Nuclear Power Could Save the Planet

As we all know, our American liberals see themselves as the “reality-based” community that believes in science rather than religious superstition and myths. If so, they will be interested in the emerging science of hormesis, the idea that small quantities of toxins, even those that kill at high concentrations, may actually be beneficial.

The principle was demonstrated by Dorothy L. Sayers in her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Strong Poison. The not-very-lovely mystery novelist Harriet Vane is accused of poisoning her lover, the avant-garde novelist Philip Boyes, with arsenic. But it turns out it was the oily family lawyer Norman Urquart what done it. Over several months he had ingested small quantities of arsenic and developed a tolerance for the poison. So when he shared an omelette with Philip Boyes that was laced with the stuff, Boyes died in horrible pain while he experienced no ill effect.

It turns out that small amounts of nuclear radiation are beneficial too. Theo Richel reports that they are reducing the estimates of death from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Right now, it is estimated that about 4,000 people will die prematurely from exposure to Chernobyl. But it may be that the estimate of excess deaths will be one day be reduced to a deficit, because “many people in the area [will] not have cancer as a result of their extra doses of radiation.”

Only about 140 people around the reactor received very high doses (28 of them died as a result), the rest of the population received an extra dose that was lower than normal background radiation

The notion that any exposure to nuclear radiation would increase cancer death arose in a report in 1958 analyzing cancer deaths among the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The more radiation, scientists found, the bigger likelihood of cancer death.

But the question is, what happens as you lower the radiation dose. Does the likelihood of cancer
reduce slowly toward zero?

Some people had received an amount of radiation that was about 50-100 times the normal, natural, background radiation that the rest of the Japanese receive (about 2.5 milliSieverts/year). In this group of so called Habakushas (bomb survivors) they could not find enough cancer deaths to create a decent statistic that showed radiation is carcinogenic even at these low doses. So the straight line of dose and effect suddenly stopped.

But the scientists didn’t say, well, we don’t know what happens at low doses. Instead, they extended
their graph and invented a hypothesis called LNT (Linear no threshold). Radiation was dangerous all
the way down.

But maybe they were wrong.

In the past half century it became clear that there are many places on earth where
background radiation is 50, 100 or more times higher than the sea level average of 2.5 milliSievert...
In all these places epidemiological studies were started and they produced a
remarkably consistent picture: the people there have either the same or a slightly lower chance
of cancer compared to their
less-irradiated countrymen. They live just as long or a little bit longer.

You can see that this rather makes a mess of the nuclear meltdown hypothesis, celebrated on stage
and screen. If Chernobyl caused no excess deaths, except for the people actually at the reactor attempting
to contain the meltdown, then why are we worried about radiation from nuclear plants and from
nuclear waste disposal sites?

Naturally, all you folk in the “reality-based” community will be eager to understand the emerging
science of hormesis, and you will want to seek additional information here and here.

Imagine. Maybe hormesis points the way to solving the nightmare of global warming. Instead of burning
fossil fuels to power our cars and homes and destroying the planet, we could use nuclear power.
Because hey, a little extra radiation might do us good. And it could save the planet.

Liberal Guru Dies. Who Knew?

M. Scott Peck, author of perennial bestseller The Road Less Traveled, died on September 25 of cancer. “Life is difficult,” he wrote. It is a series of problems and we gain the wisdom to overcome them by discipline (and also through love, growth, religion, and grace). Who, among the reading classes of a certain age, has not read his book, or known what it was about?

Appearing as it did in 1978, Peck’s book was well-timed to offer a way for the baby-boom generation to sober up after the binge of the Sixties without actually admitting that their dissipations were rather more than harmless adolescent pranks.

But who knew? You wouldn’t know it from the obituary in The New York Times. You’d only get a hint of it in the obituary in The Washington Post. In fact, you’d have to go to the obituary in The Daily Telegraph to learn that Peck was not quite the paragon of wisdom he presented in his book.

On the contrary,

Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chain-smoking neurotic whose life was characterised by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children.

In the end, his wife divorced him and two of his three children wouldn’t speak to him.

Hey, nobody is perfect. But it is still a remarkable thing that in all these years as a bestselling author, lecturer, and celebrity, there was never a scandal about the rather significant gulf between Peck’s philosophy and his life. If he had been a fundamentalist preacher and had written a best-seller on the Christian life, we can be confident our liberal friends would know about his every pecadillo and be able to recite chapter and verse of his misdeeds to us upon request. And also without request.

It’s the great double standard of our age. Conservatives that fall off the wagon are hypocrites and frauds. Liberals that don’t live up to their principles are merely human.

And that’s how it should be, after all.

Ballroom Dancing? At College?

Half a century after rock-and-roll ate pairs dancing for lunch, it looks like
ballroom dancing is making a comeback—at the university.
Liz Lightfoot reports that Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England
are getting serious about an annual ballroom dancing competition between the two
schools.

It has become so serious that

Cambridge University has appointed its first permanent
ballroom dancing coach as
the activity becomes the latest campus craze.

It is not before time. The bump and grind of rock-style dancing means nothing.
How about dancing plastered up against a dancing partner as you whirl around the
dance floor? Said Chris Horner of Cambridge University:

"It’s strange that male dancers pressed against a beautiful
woman are supposed to be gay while sports where 15 men run around holding
on to each other or getting
sweaty together in the showers are seen as manly,"

Actually, as an experienced Argentine Tango dancer, I’d say that the
prospect of pressing up against a beautiful woman is more enticing
than the actual experience.

The University: Sickness Unto Death

It’s university week as various opinion media trot out their annual state of the academy pieces. In
James Piereson’s
The Left University we saw a picture of the university drawn using the German historical method,
penciling out the progress of the academy from teacher of absolutes to liberal research institution to the current
left university that amounts to an establishment of secular religion.

On the other hand,
Victor Davis Hanson shows the university as a corrupt institution approaching terminal
sickness, or as we Kierkegaardians say, sickness unto death. You can tell there is something wrong by
comparing the antics of today’s college presidents with the giants of the university’s golden age: men
like “Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchens (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard).”
Today’s presidents are pigmies by comparison.

There’s the infamous trashing of Harvard President Summers by the Harvard faculty for daring to suggest informally that
there might be innate differences between men and women.

There’s “Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz,
heralded Mr. Summers’s public humiliation as a `teachable moment.’” Maybe there is a teachable moment
also in discussing
the shenanigans surrounding her appointment. Her partner got herself a six-figure job at the
university and a move-in allowance in the deal. What’s all that about?

And what about University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman?

She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more
likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange
professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns,"
supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate.

It turned out that everything about Churchill was a lie: his Native American ancestry and his academic
achievements.

But none of these worthies hold a candle to new Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau of the University of
California at Berkeley. On taking up his office

the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic,
and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5%
Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in
contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white.

The chancellor blames the underrepresentation of traditionally marginalized minorities on Proposition
209 that banned racial quotas in state government.

"I personally don’t believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

Oh really. But it really doesn’t matter what the people intended, chancellor. As a famous United States
Attorney General often used to say: “It’s the law.” Your job, as a government functionary, is to obey
the law. For changing the law we have legislatures and elections, initiatives from the people, and all
that stuff.

You wanna change the law? Run for election.

After the Left University, What Then?

In an important article in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson, longtime director of the James M. Olin Foundation, takes a look at The Left University and what to do about it.

American universities have gone through three stages, according to Piereson. The first stage was the British model: universities founded by Protestant denominations and designed

to transmit knowledge and right principles to the young in order to prepare them for vocations in teaching, the ministry, and, often, the law. Few thought of these institutions as places where new knowledge might be generated or where original research might be conducted.

In England, as in America, research and discovery were sponsored by nonacademic institutions like the Royal Society in London or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the latter founded by Benjamin Franklin.

It is significant to note that the great figures of nineteenth century America, businessmen like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Pullman, not to mention politicians like Jackson and Lincoln, “had little formal education at all.”

But all that changed when the Germans invented the research university. Conforming to Kant’s idea that you could never know the thing-in-itself, they founded the University of Berlin, “based on the idea that truth is not something known and passed on, but the subject of persistent inquiry and continuous revision.” The research model placed the faculty, not the students, at the center of the institution.

The model of the German research university spread rapidly in the United States in the decades after the Civil War, inaugurated by the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 as our first institution organized around graduate research studies. The late scholar Edward Shils referred to this as "the most decisive single event in the history of learning in the Western hemisphere."

The men of the research university brought a different culture to the public square, inspiring the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century and bringing “experts and expert knowledge into the political process.” What we may call the liberal university grew in size and prestige until the 1960s.

Then, in a single tumultous decade, the liberal university was replaced by the left university. Suddenly, the open, tolerant liberal university, dedicated to an optimistic vision of progress through knowledge, was shattered and in its place grew an altogether different institution, the university dedicated to “identity politics, group rights, and diversity.”

Ever since, the university has been radically out of step with reality and out of step with America. It has been wrong about the fall of Communism, wrong about the convergence between the Communist and capitalist systems, wrong that “welfare programs were in no way implicated in urban poverty, crime, family breakup, and teen pregnancy.” And the university research that once fed into the political process during the age of the liberal university is now done by independent think tanks like the “Manhattan
Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution,” and Piereson’s own Olin Foundation.

What is to be done? Piereson does not offer too much, except a recitation of reforms initiated by trustees and philanthropists. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But here is a more radical Three Point plan.

First, end university tenure. If there is one thing we have learned over the last half-century it is that people guaranteed a job are unhappy, cramped people, dogs-in-a-manger obsessed by their rights and utterly unlikely to serve the community. The university should be the great public square in which young people get to experience the great and the good as they visit the university for a season.

Second, prune back the research model. Some areas of the university lend themselves to the research concept, particularly in the hard sciences. But many do not. Is research in English literature a good idea? Research in law? It is probably not an accident that English and Law are departments that have been utterly vitiated by left-wing ideologies. The research model requires incumbents to do research in order to get tenure, money, and the glittering prizes. Some departments should be liberated from this burden.

Third, break up the “bums on seats” government education monopoly and its co-conspirator,
licensure. Why are we putting children in classrooms for twelve years K through 12, apart from creating jobs for education professionals? And why do we legislate a forest of credential requirements? The postmodernists know why. Power. Instead we could, we should be educating our children to adventure, to creativity, to service, or to work. Parents, take your pick.

It goes without saying that reforms of this magnitude can only be advanced by the conservative movement and its political arm, the Republican Party. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats are too compromised by their economic and political interests to do anything but resist to the last dollar of taxpayers’ money the system that gives them a comfortable livelihood, status, and power.

"Nobody Screws With Me"

Everybody is worrying about the decline of male participation in the university. At present
“135 women are graduating from college for every 100 men.”
Instapundit has a lot
of links.

The big question is: Where are all the men?
Vectorsphere
has some interesting posts on this, inluding a post from a father whose son was earning $70k a year as an
electrician. Many young men drop out of college because they cannot stand being indoctrinated as
“liberal feminists.” But after a few years in the real world, some of them return. So how do they deal
with the leftist faculty? One returnee responded:

I’ve got 12 years work experience, and if [they] dick
me around I’ll drag them through every rights process this university and state
laws have, and they know it. Nobody screws with me.”

So, fellas. Maybe the thing to do is to put off college until you’ve grown the cojones you
need to deal with the lefty professors. Then get in there and teach ’em a lesson.

Cherie Blair's Royal Progress

The personal is the political, they say. Whatever that may mean, we certainly like to imagine that celebrities actually live the characters they portray. And we like to imagine that the politicians of the other party are demonstrably not the kind, compassionate souls that other people’s money (actually, our money) makes them appear.

A recent biography of Britain’s First Couple, Tony and Cherie: A Special Relationship, by Paul Scott, gives us everything we want to believe about Cherie Blair, according to Frank Johnson (subscription required) in The Spectator, and more.

You see, as is proper in a working-class lass, Cherie Blair did not at all enjoy her trip to the Queens’s castle in Balmoral, Scotland.

First of all, she hated the ghoulish statue at the foot of her bed. Then she hated the bagpiper announcing the fresh Scottish morning at 6:00 am every day. The Queen’s royal corgis made “her eyes bulge, go red and begin to water.” Of course, writes Frank Johnson, this is probably because the royal pooches are not ordinary corgis but royal corgis. Not the sort of privileged animal likely to spark sympathy in the progressive breast of barrister Cherie Booth QC, who has defended the right of Muslim girls to wear the burqa in British schools.

All this is, of course, mere by-play. What really prompts an attack of acid reflux in the unbiased reader is the story of Cherie and the Tea with the Queen Mum.

Mrs Blair [did not] enjoy having to attend an afternoon tea party for the late Queen Mother’s `elderly women friends during a Balmoral holiday’. According to the book `it was not just tea but a steady supply of sherry that was on offer to the titled OAPs [old age pensioners]. The party began in a genteel enough manner, but as the afternoon progressed it steadily descended into a raucous sing-along with the Queen Mother leading from the front and insisting that a mortified Cherie join in every tune.’

Dear me. Now really. Who is there with a heart so hard that they could not enjoy, indeed not feel a lump in the throat when singing along with a bevy of slightly drunk little old ladies as they rumbled through the good old songs of their youth?

Maybe Cherie Blair would prefer a tuneful ditty from the Rolling Stones golden age, such as the compassionate and sensitive “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

China and Japan Confront Each Other

Those of us that expect a world ruled by China in 2050 often worry about a coming confrontation
between the U.S. and China. Actually, it is more likely that the confrontation will be
between Japan and China. In Ping Chong’s puppet show Cathay: 3 Tales of China the Americans
are merely comic. But the Japanese are the murdering monsters that invaded China and killed innocent
Chinese children and raped pure Chinese mothers. If you listen to the Chinese guides when you visit
China, you certainly understand that they are not happy about the sacking of the Imperial Summer Palace
in the nineteenth century by the US and the Brits. But that outrage was small potatoes compared to the
crimes of the second-rate Japanese.

And there is another reason for the Chinese and the Japanese to dislike each other. Energy.
Arthur Herman tells the story about
“the rich natural gas reserves in the remote uninhabited Senkaku Islands, located in
the East China Sea roughly halfway between Taiwan and Okinawa.” Both China and Japan claim sovereignty
over the islands, and China has been executing naval shows of force around the islands lately.

For Herman, it all sounds familiar.

All this is eerily reminiscent of the international "incidents" in the
years leading up to World War One, when Europe’s Great Powers tested each other’s willingness
to go to the brink: Fashoda in 1898, Tangiers in 1905, Agadir in 1911.

A century ago, a strong, self-confident Germany was seeking a place in the sun.

Like Europe’s Great Powers a century ago, the industrial powers of
Asia and the Pacific Rim are strong, self-confident,
self-assertive; they feel their time for greatness has arrived.

Can we learn from history, or are we condemned to repeat it?

Why Democrats are so Obstructionist

Congressional Republicans are puzzled by the intransigent opposition and obstructionist
tactics of the Democrats in Congress, according to
Gary Andres.
They recall the good old days when they were in the minority. They
would always put up a “comprehensive alternative” to the legislation proposed by the Democrats, and
suffer good naturedly as it went down to certain defeat.

But the minority Democrats of the twenty-first century don’t play by those rules. They
“rarely offer comprehensive alternatives to major Republican initiatives, choosing instead to
propose politically embarrassing rifle-shot amendments or none at all.”

Why are they acting so obstructionist? The truth is that ongressional Democrats seem to be merely responding to the wishes of their party.

Some of the loudest and most influential voices in the Democratic Party --
such as Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network, and blogger Markos Moulitsas from the Daily Kos -- care more about creating acrimony than alternatives. These activists dominate party voters, volunteers and contributors, and their message to
Democratic congressional leaders is clear -- combat yes, consensus no

But it is not just obstreperous activists that move the Democrats to obstruction. Their political
philosophy argues that as well. It was, after all, as recently as 2000 when Al Gore ran for president
to fight for the people against the powerful. Deep in Democratic hearts is the feeling that without
a powerful and compassionate government run by them the nation will descend into oppression and
victimization. Workers will lose their benefits, women will be dying from botched abortions, and old people will starve in their beds.
Democrats really believe that stuff, and that
is why the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were insistent in
asking Judge Roberts how he proposed to defend peoples’ rights.

And let us not forget the influence of the academy that has been teaching the nation’s youth for
a generation that everything political comes down to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia—in other
words, irreconcilable conflict.

Republicans had better stop complaining about the Democrats. They will always be petty and obstructionist
in opposition. Republicans should figure out how to turn the negativism to their advantage.

But at least the Democrats still have moderate folk like
Mickey Kaus. He argues against the mindless progressivism
of Matthew Yglesias that Democrats need the unions and should fight to keep the
Depression era Davis-Bacon Act that pegs construction wage rates for
public projects at union-defined
“prevailing” rates.

If union members constitute a mere 8 percent of the private sector work force, doesn’t that
mean that most Americans don’t feel the need to have unions fight for the people against the powerful?

Simon Wiesenthal, RIP

The great achievements of the life of Simon Wiesenthal are well known: how he
set up a center for investigation of crimes against Jews during the years of the
Second World War; how his sleuthing helped the Israeli Mossad track down and bring
to justice Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat that efficiently organized the death camps in
which so many millions died.

But it is the details of Wiesenthal’s life that are fresh and new, and cast a light
upon Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born, for instance,
in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, a town that is now part of western Ukraine, but then “an autonomous region of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Polish was the official language.” Buczacz was then 60 percent Jewish.

His childhood was not without event, as the obituary in
The Daily Telegraph attests.

From 1915 to 1917, the family was obliged to seek refuge in Vienna, when
Buczacz was overrun by Jew-baiting Cossacks from Russia.

Evidently, the troubles in Eastern Europe started well before the Final Solution was promulgated in 1942. At the end of
World War I, Buczacz became part of Poland.

But while his education continued in Polish, there were continual changes of
authority: Russian Bolsheviks drove out the Poles; the Poles enlisted the aid of the brutal
Ukrainian Petlyura cavalry. "We would get up
without knowing what regime was in power," Wiesenthal remembered.

If you remember, Poland became involved in the civil
war that raged in the Soviet Union for years after the Bolshevik Revolution.

He graduated from the local gymnasium (which means that the city’s education system was
based on the German model) and struggled for years against anti-Semitic discrimination to qualify
as an architect. Then in 1939 in the Nazi-Soviet partition his town became part of Ukraine and
Wiesenthal was suspect as a “bourgeois” Jew.

In 1941, of course, Buczacz was invaded by the Germans and Wiesenthal became suspect not just
as a Jew but as a member of the “Bolshevik intelligentsia.” He ended up in the Mauthausen death camp.

How did he survive? When millions were done to death, how does the individual survive?
In Wiesenthal’s case the answer is: because of his drawing skill. A guard gave him extra food
“and gave him drawing materials to produce presents for the other guards.”

After the war he began his documentation activities for which we know him.

We may certainly understand, learning of the life of Simon Wiesenthal, how Eastern Europe and its
peoples were cruelly cast about and battered in the last century by the rip-tides of history. And
we may celebrate the great good fortune of those that survived as we mourn the millions lost
in the awful maelstrom.

"Don't Get Stuck on Stupid, Reporters"

Conservatives are rolling in the aisles this morning chuckling about LtGen Honore’s advice to the media
yesterday. “Don’t get stuck on stupid, reporters,”
he advised.
Honore and Mayor Nagin
were trying to advertise information about buses for evacuation of New Orleans
in advance of hurricane Rita. But reporters wanted to talk about why the
preparation for this hurricane was different that the preparation for hurricane
Katrina.

So LtGen Honore decided to treat the highly objective new media like they
were dumb recruits in basic training. He wanted to get a clear message out to
the people of New Orleans. Things like: Here is where the buses will be. They will take you
out of town. Period. He didn’t want to be retailing rumors about where the buses
might be, as one reporter asked. He wanted to use the news media as a medium
of communication. So help me, news media, he gently and respectfully asked.
Help me get this message out to save lives in the city of New Orleans.

Now you would think that the news media would be buzzing with reports about the,
er, plain talk from LtGen Honore. After all, they loved John McCain and his
“Straight Talk Express” in 2000. But no. If you look at
Google News on the morning of September 21, 2005, all you see is
entries from conservative blogs. No MSM in sight. Now why would that be?

They are Closing the Hospitals in Britain

When I read James Bartholomew’s book
The Welfare State We’re In I didn’t really believe his claim that
the British National Health Service (NHS) hadn’t built a single hospital since it
was formed in 1948, and that mainly it had been closing hospitals in its 50 years
of monopoly health care provision. I resolved to keep an eye out for corroborating
evidence.

And of course who can forget the Canadian hospital in The Barbarian Invasions
that has a whole floor closed down—because of what, short staffing or something?

So here’s the story I have been waiting for. It’s from the London Spectator,
written by Ross Clark.
The NHS is busily closing small “cottage” hospitals all over Britain to cut costs. And
of course they are doing it in a stealth campaign.

The 16 in-patient beds at Bradford-on-Avon Hospital,
Wiltshire, were closed with three days’ notice in early August,
again supposedly as a temporary measure, in reaction to staff shortages.
Yet last week West Wiltshire Primary Care Trust
announced that they will not be re-opened.

Many of these small local hospitals were built centuries ago, funded by benefactions
and local subscriptions. They were, if you like, charities. But
they were “owned” by the whole community. In 1948 they were given to the NHS. Now
the NHS wants to close them.

Those of you that believe in single-payer health care might want to think
a bit about the closings of the cottage hospitals in England. When there
is a single payer then you had better expect that the local needs of local communities will get lost in the
shuffle of centralization and rationalization.

Because in a rational world it doesn’t make sense to have a little hospital
in Podunk, Iowa, or in any small community. Why, a small 20-bed hospital is just as inefficient as
a one-room schoolhouse.

China's Emerging Middle Class

When we can take a moment from the delicious pleasure of bashing the other guys on the Iraq
war, the evil Bush, hurricane Katrina, and right-wing ideologues on the U.S. Supreme Court, we often
turn to thoughts of China. What will happen when China takes over the world in 2050?

Here’s a little look at the emerging Chinese middle class, the “xiao zi” or “little bourgeois”
that is beginning to fill China’s bursting cities. Writes
Trudy Rubin,

Wander through some of Beijing’s many malls and watch crowds of young Chinese
chatting on cell phones, roaming in and out of Nine West, Mr. Klein, Givenchy,
Rolex watch stores, Starbucks, Pizza Hut or the local cineplex, and
you realize Americans have paid too little attention to the world’s biggest story

That’s hardly fair. We’ve been delighted to read about China’s amazing progress from the
miseries of the Cultural Revolution.

Of course, the xiao zi like this young woman, Jie, understand that they are living in the middle of a remarkable change.

"When my father was 30, he couldn’t imagine owning a car or an apartment or going
abroad," Jie said. When she was a child, her family lived in one tiny room, assigned to her
father by his state-owned employer. Jie and Yeu are now pushing 30; they own a two-bedroom flat,
a vacation home and two cars, and can afford to travel overseas.

But of course, nobody knows where China will go from here. That is the great question that is
coming up. What will the Chinese do with their power and their wealth half a century from now?

One Small Step for Academic Freedom

Last week Ohio state universities took a small step towards academic freedom for their students. As
David Horowitz writes,
“The Inter-University Council of Ohio has reached an agreement
with Senate sponsors of the Ohio Academic Bill of Rights (Senate Bill 24) to implement key
principles of academic freedom
in all public and private colleges and universities in the state.”

It’s a pity though that the Ohio media doesn’t seem to agree. According to Horowitz they spun the
agreement with Ohio State Senator Mumper as “Colleges deflect `Bill of Rights.’” But the Academic
Bill of Rights advocated by David Horowitz merely repeats words used nearly a century ago by the American
Association of University Professors. Today the university professors want to claim that Horowitz’s
Bill of Rights will chill free speech. But, again, as Horowitz writes:

the clause in the Mumper Bill that would bar professors from bringing their
academically irrelevant political prejudices into the classroom is taken almost verbatim
from the American Association of University Professors’ own classic statement on academic
freedom: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject,
but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which
has no relation to their subject.” (AAUP
1940 Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure.)

So why are the professors claiming that an implementation of their own statement on academic
freedom is in fact a violation of academic freedom?

Germans in a Funk

The German voters spoke clearly to their politicians in Sunday’s election. They are frightened. They
are fed up with the status quo but they are afraid of change. They are fed up with 5 million unemployed
but they don’t want to give their leaders a mandate to do anything about it.

That was clear from the reaction to the half-hearted trial balloon for a flat tax to replace Germany’s current complex system of income taxation. Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel brought flat-tax advocate Paul Kirchhof onto her staff and the SPD leader Schroeder jumped all over her. Obviously the German voters agree with him, since the substantial lead for the CDU/CSU coalition evaporated in the weeks after the flat-tax trial balloon.

It’s all so sad. The nation of Kant and Einstein is cowering in a cave like Wagner’s Fafner the dragon.

All in all, you could say that the Germans have had a rough time for the last century. Despite being the most advanced country in Europe they have been cursed with a second-rate political class. Bismarck was too smart for his own good and Kaiser Wilhelm too obtuse. The Weimar years were a lost weekend and
Adolf Hitler was, unfortunately, the most brilliant politician of the twentieth century.

A new aged seemed to dawn when economist Ludwing Erhard jump-started the economy in 1948—when Germany had nothing left to lose—and sparked the twenty-year Wirtschaftwunder. Then the Social Democratic Party returned to power, followed by the corrupt CDU Chancellor Kohl.

Well, the Germans invented the welfare state, so it is understandable that, with pride of ownership, they should be reluctant to admit its dreadful flaws and try Anglo-Saxon supply-side economics instead. We are not talking rocket science here. People should have responsibility for their own lives, as much as possible. Government can’t be trusted with the welfare of the people. Tax rates should be low and government spending as low as possible.

But the Germans are not yet ready to take the plunge. And that’s a shame.

Blair Dumps Kyoto

Whose side is British Prime Minister Tony Blair on? For years he’s been toeing the line on global
warming and providing verbal support for the European approach, the carbon emission limits of the Kyoto
accord. Now, according to
James Pinkerton, he’s changed his tune.

At the Clinton Summit in New York recently he said he would be “brutally honest.”

"My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now?
"No country," he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the
Kyoto treaty, or any other such
global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.

OK, fine. There’s nothing like taking a dose of reality, every now and again. So what policy does
Blair recommend now?

"What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology...
There is no way that we are going to
tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it."

Er, isn’t that the policy of the Bush administration? To deal with global warming by developing
technology rather than by imposing unrealistic caps on carbon emission?

San Francisco Earthquake was Worse

Was Hurricane Katrina the worst national disaster ever? According to
Donald Luskin the San Francisco earthquake was worse.

It was worse in terms of total damage, worse in terms of looting, worse in terms of violence, and
worse in terms of federal and local government miscues.

The performance of first responders in 1906 was as dubious as it was in 2005.
Half the San Francisco policemen and firemen walked off the job, leaving whole districts
virtually unprotected and unpatrolled. The U. S. Army, which had two infantry divisions
stationed right in the city, could not coordinate emergency response with the mayor.
Mayor Schmitz and Brigadier General Funston despised each other.

So that’s all right. But the behavior of the victims was just as bad.

The looting and other civil violence in New Orleans that shocked the nation was
far worse in San Francisco. Crowds looted homes and stores as the spreading fire approached
and engulfed them, ransacked hospitals for drugs, and cannibalized the few belongings of the
tens of thousands of refugees. Most shocking of all, some of the worst looting was done by
Army and California
National Guard troops, especially in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Wow. Now let us think. What was the similarity between the United States of 1906 and 2005?
What could it be? Of course! Evil Republicans controlled the White House and Capitol Hill!

Hero of the Hurricane: Wal-Mart

Out of the miasma of blame and media bias in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one American institution
is emerging from the cloud of ruins like a firefighter emerging from the ruin of the World Trade Center:
Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart was first with a monetary contribution to disaster aid. Wal-Mart had pre-positioned
goods like generators and Pop-Tarts (!) at its distribution centers. Wal-Mart announced it would
open mini-Wal-Marts in the disaster area to distribute vital food and supplies to disaster victims.
And Wal-Mart already has nearly all of its stores in the disaster area back in business.

Even the left has taken notice, but only to slap Wal-Mart with the usual canards. In The Nation
Liza Featherstone compliments Wal-Mart for their response:

Thank goodness, then, for Wal-Mart, which immediately sent 1,900 truckloads of
water and other emergency supplies to the afflicted. The company has also contributed $17
million to
the hurricane relief effort, and more than $3 million in merchandise.

Then she slips in the shiv:

A company capable of operating in such a coordinated, humane way should do
so not just in a disaster but every day. There is no reason Wal-Mart could not operate
in an equally streamlined, well-organized manner to make sure that labor laws (on overtime,
child labor, discrimination) are followed. There is no reason its impressive resources could
not be marshaled to remedy the daily, ongoing disaster that
so many of its workers face: low wages and inadequate healthcare.

Then she goes too far.

According to the conservative wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal editorial page,
the superiority of Wal-Mart’s Katrina response shows that the private sector is simply more
effective than the government. Well, yes, oddly enough, when you starve a government by draining
its resources and
electing officials who don’t believe in it, nothing seems to work.

Er, what exactly do you mean by people who “don’t believe” in government? You mean “belief” like in
religion? And what exactly do you mean about a government starved for resources? Which government
did you have in mind, exactly?

The commentary of economics professor
Thomas Sowell is perhaps a little more reliable.

[The] question is what set of incentives has the better track record for
getting the job done -- and especially getting the job done promptly when time can be
the difference between life and death.

The country does not have one dime more resources available when those resources are channeled
through government. The resources are just handled less effectively by government and dispensed
in an indiscriminate way that encourages people to
continue locating in the known path of predictable disasters.

What we saw after Hurrican Katrina is that individuals and corporations were able to act, and did act,
much faster than governments at all levels. That ought to teach us a lesson, even the faithful
believers in government at The Nation.

Nursing Home Owners Overwhelmed

The august New York Times kindly forgave the state and local governments in Louisiana for failing
to execute on their disaster recovery plans as hurricane Katrina bowled over their state. They headlined the government response thus:
“Federal Authorities Hesitated — Local Officials Were Overwhelmed.”
And rightly so. Everyone knows that when Democrats
fail to execute, it is Republicans that are to blame.

But no such understanding is being extended to nursing home operators that ignored
warnings to evacuate their patients. Salvadore and Mable Mangano had filed an evacuation plan and had a contract
with an ambulance service to get their patients out in an emergency but they didn’t pull the trigger, according to AP reporter
David Crary.
So 34 of their patients died.

Fortunately, the Louisiana state authorities are right on the ball with this one, and have issued criminal
indictments against the couple for failing to provide a prudent level of care for their patients.

"The pathetic thing in this case was that they were asked if they wanted to
move them and they did not," said Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti. "They were warned
repeatedly that this storm was coming. In effect,
their inaction resulted in the deaths of these people."

The compassion and concern shown by Louisiana state politicians for
the fate of helpless victims of rapacious nursing home operators is heartening. But the lawyer for the Manganos, Jim Cobb,
asserted that “his clients were innocent and had waited for a mandatory evacuation order
from the officials of St. Bernard Parish that never came.”

Leaving the Poor Behind

Critics of the president are shocked that in the evacuation of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina the
poor were left behind. Said Senator Kennedy: “those people who had cars and money got out,
and those people who were impoverished died.”

Well, Senator, and whose fault is that?

The ground theme of the conservative movement of the last half-century is that if you encourage
helplessness, and sustain helpless people in their helplessness with programs and pensions, as the
welfare state does, then you will increase the number of people who are “impoverished.”

New Orleans, according to Brendan Miniter,
is a poster child for the welfare state.

The welfare state failed the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and other
flooded New Orleans neighborhoods long before the levees gave way. This gets us back
to the question Sen. Kennedy wants Judge Roberts to answer about whether to adopt
a narrow view that prevents real progress from taking place. And it also explains
the role Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco--both Democrats--played in leaving
mostly poor, minority
citizens in a city that was clearly descending into chaos.

So let us ask another question. How could, how in the name of the poor that
have voted for Democrats ever since the dawn of time, how could Democratic politicians
like Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco have left the poor to perish in New Orleans?

We know the answer to that. The fact is that the Democrats instinctively like the poor to be
concentrated in the inner cities and helpless. If they were prosperous and
self-reliant, they would move out and start voting for Republicans, and we can’t have that.

So how are we going to help the people left behind next time? Writes Miniter:

Are we going to try another big-government program and expect better results
this time? Or are we now going to realize that ownership is the most likely path to the middle
class? School vouchers can help poor parents take ownership of their children’s education and
finally break the grip teachers unions have on the public schools. Health savings accounts and
private accounts for Medicaid and Social Security will give those on the lower rungs of the
economic ladder the skills as well as the assets necessary to climb higher. In late August
the levees broke in New Orleans. But the welfare
state had left the poor stuck in the mud long before that.

Amen to that.

More Liberal Brainwashing at the University

The stories keep trickling out. About the astonishing culture of liberal postmodernism in the university.
About how it is enforced with the threat of shame and the power of employment. Here is the latest
installment from a Resident Assistant at a Catholic university somewhere in America,
“Athena Kerry.”

“Athena” tells of the hiring process she went through to become a Resident Assistant at a residence
hall. The applicants were invited to design a residence hall. A couple of design requirements tipped
off the agenda.

How do you address the needs of non-Christian students who may need worship space? and

How would you encourage any students who may not support GLBTQA to become "persons of care"?

Well now. Imagine the powers at any university ever giving a single thought to the needs
of conservative Christian students for worship space. Why the very idea! Our universities have spent
the last half-century erecting every possible barrier they can imagine to marginalize Christianity at
the university. And now they are concerned about “non-Christian students who may need worship space?”

The RAs don’t like it, but they have been effectively cowed.

The few of us RAs that have banded together — all female, the men
say nothing, perhaps because many are themselves gay — quietly whisper "hypocrisy" in
back corners of basement apartments.
But any more than that threatens our employment.

Perhaps the men say nothing because they have taken the advice given to the Roman emperor Claudius by
his trusted friend in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
“Trust No-one! Not even me!” Certainly trust no-one at the university. You never know when they might be induced
to inform upon you.

Imagine the Pulitzers, the fame, the patents of nobility that would be trotted out for a liberal
that exposed such goings-on at a conservative university or at a big corporation!

Can Blogs Challenge the MSM on Katrina?

Sunday headline in
The New York Times: “Federal Authorities Hesitated — Local Officials
Were Overwhelmed.” Yes, the poor little local officials. The whole thing was just too big for them.
And the newsweeklies are echoing the MSM line.

Can the conservative blogs change the story? That is, can they change the story from
the current MSM groupthink that Bush failed and make the MSM’s shoddy reporting the story?

Blogger Jeff Goldstein
fisks the newsweekly coverage which is full of excuses for Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin but
ruthless in condemning Bush’s leadership style. We are to believe that

The feds are responsible for the failure. Bush failed to anticipate that
the City of NO wouldn’t follow its plan (what there was of one), that the Governor didn’t
understand her function in the chain of command, and then — once he did know — his management style
prevented him from wresting control of the state from Blanco.

As The New York Times says, local authorities were overwhelmed, poor dears, because the
dog ate their homework. Goldstein continues:

Of course, to believe Newsweek’s narrative attempt to frame the
disaster this way, one has to believe, as Newsweek apparently does, that the Federal
government is the only real government, and that the President and federal
agencies are — or need to be — in control of all local disasters.

So if the Federal government is “the only real government” does that mean there should be
a single national policy, dictated by the federal government, on, say, gay marriage?
Or is that where federalism and states rights kick in?

Enquiring minds would like to know.

The Meaning of New Orleans

What is the meaning of Hurricane Katrina? That is the big question as we move from the shock battle
of the blame game to the aftermath. And there is nobody better equipped to provide guidance than
the American philosopher Lee Harris, who writes for
TechcentralStation.com.
In three articles this week, Harris unpacks the hurricane aftermath with the practiced hands
of a man who has studied philosophy and has also lived life. In doing so he penetrates to the heart of
the problem that conservatives must deal with: uncertain place where reason and emotion fight for control.

In The Meeting of Rage and Reason Harris
writes of his rage at the incompetent and uncertain government response to the hurricane. But many people
did not respond as he did. Some of them did not feel his rage at all.
“Some friends went so far as to scold me for my loss of emotional self-control.
Some even accused me of responding irrationally.” Readers who know their Harris knew what was coming next:
“The German philosopher Hegel once said that no great thing has ever been done without passion.” Logic
and reason are all very well in their place. But don’t look for logicians to save you from the flood.

Think twice before you demean the rage that sometimes simply overwhelms our rational
judgment -- it may be one of those tricks by which a higher rationality has managed to make itself
manifest in the actual world around us. In short, it may exemplify what Hegel called
"the cunning of reason" -- namely reason’s ability to use even our most irrational impulses
to fulfill its own loftier purposes.

Next, in The State of Nature in New Orleans: What Hobbes Didn’t Know Harris takes apart
Hobbes’s famous apothegm that life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Not in state-of-nature New Orleans it wasn’t. People weren’t wandering around “solitary.” Not at all.

If you step back and look at what really happened in New Orleans, the fact will
jump out at you that human beings, instead of running around solitary and alone, immediately
clumped together into gangs and groups, of two fundamental divergent types:
one purely aggressive, and the other purely defensive.

Mankind is, even in the state of nature, a social animal.

But what about the rest of Hobbes’s list? Was life in state-of-nature destined to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short?”
Yes. It probably would be, for the group of people that were weak. But the robber bands of the
ruthless and aggressive young men were having a grand old time. Life for them was great, just as it
was thousands of years ago for Xenophon and his Ten Thousand on their march out of Persia back to Ancient Greece. How did this band of ruthless
men sustain themselves on the march?

They support themselves by capturing men, boys, girls, and women, herding them
together and selling them at the next slave market they come to, in order to buy provisions
for themselves. Does anyone feel the slightest guilt about it? No -- none at all. Not more
guilt than the young
looters and rapists of New Orleans felt during their rampage.

In the state of nature, the powerful fatten themselves upon the poor, and make them into slaves.
Life for them is great.

Finally, Harris wonders about the political impact of the government incompetence in
Katrina and the Political Waves. After 9/11 we gave the government enormous powers to
save us from the terrorists. But what good was all that power after Katrina? Americans got
to see on our TVs a parade of incompetents that did not know how to deploy the power and
the resources that we had
given them to keep us safe.

Katrina will have a profound impact on the way Americans think about their
government, just as 9/11 did -- only Katrina will almost certainly move public opinion in
the opposite direction from the way 9/11 moved it --
with consequences that are, for the moment, foreseeable.

It would certainly be wonderful if the American people, for once, decided they wanted the
government to have less power rather than more. But don’t count your chickens yet.

Sticking up for Price Gougers

The first thing that the media and camera-hungry politicians look for after a national
disaster are price gougers.
Woe betide the evil gas stations that put prices up when
supplies tighten! The reporters and politicians are shocked by the greed of the price gougers.
How could they do it?

Thanks for nothing, pal. When I went to my local Arco gas station, on Friday September 2, the
price was nobly unchanged from before the unundation of New Orleans, but what use was that? A
battalion of TV watchers had descended on the gas station and pumped every last gallon of gas into
their cars before I got there. So I got none. Fortunately, there were no evil price gougers in sight.
But evil gas hoarders had scarfed up all the precious
gasoline to top off their tanks. How could they?

So what is fair? To reward the hoarders who rush out and pump gas into
their cars before the price goes up? Or to raise the price to make the hoarders pay for their greed, and
keep the gas station open, providing gasoline for consumers at some price, however obscene.

Most people seem to forget that the reason we have an abundance of goods and services at our
disposal is that their producers and middlemen get to charge whatever price they want. Sometimes,
they put goods on sale (so consumers get to do some price gouging) and sometimes they raise prices (so
producers get to do some price gouging.) The point is that by letting producers adjust prices
according to market demand, we always have
goods and services available for purchase.

What about the carpenter who travels to New Orleans to help rebuild the city, asks
John Stossel? Is he a price gouger if he charges above the going rate for carpenters
in New Orleans before the flood? Hardly. It’s going to cost him a bundle to move to New Orleans and
provide his services there. He’s going to want to be handsomely rewarded for his labor and for
disrupting his family for months.

Any tradesman who treks to a disaster area must get higher pay than he
would get in his hometown, or he won’t do the trek. Limit him to what his New Orleans
colleagues charged before the storm,
and even a would-be hero may say, "the heck with it."

So is he evil for demanding more? On the contrary.

It’s the price "gougers" who bring the water, ship the gasoline, fix
the roof, and rebuild the cities. The price "gougers" save lives.

But that’s not what we Americans want to hear. We resent paying more for goods that are suddenly
in short supply. And we want someone to blame.

Get Your Education Myths Here

We all know a lot about schools. We know they are underfunded. We know that
teachers are underpaid. And we know that Johnny can’t read.

Actually, write
Jay P. Greene & Marcus A. Winters, we’re wrong.

Schools aren’t underfunded. Anything but.

In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil
— double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total
school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national
defense ($454 billion) and
more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

That means, if you prefer to look at it that way, that K-12 soaks up about five percent of GDP, about
the same level for the last 20 years. Want more?

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid.
In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour,
more than architects ($26.64), mechanical
engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Why do we have these wildly inaccurate ideas about education? It’s
partly because we all think we are education experts. But the main problem
is the propaganda machine of the education industry.

Unfortunately, teachers unions, school-board associations, and others
with a financial stake in education policy take advantage of our vulnerability
to myths about education. While most of us feel comfortable entrusting our
children to their teachers at school each day, the interest groups that
represent them and their schools do not warrant our trust. Teacher unions and the rest of the education establishment, like other interest groups, will support claims that advance their agendas regardless of
whether those claims are based on facts or myths.

And until we understand the real facts about education, our children will suffer.

Guardian Leftie Bails on Schroeder

You’d think that the chaps at Britain’s lefty Guardian would love German Chancellor Schröder.
He’s as solid a Social Democrat as you could imagine. He’s defending the European “social model” from
the evil forces of Anglo-American globalization. He’s earned standing “O”s for his strident (and
convenient) anti-Americanism. So why is
Martin Kettle bailing out on the Unions-Kanzler?

Well, it’s because of a personal failure of leadership, whatever that means.

The SPD’s central failure has been its inability to provide a
coherent social-market-based
answer to the problems posed for the nation state by globalisation.

Well that’s a thought! The problem is, of course, that there is no coherent social-market-based answer
to the problems posed by globalization. The whole idea of the social market is to ignore the
market and promise big fixed benefits and pensions to your supporters when you don’t have a clue
whether you will ever be able to pay those benefits without bankrupting the nation.

Actually, the Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere do have a coherent plan to solve
the problems posed by globalization. It is to retreat
as slowly as possible, pretending that they are delivering on their promises while slowly withdrawing
them, bit by bit.

But the laugh is on Kettle. Recent news indicates that the German economy is finally starting
to perk up after 15 years in the doldrums. Wage costs are down and exports are up. It’s all probably
due to Germany’s famous “Mittelstand,” the medium-sized business that dominate Germany’s exports.
If Angela Merkel wins the election and becomes Chancellor then
she will get the credit for the economic upswing that is already in progress.

Does Martin Kettle really want that?

Parents Saving Their Children

As everyone continues with the delicious pleasure of the blame game, it is well to remind ourselves
what the Katrina aftermath is really all about.

It is about children getting separated from their parents.

In this story reported by the Los Angeles Times we learn of seven children found
wandering around an evacuation center under the supervision of a seven-year-old.

How could that happen? How could parents so neglect their children as to allow them to become
separated from them in such a crisis? The answer is salutary. The children were picked up from
the roof of a building by a helicopter. Their parents elected to stay behind and get picked up later.
The children needed to be saved first.

“I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life
for my kids. They should feel the same way,” said [one of the fathers]. “They were shedding tears.
I said, `Let the babies go.’”

His daughter and her friends followed his advice.

“We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them,” Williams said.The helicopter didn’t
come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas,
and although Williams was reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact.

Fortunately, the story ended happily, as the publicity over the seven abandoned children enabled
the parents to find out where their children had been taken. And so the families were reunited. No
blame game, just
humans doing the right thing for their children.

The Welfare State in Action

What happened in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster,
writes
Robert Tracinski. It was man-made. Man-made over the last 40 years
of the welfare state.

What kind of people would not club together after a disaster to help each other?

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for
an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the
very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away,
frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to
treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction?
Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

Tracinski and his wife puzzled over this for a while, and then they realized what was going on.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of
the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior
that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and
protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and
doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around
and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. And they don’t use the chaos
of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses
and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is
going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never
worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off
of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

And of course, you would expect that the government of a welfare state city would
be incompetent. “In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials
is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters — not
to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.”

It is going to be interesting to see whose “narrative” tells the story of the battle of New Orleans.
Will it be the incompetence of President Bush, the man who failed to get federal assistance into the
city within moments after the disaster? Or will it be the corruption and incompetence of the government
and the people of New Orleans? It will be up to the American people to decide.

Allan Bloom Was On Our Side, Claims Liberal

Who would have thought that the man that liberals sneered at for his best-selling
The Closing of the American Mind would some day come to be celebrated at the
back of The New York Times Book Review as a writer who would probably be on the side
of liberals today?

You see, even while they were publicly excoriating Allan Bloom for his reactionary views,
some liberals actually appreciated what he was doing. According to
Jim Sleeper:

some thoughtful liberals found themselves reading “The Closing” under
their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse or repudiate it but sensing that
some reckoning was due.

So what is Sleeper’s game? What is he doing praising the Allan Bloom that criticized the liberal
academy so roundly twenty years ago?

He is using Bloom as a club to beat today’s generation of conservative activists, first of all
Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Kimball has written
Retaking the University: A Battle Plan and Sleeper wants to blunt his attack.

What exactly is Kimball’s plan, you wonder? It amounts to little more than to “say that the job of criticism is never finished”
and call for a serious look at tenure in the university. Some battle plan!

And then
there are other conservative activists like David Horowitz and his campaign for an “Academic
Bill of Rights” that must be stopped.

You see, Bloom was never a conservative ideologue. Oh no. Instead the University of Chicago
professor was “an eccentric intrepreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay
life [and]... mistrusted modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the
university’s culture must be adversarial.”

So that means that Bloom would side with liberal professors in their
intellectual citadel against the conservative hordes at the
gates? Well yes. You see, it’s all very well for David Horowitz to say that “I don’t want the universities
to be conservative.” But we know how far to believe that! Did you know that Horowitz’s “small board
of directors included John O’Neill of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth[?]”

Well. Need I say more? Allan Bloom, the Epicurean gay professor, would never had sided with the
public face of the evil Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!

The Battle of New Orleans

Updated from the war of 1812 to the present era.
(After lyrics by Jimmy Driftwood, sung by Lonnie Donegan, see
here,
here and
here.)

In August ’05 we took a little trip

Volunteers and Guardsmen down the mighty Mississip.

We took a little bacon and we took a little beans

And we caught the bloody looters in the town of New Orleans.



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



We coudn’t see no cops and we couldn’t see no mayor

But we saw their badges lying where they threw ’em in the sewer

We passed by Governor Blanco and the victims on the roofs

We saw all the results of the politicians’ goofs



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Our leaders said we could take ’em by surprise

If we didn’t fire our muskets til we looked ’em in the eyes

We held our fire til we seen their faces well.

Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave ’em... well.



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Yeah, they ran through the flood and they ran through the levees

Slipping on the badges of the cops-a-while-ago.

They ran so fast that the media couldn’t catch ’em

on down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



The hurricane had left the Crescent City in a mess

We need now Mayor Rudi ’cause he leads us through the stress.

He’ll clear away the sludge and rebuild the shattered dreams

And run for President from the town of New Orleans



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Yeah, they ran through the flood and they ran o’er the levees

Tripping on the badges of the cops-a-while-ago.

They ran so fast that the media couldn’t catch ’em.

Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

The 2008 Fix is In

What fools we were to think that George W. Bush was an imbecile. It is all so clear now. How he
arranged 9/11 just as the Arab nation suspects—but not as an excuse to invade the Land of the Two Holy Places, oh no. It
was part of a fiendish plan hatched by Karl Rove to boost Mayor Rudolph Guiliani and to scotch the presidential plans of Hillary
Clinton. Then Bush set up the war in Afghanistan and Iraq to
distract the anti-war left. And, of course, he crossed up the Democratic mayors and governors of the Gulf Coast
so that they would blow off their post 9/11 disaster planning and First Responders training.

So it was all a setup. Now that the inevitable hurricane has made a mess of the Gulf Coast we
are waiting for the other shoe to drop. President Bush knows, as he has planned all along, that he will soon be
“forced” by universal demand to appoint Guiliani as Gulf Coast Czar to clean up the mess. How did he
do it? No one will ever know.

And if the socially liberal Guiliani can be the favorite presidential candidate of conservative
Republican women because “he made us safe,” could independent suburban women possibly feel any different?

Might not even a few childless liberal nuns pause in their devotions before the altar of Roe v. Wade and crinkle
the ghost of a smile towards the knightly Rudi?

The brilliance of it. The strategery. The audacity. It is a coup that out-shines in brilliance
the very best efforts of of a Talleyrand, Metternich, or a Bismarck. And it brings to an end the
presidential ambitions
of the Clinton family, at least in this generation.

Children of Nature in the Midst of Civilization

How is it possible? After 160 years of public education, fifty years of social service agencies, a vast infrastructure of government programs and interventions, how is it possible for a great American city to descend into lawlessness in a couple of days?

The answer is developed by Nicole Gelinas in City Journal. New Orleans really doesn’t have a government worthy of the name.

New Orleans has no real competent government or civil infrastructure — and no aggressive media or organized citizens’ groups to prod public officials in the right direction during what will be, in the best-case scenario, a painstaking path to normalcy.

Its crime rate is ten times the national average. People with skills and drive have been leaving in droves over the last generation. It is full, as the American philosopher Lee Harris puts it, of “children of nature.”

How could there be so many children of nature in the United States of America in the year 2005? How could that happen? Whose fault is it? That is something to think about.

The Blame Game Begins

As the Democrats crank up the blame game, citing a planned “cut” in the budget of the
New Orleans District Corps of Engineers budget
here and
here as a reason to blame President Bush for
the devastation, conservative
Michael Ledeen waxes lyrical about the insouciance of cities that live
under constant threat of annihilation.

For decades, Democrats have excoriated the Corps of Engineers as a wasteful organization that harms
the environment with its dam-building and river channelization projects. Now they are going to use
“budget cuts” as a cudgel to beat President Bush.

But Ledeen writes about how cities like New Orleans, Venice, and Naples, that face constant
threat from inundation from water or blanketing with volcanic ash, must affect a bold face against
the furies of Nature. New Orleans, he writes,

has long been admired for its literary creativity, its exceptional food,
and its wonderful music, and deplored — albeit also frequented — because of its legendary
corruption and degradation. The possibility of its destruction no doubt played a role in the
character of its people, and it is no accident that an annual bacchanal took place there, in
the riotous celebrations of Mardi Gras. Death has always been omnipresent in the consciousness
of the city; dancing in defiance of death was the city’s trademark, and the spirited music that
defined New Orleans for much of the world was played at
the happiest occasions, and at the most famous funerals.

In the coming months the people of the United States will dip generously into their pockets and their hearts to help
the people of New Orleans as they rebuild their city and their lives. We all hope that our
Democratic friends will pitch in and help.