Maggie's Farm

 are all caused by global warming? What about earthquakes, snowstorms, headaches, and malaria?

Droughts, floods and storms have been with us forever. Guess what? Food prices are rising because of the price of oil and because food crops are being displaced, at the moment, by ethanol production.

Am I paranoid to think that the UN hopes to leverage global warming hysteria into money and power?

"Climate change" - whatever that means - hasn't happened yet. It's a computer modeling prediction.

From a piece at LaShawn:

...you cannot, even if you lived 1,000 lifetimes, make a coherent and logically sound argument in favor of racial discrimination in the other direction. Nothing, not even the most heinous act committed against a black person by our government, justifies discriminating against other races in favor of blacks.

Let me put it this way: I have yet to read or hear a coherent and logically sound argument in favor of so-called reverse discrimination. Perhaps one exists. If you’ve read or heard such an argument, do let me know.

But of course, LaShawn does know why: it's racial pandering and racial politics. For me and for LaShawn, people are just plain people. The politicization of skin, historical and at present, is a common human failing - but, sadly, so are many other human evils.

From a piece in the NYT on the malaise in Italy:

Now it is essentially an exquisite corpse, trampled over by millions of tourists. If Italy does not shed its comforts for change, many say, a similar fate awaits it: blocked by past greatness, with aging tourists the questionable source of life, the Florida of Europe.

Coyote wrote this in Feb, 2005:

I resisted the call by a number of web sites at the beginning of the year to make predictions for 2005.  However, now I will make one:  We will soon see calls to bring a tighter licensing or credentialing system for journalists, similar to what we see for lawyers, doctors, teachers, and, god help us, for beauticians.  The proposals will be nominally justified by improving ethics or similar laudable things, but, like most credentialing systems, will be aimed not at those on the inside but those on the outside.  At one time or another, teachers, massage therapists, and hairdressers have all used licensing or credentialing as a way to fight competition from upstart competitors, often ones with new business models who don't have the same trade-specific educational degrees the insiders have....

Such credentialing can provide a powerful comeback for industry insiders under attack.  Teachers, for example, use it every chance they get to attack home schooling and private schools, despite the fact that uncertified teachers in both these latter environments do better than the average certified teacher (for example, kids home schooled by moms who dropped out of high school performed at the 83rd percentile).  So, next time the MSM is under attack from the blogosphere, rather than address the issues, they can say that that guy in Tennessee is just a college professor and isn't even a licensed journalist.

Read the rest of his current piece. Subject also at Moonbattery.

I used to view Al Gore as a fairly decent sort, honest as politicians go, affable, sometimes a bit clownish in his sanctimony and pomposity, a bit naive from his privileged youth and from never having held a real job in the real world, probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer but generally a well-intentioned guy who would be a congenial doubles tennis partner.

(I viewed his failure to be seduced by the Clinton slimy charm to be much in his favor. It has often been said that he cannot stand them.)

Traumatic events can short-circuit people's brains, and I think this fellow has experienced a personality change, if not a psychotic breakdown as a result of the ego injury of his agonizingly close loss of the election. Until then, his charmed life had had no apparent disappointments or major rejections, unlike most people who toughen up from the hard knocks of life. Strings of luck tend to make people want to believe it's because of them, and not La bella Fortuna.

I am not one for ad hominems. In fact, I am concerned about this guy's stability, specifically about the form of paranoid disorder known as monomania.

Those with a monomania want everyone else to join in their obsession (eg Captain Ahab). People who think their mission is to save the world are insane by definition.

Meanwhile, Old Man Winter just won't give us a chance to shovel the front walk before slamming us again. I often consider how many heart attacks would be prevented if only globalisticalistic warmening were really happening, but I love winter - I'd miss it. But I am not worried. Unlike Al Gore, I was a science major and I can look at data and stats with a modicum of savvy and healthy skepticism, knowing that 99% of it ends up being wrong - including, already, much of the science I learned in college. Among other things, my Ivy League scientist profs taught me that the world would be entirely without oil by 2000 with none left with which to produce medicines, and that the next Ice Age would begin about then, threatening civilization itself. Meanwhile, I plow the snow from my driveway today with relatively cheap gas: they might be right about the latter - the coming Ice Age. I am in it.

A h/t to JDZ for finding this provocative essay by Mr. Moldbug, Why I am not a Libertarian. A quote:

The Loyalists have no political descendant. There is no American alive today whose loyalty to the British Crown was passed down to him in an unbroken chain from 18th-century Loyalists. You would be about as likely to find a native speaker of Etruscan. Both Democrats and Republicans are factions of Patriot.

And yet: the Loyalists were right. At least on this one rather important question. Britain was not on a path to a weird, 1984-like future with gold braids and epaulets, crushed under the iron heel of the King, the Church of England and the Lords. Rather, the power of throne and altar and fief in Britain had been dwindling almost monotonically since Mary Tudor - a process which of course has continued to this day.

The Loyalists were right. And yet they have no intellectual descendants at all, not in the US and not anywhere else. At least from the point of view of their political DNA, they were simply obliterated - not unlike the Cavaliers, to whom their resemblance is more than passing. And in what folder does almost everyone alive file this event? I'm afraid that folder is progress.

It's a meaty piece, perfect for a sleety, snowed-in afternoon with a glass of brandy and maybe a big hunk of English Stilton. Mr. Moldbug has the disbelief in the word "progress" which we share and have written about here, and he shares my ambivalence about the justifications for the American Revolution (which he terms a "criminal mob"). However, I am glad that it happened and that the US is not joining the EU today.

I may or not be technically a Libertarian, but I do take liberty as an ethical and not a practical matter. There is little that is easy, practical, or neat about liberty.

Image: A nice wheel of Stilton, correctly wrapped in a linen napkin