may be more).  They’re going to get — pay attention closely — retroactive pay increases.  That’s right; their contracts said they’d get paid $X.  They got paid $X.  Their contracts had expired, and they continued to get paid $X.  But now, after the fact and for no additional performance of any nature, they’re going to get paid $X+Y.  Of course, the teachers union vigorously supported Comrade De Blasio in his campaigns.  But This is Not a Payoff of Money for Votes, you understand?  No!!  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And while the teachers are going to get their money up front — while the Bloomberg surplus lasts, at least — “Much of the cost of retroactive pay for city teachers would not to be paid until the last years of Mr. de Blasio’s theoretical second term.”  Hand the money over now; figure out where it’s coming from eight years from now.  Because we’ve got “more ‘accurate’ forecasting,” you see, so we know what the world, national, and local economies are going to be doing eight years from now.  Eight.  Years.  From.  Today.  You heard it there first, people; the city government of New York City is officially basing its long-range financial commitments on possession of a crystal ball.

On a final note, there’s a line in there about adding in $20 million for “student aid” programs at City University of New York.  For those who don’t recall, CUNY’s original mandate was to provide free or very-low-cost quality higher education to the city’s less-well-off.  For years it did pretty much exactly that.  Oh sure, it’s had its moments of comedy, such as Leonard Jeffries, but by and large it did what it was supposed to, and for many students did an outstanding job.  Those days appear to be ending, if they’re not already over.

Now CUNY is morphing into a comfy slush fund for sinecures, place-men, and political payoffs.  Recently former Enron advisor and populist mountebank Paul Krugman got hired by CUNY to . . . well, that’s the point.  For his entire first year he’s been hired to do pretty much nothing.  Thereafter, he’s obliged to do only nearly nothing.  And for this he’s getting a base salary of $225,000 per year (with summers off, thereby increasing the annualized lick to an even $300,000), plus $10,000 for “expenses.”  So that’s $235,000 (plus payroll taxes, plus other benefits) cash out the door, each year.  Which means that over 1% of that $20 million in “student aid” is actually going to one man.  Who has been hired to do as close to nothing as you can imagine.

This is progress, folks, with a vengeance.

Department of Everything Old is New Again

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Yesterday in Vienna the results of a survey study were published.  Those polled were Austrians over age 15.  They were asked their opinions about a number of things, including You Know What.

First, the good news.  Eighty-five percent agreed with the statement “democracy is the best form of government.”  Remember that number: 85%.  Thirty percent agreed with the proposition that the national socialist era (in Austria, at least) brought “only bad” things; another 31% agreed with the position that it brought “mostly bad” things.  Those two groups strongly correlated with whether the particular respondent had a “Matura” (the equivalent of the German Abitur, which is a level of academic challenge and achievement most Americans aren’t exposed to until their junior year in college, if then), and with whether the respondent had an overall optimistic view of his economic future.  The further good news is that the combined 61% who saw either primarily or exclusively bad things in the 1938-45 years represents an increase from 51% in 2005.  So in nine years we’ve seen a 19.6% increase in the proportion of People Who Get It.

But, lest one get too congratulatory, 36% of the respondents agreed that the Nazi era brought “both good and bad” with it (the write-up doesn’t make clear whether the survey included questions to tease out the responsive question, “For whom?”).  I mean, I can partly understand at least the ethnic Germans figuring that, since the Anschluß ousted a government that was scarcely democratic or representative, and in fact was first cousin to the authoritarian state to the north, all they did was trade one thug for another.  On the other hand, it’s not as though Austria was poised for war in March, 1938, or that its military had been given instructions similar to those received (with blanched face and sweaty palms) by the German high command in November, 1937.  And it’s not as though pre-Hitlerian Austria was already rounding up and persecuting its Jews.

What’s alarming is that 3% of the respondents agreed that the national socialist era brought “primarily good” to Austria.  I guess all you can do is observe that there’s one in every crowd, and in fact, it seems, at the rate of 3 per 100.

More disturbingly, 56% agreed that it is time to “end the discussion of the Second World War and the Holocaust.”  Yeah, because talking too much about a monstrous crime in which your society played a leading role makes it so much less likely that someone else will go goose-stepping down your path.  American chattel slavery ended 150 years ago next spring.  Scholars are still parsing through the surviving records and evidence and still finding new facets to explore, new insights to gain, new lessons with resonance for human relationships in the 21st Century.  The twelve years of national socialism left incomparably greater documentary residue, and the Last Pertinent Question on the war and its implications for humanity isn’t likely to be asked or answered in my lifetime.  But hey! Austria’s Got Talent! or whatever crap they watch over there.

You can to some degree write off that 56%.  Half the human population is of below-average intelligence (that’s not invidious; it’s statistics).  It’s not reasonable to expect that lower half of the curve to have the imagination to suspect the vast scope of the unexplored that remains out there in any field of contemplation as complex as what went down from 1933-45, and in fact the years preceding it and following.  While it sounds callous, you can write them off because there’s no reason to suppose they’ve been listening to the discussion in the first place.

The genuinely alarming data point from this survey is the number — 29% — who agreed that what Austria needs is “a strong Leader who does not need to worry about parliaments and elections.”  Oh dear.

For starts, don’t think that 29% figure is small enough to ignore.  The Nazis themselves in Germany only topped out at 43.9% in their last election (05 March 1933), and that was after they’d taken power, after the Reichstag fire, after arresting most of the socialist and communist party leadership, and after loosing the Sturmabteilung in its tens of thousands on the streets.

Secondly it gives an idea of how high a proportion of the population (i) seeks its salvation in government action, and (ii) views that action as itself a normative positive value.  As Jonah Goldberg points out in Liberal Fascism, one thing the fascistic parties of Europe (and their leftist sympathizers in America) all shared in common is an express faith in the value of action, forceful action, action that stands for no delays for deliberation.  “Bold, continuous experimentation” (FDR), anyone?

This 29% number suggests that a large proportion of one’s fellows has not contemplated how much easier is it to do harm than good, how much easier it is to un-do good than harm, and finally, how susceptible to the laws of unintended consequences governmental action is.  When Calvin Coolidge’s father was elected to the Vermont legislature, his son, by then a Massachusetts state senator (I’ve slept since I read this, and I don’t think he’d been elected governor yet), wrote him a note.  It was much, much more important, Calvin wrote his father, to thwart bad legislation than it was to pass good.  Calvin Got It.  Wanting a “strong leader” who can “cut through the red tape” and “get things done” without all that pesky give-and-take, all that empty vaporing debate, is strong evidence that one is dealing with someone who simply has not attended to the world around him very carefully.  [Ironically it was Coolidge and Dawes, grinding through the federal budgets line by line, who actually in the literal sense eliminated use of the red tape that had been used to bind government documents.  That anecdote is in Amity Shlaes’s recent biography of Coolidge.]

Finally, 29% thinking what one needs is a strong leader who need not bother with legislatures and elections, while 85% think democracy is the best form of government, suggests that a sizable proportion of the Austrian population is politically schizophrenic.  Guys:  You cannot square those two positions into any relationship other than diametric opposition.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously and consistently is not possible.

You have to wonder whether the survey designers shoved in questions which, together or in a single question, restated the guts of the Ermächtigungsgesetz (translation here) and then asked the agree/disagree position.  I wonder how many, relative to 29%, would have agreed with the proposition that what Austria needs is legislation that grants the country’s Leader the power to do those certain specific things which the Reichstag granted Hitler in 1933.

Perspective

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On the one side, we have someone with enough resources to attend Georgetown University School of Law, but who is outraged! that other people don’t want to foot the bill so she can roll in the sheets with whomever she pleases, under whatever circumstances she pleases, without concern over potential reproductive consequences. We are told that our opposition to funding her recreation is a “war on women” (or is it wymyn?).

And on the other hand we have Boko Haram, which kidnaps their female victims by the truckload.  “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah.  There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.”  The Nigerian government has been accused of inaction.  It vigorously disputes that (it has, after all, acted: it arrested a leader of the protest marches).  But lest you think that all Boko Haram is about is selling women into slavery, they want you to know different.  Look up the village of Gamboru.  As of yesterday morning they’re about 200 [Update (08 May 14):  The NYT reports “at least” 336 dead.] residents short; Boko Haram attacked the village and slaughtered the inhabitants. Oh dear.  What will the Religion of Peace think of next?

In an earlier post I linked to a report (also in the FAZ) on the practice of forced marriages in Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Niger.  Even in good times, as the article reports, fully a third of girls are forcibly married off before they’re 15.  Some are married and delivered to their new husbands before they’ve even begun to menstruate.

And in another post I linked to reports about what happens in a true “rape culture” when a victim (of a gang rape, no less) has the temerity not to know her place and shut up.

I’m not here to argue that Western civilization is perfect.  Or even that it doesn’t need some smithing here and there.  I cannot deny that many men fail, in their ordinary daily lives, to treat women with the respect they deserve as moral free agents and repositories of the divine spark (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”  Gen. 1:27; note that both male and female are created in the image of God, by the way).  I cannot and do not deny that many men in their ordinary daily lives fail to respect the mental attainment and acuity of the women they encounter.  Likewise I cannot and do not deny that many men fail to bring, in their personal lives, a proper sense of awe to their women as the cradle of human life.  And by like token, I sure as hell don’t deny that not a few women out there shamelessly abuse those men who do make the effort to engage women in general and the women they encounter in particular as presumptive moral and mental equals (at least until demonstrated otherwise).

But to pretend that half the human population in Western civilization consists of victims of a “war on women,” when at no time in recorded human history, in no place in the world, have women in general and in particular — even women at the very bottom of whatever scale you choose to measure by — been physically safer, healthier, longer-lived, more independent in their persons and their affairs, and with greater access to coercive power over their fellow humans, is to spit in the faces of those 12-year-old brides, to kick dirt over those 200+ schoolgirls who are to be sold according to the dictates of Allah.

If there were justice in this world, a deputation of mothers of those schoolgirls would drop by Sandra Fluke’s apartment and beat her with pieces of fire wood until she could no longer walk.

[Update (14 May 14):  As if on cue, here we have Mlle Fluke herself on the Boko Haram kidnapping situation.  There are links to the audio, and a partial transcript.  Let’s just say Comrade Fluke does not come across terribly well.]

No, Seriously, this Actually Happened

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I don’t care if you have to download every malware or virus in the cyber-world to translate this article from today’s Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung.  Do it; it’s worth it.

My spam filter routinely catches all manner of e-mails according to the subject lines of which I am encouraged to . . . errrmmmmm . . . aahhhhh . . . enhance certain interpersonal experiences by quantum measures.  I don’t open them, for obvious reasons, but the overall tenor of the subject lines seem to intimate (pun) issues relative to . . . uuuummmmmm . . . dimension.

The poor sap in the linked article seems to have opened one of those e-mails, and actually gone to a doctor for the procedure.  Paid him €3,500 (that works out to something north of $4,800) for the procedure, the purpose of which was to increase girth.  And it worked!  Too well, alas; the patient alleged that the doctor used too much of whatever it was he was supposed to use, with resulting stricture that nearly prevented him from urination.  Files malpractice claim and has now lost.

But seriously:  $4,800 for a thicker Old Man?  And then dismay when things didn’t work out as hoped?  What color is the sun on this guy’s planet?

Somewhere, some day, someone will put together a graph to try to chart just where Western Civilization went over the edge.  This story will be a data point on that graph.

Cards Turned Face-Up on the Table

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Haven’t got around to posting recently; I’ve been out of state for the better part of the last two weeks, and in the intervals trying to stay not too far behind things at the office.

I’d intended this to be an update to an earlier post, but the more I thought the more I decided it merited its own.

From our neighbors to the north, we have this article (via Classical Values) on the effect that all the relentless harping on imminent doom and destruction from “climate change” (as if the climate has not been changing for 4.5 billion years or thereabouts) is having on children.  Specifically, the head-shrinks (or what Rumpole calls “trick cyclists”) are noting an uptick in cases of teenagers and younger children presenting clinical anxiety symptoms which the patients attribute to concerns about “climate change.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know.  Remember “Duck and Cover” and all the other civil defense training we pumped into the schools?  The Soviets were targeting American cities for instantaneous destruction and we had millions of civilians at risk.  This was less than twenty years after we wrapped up our strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan, so we had a real good idea of what happens to civilian populations when the bombing starts.  Granted that what can be done, especially when there’s essentially no forewarning of attack, is limited, but Officialdom did what it could by way of getting the word out.  And building bomb shelters, and designating evacuation routes, and so forth.  When my parents moved to our sleepy little town in 1968, far from any conceivable target zone for anything other than “incontinent ordnance,” there was a house that had its own fallout shelter.

And they showed films in the schools of what to do when the Soviet missiles were in-bound.  It must have been terrifying, especially since nearly all of those children would have parents, older siblings, or other close relatives who’d actually seen with their own eyes what was left of Germany and Japan, and could state from personal knowledge that This Stuff Can Happen.

But at least in the 1950s, when we had small children being taught to hide from the glass shards produced by nuclear attack by crawling beneath their school desks, there really, actually was a large group of very well-funded, very intelligent, and highly dedicated people who spent a phenomenal amount of time, energy, and money to be able to — you know — actually do that, viz. drop nuclear weapons on American cities.  It wasn’t just a bunch of computer models that predicted what would happen in a fire-storm.  Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and numerous other cities weren’t just columns of data on some scientist’s computer screen.  Warsaw, Berlin, and cities too numerous to name in the Soviet Union were smoldering testaments to what ordinary aerial bombs and artillery shells could accomplish when applied in sufficient quantities in a small enough area.

Note the tenor of the linked article, though:  It’s approving of scaring the living snot out of children.  One source interviewed favors us:  “The answer, on a personal basis, to this kind of helpless distress is ‘mastery’: that is, helping people to master small tasks that reduce their carbon footprint can lead to a greater sense of control and efficacy for that person – and with that a reduction in anxiety.”  But of course.  Terrorizing youth is good, you see, because it leads them to enlist in the Cause.

While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and cheapen the very real, very immediate catastrophes of the 20th Century, and urge that, in response to computer models that cannot explain the last fifteen years-plus of observable data (the lack of “global warming” since 1998) we all surrender — more or less permanently — the freedoms and rights which we grudgingly and temporarily did to defeat a rabid dog who was literally at our throats.  “Our forebears had the First World War and the Second World War. Another generation dealt with the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. Now the greatest threat to this generation – young and old – is the climate problem, which involves a lot of volatility, and a lot of change. . . .  We have to find the flexibility, the courage and the determination to stand up to that crisis – collectively, not just as individuals. Like our parents did before us.”  Ah!  The collective, the Holy Collective.

During both world wars, Western society gave up a great deal of what made it, well, Western.  We internalized that Loose Lips Sink Ships, and watched our neighbors for suspicious activity.  We carted off an entire group of American citizens and locked them up in camps.  We turned in our pots and pans to be melted down.  We did without tires for the car, gas for its tank, cuffs on pants legs.  We got used to letters from a father, son, or brother with entire paragraphs blanked out.  We got used to being told what we were going to bring home at the end of the week.  If we made too much of a stink about it, we knew that we were likely to receive a visit from some guy driving a government car . . . and so would our neighbors.  If a household appliance broke, we went without because the factory that might have replaced it was turning out receivers for M-1 rifles instead of irons.  As Paul Fussell noted, about the only thing that wasn’t rationed was alcohol.  But no one, nowhere, in no context was brazen enough to propose that we accept all that as permanent fabric of society.  Everyone knew that those measures were necessary to defeat two of the most wicked societies in recorded history, and we knew that once the war was over so was the police state.

“Climate change” of course is different.  Because you cannot defeat “climate,” because it’s always there and always dynamic, the propounded surrender must be forever.  What is being force-fed to our children is the need for perpetual submission to distant groups of people — “experts,” authorities, panels, supra-national organizations — over whose actions we are to have essentially no say.  Because the science is settled, you see.  “Unlike adults who can put their heads in the sand about what we have been doing to our planet, these kids are very aware of what’s going on. . . .  Because of the Web, it’s not hidden any more. Children often ask me questions that we, as adults, try to evade: What is going to happen to the human race?”

Eugenics was settled science. [Update (07 May 14): Right on cue, here’s a recent article from The Washington Times about Margaret Sanger and her place in the eugenicist movement . . . which was a “global movement” after all, just like what we’re encouraging our children to join.]  Just like Gobineau’s theories of biological racial superiority were settled science.  Just like the four humors were settled science.  Just like the ether was settled science.  If there is nothing left to discuss, then there can be nothing left to debate.  If there is nothing left to debate, then any intrusion into the ordering of society on that point by mere lay people can by hypothesis only be destructive.  As Confucius correctly observed, that which is round can be no rounder.  Thus the moral imperative for representative government fails.  Phrased differently, Jefferson’s dictum, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” no longer applies.  I mean, you don’t “consent” to gravitational acceleration at 9.81 m/sec/sec, do you?  It’s not an abomination to force you to behave as if the boiling point of water at sea level were 212 degrees Fahrenheit, is it?  And therefore it cannot be objectionable to coerce your submission to whatever is necessary to stave off “climate change,” can it?  [Update (08 May 14):  From the explanation of why Dear Leader’s administration is taking the explicit position that Congress cannot stop it from adopting pretty much whatever environmental regulations it pleases, we have the notion of “actionable science.”  As David Harsanyi paraphrases it, “Podesta says this is “actionable science” so separation of powers and consent of the governed and other trifling concerns are no longer applicable.”]

“As human beings we are made to deal with crises collectively, not individually. So we try to help them realize that, yes, we are looking at a global crisis, but you can also choose to be part of a global movement to address the crisis. This is a particularly important message to deliver to children, who are very sensitive to isolation. When a child goes into their imaginative being, they can really magnify their isolation, which can become overwhelming .… We tell them to become agents of transformation and change” (emphasis mine).  Yes, children are very sensitive to feelings of isolation.  But do you counsel your child-patients to turn to their families? their church? their neighborhood or town?  Oh no; those will never do, you see.  Turning to those circles of engagement might entail merely helping your neighbors shovel the mud out of their own living room, or standing in a chain brigade for sixteen hours passing sand-bags, or bringing food and water to the people who are passing them.  It might entail nothing more involved than getting your own hands grubby helping your fellow citizens; it certainly won’t reduce your “carbon footprint.”  What you must do to expiate your feelings of isolation, Dear Children, is turn to “global movements.”  Of course, in a “global movement” about all you’re going to get to do is (i) turn over your own money; (ii) surrender your own freedoms; (iii) advocate the forcible separation of your fellow citizens from their money and freedoms; and, (iv) most of all, obey.

The linked article turns up nearly all of the Climate Movement’s cards face-up, all at once.  You as a mere individual are isolated in the face of immediate doom.  Your family, your faith, your community are of no help to you.  To break from your isolation you must act, and your action must take the form of submerging yourself in the mandates of a “global movement.”  You must not dispute Your Betters because They Know.  Your parents and those beetle-browed people whom you talk to in your daily life must not be listened to, because they’re just hiding their heads in the sand.  “But despite the fact that we live in a world with more volatility and fear, experts say there is hope. And to stay mentally strong, they all advocate not just calling for change, but acting for it.”

And all of this is part of “a particularly important message to deliver to children.”  Pavlik Morozov would no doubt approve.