The Surge is Working, But...

It’s pretty clear that the “surge” in Iraq is making progress.  And as Dean Barnett observes, the left is taking it badly.

SO HOW HAS THE LEFT reacted to this positive development? Poorly, angrily, and childishly. In other words, characteristically.

Actually, it is not surprising that the surge is working.  The surge is a military operation in which the US Armed Forces are doing military things, like searching out and destroying Al Qaeda forces in places where they are concentrated enough to make it worth while to attack. 

Before the surge the strategy of the United States was to “stand up” the security forces of Iraq and keep US combat forces in the background as much as possible.  It was the failure of this strategy that provoked the appointment of Gen. Petraeus and the adoption of the surge strategy.

But what comes next?  What in fact do the various factions in Iraq want and what will they do to get it?

Right now Iraq exists under the umbrella of US power and the native Iraqi political and military forces are restrained by that power. 

In my view the clearing out of Al Qaeda that seems to be the goal of the surge merely sets up a cleaner civil war between Shia and Sunni than might occur if Al Qaeda were in the full bloom of its power in Iraq.

We have not heard much about the Shia militias since they withdrew from Baghdad at the beginning of the surge.  Doubtless we will hear from them when the surge is over and the US combat forces start to leave Iraq.

Then we will find out what kind of powers are contesting for Iraq and what they are prepared to do in order to win.

Debating YouTube

Should Republican presidential candidates descend to the level of YouTube?  Actually, more to the point, should they subject themselves to the Children-of-the-Welfare-State worldview of the YouTube generation?  Hugh Hewitt says: No.  But Patrick Ruffini thinks that a Republican YouTube debate is on, whether we like it or not.

Governor Romney says that he’d be open to participating in a rescheduled debate. Mayor Giuliani expressed support for a date change[.]

The question for Republicans is whether we can turn the depressing lefty helpless-victim mentality of the YouTube questioners into a plus.

Can a presidential candidate say to a YouTuber: “I’m sorry, but I disagree with your underlying assumptions.  We’ve tried that government-centered approach and it doesn’t work.”  Are you allowed to respectfully disagree with a voter?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred politicians don’t even try.  Because there is nothing to be gained by insulting anyone.

The thing is: Republicans need to be able to confront the comprehensive and mandatory national government program approach to politics and persuade the American people that they have something better to offer.

Otherwise the American people will sensibly vote for the party that really believes that government can make a difference in peoples’ lives.

Alarm bells on China

Classical liberals thought that they had won the argument over free trade back in the nineteenth century.  But the apologists for directed trade or mercantilism keep popping up again.  Like William Hawkins from the US Business and Industrial Council. 

The "global economy" is not based on the "harmony of interests" once envisioned by 19th century classical liberals, but on cut-throat competition. Winners and losers in these commercial contests impact the national societies in which they operate... There is no world community in any meaningful sense. Energetic nations rise, complacent ones decline.

So the Chinese deliberately keep their currency low in order to build an industrial base.  The gush of cheap Chinese goods puts industrial corporations elsewhere in the world out of business.  If the Chinese are not willing to increase the value of the yen:

it will be necessary to adopt other measures, such as the countervailing duties used to offset other subsidies.

Of course, the assumption that Hawkins makes is that the low yuan policy of the Chinese is in fact the best policy for the Chinese to achieve national power and greatness.  But is it?  There is a cost for the low yuan, the huge overhang of foreign exchange reserves and US sovereign debt.  Hawkins assumes that this strengthens China and weakens the rest of the world.

But Hawkins is supposing that the crude power calculations of politicians is correct, that emphasizing exports is the way to international power. 

More likely it is true that a more balanced growth policy is the better course.  What good did Germany’s national greatness policy after 1871 do for it?  It ended in the ruin of 1918 and 1945.

It could be that China is growing as an energetic nation in spite of its mercantilist policies.

Or it could be that China is emphasizing industrial growth purely as a strategy to mop up the internal migration (said to be as high as 25 million a year) from the country to the city.

"Can I Help You?"

It’s a Gilded Age, writes Peggy Noonan, an age of fabulous wealth, but the manners aren’t so good.  Noonan reports daydreaming into a store on Madison Avenue recently

"Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark.

Hmm. And another store:

"How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

The angle, of course is that the shop assistant is trying to engage, to have a relationship.  And that makes it easier to sell.

No doubt.  But I rather look on the bright side of this.

It is, I believe, hard work to be cheerful and outgoing to every customer that comes into the store.  This is particularly so when you enter the produce department at Safeway and you are greeted by a worker restocking the food displays. 

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

I find this affecting.  There is nothing in the world that I would find more difficult than to stop what I am doing to take a customer half way across the store to find a product and be cheerful about it.  Yet the folks working at Safeway greet me like this every time I go in.

I try to respond by being cheerful in return.

I found out recently why they are so careful to greet me.  They never know when a mystery shopper might come by.  If they don’t greet the mystery shopper then they get into trouble.

They work hard in retail, and they do it right out in the open, not hidden, like many of us, in a cubicle.  I think they deserve our respect and consideration.

It’s a question of manners.

Mean-spirited Universities Sit on Cash

Our Democratic friends in the House of Representatives recently passed an education bill to take $18 billion away from the evil student loan industry and give it to students.  We at Road to the Middle Class have criticized them for this, a mindless shoveling of more cash and subsidies to the universities. Now Senator Kennedy is pushing the bill through the Senate.

But that’s not the real problem, writes Lynne Munson.  The problem is that universities are sitting on piles of cash, like Scrooge, watching it grow through the magic of compound interest.  But do they spend it?  Oh no. 

The value of college and university endowments skyrocketed 17.7 percent last year, while private foundation assets increased 7.8 percent. Just 3.3 percent of the increase in academic endowments is attributable to new gifts. Most of the gain is a result of stingy, outdated endowment payout policies that retain and perpetually re-invest massive sums.

Regular private foundations are required to spend out five percent of their endowments every year.  But universities only average a four percent payout.

How does that work out in an actual university?  Munson takes a look at Stanford.

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

We know why the select universities all charge tuition.  They charge because people will pay it.  Parents are willing to pay big bucks to get their children into Stanford and other select colleges.  Although colleges talk a good game about diversity and broadening access to higher education, in reality they charge whatever the traffic will bear.

Anyway Congress has the whole thing well in hand.  It’s the student loan companies that are to blame!

The Cruelty of the Welfare State

Everyone knows that the welfare state is the most wonderful thing in human history.  Finally, after the madness of the nineteenth century when the poor went unfed and the homeless unsheltered and children uncared-for, we have a system that cares.

Then there are the folks like us here at Road to the Middle Class that believe that the welfare state is the cruelest, most uncaring system in history.  This column by Jennifer Roback Morse, author of Smart Sex and Love and Economics, on the foster-care system suggests that we here are right and “everyone” is wrong.  Well of course we are.

The story concerns the death of a child in foster care.

Malachi Jermaine McBride-Roberts life was brief and difficult. He was born to a teenage mother living in foster care. After she ran away, he was sent to live with another foster family.

So this kid was a second-generation foster kid!  How could it happen?  Well, the short answer is that the system encourages it.  First of all it encourages birth parents to hang on to their parental rights.

Some birth parents consider the best of all worlds to be keeping parental rights, seeing the child once in a while, but letting someone else do the hands-on child-care work. Unfortunately, the system enables, rather than discourages this posture.

Why be surprised?  Isn’t that always how the welfare state works.  And, of course the local bureaucracy of social workers and attorneys live off the process, the process of managing children in foster care.  And the last thing they want to do is make a mistake.

Although California law requires infants to be “fast-tracked” for permanent placement, attorneys and judges don’t want their decisions overturned on appeal.

We know, of course that swift adoption is the best option for the children of children, particularly, as in this case, the child of a teenager with no possible means of support.

Adoption removes a child from the foster-care system. Adoptive parents become accountable for a child in a way that the bureaucratic government agency never can be. Adopted children do better than the children of single mothers. And even the average child of an average single mother has far better life chances than a child in foster care.

But the system doesn’t encourage that.  Instead it rewards bureaucrats and attorneys who dot their “I”s and cross their “T”s.  And of course the reality of adoption politics is that the government bureaucrats and the attorneys get the ear of the legislators.

What would be the best way to define a cruel and unjust society?  I’d say a society that allowed children to moulder away in foster care for their entire childhood.

And that’s what we have under the current cruel and unjust welfare state.

Grabbing The High Ground

Back in the old days before the French Revolution the world was a conservative place. Rigidly conservative.

And the reason was pretty simple.  In the agricultural age if you made a mistake out on the farm it was curtains.  The only thing to do was to stick with what worked: tradition.

But since the Enlightenment tradition has been on the defensive.  In fact even gradual reform has been on the defensive.  Human rights and reason have carried all before them. 

In the old days, the reformer had to prove his point; now the traditionalist had to show cause why mindless tradition should be preferred over rational reform.  And never mind what Edmund Burke said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

That’s a big deal, as Ben Shapiro writes.

In the realm of politics, the question of burden of proof is a vital one. Whoever has the burden of proof is at a disadvantage.

The issue of gay marriage illustrates this.  Reverend Reggie Longcrier asked the Democratic presidential candidates this week:

[W]hy is it still acceptable to use religion to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights?

When you put it that way—and the MSM usually does—you put yourself in the driver’s seat, forcing the opponents of gay marriage to show cause why we should not implement gay marriage immediately.

For the argument against gay marriage is usually an argument from tradition.  That’s the way it’s always been and we don’t know what could happen if we change things.

Actually, in the area of gay marriage we do have rational knowledge.  We know that children need to live with their married mother and father if they are to be safest.  And we know that the “sexual constitution” by which men are socialized from their natural predatory instinct to be faithful fathers and providers is harmed by promotion of “diverse” lifestyles.

We know that where the family is concerned the burden of proof ought to be on the people who want change.

But still.  As of right now the burden of proof is on the traditionalists.  On almost everything.

And that has to change.

British Conservatives in a Pickle

In Britain they are trying to dry out after 50 year floods.  But in the Conservative media they are drowning from the incompetence of Conservative leader David Cameron.  At least that’s what ASimon Heffer thinks. 

The leader of the Labour Party, he writes, has shown himself to be a “serious politician.”

The Leader of the Opposition, by contrast, has no programme other than a concatenation of stunts... He finds the traditional beliefs, and the traditional believers, of his party utterly detestable.

Not surprising, when you consider that his only proper job before entering politics was in PR.

Here in the US Cal Thomas has written off not just the British Conservative Party but the whole United Kingdom.  Reviewing the Conservative Party policy document on welfare reform, “Breakdown Britain” and the hostility of the British courts to religion he expects things to get worse, not better.

Britain is broken. The cause runs deeper than the Tories can address, even if they win the next election, which seems unlikely.

In the present political season Republicans in the US are not feeling too good.  The Iraq War is a mess and Democrats are raising a lot more money to fund the 2008 presidential election. But a look at Britain tells us just how good we have it.

The reason that David Cameron is struggling is that he is leading a center right party in a country with two center left parties.  He is in the same position as US liberals.  Living in a conservative country they have to pretend that they are patriotic and respectful of religion and traditional values to get elected.

But everyone knows that liberals think that patriotism is really nascent fascism, and God is a delusion.

In Britain the Conservatives have to pretend that they are really centrists, that they really love government schools and government health care.   When everyone knows they do not.

The Secret Life of Cars

You may not have wondered how a car makes you feel, but BMW has.  That’s what Richard Morrison found out.  Says the “driver interfaces psychologist” at BMW:

We’re constantly asking the question: what kind of psychological space is a car?

Well, of course, we’ve all wondered that.  And we’ve wondered how many people call their car by a nickname (26 percent of women), the importance of cup-holders (they make you feel safe).  And you’ve wondered how many people sing in the car (four times as many during the morning rush hour as the evening rush hour).  It’s all there in BMW’s Secret Life of Cars.

But the big question is why people drive their cars rather than take public transportation.  The answer is perfectly simple.

Time and again, car owners identified the “cocoon-like security” of the car — the enjoyment of personal space, the chance it gives for “me time” — as the reason why they prefer to drive, even where public transport is cheaper and more convenient[.]

But you knew that.

Democrats' New War on Poverty

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare a new war on poverty, writes Linda Chavez.

Mr. Obama wants to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, which would price the lowest-skilled workers, especially young blacks, out of the job market, not to mention increase inflationary pressure on wages.

Mr. Edwards would have the government create 1 million new temporary jobs for the chronically unemployed, despite abundant research that shows these programs have no lasting impact in reducing poverty or increasing long-term employment among the poor.

Oh dear.  All this stuff has been shown to be nonsense time and time again, most notably by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So why don’t Democrats propose something that might actually work?

The elephant in the room, of course is family breakdown.  As Chavez relates:

Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families only 8.3 percent.

This really isn’t rocket science.  Government welfare benefits encourage family breakup and broken-up families reduced to the mammalian minimum of mother and child are much poorer than mother-father-children families.

Chavez writes that Democrats worry about not being “inclusive” or of being “intolerant” if they “talk up marriage.”

I wonder about that. 

The problem for Democrats goes deeper than inclusiveness and intolerance.  It’s not airy-fairy notions that hold them back from reforming the welfare state.  It is political survival.

Democrats’ whole political support system is built upon patronage and clientage, playing Lady Bountiful and distributing benefits to the tenants on the liberal plantation.  People that have risen out of poverty through work and family find that they don’t need government.  That’s when they stop voting Democrat.  And that’s when all the Democratic government employees find themselves out of a job.

And Democrats know it. 

The "New Victorians:" a Trend or a "Trend?"

It would all seem pretty sensible if it weren’t that the trendy New York Observer’s Lizzy Ratner was all over it.  According to  Suzanne Fields the new generation of twentysomethings are getting married earlier and having children.

Websites for "modest clothing" are expanding, and Wendy Shalit, who earlier wrote about "A Return to Modesty," has a new book called "Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good."

And in a telling comment, the daughter of sex goddess Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) illuminates the other side of the sexual revolution.

"When you’re 12," says Molly Jong Fast, "there’s nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding."

Erica Jong had books to sell so she had an excuse.  But the rest of womankind doesn’t do well with open marriages and a “sexual life.”  Women don’t do too well with abortions and empty cradles.  But a lot more women are going to have to be hurt before we change the culture to make it more friendly to families and mothers and children.

But is this really a trend?  Or just media hype?

Dean Barnett's 9/11 Generation

We know all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish Dean Barnett.  Forty years ago, they (that is, we, since I’m a boomer) checked out of their generational challenge. 

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.

But now we have the 9/11 generation.  And it is starting to look as if it is very different.  Barnett has been taking a look at the young people signing up for the armed forces and he likes what he sees.

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who... could have chosen to do anything with their lives.

Something about the culture has changed.  Barnett speaks about a young man who graduated recently from Harvard and obtained a commission in the United States Marine Corps.

After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

So what is it about these young men? LTC Kurt Schlichter of the California National Guard has an answer:

"The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

Here’s another idea.  After the cultural revolution of the last half century young men have discovered that they have a real problem in choosing and living a life that has meaning.  Men have been marginalized and scapegoated out of their respected roles and fathers and providers and they have been forbidden to complain.

But what young men can do is what they have always been able to do.  They can offer themselves and their lives in the defense of the nation’s women and children.

Things haven’t changed that much after all.

What Do Women Want?

The feminists don’t want to hear it, according to Megan Basham, but married women are trickling out of the workforce.  And it’s because they don’t want to work full-time. 

Only 21 percent of working mothers report a preference for a 40+-hour work week, while only 16 percent of at-home moms say the same.

What could be driving this?  Feminists say it’s the post 9/11 economy.

Rather than admit the obvious, that women increasingly favor cutting back their careers when their children are young, some feminists are employing their own brand of voodoo economics. Women aren’t opting out, they’re being pushed out, they say.

There is this idea out there that working for a living, having a brilliant career, is the reason for living. Sorry to rain on the parade but it ain’t so.

Men work mainly so that they can get access to women.  Down the ages, women have preferred monogamy, and they have preferred men that didn’t look like losers—in short, men with jobs.  So men figure that they’d better get a job.

High status women, the ones that men fight over, are a different proposition.  Men with a taste for them need more than a job; they need a fortune, or a fortunate political career.

Women work because... Yes why do women go out to work?  Many women work because they have to.  Always have, always will.  But we are talking about the upper-class feminist ladies, women like the First Feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Second Feminist Betty Friedan.  What they wanted was liberation, liberation from the fundamental work of women, which is, of course the only really important work in the world, the work of generation. 

But a generation after the intoxication of the Second Wave of feminism many women are finding that the most important thing in their lives is children—their children.  So they are asking themselves why they are out in the world working themselves to exhaustion when all they can think about is their children.

It’s a good point.

When the US Leaves Iraq

Call me a conspiracist, but I believe that US political class has already decided to leave Iraq.

I base this on the behavior of presidential candidate John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign.  Time and time again he would rail at the Bush administration for not doing something—like ramping up training of Iraqi security forces—and then it would turn out six months later that the Bush administration was doing it, but just hadn’t splashed it all over the media.

It was as though Kerry knew what the Bush administration was going to do next week, and used the knowledge to accuse the Bushies of not doing it this week.

All this year the Democrats are pushing troop withdrawal resolutions in Congress.  Why would they bother except to whip up their netroot base?  In September, after Gen. Petraeus reports, the Bush administration will either announce that the surge has been a success, in which case it will start to draw down troops, or it will admit it not quite a success—and start to draw down troops.

Democrats are doing what Kerry did in 2004, demanding that Bush do what he is going to do anyway.

But we center-right people are better than that.  We are people with serious responsibilities and a serious strategic outlook. We should start thinking about what comes next.  To help us Austin Bay has set forth the seven likely scenarios in Iraq after the US leaves.  As he points out, he’s not the only one thinking about contingencies.

Business and government make plans. Every plan anticipates a future outcome. Since the future can’t be predicted, the best plans acknowledge uncertainty. Acknowledging uncertainty means accepting risk -- the risk of being wrong.

So here are the seven scenarios for Iraq post withdrawal.  Go read the whole thing if you want the details.

1. Three new countries
2. Regional Shia-Sunni war
3. Turkey expands
4. Shia dictatorship
5. “Gang-up” of Shia and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs
6. Chaos
7. The Iraqi center holds

Doesn’t look too promising, does it?

My own feeling echoes that of the Asia TImes’ Spengler.  He points out that  proper nations “have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists.”  They need people who show up on time and get along with the neighbors.

Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

Sounds pretty shocking, doesn’t it?  But we had two civil wars here in the US.  And between them they pretty well took care of the rejectionists, first of all the Brit loyalists and secondly the Southern slaveholders.  Since then, we have gone without civil war, which is nice.  Everyone gets along with the neighbors except when liberals come along and heighten peoples’ group identity instead of their American identity.

But there are always some troublemakers.

In the Middle East the west has been keeping the safety valve screwed down for decades because we want access to the oil with no interruptions and no shenanigans while the natives fight it out to decide who gets the revenue from the oil.

But what about the people of the Middle East?  What do they want?

Eating beef 'is less green than driving'

They’re coming to take you away, those lefty global warming types, those watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag.

Now some Japanese scientists have computed that, according to the Daily Telegraph, eating meat contributes to global warming. 

Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday.

The reason, of course, is that a lot of methane gets released into the atmosphere during the life of  a humble cow, on account of the anaerobic digestion going on in the multi-chambered bovine GI tract.

Well?  Is that too much?  Shall we give up our meat to save the planet?

Or should we emulate Charlton Heston? You’ll only take my meat out of my cold, dead hands.

And here’s another fact.  A lot of methane gets discharged into the atmosphere as a result of wet rice cultivation.

Should we stop eating rice?

Dem House Solves College Costs With Subsidies and Regulation

With college costs soaring way above the rate of inflation and many graduates finding that they can’t find jobs to pay off their loans, what would you do if you were Congress?

Naturally, you would increase the already vast subsidies for higher education and you would get tough on price gougers with new regulations, as reported by Ruth Mantell of Marketwatch.

The House passed a student-loan bill Wednesday that would boost college financial aid by about $18 billion over the next five years and cut federal subsidies to lenders.

If you are willowy blonde Anya Kamenetz, writing a youth-oriented financial advice column on Yahoo called “Generation Debt,” this all seems right and proper.  She quotes Democrat George Miller.

"This bill is a remarkable step forward in our efforts to help every qualified student go to college," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the legislation. "With this bill, we are saying that no one should be denied the opportunity to go to college simply because of the price."

 And the delicious thing for Kamenetz is that if you can’t afford to pay back your student loan, you don’t have to.

[G]raduates whose earnings don’t exceed 150 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for a single person) would be exempt from repaying student loans.

Isn’t that nice?  Another subsidy program which will sluice more money into the bottomless pit of government education.  But there will be strong controls to penalize colleges that increase their tuition too much!

Starting in 2011, any college with high, outlying tuition increases would have to submit a report to the education secretary explaining why. After two consecutive years, the college would be placed on "affordability alert status."

That will set them quaking in their shoes.

Twentysomething Kamenetz has perfect MSM credentials: an Ivy League education and a stint with the Village Voice.  But the commenters on Yahoo weren’t too impressed.

They could see what was going down.  They knew that more subsidies means more subsidies.  They were contemptuous of the idea that you should only repay your student loan if you could afford it.  Why that would mean that kids would sign up for basket-weaving and never try to earn a thing after they graduate!

It’s the great challenge for conservatives in the next generation.  To educate Americans to the idea that more subsidies equals bigger government and less room to breathe, that the more the government helps us the more we have to turn to the government for help.

It seems too complex an idea to communicate, and yet the Yahoo readers seem to get it.

Who Is Norman Borlaug?

Everybody knows Paris Hilton.  But who the heck is Dr. Norman Borlaug?  Like, whatever?

Step away from that remote!  And listen.

Norman Borlaug is the guy behind the green revolution, the advances in grain breeding that has produced staggeringly large increases in crop yield in the third world.

It started in Mexico, as Elizabeth M. Whelan reports.

Over the course of 20 years, he developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat. The results were spectacular: Mexico evolved from a wheat importer to a net exporter by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, Dr. Borlaug’s work nearly doubled wheat production in Pakistan and India, saving millions from starvation.

You’d expect the media and the liberals to be all over this guy like a cheap suit, but somehow it never took. 

Perhaps it’s because he helped people help themselves.  Our MSM buddies much prefer people who help people by handing out other peoples’ money.  You can’t do much media without emotionally compelling victim situations that can only be solved by handing out other peoples’ money.

Perhaps it’s because a lot of the funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation.  You know, evil oil money.  Remember how the evil John D. Rockefeller put the father of magazine feature writer Ida M. Tarbell out of business more than a century ago?  Who can forget?  

And then there’s the GM connection.  Who knows how much of that high-yield grain is Frankenfood! 

This week, Dr. Norman Borlaug was awarded in the Capitol Rotunda the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian award.

I’d say he deserved it.

The Not-so All-Night Debate on Iraq

The United States Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body, and last night they debated a motion to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq.

But it turned out not to be quite the extravaganza we were promised, according to Shailagh Murray, Paul Kane and Debbi Wilgoren in the Washington Post. 

Reid, the majority leader, initially had threatened to schedule votes throughout the predawn hours. But he agreed shortly after midnight to delay even procedural votes until 5 a.m. That meant most senators could grab a few hours of shut-eye, so long as a few remained in the chamber[.]

Sen. Reid went to bed and a handful of senators kept the debate going, alternating Republican and Democratic throughout the night. 

That’s the way the WaPo reported it.  At The Captain’s Quarters, Ed Morrissey wrote about calling Majority Leader Reid’s bluff.  According to Morrissey Reid figured that Republicans would call for a quorum and when it failed would go home for the night and allow Reid to accuse Republicans of “dodging the debate.”  Instead, Republicans showed up for debate and Reid went home.

The overnight session has done nothing except to annoy Republicans into a more unified caucus, and to make Harry Reid look like a fool. One might have expected a Senator from Nevada to recognize a busted flush when he saw it.

At least the MoveOn.org folks got their media event.

In the Belly of the Beast

The reason we need the welfare state, liberals tell us, is because we need a safety net to protect us from the excesses of the free enterprise system.  Without the rights and the protections of an activist government people would suffer.  Corporations have no mercy.  The moment you can’t do the job, you are out on the street.  That’s why we need workers’ rights and consumers’ rights and a host of benefits provided and enforced by government.

No doubt we do need protection from corporations.  And fortunately governments are only too glad to pass laws to curb their power. So when someone gets chewed up by a corporation they can hope for redress. 

So, we’ve taken care of Big Business.  But what about Big Government?  What about Big Education and the good folks hiding behind Our Teachers?

Unfortunately Big Ed can chew you up and spit you out just like the robber barons of old.  Of course, they don’t have the company goons, like they did in the old days. No, they are much more sophisticated.  They can rough you up and kick you out without leaving a mark on you, at least not on the outside, as Nancy Coppock found out.

Nancy worked as “a middle school remedial reading teacher in a small Texas town outside this major university town.”

I took my job very seriously because to me, the best thing I could do for mid- to below-average students, many minority and poor, was to make sure they could read to the best of their ability.

You can say that again.

One special ed student, Duane, had extreme emotional problems.  Cunning and streetwise, Nancy was still “able to shame the young man into accepting just discipline” and the school principal noticed and recognized her for her achievement.

Then came the day when Duane suddenly “plunged a sharp pair of scissors downward toward my face” and stopped just inches from Nancy’s eyes.

Nancy reported the incident but asked that the boy not be punished.  She wanted to settle the problem herself.  But she never got a chance.  The boy was not punished, yet eventually came “into the office and demanded to be punished.”

Nancy approached the boy’s psychiatrist and requested a chance to attend a session with the boy; the boy needed absolution, she told him. 

Oops!  Back up Nancy.  Wrong religion!

I was told it would be *inappropriate *for me to attend another session and was sent on my way. Evidently, the doctor went straight to the school counselor, who then typed up a memo listing the reasons why I should be sent home from school because I was dangerous to Duane.

Then “I was informed that I was to not return to work until a psychiatrist had examined me and found me suitable for work.”  Then nobody would talk to her at school.  Then she was being tested by a psychologist.  Then she was telling the principal that she wasn’t being treated fairly.  Then she was told: “Well that’s your opinion.”  She decided to quit at the end of the term, but she got to teach Duane until then.

On the last day of school, Duane cried like a big baby, wondering what he was going to do without me... He was in anguish because he knew I had been punished for what he had done.

They spat Nancy out.  But they saved the system, and it can continue to make a difference in the lives of kids.  That’s a relief.  Duane went on to commit a robbery and shot at a pursuing policeman; but at least the school did all it could.

One thing is certain.  The school district needs additional funding so that it can deal better with at-risk kids.

The thing about people and corporations is that, however bad they are, you can shame them, and fine them, and tax them, humiliate them, and cut them down to size.

In fact the dirty little secret about people is that, from time to time, if you extend a little love to them they will kneel at your feet.

But government is shameless and it is sovereign. 

Who will protect us from the government?

It's a Regional War, Stupid

From the very beginning of the war on terror, it was obvious that the war was not just a war against Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but a war to prevent the emergence of a single regional hegemon in the Middle East.  Democrats profess not to know this, and Republicans barely seem to know it.  But President Bush does, according to Michael Ledeen.   In his press conference Monday, the president said:

The fight in Iraq is part of a broader struggle that’s unfolding across the region.

The fight is, of course about the expansionary ambitions of Iran.  It has been the policy of the United States for decades to oppose the emergence of a single controlling power in the Middle East, for the obvious reason that such a hegemon would come to control all the oil in the region.

First it was Saddam Hussein who was the problem.  That is why we went to war in the first Iraq war, to prevent Saddam from moving south from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia.

Now that Saddam’s regime has been liquidated, the problem is Iran.  So whether the United States stays in Iraq or retreats, the problem is still the same.

And it’s likely that the Middle East will remain a problem until the end of the oil age. 

Germany and France on Collision Course

The euro has climbed to stratospheric levels in recent months, approaching $1.40 to the euro.  But  Ambrose Evans- Pritchard thinks it will all end in tears.  The high euro is sitting on the back of a revived German economy, achieved by a signal achievement of German companies in moderating the wages of German workers.

By screwing down wages, Deutschland AG has deflated costs since 1995 by 20pc against France, 30pc against Spain, and 40pc against Italy.

Unfortunately the other countries in the euro are hurting badly, France in particular, and they want a weaker euro.  In particular the French love their Airbus.

Airbus chief Louis Gallois said a rate above $1.35 means death for European aviation. "If there is a prolonged slippage in the dollar much beyond that, then we need to ask ourselves if we can still build airplanes in Europe," he said.

The problem all along for the euro is that it needs harmonized economies to succeed.  But the EU nations are not harmonized economically.  Each country sports it own beloved home-grown market distortions reflecting its correlation of political forces.

The Germans are sensitive to the need for a successful economy. They had three economic meltdowns in the twentieth century and it seems to have concentrated their minds.

Plus they are, or were, the most advanced country in Europe.

However it may seem from the point of view of schadenfreude a economic row between Germany and France really would not be fun for anyone.

L.A. Diocese Pays for Abuse

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay out over $600 million to plaintiffs to settle claims of sexual abuse by clergy, reports the Associated Press.

The settlement pushes the total amount paid out by the U.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that amount paid by the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

It is, of course, right and proper that the Catholic Church should be held to account for the abusive behavior of its priests and religious.

And it is a tragedy that the hard work and the contributions of lay Catholics, who responded to the call made in the nineteenth century to first build the school and then build the church, should be paid out in this way.

What many of us would like to know, and of course what we can never know, is whether the abuses represent the culture of the pre-Vatican II culture or the post-Vatican II culture, or both.

The simple answer, of course, is that all organizations, secular or religious, big or little, cover up to protect the institution.  And in the effort to hide the truth the individuals that the institution is sworn to serve get chewed up and spat out.

The Catholic Church can be grateful that this evil has been brought to the light.  Other great institutions should take note, and clean out their stables before it is too late.

Religion is Safe With Democrats Says TIME

For years Democrats have warned that religion and politics don’t mix.  You’d expect them to say that because Democratic voters are secular.  Democratic voters don’t mix religion and politics.  In fact they don’t really “get” religion at all.  If they feel a religious impulse they call it “spirituality.”

The trouble is that the American people are religious.  That makes it difficult for Democrats to win elections.  But now things are changing.  Hillary Clinton is talking about her faith.  John Edwards is organizing conference calls with progressive religious leaders, and Barack Obama “has run six faith forums in New Hampshire,” according to Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy in TIME.

In this campaign season, if Clinton and Barack Obama and John Edwards are any measure, there will be nothing unusual in Democrats’ talking about the God who guides them and the beliefs that sustain them.

Gibbs’ and Duffy’s article about the Democratic focus on religion in this campaign cycle is a classic.  It takes an issue that has been a problem for Democrats and tells a heartwarming story about how Democrats are learning their lesson and reaching out to the people, working to understand the problems they are wrestling with and nodding approval for their solutions.

It makes you wonder.  What would it be to live in an America where the mainstream media was sympathetic to all religion, not just the religion of Democratic presidential contenders?

But can Democrats pull it off?  After all, they have spent the last generation riling up their base against organized religion.  Now, all of a sudden, they care about religious people and their concerns.  Can they really turn on a dime like this and make it work?

Or are they trying to have their cake and eat it too?

Working Moms Want to Cut Back on Work

Woman, we know, is the “victim of the species.”  That’s what Simone de Beauvoir, haute bourgeoise and existentialist, wrote in The Second Sex, and she should know.

Back then, high-born victims like the Beaver wanted jobs, careers, anything that men did.  But now the average working victim, according to the Pew Research Center, wants to work part time.  Here’s how AP reported the Pew findings of their opinion poll of working mothers.

Sixty percent of the working mothers said a part-time job would be best, up from 48 percent 10 years ago. And 19 percent said not working at all would be ideal -- roughly the same as in 1997.

Here’s how the folks at Pew interpreted the results.

Cary Funk, a Pew researcher on the survey, said the trend reflected women’s latest thoughts on the ideal arrangement for their children.

When you get to non-working mothers, or stay-at-home mothers, you get a definite break of opinion against working outside the home at all.  Asked if mothers should work, moms split according to whether they worked or not.

Among stay-at-home moms, 44 percent viewed this situation as bad, 22 percent as good, and the rest said it made no difference. Among working moms, 34 percent saw the situation as positive, another 34 percent as negative.

As Beauvoir wrote, woman’s life is “subservient to maternity.”  It takes a French intellectual to be scandalized by the obvious.

Here is the link to the report at Pew Research Center

Hewitt Talks to Republican Jews

Conservative talk-show host talked to the Republican Jewish Coalition recently, reports Current Jewish Issues.  He was not optimistic when it came to the next presidential election.

People look back at the 1980 election, Hewitt told his audience, and remember only that it was a landslide.  But, of course, in fact it was a close-run thing and Reagan only began to break away in the last week.  Hewitt remembers.  He was there. 

The 2008 election is going to be just as difficult.

[I]t is going to be a long and difficult and often bloody 20-30 years ahead of us. That’s a very tough hard message to sell in 60 seconds . . . especially when Democrats insist on saying it’s not so, and that we can retreat from Iraq without the carnage following us home, and that we can pretend that the radicalization of the Islamic population in Europe is neither far advanced nor continuing.

Sooner or later, rank-and-file Jews are going to break conservative and Republican.  Jewish intellectuals have been a major force in the conservative movement.  Jews are prominent in conservative talk radio.  But most Jews are still hesitant to join a party that is identified with Christianity, the scourge of Jews for a thousand years.

But Jews have survived the progroms, and they have done it by being adaptable.  They have never known from where the next progrom would come.  For over a century they have thought that the Enlightenment and secularism have been the safest place for the Jews.

But now we see rising anti-Semitism among western secular elites and the secular rank-and-file.  Is there really safety for Jews on the left?

What will flip Jews into the Republican column will be a defining event in the Middle East.  Let us hope it is not the destruction of Israel.

Global Warming and Solar Heating

Who do you believe?  Today there were two articles on the relation between solar radiance and global warming.  In the American Thinker D. Bruce Merrifield writes that the global climate is driven by a variety of solar variations and that CO2 and methane concentrations are a product of heating and cooling rather than a cause of it.

The current 100 year solar radiation cycle may now have reached its peak, and irradiation intensity has been observed to be declining. This might account for the very recent net cessation of emission of green house gases into the atmosphere starting about 1988, in spite of increasing generation of anthropomorphically-sourced industrial-based green house gases.

But in The Daily Telegraph Roger Highfield writes that Professor Lockwood and associates report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society  A that “the sun is not responsible for recent global warming.”

The study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays.

Actually the argument is not whether the recent global warming is a result of anthropogenic-forcing, but whether we should do anything about it. 

The argument of scientists like Merrifield is that the earth’s climate has experienced huge fluctuations in the past, probably due to solar variations, and that the current warming is nothing to get excited about.

The position of global warming enthusiasts is that the warming over the last century is mainly anthropogenic and that a continuation of the warming is a danger to the planet. 

The End of the Newspaper Columnist

About twelve years ago, according to columnist Bruce Bartlett, a pal called him up and suggested he write a column for the Detroit News. He agreed, and eventually the column got syndicated. 

But now Bartlett is hanging it up. No more columns, thank you; there’s more money and more editorial control in writing books.  In fact, he reckons, “the demand for traditional column writing has pretty much dried up[.]”

We all know the reason.  Newspapers are declining and they just don’t have the money for columnists any more.  There’s too much competition from the amateurs on the internet.  Editors would rather pick up the bland pablum that comes at “no additional cost from the New York Times and Washington Post news services.”

You can’t argue with that.

But don’t despair.  Bartlett thinks

there will always be a market for quality commentary, however, and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it.

But in the mean time the market stinks.

British Conservatives Issue Plan To Fight Social Breakdown

It’s called Breakthrough Britain and it has been billed as the most important document on social welfare in Britain since the Beveridge Report of 1944 that set the agenda for the post World War II welfare state.

The idea behind the report is fairly simple, according to George Jones.  It says that: 

It is time to stand up for marriage and send out a signal that it is good for society

Breakthrough Britain is organized around five social pathologies that are tearing the social fabric apart with one section of the report dedicated to each pathology.

1. Family Breakdown
2. Economic Dependency
3. Educational Failure
4. Addiction
5. Serious Personal Debt

Breakthrough Britain proposes to end the penalizing of marriage in the tax code; it will require single mothers to enter part-time work once the youngest child reaches five, and full-time work once the youngest child reaches 11.  It will increase taxes on alcohol and use the monies to fund addiction programs. 

The final section of the report looks at the “Third Sector,” voluntary associations and charities that help the poor.  Charitable giving in Britain is half that of the United States, and it is concentrated in the large charities.  A number of proposals are suggested to strengthen associations.

Above all, Breakthrough Britain proposes to re-establish marriage as the central beneficial institution in society.  For it is a matter of empirical fact that children are safer when living with their married mother and father.  Much safer.

But, reports the lefty BBC, “Labour said the proposals would "discriminate" against some families.”

Yes.  I think that is the idea, to discriminate against the kind of families that empirical evidence shows are dangerous to women and children.  And men too.

Keeper of the Tower Lives in France

Is this what Britain has come to?  The chap who keeps an eye on the crown jewels in the Tower of London lives in north-western France.  Brittany, to be exact.

And why would Major General Keith Cima live in France?  It starts with the basics: “less traffic, less crowding, affordable housing.”  Then there is the matter of the schools.

Our younger children go to school there and learn as we did: facts, focus, lots of tests, plenty of homework. And if they do not do well enough, they repeat a year, which is a great incentive to work hard.

Yes.  It seems almost surreal to imagine a school system like that.  The French are so old-fashioned. And there’s more.

The medical system is superb, and operates off a mixed system of state provision, pay-as-you-use and modest insurance premiums. Appointments are on time, and the IT works. There appear to be no waiting lists; a consultant [specialist] gets his diary out and asks when the operation would be convenient. Even a casualty department on a Saturday night in a city is free-flowing (good, as my thumb had just lost a debate with a circular saw). My dentist apologetically presented me with a bill for £30 [$60] the other week for a capped tooth[.]

You read of more and more Brits moving to France.  They don’t seem to be quite as frank about their reasons as the major general.

But it seems to be that things actually work in France.  It must be the Cartesian rationalism.  And we thought that the French were finished, suffering from terminal euro-sclerosis.

Now The Lawyers are Upset

The Brits are just waking up to the idea that lawyers are miserable.  Apparently 25 percent of them want to leave the profession, according to Sathnam Sanghera.  But of course this is nothing compared to lawyer misery in the United States.  Here, 40 percent of lawyers want to leave the profession.  In fact, lawyer misery has become an industry. 

[T]here are now almost more books, articles and websites dedicated to the subject of legal despair than there are American lawyers. Which is saying something, given that the USA has more lawyers than people.

Ho, ho.  Those Brits must have their little joke.  But why are the lawyers so miserable?  Sanghera lists the reasons.

1. The long hours.
2. The misery of someone so intelligent doing such mind-numbing work.
3. The “yawning gap” between the ideal of law and the reality.
4. The toll of being “competitive, aggressive, judgmental, analytical, adversarial, emotionally detached, paranoid of being sued and, worst of all, pessimistic.”
5. “The vortex of hatred.”  Apparently lawyers hate each other, hate their clients and the clients hate them right back.
6. The self-inflicted misery.  After all, you don’t have to destroy yourself, but in the competitive world of high-stakes lawyering, people do it all the time.

Hold on a minute.  What is so different about lawyers?  Doesn’t everyone suffer in a high-stakes career where you are dealing with ruthless competitors all the time and confronted by the fact that all work, even the most creative, is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration?

Maybe it’s just that lawyers are pushy enough to demand attention.  They demand that we witness their misery.  Other people manage to live their lives of quiet desperation without calling attention to themselves.

But lawyers are different.

The Underclass As Residue of Social Mobility

Most of us like to write about the underclass as a failure of the welfare state.  Underclass unemployment, crime, and social pathology are all the consequence of anesthetizing poor people with subsidies  and rewarding failure.  But Matthew Parris has a different idea about the underclass, at least in Britain.  He sees it as the residue left in the “sink estates” [public housing] after everyone else has left for the suburbs.  Says he:

And I wonder too whether, perverse as this may sound, the plight of the poorest in modern Britain is a result of, rather than a reproach to, social mobility.

You see, back in the old days of class, the classes lived separate and looked after their own.  The rich found nice little billets for the rich idiots and the deserving poor looked after the “undeserving poor” out of class solidarity.

But with the advent of the meritocratic society everyone is sorted not by origin, class, or caste, but by results.  Winners go with winners; winners marry winners.  And losers get stuck with the losers.

People with any drive, capable and motivated people, can find their natural level in our less classbound society. They move on, and up[.]

And the losers get left behind.

Tell that to Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom, and see where it gets you.

The Real David Halberstam

For what seems like forever we have been taught to celebrate David Halberstam as the intrepid journalist who blew the lid off the Vietnam War.  He wrote about how The Best and the Brightest betrayed the United States in their fumbling little war in Vietnam.

Actually, it wasn’t like that at all, according to Mark Moyar, author of an expose about Halberstam, Triumph Forsaken.  It was Halberstam and his buddies in Saigon who committed the central blunder of the war.  It was they who agitated to get Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem removed. 

[T]hey had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won.

So they briefed their pals in the US government and told them that Diem was no good.

Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup.

Unfortunately, the removal of Diem screwed things up.  His assassination created a power vacuum and a purging of Diem loyalists.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam.

So Halberstam and his pals had to do a bit of coverup.  They developed the story that things were going to hell in Vietnam before the Diem assassination.

Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim.

It is a tragedy that David Halberstam should have lost his life in an auto accident.  But if Moyar’s story is true it is outrageous that Halberstam attempted in such a disgraceful way to influence US policy in Vietnam.  And it is tragic that he succeeded.  It is criminal that he then proceeded to cover up his manipulations and succeeded.

What happened to the journalistic passion for the truth?

Is Government Force? Michael Moore Says No

We all know, or at least we’d better know by now, that Michael Moore thinks that government health care, as practiced in Canada, Britain, and Cuba is hunky-dory.  

(I know.  Have you asked a Brit about her wonderful NHS lately?)

Libertarian John Stossel got to ask him about this on ABC’s 20/20 TV show.  How come he could be so relaxed about government health care, Stossel asked?

"But government is force," I said to him. He was incredulous.

Michael Moore: Why do you see it as force?

Me: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.

Moore: No, it doesn’t, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government to collect taxes from them.

So now you know why liberals wax enthusiastic about the wonderful things that government does for us.

They have talked themselves out of believing that government is the agent of force and compulsion.  Don’t look at the tax collector, they say; look at the good results: a wonderful program to increase minority home ownership. 

But it’s force, says the conservative. 

No it’s not; it’s compassion, says the liberal.

Says Stossel:

Michael Moore may not have thought about it, but there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force.

There’s a lesson here for conservatives.  We don’t spend enough time asking our liberal friends: But why do we have to do this by force?

Oh no we’re not, they’ll say.

OK. So the American people voted Bush into office to fight the war on terror and he spends a hundred billion dollars a year on the war in Iraq.  That’s not force.  It can’t be.  Liberals say so.

No doubt that has nothing to do with reports that people are refusing to pay their taxes because of the war.

Don't The Pols Get It?

Now that the Democrats are back in control of Congress we are hearing calls for increasing taxes on business and the rich.  A couple of senators, one of them a Republican, want to increase taxes on financial partnerships from 15 percent to 35 percent.

And then there are the genius Democrats in the House, according to Richard W.Rahn:

At the same time, House Democrats proposed an increase of 4.3 percentage points in the maximum individual tax rate.

This is at a moment when newly-installed Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Britain has assured business and the rich in Britain that he won’t be killing the golden goose of low tax rates on financial businesses and the international “non-domiciled” rich.

What planet do these politicians live?  Don’t they get it?  Don’t they realize that the best way for them to get lots of lovely lolly to spend on buying votes is to make tax rates low across the board so that people expend their effort in making products and services and not on figuring out how to minimize taxes? 

But some people never learn.  One nice little train coming down the tracks is that business tax rates are much lower in places like Ireland and the eastern European countries like Estonia.  Businesses have noticed.

And then there is Sarbanes-Oxley, the financial reform act that loads up US corporations with tons of paperwork.

Some optimists think that the left learned its lesson about the economy in the Reagan-Thatcher years.  At times like this it seems hard to believe that they really “get it,” other than the need to get reelected.

Arnold Kling on Trust in Society

The big problem of the human race is the problem of extending trust beyond blood kin.  In traditional society you just don’t trust people who are not blood kin.  That works pretty well in an agricultural village but it begins to be a problem in the city.  So mankind has developed the radical notion of extending trust beyond the limits of blood kin.

As Arnold Kling puts it: 

A high-trust society is one where trust extends beyond one’s clan or village. Trust within families is something that can be taken for granted, even in a low-trust society. A high-trust society is one that has found a way for trust to extend to strangers.

All this was developing nicely in the nineteenth century with capitalism, which rewards trustworthy behavior with lowered costs and increased profits.  But a parallel movement was the development of “fraternal” associations in which men pretended to be brothers.  It was an ingenious way of dealing with the trust issue.  Why not say that people that you trust are your brothers (or sisters as the case might be)?  Then you can have the comfortable feeling that people you trust are virtual kind.

The nation state is another way of pretending that people who are not your kin, but who speak the same language are in fact kin.  Again, we talk about the mother country, pretending that we are all children of the same mother.

But then along came the progressives and the academic middle class with the welfare state.

The welfare state replaces the contractual and fraternal bonds of trust with the vertical relationships of patronage and clientage.  It lowers the level of trust in society.  This works well for liberals who become responsible for negotiating between the competing interest groups in the welfare state.  They like it because it gives them power.

But it infantilizes ordinary people. Instead of being responsible themselves for building trust with other people, which is an essential skill in the democratic capitalist economy, they become subordinates—at work and in society.

When we conservatives fix the Broken Society one of the big tasks will be to resume the building of voluntary fraternal organizations in which people interact as equals and build trust networks.

We know it can be done because ordinary people did it successfully in the nineteenth century before the academic middle class came to power and wrecked the voluntary fraternal sector.

BBC Scare Quotes for Climate 'Scepticism'

It’s truly amazing, when you think about it, that after all the scare stories and media advocacy that the BBC would find itself reporting the results of a public opinion poll on global warming:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

What is more, the public is not at all sure that the motives of the climate change advocates are as pure and the driven snow.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

Maybe someone found out that global warming advocate Al Gore is set to make a fortune from carbon offset trading.

The BBC’s article really is a gem of a piece.  Here are some more quotes. 

[The polling firm’s] head of environmental research, Phil Downing, said the research showed there was "still a lot to do" in encouraging "low-carbon lifestyles".
People had been influenced by counter-arguments, he said.

Er, isn’t the polling firm that did the study supposed to kinda take a hands-off attitude towards the encouragement of public opinion?  Or does the modern polling firm first whip up public opinion and then sample it.

And isn’t the whole point of a political conversation the full and free ventilation of arguments pro and anti?

So let’s pull the vice-president of the Royal Society, Sir David Read, into the argument.  The Royal Society is Britain’s academy of eminent scientists.  Said he:

People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.

Couldn’t agree more, old chap.  I am sure that you have never been guilty of that.  Then he goes on.

The science very clearly points towards the need for us all - nations, businesses and individuals - to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate.

Sorry, old chap.  The science doesn’t point to anything of the kind.  The science just says that since about 1850 there has been a moderate increase in global temperature and that there is a good chance that the increase is due to “anthropogenic forcing,” in short, due to man.  Speculative science has a lot of theories about what might happen if the warming continues.  I think it is fair to say that the quality of this science is rather less solid than the rather clear evidence of moderate warming.

The science says nothing about what we should do about it.

The Broken Society in Germany

Yes, yes.  For decades we have been worrying about little girls in school.  Feminist organizations have been gussying up studies showing how girls are hopelessly shortchanged by just about everything. 

Now the real results are coming in, according to The Economist.

In eastern Germany, that would presumably be Brandenburg and Pomerania, the girls have left to go west, and they have left the boys behind.  Why is that?  Because the girls do better in school. 

Girls are more studious than boys, so they get better qualified and migrate west to find both partners and jobs. The boys lack role models at home, where fathers are often unemployed, and at school, where teachers are mostly female. Young men now account for 65% of German high-school dropouts.

Well, now.  That’s interesting, isn’t it?

And it illustrates one of the basic facts of life.  Women will do what they are told.  If you tell them to pay attention to kinder, kirche, küche, they will beaver away in the home.  If you tell them to get an education and get a job, off they will go and dutifully do it. 

Men are different.  Men don’t like to do what they are told.  The big problem always is how to socialize men so that they contribute to society instead of hanging around in gangs, robbing and raping and killing.

For the last generation or so, ever since the well-born Simone de Beauvoir complained that women were The Second Sex, we have been acting as though women were the problem, not men.

We will pay dearly for this mistake.

Correction.  All humans will pay dearly for this liberal mistake.

A Father Speaks

In these diverse postmodern days what should a father do?  The father of teenaged girls, that is.

Doug Giles has some ideas.  You see, he doesn’t get with the “hip and groovy dad” bit that lacks a strong “opinion regarding their [daughters’ dating life.”  No sirree.  Says he:

Yes, seeing that I’m still the Alpha dog of the Giles castle, that I still pay the bills, buy the SUVs, pay for College and secure their condos, then by God, I’m still makin’ the rules.

How about ten rules about all this, or as we say in judgmental America, Commandments, for young swains to observe when they are swaining around the house?

1. Know what?  I don’t like having you around.
2. You’d better have a life.  Ideally you should be pursuing a “noble goal at Mach2 with your hair on fire.”
3. No touching my daughter.  Certainly not in my house.
4. You will “look me in the eye, shake my hand like a man and turn off your cell phone.”
5. You are the boy; I am the man.
6. “Our family is old school.”
7. You can earn my favor with gifts: cigars, for instance.
8. Forget the dirty jokes.
9. You will keep your word—even in small things.
10. Three things: “Look good,” “read” so that you can converse intelligently, and “serve... round the house, in our community, in our nation and with our wonderful world.”

Really, what’s not to like?

Steyn on Immigration and the "Pork-filled Rooms"

How does he do it?  We are talking about Mark Steyn, of course.  His post-immigration-bill article fairly gushes with Steynisms, as in:

• [T]he people... declared their independence from the United States Senate... "No legislation without explanation."
• [Cooking] up the "comprehensive" immigration bill’s "grand bargain" behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms[.]
• Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, Lottissippi Republican[.]
• Gulfport is a port in the Gulf emirate whose grateful people Sultan Trent has ruled o’er lo these many years.
• ["]I’m not proposing an electrified goat fence," the Lottly Goatherd added.

But, characteristically for Mark Steyn, there is a serious point beneath and the fun and frolic.  A serious discussion of the issues. “Time and again, the remote insulated emirs were offered the opportunity to rise above their condescension and declined to do so.”  But the fact is they have nothing to be condescending about.

There are immigration laws on the books right now, and they are flouted with impunity by "sanctuary cities," states and the federal government itself. The political class tells us a nation on permanent "orange alert" at ports of entry can’t enforce its borders, and a broken immigration bureaucracy that can’t process existing levels of applicants can reliably handle another 20 million.

Tell you what, Senators.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings on why the law isn’t being enforced?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings about why it is so important to have orange alerts in the airports while keeping the borders wide open?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on the failure of the immigration bureaucracy to process the existing levels of applicants and develop an assessment of the utter chaos that is likely to ensue if it tries to handle another 20 million?  That’s your job. 

Yes.  Work is hard.  That’s why you get paid to do it.