Keeping the Home Computers Burning

The Brits are having a spot of winter weather right now, what they call “snow chaos.” That is British understatement to describe road conditions where 1,000 cars have been temporarily stranded by five inches of snow in Cornwall.

But Vicki Woods is worrying about the home computers. What happens if the power goes out and there is no power for any of the vital home appliances. Like showers.

My husband observed that the shower wouldn’t work if the electricity went down. The shower? What was he on about? "You chose, if you remember, a power shower. What do you think ‘power’ means?"

Yes, it always comes as a shock when the power goes out. It is even more of a shock to learn that the Brits have jumped from claw-footed bathtubs to power showers in one giant leap. But then Ms. Woods starts to worry about the really important things, like how are we going to keep all the computers running when the power goes out? Time to look for a generator.

The one I liked best was a tidy little yellow object the size of a hat-box, costing £249 ($400). I liked it mostly because it promised "running time approx 10 hours", which would do me nicely if the house was plunged into darkness at three in the afternoon.

The chap down at the pub thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard all week. A little thing like that wouldn’t be able to do anything, let alone power the Woods’server farm.

"You’d be looking at - ooh, what? £500 ($900) down for a serious piece of kit that’ll do all your computers, and all you’ll need then is a gizmo that...

Yes, it’s great fun on a dark November evening to get all snuggled up next to a roaring fire and tap humorous articles about what to do when the power goes out.

But imagine the “scrum” (another classic British word) at the superstore when everyone and his brother are rushing out to buy themselves a generator! How big would it have to be to run the computers, the home theater, the microwave, the power shower, and a light or two?

Winning in Iraq

What is going on in Iraq? Are we on the cusp of helping the Iraqis establish a self-governing society complete with federal constitution and a consensual politics in which the punctuations of suicide bombers are merely gigantic sound effects? Or are we on the cusp of failure, in which the progress from election to constitutional referendum to election is a mirage of stage effect in which the reality is a menacing insurgency that is poised to plunge Iraq into civil war?

The honest answer is that we don’t know. If we knew the real situation then everything would be over, bar shouting.

But military historian Victor Davis Hanson thinks we are on the cusp of victory.

Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years.

That is why the Democrats are not willing to go beyond their opportunistic truckling to the “Bush Lied” crowd and their ankle-biting criticism of the details of the war in Iraq. When offered a chance to vote on bringing the troops home, they respectfully declined.

They are politicians. They are creating noise—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and preparing the ground for an “I told you so” moment, if it comes, that could help them regain control of Congress or propel a Democrat to the White House in 2008. It is a tactic that has very little downside. If the Bush strategy succeeds, well, then they can say that Bush was lucky to win, considering how he bungled the whole thing from start to finish.

Be Thankful and Hope

In the present season of conservative and Republican exhaustion it is easy to think that the great tide of conserative reform has reached its high tide and has turned into a vicious rip-tide that will swallow its supporters. Even if that is so we should be thankful, especially in this season, for all that the American conservative movement has achieved in its program of resumption, that is, the resumption of eternal truths and practices that sustain the civilized life. We use “civilized life” in the strict sense referring to the life of the city in its characteristic of bringing together those of a commercial habit to serve the consumers.

But there is also hope. In the weeks after the voters of California truckled to their public employee masters and the principled liberal voters of King County, Washington, voted to reelect Ron Sims, the county executive that presides over the third most corrupt election system in the United States, according to one observer, there are buds of renewal. According to Max Borders

Many of us are tired of trying to use political channels to bring about social change. We’re dissatisfied with the way government handles such projects, we’re fed up with the bureaucracy, and we resent having our money taxed from us every paycheck to be managed by those who only claim to know better.

And some of us are doing something about it. Borders cites a whole range of “social entrepreneurs,” many of them successful business entrepreneurs like the Google guys and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who

are starting to figure out that civil society works better than government at bringing about civic improvement, opportunity, and positive change. The altruism boom is underway. And if the government doesn’t smother it, social capitalism can amount to a revolution for tremendous good.

Fast Company has compiled a list of these new social entrepreneurs. But will they make a difference?

One thing is for sure. The present huge power structure that runs the government system of social support will not give up without a struggle.

An Old Reagan Hand Says GOP in Power Too Long

Reagan aide Lynn Nofziger is now 81. It was forty years ago that he left his job as a journalist to join the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan. Now he sees that the GOP has been in power too long, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

"They’ve been in power too long," Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. "Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there."

Also, the Democrats have opposed the Republicans at every turn, and Republicans are just tired.

Maybe Nofziger is right. Maybe the Republicans need a turn in the political wilderness to do some thinking and to develop a new political vision. Not that the Democrats are any better.

If Republicans have got fat and lazy at the national level the Democrats are in worse shape. Their aristocratic vision of government by the enlightened and educated for the benefit of the “little people” that sounded so noble two generations ago is now a hollow joke. Today’s Democrats are an oligarchy, pure and simple, a coalition of the well connected and the privileged passing out the spoils of the tax system to their followers.

At least you can say that their followers’ needs are modest, for now. State and local government employees earn a mere 40 percent more than private sector workers and retire in their fifties.

Imagine what things will look like in twenty years. Democrats will probably have convinced themselves that they deserve to earn twice as much as evil Republican private sector workers. And they will retire on magnificent pensions in Florida and Arizona in their forties after twenty years of selfless service for the people.

Yes. Hillary Clinton for President!

Pushing Back Against "Bush Lied"

Although it is true that the Republicans direct all three branches of government and the political power that goes with it, they do not own the culture, the media, and the academy. And the do not own the rank and file that actually do the work in the governments of the nation.

That is why the Democrats can successfully operate a campaign of deceit like the ongoing “Bush Lied” campaign, the accusation that Bush lied the nation into the Iraq war.

But any thoughtful student of political affairs would have observed how carefully the Bush administration built its justification in the months leading up to the Iraq war. You could tell that every sentence had been carefully parsed, probably in light of the Vietnam experience, so that its meaning could be justified by the facts and analysis to hand at the time.

And anyway, how come the left started the “Bush Lied” campaign even before the Iraq invasion. Did they know something that we didn’t know? Or were they merely taking their cues from their handlers? And who were they?

Pundit Michael Barone takes aim at the “Bush Lied” folks.

The propagators of the big lie against President Bush are trying to delegitimize not only him, but all the progress due to Iraq, progress toward freedom for Middle Easterners and toward a Middle East that no longer threatens the United States.

The tactics of the Democrats in the last decade have been openly obstructionist, issuing, one supposes, from the rage at being displaced from the center of power, first in 1980, then in 1994, and most humiliating of all, in the dead-heat election of 2000. You can understand why. It’s about power.

Their whole existence and reason for being is bound up in the continuance of the 30 percent of GDP that they have built up into a vast patronage machine over the last century. Now the chickens are coming home to roost: a vast government machine that does not do very much with a lot of money; unsustainable entitlement programs; privileges and subsidies that are threatened by the new global economic order.

The only thing that Democrats have thought to do about their strategic position is to counterattack, whether it is Social Security, tax cuts, Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq. They can get away with it because the mainstream media lets them get away with it. Imagine Republicans attacking a Democratic president and blocking his program. The mainstream media would make the Republicans into mean-spirited monsters. (Oh yes, they did.)

Sooner or later, Democrats will have to think of something smarter than mindless obstruction. But it doesn’t look as though that will happen any time soon.

And that is a pity. Because the American people are going to have to pay the bill.

Government Workers Earn More

Sixty-year-old baby boomers all across the nation are reporting a curious experience. When they go to their 40-year high school reunions they discover that their old school pals that went to work for the government have already retired. Imagine that! The humble toilers who opted out of the fast lane have already left the rat-race for a comfortable retirement. Who would have thought it?

Of course, it’s worse than that. Not only do government employees retire earlier, they get paid more than workers in the private sector, as Steve Malanga reports.

Take teachers. Everyone knows they are underpaid. But according to the National Compensation Survey, public school teachers earn about 20 percent more in hourly pay and benefits than professional workers in the private sector.

The federal government’s national compensation survey estimates that local public school districts pay teachers an average of $47.97 per hour in total compensation, including $12.39 per hour in benefits — figures that far outstrip not only what private school teachers earn, but also the average of what all professional workers earn in private business, a category that includes engineers, architects, computer scientists, lawyers, and journalists.

OK, but that is just teachers. What about ordinary workers? Well, state and local government workers earn about $35 per hour in wages and benefits while private sector workers earn a little less than $25 per hour. Wow. That means that the average public sector worker makes about 40 percent more than the average private sector worker.

No wonder that liberals are trying to do a number on Wal-mart. If they could force Wal-mart to pay more then it wouldn’t seem that liberal government workers are overpaid. Never mind that, if we arbitrarily raised worker pay with minimum wage laws and mandatory benefits we would end up with European levels of unemployment.

Still. Forty percent more! That starts to make private sector workers look like mugs. What is the point of accepting the risk and the challenge of private sector work if the tenured, lifetime employment government worker earns more?

You tell me.

A Question of Belief

As everyone knows, the world is moving progressively down a path of secularization, away from a traditional language of myth and magic and towards a reality-based world of science and logic. Why then, asks Frank Furedi, is the modern world full of “life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides?”

These modern sources of spiritual authority seem to have stepped into the social space formerly occupied by traditional authority figures.

Yes, it has become fashionable to treat traditional forms of authority — monarchy, church, parliament — with derision. Criticism of traditional institutions has become so prevalent that it bears all the hallmarks of classical conformism. Scientists, doctors and other professionals have also experienced an erosion of authority. But the diminishing influence of conventional authority has been paralleled by the rise of a new ‘alternative’ one.

So we have the curious situation today that people distrust politicians but trust celebrities. Sir Bob Geldorf possesses the moral authority to browbeat elected politicians about aid to Africa. People question the actions of the scientifically-driven drug companies and trust the folk remedies of the herbalist.

The people that patronize herbalists and shop at natural foods stores are often the same people that are contemptuous about the beliefs of the creationists and Intelligent Design folks.

It is perhaps too extreme to say that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything. But they certainly will believe in something, and if they do not submit themselves to the moral authority of priests and ministers they will submit themselves to the authority of life coaches and gurus.

Perhaps Paul Bloom is on to something in “Is God an Accident” when he writes that children from an early age learn to differentiate between moving objects and immovable objects. They project into the moving objects the notion of purpose. Moving, objects, “psychological things” possess “minds, intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires.” If humans develop the notion of purposeful things as a way of explaining to themselves the behavior of moving things, then it is a short step to ascribing purpose to the whole world of moving objects and the Author of it all.

When you decide that the Author is dead then you soon find you need to replace Him with substitute guides. You still need to learn about your purpose in this world and to divine the purposes of others. You head off on a journey to the other side of the world and find yourself back where you started.