American Buy Hybrids for Power

Here in Seattle just about every liberal in the city
is driving around contentedly in a Toyota Prius saving oodles of
gasoline with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive®. They have the same conceited look
on their faces as shoppers at PCC Natural Markets while they watch their groceries being
bagged into their own bags that they bring to the market. Not for them the evils of non-recyclable plastic sacks.

But all is not well in the hybrid car business. Most Americans buy hybrids not
for the gas mileage or to save the environment. They buy them for the extra power. That is what
Matthew L. Wald reports
in The New York Times.

Mark Buford just bought a hybrid Honda Accord. It’s the top of the line V6 Accord
and it gets about the same gas mileage as the four cylinder Accord costing $10,000 less.
Buford “liked the way that the electric motor on his new car kicked in early during acceleration.”
He

got just what he wanted from the Accord, a hybrid
with no sacrifices. “I wasn’t prepared to give up anything to `go green’ -
not performance, amenities, or space,” he said.

But guess what. Mark still gets the tax subsidy for buying hybrid. The national
nannies are not amused.

“The new ones are all being used for power,” said Kateri Callahan,
the president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group
based here.

Hybrids should be encouraged, Ms. Callahan said, because their
electric components some day could be useful in an all-electric car,
perhaps running on a fuel cell. But she added that the government
should be careful
about which hybrids it subsidizes through tax benefits.

Don’t you just love these activists that care so much about us, and only
want to force us to conform to their agenda in our own best interest?

A word to nonprofit advocate Kateri Callahan. If you want to be “careful” about something, the last thing
you’d do if you had any sense would be to get the government involved.
Let’s just call it
the “precautionary principle.”

Our Pals in India

It has taken too long, but now at last the United States and India are getting it on. Since
Indians are taking over the tech industry and the motel industry in the US, why not?
Bruce Fein makes the argument for closer ties as Indian Prime Minister Singh makes
a visit to Washington DC.

But the real measure of alignment between India and the United States is highways. And here there
is real progress. India is getting serious about building a world-class limited access highway system, as
this article reports. First up are limited
access highways linking the Golden Quadrilateral: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkota.

Religion in Britain. It's There If You Look

The British are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church
experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as
Danny Kruger reports from
Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending
“the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings.
In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation
of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye,
who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central
London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].

In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy
but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches
of Britain’s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There’s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most
cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and
steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.

As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the
churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles
Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face
to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire
for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first
place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of
Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago
the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and
fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you
can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.

Kenyan: Stop the Aid to Africa!

Think for a minute about what aid does to Africa. If you send them free grain then
you put African farmers out of business. If you send them free clothes then you put
African garment workers out of work. That’s why the Kenyan economist
James Shikwati says: “For God’s sake, please just stop the aid.” Here is
how the distribution of free corn devastates Africa.

He cites the distribution of corn and clothes as examples
of “do-goodism” gone wrong, hurting those it sets out to help in an
endless circle of vicious venality. Corn arrives from highly subsidized
European and American farmers. African politicians take portions of it
to distribute to their constituents. What isn’t given away is dumped on
the black market, and sold at such bargain prices that an African
farmer can’t compete, so he puts down his hoe.

So it makes complete sense that empty-headed pop star celebrities and venal
welfare state politicians should be ganging up to double aid to Africa. It’s
a marriage made in heaven.

From the
viewpoint of the twenty-first century, we know now that the “well-meaning” welfare state politicians
utterly destroyed the little platoons of charity and self-help that sustained Europe
and the United States in the nineteenth century. They turned proud independence
into muling dependency. And rock music has never
pretended to be anything other than a direct attack on society as we know it.

Go on. Read the whole thing.

Guess What? Lefties Need More Campus Speakers

And you thought that the only way you could get to speak to America’s college students was
if you had impeccable left-wing credientials?

No. Wrong Again. Apparently the left really has a problem on campus countering the Young Americans for Freedom and so George Soros has launched a new speaker’s bureau. Writes Jason Mattera:

Campus Progress, a project of billionaire George Soros’s Center for American Progress (CAP), seeks to “empower a new generation of progressive leaders.”

Oh. Who would have thought it. Imagine that! Students at our nation’s universities are not getting
the straight story on progressive ideas, and so a new outreach effort is needed.

So Campus Progress had a national student conference at which the progressive Thomas Frank opined:

“They [Republicans] didn’t have any problem with Hitler, other than the fact that they thought he rocked.”

Oh good. Really advanced thinking here: the good old argument ad Hitlerum! Here’s another gem:

One young progressive asked how to campaign in the suburbs. He was not given an answer, but a specious sound bite. It’s difficult to campaign in those areas, said Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. “They are not our base — the white married couples who moved away from the cities to get away from minorities and smog.”

Wrong again, pal. David Brooks has written that white married couples move away from the cities
to get away from the poor and liberals. Now why would they do that? Is it because the liberals are impossible bossy-boots that cannot be happy unless they are using the poor as cats-paws to bully
the long-suffering middle class?

Slackers at the Office

American workers are slackers. We goof off to the tune of
“$759 billion a year in salaries for which [employers] receive no apparent benefit.”

Why do employers put up with it? Lawrence Henry thinks he knows.

I spent a year in an advertising agency where we worked very hard, especially hard on those four occasions a year when the company’s nationwide sales force got together and we had to create displays, training programs, and media material for the meetings. The creative director, a good guy, asked me what I thought would be the best reward for people who had put in long extra hours.

“Time off,” I said.

It was the one thing he couldn’t do. The company didn’t have the time to give. They could only take. And companies take a lot of people’s time.

Why is this? Why do companies have to have their people at the office all the time?

They do it because the alternative is too hard. Managers have only
so much management in them, and keeping track of a herd of people coming in and out at all times would
be too hard on them. So they keep people sitting around who don’t do too much work.

Remembering Dorothy Fields

Today is July 15, 2005, the centenary of Dorothy Fields. You know her, of course. She
wrote some of the greatest songs of the greatest song era in history. As in the Louis Armstrong
favorite:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worries on the doorstep

Life can be so sweet

On the Sunny Side of the Street

Or if you prefer there is the incomparable:

Someday, when I’m awfully low,

When the world is cold,

I will feel a glow just thinking of you

And The Way You Look Tonight.

They don’t make ’em like that any more and we know why. We don’t have innocent girls
with romance swirling in their heads any more. Instead we have Sex and the City
females who are welded to their cellphones and have a vocabulary anchored in “like” and “whatever.”

They are not women who fall in love; they are women who are “sexually
active.” What does that mean, you ask? It is liberal-speak for women
imagining they can live like men, treating their sexuality as a matter of getting laid. Sorry sisters, girls
have never felt like that. They can’t. That’s because sex is much bigger than the modern
concept of “an active sex life”. Sex is about generation, the next generation, and
the further you get from that truth, the less you will appreciate the songs
of Dorothy Fields.

Instead you will become the liberal who has made it a point never to have seen The Sound of Music.
There must be a lot of sophisticated liberals who have never seen The Sound of Music. Again
the reason is pretty simple. Liberals can’t deal with the hopelessly naïve Maria, the young girl that
just loves children and ends up snagging the fabulously rich guy just like a Jane Austen heroine. They want
irony.

They can have it. The rest of us want Dorothy Fields and “Big Spender.”

There is lots of stuff around about Dorothy Fields. You can start with
Mark Steyn’s article. Then there is a site in the UK
here. Then you can Google up more.