Maggie's Farm

Note that we post pieces on climate under Politics, not Conservation and Natural History. We place it where it belongs.

MIT Climate scientist calls warming fears "silly," in debate with Bill Nye. h/t, Junk Science. Bill Nye cannot stand up to an MIT Climatologist. Nye drank the Kool-Aid, but has no facts.

From November, Lord Monckton wrote Apocalypse Cancelled for The Telegraph. He goes over the issues in detail. h/t, Small Dead Polar Bears.

And, speaking of Polar Bears, they seem to be thriving in all of the sweltering heat. Also, about those famous bears on the ice floe: that's what Polar Bears do. They hang out on ice floes. They aren't stranded - it's normal for them. Althouse

Roger Scruton wrote this in 1999, at the time of the war in Kosovo, and it applies well to today. A couple of quotes:

In effect, the war in Serbia is an exercise in sanitized aggression -- force without the risk of force, violence without tears, destruction from a place of safety. Not only is this cowardly: It is profoundly counter-productive, as we are beginning to see. Courage is a higher value than safety, and a life without risk diminishes the gift of freedom. And part of the value of courage over hesitation lies in the fact that it moves more decisively, more economically, and with less catastrophic destruction, to its goal. Courage is not just intrinsically admirable; it is also the most efficient means to achieve what we want. 

and

It is not only in war that the liberal priorities are dangerous. The obsession with health is profoundly unhealthy, and the pursuit of safety unsafe. If we believe that the state is there to cushion us from misfortune, to compensate every loss and make up for every suffering, then we automatically relinquish control over our lives, while drastically narrowing the sphere of human action. Regulations of a mind-numbing complexity now govern activities, consumer products, and employment, with the aim of ensuring that the citizen can amble through a risk-free world, picking his pleasures from shelves loaded with packaged and sanitized products, waddling onwards in a state of moral obesity. As a result, the citizen lives longer than he might. But his life is less completely his own. We have suffered an enormous diminution in the value of human existence, because we have removed risk from the heart of it. It is only by staking your life, that you fully possess it.  

The whole essay is fully Scrutonic. Read it. (h/t, Reader)

Re yesterday's post on Secular Culture (work done by Roger, of course):

READ THIS SPEECH, if you do nothing else today.

Fascinating, and full of examples and images. I won't quote from it because it the link contains all sorts of frightening copyright warnings. It is from 2005.

In my opinion, getting speeches like this distributed and read is the best thing blogs can do: it's the magic of the link, which we already take for granted.

(Thanks, reader, for letting us know about this speech.)

Dunn's piece in Am. Thinker. He points out that warming is just the latest in a long series of environmental apocalyptic visions - none of which have panned out. One quote:

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)

Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.

Dunn really nails the mindset. Wish I had written this piece. Whole thing here.

We must confess that we take this notion about as seriously as we take MLK's Birthday. Not racist at all: just aware that such things are sops thrown to loyal constituents of the Dem party. Party favors that cost them nothing.

Note that there is no Asian History month, and no Hispanic History Month (although the story of the Spanish invading Central America, stealing the gold, and killing all the natives, would be an exciting and inspiring story for the kiddy-poos). No Swedish History month either - and no Indian History month (for either kind of Indian). There is no Arabic History Month, but coming soon, no doubt, to a government school near you. Gimme your vote and we'll give you a month. No vote - no month.

LaShawn has the best post on the subject, here and especially here.

"Elites to anti-Affirmative Action Voters: Drop Dead." That's the title of Heather McDonald's exhaustive review of all the of tricks that California has been using to sneak around Prop 209, which forbids race-quota based admissions and hiring.

One thing that struck me about this piece is how the state universities believe themselves to be above the law, and that they are somehow entitled to operate illegally, with impunity.

The last decade in California shows the power, and the limitations, of the crusade for a colorblind America led by Ward Connerly, architect of the 1996 anti-preference initiative. Without a doubt, Proposition 209, as that measure is called, has cut the use of race quotas in the Golden State’s government. But it has also exposed the contempt of the elites, above all in education, for the popular will. “Diversity”—meaning socially engineered racial proportionality—is now the only official ideology of the education behemoth, and California shows what happens when that ideology comes into conflict with the law.

Read the whole thing. It's a remarkable story - and a disturbing story -about people who believe that the ends justify the means. And it's a story about academia's entirely unwholesome obsession with race. And, finally, it's a story with a sub-theme about a large black subculture in America which rejects the dominant culture's value of disciplined self-improvement. If you want to blame the schools, you are probably missing the point - although it is their challenge to counter the influence of self-defeating attitudes.

In the end, race quotas will always be rejected by voters. And the voters pay the bills. Quotas are obviously unfair, they discriminate against other skin colors - and nobody wants an affirmative action pilot or doctor.

A quote from Ben Stein's piece in American Spectator:

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn't done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is (and I mean ENDLESSLY) and how he's just a vestigial organ on the body politic right now.

The media is doing what it can to basically oust Mr. Bush while still leaving him alive and well in the White House. It's a sort of neutron bomb of media that seeks to kill him while leaving the White House standing (for their favorite unknown, Barack Obama, to occupy).

At Maggie's Farm, we plan to avoid discussing the primaries and the '08 election for quite a while. It is too far away to say anything meaningful - anything can happen between now and then. It's a waste of virtual paper and virtual ink, we believe, and thus damages our virtual planet.

Where is our News Junkie today? On a listening tour in Iowa in NYC on an underwear modeling job again. He calls it "beer money" but it actually supports his poorly-paid, humble journalism career in MA. 

Image: The Diebold Accu-Vote system, famously accurate when Dems win elections, but deeply flawed, corrupt, and hacked by Karl Rove when they do not.

French member of Parliament convicted for saying that homosexuals are morally inferior.

This isn't about gays - it's about the slippery slope to speech control. Is freedom a universal human aspiration? I doubt it: I think it might be an Anglo-Saxon thing. (Is that a racist statement?)

However, to refute even that Anglo-Saxon statement, look what David Cameron wants to do.  Is it too late for another revolution in the UK? Heck, look at what we did in the US, and that was about a lousy tea tax.

OK, I take back everything I implied about Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism: maybe all humans are infants at heart, longing for a Daddy and Mommy to provide and to take charge.

Image: A guy who knew what was best for you.

The Duke humanities faculty have everything figured out, don't they? Allen in The Weekly Standard:

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege.

Read the whole thing. And wonder, like me, how long it will take for this sort of academic to be "unmasked" as no more than cynical, bitter, and ignorant careerists, with interest in neither truth nor beauty.

Are there two Dukes? Because one does not encounter such soul-less people in the stands at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Contrary to what some would have us believe all cultures are by no means equal. The fact is that one is clearly superior to all the others by almost any measure we may choose as a basis of comparison. All the evidence shows that the West is the only successful cultural tradition of our time while all the rest have shown themselves to be incompatible with the modern era. The claim that all cultures are intrinsically equal is thus not only patently untrue, but it is also one of the most insidious lies of our age.

Any nation that truly desires prosperity, human rights, and progress must adopt western values. Those in other traditions that have done so have been amply rewarded for their prescience. Japan, South Korea and Honk Kong are examples of those who have prospered greatly as a result of adopting those quintessentially western constructs - democracy and capitalism.

Advancement, justice and affluence can only be attained by societies that operate along the western lines. For all their alleged wisdom and insight all the other civilizations have not only failed to achieve these ideals but have invariably produced the opposite, spawning malfunctioning and backward societies. History has clearly shown that the only viable way is the western one. It is the only one that can bring about progress and guarantee a dignified existence for man.

It is rather ironic that while progressively larger parts of the globe are in the process of transitioning to the western model, its internal enemies have managed to undermine it from within. Their weapon of choice - and one which has proven surprisingly effective - is multiculturalism, a ploy by which they seek to dilute our tradition with values of failed cultures. That this subversive doctrine has gained such prominence is remarkable given that the foreign material at its disposal is for the most part not only noticeably defunct, but - judging by the results it produces - to be avoided at all costs. The deep inroads multiculturalism has made over the years are largely a result of the decades of relentless attacks on the West which have undermined its people's confidence in their own civilization and weakened their resolve to stand up in its defense.